Robotic AI-Powered Ship Tries Retracing Mayflower's Voyage, Has to Turn Back (apnews.com) 34
Check out this video footage of the sleek Mayflower 400 slicing through the water, hoping to retrace the historic 1620 journey of the famous ship which carried pilgrims to America.
Unfortunately, unlike the real Mayflower, this robotic 21st-century doppelganger "had to turn back Friday to fix a mechanical problem," reports the Associated Press:
Nonprofit marine research organization ProMare, which worked with IBM to build the autonomous ship, said it made the decision to return to base "to investigate and fix a minor mechanical issue" but hopes to be back on the trans-Atlantic journey as soon as possible.
With no humans on board the ship, there's no one to make repairs while it's at sea.
Piloted by artificial intelligence technology, the 50-foot (15-meter) Mayflower Autonomous Ship began its trip early Tuesday, departing from Plymouth, England, and spending some time off the Isles of Scilly before it headed for deeper waters.
It was supposed to take up to three weeks to reach Provincetown on Cape Cod before making its way to Plymouth, Massachusetts. If successful, it would be the largest autonomous vessel to cross the Atlantic.
With no humans on board the ship, there's no one to make repairs while it's at sea.
Piloted by artificial intelligence technology, the 50-foot (15-meter) Mayflower Autonomous Ship began its trip early Tuesday, departing from Plymouth, England, and spending some time off the Isles of Scilly before it headed for deeper waters.
It was supposed to take up to three weeks to reach Provincetown on Cape Cod before making its way to Plymouth, Massachusetts. If successful, it would be the largest autonomous vessel to cross the Atlantic.
No sails. (Score:2)
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Yeah I was hoping for robotic sailing and automation. THis is ... well it's OK I guess but I bet several nations have a navy that does this already, underwater.
Re:No sails. (Score:5, Informative)
If they turned back for repairs the first try... then they're doing a good job at replicating the voyage. The original voyage turned back for ship repairs twice.
http://mayflowerhistory.com/vo... [mayflowerhistory.com]
...would have been more realistic if it were a robotic sailing ship, though. With a motor, it's hardly fair.
Re: No sails. (Score:2)
The question is, will it bring disease? (Score:4, Interesting)
As we know, when Europeans came to the New World, they brought a veritable zoo of diseases with them. A study of the devastation [cdc.gov] suffered by Native Americans in the Plymouthy/Patuxet area seems to indicate the black rats which stowed upon vessels such as the Mayflower brought leptospirosis with them. This zoonotic disease is passed on through the urine of rats and when people come in contact with said urine infected with leptospirosis, they suffer debilitating symptoms such as profuse bleeding [slate.com]. Oddly, the more healthy you are and the more aggressive your immune response, the more likely you are to suffer severe symptoms because chopping up leptospirosis helps it spread more rapidly through the body.
One question of why the Native Americans suffered far more than the Europeans may lie in the cleanliness of the natives. Native Americans bathed fairly regularly (for the time) and were also in contact with water far more than the interlopers. So like the English whining about the Vikings stealing their women because they bathed more regularly and smelled nice [skjalden.com], the squalid conditions of the Pilgrims may have helped protect them from the disease they brought with them.
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No, that will come with their next project...the Wuhan 400.
Stay tuned.
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That's a lovely piece of euro self hate, but .. huh?
Why would Indians be coming into lots of contact with shipboard rat urine? Did their lifestyle even lend itself to rat-infested structures?
Didn't read the articles, did ya? Or rather, unable to read, aren't ya?
The various Europeans who came to North America were the literal embodiment of this quote [youtube.com]. Chief Pontiac may have said it best:
They came with a Bible and their religion stole our land, crushed our spirit . . . and now tell us we should be thankful to the 'Lord' for being saved.
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What you posted a link to isn't even a study; it's a "New Hypothesis".
And even it knows that it is full of crap.
Precolonization and postcolonization English written accounts do not mention rats, the numbers of which may have been influenced by the presence of cats, but aboard ships rats must have been common.
"We have no evidence for this hypothesis, but ... white man bad!"
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God knows the world would be in better shape with North America closer to SA or Africa, and no US to resist the Nazis, Soviet Union, or now modern China.
The solution to the Fermi paradox may be that all other planetary societies sink into eternal dictatorships, with whatever passes for a boot stepping on whatever passes for a face, forever.
The forever is the same.
Re: The question is, will it bring disease? (Score:2)
And why would written accounts, probably of things important in those times, mention RATS or their type, nos, skin color etc ? It's not like they knew rats were vectors for specific diseases.
Carrying n spreading diseases in far off areas by humans or rats or bats is pretty much true since forever all the way to covid times.
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Re: The question is, will it bring disease? (Score:2)
Original sin (Score:2)
Some of your ancestors did bad things. So you are guilty.
It's OK to forgive yourself.
Population size, not cleanliness (Score:2)
One question of why the Native Americans suffered far more than the Europeans may lie in the cleanliness of the natives.
If that were the case then, given your second point, why would the Vikings not have been wiped out by the diseases in the populations that they raped and pillaged? Nor would this theory explain why the Aboriginals in Australia suffered a similar problem when Europeans arrived since by then Europeans had largely learned to bathe, at least once in a while.
I had always understood the difference to be that both North America and Australia contained relatively small populations compared to the combined popul
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AI? (Score:3)
What's the "A.I." needed for? These things seem more like a challenge of power, reliability, stability, and luck. The navigation could be done with off-the-shelf GPS-based systems.
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What's the "A.I." needed for? These things seem more like a challenge of power, reliability, stability, and luck. The navigation could be done with off-the-shelf GPS-based systems.
I was wondering the same thing. The best answer I could find was this:
A hypothetical example: let's assume that MAS is in the open ocean, approaching Cape Cod, with no current network connectivity. In its path ahead is a cargo ship which has had a collision with a fishing vessel and lost some of its load. In this scenario, MAS's AI Captain will use a host of technologies and processes to independently assess the situation and decide what action to take, without ever connecting to a land-based mission control. [mas400.com]
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Robotic? (Score:2)
"With no humans on board the ship, there's no one to make repairs while it's at sea."
Why couldn't the robot do the repair? ;)
Re: Robotic? (Score:2)
Becoz they knew you would then want another robot to repair the ship repair robot
No Bruce Dern? (Score:2)
They should have known better - just put Bruce Dern in suspended animation, with automatic wakeup issued in case of damage or malfunction requiring human intervention.
doppelganger ? (Score:1)
Turned back? (Score:2)
Some of the Puritans did turn back... (Score:1)
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...the original plan for the 1620 voyage was supposed to have been two ships: the Speedwell and the Mayflower. The Speedwell sprung a leak shortly after leaving England for the New World, and had to turn back...so maybe not entirely different.
Correction - when the Speedwell sprung a leak, they BOTH turned back. Eventually, the Mayflower left again, solo.
I'll hold out . . . (Score:2)
I'll hold out for the Mayflower 3000 by Dogbert.
ProMare.. (Score:2)
The AI read the 1619 Project (Score:2)
And the programmers added in an overdeveloped sense of guilt and an inability to distinguish fact from fiction.