Which is one of the scariest things I've seen in a while. The video glosses over the fact that EMPs would probably make for a viable (if collateral-damage-inducing) defense, but still pretty terrifying.
Commercial electronics designers have been designing around EMI for decades now. Is it that hard to imagine that actors would put in the effort to shield their devices? A Faraday cage around the electronics would go a long way towards eliminating the effects of an EMP.
Even if you couldn't stop the EMP from knocking systems out, you could design them to come back online very quickly, making the EMP a rather expensive temporary measure.
For home-made drones it might be effective, but those drones are cheap, and the attackers could always launch more. I just don't see EMPs as posing a real threat to any military.
Am I off in my estimation?
EMI protection in devices is meant for normal interference, not high powered EM stuff.
What about the next wave of drones coming in 5 minutes later? Now you are in an arms race against amount of drones/waves and speed of your EMP generators to generate deadly enough pulses.
I am not at all familiar of what kind of equipment you need to generate EMP that would fry electronics in a building wide scale, but would that make financial sense to include in every building? Would they be fast enough to produce and install before attacks become too prevelant?
Perhaps if you made the Faraday cage out of superconducting material. But that would currently require huge cooling equipment, so that's not really an option.
Ever seen a carrier's radar hit a drone? And that's nothing compared to NEMP waveforms.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_comp...
It will be effective for maybe 50-100 yards. I can afford more drones than you can afford Aegis platforms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XbLz0L6UdI
(Change it to english subtitles)
Essentially instead of spraying water out of the sprinklers, spray paint or other liquids that would block the vision of the drones. I think that would be a lot cheaper and harder to build defences for than an EMP.
(Just realised that you could also spray a opaque gas which would also block vision and might make less of a mess to clean up).
A military base might have robotic sentry guns [1] to begin with, as they are already armed with these today to defend against incoming mortars. Later on, I imagine with offensive drone capabilities being developed, it will lead to repurposing the drones in a defensive posture. Perhaps the best answer is to scale with the threat.
The defensive drone fleet circle the base. Upon a detection of an incoming fleet, rather than one sentry gun taking on 100 or 1000 drones, a defensive swarm targets the incoming swarm. More of a one-to-one fight or perhaps 1:4 if your drones are more capable fighters.
This is all a bit of a bummer. We talk about how we'll get robots to obey the three laws of robotics, but it'd be nice if we could just get humans to follow the first law. "A robot (human) may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."
In this scenario, cyber-warfare will become even more critical. Imagine being able to hack and take over your enemy's defensive drone contingent.
The question to me is how do you defend civilian targets like universities, city halls and malls? You can't build military style defences around these targets and the budget is going to be pretty low. Also you need a exceptionally low response time since the drones can deploy and kill in seconds.
Beyond that, you might see people purchasing defensive measures once attacks become more of a threat. Whether that's lasers, other drones or something we haven't thought of. There would be a demand for counter measures - you can already see the market forming for such counter measures.
Do you really think that it would work to avoid to someone grab the necessary components to build a cheap drone ?
What must criminalise is the components to make drones a weapon. Aka, EXPLOSIVES and WEAPONS. And restrict access to chemicals to make explosives.
And this would not work when the guys building it, are living on anarchy place where the effective law are made by they.
Against drones? You probably don't. I mean, those are pretty vulnerable to all sorts of attacks; aerial drones don't really change things.
I think that arms race will rather quickly lead to the use of very fast moving objects that don’t slow down much due to air resistance (i.e. bullets or missiles)
You can blind or short out the cameras using infrared lasers, much better than paint which requires much closer range.
String polymer sounds like it could work, my only concern would be if you could design prop guards for the drones such that they filter the air (very coarsely) and don't allow any objects to touch the props.
https://hackaday.com/2011/09/05/engine-hacks-a-pulse-jet-uav...
Handgun shot shells!
The other direction you could possibly go is a super-fine, but conductive powder (would carbon powder work?) that could get in the motors and potentially cause a short. Particulates that fine would probably be a health risk though.
Just as a side note, as long as your elemental carbon nanoparticles are larger than 10PM (most recommend 2.5PM) they are not considered damaging to health by the WHO [1].
[1] http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/162535/e...
Found a youtube video. ETN stands for Erythritol tetranitrate, an explosive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug3qce3Sae4
Yikes...
The only comfort I can find is that the process is probably just complicated enough that 50% of the idiots who try to make it will probably maim themselves instead of succeeding.
The only effective defenses today are the same as against regular missiles: guns, missiles, decoys, ECM, and blinding lasers. In a few years high-powered lasers might become viable.
Some other possible defenses are other drones and flack clouds. A flack cloud in the classroom in the video might have defeated the drones.
Both of these defenses might be staged strategically throughout various public places or even carried by individuals for their own protection.
If drone attacks become common, anti-drone defenses are likely to become widespread as well.
I'm personally more concerned about potential chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare, against which there's really not much that people can do, and which might eventually become as easy to perpetrate as conventional drone attacks (and might even be facilitated by them).
Most of our resistant bacteria are coming from something that makes holding onto resistance a survival trait. Antibiotic overuse in factory farming or hospitals which obviously are continuously battling bacteria are two of the prime generators.
This is the first time I've heard this. Can you recommend some references with more info on it?
Long-term starvation-induced loss of antibiotic resistance in bacteria
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24196362
Loss of Antibiotic Resistance in Staphylococcus aureus Resulting from Growth at High Temperature
http://www.microbiologyresearch.org/docserver/fulltext/micro...
And here's a more high level answer from the Biology StackExchange on the mechanism by which this happens with a link to 3 other papers on the underlying subject https://biology.stackexchange.com/a/15930
I think most of that concern is misplaced. It will never be easy for non-state actors to conduct nuclear warfare (unless you count inefficient small scale radiological attacks) and while a sufficiently dedicated group can synthesize chemical weapons, it's easier and generally more efficient to just build a big truck bomb (or ten). Biological warfare is more complicated, both because it depends on your definitions (it could be said that every person stupid enough to go to work with the flu is engaging in biological warfare, they're certainly doing more damage than all the world's terrorists put together ever have), but also because that's the one area where rapidly developing technology really could have a huge impact in the near future.
Well, you could say that.... But it's about as smart as engaging in a fight against micro-aggressions. If you fight for a society where the individual can't even handle minor stress factors, you fight for a society with little to no immune system, that is all but guaranteed to crumble.
It's very chilling that this new vector of attack is very much here for everyone to utilize.
No need to do that, just get an old enough car/truck that can be started with a crank.
I had the relay box catch on fire (in the pouring rain!) once. Put the fire out, pulled all the twisted charred copper off itself as not to short out, found another battery and bam! Off she drove again.
If I hadn't stopped immediately as the fire started, the car would have happily kept running - it only needed the relays for the starter motor. Everything else runs from the points/distributor/alternator.
If you had an old diesel, it'd be even better. Those literally have no electronic components necessary for the engine to run - mechanical fuel pump, glow plugs. They can basically run underwater as long as it's got fresh air coming in.
That said, a lot of it is surprisingly plausible (though maybe not the grainy filming-a-CRT overlays).
The part where the chap at the end explains the purpose of the video? It's not supposed to make people think it's real.
http://www.businessinsider.de/drones-carrying-drugs-and-expl...