DARPA to Create Brain-Chipped Cyborg Moths
June 1st, 2007Via: The Register UK:
Famed US military mad-scientist bureau DARPA (the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency) is engaged in an effort to grow/build cyborg moths for use as spies. No, really.
The program is called Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems, or HI-MEMS. In it, the arguably over-caffeined DARPA boffins aim to construct a tiny lepidopterine infiltration borg by growing a living moth around a “micro-mechanical system”.
“Animal world has provided mankind with locomotion over millennia,”* says Dr Amit Lal, DARPA HI-MEMS program manager.
“For example we have used horses and elephants…olfactory training of bees has been used to locate mines and weapons of mass destruction. The HI-MEMS program is aimed to develop technology that provides more control over insect locomotion, just as saddles and horseshoes are needed for horse locomotion control.”
Except that, rather than saddling up a moth and riding off, DARPA wants to implant a metallic core which will wear their bodies like a living cloak. Sound familiar? It does to us. If Dr Lal was using vast Austrian bodybuilders rather than moths, we’d be talking Terminator yet again (this happens rather a lot when one starts looking at the US defence establishment).
In a Times article today, Rod Brooks of MIT’s computer science and artifical intelligence lab (CSAIL), was quoted on the insectoid cyber-infiltrator project.
“This is going to happen,” said Mr Brooks. “It’s not science like developing the nuclear bomb, which costs billions of dollars. It can be done relatively cheaply.”
“A bunch of experiments have been done over the past couple of years where simple animals, such as rats and cockroaches, have been operated on and driven by joysticks, but this is the first time where the chip has been injected in the pupa stage and ‘grown’ inside it.
“Once the moth hatches, machine learning is used to control it.”
Research Credit: PD
This reminds me of a story I heard on NPR seven years ago. At that time, they were attempting to build an entirely mechanical fly with camera eyes to use for “rescue efforts”, such as collapsed buildings, in order to find trapped people.
A friend of mine theorized that when we hear reports like this, about technologies they’re supposedly developing, the technologies actually already exist. The purpose of the public reporting is to make people think the thing isn’t operable yet.
The current, publicly known weaponry they have is ridiculously terrifying. The microwave weapon, sonic weapons (LRAD), and of course the gay bomb. Admittedly, the gay bomb was just one of those silly Strangelovian ideas that tax-paid military theorists occasionally come up with, like Operation Northwoods.
But the thing I’m writing to point you to is a television show on Discovery called Future Weapons, which invites you to get your “firepower fix in the weapon zone.” Reality has now become a 24-hour, surround-sound, global psy-op. Neocons? More like Neo-Crowleyites, performing a world-wide ritual magik theatre-of-death mind-f***. You don’t need to sneak into Bohemian Grove to see the death cult in action.
Very astute points Karl. I got disgusted years ago with how weapons of destruction, and more importantly the destruction of people, were depicted in some sort of entertaining package served up with glitzy graphics and music. Death, a culture of death through ritualized entertainment, is indeed whats broadcast/programmed continuously.