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jacquesm

There are lots of good ideas, but the fact is that the people that are trying to solve this right now have:

1) tons of experience in deep sea work

2) a pretty good idea of the situation (which the rest of us mostly lack)

3) a very large budget and an inventory of resources at their disposal

4) are far from stupid.

So if this is going to be solved in the short term I doubt it will be an outsider.

Occasionally outsiders do come up with great solutions, one I remember was the jet engine strapped to a tank to blow out the gulf war fires. That was sheer genius.

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/01q2/stilling_the_fires...

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I totally agree. But, like you illustrated with your comment, outsiders (perhaps because they are outsiders) occasionally come up with good solutions. Or at least new ways of thinking about the problem.

That is all kinds of awesome!

In Arthur C. Clarke's "A Fall of Moondust", there is an accident and a bus full of tourists sinks into the lunar dust, is covered over and lost. This presents massive engineering challenges as the dust is so fine, the location unknown, resources limited to what's on the moon base, and the trapped people have a limited air and water supply so there's a tight time limit.

There's a scene where they are trawling for suggestions from the public in a TV show contest - people suggest ideas, and an a panel of experts rip the ideas apart. A side effect is that it's a great publicity boost for the difficulty of doing things on the moon and the achievement of having a base there.

I wont spoil the rest of the book for you, but has anyone tried doing this with the oil leak? Engaging the public in that kind of way, not just asking for blog comments on a news article, but a real challenge in an X-Factor style big-hype approach?

I wonder if the 'hive mind' is really that much smarter than an expert in the field, but for brainstorming (which is what this is about) it might be useful.

I'd hate to be the BP exec to sign off on some harebrained scheme coined by a non-expert, they'd have a problem even if it did work.

It may come to that yet though.

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