Showing posts with label fish cannon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fish cannon. Show all posts

Monday, August 25, 2014

My Kingdom for a Man-Sized Fish Cannon

Alternate headline: Why Should Fruit and Salmon Have All the Fun?

For far too long, only fruit knew the joy of being placed into a flexible pneumatic tube and sucked gently, though rapidly over vast distances before landing comfortably. Today, thanks to the engineers at Whooshh, salmon and other fish are getting in on the action.

In many places in the world, human demand for electricity and predictable water supply have led to the creation of dams that have the unfortunate side effect of interfering with the migratory spawning habits of various species of fish. Though salmon, for example, can leap over barriers as high as 12 feet tall, that's often not enough.

Enter Whooshh, and their vacuum tube. Wildlife stewards, fisheries managers, and those lucky civilians with a need to shoot fish as far as 200 meters now have the mean. Fish are loaded into the safe, soft tube at one end, then propelled at 22 mph to their destination. Screaming their fishy heads off, rollercoaster-style, the entire way, I assume. (Like the little girl, not her dad.)

Here at G:TB, we're constantly seeking innovation, to repurpose the mundane in search of the sublime. Just last week, for example, we identified a way for humans to grow new appendages. (Has the engineering team completed that prototype yet? Who's in charge of the engineering team? Someone send a memo to someone.) 

And in that spirit of relentlessly seeking to improve the human experience, we've contacted Whooshh to explore the feasibility of the next, most obvious step in the evolution of vacuum-powered matter transport: the man-sized version. We're working on a name for it, but I've already volunteered by be a test subject. We'll start with simple tasks, like shooting people into a lake, but if our hunch is right, you'll be commuting this way within the decade. 

You know what Bart Scott has to say about that.