July 3, 2018 — We have, upon occasion, written of our fear of flying monkeys, robots, drones, wasps and eggs. There are more, but that seems sufficiently embarrassing.
Well, the robots are back at it and we’re here to tell you they’re not going to stop until they run the whole magilla. Wait until you walk into Delaney’s for a Tuesday night special and there’s a robot making your linguica pizza instead of Ronnie.
NOAA, in particular, seems enamored of the creatures, using them for all manner of survey and discovery tasks. It now has a fleet of Saildrones — wind-powered autonomous marine surface vehicles — it uses to help assess climatic and marine conditions, as well as the health of some fish stocks.
It also has other unmanned craft.
Just last week, according to The Charlotte Observer and the livescience.com website, NOAA researchers were aboard the vessel Okeanos Explorer to map the ocean floor off the coast of North Carolina when they came across something they called a “sonar anomaly” (which is science speak for “huh?”) and hinted it might be “an archaeology site, a geological formation or otherwise.”