RobertB-DC's Journal: Ghost Article: "Smart Dust" to Explore Planets

I'm too tired today to add the fancy formatting, sorry. I've got two other ghosts from last month sitting on my hard drive, and I don't want this one to join them for fear of ectoplasmic overload, or something. So here's the basics:

Science: "Smart Dust" to Explore Planets
Posted by ScuttleMonkey in The Mysterious Future!
from the new-but-not dept.
Ollabelle writes
"The BBC is reporting how tiny chips with flexible skins could be used to glide through a planet's atmosphere in swarms to gather data and report back. 'The idea of using millimetre-sized devices to explore far-flung locations is nothing new, but Dr Barker and his colleagues are starting to look in detail at how it might be achieved. The professor at Glasgow's Nanoelectronics Research Centre told delegates at the Royal Astronomical Society gathering that computer chips of the size and sophistication required to meet the challenge already existed.'"

Links: tiny chips with flexible skins

Article link: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/18/1925206

Update: Good thing I didn't go to all that trouble, because the article was only playing dead. It went to "Nothing to see here", but remained in red on the front page and eventually went live.

One can't help but wonder

[RM6f9]

How would earth/humanity respond to such a nano-invasion? I find myself chuckling at the idea of a full-on test being run on the closest earth-like planet (earth, oddly enough!) with a sufficiently large enough group of folks who didn't get whatever warnings were published in advance to demonstrate exactly how paranoid we (as a species) generally are...

Re:

[RobertB-DC]

I was wondering the same thing -- what if we're digging for dinosaur fossils and find a layer of decomposed plastic?

But I'm sure that's being fully discussed, since the article actually did go live after all.

Archaeologists have found....

[zogger]

...some pretty bizarre stuff before, along with miners finding pretty odd looking things at levels that indicate they are way older than tool using humans. So far they are dismissed, basically ignored because they don't fit into conventional thoughts and beliefs of mainstream academia.

Or so I have read, as a caveat. The only cool archaeological "thing" I ever found in the woods like that was a monk's beehive (stone hut)