5 ms·

Amazing that our state of the art technology is a fragile device that can fly for 30 minutes, while this ancient entity can fly nonstop, deriving energy from bu

Amazing that our state of the art technology is a fragile device that can fly for 30 minutes, while this ancient entity can fly nonstop, deriving energy from bugs and water, fly through storms, self repair any damage, has global navigation and local avoidance, and even can self replicate. It's humbling to realize how far off our technology is in certain areas from competing even with insects.

imtringued 5y ago
Building small robots is a pain. The commercially available actuators are huge and not very powerful if they don't come with a gearbox.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  That's not the reason they're a pain. They are a pain because friction doesn't scale down nicely.
dataflow 5y ago
Let's give the technology 60 million years to be perfected and then compare. P.S. This aircraft flew from Japan to Hawaii in 118 hours solely powered by solar energy https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/solar-impulse-2-breaks-records-flying-around-world-without-fuel https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/solar-impulse-2-br... (n.b. this isn't to dispute the awesomeness of birds.)
- barney54 5y ago
  Yes, and then they had to replace the batteries that suffered “irreversible damage” and that took several months to fix. These birds just keep on going.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Kye 5y ago
    Unless they hit one of our earlier attempts to survive long enough to be as good as birds. I hope new wind farms are built with awareness of bird migration in mind. https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/collisions/wind-turbines.php https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/...
  - kijin 5y ago
    Self-replication helps a lot. Birds suffer irreversible damage all the time. They just spam the world with more birds to replace the dead ones.
  - hammock 5y ago
    I'm sure the bird started the trip with a full stomach, so that it had the fuel not only to power itself but also to repair itself in flight.
- rpastuszak 5y ago
  > Let's give the technology 60 million years to be perfected and then compare. Your point being?
  - rpastuszak 5y ago
    I really don’t get the point of that comment, that was a genuine question.
  - mynameisvlad 5y ago
    I mean, it’s pretty clear what the point is. That we are comparing a few decades of work with what is essentially millenias worth of evolutions. Of course our technology is going to lose, it’s nowhere near as mature as nature’s.
foxhop 5y ago
Technology will never replace nature, only augment. People who think wrongly will be the destroyers of nature.
- vimacs2 5y ago
  I'd go a step further and say that technology is nature. Humans just represent another way for nature to enhance the permutation of new possibilities. For thousands of years, we acted like the animal analogue to the fungal mattes that had terraformed the continental landmasses to become livable by plants hundreds of millions of years ago. Everywhere we went, we planted intricately organised forests of different plant species that then aided an enhanced biodiversity of the fauna too. It's only recently in our history that humans have turned from a proliferator of biodiversity to a poison for it.
  - ninkendo 5y ago
    Humans have always been a disaster for the environment they move into. We drove mammoths to extinction over 10,000 years ago. Australia used to have large numbers of megafauna species which the aborigines killed off tens of thousands of years ago. Humans would use fire to burn their prey out of hiding (and destroying their habitat in the process), then just move off to the next habitat once everything was burned up. Humans being a destructive force to the ecosystems we depend on is definitely not a new thing.
    - vimacs2 5y ago
      That humans had a major role in the extinction of wooly mammoths is likely correct. However this cannot be said for the megafauna in Australia: https://theconversation.com/aboriginal-australians-co-existed-with-the-megafauna-for-at-least-17-000-years-70589 https://theconversation.com/aboriginal-australians-co-existe... Our propensity to blame past extinctions on humans often has more to do with projecting our own civilisation's tendancies at destruction than some immutable fact about human nature. Mammoths also tended to live in areas of relatively low biodiversity such as the artic and tundra anyway so this does not contradict my point that historically humans have caused increases in the biodiversity in their local ecologies. There is substantial evidence that the Amazon rainforest for instance was at least in part cultivated: https://www.voanews.com/a/amazon-rainforest-ancient-people-cultivated-trees/3747940.html https://www.voanews.com/a/amazon-rainforest-ancient-people-c...
hungryforcodes 5y ago
Though to be fair to technology, it's amazing how it can track a bird 8000 miles on just solar power, giving us a view of the world no other bird will ever really have at the moment.
obiwan14 5y ago
Everything we build is an attempt to replicate what already exist in nature. How close we come is a function of our expertise and understanding of the laws of life. As we understand these things better, we'll be able to build objects that closely match what's in nature.
jacquesm 5y ago
I once read this bit and your comment reminds me of it: "As life, cockroaches absolutely suck, but as technology they excel".
postalrat 5y ago
Biology is basically alien technology that we've been studying but can't figure out how it works.
xnx 5y ago
Nature is the most advanced technology there is. This is why it's such a shame that climate change leads to destroyed habitats and lost species. We'll never know what ingenious solutions nature cooked up in some obscure extinct species.

imtringued 5y ago

Building small robots is a pain. The commercially available actuators are huge and not very powerful if they don't come with a gearbox.

jacquesm 5y ago
That's not the reason they're a pain. They are a pain because friction doesn't scale down nicely.

dataflow 5y ago

Let's give the technology 60 million years to be perfected and then compare. P.S. This aircraft flew from Japan to Hawaii in 118 hours solely powered by solar energy https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/solar-impulse-2-breaks-records-flying-around-world-without-fuel https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/solar-impulse-2-br... (n.b. this isn't to dispute the awesomeness of birds.)

barney54 5y ago
Yes, and then they had to replace the batteries that suffered “irreversible damage” and that took several months to fix. These birds just keep on going.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Kye 5y ago
  Unless they hit one of our earlier attempts to survive long enough to be as good as birds. I hope new wind farms are built with awareness of bird migration in mind. https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/collisions/wind-turbines.php https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/...
- kijin 5y ago
  Self-replication helps a lot. Birds suffer irreversible damage all the time. They just spam the world with more birds to replace the dead ones.
- hammock 5y ago
  I'm sure the bird started the trip with a full stomach, so that it had the fuel not only to power itself but also to repair itself in flight.
rpastuszak 5y ago
> Let's give the technology 60 million years to be perfected and then compare. Your point being?
- rpastuszak 5y ago
  I really don’t get the point of that comment, that was a genuine question.
- mynameisvlad 5y ago
  I mean, it’s pretty clear what the point is. That we are comparing a few decades of work with what is essentially millenias worth of evolutions. Of course our technology is going to lose, it’s nowhere near as mature as nature’s.

foxhop 5y ago

Technology will never replace nature, only augment. People who think wrongly will be the destroyers of nature.

vimacs2 5y ago
I'd go a step further and say that technology is nature. Humans just represent another way for nature to enhance the permutation of new possibilities. For thousands of years, we acted like the animal analogue to the fungal mattes that had terraformed the continental landmasses to become livable by plants hundreds of millions of years ago. Everywhere we went, we planted intricately organised forests of different plant species that then aided an enhanced biodiversity of the fauna too. It's only recently in our history that humans have turned from a proliferator of biodiversity to a poison for it.
- ninkendo 5y ago
  Humans have always been a disaster for the environment they move into. We drove mammoths to extinction over 10,000 years ago. Australia used to have large numbers of megafauna species which the aborigines killed off tens of thousands of years ago. Humans would use fire to burn their prey out of hiding (and destroying their habitat in the process), then just move off to the next habitat once everything was burned up. Humans being a destructive force to the ecosystems we depend on is definitely not a new thing.
  - vimacs2 5y ago
    That humans had a major role in the extinction of wooly mammoths is likely correct. However this cannot be said for the megafauna in Australia: https://theconversation.com/aboriginal-australians-co-existed-with-the-megafauna-for-at-least-17-000-years-70589 https://theconversation.com/aboriginal-australians-co-existe... Our propensity to blame past extinctions on humans often has more to do with projecting our own civilisation's tendancies at destruction than some immutable fact about human nature. Mammoths also tended to live in areas of relatively low biodiversity such as the artic and tundra anyway so this does not contradict my point that historically humans have caused increases in the biodiversity in their local ecologies. There is substantial evidence that the Amazon rainforest for instance was at least in part cultivated: https://www.voanews.com/a/amazon-rainforest-ancient-people-cultivated-trees/3747940.html https://www.voanews.com/a/amazon-rainforest-ancient-people-c...

hungryforcodes 5y ago

Though to be fair to technology, it's amazing how it can track a bird 8000 miles on just solar power, giving us a view of the world no other bird will ever really have at the moment.

obiwan14 5y ago

Everything we build is an attempt to replicate what already exist in nature. How close we come is a function of our expertise and understanding of the laws of life. As we understand these things better, we'll be able to build objects that closely match what's in nature.

jacquesm 5y ago

I once read this bit and your comment reminds me of it: "As life, cockroaches absolutely suck, but as technology they excel".

postalrat 5y ago

Biology is basically alien technology that we've been studying but can't figure out how it works.

xnx 5y ago

Nature is the most advanced technology there is. This is why it's such a shame that climate change leads to destroyed habitats and lost species. We'll never know what ingenious solutions nature cooked up in some obscure extinct species.