A emp is a rather simple machine . Radioactive material is right in your kitchen . Take the cover off your microwave the magnatron is radioactive says so right on it . Smoke alarms also contain radioactive isotopes . You just have to look around it's everwhere . Yes I realize this is not weapons grade but the dirty bomb senerio does not require weapons grade plutonium . It's like the differance between HE laundry soap and purex cheap crap laundry soap .
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Given half a chance people will do half of what you expect from them .
This concept appears a bit hopeless to me in the sense that converting biomass to the heat necessary to generate steam is a pretty big endeavor. Cattle, elk, humans, and so on consume a great deal of biomass yet do not come close to the tempertures necessary to convert water to steam.
To me this concept would require a very large machine and that presents yet another problem in that size requires more and more biomass ingestion.
It takes a really large pile of manure to make not so much methane.
Maybe this thing could find a Texas Panhandle feedlot then sit on it (in every sense of the word) for a month or so to stock up on methane.
It takes time for flesh (human or otherwise) to rot thus producing gas.
Perhaps it will be programmed to look for bean fields?
I think the first thing the programmers better burn into the EATR's CPU is Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. Just because it's not being built by Cyberdyne doesn't mean it can't have its programming corrupted. Or are they really looking forward to a Westworld scenario where nothing can go wrong... go wrong... go wrong?
Zombie robots that fart! Great, that's just great. And because they are robots, they are mostly bulletproof. If it can eat manure, it can eat a Democrat. Call them "buzzard bots"
I think the first thing the programmers better burn into the EATR's CPU is Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. Just because it's not being built by Cyberdyne doesn't mean it can't have its programming corrupted. Or are they really looking forward to a Westworld scenario where nothing can go wrong... go wrong... go wrong?
Hehe yeah because we all remember that one of those laws was logically flawed, and actually caused harm to someone.....I need to read I, Robot again.
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This concept appears a bit hopeless to me in the sense that converting biomass to the heat necessary to generate steam is a pretty big endeavor. Cattle, elk, humans, and so on consume a great deal of biomass yet do not come close to the tempertures necessary to convert water to steam.
To me this concept would require a very large machine and that presents yet another problem in that size requires more and more biomass ingestion.
It takes a really large pile of manure to make not so much methane.
Maybe this thing could find a Texas Panhandle feedlot then sit on it (in every sense of the word) for a month or so to stock up on methane.
It takes time for flesh (human or otherwise) to rot thus producing gas.
Perhaps it will be programmed to look for bean fields?
I was thinking the same thing, unless it holds, say a few chemicals that make a reaction of a lot of heat upon mixing? Like, in a weird way, they had stomach acid? I am not saying they need to have acid in them, but what if they had some sort of chemical(s) that when they hit biomass it actually broke it down and melted it? Some acids will eat through biological material but not through manufactured materials that are of course non biological. Ever see any of those cadaver art/science displays? The ones that are just a bunch of human arteries are when the body got filled with some sort of plastic through out their arteries and veins and then got dumped in a bio acid that ate away all biological items but left the arteries and veins intact in the plastic.
Hehe yeah because we all remember that one of those laws was logically flawed, and actually caused harm to someone.....I need to read I, Robot again.
Yes, tlarkin, you do. I haven't reread the Robot stories in years, but the only instance in which I recall a violation of the Three Laws of Robotics was a case in which a madman who worked for US Robots deliberately set up a positronic brain in which the First Law was programmed to read, "A robot may not injure a human being," leaving off the second clause "...or though inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." The logical implications of this altered First Law are obvious.
So everyone is on the same page, here are Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
While there is the potential for conflict within the Three Laws - for example, what if an alcoholic with cirrhosis of the liver who owns a 'bot tells the robot to go buy him a fifth of Scotch, while the human's doctor had previously told the robot not to buy alcohol for the owner because drinking might kill him? - there are no flaws in Asimov's logic. He set out deliberately to break away from the Robot as Monster stereotype that exists as far back in literatures as the Golem in Jewish folktalkes, the Zombie in various African and Caribbean folktales, and of course the Creature created by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, to say nothing of actual mechanical men from movies like Lang's Metropolis and Capek's R.U.R. He wanted robots to be helpful servants of mankind, not droids that could and would go berserk and massacre their creators. And over time, Asimov's view of robots operating under the Three Laws became the perception of most people and filmmakers, Stanley Kubrick and Michael Crichton excepted. We did not see a serious return to the theme of Robot As Monster until James Cameron's The Terminator in 1984.
I may be blurring my sci fi stories here but what I remember was, that there was a certain situation where a robot had to kill a human to abide by all three laws due to it protecting the human from itself.
There is also a gray area of AI robots creating other robots. Sure one AI in design may not be able to harm a living creature, but it could create one that could.
Yeah I will have to read the robot series again. I never finished the foundation trilogy either. I found it very informative and interesting but I don't think it needed to be a trilogy.
I may be blurring my sci fi stories here but what I remember was, that there was a certain situation where a robot had to kill a human to abide by all three laws due to it protecting the human from itself.
You also might want to give Fritz Lieber's The Silver Eggheads a read. It has an interesting alternate take on robot evolution, including robot sex - sex between robots, that is. If a human wanted to have sex with an android, there were Madame Pneumo's femmequins; but you really needed to be careful with those.
