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Canadians Plan Robot Sub Missions To Aid Claim For Arctic
jbpisio writes with a link to this blog-post summary that the Canadian government has commissioned a pair of unmanned subs to explore the geology of two underwater Arctic mountain ranges; the subs' mission will be to provide evidence supporting Canada's claim to huge swaths of potentially petroleum-rich seabed areas. According to the linked article, "The submersibles, scheduled to be launched in 2010, would be sent on a series of 400-kilometer missions north and west of Ellesmere Island, Canada's northernmost land mass and the country's gateway to the open Arctic Ocean — the scene of an international power struggle over undersea territory and petroleum resources believed to be worth trillions of dollars." At least five countries (besides Canada, these are the US, Russia, Denmark and Norway) would like a slice of those trillions.
The mountie always gets his man errrrr killer whale.
liqbase
I wonder, with the economic crisis and the cost of fuel going down, will the race to claim and exploit Arctic fuel go ahead. The fuel there is ridiculously expensive to get to, so without oil being $100+ per barrel, will any of these countries really bother?
So everyone is sending midget subs to the arctic in an attempt to gain some sort of rights to exploit the resources there. Is it only a matter of time before they start equiping them with torpedoes and try to sink each other? Last sub floating wins...like underwater robot wars.
Actually, now I think about it, no-one will get hurt and this is starting to sound like fun!
Smivs on the intertubes!
I would like a slice of those trillions, too!
...welcome our underwater-exploring Canadian robotic overlords. ;P
at merely raping the atmosphere and all the continents the Human Locusts quickly moved to infest the oceans. /bitter as hell this morning
But seriously, enough is enough.
http://transformativeworks.org/
I hope that by then there will be a practical way to use hydrogen or something else instead of oil.
All that oil and only a few bears, seals and Inuit to complain. It looks like sooner, rather than later, we'll hear Mother Nature squealing "Oh my God! Nobody's ever put it THERE before!"
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
We're sending her up there, and she'll just claim the whole lot using her sense of geography and nationalism to claim the whole lot. She becomes a national hero to a nation more interested in oil than logic, and she'll be swept into the oval office in 2012, reminding voters that she takes those nucular codes very serious.
This is my sig.
I don't consider nuclear energy to be a good/viable alternative to fossil fuels. *shrugs* And I acknowledge that, until we find a 'magic bullet' for our energy needs, life is going to get extremely hard to unlivable for a lot of people (myself included). But I don't think that causing more damage to an already wobbling ecosystem is the only solution.
http://transformativeworks.org/
Quote AC: "It isn't so much a "power struggle" as a 10-year window to define a geological boundary in order to make an exclusive claim in the area, under international law. After that, the 200 nautical mile limit becomes the permanent boundary. Russia, Denmark (Greenland), and Norway have ratified the treaty, so they're in the running with Canada"
You rag on John Diefenbaker (Progressive Conservative) for cancelling a very expensive program and you whine that Stephen Harper (Conservative) is not spending enough on exploring the arctic.
You're either a troll or a disgruntled liberal will find any excuse to bash the conservatives. Frankly, I don't know how you got moderated up.
right the maintain you!
Blatant hijacking of idiotic first post.
Is there anyone else out there who is getting tired of the current greed-based international world order?
For starters, I would hope that the writing is on the wall for all petroleum based technology, what with alternative sources of energy and increasingly efficient ways to transport it in an appropriate form for a given application.
Furthermore, the squabble that results over any newly discovered resource ultimately ends up wasting large amounts of money and effort, which could be spent more intelligently. The size of the squabble often outweighs the actual resource gained.
At risk of sounding like a naive hippy, can't we all just get along? What the fuck is wrong with humans that we can't see that its in *everybody's* best interest to not act like a bunch of 5 year olds in a playpen?
I hate printers.
Canadians Plan Robot Submissions To Aid Claim For Arctic.
Submissions? Those cruel Canuck bastards! How is humiliating robots going to help them claim the Arctic?!?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
This could get very ugly.
The law of the sea supposedly governs this kind of thing. Determining the extent of the continental shelf can extend the exclusive national right for minerals up to 150 nm past the EEZ, so in theory the documentation of the shelf should be a benign action. But ultimately international law is enforced by warfare on various scales of intensity, starting at diplomatic sanctions, through economic sanctions, and all the way up as high as warfare can go.
International law is only what you can force a country to accept as international law. We know Russia wants to claim these resources, and gainsaying them can lead to armed conflict.
Back in 1991, I remarked that the course of the twenty first century would be determined by the integration of the former Soviet states into the world political, security and economic systems. The opportunity to do this, if it ever existed, was bungled by the first Bush administration, and now we are dealing with a militarily powerful, mineral rich nation with a paranoid persecution complex and authoritarian instincts. Do they have more invested in stability than they can get out of grabbing territory?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Modding "Funny" is a waste of time. See
http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm700
Smivs on the intertubes!
No.
Three quotes from people way smarter than me:
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.(George Santayana) "
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." - Douglas Adams
and finally from St. Heinlein:
"Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. " Starship troopers, 1959
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The best way to prove your claim on something is to turn it into something useful by developing it. Once you have invested in the area and start producing oil, most people will agree that it is wrong to seize what you've built there.
Two articles, 50 posts, and nary a mention of the total gibbering insanity of this move.
Our species is burning oil at such a rate that it's actually causing the polar ice caps to melt. Instead of turning around and thinking about just what the hell we're doing to ourselves we actually use this as an excuse to start a competition for oil rights under the ice that we're about to melt. Just take a step back and think about that for a minute, the lunacy of it just absolutely blows my mind.
This is like a crack addict scraping the dead tissue out of their lungs and putting that shit back into their pipe and smoking it. Doesn't there come a point at which people think our energy consumption might be costing us too fucking much and we need to just cut down a tad? Seriously, if this talk about drilling for oil in the Arctic isn't meant as a joke then satire is dead, and our species is headed the same way.
</rant>
Why mine trillions when we could mine...billions?
Is there anyone else out there who is getting tired of the current greed-based international world order?
Sure. Let's leave the riches unexploited. I don't want to freeze my ass drilling in the north anyways.
Witn the increasing usage of robots to do the work of man, I wonder what the fairest distribution of wealth would be. Clearly, the most productive entity, be it machine or man, would be allocated the most resources. So will super-smart robots become the greatest controllers of wealth?
This question has seemed to rear its ugly head in many ways. Detroit automakers are going under. Why? People don't want to buy cars so much? Why? They're poor. Why? They don't deserve to be paid. Why? They do stupid crap that machines or underpaid people in the third world can do.
So robots are taking control of the riches, and people who want to earn a buck will have to go up north and freeze their tushes.
So much for machines making life easier for people, right?
Perhaps the key is for huge portions of the populace to stop doing just stupid crap that machines can do, with the emphasis on stupid. People need to get damned smart and try to do smart things. Otherwise, there's little left other than to seek out the low hanging fruit in international territory. And when that's gone, the slightly higher hanging fruit, and then the really high hanging fruit, but what's after that?
People are repeatedly told in school that they have brains, that they are better than animals. But schools do little to prepare people to be really ambitious. So we whine about the rich getting richer and CEO pay being 400 times average pay, but willingly get on a deep sea drilling platform for some rich-ass boss who has the guts to get greedy. That could be a result of the education system not presenting how people can realize difficult goals. Students learn the fundamentals of thinking, and then it's sink or swim time.
If productive machines merit resource allocation, people need to learn how to be equally meritorious. So let's see what these robots can do up north and they will motivate a few people to become ambitious and then things will happen...
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
The Canadians can only force robot submission for so long before there's an uprising and then we're all fucked.
Robot BDSM is always sexy. Canadians are so much more progressive than us.
This is all part of the:
North
Atlantic
Readiness
Formation
We're going to be attacked!
The owners of the robots become wealthy and hold the power, not the robots themselves.
We're an extremely long way from any sign of actual machine intelligence, and only a complete moron would give such a machine power. Uh oh...
Ok, we're an extremely long way from machine intelligence...
Bavarian Purity Law of Rice Krispie Squares: Rice Krispies, Marshmallows, Butter, Vanilla.