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Mechanical Butterflies?
MImeKillEr writes "According to an article on BBC News, two researchers from Oxford took highspeed photographs of an Admiral butterfly in a specially-designed windtunnel to study how butterflies fly. The resulting research brings insight into small-scale flight dynamics. Although the article doesn't give an ETA on this, they expect to be able to build an aircraft with a 10cm wingspan that will be either autonomous or radio controlled. This will allow them to be used in rescue missions, cave exploration and possibly even on Mars."
If you could put cameras on these things they would be great for espionage. I imagine the military would love to see some tiny radio controlled flying vehicles with video capture capability.
you can take the road that takes you to the stars...
and possibly, terrorism. and possibly Big Brother's lil Helpers, and possibly a pest to native birds who try to eat them.
What a world we live in!
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
> The butterfly has had hundreds of
> millions of years to develop it's
> flight model.
So what? The lotus flower had at least as much time to develop its self-cleaning petals, but it took human scientists just a few years to develop an agent that gives any glass surface the same property just by spraying it on. It forms the same nano structures that make water drops, which take every trace of dust and dirt with them, flow off completely, or even drops of super glue.
> It's about the finely tuned control
> mechanisim (in this case, butterfly brain)
Oh look, behold the mighty powers of the butterfly brain, which is about as intelligent as my cheapo Casio watch. I don't see much problems with emulating this. By the way, most of the 'knowledge' about flying isn't in that tiny butterfly brain anyway, it's hardwired into the nervous system. The wings flap so fast that the delay of sending impulses all the way to the brain and back all the time would be too big.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
If you're thinking about writing algorithms (if-then-else-style) that emulate a butterfly's behaviour down to every wing-movement and fitting them into a tiny microchip: yes, that would be _very_ hard.
Of course you can't actually achieve anything with wrist-watch technology; however, there are alternatives: Self-learning algorithms, neural networks, genetic algorithms, etc. There was that
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
Send a massive swarm out that all broadcast back small pieces of the scene from different angles. All of the physical location data is combined with the video, a computer back at "base" assembles it all into a 3D VR world.
Then you as a participant ("butterfly tamer" ?)could control the swarm, and as you moved through VR space, the butterflies would move through physical space to try to build up the detail of image necessary for what you're looking at.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
Well, first bear in mind that the Martian atmosphere is MUCH less dense than even the air at several km elevation. Standard pressure on earth at sea level is defined as one atmosphere. Standard martian ground level pressure is about 0.01 atm. Even at 20 km elevation (far higher than any insect could fly) earth's atmospheric pressure is still 0.05 atm, or still 5 times that of Mars.
The weight of the wings will increase with the cube of the size of the wings, meanwhile the lifting power of the wings will increase with the square of the size of the wings. It is quite concievable that by the time you get the wings large enough to lift the body in a Martian atomsphere the wings will weigh too much to lift themselves and the body as well.
Plus, just scaling the wings won't work. Any serious increase in the size of the wings will require you to increase the size of the motor, solenoid, dielectric fiber, or whatever is moving the wing.
This is not to say it can't be done. I really have no clue if it's feasable on a Mars. It's just that just scaling the wings won't work.
When things develop through evolution it tends to be by a series of small changes, each representing no improvement or a small improvement. This means that although evolution over a long time tends towards a working solution, it doesn't always tend to the best (most efficient) solution. The structure of your eye is a case in point - the blood supply lies in front of the light sensitive cells of the retina.
What may be useful is that the process can find non-intuitive solutions to problems and there is a built in robustness to what emerges. Random variation has to have a wider tightrope to walk or any deviation from the norm would be fatal. Complex evolved systems also tend to have a built in redundancy as they grow out of similar and simpler systems which become interrelated.
Slashdotters may remember a report a year or so old about an evolving robot which developed dragonfly-like flight. Why take a pattern found in nature (photographic the butterfly) and try to work out how it works when you can evolve it directly with a learning system? If you're going to ape evolved systems it seems much more sensible (and easier) to me to ape the process rather than the result.
> The butterfly has had hundreds of
> millions of years to develop it's
> flight model.
So what? The lotus flower had at least as much time to develop its self-cleaning petals, but it took human scientists just a few years to develop an agent that gives any glass surface the same property just by spraying it on.
True, but the lotus flower is capable a lot more than just repelling water/dirt: it can repair the damaged surface, it can reproduce itself literally out of nothing - just water, sunlight and some minerals. Moreover it can come up with new designs if the environment changes. The list could go on.
Try to top that with a bunch of scientists and a few years of development...
You're saying human scientists were able to do that a few years after we speciated from whatever our direct ancestor was? Wow, I missed that.
No, really, I understand -- you're saying it won't necessarily take forever, now we've thought of it, to mimic butterfly flight. Maybe.
But go take a look and see how long submarine designers have been trying to mimic the agility (and specifically, lack of drag) of dolphins in the water. Or watch the way a sparrow uses stall speed when it lands on a tree branch outside your office window. Ain't necessarily all that easy. We can't make robots that run around like a five-year-old can, and that's a mode of locomotion we know pretty well, right?
I have liatris aspera plants in my front priarie garden -- a monarch magnet -- and sometimes in August there are maybe eight butterflies dogfighting for position out there. They aren't sluggish in flight, not at all. Maybe you haven't watched a buttefly lately?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
This is so true. I get so tired of seeing academics making tiny models of the pyramids or stonehenge, pulling a few strings and proclaiming, "behold, proof of how the pyramids were built. Now give me my tenure." At no point however do they conceed defeat when attempts to make a "full size" model fail. The thought process seems to be this, "Hmm, our 10 foot high pyramid is a complete failure. Nevermind, the method could easily be employed by an ancient civilisation (who hadn't even invented the wheel according to our ever so reliable sources) to build absolutely humungous structures consisting of blocks literally hundreds of times heavier than our puny examples." Does anyone else think that the historians have got something wrong at some point along the way?
Archeaolgy -- Science fiction of the past.
Very soon there will be nowhere to hide, as flying/airborne networks of 'bugs' with full audio-visual capability will be all over, indoors and out, in due time. There's no way to stop this and I'm not saying we should try, but it will make life 'interesting' in ways we can barely conceive of right now.
Mosquito nets, repellant and bugspray will take on new meanings in the not-too-distant future.
**>>BELCH