We will monitor pollution by (checks notes) dispersing a huge swarm of tiny robots, themselves made of heavy metals, that are infeasibly difficult to recover or recycle.
Someone is going to aspirate these things.
Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance
51–60 of 109 posts
Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have given up hoping he will ever finish the "zones" series. It's been ten years since _Children of the Sky_. Better almost that he never wrote CotS and left us hanging. :(
amazing author IMO. came out of nowhere, wrote very little, kubrickian in that he doesn't want to repeat himself, idea quality is astounding in that his ideas are new, influential, and fully formed. You can read true names every 5 years and still be like 'oh that piece came true'. Rainbow's End is the icing on the cake. Everyone has N novels in them, maybe he just reached N.
"Rainbows End" (no apostrophe) -- different meaning.
Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance
#53These devices don't even have space for an antenna (limited by physical size). The power required by the sensors is dwarfed by RF transmit. The current challenges of powering a radio device with an MPU at this size are far too great for this to be useful. Unless there is a breakthrough in radio physics, drones need to be a certain size that is much larger than this. Unless they plan to release a billion of these, swe…
Doesn't that ring-like structure in the center look like an antenna? I suppose it could just be traces between the 'lobes' of the circuit on each wing. That said, it does seem like a tall order to pack in useful sensors and some way to transmit into tiny particles like these.
Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance
#54Great, thats all I need to breathe in every day
Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance
#55Could?
Hitachis RFID-'Powder' was developed almost twenty years ago.
https://thefutureofthings.com/3221-hitachi-develops-worlds-s...
Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance
#56Remember when HN collectively lost their minds and questioned journalists integrity for suggesting that the Chinese government could have put a backdoor chip gasp the size of a grain of rice on Supermicro motherboards?
Everyone agrees that they could; the question is whether they did.
No, everyone did not agree with that. Phrases like "against the laws of physics" were being thrown around.
And for nearly every other computer security issue, simply the presence of the possibility is enough to take action.
Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance
#57AKA "smartdust" > The concepts for Smart Dust emerged from a workshop at RAND in 1992 and a series of DARPA ISAT studies in the mid-1990s due to the potential military applications of the technology.[2] The work was strongly influenced by work at UCLA and the University of Michigan during that period, as well as science fiction authors Stanislaw Lem (in novels The Invincible in 1964 and Peace on Earth in 1985), Neal…
Vernor Vinge's first use of that concept in a book was published the same year as that workshop. I wonder how the timing of that works out. It's not uncommon for the stage to be set by previous work and multiple actors putting 2 and 2 together in a fairly short period of time.
I can never keep track of who has published works as serials or as short stories prior to novelization. I don't see anything in Wikipedia about that for A Deepness in the Sky though.
Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or just, you know, use a high frequency. There are tiny antennas. You can just power it via induction (like RFID) and you're set. It still couldn't transmit super far but I bet it would work.
High frequency = high power. Energy harvesting is in the femptoWatt range.
> High frequency = high power
This isn’t true in any sense applicable to this discussion. For example a near-optical laser transmitter can be as or more efficient in joules per bit than an RF transmitter, depending on the situation.
Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance
#59Imagine getting one of these flying microchips into your eye...