Creating a self-replicating robot swarm to recycle the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Recycle the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

A Plan Just Crazy Enough to Work...

Self-replicating Robots Collecting Trash and Cleaning the Oceans

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

Self-replicating Robots

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.

"Metabolic" Process

Solar distillation to produce salt; melt the salt for a Molten Salt Oxidation reactor; use that to convert the trash into synthesis gas.

Schematic of recycling process

Timeline

Basic Robot Design

The basic design for the robots is a floating sphere with a sail and a keel.

Basic design of floating robot

It has just enough sensors and brains to be able to use its sail and keel and the ambient conditions to navigate around.