Creating a self-replicating robot swarm to recycle the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Ever since I first heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch I've been thinking about how to clean it up, and I believe I've come up with a workable plan to do it. Also, the recent success of the Wave Glider in crossing the ocean last year has convinced me that the available technology has become cheap enough and powerful enough to make this plan feasible
The only way to clean up such a huge mess is to create a system that mimics the way life would do it. Really, if something could eat plastic there wouldn't be quite such a bad problem. It is because no living creature can digest plastic that it stays around and accumulates. So the solution is to create a kind of artifical life that can eat the plastic. Robots that replicate themselves, with a little bit of manual assistance, and collect and convert the trash into forms that can be used by living creatures.
Solar distillation to produce salt; melt the salt for a Molten Salt Oxidation reactor; use that to convert the trash into synthesis gas.
The basic design for the robots is a floating sphere with a sail and a keel.
It has just enough sensors and brains to be able to use its sail and keel and the ambient conditions to navigate around.