Slashdot Mirror
This Week's Government Cyborg Animal
Security writes "The BBC writes "The Pentagon's defence scientists want to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions. The idea is to insert micro-systems at the pupa stage, when the insects can integrate them into their body, so they can be remotely controlled later. "."
I can see the headline now.
"Disaster strikes at Los Alamos when cybernetically enhanced insects designed for tactical germ warfare escape captivity; hundreds reported dead and critically injured."
Before I go on, I'd just like to say that DARPA has some really sick, sadistic fucks in its ranks. I don't care just how many of their inventions have made the trek from tactical to practical. Nothing DARPA has ever made was made without the idea of killing someone in mind, and these cyberslave insects are no exception.
It says in the article that wasps were one of DARPA's prime candidates for cyberization. Something about that seems odd to me, since moths would make much better bombsniffers - best sense of smell in the animal kingdom - and something like a large fly would probably make a faster and less conspicuous transmitter. Wasps and their cousins, however, know another trick - they sting, and they're pretty damn good at it. It's also possible that if wasps or hornets consume the flesh of a dead poisonous snake or chew up wood treated with certain compounds to build their nests, they can absorb some of these substances into their bodies with no ill effects to themselves. When they sting someone or something, though, all the toxins they absorbed get passed along with their own venom, with potentially grave consequences. This is one reason that if you find a dead rattlesnake on your property, you want to dispose of it safely - if the bees get a hold of it, suddenly getting stung is a very big deal even if you aren't allergic.
I'd venture to say that DARPA wanted an aggressive, resilient insect like a wasp or a hornet not because they're good fliers or because they're social, but because they sting and can sting many times without dying. They're ideal for tactical chemical and germ warfare, and a swarm of these bugs implanted with microchips and a small payload of a toxic agent or some kind of deadly germ could wipe out an entire town within minutes, or tear ass through entire platoons of soldiers in the blink of an eye. They might have come up with the idea of using these things for surveillance, security, and communications after the fact, but I can say with a fair amount of certainty that these things were designed to kill. It is DARPA, after all.
What you see as a bombsniffing bug or a discrete microtransmitter today will be an army of micro-assassins tomorrow. I'm just glad that instinct took over in the case of the wasps, for now anyway...