Thursday, June 19, 2008

Rude Galactic Neighbors

I have had neighbors who play loud music, complain about the height of my grass, and do other less pleasant things, but none who are outright rude. Now it appears that the British are planning a "high-speed penetrator" project in which a payload of sensors and instruments would crash its way into various planets and send back information. This seems like a very rude thing to do from a "space neighbor" standpoint. I'm pretty sure that we wouldn't appreciate some other alien civilization lobbing pot-shots our way just to find out what kind of resources may be buried beneath our soil. It seems to me kind of a bootstrap approach: we're trying to look for signs of life on other planets, but in the process we're doing some pretty serious damage to anything that might be in the immediate vicinity of said sensors. Weird.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6345

Monday, June 9, 2008

Are Humans Just Smart Bugs?

Humans are all soft and gushy inside, and when it comes down to it, we're really not designed to take a lot of trauma. So some people have been inspired by nature to try to make us tougher, stronger, more (fill in the blank). One neat idea that has taken a long time in coming but that may be worth the wait is robotic exoskeletons. It appears that we may soon be able to work hard like an ant, for a price.
http://blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/2008/05/29/berkeley_bionics_accepting_orders_for_prototype_exoskeleton.html
When we watch ants filing along, ferrying food/resources back and forth to their colony, they seem pretty predictable. Food, home, food, home. Well, so are we.
http://staging.spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6330
Maybe an understanding of just how like big smart bugs we are could help us fix some of society's problems, or at least engineer better solutions to them.