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U.S. Will Use Robots to Patrol Water Supply
bl8n8r writes "By the summer of 2005, the United States will have an underwater network of robots monitoring the nations fresh water supply. Realtime environmental details will be used to help safeguard the nations drinking water. The robots would take on the painstaking, time consuming, and sometimes dangerous, task of collecting water samples which is currently being done by carbon based lifeforms."
Case in point: He built a water preheater out of some foil-backed foam insulation, some pipe, black paint, and a 55 gallon drum. He built a box out of the insulation with the foil facing in, painted the drum black, and hooked it up between the water supply and the hot water heater. On sunny days it gets the water hot with free energy before sending it to the water heater. This reduces the amount of paid energy he had to use. Total material cost: $100. And it saved him $175 in the first year.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
you know that the alien/accidental mussel called the zebra mussel has cause more of an increase in water quality increase in the great lakes than ANYTHING ever done by any technological means?
one little creature filters a bunch of fricking water a day.... about 3 gallons worth... now couple that with the things INSANE reproduction rate.
the best solution is not technology but finguring out how to use the natural systems that are so hugely more efficient than anything we can design.
Lake michigan is clearer than I ever remember... and Lake erie is actually looking like it's containing water and not industrial waste anymore.
Granted, it IS trasnferring the problem into the sediment as these buggers die, but now it's in a location we can clean easier than the raw water.
anyways, Cince I live near the absolute largest fresh water supply on the planet, why havent we seen any of these things being tested, talked about,etc... the NOAA research station here has nothing about them, and nither does the University of Michigan research station...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"The robots would take on the painstaking, time consuming, and sometimes dangerous, task of collecting water samples which is currently being done by carbon based lifeforms."
I'm sure these carbon based lifeforms are happy they are having their jobs outsourced to robots next year. Why make it sound like we are doing these divers a favor by taking away their work?
This and similar technology, should go a long way to prevent those Catch 22 situations.
This is a boring sig
This is interesting. A similar situation, a friend of mine with hundreds of acres of farmland, once dedicated a 25'x25' flat area, dug it out 6", laid 3" of gravel, and put 25x25 of ribbed steel roofing on the gravel after painting it black and running copper pipe through the ribs underneath.
Plug a pump into it, and he instantly had hot water for his outdoor hottub. Unfortunatly, this don't work too well in Canada under 24" of snow, but none theless, the system could easily be bypassed in the winter.
This is crazy. You're talking about millions of gallons of water. Do you know how much it'll take to pollute that? Maryland wastr treatment plants are known to be dumping 8x the legal limit of fecal bacteria, and they have yet to have anythign happen to them.
Poinsoning the nations drinking supply can only be effectively done in an area close to a user. Maybe a city block or street at most. Anything else would take HUGE amounts and would definately be suspicious.
If you really want to protect the country from terrorism, get us off a centralized power grid. And get off petrol. The day american homes supply the businesses with power, (with the power company securly locked int he middle to manage it) will th the day that we'll be safe. Unless you can't telecommute. Which is when you should be driving an electric vehicle. Hell your house will prooduce your own fuel for the car. It's "free" energy.
Water can be purified from almost any kind of contaminant. Energy can only be made (currently) at dams, reactors and windmills. (Solar is not big in the US, and nat-gas fuel cells still need a central line to the fuel company)
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My agency bought these not long ago, and while they have collected thousands of data points, they are not robots (as they were first touted here), and they are not worth this sort of story on CNN. First off, they are poorly built, definately not designed for life on water. They remain more like something you or I would build as a hobbyist. Not something that I would issue as a commercial product. The real story here is in the sensors that are made by other compaines. That is pretty nifty stuff, being able to detect nutrients in water. But it is really far from true pollution. There is no sensor for benzene, chlorine, gasoline, copper, and a myriad of other chemicals that form the true group of water pollutants. There is a second generation buoy being turned out by one of their competitors. And that's what I am looking at in order to keep our program running, and more dependable.
What's not to like? A robot protecting the environment. But do they have to shove in the word "terrorism" into the first few phrases of the article?
Different polutants threaten and sometimes really do contaminate water supplies now and then (the latest example I can remember was MTBE-containing unleaded fuel from a largish tank), but it's almost always been about accidents. Does every new piece of tech have to be a weapon in the war on terrorism too, atleast in the media?
I sure hope there is some truly secure system planned for the transfer of water supply data. When terrorists, which they are clearly trying to defend against, figure out how to imitate signals these guys send then I have a feeling we'll be sensing dangerous water all the time due hacked bots. After all a terrorists goal is only to cause terror, it doesn't require actually poisoning the water.