When pulses of light travel along a fibre optic strand, tiny reflections sometimes bounce back along that line. These reflections are affected by factors including temperature, vibrations or physical disturbance to the cable itself.
With this technology, it is even possible to work out the approximate size of a vessel passing above a subsea cable, as well as its location and, in some circumstances, its direction of travel. That could be correlated with satellite imagery, or even automatic identification system (AIS) records, which most ships broadcast at all times.
Mr Heiden argues that cables installed solely for the purpose of monitoring marine activity could be especially useful – one might place such listening cables, say, 100km from a vital port, or in the vicinity of a key gas pipeline or telecommunications cable, rather than within those assets themselves.
They currently require a dark fiber or some free channels to perform this magic trick. Maybe someday even that requirement will go away?
So all those past generations that just blithely declared that "the solution to pollution is dilution" and created a massive mess for us to deal with were just showing us respect?
No one is proposing we dilute spent nuclear fuel. In fact just the opposite. Consolidate it all in a 1,000-year stable location.
Parent is only arguing that we don't need to engineer a 10,000-year stable location, especially if a failure will cost 100's of lives (still sad) but not millions of lives. Especially compared to the climate-changing alternatives of throwing our hands in the air.
Do you believe that people in the past were not self centered? That they had children for the greater good of our species? You think that's air you're breathing?
If we don't start feeing massive amounts of (anonymized) data into machine learning, then we're going to miss out on a future of diagnosis for rare diseases, quick identification of emerging diseases, robust symptom attribution, etc. We'll be stuck searching the Internet for random symptoms (that all seem to lead to a cancer diagnosis).
I'm not saying Google is the best company to do this, but I'd rather have them do this than have it not happen at all in our lifetime.
One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
