io9
It may look like a smiling mecha puppy of vast proportions, but this suburb-eating robot is a vicious destroyer of suburbs and suburbanites whose giant legs pulverize housing tracts in order to plant new forests. The creation of Australian firm Andrew Maynard Architects, the suburb-eating robots will be deployed to clean up abandoned, decaying suburbs in Australia when peak oil forces people to stop driving cars and move into the urban centers. These mega-bots are going into production in 2019, and their engines will be fueled entirely by human fat.
The folks at Andrew Maynard Architects explain their project, with tongues planted mostly in cheek:
The age of the outer-suburb is soon to come to an end. Many analysts believe that Peak-Oil will be reached soon after 2011. When we hit Peak-Oil we will not only have no petrol to run cars, furthermore we will no longer have many of the goods we need and there will be huge food shortages as food production and distribution relies heavily on oil based fertilisers which drastically increase yields.And here I thought the only thing that fat was good for was making alien babies on Doctor Who.With no cars people will no longer be able to reach the suburbs and hence metropolitan populations will swell as suburban refugees are forced to wander into the cities . . . The suburbs will decay . . . At Andrew Maynard Architects, we have decided to give mother-nature a hand. We have begun designing the first suburb eating robot and we hope to go into production in early 2019. We have called our robot the CV08. In short, CV08 consumes the abandoned suburbs through its front 2 legs. It processes the materials and fires off compacted recycling missiles to awaiting recycling plants. CV08's middle legs and one rear leg follow the front legs to terra-form the newly revealed earth with native Flora and Fauna. Vast stocks of the Flora and Fauna are stored within CV08 in carbonite sleep until they are required to colonise what was previously suburban wasteland.
Over 50% of Australians are currently over-weight due to complete car dependence, a sedentary lifestyle and over eating. With this in mind the 6th leg has been designed to pick up, and apply liposuction to over-weight Australians that have been to slow and unfit to migrate into the denser areas with the rest of the population. As there is no longer a steady stream of oil, CV08 fuels itself with the vast quantities of excess human fat that it finds on its journey through the suburbs.
Suburb-Eating Robot (PDF) [Andrew Maynard Architects]
Comments
Seems to have a built-in absurdist monster movie scenario. As dependence on cars decreases and the amount of fat available to the machines declines, they may have to lower their criterion for judging humans overweight. And, after all, there's a lot of fat in a human brain.
"Would you like to fill up with "Overweight", "Fat" or "Obese", sir?"
Everything about this makes me happy.
I, too, can launch a tired, boring, unecessary, bigoted attack on fat people/modern civilization/mankind in general.
@Huxleyhobbes: Yeah, but can you do it with snappy infographics?
This of course requires an aggressive response from a 10-storey high Homer Simpson-type creature - the American retort to such blasphemous anti-hyper-consumption/ anti-mega-lazy values. I dub thee defender of western culture "Gluttonomous-the-Great'. Go forth and slay these AIBO type enviro-bots!! Yippe-Kai-yeeee [giggle-snort].
A couple of biplanes, a few hundred feet of rope, and one spear gun, then we can play the Hoth level with these bad boys. All while it poops skinny people at us.
Sort of like Star Wars, meets Flyboys, meets Weight Watchers.
I think a Great Gargant could take care of those.
Also, nanites=magic!
I'm stuck in Yuppieville today. On the drive in this morning I was thinking that the Suburbs would have to culled for resources when the zombies take over. I just hate all the macMansions that block the view of the mountains and would be a safe haven for the undead when they retreat from the sun.
I cannot believe this is true..
Cool design in sketchup, tho.
@broomstick: No, it's a very pointed joke. And yet you never know. Those Australians are hardcore.
Someone been watching too much Doctor Who
@Huxleyhobbes:
But isn't that one of the great things about modern civilization? That we can engage in Swiftian satire like this? I mean only last week io9-ers were treated to a rap roast of Richard Dawkins made by creationists.
If we can turn liposuctioned fat into fuel, won't we want to have people get obese in order to drain them? Doesn't that negate the need for any of this in the first place?
I'm all for crushing suburbs though so don't mind me!
It has missles in its head. Hardcore.
@Epaminondas:
If we could set it up so that the people can get fat off the planted woodlands, it would be a perfect little ecosystem. Like those mini-biospheres you can buy from the Discovery Store, only... a little bigger.
April Fools! Right? ....Right?
It just seem like an idea from a cartoon or something
@MickyK: Nah, mate, it's real, and you bastards better watchyerarse because by "outer suburbs" we mean "everywhere not 'ere" and by "fat buggers" we mean you. We figured that if we crossed a retired car-assembly robot (well, we're not making much in the way of cars anymore) with a wombat (nothin' stops a wombat - if you hit one they'll root ya ute from bonnet to boot) and pump it full of steroids and megatechnology (it's like "nano" but bloody big) built big enough to cock a leg on the Harbour Bridge, and shove it full of dropbear-cannon (they've a dropbear throwing range of 5 miles, and those bastards'll land on your back and screw your head right off), we'd have a superweapon on our hands that'd let us hold the world to ransom: make Olivia Newton John and Crocodile Dundee popular again or we give these things a noseful of testosterone and VB and a head full of rutting-wombat-images and point it at your parliament houses.
That'll bugger ya...twice...with feeling. Just ask that mad, kiwi bastard our smaller prototype dealt with.
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