4 ms·
>I'm just wondering what that would look like. It seems a Sisyphean task at best, like seeking a needle in a haystack. And how do you make sure you don't accide
by FDSGSG 5y ago
>I'm just wondering what that would look like. It seems a Sisyphean task at best, like seeking a needle in a haystack. And how do you make sure you don't accidentally damage a hard drive with an excavator? What makes him think the hard drive is not already damaged because it has been driven over or just the weight of garbage crushing it? What if his hard drive went through one of those conveyor belts with a giant magnet above it to separate metals?
Sorting out all the hard drives within the proposed quantities of trash seems well within the realm of what's possible with modern waste sorting robots.
Hard drives are really sturdy, it's unlikely that the data would be unrecoverable if you were able to identify the correct hard drive remains.
- dmurray 5y agoYeah, I think you could do this project for tens of millions and have a 20% chance of finding it intact, and you could argue those numbers are conservative. All assuming everything is as described in the article. Here's an account [0] of a single diamond mine that processes 60,000 tons of material every day, of which 10,000 tons is ore that needs to be examined closely enough to find diamonds. The article talks about excavating a 250m x 250m x 15m volume, approximately 1 million tons. Even if all of that is potential "ore" - which I doubt - that's a hundred days for the diamond mine. The diamond miners have different economies of scale and different environmental concerns, but I think it's a good starting point. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/diamond-mine-siberia-russia-alrosa-photos?r=US&IR=T#each-excavator-bucket-holds-about-30-tonnes-more-than-66000-pounds-of-soil-or-ore-19 https://www.businessinsider.com/diamond-mine-siberia-russia-...