A New York Times article from November 26, 2024, kept showing up on my computer screen, and I kept avoiding it in disgust. Finally, I gave in and read it. It began like this:
"Hummingbirds zooming around the garden from flower to flower and sipping nectar probably don't appear at first glance to be models for instruments of war."
Probably? Probably? Beautiful things of wonder that appear out of nowhere and can vanish again at any moment? Flying bursts of color smaller than your hand that never land and never pause... until they do and you stare awestruck at such marvels, wishing them a world without bombs, oil, livestock, or newspapers? Have you asked them or any decent observer whether they are or are not models for instruments of war?
And, by the way, is war a goddamned orchestra with "instruments"? Don't you mean weapons of mass murder?
OK, sorry. Just my initial reaction. The article continues:
"But the tiny thrumming birds are unparalleled aerial acrobats, power in miniature, instantly zipping forward and backward, diving quickly down and soaring back up, pitching, rolling and yawing, and even flying upside down. Their sophisticated flying abilities have captured the attention of robot designers, especially those studying the use of drones in modern warfare."
Well that's a lie. Not an ordinary 2=3 or WMD lie. It's a New York Times-style lie. Hummingbirds have always, for millennia, captured the attention of everybody. Every single person with eyes. It cannot be news that they've captured some particular people's attention, for godsake. The news is that the United States has dumped all of its money and resources -- and a bunch of those rightfully belonging to other people and other living things as well -- into researching new weapons of mass murder. So, a particular group of people has the ability to try to manufacture hummingbirds. THAT's the news.
"'Hummingbirds are the best flyers out there,' said Bret Tobalske, professor of biology and director of the Flight Lab at the University of Montana. 'They are extreme in their physiology and flight performance. They are incredibly maneuverable. They are capable of hovering indefinitely' -- an adaptation driven by a love of energy-rich nectar. As vehicles without crews have taken over the skies in conflicts, hummingbirds have become the subject of new research. The Flight Lab, accustomed to looking at the ecology, evolution and biomechanics of bird flight, is part of a broad effort, funded largely by U.S. defense dollars, to build a better robotic hummingbird. Mimicking these highly adapted birds -- a phenomenon known as bio-inspired technology -- is the holy grail for the makers of flying robots. 'A real hummingbird can fly circles around robotic humming birds,' Dr. Tobalske said. 'They can fly circles around real birds too.'"
How did these "vehicles without crews" take over "the skies in conflicts". Who decided that conflicts had to be in skies and not at negotiating tables? Did the vehicles cause their own taking over of the skies? It's not a crazy question, because many people fear that will soon be possible. But this is the New York Times in which war victims are constantly causing their own deaths and dismemberments, so chances are that some humans are choosing to fill the skies with robot death planes. Chances are very, very good -- in fact -- that it is just those humans who are living off what they call "U.S. defense dollars" despite the sale and gift of U.S. weapons to half the world and their use by those recipients and by the U.S. military to attack, kill, injure, traumatize, and destroy, often on both sides of a war.
What those people are doing is called building "a better robotic hummingbird" even though the next sentence admits that there is no such thing as a robotic hummingbird, even though the New York Times has presented us with no evidence that people generally want there to be robotic hummingbirds, and even though such little monsters would be guaranteed to soon be spying on everything people do, facilitating all variety of murder and mayhem, and damaging the world in a million ways likely including causing injuries to actual hummingbirds used in television advertisements for the fake ones.
"There have been hummingbird robots built -- most famously the NanoHummingbird, built by AeroVironment, a private company, with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA -- but they have myriad limitations. 'None of these robots can fly fast forward,' Dr. David Letink a professor of Biomimetics at Groningen University in the Netherlands who has studied and built flying robots for decades. 'That can only be performed by bigger robots.' Aircraft design has long been informed by avian flight. And numerous flight labs around the world study several types of creatures -- hawk moths, dragonflies, bats and hummingbirds -- to examine the secrets of their flying skills to build better machines. Much of the work is funded by defense agencies, toward the aim of using the knowledge to design better aircraft. The work at Montana's Flight Lab is funded by the Office of Naval Research, part of the Defense Department, under a contract totaling a little more than $660,000, part of $2 million over seven years that was allocated to institutions to study the birds. The Defense Department did not respond to requests for comment."
Why would they comment? Through silence, surely they assure us that they're not up to any of the horrendously evil things that we know perfectly well they're planning for their mini-robot death planes, things we've already seen in Hollywood movies but things it might not be polite to talk about in the New York Times.
"A robot based on a hummingbird might not be likely to carry weapons, but instead could be deployed to scout streets ahead of troops, spy on troop movements or be dispatched to search for wounded soldiers in places where humans can't go, like inside a collapsed building or a tunnel."
Harmless! Just benevolently saving murderers from other teams of murderers who've also been sold min-robot death planes to also save themselves from the first group, although nobody gets saved in the end because everybody knows exactly where everybody is now, thanks to all the mini-death-bots.
"Insects, interestingly, have evolved a very different approach to flying than that of birds and bats, whose wings evolved from arms. They have no muscles or nerves in their wings; instead some have a sophisticated pulley system worked by internal muscles on a hinge that control the wings in a manner similar to strings on a puppet. 'The fly wing hinge is perhaps the most mysterious and underappreciated structure in the history of life,' says Michael Dickinson, professor of bioengineering and aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology who recently published a paper on the topic."
Not the balanced ecosystem? Not the atmosphere? The wing hinge? How many grant applications did it take to figure that out, I wonder.
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