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TechnoratiA Futuristic Nightmare That Just Might Come True
Biological weapons delivered by cyborg insects. It sounds like a nightmare scenario straight out of the wilder realms of science fiction, but it could be a reality, if a current Pentagon project comes to fruition.
Right now, researchers are already growing insects with electronics inside them. They're creating cyborg moths and flying beetles that can be remotely controlled. One day, the U.S. military may field squadrons of winged insect/machine hybrids with on-board audio, video or chemical sensors. These cyborg insects could conduct surveillance and reconnaissance missions on distant battlefields, in far-off caves, or maybe even in cities closer to home, and transmit detailed data back to their handlers at U.S. military bases.
Today, many people fear U.S. government surveillance of email and cell phone communications. With this program, the Pentagon aims to exponentially increase the paranoia. Imagine a world in which any insect fluttering past your window may be a remote-controlled spy, packed with surveillance equipment. Even more frightening is the prospect that such creatures could be weaponized, and the possibility, according to one scientist intimately familiar with the project, that these cyborg insects might be armed with "bio weapons."
For the past 50 years, work by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- the Pentagon's blue skies research outfit -- has led to some of the most lethal weaponry in the U.S. arsenal: from Hellfire-missile-equipped Predator drones and stealth fighters and bombers to Tomahawk cruise missiles and Javelin portable "fire and forget" guided missiles. For the last several years, DARPA has funneled significant sums of money into a very different kind of guided missile project, its Hybrid Insect MEMS (HI-MEMS) program. This project is, according to DARPA, "aimed at developing tightly coupled machine-insect interfaces by placing micro-mechanical systems [MEMS] inside the insects during the early stages of metamorphosis." Put simply, the creation of cyborg insects: part bug, part bot.
Bugs, Bots, Borgs and Bio-Weapons
This past August, at DARPA's annual symposium -- DARPATech -- HI-MEMS program manager Amit Lal, an associate professor on leave from Cornell University, explained that his project aims to transform "insects into unmanned air-vehicles." He described the research this way: "[T]he HI-MEMS program seeks to grow MEMS and electronics inside the insect pupae. The new tissue forms around the insertions, making the bio-electronic interface long-lasting and reliable." In other words, micro-electronics are inserted at the pupal stage of metamorphosis so that they can be integrated into the insects' bodies as they develop, creating living robots that can be remotely controlled after the insect emerges from its cocoon.
According to the latest reports, work on this project is progressing at a rapid pace. In a recent phone interview, DARPA spokesperson Jan Walker said, "We're focused on determining what the best kinds of MEMS systems are; what the best MEMS system would be for embedding; what the best time is for embedding."
This month, Rob Coppinger, writing for the aerospace trade publication Flight International, reported on new advances announced at the "1st US-Asian Assessment and Demonstration of Micro-Aerial and Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology" -- a Pentagon-sponsored conference. "In the latest work," he noted, "a Manduca moth had its thorax truncated to reduce its mass and had a MEMS component added where abdominal segments would have been, during the larval stage." But, as he pointed out, Robert Michelson, a principal research engineer, emeritus at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, laid out "on behalf of DARPA" some of the obstacles that remain. Among them were short insect life-spans and the current inability to create these cyborgs outside specialized labs.
DARPA's professed long-term goal for the HI-MEMS program is the creation of "insect cyborgs" capable of carrying "one or more sensors, such as a microphone or a gas sensor, to relay back information gathered from the target destination" -- in other words, the creation of military micro-surveillance systems.
In a recent email interview, Michelson -- who has previously worked on numerous military projects, including DARPA's "effort to develop an 'Entomopter' (mechanical insect-like multimode aerial robot)" -- described the types of sensor packages envisioned, but only in a minimalist fashion, as a "[w]ide array of active and passive devices." However in "Insect Cyborgs: A New Frontier in Flight Control Systems," a 2007 article in the academic journal Proceedings of SPIE, Cornell researchers noted that cyborg insects could be used as "autonomous surveillance and reconnaissance vehicles" with on-board "[s]ensory systems such as video and chemical."
Surveillance applications, however, may only be the beginning. Last year, Jonathan Richards, reporting for The Times, raised the specter of the weaponization of cyborg insects in the not-too-distant future. As he pointed out, Rodney Brooks, the director of the computer science and artificial intelligence lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, indicated that the Pentagon is striving toward a major expansion in the use of non-traditional air power -- like unmanned aerial vehicles and cyborg insects -- in the years ahead. "There's no doubt their things will become weaponized," he explained, "so the question [is]: should they [be] given targeting authority?" Brooks went on to assert, according to The Times, that it might be time to consider rewriting international law to take the future weaponization of such "devices" into account.
But how would one weaponize a cyborg insect? On this subject, Robert Michelson was blunt: "Bio weapons."
Cyborg Ethics
Michelson wouldn't elaborate further, but any program using bio-weapons would immediately raise major legal and ethical questions. The 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention outlawed the manufacture and possession of bio-weapons, of "[m]icrobial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin... that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes" and of "[w]eapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict." In fact, not only did President George W. Bush claim that Iraq's supposed production and possession of biological weapons was a justification for an invasion of that nation, but he had previously stated, "All civilized nations reject as intolerable the use of disease and biological weapons as instruments of war and terror."
Reached for comment, however, DARPA's Jan Walker insisted that her agency's focus was only on "fundamental research" when it came to cyborg insects. Although the focus of her agency is, in fact, distinctly on the future -- the technology of tomorrow -- she refused to look down the road when it came to weaponizing insect cyborgs or arming them with bio-weapons. "I can't speculate on the future," was all she would say.
Michelson is perfectly willing to look into future, especially on matters of cyborg insect surveillance, but on the horizon for him are technical issues when it comes to the military use of bug bots. "Surveillance goes on anyway by other means," he explained, "so a new method is not the issue. If there are ethical or legal issues, they are ones of 'surveillance,' not of the 'surveillance platform.'"
Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights and civil liberties group, sees that same future in a different light. Cyborg insects, he says, are an order of magnitude away from today's more standard surveillance technologies like closed circuit television. "CCTV is mostly deployed in public and in privately owned public spaces. An insect could easily fly into your garden or sit outside your bedroom window," he explained. "To make matters worse, you'd have no idea these devices were there. A CCTV camera is usually an easily recognizable device. Robotic surveillance insects might be harder to spot. And having to spot them wouldn't necessarily be good for our mental health."
Does Michelson see any ethical or legal dilemmas resulting from the future use of weaponized cyborg insects? "No, not unless they could breed new cyborg insects, which is not possible," he explained. "Genetic engineering will be the ethical and legal battleground, not cybernetics."
Battle Beetles and Hawkish Hawkmoths
Weaponized or not, moths are hardly the only cyborg insects that may fly, creep, or crawl into the military's future arsenal. Scientists from Arizona State University and elsewhere, working under a grant from the Office of Naval Research and DARPA, "are rearing beetle species at various oxygen levels to attempt to produce beetles with greater-than-normal size and payload capacity." Earlier this year, some of the same scientists published an article on their DARPA-funded research titled "A Cyborg Beetle: Insect Flight Control Through an Implantable, Tetherless Microsystem." They explained that, by implanting "multiple inserted neural and muscular stimulators, a visual stimulator, a polyimide assembly and a microcontroller" in a 2 centimeter long, 1-2 gram green June beetle, they were "capable of modulating [the insect's] flight starts, stops, throttle/lift, and turning." They could, that is, drive an actual beetle. However, unlike the June bug you might find on a porch screen or in a garden, these sported on-board electronics powered by cochlear implant batteries.
DARPA-funded HI-MEMS research has also been undertaken at other institutions across the country and around the world. For example, in 2006, researchers at Cornell, in conjunction with scientists at Pennsylvania State University and the Universidad de Valparaiso, Chile, received an $8.4 million DARPA grant for work on "Insect Cyborg Sentinels." According to a recent article in New Scientist, a team led by one of the primary investigators on that grant, David Stern, screened a series of video clips at a recent conference in Tucson, Arizona demonstrating their ability to control tethered tobacco hawkmoths through "flexible plastic probes" implanted during the pupal stage. Simply stated, the researchers were able to remotely control the moths-on-a-leash, manipulating the cyborg creatures' wing speed and direction.
Robo-Bugs
Cyborg insects are only the latest additions to the U.S. military's menagerie. As defense tech-expert Noah Shachtman of Wired magazine's Danger Room blog has reported, DARPA projects have equipped rats with electronic equipment and remotely controlled sharks, while the military has utilized all sorts of animals, from bomb-detecting honeybees and "chickens used as early-warning sensors for chemical attacks" to guard dogs and dolphins trained to hunt mines. Additionally, he notes, the DoD's emphasis on the natural world has led to robots that resemble dogs, monkeys that control robotic limbs with their minds, and numerous other projects inspired by nature.
But whatever other creatures they favor, insects never seem far from the Pentagon's dreams of the future. In fact, Shachtman reported earlier this year that "Air Force scientists are looking for robotic bombs that look -- and act -- like swarms of bugs and birds." He went on to quote Colonel Kirk Kloeppel, head of the Air Force Research Laboratory's munitions directorate, who announced the Lab's interest in "bio-inspired munitions," in "small, autonomous" machines that would "provide close-in [surveillance] information, in addition to killing intended targets."
This month, researcher Robert Wood wrote in IEEE Spectrum about what he believes was "the first flight of an insect-size robot." After almost a decade of research, Wood and his colleagues at the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory are now creating small insect-like robots that will eventually be outfitted "with onboard sensors, flight controls, and batteries... to nimbly flit around obstacles and into places beyond human reach." Like cyborg insect researchers, Wood is DARPA-funded. Last year, in fact, the agency selected him as one of 24 "rising stars" for a "young faculty awards" grant.
Asked about the relative advantages of cyborg insects compared to mechanical bugs, Robert Michelson noted that "robotic insects obey without innate or external influences" and "they can be mass produced rapidly." He cautioned, however, that they are extremely limited power-wise. Insect cyborgs, on the other hand, "can harvest energy and continue missions of longer duration." However, they "may be diverted from their task by stronger influences"; must be grown to maturity and so may not be available when needed; and, of course, are mortal and run the risk of dying before they can be employed as needed.
The Future is Now
There is plenty of technical information about the HI-MEMS program available in the scientific literature. And if you make inquiries, DARPA will even direct you to some of the relevant citations. But while it's relatively easy to learn about the optimal spots to insert a neural stimulator in a green June beetle ("behind the eye, in the flight control area of the insect brain") or an electronic implant in a tobacco hawkmoth ("the main flight powering muscles... in the dorsal-thorax"), it's much harder to discover the likely future implications of this sci-fi sounding research.
The "final demonstration goal" -- the immediate aim -- of DARPA's HI-MEMS program "is the delivery of an insect within five meters of a specific target located a hundred meters away, using electronic remote control, and/or global positioning system (GPS)." Right now, DARPA doesn't know when that might happen. "We basically operate phase to phase," says Walker. "So, it kind of depends on how they do in the current phase and we'll make decisions on future phases."
DARPA refuses to examine anything but research-oriented issues. As a result, its Pentagon-funded scientists churn out inventions with potentially dangerous, if not deadly, implications without ever fully considering -- let alone seeking public or expert comment on -- the future ramifications of new technologies under production.
"The people who build this equipment are always going to say that they're just building tools, that there are legitimate uses for them, and that it isn't their fault if the tools are abused," says the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Eckersley. "Unfortunately, we've seen that governments are more than willing to play fast-and-loose with the legal bounds on surveillance. Unless and until that changes, we'd urge researchers to find other projects to work on."
Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Adbusters, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch. His first book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, has just been published in Metropolitan Books' American Empire Project series. His website is NickTurse.com
Copyright 2008 Nick Turse
45 Comments so far
Show AllHow long before this technology is "integrated" with humans. May be its already happening as we speak.
HOWLONG
yes, those horse flies with the red heads. they carry larvae inside them.
People are going to want them once this technology goes public and a private corporation buys it. How about your stalker sending a robotic moth to your window?
I'm gonna start keeping some bug spray handy.
PLEASE LARGE ASTEROID HIT THE PLANET.
These little buggers are the tactical breakthrough that America's war on drugs has been waiting for. Think of what a swarm of a couple of billion poisonous bio-mechanical insects can do to a Colombian coca field or an Afghan poppy plantation. There's just no way that a crop can be protected from a swarm of mechanical insects that are immune to every known pesticide and chemical.
Within the U.S. itself, imagine a half trillion or so of these nearly microscopic insects loosed to scatter across the continent and then roost on window screens and doors. With their tiny chemical sensors they'll be able to detect if marihuana is being smoked inside the premises without violating a resident's 4th Amendment rights; in fact, the tiny enforcers will not even be noticed, even if dozens or hundreds should alight on a rooftop and surrounding shrubbery. When a violation is detected, the bug's tiny antenna can alert a roving interdiction team, sending exact directions to the site in violation.
I have long considered that houseflies might just be God's little spies, but apparently they will be government's too - if we survive as a species that long.
I remember that days…when the US screamed and shouted about bioweapons…nuclear weapons….human rights attrocities…
Now we are the monsters who violate and use those very things
Makes me wonder what we progressives will eventually do.
To those who work on such programs: you are no longer human, nor of earth. You are simply cyphers. You have no rationale, no reason and no humanity left in you if you were, in fact, ever human. To weaponize nature, to f**k with evolution for a buck, words do not fail me: you simply disgust me as human beings. If this is all you can do with your talent, the education and the ideas of science "to serve humanity" then I would rather we figure out how to remove you from the gene pool or find you some decent work like planting trees, cleaning the air and the rivers of pollution with tax payer's dollars.
That such 'people' can exist and flout every ethic associated with life and survival that there is…just shows me how sad the great words of the philosophers are, for they obviously have no value.
To those who support and fund and drive such projects forward, you are all simply death-dealers. No one of you is any better than those who manned the ovens or gave the orders to fill the chambers with gas that murdered first 400,000 disabled persons and then 6,000,000 in the death camps of Auschwitz, Belsen and other such blots on history. You are really the most loathsome creatures for your work creates and perpetuates a world of disorder, chaos and strife. You disgust me, and I am outraged. Your existence is an affront to life.
Ah, there's my answer. Dehumanization of the enemy. The first step to becoming him.
Setting aside the April Fools' Day tone of the story, I can't condone the use of the above-cited Bug Zapper to indiscriminately zap innocent insects.
Because I went to bed last night right after reading this article, and I had a nightmare involving Jiminy Cricket chirping, "Don't tase me, bro!" just before I turned him into a puff of smoke.
And now I'm afraid of having a nightmare in which I'm featured on the left-hand side of Common Dreams:
Bug Zapper Sales Spike Due to Cyberbug Hysteria.
These scientists are war criminals. When the regime finally falls, ...
To those who work on such programs: you are no longer human, nor of earth. You are simply cyphers. You have no rationale, no reason and no humanity left in you if you were, in fact, ever human. To weaponize nature, to f**k with evolution for a buck, words do not fail me: you simply disgust me as human beings. If this is all you can do with your talent, the education and the ideas of science "to serve humanity" then I would rather we figure out how to remove you from the gene pool or find you some decent work like planting trees, cleaning the air and the rivers of pollution with tax payer's dollars.
That such 'people' can exist and flout every ethic associated with life and survival that there is...just shows me how sad the great words of the philosophers are, for they obviously have no value.
To those who support and fund and drive such projects forward, you are all simply death-dealers. No one of you is any better than those who manned the ovens or gave the orders to fill the chambers with gas that murdered first 400,000 disabled persons and then 6,000,000 in the death camps of Auschwitz, Belsen and other such blots on history. You are really the most loathsome creatures for your work creates and perpetuates a world of disorder, chaos and strife. You disgust me, and I am outraged. Your existence is an affront to life.
Siouxrose- Sigh. So nice that someone else here gets my obscure(?) geek references.
I am really, REALLY, hoping that we can get through the coming election cycle without having some group of poor innocents getting blown to powder in order that the neo-cons can continue their insanity.
But, I am not putting any money on it.
I am, after all a realist. Money talks. The poor get tasered. And the rest of America votes for the next American Idol.
first they cyborg the bugs, then humans, in the fertilized egg, no retro-fits, they come that way from the factory.
My America, what nightmare place you are. Derek Jacobi uttered the Curse in Graves, "I, Claudius", "Let all the poisons that are in the mud, hatch out."
They have.
The time of the Big Dark is nearly ended. Next comes the Great Shattering. It will happen in cascading waves, the crests coming closer together, until the big Wall of disaster. Anybody under the Wall dies.
Sorry. Could have been stopped. Never had to happen. America has always fought for what it believed in: Aryan Male Supremacy; Human slavery; Gender slavery; Massive child abuse; Constant war; & Genocide. Always. The rest was never more than words to us. That's why the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Your Jobs, Your home, Your education, Your health care, Your pension, Your 40 hour work week were all so easy to take away from you.
YOU WOULDN'T FIGHT FOR THEM.
YOUR PARENTS WOULDN'T FIGHT FOR THEM.
YOUR GRANDPARENTS WOULDN'T FIGHT FOR THEM.
And now they're gone.
Good bye. Somebody out there light a candle but be careful an American doesn't knock you down to steal it from you. Culture is everything.
Peece.
"These cyborg insects could conduct surveillance and reconnaissance missions on distant battlefields, in far-off caves, or maybe even in cities closer to home, and transmit detailed data back to their handlers at U.S. military bases."
they're already being used against the United States. our enemies know what Bush Co. are going to do BEFORE they do it!! or are the Bushies just so darn predictable??
video and pictures of said creatures:
seemyworldonvideo.com/view/33/bio-remote-dragonfly/
primidi.com/2007/06/22.html
Also, does anyone know what type of fly carries its larvae inside its body?
I thought flies only laid eggs.
GALEN: If you want to take the BRAZIL analogy further, how 'bout all the energy directed at their version of Homeland Security, what did they call it, the ministry of ... ? Where the guy itches his nose causing a typewriter key to elicit the wrong spelling of a target terrorist, so a poor slob is instead picked up. As the women lunch on those soylent green yummies, and compare stitches from plastic surgery, bombs go off... terrorists abound everywhere, evidence of a state run by paranoids... so much like home.
PAUL BRAMSCHER: Eloquently stated, you posed the very question I would have... truly I think this one, nature's key elemental armies, will turn on those who possess the conceit to think they have the right to enslave yet another genre of the great Creation paradigm.
Gotta get me a bug zapper. Who knew I might be taking out millions of dollars of Pentagon research!
Remember, the flaw in the American system is that we spend way too much money to fight our wars.
R/C cyborg insects. Hunter Killer AI robots roaming the battlefield. Skyborne surveillance drones in Miami. Designer plagues. Corporate built civilian detention centers. Corporate mercenaries. Terminator gene GMO crops. Taser happy 'police' controlling a TV addicted mood suppressing drugged populace.
Excuse me.
I would like to know how to get back to my own parallel dimension, instead of this Sci-fi inspired nightmare.
I really would like to know when I slipped into Terry Gillaims 'Brazil'...
"I am always very skeptical of this type of technology especially when you consider the human element in deploying it successfully. The pentagon has a lot to gain in intimidating it's opponents. Reality is much more complicated."
I agree with agitkid. We've spent billions of dollars on the Missile Defense System, but it still doesn't work. It feels like it does because they keep repeating the lie, but that does not make it true. During the first Iraq war we heard endless propaganda about the Patriot missile defense system; missiles that shot conventional missiles. Later studies were done, and found that the Patriots didn't shoot down anything. It was not reported in the corporate press (certainly not as much as they were promoted), but where is the patriot missile system now? Certainly the pentagon scientists have achieved amazing things, but they are still bound by physical laws and limited by current knowledge. The internet and computers are amazing, but they are still a believable extension of early computer chip technology and the telephone.
A good example of over reaching by government scientists is the CIA's MK-ULTRA program. In Montreal in the 1950's at a University hospital Dr. Ewan Cameron, a psychiatrist, used patients to test mind control techniques. Using mainly Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT), drugs, and isolation in different forms Dr. Cameron tried to find ways to erase specific memories, and control people against there will. He was able to wipe minds clean (remember ECT always causes memory loss), but that's it. Not specific memories, not mind control just a total memory erase, and significant brain damage causing functional impairment. Terrible for his test subjects, but achieving nothing either for the CIA or for his dream of erasing traumatic memories and rebuilding the mind (usual arrogant psychiatric thinking). From personal experience from a lifetime in psychiatric care I can tell you things haven't changed much. ECT still is used, now with anesthesia and a muscle relaxant, but the result is the still general brain damage and memory loss. All of the new post Prozac drugs are nothing but crap. This has been confirmed by a February University of Hull Study. From personal experience, both my own and what I've seen in my fellow patients, the only benefits are from the placebo effect and general brain damage causing compliance and passivity. Just like the Missile Defense Sheild it's just a product to make money if they can't make it work they'll let marketing deal with it.
We must be wary of new military technology, but we must also keep in mind: if it sounds too fantastic to be true it probably is.
For the University of Hull antidepressant study:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-wellbeing/health-news...
For Dr. Cameron's CIA experiments:
http://www.ect.org/cia-brainwashing-victims-seek-canada-court-action/
Microbiologists have found bits and pieces of the HIV virus in gulfwar veterans with the syndrome of the same name.
"This seems to me to be another hare-brained Pentagon scheme(akin to the program where they tried to blow-up goats telepathically by having human volunteers stare at them.)"
JohnR, thank you for the laugh. I about peed myself.
Cornell is where BGH was developed as well. Our universities used to be centers of higher learning and pure research. Now they're business fronts and weapons labs.
Not a good sign.
kathyodat
neomunk
Problem with that plan is birds, bats, and bees are dying in droves.
And come spring, think of all the bug-bots that'll be shoved down baby birds throats.
I've always believed AIDS was one of our bugs developed for germ warfare, and tested on the two species deemed expendable.
Don't Swat that Bug Bot
Don't swat that bug bot
tame it and train it
when it expires
time capsule it
to leave a clue
for others who come after you
to laud the absurdity of the few
the profit pestilence crew
Don't use seeds
to get birds to do bot offing deeds
please consider digestion
and the health of compost
like the DARPA rot
that has us so distruaght
Never ceases to amaze me just how much effort we put into developing new ways to kill each other while ignoring the things that really threaten our survival. We have to be one of the stupidest species on the planet!
I cannot wait for the "cockroach gap" and "rat gap" to become justification for MIC embellishments, and enhanced profiteering.
But let's hold off on Sat night live's land shark, please …
And I really I was just joking about Jake being a nano-NAT, I already have enough ants thank you very much.
Namaste (I am ONE with ALL life)
I don't know if I am jumping on board with this one quite yet (although the "superbugs" in our hospitals are already here, and they are a whole lot more lethal). How would the Pentagon train these little critters to do their bidding? What if the Ruskies and the Chinese develop effective defenses to them (such as bats, and barn swallows)? The concern about insects delivering biological agents is a little more plausible, but the Pentagon spent many years, and many millions of dollars trying to "weaponize" the lowly Frisbee, all for naught. I tend to think that the effort required to control the little fellas would be more than overwhelmed by the effort required to either disorient them, or kill them outright. And besides, if the Russians or Chinese (or Iranians, at that point) thought that we were using bugs to defeat them they might just respond in the old fashioned way, with a thermonuclear weapon. Although I have heard that cockroaches might survive a nuclear war (no word on whether the cockroaches occupying the Pentagon would be among them).
Who woulda thunk it... Laying out lots of birdseed on a regular basis forms an active anti-air defense from DARPA weaponry. Wow.
WTF....that was my point...lol
Only we can have them!!
It was pretty hard to read this whole thing. Even if these things are nowhere near ready to deploy, the fact that hundreds of people in our prestigious universities are taking DARPA money to work to make nightmares come true speaks so poorly for the human race that I wonder if it isn't better if we kill ourselves off. Certainly bombing these labs would be entirely morally justified. It just goes on, this phenomenon of people with very high IQs and very low wisdom quotients being willing to set their expertise to the use of the state for any and all purposes, disavowing moral responsibility--while those who hire them use the excuse that someone else is no doubt working on the same thing so "we" must be first. Every generation the level of horror in what they create goes up another level of magnitude. If the human race can't grow beyond its depraved, schizophrenic acceptance of warfare, we will kill ourselves off, along with much or all of the rest of the living world.
The best defense against Bugbots is a good offense:
PRODUCT: The Hand Zapper
"A small tennis racket looking device which is used
to electrocute insects. It is powered by two "AA" batteries, and works very well at delivering a zap of electricity which is more than strong enough to instantly fry most any insect."
This just in: The Department of "Homeland Security" has declared that The Hand Zapper is a terrorist-related weapon, mostly likely provided by Iran to destroy Israel.
http://www.bugspray.com/catalog/products/page1941.html
It has already happened. It is just coincidence I am sure, but a few miles from Lyme CT at the tip of Long Island is Plum Island which was used during WWII to investigate how ticks could be used for transmitting disease. They were very sloppy since they were on an island and "How could anything escape from there?"
A few years later (I think 1955) the first evidence of mysterious diseases started to occur. Later, ticks were identified as the carriers of what is now known as Lyme disease.
So even better than cyborg insects are ones that you have no control over that spread and infect the population.
Yankee Magazine had a great article on the history of Lyme disease sometime last year.
Thank you Pentagon for your foresight.
Coming soon from Apple: "iBug - bugging, with smugness"
@Unchained
The US has never screamed about nuclear weapons...unless someone else has them. The US will vigorously defend its ability to produce, test and stockpile nukes.
Maybe we could have some bots build to put in Washington that could home in the corrupt...if a polygraph can determine stress...well....so could bot sensories....ahem....
I remember that days...when the US screamed and shouted about bioweapons...nuclear weapons....human rights attrocities...
Now we are the monsters who violate and use those very things
Ever see the movie "Screamers"....
Fiction one day....fact the next.
I have read about DARPAs projects for years now, and the more I read these stories, I can't help but feel that one of the pentagons intentions in releasing this type of information on unsuspecting journalists is the fear factor.
I am always very skeptical of this type of technology especially when you consider the human element in deploying it successfully. The pentagon has a lot to gain in intimidating it's opponents. Reality is much more complicated. Witness Iraq. A lot of good these bugs will do against a well armed population who fights back.
Also, if we want to talk about chemical warfare, then lets start with depleted uranium, which has devastated Iraq's civilian population now for almost 17 years, a crime against humanity.
And an aside, if you want to defeat these little bugs they are allegedly designing, just put up a few good fans around your windows and doors, just like you find in restaurants...you know, the ones designed to keep bugs out of the kitchen.
Lets not forget who the Wizard of Oz actually was...
Ah...better living through science.....
Amit Lal, the product of a free people, no doubt.
But how would one weaponize a cyborg insect? On this subject, Robert Michelson was blunt: "Bio weapons."
DARPA has many fascinating programs, and we truly them have to thank for fantastic technology, much of which benefits ordinary people (e.g, the internet, TCP/IP, etc).
"Bug-bots" is but one small component of the weaponization of nano-technology. Another project is the use of nano "dust motes" for detection of virulent and poisonous agents. It only stands to reason that the genetically targeted delivery of bio- and chemical weapons by dust-mote is also being researched.
I knew that damn dragonfly was following me!Is that line of Deer ticks crawling under my door carrying weapons grade Lyme Disease ? AIEEEEEE!!@#$%^&*()+_)(*&^AHAAHEALP! They are gonna disappear me and my friends will just think I'm a paranoid nut having a psychotic break!The trouble with wild conspiracy theories is that some of them are true! Scary shit Nick ! peace
How is the imbedded chip functionally-integrated into the bug's central nervous system? This seems to me to be another hare-brained Pentagon scheme(akin to the program where they tried to blow-up goats telepathically by having human volunteers stare at them.) Still, with the predicted eclipse of human cognitive abilities by computers, it does give one pause to worry about what nightmares await in "the brave new world".
Since Bush has dialed back the 4th Amendment, Geneva Conventions, Habeas Corpus, and apparently the Magna Carta, the dialing back of the '72 bioweapons ban should be expected to occur as well.
I think it was Philip K. Dick who wrote, indirectly, in "Man in the High Castle" about something that went awry in Africa and depopulated the entire continent. Would seem that a genetically-targetted weapon is just around the corner as well. The big question for the megalomaniacs will be whether it mutates and goes after its maker as well as its intended victims.
These issues have pretty much all been covered -- and warned about -- in sci-fi.