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Bionic Bugs To Fight Terrorists
dptalia writes "Israel is looking to create a small robot, no larger than a hornet to follow, film, and kill terrorists. It's just one of a series of weapons the country is considering as an alternative to conventional technologies. Other ideas floating around include gloves that would give their user 'bionic strength', and ultra-miniaturized sensors to detect explosives on suicide bombers." From the article: "The research integrates nanotechnology into Israel's security department and will find creative solutions to problems the army has been unable to address, Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres told Yedioth Ahronoth. 'The war in Lebanon proved that we need smaller weaponry. It's illogical to send a plane worth $100 million against a suicidal terrorist. So we are building futuristic weapons,' Peres said."
All, excelent, in a decade we will have cylons. Anything for freedom!
'The war in Lebanon proved that we need smaller weaponry. It's illogical to send a plane worth $100 million against a suicidal terrorist.'
Maybe it's just me, but that sentence makes it sound like we're running terrorists over with our jets. Teehee
We've been hearing about this type of thing in science fiction books, then movies, and then in magazines like Popular Science for at least the past 20 years. While I think we probably have the technology to create the hornets, I seriously doubt we have the technology to have them fly very far then deliver some type of lethal force (e.g. poison) to a specific target.
Plus, it's reasonable to assume that $100's of millions would need to be invested in such a "nanohornet" for it to be feasible. Heck, the current world's smallest flying robot is massive compared to a bee, and can only fly a few minutes (yes, this link is from 2003, and the the robot is still considered the smallest working prototype of a flying robot).
In my opinion, the israelis need to invest in far better armor and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. During their conflict with Hezbollah, the UAVs were a huge success. Also, wouldn't highly armored robotic vehicles be better than a hornet? For example, maybe an armored ball (kind of like those hamster balls) that would essentially be indestructable and roll around doing reconaiscence and shooting things. Just a thought.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
... what's Hebrew for "Skynet"?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
What kind of bionic strength would gloves give? A bone crushing grip? You lift with your whole arm, not just your hands.
Demented But Determined.
Sounds like the flying robotic syringes in Dune, they silently fly around to find their target, then fly directly into them and inject some sort of fast acting poison (the spice?).
tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
It's very unfortunate. It will not be only for terrorists. We will soon have "terrorists" and our political and business leaders simply picked off by a small, unseen remote controlled insect carrying a poison payload.
As if the world's oppressed peoples didn't have enough to deal with, now they've got to look over their shoulders for paparazzi hornet-bots and Lee Majors in a Nintendo Power Glove as well? What next, motherfXckin' snakes?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
What really bugs me: What if these killer bugs have bugs?
Yes, what a fantastic plan... that is until the terrorists invent rolled-up newspaper! Then whatcha gonna do?
FFFFFFFFFFACE!!
As a staunch Israeli supporter, this really frustrates me. Yes, it will reduce civilian casualties. Yes, it will be able to destroy missle launchers without having to go in and do any fighting. Yes, it will render the Hamas tactic of hiding amongst their own people useless. But no, there's no way you're going to establish trust with a people when you have killer robotic hornets flying around their homes.
If only they were this creative and imaginative when sitting down to try to solve a conflict peacefully. This goes for both sides, and it applies in most conflicts.
Remember, no matter how intelligent the weapons inventors are, it's still violence; and "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent".
Wouldn't it be easier to call on God to deliver a plague of locusts? Worked for Moses.
Bullets ARE about the size of a hornet and already follow and kill people.
If the bullet was following someone cleaver enough to move out of the way, it is very very cheap to send another.
...SHEIKS with frikken laserbeams attached to their heads!
In my opinion, the israelis need to invest in far better armor and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. During their conflict with Hezbollah, the UAVs were a huge success. Also, wouldn't highly armored robotic vehicles be better than a hornet? For example, maybe an armored ball (kind of like those hamster balls) that would essentially be indestructable and roll around doing reconaiscence and shooting things. Just a thought.
Well you're right the UAVs worked great, and you're right that they need far better armor if they want to continue using armor. The RPG-29s and guided missles used by Hezbollah did a number on the IDF's Merkava MBTs, considered one of if not the most heavily armored tanks in service. Between those relatively cheap shoulder-fired infantry weapons, and the shaped-charge mines Hezbollah had sprinkled throughout their territory, it was demonstrated pretty conclusively that today's armor isn't standing up to even the guerilla weapons. More armor is needed, though I'm not sure that's the right tack to take.
First, tanks aren't that great in the kinds of environments we're talking about: hilly terrain with valleys and choke points that can be littered with mines and give attackers on the ridges an ideal firing line to hit the tank's weak point, and cities and villages that have basically the same properties. A slow moving tank with an enemy on high ground is vulnerable.
Second, there is no such thing as "essentially indestructable". In the ages-old battle between weapons and armor, weapons always win eventually. There have been times that armor would have a brief period of success, but then the weapons would advance one generation and the armor would fall behind. This is just the nature of the beast: it's easier to destroy than to resist destruction. It's easier to focus a large amount of energy on a small area, whether the tip of an arrow fired from a longbow or the shaped-charge explosive of an RPG, than it is to build a material that can resist that energy, whether steel armor or the advanced composites used in MBTs. Reactive armor was designed to defeat the shaped charge rockets, so the rocket designers responded by simply adding a smaller charge ahead of the main one to defeat the reactive armor so the big charge can hit the main armor with full force. Just as the cannon signalled the end of the castle, the RPG-29 and ilk are signalling the end of MBT armor.
Not that tanks aren't useful and further armor developments serve no purpose, it's just that you aren't going to get much of a lead even over non-state-militaries like Hezbollah. An autonomous tank would be nice because when it gets destroyed you haven't lost a tank crew as well. Plus you could design it to be more robust than a manned tank (where breaching into the crew compartment is basically all you need to do). But it isn't going to be an indestructable ball of death, that is for sure.
The enemies of Democracy are
Nice to see the Israeli military get some of their best ideas from an eleven-year-old TV show.
Well, I guess it's time to design my line of powerful electromagnetic door and window frames!
Lets see you film me when I flashfry your memory, stupid bug!
Oh, new tin-foil hat... randomly swipe a powerful magnet over any bug you see!
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
Read the first book. Then stop reading them. Every book after the first one was absolute crap.
I was thinking to myself the other day of the same thing...
If you make a tank automous or at least remote controlled, then you don't really have worry about protecting the crew anymore. Hence you can replace the saved weight with something devoted to firepower, fuel, and speed.
In fact, why not make the tank cost $500,000 rather than $10 to $25 million and make a whole slew of them with mass production
Sure an RPG could kill it with one hit, but a well placed mine or RPG could immobilize the best armored tank anyways.
You could simply put these out as 24 hour sentries or suicidal armored spear heads without the risk of loss of life.
Considering how limited the manned tank crew's vision to the outside world is anyways, I can't see how having multiple cameras and a remote feed to a crew in a bunker somewhere can't be an improvement.
Can anyone think of downsides of remote controlled tanks?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
"renouncing violence"
Not very wise when the armies invading and attacking you have not done the same.
Where were you when the voynix came?
...to the Diamond Age.
For further reading and insightful predictions about the sociological effects of nanotech, see Mr. Neal Stephenson.
Among his other speculations: as nanotech becomes ubiquitous (in the way that bacteria are today), societies will manufacture nanotech-based airborne immune systems for themselves.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Peace is not going to be possible until those crimes are acknowledged and some reparations made.
But then we need to get the Palestinians to pay reparations to the people whose land they stole hundreds or thousands of years before, and we have to track down those peoples' descendents and make them pay reparations to the descendents of whoever had that land before that, etc. etc.
The Americans will have to pay reparations to the Native Americans (most of whom are only fractionally N.A.) for their land. The British need to determine how much French/Norman and Celtic ancestry they all have, and the people with less Celtic ancestry will need to pay reparations to the people with more Celtic ancestry. And then we need to go back farther in time and determine which Celtic tribes stole land from which other Celtic tribes, and determine which people are descended from which tribes......
Exactly how far back in time do we need to go in paying reparations? We're going to have to invent a machine to peer into time to see who owes who reparations.
Israel couldn't knock out Hezbollah's tv station during the 34 day conflict nor could they disrupt the communications between Nasrallah and the troops in the field. For a good read on how Hezbollah defeated Israel, please see this journal entry which links to a three-part article from Asia Times Online.
I'm not trying to karma whore so please don't give me mod points. I'm just pointing out articles which answer the posters question.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"But no, there's no way you're going to establish trust with a people when you have killer robotic hornets flying around their homes"
What trust? With the Hamas vote, already half of the Palestinians indicate that they want the Israelis exterminated.
Where were you when the voynix came?
2) stealing the tank remotely
I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress -J Adams
The stone and slingshot. David used it successfully against Goliath.
-- Cave quid dicis, quando, et cui
What kind of bionic strength would gloves give? A bone crushing grip? You lift with your whole arm, not just your hands.
True. However --
I assume that gloves are much, much cheaper to develop and build than full-arm augmentation. (For full-arm augmentation, you really need full-body reinforcement -- upper body augementation to support the arm, augmented lower body to support the upper body.)
Crushing grip alone can be very useful. Close-quarters action -- break a man's bones. Useful for black-bag specialists -- shatter locks, etc.
-kgj
-kgj
The Merkava Mk. 4 is often cited as the best armored tank in the world, though I'm not sure that is accurate. It is the tank offering best survival for the crew within, however. This has been achieved by various intentional design decisions, such as placing the engine in the front of the crew compartment as extra armor, and having rear exits for evacuating soldiers, as well as some tanks serving as heavily armored ambulances, with special space reserved for emergency medical treatment. Anyhow, as for the discussion about the future utility of tanks in the face of modern anti-tank weaponry, which has proliferated to the point of being available to any determined interested buyer, see the Trophy system and Iron Fist, two Israeli anti-anti-tank systems (the first of which is operational, but wasn't installed in tanks prior to the Lebanon conflict out of budgetry considerations, which in retrospect was a poor choice, not sure about the second).
"Unlike in Darfur, where the world disapproves but is too lazy/incapable of fixing the problem, in Israel not only are we not trying to stop the war, we're FACILITATING it."
To make clear the actual genocide problem (and you were blaming the VICTIMS!), here are some quotes from the current Palestinian government and their actual charter: "Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious" [At least they do not hide their hatred behind the code word "Zionists"]..."The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees.". The charter includes many other references "evil" Jews and the necessecity to eliminate and/or subjugate them.
In contrast, the government of Israel supports "there should be an independent viable Palestinian state". Also seen are the statements "In that case we will have to move forward, even without a Palestinian partner, in order to separate from the Palestinians, to pull out from areas in the West Bank"..... This is in distinct contrast with the extreme hardline imperialism advocated by Hamas.
Where were you when the voynix came?
whose land they stole hundreds or thousands of years before
I took your skateboard 25 years ago. It is still in my basement.
My late grandfather stole your late gradfather's pogo-stick.
You don't see the difference there?
also, reparation shmeparations, just give me back my skateboard.
When people who are still alive who have been the victims of the acts in question, reparations are due. Perhaps extending to the immediate children and grandchildren of those people (I note that some Holocaust reparations have gone to heirs, not to Holocaust survivors).
Also, so long as political entities remain extant, so do their obligations. The U.S. has treaty obligations of Native nations, even if the people who signed those treaties are long dead. Similarly, as Jack Straw has admitted, Great Britian bears much of the responsbility for the fscked-up sitation in the Middle East, from the Balfour Declaration that started the theft of Arab lands for the benefit of Zionism, to the formation of Iraq; the Britian ought to live up to its obligation to people in those areas.
For land, no; but reparations are due for extensive contemporary treaty violations with Native nations, and for recent acts of cultural genocide. There are men and women out there now who as infants were stolen from their Native American parents and given to "good White Christian" families to be raised. (In a more good ol'-fashioned style of genocidal policy,thousands of Native women were compeled into sterilizion in the 1970s.)
Similarly, while slavery reparations may be a dead issue, reparations are long overdue for every person who suffered under segregation laws.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
"We in Canada are paying reparations for a government imposed head tax on Chinese immigrants back in the 20s, this is pretty reasonable"
Don't knock the Chinese head-tax. It kept the numbers of two- or three- headed Chinese to a minimum, didnt it?
Where were you when the voynix came?
Gee, I seem to remember Israel giving land "back" to the palestinians. What did they do? Went on a rampage, used that land to launch an attack and kidnap people. Use the land to fire rockets into Israel. I think you need to examine who is really the main cause of unrest in Israel.
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
"If Israel had land in 1940, why did 6 million Jews die during the holocaust when they could have just fled there?"
The government of the Palestinians in the 1940s, such as it was, was a close ally of Nazi Germany, and actually participated in the Holocaust. This government pretty much survived for a long time: the leader from back then was Arafat's mentor.
Where were you when the voynix came?