Planet Eaters

I’m in the home stretch on the book (yay!) and so my post will need to be short today (boo!), but I wanted to share some of my research on the book. I’ve always had a fascination with big machines, and since Feral Sapiens takes place in an asteroid mining colony, that means I get to indulge myself by digging up (yuk! yuk!) information about some of the biggest moving machines on Earth: mining machines.
I used to do engineering consulting for a mining company, and though I never got to see any of these machines up close, even from a distance, even in pictures, they inspire awe. This site, btw, is a great one-stop shopping source for the big machines and their handiwork.
The biggest moving machine is apparently this one:

And just to give you some perspective, here is a drawing of the same machine, laid out next to the Eiffel Tower:

But my favorite has to be this big, roving earth mover:

Here’s another view:

The drivers of these things told me that they don’t even feel it, when they drive over “smaller” equipment (like bulldozers and things). Never mind people. These creatures’ descendents will be planet eaters.
I was thinking about Maureen’s post about Not Science Fiction, and I really enjoy NSF. But I have to admit, well written SF about big machines and the people who live in them definitely floats my skimmer, too. I am fascinated by the tools we build, and how they come to be an extension of ourselves, in all kinds of ways. This also has to do with the concept of the Singularity… and to illustrate, let me tell you a joke.
Once, a man had a frog growing out of the top of his head. He went to the doctor, who said, “My, my, this is unusual! How did this happen?”
The frog replied, “You’ll never believe this, doc, but it started out as a wart on my ass.”
Each of us on one level is an individual, whole and complete. But in a larger sense, we exist as a member of society. That society is a system. A sort of meta-entity. All systems we build are tools. Governments are tools. Money is a tool. Resource consumption, the vehicle of capitalism, is a tool. Language is a tool. Science is a tool, as is math. Our tools extend the reach of the entity that is humanity, both physically, and in terms of our knowledge.
What the Singularity really is, at its heart, is a question: what level of complexity must our tools achieve before they become the point of the whole exercise, and we are merely a means to ends that don’t serve our best interests?
Aren’t we already in the grip of forces beyond our control? Hasn’t technology already taken us to places we could never survive without it? There are more than six billion people on this planet. Without fertilizer, fossil fuels, and big machines, we could only feed a fraction of that number. Medical advances are enabling us to live longer, healthier lives. There is no doubt that we have benefited greatly from our ability to conceptualize, build, and use tools. But there is also no doubt that our systems are straining at the seams. It’s a long way down from the heights we’ve scaled to date.
I’m not so sure, in other words, that machine self-awareness is a pre-requisite for the Singularity.

 http://eatourbrains.com/EoB/2007/07/30/planet-eaters/

This is the largest earth mover in the world built by the German company, Krupp, and seen here crossing a federal highway in Germany en route to its destination (an open-pit coal mine). It is cheaper to move the thing like this, than to construct or reassemble onsite.

• The mover stands 311 feet tall and 705 feet long.
• It weighs over 45,500 tons
• Cost $100 million to build
• Took 5 years to design and manufacture
• 5 years to assemble
• Requires 5 people to operate it
• The Bucket Wheel is over 70 feet in diameter with 20 buckets, each of which can hold over 530 cubic feet of material.
• A 6-foot man can stand up inside one of the buckets.
• It moves on 12 crawlers (each is 12 feet wide, 8’ high and 46 feet long)
• There are 8 crawlers in front and 4 in back.
• It has a maximum speed of 1 mile in 3 hours (1/3 mile/hour)
• It can remove over 76,455 cubic meters each day. (100,000 large dump trucks at 40yds. each)