Oil plugging ideas.
The Deepwater Horizon incident is, in addition to a catastrophic environmental disaster, which I'm not making light of, also a fascinating engineering problem. There is plenty of politcal blaming to go around in terms of whose fault it is that safeguards were not in place to ensure that if the rig blew up, it would not leave a permanent, open gusher a mile beneath the sea. But having failed to do so, it would appear there is no one in the world who actually knows what to do about it. I was thinking "big rock", but apparently it's significantly more complicated.
I don't really know if I'm naive in thinking there was a bygone day when Americans (and being this is BP, also non-Americans) knew how to actually solve problems, or if maybe we were just lucky that a lot of guys didn't die on their way to the moon. But it sometimes feels like we have moved from the age of engineering to the age of financial shell games, and that's where our smartest people are now employed.
I don't really know if I'm naive in thinking there was a bygone day when Americans (and being this is BP, also non-Americans) knew how to actually solve problems, or if maybe we were just lucky that a lot of guys didn't die on their way to the moon. But it sometimes feels like we have moved from the age of engineering to the age of financial shell games, and that's where our smartest people are now employed.