quote: But modern engineers want to design vessels for more nuanced tasks. They want vehicles that can hover at the ocean floor and instantaneously respond to the current to hold their positions. They want vessels than can quickly maneuver around small objects or in tight spaces. They want machines that can operate in the harsh turbulence that would destroy existing craft. And they want all these capabilities in an energy-efficient package. In all, they want to reinvent the penguin—or perhaps the whale or a fish.
quote: Next to any marine animal that uses flippers to guide itself through the water, humanmade vessels are clumsy.
quote: Since the mid-1930s, when England's Sir James Gray declared that dolphins move through water so efficiently that engineering principles were inadequate to explain the mechanism, people have sought to understand marine-animal locomotion
quote: Other scientists and engineers are modeling not just the motion of natural fins but also the material. Those teams are using rubber and silicon instead of metal and wood.
I don't know how often scientists do this, but reading this article shows that mimicking animals - biomimetics - is much more versatile than what humans can think of. Of course, this makes sense, since the animals have thousands of years of evolution continuously making the phenotype ever more suitable for the organism.
So does it make sense to study organisms as a base of knowledge to expand upon? Could we help increase the efficiency of capturing solar energy by studying chloroplasts of plants? Can inspecting the methods bats use to communicate with each other improve sonar technology? Could even studying fossils of animals before the great extinction periods, who had thousands of years to evolve, help improve what we already have?
Posts: 2756 | Registered: Jul 2002
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Sure! The ants invented the arch as an architectural element several hundred million years before humans did. Steal ideas from wherever you can find them, I say! Reverse engineer everything you can! Nature is extremely clever in lots of ways. We should copy all that and patent it!
There is a team working on a robo-tuna that I read about in Scientific American a couple of years back.
The other thing we can do is breed working animals sort of analogous to sheepdogs or carrier pigeons, only more like diveseals and trackertuna, or whatever. Any animal at all, in fact. Only I worry about what sort of deal the animals get out of it. Dogs seem fairly happy overall, though way too many of them are mistreated.
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I agree on for the most part, but I want to point out that we have done some things in the aquatic arena that animals can't. Top speed comes to mind, we're we've built craft that would literally blow any aquatic create away. Now this is just a nit-picky thing, overall aquatic life is far more well versed for the water than what we've created, but I don't think it's fair to say that humans have failed in every way in terms of "competing against nature", not to mention we do have to design these things to fulfill a purpose other than pure survival.
But aside from that, this sounds really neat, many things have been learned from animals, and often the coolest ideas come when we get stuck, and then look to see how nature has solved that same problem.
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