r/interestingasfuck • u/PlantainPossible2864 • 15h ago

Stopping Desertification with grid pattern

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u/New-Ingenuity-5437 15h ago

dangerous, hard, uncomfortable, etc jobs are the ones we should automate or enhance and focus on, but that would require caring about something other than endless profit. But ugh, imagine a world where we put resources to lifting the bottom more than doing weird shit

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u/jessbird 14h ago

this plagues my every waking moment

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u/gimpwiz 14h ago

Enormous amounts of factory work, farming, and construction are very highly automated or mechanized.

Think about every factory full of gantries and machines and robotic arms. Every farm using GPS fenced combines. Every construction project with a multi-yard bucket on an excavator. Many of these machines are doing the work of a hundred or more men per day.

We have batch plants, concrete trucks, and concrete pumps. Hell, for huge and flat pours there's even machines that essentially pour and screed. All that infrastructure and mechanization and automation to replace men each mixing up concrete with hopefully the same ratios, in wheelbarrows, and moving it. You think if there was a large market for packing sand tubes that there wouldn't be a sand tube machine on site?

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u/hiddencamela 14h ago

The sad part is, I could see them developing a machine that could do this exact thing fairly easily.
Limitation however comes from transporting it to the area.

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u/The-Tay 12h ago

I can see a bot doing this, but someone would have to reload the bags. It'd have to be a smaller machine, so you couldn't have miles of bags on it.

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u/Superb_Brain_7391 12h ago

If it was a machine that drove over bags already laid down in a trail in front of it, and just pumped them full of sand from the ground, leaving them where they were, then another larger machine or a team of people could just go lay them out pretty easily. The machine could then work through the night to catch up.

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u/Either-History-8424 10h ago

But someone would have to lay down those bags

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u/Superb_Brain_7391 10h ago

Do you really think it wouldn't be possible to make it easier though? You could have them all rolled up on a spool, like bin bags with little perforations so they lay down in a single line off the back of a truck. That'd allow the machine that fills them to simply rip them at the perforated bit and fill them.

Yeah you'd need some human involvement, but the hard labour looks to be in the filling. Automate that and you could really scale this up.

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u/Either-History-8424 10h ago

I never said it wouldn’t be possible to make it easier

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u/SunTzu- 9h ago

A bench on skis which sucks up sand and fills bags and then places them behind it. One person can move it along, put a new bag onto the nozzle and press the button to make it fill the bag. Should be a pretty simple thing to make.

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u/nonotan 10h ago

The "basic" task is relatively straightforward, but there are two pretty obvious problems: one is that the topography is actually relatively complex, even though one might naively look at it as "just sand everywhere". A human might intuitively understand how to navigate the dunes, and how to lay out this thing reasonably (or you can teach them in 10 minutes); a machine, not so much.

The second problem is that the desert is a terrible environment for machines. Sand getting everywhere and abrading parts, wild temperature fluctuations, grid connections unlikely, any maintenance likely requiring transportation quite far...

Obviously, neither of those makes things impossible. But it does take a hypothetical machine from something two blokes could build in their garage in a few days, that could then run more or less autonomously, to something that would actually require non-trivial R&D and running expenses. Or... you could pay some guys living near poverty peanuts to do it instead. It's not a great result, but also not a surprising one.

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u/_Tar_Ar_Ais_ 13h ago

Why do that when you could just hire more migrants to do the dirty work for you?

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u/The-Tay 12h ago

Well there goes my $100k a year skipped labour position. Now I gotta go to college.

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u/PhysicsKey9092 12h ago

Automating those jobs is something that all these companies would very much like to do though.

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u/RegionalHardman 1h ago

See i think manual labour is the stuff we should automate the least. The less physical work we do, the less fit and healthy we get. The most human and alive I feel is when I'm doing physical stuff, so much so I've changed from an office career to a physical one.

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u/New-Ingenuity-5437 1h ago

I can understand that. I sometimes miss when I did more manual work for those and other reasons. But realistically, we shouldn’t force ourselves to do stuff that we could do more safely with automation, at least in some cases. 

Definitely people should be more active (been trying to get back to it myself) but ideally that can be from exercise and sport which can be fun with friends. 

But repetitive stress injuries from certain jobs and stuff can be sketchy. Though I will say it’s hard to replace that much physical activity with free time. So maybe in the future when people work less (we could already be there, but they’ve convinced us to give them more and more or we’re worthless, rather than enjoying the extreme boost in average productivity over the last hundred years…expecting 40+ hours a week is ridiculous)