> "All we hear in the news is the lack of congestion on the waterside and we can confirm that, but we are drowning on the landside by long lines and staffing issues at the terminals,”
Boston Dynamics has built droids capable of handling cargo.[1][2][3]
If humans are in short supply and these supply issues are causing companies to lose money, surely every business handling cargo from the ports will line up to buy some BD droids?
That's not the kind of robot you need to handle containers in a terminal. Terminals don't open the containers up. They move the whole container from the ship to a stack, and from the stack to the onward transit (truck, trains, barges)
The kind of equipment suitable for this job doesn't look like a droid. If you don't know what you are looking at you would mistake them for a crane, because technically that's what they are. Search for automated rubber tired gantries[1], or automated rail mounted gantries.
Port automation is a fascinating subject. The equipment is huge, so it is very expensive. It's not like you just order a crane from Amazon and it's delivered by the next day. Just figuring out how they get to your port from the manufacturer is an operation in itself. (Here is a time lapse of the Port of Houston unloading their new RTGs [2])
Then you have the problem of integrating them into your software infra. Sure the crane can pick up any container from the pile and put them down anywhere, but to be efficient you try to minimise wasted movements. If a truck comes in for a container and your automated cranes needs to dig it out from the bottom of the stack you just wasted a lot of time. The best case is when all the operations are integrated such that the terminal operating system (TOS) knows before the container is unloaded from the ship when and where will it be needed next. That way they can optimise where they place it to minimise double handling. Here is a good video which shows all the moving parts of the full system, software and hardware: [3]
And then let's not even talk about labour issues. Understandably longshoreman don't like to assist in replacing themselves if they can help it. If you have a working port
and you want to slowly transform it into an automated one, you will probably encounter friction. Best case you win the hearts and minds of your existing workforce over, but if you don't do this very carefully your whole operation might screech to a halt. It is often simpler to build a new automated terminal from the ground up than to try to do knee surgery on a running giraffe.
Thank you for your insight! What about ship size? I don't remember if I saw this previously on HN or if it was a path I went down trying to find out the height of the Baltimore Beltway bridge in Maryland. The issue I came across was that container ships are being built so big now that fewer ports can handle them because of the gigantic gantries that need to be installed and the increased complexity of the automation -- both of which you discuss -- plus dredging, etc. With the smaller ships in the past, a surge in ships could be distributed among more ports up and down the coast, thus alleviating problems like we're seeing. Now, the ships are too big for many ports, which is to the advantage of the big ports/ship-owners who profit from their monopoly.
(I brought up the Baltimore bridge height because, in looking it up, I ran across some articles about the delivery of the new, giant gantries at the Port of Baltimore from China, similar to your Houston example. The ship made its way carefully and successfully underneath the longer Chesapeake Bay Bridge and also the Baltimore Beltway bridge, with only a few feet to spare in both cases. Obviously, this was all carefully coordinated with the local authorities and experts. What I found especially interesting was that the "ship" was also very wide. Very long booms or whatever were stretched out horizontally and perpendicular to the ship. My memory is that these were part of the gantries and they were lowered to further decrease the height of the ship, but maybe the booms are normally this way on the ship to keep it from becoming too top-heavy? [I should watch the YouTube you provided of Houston!] Anyway, this took me off on tangents on the internet reading more and more about the ships and the ports.)
The main constraint for East Coast ports is that they are on the wrong side of the continent from most of the import/export demand in Asia. The Panama Canal isn’t exactly cheap, and some boats don’t even fit in the Canal!
They did recently build out a new expansion of the canal but these problems still remain. What is really cool is the fact that the New York port raised a bridge deck to support the new maximums. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayonne_Bridge
I don't think there are any humans picking up and moving these containers by hand. Robots are already doing the physical moving from one transport type to another.
You'd be surprised how strong the longshorman's union is. It's a cesspool of nepotism and corruption(at least in San Diego, where I used to be close to a family of them and got to hear the dirt). It would take a major economic catastrophe(no, not like the current one) to displace them, and you can bet there will be violence in return.
At the California ports experiencing the worst of being unable to fulfill high demand, the robotics space is intentionally diminished by union activity. Rotterdam stores, moves, and transfers with much greater efficiency with robotic assistance.
However, I don't support injuring workers with tech efficiency advances - it's morally wrong.
But I do wish tech and labor everywhere had better discussions on how to introduce efficiency while also, and more importantly, preserving gainful employment and creating better work experiences.
It seems like viruses always tread a spectrum between infectivity and lethality. Does or could a virus exist which:
- has a 100% fatality rate, like rabies
- can keep the host alive long enough to spread and
- cannot be defeated by any prospective vaccine or can evolve fast enough to evade them?
Basically, airborne and human-to-human rabies, with no vaccine. Or vaccine resistant ebola, but even more lethal, infectious, and a longer incubation period.
Put more concisely, could a virus exist with the potential to wipe us out.
Maybe, just maybe, if we stopped building telescopes like fragile porcelain dolls with glass heads that can't take a scratch and started building them like tanks that can take a beating..
>”Maybe, just maybe, if we stopped building telescopes like fragile porcelain dolls…”
It’s a pet peeve of mine but whenever I read “Maybe, just maybe” I instantly dislike whatever comes next. It’s an indicator that the post is sardonic and dramatically over simplified.
The real reason why the JWST is so delicate is because it’s a large satellite that had to be crammed into a tiny fairing. That means it has to be folded up like the worlds most intricate origami. All those moving parts, coupled with incredibly thin and weight saving components means that deploying it successfully is tremendously fraught with complexity. If we had a wider diameter rocket, JWST wouldn’t be nearly as complicated. But that simply wasn’t the case in 1997 when it was first designed.
Soon we might have an option to avoid the extreme mass and size restrictions caused by having to squeeze the JWT on top of Ariane 5 - if/when Starship proves viable, then we could probably cut the cost of the telescope development by an order of magnitude by being able to choose a reasonable tradeoff instead of sacrificing everything (complexity, cost, reliability) just to cut down some weight and size.
Its about balancing between the needed properties, strength and weight. Similar thing for airplanes, a minor collision can ground a plane but would be a non issue for a tank.
China’s hypersonic weapon test in July included a technological advance that enabled it to fire a missile as it approached its target travelling at least five times the speed of sound — a capability no country has previously demonstrated.
Pentagon scientists were caught off guard by the advance, which allowed the hypersonic glide vehicle, a manoeuvrable spacecraft that can carry a nuclear warhead, to fire a separate missile mid-flight over the South China Sea, according to people familiar with the intelligence.
Experts at Darpa, the Pentagon’s advanced research agency, remain unsure how China overcame the constraints of physics by firing countermeasures from a vehicle travelling at hypersonic speeds, said the people familiar with details of the demonstration.
Military experts have been poring over data related to the test to understand how China mastered the technology. They are also debating the purpose of the projectile, which was fired by the hypersonic vehicle with no obvious target of its own, before plunging into the water.
Some Pentagon experts believe the projectile was an air-to-air missile. Others think it was a countermeasure to destroy missile defence systems so that they could not shoot down the hypersonic weapon during wartime.
Russia and the US have also pursued hypersonic weapons for years, but experts say the firing of countermeasures is the latest evidence that China’s efforts are significantly more advanced than either the Kremlin or the Pentagon.
The White House declined to comment on the countermeasure, but said it remained concerned about the July 27 test, which was first reported by the Financial Times last month.
“This development is concerning to us as it should be to all who seek peace and stability in the region and beyond,” said a spokesperson for the National Security Council. “This also builds on our concern about many military capabilities that the People’s Republic of China continues to pursue.”
The NSC added that the US would “continue to maintain the capabilities to defend and deter against a range of threats” from China.
Rare earths are neither particularly rare, nor particularly likely to be unusually abundant on a Planet 9.
However!
A Mars or Earth-sized planet sufficiently far out in the solar system might be sufficiently cool to be able to retain helium in its atmosphere, without being a gas giant planet. If so, it might conceivably be the best place in the solar system to obtain 3He, an isotope that has considerable attractiveness for use in fusion reactors. A D-3He fusion rocket might even provide a nice way of getting out there and back in a reasonable time.
I don't see how the "attractiveness" of helium-3 is anything non-zero. If you can't even fuse deuterium with tritium, which is the easiest thing there is, helium-3 fusion goes out of the window.
DT is certainly easier to fuse, but it presents very difficult, IMO likely intractable engineering problems. D3He would finesse those problems (neutrons, material damage, tritium breeding), and potentially enable direct conversion of fusion energy to electrical energy (or, perhaps, more volumetrically efficient transfer of thermal energy to coolant). So IF the physics can be made to work, D3He could end up being more practical.
The company to watch on this is Helion, and perhaps Princeton Satellite Systems.
The moon has 3He, at a concentration of maybe 10ppb, in regolith the heating of which would use more energy than the released 3He would yield in fusion.
Helium at cosmic isotope ratios is 120ppm 3He. So if there were a planet out there with an atmosphere of this helium, extracting the 3He would be much easier (just compress, liquefy and separate, which you'd have to do with lunar helium anyway.)
The technology and infrastructure needed to reach Planet 9, build a mining outpost, then transport everything back at a profitable cost is likely decades if not centuries away. That’s not counting the fact that Planet 9 is so far away that getting there with current technology is a lengthy affair in itself (the New Horizons probe wouldn’t even be halfway to a theoretical Planet 9, and it’s been flying for over 15 years!)
Not saying I don’t want this to happen - I would love nothing more than to have humanity push out into the solar system, but recycling or scavenging is infinitely more of an realistic option.
The fastest man-made object ever launched was the New Horizons spacecraft. Headed on an intercept course for Pluto 30 AUs away, it took 9.5 years to get there. And that's without slowing down; if you actually wanted to land on Pluto you would need to spend even more time actually slowing down. The object in the OP is 225 AU away (which is dramatically closer than prior estimates of the distance of Planet 9 (300 AU)). All this means that, even moving as fast as we have ever launched a spacecraft, it would take at least 70 years for a probe to reach Planet 9, even without taking time to slow down. A probe launched today would return with its cargo no sooner than 2160. That's probably never going to be economical, even with future improvements to spacecraft propulsion (moving faster just means you need more and more fuel to slow down, at which point you are beholden to the tyranny of the rocket fuel equation).
It's easy to forget the scales here. We're used to Pluto being our reference point for "far edge of the solar system", and it's easy to conclude that Planet 9 is about as far as Pluto, but it's so much farther. Voyager 1 is a bit more than halfway that far.
I dont mean to take away anything from your post - but wanted to mention that the parker solar probe has now beat new horizons for fastest man made object (if you don’t count the manhole cover :) )
Indeed, but the Parker Solar Probe is cheating, since it's going so fast because it's literally plummeting into the sun--the exact opposite direction of a deep space probe. :)
We have plenty of rare earths here on our homeworld. If we run out (which we won't), we'll scavenge before we build the trillions of dollars of infrastructure necessary to mine the solar system.
Or we could, you know, build mining and manufacturing facilities on a planet that's, say a couple of AU away, instead of a couple of hundred AU. There's reasons we've done neither.
Rare Earth metals aren't actually that rare. We even have a lot of big mines that are closed right now because its not profitable enough yet and many other sites enrirely undeveloped.
Boston Dynamics has built droids capable of handling cargo.[1][2][3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iV_hB08Uns
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7v8ZUq16F4
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkv-_LqTeQA
If humans are in short supply and these supply issues are causing companies to lose money, surely every business handling cargo from the ports will line up to buy some BD droids?