8 ms·

Call this a freely given and viable but hard to monetize idea - this is a very tractable area for software and drones. Same with locating people in lost wildern

Call this a freely given and viable but hard to monetize idea - this is a very tractable area for software and drones. Same with locating people in lost wilderness areas. You have a programmatic way to organize coverage areas, you have access to above-human audio and video capabilities, and it reduces the resources/time ratio that is critical in rescues. This was the tragic and avoidable story that convinced me this was possible - https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/us/missing-hiker-geraldine-largay-appalachian-trail-maine.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/us/missing-hiker-geraldin... There was a limited geographical footprint and coordinated, modestly sized fleet of quadcopters with mics and/or thermal imaging could probably cover 20 square miles/day. Same couple be applied with optical/higher altitude drones for people lost at sea. You could supplement sensors with basic face/voice recognition in less remote settings. You could supplement with something like Planet in more remote/ocean settings. Does something like that exist already?

oh_sigh 6y ago
Well, there are just personal locator beacons which you can rent and tell rescue personnel exactly where you are if you need a rescue.
- danpalmer 6y ago
  Satellite phones with this capability are remarkably cheap for anyone who’s undertaking activities that might call for this. Contracts typically have a call centre able to dispatch relevant local authorities wherever you are.
- Razengan 6y ago
  What if you lose them or they fail to work?
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Then you’re in the same place as if you didn’t have one and you’re hopefully not making yourself utterly dependent on them.
    - Razengan 6y ago
      Then it’s not really the same thing as the GP’s comment was taking about: A service that looks for you and SOS signals which can be constructed at the distress site without depending on any equipment you had before you were stranded.
  - tapatio 6y ago
    Carry a backup?
  - crooked-v 6y ago
    Then you've wasted $250, which at that point is presumably the least of your problems.
- vosper 6y ago
  They're not even expensive to buy. I picked one up for a few hundred dollars for hiking. I believe it's good for 10 years, until the battery needs replacing. I don't even do particularly intense hikes, usually not even overnight, but I read a few stories and realised how easy it is to end up in a situation where you need one. You just have to slip over and land badly, that's all it takes. Or maybe it won't be me, but someone else on the trail who needs help.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    The history of humans, traveling totally unprepared into harsh environmental conditions, thinking they'll just "Rambo" their way through, is stunning. The "Into the Wild" bus comes to mind[1]. So many people died every year, attempting to forge rivers unprepared, and brave the harsh Alaskan elements, that they had to remove this bus! It wasn't enough that people died every year, and that most of them had practically zero harsh environment experience... Nature will kill you every chance it gets. Be prepared, or don't go. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53106441 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53106441
    - prionassembly 6y ago
      We choose to go to the moon!
      - Alupis 6y ago
        I'd argue they were abundantly prepared for going to the harsh moon environment.
  - newman8r 6y ago
    yeah I've got one too (for kayaking in the ocean and hiking/overlanding), the peace of mind that they offer is worth the cost alone. I like to go places with no cell signal, and when you're hours from the nearest paved road, it's nice to know that you can get airlifted out if you get bitten by a snake, etc.
  - jessriedel 6y ago
- thaumaturgy 6y ago
  This is the right answer. A Garmin InReach or similar device with two-way messaging capabilities should be regarded as standard equipment now for anyone going into backcountry or remote areas. The two-way messaging allows local rescue teams to assess your condition, confirm your location, and deploy the appropriate resources more quickly.
  - senkora 6y ago
    Yep. I planned to hike the Appalachian Trail this year (canceled due to covid), and the Garmin InReach was universally recommended equipment.
  - crooked-v 6y ago
    Though, keep in mind that the satellite messenger's battery is going to run lower much faster if you use it much (and paying at least a $12/mo subscription for it on top of the purchase price, you'll probably be pretty tempted to use it), while a PLB never runs down from use because you only ever use it in a definite emergency.
implying 6y ago
If you were lost at sea / in the wilderness, would you trust your safety and eventual return to a machine learning model picking up your body heat? I know I'd want actual people in the aircraft.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  You can do both. Predator/Reaper/Global Hawks [1] [2] working alongside human aircraft, deployed from land or aircraft carrier. If you don't trust the ML, have humans in the Vegas desert watching the feed. I imagine military sensor platforms are very good for identification of humans. > Five Reapers can provide 36 hours of combined surveillance coverage in Afghanistan with individual sorties lasting up to 16 hours; a further five vehicles increases this to 72 hours For reference Afghanistan is roughly 251k square miles in size. Ten Reapers to cover 251k square miles for 72 hours at a time. Caveat, I have not done the math what the O&M costs are per hour for such a drone fleet. Alternatively (or in concert?), Planet Labs supports 50cm resolution, and you can buy their imagery with a credit card. They are imaging almost the entire Earth daily (although they might exclude oceans? I imagine for the right price, they'll retask or capture a grid on demand). [3] [4] It's not heat sensing, but there might be signal to be found. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper [2] https://www.pacaf.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2203962/global-hawks-return-to-yokota-to-provide-continuous-support-to-joint-partners-a/ https://www.pacaf.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/220396... [3] https://www.planet.com/why-planet/ https://www.planet.com/why-planet/ [4] https://www.planet.com/pulse/more-spectral-bands-50cm-global-analytics-change-detection/ https://www.planet.com/pulse/more-spectral-bands-50cm-global...
  - 7952 6y ago
    The sky is cloudy a lot of the time which limits the effectiveness of satellite imagery.
- throwaway5752 6y ago
  I have been involved in lower grade search efforts. This is not either/or, this is supplemental. If you've never been in a scenario, particular with children, time is of the essence particular with temperature or terrain hazards. Time is the enemy, and the goal of this would be reduce time to cover a search area. If you find it interesting, https://www.outsideonline.com/2059616/how-backcountry-search-and-rescue-works https://www.outsideonline.com/2059616/how-backcountry-search... is a good read.
Alupis 6y ago
Or... a dude in a helicopter with FLIR? Sometimes, low tech is best, honestly. Of course they already have that. The problem isn't coverage usually, it's density of the terrain features and vegetation, and an unknown search radius in some cases. That, and unprepared people with no way to signal a search vehicle if one comes near. That's a human problem though, not a tech problem.
- throwaway5752 6y ago
  Sure. It's the unknown search radius, availability of pilots, human factors, as well as the greater ability of a drone to self (or with human intervention) track in to greater resolution that makes me wonder if this is doable. Get the helicopter with a flir camera, but also send out 50 quadcopters or uavs as a force multiplier. If there is some sort of interesting infrared or acoustic signature at a site, just log it with GPS coordinates for human follow up.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    > Get the helicopter with a flir camera, but also send out 50 quadcopters or uavs as a force multiplier. You're going to have to contend with the disruption of 50 quadcopters barreling their way through natural wild habitat, foilage and more without disturbing all of the animals that live there. Or simply convince people that is a worth-while trade-off for saving unprepared skiiers that went off trail and down the wrong side of a mountain against all warnings... That aside, I don't think there's much utility there. A large aerial drone like a Predator or something, ya that might be a big help (very long loiter times, powerful imaging equipment, etc). But you wouldn't need 50 of those, and the same difficulties will be present (body heat can only show on FLIR if it's not blocked by layers of foilage, etc). But... then you'll have to convince people it's not a "militarization" of rescue services!
    - throwaway5752 6y ago
      I will push back on you a bit there. Most people can only cover a couple of dozen miles a day, depending on the person and the terrain. A lot of the time, they realize they are lost and will yell or try to make themselves found. Maybe a high foliage environment would be a better target for directional mics / acoustics. I think the search and rescue efforts as they stand are pretty disruptive (helicopters, teams covering grids) so I don't think this is incrementally much worse. The "unprepared skiiers" (or hikers, sailors) you mention are someone's child and often someone's parent. They are loved and mourned, and it's a bit easier to get lost than is generally appreciated. A sea rescue is a different ball of wax than a forest rescue, and I was freely mixing both situations. In the sea setting, Plant Labs or a aerial drone like a predator (like commercializing existing military tech, eg, GPS) is more appropriate, perhaps. The biggest obstacle here is staging these for use and being available in a timely manner, on the order of hours.
SiVal 6y ago
I'd like to see all phones and phone towers fitted with an emergency ping ability and an emergency ping protocol, since almost everyone carries a phone these days. If you needed help, you'd enter a text describing your situation (a default text would be used if you could only click a "HELP!" button), put the phone in a special mode that would shut everything down to conserve battery power but would send out a stronger-than-usual radio "ping" every 60 seconds or so (depending on battery). To save energy, the ping would not include the text. The repeated pings would be optimized to just shout into the ether, to get attention from the greatest distance possible. Any receiver would recognize that it was an emergency ping and could respond with a protocol response ping that requested more info. The response would be sent at a predefined time delay and frequency that would be determined by the outgoing request ping that had been received so the phone would only have to listen to one frequency and for a brief time to save battery. The phone could rotate its outgoing pings to different frequencies but would always know when and at what frequency to listen for a response based on the outgoing ping it sent. When it got a response from a tower, and only at that point, the phone would expend extra energy to transmit its location, the text, battery status, etc. Based on various factors, the tower would schedule future transmissions and automate most of the data exchange to conserve the phone's power, would notify responders, and would tell the phone to notify its owner that help was being sent. You could then put this emergency ping protocol into search and rescue aircraft and drones with mesh network abilities.
- throwaway5752 6y ago
  Cellular coverage is amazing and always improving but the exact areas that are problematic/have gaps are more likely to be search and rescue locations. Further, people don't always stay put after a device runs out of power, and it can't be assumed everyone is carrying a device on a cellular network (particularly children).
- floatrock 6y ago
  I've heard of ski resorts using stringray-like devices to locate avalanche victims.
thaumaturgy 6y ago
This does not work well in practice, yet. There is a lot of interest already in using both off-the-shelf and more purpose-built drone technologies in search and rescue. They currently have too many limitations: they cannot navigate complex tree canopies close enough to the ground to provide reliable visual contact with subjects; their flight time is so limited that deployment and management is a real pain for large search areas; and if they aren't fully automated then you get the same signal problems with your remote that we have with our much more powerful radios with the added benefit of extremely powerful repeaters scattered on nearby hills. This isn't to say they can't be a resource in SAR. Alameda County brought out a brilliant array of UAV equipment after the Camp Fire and were able to survey large portions of the burned town of Paradise and then process the imagery down to almost 1 cm resolution in their IC trailer. It really was some next-gen stuff and they did it way faster than the ground pounders could survey the same area. Down in the southwest, in specific types of terrain, drones are being used to quickly survey some popular holes that hikers find their way into. And, a drone scouted an orchard and found a lost subject there about a year ago. But you have to weigh those successes against the much larger number of cases where people with hundreds of hours of experience can still very nearly step on top of a nonresponsive subject without seeing them. Finding lost people is hard, and many of the failures to find lost people have more to do with the problems of getting bad information into IC, or searching the wrong area, or the subject being in an inaccessible area, or the lost person's remains getting quickly predated by local wildlife. Thermal imaging likewise just does not work the way that people think it does. It doesn't work in cold environments like the Sierra in winter (western or eastern), because people are typically wearing insulated clothing and the entire area around them is a gigantic heat sink. It also doesn't work in very warm environments or in heavily vegetated environments or rocky environments with sunlight -- rocks absorb and re-radiate heat and so do plants. I've had this conversation a few times with different technologists. What we need is a balloon that we can put up with a big ol' repeater on it. That would provide a lot more immediate benefit for search operations. But, it's not sexy, so nobody's as interested as they are in trying to fly quadcopters over impossible terrain 20 minutes at a time.
- throwaway5752 6y ago
  Thanks for the informative reply. Your point about "What we need is a balloon that we can put up with a big ol' repeater on it" is particularly brilliant and I hope the right people are reading.
ohazi 6y ago
The "search" part of search and rescue is a solved problem. There's no reason to go into the wilderness without a PLB in 2020. PLBs cost around $300 [1], they have five+ year batteries, and they don't require a subscription. If you need to use it, you turn it on, it grabs a GPS lock and transmits your coordinates for about a day, during which at least one satellite will see your signal and downlinks all over the planet will log your location. It may still take some time for rescue services to get to you, but finding you will no longer be the primary concern. If $300 is still too much, you can usually rent or borrow one for the duration of your trip. Just throw one in your backpack and consider yourself lucky if you never end up needing it. The nature of emergencies means you don't know what you're going to run into. You could be lost, you could have a broken leg, you could have been bitten by something lethal, you could be treading water 100 miles offshore. You could have provisions for a month, or you could need a medevac ASAP. If you actually have an emergency, do you want to sit around for a week and hope that you get noticed, or do you want rescue services all over the planet to have your exact coordinates within the hour? Ten years ago these might have been newfangled novelty gadgets, but today they really should be considered required safety equipment if you're going into an area that's remote, or where there's a real possibility of veering off course. If you're sailing a boat or flying an airplane, they're usually legally required now too. They may not be mandated for hikers or backpackers, but don't be an idiot -- you need to have one. Rescue services don't look for lines in the sand or messages in bottles anymore. The world spent over a billion dollars to get the Cospas-Sarsat program up and running, and the expected method for signaling distress in 2020 is by satellite. You should have the equipment to make a distress call if you're going to be in a position where it may be necessary. Don't needlessly make things harder on yourself and on rescue workers by thinking that it's manlier to flash a mirror at an airplane. That can be your backup method, but not your primary. [1] https://www.acrartex.com/products/resqlink-400 https://www.acrartex.com/products/resqlink-400
- throwaway5752 6y ago
  I'm not trying to take this discussion in a bad direction, but we're seeing a society-wide failure in the US to wear small pieces of cloth over our face to reduce the transmission of a serious illness. People frequently fail to prepare adequately even when given the means and opportunity. Search and rescue scenarios are not always for people that planned around getting lost and have a locator beacons on their person. I agree, if everyone had one, it would be ideal and would almost completely eliminate the need for what I described. edit: rather than reply and extend the thread, I just wanted to say I strongly agree with you on the matter of PRBs and survival prep. I think you may have persuaded me to pick one up for day hikes.
lm28469 6y ago
> prone to anxiety, a diminutive 66-year-old woman with a poor sense of direction, hiking the Appalachian Trail by herself, who wandered into terrain so wild, it is used for military training. Not to be insulting but I feel like the issue could have been solved 10 steps before the need to involve swarms of drones. If people want to go in remote areas they should carry ways to be located, there are no reasons not to carry one. It's the kind of thing that would make sense if money didn't exist, like having a police officer in front of every single house in the country to prevent burglaries.

oh_sigh 6y ago

Well, there are just personal locator beacons which you can rent and tell rescue personnel exactly where you are if you need a rescue.

danpalmer 6y ago
Satellite phones with this capability are remarkably cheap for anyone who’s undertaking activities that might call for this. Contracts typically have a call centre able to dispatch relevant local authorities wherever you are.
Razengan 6y ago
What if you lose them or they fail to work?
- ghaff 6y ago
  Then you’re in the same place as if you didn’t have one and you’re hopefully not making yourself utterly dependent on them.
  - Razengan 6y ago
    Then it’s not really the same thing as the GP’s comment was taking about: A service that looks for you and SOS signals which can be constructed at the distress site without depending on any equipment you had before you were stranded.
- tapatio 6y ago
  Carry a backup?
- crooked-v 6y ago
  Then you've wasted $250, which at that point is presumably the least of your problems.
vosper 6y ago
They're not even expensive to buy. I picked one up for a few hundred dollars for hiking. I believe it's good for 10 years, until the battery needs replacing. I don't even do particularly intense hikes, usually not even overnight, but I read a few stories and realised how easy it is to end up in a situation where you need one. You just have to slip over and land badly, that's all it takes. Or maybe it won't be me, but someone else on the trail who needs help.
- Alupis 6y ago
  The history of humans, traveling totally unprepared into harsh environmental conditions, thinking they'll just "Rambo" their way through, is stunning. The "Into the Wild" bus comes to mind[1]. So many people died every year, attempting to forge rivers unprepared, and brave the harsh Alaskan elements, that they had to remove this bus! It wasn't enough that people died every year, and that most of them had practically zero harsh environment experience... Nature will kill you every chance it gets. Be prepared, or don't go. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53106441 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53106441
  - prionassembly 6y ago
    We choose to go to the moon!
    - Alupis 6y ago
      I'd argue they were abundantly prepared for going to the harsh moon environment.
- newman8r 6y ago
  yeah I've got one too (for kayaking in the ocean and hiking/overlanding), the peace of mind that they offer is worth the cost alone. I like to go places with no cell signal, and when you're hours from the nearest paved road, it's nice to know that you can get airlifted out if you get bitten by a snake, etc.
- jessriedel 6y ago
thaumaturgy 6y ago
This is the right answer. A Garmin InReach or similar device with two-way messaging capabilities should be regarded as standard equipment now for anyone going into backcountry or remote areas. The two-way messaging allows local rescue teams to assess your condition, confirm your location, and deploy the appropriate resources more quickly.
- senkora 6y ago
  Yep. I planned to hike the Appalachian Trail this year (canceled due to covid), and the Garmin InReach was universally recommended equipment.
- crooked-v 6y ago
  Though, keep in mind that the satellite messenger's battery is going to run lower much faster if you use it much (and paying at least a $12/mo subscription for it on top of the purchase price, you'll probably be pretty tempted to use it), while a PLB never runs down from use because you only ever use it in a definite emergency.

implying 6y ago

If you were lost at sea / in the wilderness, would you trust your safety and eventual return to a machine learning model picking up your body heat? I know I'd want actual people in the aircraft.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
You can do both. Predator/Reaper/Global Hawks [1] [2] working alongside human aircraft, deployed from land or aircraft carrier. If you don't trust the ML, have humans in the Vegas desert watching the feed. I imagine military sensor platforms are very good for identification of humans. > Five Reapers can provide 36 hours of combined surveillance coverage in Afghanistan with individual sorties lasting up to 16 hours; a further five vehicles increases this to 72 hours For reference Afghanistan is roughly 251k square miles in size. Ten Reapers to cover 251k square miles for 72 hours at a time. Caveat, I have not done the math what the O&M costs are per hour for such a drone fleet. Alternatively (or in concert?), Planet Labs supports 50cm resolution, and you can buy their imagery with a credit card. They are imaging almost the entire Earth daily (although they might exclude oceans? I imagine for the right price, they'll retask or capture a grid on demand). [3] [4] It's not heat sensing, but there might be signal to be found. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper [2] https://www.pacaf.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2203962/global-hawks-return-to-yokota-to-provide-continuous-support-to-joint-partners-a/ https://www.pacaf.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/220396... [3] https://www.planet.com/why-planet/ https://www.planet.com/why-planet/ [4] https://www.planet.com/pulse/more-spectral-bands-50cm-global-analytics-change-detection/ https://www.planet.com/pulse/more-spectral-bands-50cm-global...
- 7952 6y ago
  The sky is cloudy a lot of the time which limits the effectiveness of satellite imagery.
throwaway5752 6y ago
I have been involved in lower grade search efforts. This is not either/or, this is supplemental. If you've never been in a scenario, particular with children, time is of the essence particular with temperature or terrain hazards. Time is the enemy, and the goal of this would be reduce time to cover a search area. If you find it interesting, https://www.outsideonline.com/2059616/how-backcountry-search-and-rescue-works https://www.outsideonline.com/2059616/how-backcountry-search... is a good read.

Alupis 6y ago

Or... a dude in a helicopter with FLIR? Sometimes, low tech is best, honestly. Of course they already have that. The problem isn't coverage usually, it's density of the terrain features and vegetation, and an unknown search radius in some cases. That, and unprepared people with no way to signal a search vehicle if one comes near. That's a human problem though, not a tech problem.

throwaway5752 6y ago
Sure. It's the unknown search radius, availability of pilots, human factors, as well as the greater ability of a drone to self (or with human intervention) track in to greater resolution that makes me wonder if this is doable. Get the helicopter with a flir camera, but also send out 50 quadcopters or uavs as a force multiplier. If there is some sort of interesting infrared or acoustic signature at a site, just log it with GPS coordinates for human follow up.
- Alupis 6y ago
  > Get the helicopter with a flir camera, but also send out 50 quadcopters or uavs as a force multiplier. You're going to have to contend with the disruption of 50 quadcopters barreling their way through natural wild habitat, foilage and more without disturbing all of the animals that live there. Or simply convince people that is a worth-while trade-off for saving unprepared skiiers that went off trail and down the wrong side of a mountain against all warnings... That aside, I don't think there's much utility there. A large aerial drone like a Predator or something, ya that might be a big help (very long loiter times, powerful imaging equipment, etc). But you wouldn't need 50 of those, and the same difficulties will be present (body heat can only show on FLIR if it's not blocked by layers of foilage, etc). But... then you'll have to convince people it's not a "militarization" of rescue services!
  - throwaway5752 6y ago
    I will push back on you a bit there. Most people can only cover a couple of dozen miles a day, depending on the person and the terrain. A lot of the time, they realize they are lost and will yell or try to make themselves found. Maybe a high foliage environment would be a better target for directional mics / acoustics. I think the search and rescue efforts as they stand are pretty disruptive (helicopters, teams covering grids) so I don't think this is incrementally much worse. The "unprepared skiiers" (or hikers, sailors) you mention are someone's child and often someone's parent. They are loved and mourned, and it's a bit easier to get lost than is generally appreciated. A sea rescue is a different ball of wax than a forest rescue, and I was freely mixing both situations. In the sea setting, Plant Labs or a aerial drone like a predator (like commercializing existing military tech, eg, GPS) is more appropriate, perhaps. The biggest obstacle here is staging these for use and being available in a timely manner, on the order of hours.

SiVal 6y ago

I'd like to see all phones and phone towers fitted with an emergency ping ability and an emergency ping protocol, since almost everyone carries a phone these days. If you needed help, you'd enter a text describing your situation (a default text would be used if you could only click a "HELP!" button), put the phone in a special mode that would shut everything down to conserve battery power but would send out a stronger-than-usual radio "ping" every 60 seconds or so (depending on battery). To save energy, the ping would not include the text. The repeated pings would be optimized to just shout into the ether, to get attention from the greatest distance possible. Any receiver would recognize that it was an emergency ping and could respond with a protocol response ping that requested more info. The response would be sent at a predefined time delay and frequency that would be determined by the outgoing request ping that had been received so the phone would only have to listen to one frequency and for a brief time to save battery. The phone could rotate its outgoing pings to different frequencies but would always know when and at what frequency to listen for a response based on the outgoing ping it sent. When it got a response from a tower, and only at that point, the phone would expend extra energy to transmit its location, the text, battery status, etc. Based on various factors, the tower would schedule future transmissions and automate most of the data exchange to conserve the phone's power, would notify responders, and would tell the phone to notify its owner that help was being sent. You could then put this emergency ping protocol into search and rescue aircraft and drones with mesh network abilities.

throwaway5752 6y ago
Cellular coverage is amazing and always improving but the exact areas that are problematic/have gaps are more likely to be search and rescue locations. Further, people don't always stay put after a device runs out of power, and it can't be assumed everyone is carrying a device on a cellular network (particularly children).
floatrock 6y ago
I've heard of ski resorts using stringray-like devices to locate avalanche victims.

thaumaturgy 6y ago

This does not work well in practice, yet. There is a lot of interest already in using both off-the-shelf and more purpose-built drone technologies in search and rescue. They currently have too many limitations: they cannot navigate complex tree canopies close enough to the ground to provide reliable visual contact with subjects; their flight time is so limited that deployment and management is a real pain for large search areas; and if they aren't fully automated then you get the same signal problems with your remote that we have with our much more powerful radios with the added benefit of extremely powerful repeaters scattered on nearby hills. This isn't to say they can't be a resource in SAR. Alameda County brought out a brilliant array of UAV equipment after the Camp Fire and were able to survey large portions of the burned town of Paradise and then process the imagery down to almost 1 cm resolution in their IC trailer. It really was some next-gen stuff and they did it way faster than the ground pounders could survey the same area. Down in the southwest, in specific types of terrain, drones are being used to quickly survey some popular holes that hikers find their way into. And, a drone scouted an orchard and found a lost subject there about a year ago. But you have to weigh those successes against the much larger number of cases where people with hundreds of hours of experience can still very nearly step on top of a nonresponsive subject without seeing them. Finding lost people is hard, and many of the failures to find lost people have more to do with the problems of getting bad information into IC, or searching the wrong area, or the subject being in an inaccessible area, or the lost person's remains getting quickly predated by local wildlife. Thermal imaging likewise just does not work the way that people think it does. It doesn't work in cold environments like the Sierra in winter (western or eastern), because people are typically wearing insulated clothing and the entire area around them is a gigantic heat sink. It also doesn't work in very warm environments or in heavily vegetated environments or rocky environments with sunlight -- rocks absorb and re-radiate heat and so do plants. I've had this conversation a few times with different technologists. What we need is a balloon that we can put up with a big ol' repeater on it. That would provide a lot more immediate benefit for search operations. But, it's not sexy, so nobody's as interested as they are in trying to fly quadcopters over impossible terrain 20 minutes at a time.

throwaway5752 6y ago
Thanks for the informative reply. Your point about "What we need is a balloon that we can put up with a big ol' repeater on it" is particularly brilliant and I hope the right people are reading.

ohazi 6y ago

The "search" part of search and rescue is a solved problem. There's no reason to go into the wilderness without a PLB in 2020. PLBs cost around $300 [1], they have five+ year batteries, and they don't require a subscription. If you need to use it, you turn it on, it grabs a GPS lock and transmits your coordinates for about a day, during which at least one satellite will see your signal and downlinks all over the planet will log your location. It may still take some time for rescue services to get to you, but finding you will no longer be the primary concern. If $300 is still too much, you can usually rent or borrow one for the duration of your trip. Just throw one in your backpack and consider yourself lucky if you never end up needing it. The nature of emergencies means you don't know what you're going to run into. You could be lost, you could have a broken leg, you could have been bitten by something lethal, you could be treading water 100 miles offshore. You could have provisions for a month, or you could need a medevac ASAP. If you actually have an emergency, do you want to sit around for a week and hope that you get noticed, or do you want rescue services all over the planet to have your exact coordinates within the hour? Ten years ago these might have been newfangled novelty gadgets, but today they really should be considered required safety equipment if you're going into an area that's remote, or where there's a real possibility of veering off course. If you're sailing a boat or flying an airplane, they're usually legally required now too. They may not be mandated for hikers or backpackers, but don't be an idiot -- you need to have one. Rescue services don't look for lines in the sand or messages in bottles anymore. The world spent over a billion dollars to get the Cospas-Sarsat program up and running, and the expected method for signaling distress in 2020 is by satellite. You should have the equipment to make a distress call if you're going to be in a position where it may be necessary. Don't needlessly make things harder on yourself and on rescue workers by thinking that it's manlier to flash a mirror at an airplane. That can be your backup method, but not your primary. [1] https://www.acrartex.com/products/resqlink-400 https://www.acrartex.com/products/resqlink-400

throwaway5752 6y ago
I'm not trying to take this discussion in a bad direction, but we're seeing a society-wide failure in the US to wear small pieces of cloth over our face to reduce the transmission of a serious illness. People frequently fail to prepare adequately even when given the means and opportunity. Search and rescue scenarios are not always for people that planned around getting lost and have a locator beacons on their person. I agree, if everyone had one, it would be ideal and would almost completely eliminate the need for what I described. edit: rather than reply and extend the thread, I just wanted to say I strongly agree with you on the matter of PRBs and survival prep. I think you may have persuaded me to pick one up for day hikes.

lm28469 6y ago

> prone to anxiety, a diminutive 66-year-old woman with a poor sense of direction, hiking the Appalachian Trail by herself, who wandered into terrain so wild, it is used for military training. Not to be insulting but I feel like the issue could have been solved 10 steps before the need to involve swarms of drones. If people want to go in remote areas they should carry ways to be located, there are no reasons not to carry one. It's the kind of thing that would make sense if money didn't exist, like having a police officer in front of every single house in the country to prevent burglaries.