RealityPrime

Flies provide aerodynamic model for tiny flying vehicles (physorg.com)

So UAVs are already making huge inroads in the military. They’re coming into use in US law enforcement, over cities and towns. And designers and engineers are already working on insect-sized flying machines, even microscopic sensors the size of dust that hang in smart clouds capturing the world around them.

These tiny bugs (in both senses) will create a sensor net of information around us, a full view of the scene, that will be of use to those would defend us, as well as those would exploit their new power to collect any and all information. Just imagine what a fly buzzing around your home could learn about you.

But looking to nature for design ideas has some drawbacks. Nature never truly solved the aircraft carrier problem, for one thing. There is no flying portable beehive* that moves the colony of bees from one hotspot to the next on a moment’s notice. The colony flies individually to a new spot and rebuilds their base. But their speed is limited by the aero- (actually fluid-) dynamic forces at smaller and smaller scales. The smaller you are, the slower you go, relatively speaking. You may be more powerful at your smaller scale, but it doesn’t help you get to Greenland any faster than a bird. And nanotech has this problem in a big way — despite some popular science fiction, nanotech bots can’t move very fast relative to our scale of living. They need something to carry them.

Bring in the aircraft carrier. We do this manually now for UAVs. Someone flies a palette of them to Afghanistan on a C-17, then loads a jeep, and then sends one off over the target area. The next generation, which I haven’t even seen discussed (apart from big drone aircraft that can circle the globe, like the Global Hawk) is the UAVC or MAVC, the airborne carrier, able to automatically bring UAVs or micro UAVs to any spot on the globe, collect them up again, and come home. For nanotech scale devices, you might even see a carrier of carriers, able to maximally disperse the tiny bots over a wide area like warheads off an ICBM.

But the scary thing is when we start seeing these at home. Who knows who controls that tiny insect buzzing near your ear. The cops? The Feds? Or your ex-wife, your personal psycho stalker? Is that something we can ever truly get used to? I don’t know. But I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

All of which makes me wonder how on earth the Secret Service is going to protect the President from the dangerous versions of these. With all of the UAVs flying around, which ones will be there to protect him and which will be there to shoot? How do you even shoot down a fly? Will we feel obligated to crush every insect we see? Every tiny fruit fly? Will we see new definitions for mental illness surrounding a very rational fear of bugs?

I think it’s about time we start taking the ethical challenges of UAVs much more seriously than just "good clean military technology." The absence of a discussion of "UAV aircraft carriers" only reinforces the idea that these bugs, like killer bees, once introduced into our local environments, are there to stay.

Some further reading:

http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/12256.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_air_vehicle
http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2004/08/scaling_lawsbac.html
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^{* the closest thing I can think of are seeds carried by animals to new places, or maybe some parasites would qualify as hitching a ride on a bigger vehicle to get around.}

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