Nano Hummingbird

This bird flew into the window of my apartment and probably died of brain injuries. If I'd been more conscientious, the use of decals could have averted this accident - but with a housecat, Henry Buttons, who would often eat several birds/day, perhaps this was a quicker, easier death.

If it escaped the cat and the window, it might have to deal with one of the side-effects of one of the beloved components of green technology: getting chopped by a blade of a wind turbine. Its cohort may soon join the passenger pigeon - estimated to have numbered in the billions on the North American continent (and, therefore possibly one of the most numerous on the planet) - in the Extinction House one of these days, along with the 70-80 species the Hawaiian Islands have lost since humans dropped in nearly two millennia ago. Mass Extinction Events - the 5th (and first caused by humans) of which we are in the midst of - do, after all, happen one individual at a time.

Not to worry: as Nature's creations get munched in the maws of man, man replaces the missing with something better. Onto history's stage - and off the pages of science fiction literature - flits the Nano Hummingbird. The same beloved research entity, DARPA, that brought us the gift of self-hopping, self-healing landmines, gave about $4 million to AeroVironment to develop the prototype for this flying spying machine. Equipped with a camera and communications system, its operator can keep it from doing something stupid like flying into a window. Instead it can be maneuvered to land on your windowsill.



At age 17 I picked up a sci fi novel (whose name I can't recall) describing something akin to a flying ball bearing, a terror-inducing/crowd-controlling technology given that it could be guided by a remote operator to zoom into the face of anyone considered subversive. Then explode.

If you're a well-behaved person, though, why worry about the subversive intentions of the human guiding the device that comes to rest on your windowsill? Maybe it just needs a place to sit while it shits, and it's the workings of my paranoid mind to imagine an ill intent on the part of its makers...other than their desire to get the upper hand in whatever endless war is being waged against the Bad Guy. Easy! Just don't become one of the Bad Guys.

True to form, Wired describes this new avian gadget as "Awesome." M-W defines awe as "en emotion variously combining dread, veneration and wonder that i inspired by authority, or by the sacred or sublime."  Like shock and awe "a military doctrine based on the use of overwhelming power, dominant battlefield awareness, dominant maneuvers, and spectacular displays of force to paralyze an adversary's perception of the battlefield and destroy its will to fight." Whatever we can conjure up can eventually be made. If history is any measure, this new bird species will be doing things worse than shitting on your wndowsill.