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"Smart Dust" to Explore Planets
Ollabelle writes "The BBC is reporting how tiny chips with flexible skins could be used to glide through a planet's atmosphere in swarms to gather data and report back. 'The idea of using millimetre-sized devices to explore far-flung locations is nothing new, but Dr Barker and his colleagues are starting to look in detail at how it might be achieved. The professor at Glasgow's Nanoelectronics Research Centre told delegates at the Royal Astronomical Society gathering that computer chips of the size and sophistication required to meet the challenge already existed.'"
Replace "gather data" with "decimate indigenous life" and "report back" with "multiply exponentially", and you have either a classic horror movie or an Iain Banks novel.
Actually its quite scary either way... grey goo anyone?
So, not being satisfied with having our waste strewn across just our own planet, now we're going to introduce the rest of the solar system to our All-Products-Are-Disposable culture? Or are these micro chip/probes going to clean up after themselves and come back to Earth?
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
When they get to the Dyson planet in the Hoover nebula.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
if we as a species are discussing this idea in earnest, why would little green men with technology advanced enough to fly here to submit us to probes? that this exists as a concept pretty quickly kills the idea that 'if we've been visited, we'd know about it.'
Seems like a very costly operation to me. These chips could be used to report back on data on a calm atmosphere and produce recurring feedback if their signal strength is significant enough. The other case (and more costly operation is) where they are instantly destroyed by say 800mph gas / electricity storms and the best feedback you could hope for is possibly wind sweep pattern / storm strength (useful in its own right but the chips would probably be damaged before suitable data is collected).
What does "...computer chips of the size and sophistication required to meet the challenge already existed." mean? Does this mean that similar projects exist here, on earth? Where would those be used (military)? The potential to spread "smart dust" in your home, or yard, or around downtown DC or Baghdad is quite scary....
Like this is new news. Pixies have been doing this for years. Do you think they sprinkle it just to make you fly? C'mon. They're merely keeping an eye on you.
Just be careful the next time you think you see a powdery substance on your ass, the patriot act isn't going to help you.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
at the physicists home:
"honey, where's my research project?" whilst hearing the reliably and heart-warming sound of a hoover doing its best.
argh. i didn't really write that, did i?
/away being ashamed of myself.
We'll probably deploy them on Earth first. On the battlefield.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
How would earth/humanity respond to such a nano-invasion? I find myself chuckling at the idea of a full-on test being run on the closest earth-like planet (earth, oddly enough!) with a sufficiently large enough group of folks who didn't get whatever warnings were published in advance to demonstrate exactly how paranoid we (as a species) generally are...
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
I don't know if you've noticed but the universe is a pretty big place and solar systems appear to be as common as can be. I'm worried about pollution on Earth, but I think you'll have to work harder than that if you want people to worry about pollution elsewhere in the universe.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I for one welcome our tiny dust-like robot overlords!
At least our dust is getting smarter...
Look, even if we deploy 1 million of these spread out on Mars, I doubt that you would even find one if you looked for 10 years. There is more "pollution" (in terms of weight) that comes in via meteorites over a month, then would be in these million. Don't believe it? Then look closely at the moon and Martian surface. Those holes are not there just to look pretty.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
On a related note, I wonder why JPL keeps focusing on a few big Mars rovers instead of lots of small ones. Smaller rovers, roughly Sojourner-sized, could do basic investigation of curious features. Having lots of small rovers would allow NASA to explore more risky places, like the alleged newly-discovered caves, the "ice trees", and Vallis Marineris (spell?). Right now they keep finding flat, safe spots because the rovers are nearly a billion dollars each. If you send a dozen small rovers instead, then you don't have the all-or-nothing pressure to be conservative. I think "wide" searchers are just as useful as detailed ones. It may also allow better decisions about where to later send the big, detail-oriented rovers.
Table-ized A.I.
First we crash probes into their neighborhoods, then we put skid-marks all over the place with our wheel-dragging rovers, now we aggravate their allergies.
Table-ized A.I.
Sometimes you just have to cut your losses. Earth is too hard to protect so the environmentalists are getting a head start protecting the rest of the galaxy :D
This sig is exactly seventy characters long and a real waste of space!
Now we just have to be careful we don't inhale the experiment.
I wonder if the demand for collecting and distributing data in real time would be feasible with such small
batteries. Battery lifetime is a challenge itself for smart dust, what happens when the application requires
data to be transmitted all the time in order to monitor changes constatly, how long would the nodes last? In
battlefields there's no need to transmit data unless something happens, like an explosion will trigger an event.
Anyhow, this is a great idea and makes a very good project!
... about this technology falling into the wrong hands? Like, say, those of the United States government? If you thought the NSA telecommunications spying was bad, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
Just because it can't be explained doesn't mean it isn't true. Science fits into reality... not the other way around.
Damn you. I completely agree with you. I was going to post a smart-ass "toner wars anyone?" comment with a link to Wikipedia; but I find, to my complete slack-jawed amazement, that there is no Wikipedia entry for "toner war". There is, which I thought a great touch, a link from "Gray goo" to "Ice-nine", a relationship which had never occured to me, but no "toner war". Now I'm going to have to write (OK, start) a Wikipedia entry for "toner war". This if you have no idea WTF I'm talking about.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Since this "Smart Dust" concept was introduced in 2001 by UC Berkeley, I'm waiting for them so say something. It has been a pretty popular term over the past years in the Wireless Sensor Network community, but always referred to the Berkeley work. However in the article they do not mention anything. Or maybe the journalist skipped that part?
The idea of introducing ANYTHING to another planet's ecosystem just strikes me as, to put it bluntly, utter stupidity and idiocy.
As if it wasn't enough for us to pollute our own planet with tiny particles and change its entire ecosystem, now we want to cover other planets in our technological waste and effect their ecosystems? Regardless of if there is life on these planets or not, the introduction of the pollutant will effect the ecology and function of the planet, eg. the weather system.
Haven't we learned from our own history?? As an Australian who knows our own history of having our ecosystem decimated by introduced influences, this has to be the worst (ecologically) thought out idea I have ever read.
We need some kind of "prime directive" quarantine, to reduce the influence of abject human stupidity on other planets.
Kris Pister, an EECS professor in MEMS at Berkeley, coined the term "Smart Dust" and has done a ton of work on it. I remember him mentioning the goals of the project in a class in 1999, and he touched upon all the accomplishments mentioned in the article, most of which were achieved. If you search on "Smart Dust" in Google, his research project site is the first that comes up. So how can their be no mention of Pister, his research, his company "Dust Networks", or Berkeley in the entire article? http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pister/SmartDus t/
Just wondering.
... now with Astrofleas.
I seem to remember on SciFi channel some programs in which streaks were found in sunlight with a camera in a shadow. Now, If the aliens were using nanoparticles to research earth, the data presented would have a very good explanation = the aliens were researching earth with dust particles. The fact that they appeared to move in intelligent ways is further evidence. So, don't try to patent these nano explorers because there is prior art in UFO videos.
Look, everything that NASA launches out of gravity well is sterile. Nothing left to grow. That includes ALL of our spacecrafts. Is it possible that something has survived? Possibly. But then it has to survive space and then the planets. The chance are very unlikely. Heck, we even crashed Galileo into Jupiter to avoid the chance that it would strike Europa or one of the other planets. I am not worried about this. Well, at least not from NASA.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I have often wondered about sending a bunch of cubesats out to explore the solar system.
Even if all they carried was a simple camera we could collect lots of interesting data.
Plus it may give us a better idea of where to send the more expensive probes
I remember this movie from when it was called Twister... (but I don't remember the space part)
Truly "Smart Dust" would clean itself out of my computer case and rifle cabinet the moment it saw the irritated look on my face. At the very least, they should make it able to say "Gesundheit!" after someone sneezed from inhaling a cloud of it.
However, there is a Sexual Harassment liability that comes with it:
Some FemiNazi would most definitely complain the moment she finds out a female astronaut was sent out to collect it after the data collection was complete.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
But, hmmm, funny how you only hear this kind of buzz from people that have not a clue about the basic laws of scale, as related to surface area versus volume, wavelengths of radio and light, and surface tension.
In a nutshell, start with a cell-phone with camera, and ponder what happens as you shrink it by a factor of ten, again and again. Surmise what happens to it's audio and video sensor resolutions, the efficiency of xmitting antennas, the power available, and it's tendency to get washed away by precipitation.
Als, consider, it's just slightly possible that Michael Chricton is totally full of s**t. (Swarm)
Sorry to have scuttled you there. If it helps, your link to the Wikepedia article on Diamond Age has encouraged me to read it. Snowcrash is one of my all time favorite novels, and, oddly enough, I've never read anything else by Stephenson.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011