And yes, people who do avalanche control typically fire explosives out of a cannon or drop them from a helicopter. Getting a machine supply all the energy is the whole idea instead of climbing mountains yourself.
The point is to avoid that entirely and harvest gravity.
Re-wilding teams already climb far and wide, and this would extend their reach without increasing their dependencies.
Ammo is a dependency.
And if you INSIST on making everything completely low-tech and renewable, build a potato gun and use high-proof alcohol as fuel. It'll weigh less and last longer than whatever rube-Goldberg trebuchet design you have.
Have you ever climbed a mountain with the intent to live on it for a month, doing re-wilding work? I don’t think you have. You will not be happy about having to climb back down to replenish the ammo can.
Mountains don’t have supply chains. Neither do remote rewilding areas. A low-cost, low-dependency, highly reusable device for throwing small things, long distances, is of immense value - even to our always-on, subscription-based cultures.
> It'll weigh less and last longer than whatever rube-Goldberg trebuchet design you have.
This is false and unimaginative. Put the optimized trebuchet in a backpack and get out there for months, chucking things around without requiring a single re-supply mission.
>manufactured cheaply by the billions
Are you even paying attention to the fact that this thing doesn’t need to have anything else manufactured for it in order to operate usefully?
Seriously, I don’t want to hear your consumption-addled argument. No, the point is to NOT have to constantly be dependent on a supply chain.
A good one will weigh about 5 pounds and not have moving parts to break. Ferment your own alcohol from plants you grow yourself. You can at least do that much, right?
>Ferment your own alcohol from plants you grow yourself
I suppose I could just harvest gunpowder from the bullet trees that grow all over candy-land, too.
Or, I could just have an ultra-optimized trebuchet in my backpack for throwing things with very little effort besides the energy (me) required to reload it, wind it up, and let ‘er rip ..
It’s like saying “why would you use a bow and arrow when you’ve got a 50 caliber machine gun industry right there, ready to help you blow things up”.
I’d use a bow and arrow in the same context - so that I don’t have to have an entire industry dependency just to survive and/or do stuff in the wild.
And before you change the context and say “yeah, why don’t use just use a bow and arrow to do your seed-bombing, huh hippy?”, that thought of course crossed my mind. Soon as I find a supersonic capable bow, that is.
It's not obvious whether a trebuchet is better than compressed air, like a BB gun.
All harvesting requires some secondary-energy source.
Gravity is a resource, it takes effort to convert it to a form that can be applied - just like wheat, photons, air guns, etc.
> It's not obvious whether a trebuchet is better than compressed air, like a BB gun.
True, it’s not obvious yet, but it sure is fun following along and imagining the final, highly optimal version making its way through the process. I’d use it for some seed bombing hijinks, anyway. Green up the place, I would.