Original story

Daily e-Mail 20.12.2017

Landfill biorobots go on rampage and eat São Paolo slum area - Brazilian army halts advance

In one of the most horrific examples of “science runs riot”, a large part of a São Paolo slum district has been literally eaten away. The damage was caused by biorobots from a nearby landfill site, which have reproduced in uncontrolled fashion, apparently owing to high lead and artificial preservatives content in the waste they were designed to consume. They broke out of the huge fenced landfill compound in vast numbers, spreading to the makeshift shelters and lean-tos of the shanty town of Patriarca, and cut a broad swathe through several blocks, devouring the buildings just as if they were their regular diet of garbage.

Crack Brazilian army units were called out to halt the advance of the biorobots, and as far as is known, there have been no human casualties, but several hundred people have been left homeless by the breakout. The controversial biorobots are one of the scientific community’s latest developments in the ongoing war against waste and the problem of garbage disposal. Landfill sites now occupy up to 5% of the land area in several countries, and the problem is particularly acute in Equatorial regions. Conventional waste processing plants are only able to cope with a fraction of the household and industrial waste being amassed. The biorobots eat selected ingredients of the piled-up waste, and use them as a source of energy and as the raw materials for new biorobots. One biorobot is capable of reproducing an identical copy of itself in the space of around two months.

According to plans drafted by the WHO Technical Committee, biorobots should provide the answer not only to the waste management crisis, but also to any number of other problems associated with raw material collection and reprocessing. They collect the most common and most important raw materials from waste dumps and digest them into easily-managed pellet form.

In the course of its projected two-year lifecycle, a biorobot of this type can sort and pelletize a ton of waste material, some 80% of which can be re-utilized effectively. When a single biorobot can be expected over the same period to generate exponentially as many as 4000 identical progeny, then the waste processing capacity of one biorobot and its descendants over 2 years is 4000 tons, and over four years already as much as 16 million tons. In spite of the setbacks that have hit the project, the UN and the WHO are determined to see the programme through and have pledged to maintain funding. The project leader, Professor Sumea Harawa, formerly of the University of Kyoto, said yesterday that without biorobots the world will soon drown in its own waste.

“Biorobots are driven by a relatively primitive biocomputer. With the greatest respect in the world, they cannot be expected to distinguish between a São Paolo slum and their normal habitat, considering the alarming similarities of the two. In future we shall naturally be looking to improve the programming of the bots, and we will also be more selective in our choices of trial sites.”

Eugene Hawk, chairman of LITL (Life Is for The Living, the pressure group launched in January following the Athens metro scare) issued a toughly-worded statement, arguing that this was just one more chilling example of what LITL has been warning of: “There are things that we should simply not be playing with. Life is one of them. Unless somebody stands up and takes real action, before long we shall have guns that think for themselves and reproduce at will.”

Hannula I. & Linturi R. 1998: 100 Phenomena. Yritysmikrot Oy, Helsinki 1998. Copyright notices ISBN 952-9508-18-2

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Johtopäätös: jätteensyöjäbiologian ydin toteutui osittain, mutta katastrofiskenaario ei.