NASA's Radar Found 4 Men Trapped in Rubble in Nepal by Their Heartbeats | Hacker News Reader

NASA's Radar Found 4 Men Trapped in Rubble in Nepal by Their Heartbeats

gizmodo.com

473 pointskaa210286 comments

This goes to show that even seemingly ridiculous (from the layman's POV) technology can be eventually used to create tecnology that can directly better our lives.

This was originally designed to detect alien life on other planets, but was converted to look for heartbeats and breathing under rubble.

It certainly makes for a hell of an executive summary for a project status report.

"The bad news is we still don't know if there's life on Mars. But the good news is we just located 4 men under a flattened Dunkin' Donuts in Kathmandu".

However, the claim that this is "based on technology used to detect alien life on distant exoplanets" sounds dubious. Exoplanets are far too distant to use radar on them at all, let alone pick up alien life signs.

I would think the technology in question is a sensitive detector. In that case, it could work either passively for the exolife search, or in an active SAR situation.

I don't know where they got "exoplanets" from. I Googled a bit and the best [0] I could find indicates some connection to radar tech used on missions like Cassini's.

0. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-290

Maybe the idea was that a probe or robot sent to distant planets could use this device to detect life signs.

First thought was that it's likely a signal processing technique designed to pick out a periodic signal in noisy data which allowed them to pick up out the heatbeats. To me that doesn't seem like much of a leap, but I don't know what they actually did.

I tend to think those four men, and the many others who died would have preferred the money had been spent on the simple, known process of better earth quake proofing the buildings in the region.

I'm not anti science for sciences sake, but this is not a logical argument. Bettering lives in Nepal is cheap and easy with current tech.

I think you might be replying to a different idea than reverend_gonzo was proposing. I think he's just noting that not-obviously-useful technological advances can have unexpected applications. I don't read him as saying that not-obviously-useful technological advances are the best way to save lives in Nepal.

If you just want to save lives, donate to whichever charity GiveWell[1] says is the best charity at saving lives per dollar. Every other use of money is vulnerable to the "but you could save more lives a different way" criticism.

[1] http://www.givewell.org/

I thought it was that dangerous fine line.

Four lives is a drop in bucket in Nepal.

I'm all pro for technology.

But I just don't want people thinking four lives matter in the scheme of things.The world in not that sort of sugar candy and gumdrops sort of place.

Saving lives is cheap and easy as you point out, I'm just saying be aware this is a PR stunt. And hey it'll work. And NASA will get more funding which is great. I just like to be aware of what's real and what's not.

With their GDP, only if someone else does it. Plus Nepal is filled with some very old temples and the like which are not going to be easy fixes; if they survived this long its a testament to chance or their builders.

Bring up their GDP through economic development which will eventually provide the money needed for better construction but that will need to wait until their political situation settles down.

> if they survived this long its a testament to chance or their builders.

People in the old days occasionally got lucky, it's more chance and survivor bias.

Once you travel the world the first thing you should realise is no current buildings/temples/old stuff is real.

They are all rebuilt / patched with concrete.

Case in point, a lot of the temple in Nepal got destroyed in the earth quake 80 years ago. They are rebuilt temples falling again.

This technology is really awesome, but I have to admit that I am scared to death of anything that can find me by my heartbeat under 6 feet of building rubble. The first thing that came to mind were those robotic octopi from The Matrix.

It would be pretty hard to hide from a totalitarian government in an attic if that government had sufficiently comprehensive residency information and this sort of technology. Count the bodies in each house on a regular periodic basis, and then figure out which ones consistently have more people than their census report indicates.

You could probably come up with some sort of regimen that would have people coming or leaving the house such that the number of people in it always stayed below what was indicated on the census, but it would still be a major concern.

Related are sentences that are grammatically correct, but semantically nonsense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_fur...

I'm not sure whether you need such sophisticated technology for that. A smart meter will do for this purpose. And the data mining for that can be applied remotely, no need to bring any fancy stuff to the site.

Last line was meant to be an edit on another comment obviously. Too late to fix it.

Or the little compliance spiders from Minority Report

No need to give the pollies any ideas, mate.

Why is our first response to new technology one of fear? This is a device designed to find alien life, the article is about it being used to save human lives, but all you see is a tool to find and attack you.

This isn't meant personally; you see this "Dystopia ex Technology" in Hollywood movies and popular novels. For every "Pacific Rim" we have, there's several "Matrix" clones ready to tear down our confidence in machines.

It's not the machines we fear. Most people do understand that it's not the tools but the people using them, and we know far too well the sort of people those are likely to be. The dystopian nightmare has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with governments. It's always been so.

There is a new wave of fear of strong AI, based on writings by Nick Bostrom, especially his book 'Superintelligence'. Elon Musk has helped to spread the word.

Unicorns are much the same. From the look of them, you'd imagine they must have gored at least a few people, but then you remember they don't exist. If we feel compelled to fear something, we can probably find more immediate dangers.

>word.

According to people who know better, you misspelled the word "FUD".

I'm not sure that's what Matrix is about. I thought it was turnabout by robotic life for our endless abuse of them - that's what Animatrix showed.

You could argue that the robots symbolized governments and Zion the freedom-seeking people. But that symbolism would be much more apparent in a different story, like Firefly/Serenity.

You realize that there was an article just today about a large spy agency violating the foundational laws of the country it was chartered in and using technology to spy illegally on citizens there, right?

The reason that people have a negative reaction to technologies that can be used for spying is that right now, in real life, spies are committing crimes against citizens using virtually every technical facet of modern society.

The thing is that that technology is being used by a bunch of monkeys. People conflate intelligence with primate social and behavioral quirks all the time because of the long running idea that all human behavior is somehow the product of the abstract idea of "intelligence." This is simply false. Many of the motivations that organizations like the NAS operate under are derived from our primate ancestry and should be name as such. This article is the perfect example that technology and tools are themselves completely amoral and what we are afraid of is not the technology but the other monkeys that we live with. AI etc is unlikely to be constrained by millions of years of evolution in primate social groups which has severely distorted human behavior but not completely stripped it of the ability to use its power for good (again, this article).

The most impressive new technology is often the result of massive spending by entities far more powerful than myself.

Guns are technology which can directly kill me, but I'm not too worried about guns, or even must gun owners. But when you're talking about a technology that (due to massive cost) is only available to governments with questionable oversight, that gets worrying.

In this specific case, I'm not particularly concerned - but you can see how the availability of the tech in question matters. If only people who are already more powerful than me can have it, it's much more likely that its power can be (ab)used to my detriment.

The parent poster is not afraid of technology, he/she's rightfully afraid of the idiots that will use it in light of the spying that's been revealed.

Because future technologies will be used for immoral causes, we should not build technologies? I disagree with your heavy-handed Neo-Luddism.

I think calling it "fear" is a bit simplistic. It's about thinking critically about new technology and how it can have unintended, negative effects.

It's not "unintentional" that DARPA funded research has military applications.

I hope that one day our children or their children can feel as you do--in the meantime, things are looking grim.

Yeah, the technology seems tailor-made to amplify schizophrenic paranoia; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9507458 for an example saying, "I suspect that this technology was used by an upstairs neighbor to track me around the apartment and electronically harass me using a microwave device. He would use a pulsed RF/microwave device (a Directed Energy Weapon [2]) to irradiate me as I moved around my apartment and also while I slept."

It's going to get harder and harder to reassure delusional people that their delusions are false when they become technologically feasible.

I was thinking X-Men. In the last movie, didn't they have robots to detect mutants underground? LOL.

Off topic, but this headline is a good example of a crash blossom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity#In_headline...

Its awful to imagine someone was trapped in rubble by their own heartbeat.

Indeed. Most people feel trapped, not by their own heartbeat, but by the electrical impulses that lie within their brains.

Or, alternatively, the heartbeat of NASA's radar found 4 men trapped in rubble?

"Radar" is in the singular, so the plural "heartbeats" cannot apply to it.

edit: Also, if somehow the radar had multiple heartbeats, we would have used "its heartbeats" rather than "their heartbeats."

disclaimer: I am not a grammarian or a linguist (IANAGOAL?)

That's not the ambiguity. The ambiguity is whether the Radar found them by their heartbeats, or whether they were trapped by their heartbeats.

Or did the radar find the men, while trapped in the rubble by the men's heartbeats?

That doesn't work because "found 4 men" is not a modifier on "NASA's Radar". If it said "NASA's Radar Found By 4 Men Trapped In Rubble" then that would work.

Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo

(It's a valid sentence, honest)

You did it wrong. This is just the name of the city of Buffalo over and over.

or the animal, or several combinations of the city and the animal.

But definitely not a sentence.

Well, I'm certainly no expert, but Internet Lore has it that any number of 'Buffalo' forms a valid sentence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...

(I think) if one capitalises every word, then they all have to be taken as proper nouns, rather than a mix of adjectives, nouns and verbs (as depicted in the tree diagram on the wiki page). At that point you're just failing to count properly ;)

You are quite right - I remembered there were eight words, but did not think through the capitalisation.

Odd that I have -4 points on it - it seemed vaguely connected to the rest of the thread.

Unless it's title case as it would be in a newspaper headline. The lack of any punctuation proves this to be the case.

;0)>

Of course - I missed that in the GP.

Exactly.

Reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_h...

Well, that depends on what you mean by "valid".

The grammar rules that you find written down are an approximate encoding of rules that native speakers have all internalized. These written down rules are not perfect, and have edge cases. They allow for sentences that a native speaker would not formulate or easily comprehend. The "Buffalo" sentence is an example of such an edge case.

First of, Thanks for this technology that helped save some of my countrymen. This goes to show that technology can indeed help in many avenues to save lives. I am originally from Nepal living in NYC, and looking for ideas that could create technology-aided sustainable development as a key to rebuilding. Ideas that come to me, which might have high $$ values for implementation are - 3D printed housing, Organic Farming for quick rehabilitation on these villages, Open-Source BTS for communications etc. As costs go lower, these affected areas might be the right place to implement these. As much as I am devastated by what is happening in Nepal right now with the death toll only rising, I would like to reach out to the technology community out here or anywhere to provide me with ideas into helping us rebuild. Most of the relief efforts are donation-based, however, for longer term - creating a sustainable economy in these low privileged areas with the help of emerging technologies is what I think is crucial for faster recovery.

Link to NASA article: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4574

With technology like this, Anne Frank's diary, if written today, would be the size of tweet.

That makes no sense.

She would have been found immediately. Because a tweet is very short.

It sure is great for those guys.

But it also says it is getting harder and harder to hide...

I wonder for how long the Navy Seals have been using this.

I distinctly remember Tom Clancy writing about this type of technology near the end of Rainbow Six (published in 1998) -- He always seemed pretty well informed on what was undergoing testing if not what was actually in use.

Nah, Clancy just got taken in by a common fraud:

http://articles.latimes.com/1998/sep/24/local/me-26013 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadro_Tracker

There have been dozens of similar frauds since, where the snake-oil-salesmen just dress up a dowsing-rod with blinking lights.

Remember, Tom Clancy was a fiction writer in the same vein as Dan Brown novels or CSI TV shows. His main nod to realism was in realms like military jargon or describing the correct fire-selector for a given model of gun.

The "heartbeat sensor" was actually an item in the Rainbow Six FPS, too.

When I read Rainbow Six, I remember wondering if he wrote parts of it to be more applicable in the video game, a la Splinter Cell. The heartbeat monitor, the map types (jungle, city, amusement park)... it seemed like nice fit.

They were still a good read though.

Weren't they made at the same time, in fact? Edit: Mind you, I only know this because I looked it up after having that exact thought reading the book :)

Yeah, according to this wiki citation[0], the tie-ins were a bit ad-hoc but the game plot was actually finalized before the book was done, which accounts for the discrepancies. So there's no real way of knowing what started out as a game mechanic.

Worked out better than Splinter Cell, anyway-- I don't think I got through more than a page of the novelization. (Which wasn't written by Clancy, FWIW.)

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20010804114957/http://gamasutra....

I remember having the same thought with that book. Elements of the book seemed to be there for the benefit of spin-off video games, much like you'll sometimes find a character in a movie probably exists for merchandizing.

Maybe I gave him too little credit in this case. Either he was familiar with prototype tech that we aren't aware of yet, or he was actually a decent near-future sci-fi writer.

I came here to say this, a device for tracking heartbeats was described quite extensively in Rainbow Six. I got the impression it was more of him extending his fiction creative license than drawing any inspiration from a real product, though. But it does make it very exciting that there appears to be an actual way of doing this.

It seems likely that the US GEO-INT has more purpose-built tech for the Seals than NASA uses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligenc...

Wow, Star Trek life signs sensors!

I can't believe nobody's said it... They're "scanning for lifeforms".

Chalk up another Star Trek technology made real!

Slightly OT, but along the same lines.

Measuring the human pulse from tiny head movements to help diagnose cardiac disease [1]

[1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/measuring-the-human-pulse-from-tin...

In the same vein [ugh, sorry, pun not intended] there's the video magnification techniques that detect and amplify micro variations across video frames - e.g. in skin tone/colouration for pulse monitoring [1] and e.g. in structures for engineering analysis [2].

[1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/

[2] http://people.csail.mit.edu/celiu/motionmag/motionmag.html

So how does this actually work? What aspect of a heartbeat is detectable in such circumstances?

This is both fantastic and frightening. Imagine what capabilities the US military has for finding people.

> used to detect alien life on distant exoplanets

I love that lead. Life detected!

Is this part of the program that just received budget cuts so that NASA can focus on the 'hard sciences'?

"NASA's" yea right. This screams military tech.

Nope, you're wrong. It's not really military. This particular project has been funded for many years by DHS.

It's based on radar tech that has been used in many past space-based contexts. For synthetic-aperture-radar-based mapping of Earth's topography from space (http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/), for radar science (e.g., looking beneath the surface of Mercury using the 70-m Goldstone radar, http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/mercury-2007...), and for precisely retrieving the Doppler shift of receding spacecraft for science and communications. (Source: I know some of the JPL radar group.)

There is military-funded work that goes on at NASA, but this particular radar tech is not such an example.

For (much) more: https://radar.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm

It's probably pulsed UWB, not SAR as that requires a moving aperature:

http://www.timedomain.com/news/wall.php

UWB has been around for 20+ years, and IIRC there was a big patent dispute back in the late 90's.

https://books.google.com/books?id=6_XVg-nX9qgC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA...

Yes, certainly not SAR. My point is there is a big heritage of space-based radar expertise the linked project is drawing on, and I was trying to choose examples that people might be familiar with. SRTM was a main source for the DEMs that people use in GIS.

Not to split hairs, but NASA and the military are, and throughout their history, very much intertwined.

There's a reason that the first astronauts were fighter pilots.

I won't argue that there isn't cross-pollination between NASA and the military, but if you're looking for a test pilot for your new, high-performance aircraft (or, say, rocket), you'd be hard pressed to find a more qualified candidate than a military test pilot.

That reasoning was used for years to exclude women from the astronaut programme, even when women outperformed men in NASA's own test pilot tests.

(Astronauts were drawn from the test pilot pool. Women could not become test pilots because test pilots were military pilots, and military pilots were not female.)

http://history.nasa.gov/printFriendly/flats.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_13

From the Nazi V-2 team to the US X-37 there is a long history of considerable inter-connectivity.

Not just people but technology, manufacturing & testing methods, etc. It's a more significant than cross-pollination to me.

Serious question, would anyone else have been more qualified for those positions?

He picked a bad example, because honestly you are right.

A better example might be how the DoD influenced/compromised the design of the Space Shuttle. The only reason it had those big-ass wings was so that it could fly polar orbit missions for the military. It never actually flew any of those missions, but it did fly a few classified military missions: STS-51-C, STS-51-J, STS-27, STS-28, STS-33, STS-36, STS-38, and a few others.

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