Predict 3D position of flying bugs and pest to shoot down them with a laser
naro.go.jp
naro.go.jp
Unless you can get mm accuracy and perfect non-foe detection it's useless with the multi-watt lasers generally required.
If one wants to shoot them down instead of some reason, why not a laminar flow water nozzle instead of a laser? Seems like that would be way safer.
I’m curious why you think mm accuracy and non-foe detection would be terribly difficult in 2021. Going off your example, I’m pretty sure a mosquito would appear rather different to any detection system than a human, or in the case of a field, a bee or something like that.
As far as I'm aware, this idea traces back to David Brin's 1990 novel Earth:
https://books.google.com/books?id=IkqAUv84Ho8C&pg=PT399&dq=i...
And it'd be probabilistic: considering that, at some point, the mosquito is bound to fly at a height higher than 2 meters in your room. And then boom, the laser.
A pipe dream but I hate these little fuckers.
If you flip a coin, and the system has a bug that determines the coin is a bug then it'll shoot. Since you're surely planning on caching the coin, you'll look directly at it in flight.
Now... you're blind.
Again, corners have a higher probability of ending up in your eye than even just someone flipping a coin in 2022.
It's time to wipe out them out. We don't need mosquitoes, and neither does Mother Nature. Use gene tech to do the job, not Rube Goldberg hacks with lasers.
Leave your bubble, I’m talking about relative probability, I’m not saying that it’s “impossible.” We accept far greater risks in our daily life than this.
Lasers are no joke.
'Don't look into the laser with your remaining eye' is also no joke.
For the small uncovered diode laser cutters, I'd recommend setting it up & running it remotely. If you use a laptop with a webcam & some remote desktop software, you can operate one safely it from a different room.
There are many covered desktop ones that I think are a bit safer though. Ventilation is also a big concern.
The reason to use an array is to precisely control the timing of each speaker so that the sound waves from each of them interfere constructively at a single point. Then by varying the timing you can target that focal point wherever the mosquito is, hopefully without causing the sound to be painfully loud anywhere away from that point.
If you actually want to create a shock wave, you need something that goes faster than the speed of sound, like high explosives... A lovely idea, but a bit overkill.
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/18/phased-array-levitation-is-s...
Or 200W xD
It's still bad if it somehow does end up targeting something delicate or flammable but at least you've gone from a line to a point. Plus a 500W laser is super pricey but you can pick up a 500W heat lamp at the local hardware store. I wonder if anyone's tried it?
On the subject of laser safety, can you make one weak enough that a human will naturally blink or look away without getting blinded but powerful enough that it'll overheat the mosquito its trained on for a few seconds? If the Joules are spread out linearly over a few second, I expect it'd exponentially decrease the risk of chance reflections blinding unprotected eyeballs.
As for the mm accuracy and IFF detection, a low power laser-as-microphone has been shown capable of differentiating the distinctive whine of female mosquitoes (the only bloodsuckers) from everything else. See a previous discussion will a link to my notes on demo here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016210.
Reminds me of the Chinese's brutally misguided attempts to stave off the famines during the Cultural Revolution. One of their worst ideas was to eradicate sparrows, thinking that sparrows were eating crops. No, sparrows were eating insects that were eating crops. So with sparrows gone, the insect population exploded, resulting in even worse destruction.
Just a reminder that when it comes to ecosystems, we really don't know what the fuck we are doing. There are hundreds of similar stories, e.g. destruction of wolves, bison, pigeons, and other organisms we consider "pests". It's a wonder that the worldwide ecosystem doesn't consider us the pests.
And mosquitos indirectly lead to many deaths, around a million people each year. Mosquitos kill more people each day than sharks have killed in the last century.
Perhaps something like a million steerable ultra-low-powered laser beams focusing on a target.
I’m also curious what the failsafes are like for this - how will they prevent laser spillover or misfires from hitting eyes? Even if this is a 1 in a million chance, it likely isn’t worth it except in highly remote areas.
And as a low-time pilot who’s been bit with laser beams from people’s Christmas decorations, I’d argue the big sky theory doesn’t apply here.
Are you fluent in the language by chance? Because I might be able to explain how I came to post the above comment but it's hard, it just ... smells.
1: https://www.naro.go.jp/publicity_report/press/laboratory/nip...
MOsquito Tracking and Heat RAy?
I think the idea never took off, and I’m still not sure why.
Still an issue, though, but not so bad
I don't see how a laser can have enough power density to kill a mosquito but still be eye safe.
(1) Targeting the wrong thing.
(2) Even if the targeting is correct, missing by a small amount, or running the laser for slightly too long, and hitting something else by mistake.
If the lasers converge for full flux, the risks associated with (2) are better managed, but that doesn't speak to (1).
If the assumption isn't correct, you could possibly still place at least two lasers and define a narrow zone between them where the angle would be about 180 degrees. Would be damned tough to hit an eye from two sides at once. But that limits you to half power per laser, which probably isn't enough margin.
IV has not, as far as I know, broken any laws, a fact which deeply undermines the legitimacy of the US legal system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKm8FolQ7jw
Guess there were some obstacles that couldn't be overcome
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/laser-shooting-mosqu...
"... The Photonic Fence will finally be tested later this summer in Florida, in a screened-in structure, against the Asian citrus psyllid, an invasive bug that is devastating the state’s orchards. So long as it manages to leave the bees alone — the last thing we need is more dead bees — it will then be tested in the open. ..."
I'm all for reducing toxic chemicals from the food supply chain and this approach looks somewhat promising. Its just difficult to predict the consequences of even an ideal outcome. That isn't to say that we shouldn't try, but maybe we could work together to mitigate such effects before mass adoption, or reframe the problem such that lasers may not be needed in the first place.
Edit: after re-reading the article I see the main subject is killing moths to improve agriculture, not mosquitos in my bedroom
We also eliminated a source of standing water by our home and that pretty much ended the issue.
Moving from southern Europe to northern-ish Europe also worked pretty well for me. It's cold, dark and rainy here, but at least the mosquitos are only a problem a few months per year.
What's not is actively destroying eco systems with poisons, emissions, warming, etc, etc.
Using a targeted system to remove them from a room/growth facility? It's fine.
Conservation through elimination
https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/fordlandia-...
The bugs evolved to live under the leaves.
That being accomplished, yea, this and self-driving / self-flying flying cars would be cool.