Unless you can get mm accuracy and perfect non-foe detection it's useless with the multi-watt lasers generally required.
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.
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.
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...
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.