Re:The Search for MH 370 (Inmarsat)
by baudehlo on Thursday October 16, 2014 @09:23PM
(#8468916)
I guess the question becomes who is going to pay for these robots? They'll need the ability to dive deep, explore, and then come up for "air" (a recharge). Those aren't going to come cheap. Perhaps the undersea cable conglomerates but it's hard to imagine the use-case for mapping inaccessible areas.
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Extend past a few decades. A post-scarcity society would almost certainly search every square metre of the ocean for this airplane, assuming humans are still making decisions.
You say "post-scarcity" like it's an inevitable scenario. Resources are finite. Energy is finite. Exponential growth doesn't last forever.
Re:The Search for MH 370 (Inmarsat)
by toomuchtodo on Friday October 17, 2014 @12:29AM
(#8469424)
> Energy is finite.
With enough renewable energy from the sun, there is very little we're constrained by
http://www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/Solar%20FAQs.pdf
"All together, the technical potentials can be estimated to be: Solar electricity: 89,000 TWc · (1-0.708) · (1-0.0345) · (0.3) = 7,500 TWc Solar fuels: 89,000 TWc · (1-0.708) · (1-0.0345) · (0.1) = 2,500 TWc Solar thermal: 89,000 TWc · (1-0.708) · (1-0.0345) · (0.225) = 5,600 TWc
These are huge potentials, dwarfing by many orders of magnitude those of the other."
Extend past a few decades and you're beyond the lifetime of the black box, sadly. It would be really frustrating to finally find the plane only to never actually find out what happened.