I've been dreaming about that to kill mosquitoes since I was a teenager. Then I wondered: "how to prevent firing the laser into someone's eye?" and my idea was to only shoot laser from 2 meters high and to only ever shoot towards the ceiling, never downwards, while having the ceiling having some kind of paint/material that wouldn't be reflecting the laser too much. Make the paint/material all white to makes mosquito detection easier.
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.
We use lasers in lots of consumer products, we don't really have any with exposed lasers. You just can't guarantee that someone doesn't flip a quarter and blind themselves. It's a cool idea but pretty impossible to be safe.
I think the chances of a quarter’s reflection aligning to your eye while the laser is on and pointing at it are pretty damn slim. If that’s still too high, you better eliminate all corners in your kitchen because someone is going to lose an eye. And don’t get me started on forks.
Lasers are assigned a classification and regulated. You can't just get a lower classification just because. You can severely damage your eye (and more) with a laser, which may not even be visible. If corners and forks were invisible, traveled at the speed of light, propagated over large distances, were regulated, and could affect aircraft, then maybe your analogies would work.
The laser is designed to shoot small things in the air.
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.
It's just an example. I've worked with industrial laser cutters (100+watt CO2) before and even with all of the protective equipment built into the machines, you still wear glasses. The idea that you could use something like this in an exposed way is crazy to anyone who's actually worked with them. Any mistake is instant and permanent. You can't make a consumer product out of this. Maybe like a large box that only mosquitos could enter but at that point, you have easier methods than a visual system moving a laser to mm tolerances.
I would like to have a cheap laser engraver/cutter but I am just afraid to buy one. Most kits don't have any protection at all except for some goggles. This might be fine for yourself but not for someone stepping into the room.
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 comment said your system has a bug as in it malfunctions and decides to shoot the coin anyways, and his other point was you will be looking at the coin wide eyed so perfect chance for a reflected laser to hit you in the eye if by chance the correct angle happens to line up and send it back to your eye. Also, I've seen too much unbelievable stuff actually happen so nothing is unbelievable in 2022. Yes we are talking highly unprobeable but with 7 billion people on earth we have to account for the unprobeable to happen.
Right, because nothing else we already use has any chance of causing permanent damage. Nothing at all.
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.
I know it is new years but you sound like an angry drunk. I know there are lots of risks in life I have taken many of them. I used to work at a Bungy jump and jumped hundreds of times. I ride a motorcycle at high speeds. I was simply commenting to the fact that your original comment did not respond correctly to the ops comment. He said a bug in the system as in a computer error bug and you went off and said there is not bug that big that would be mistaken, he wasn't talking about an insect but a computer error. Then you said that is not how reflections work, and again not true it could reflect into your eye not simply because he was looking at it but it would also take a certain angle but op was making a general statement about possible dangers. You are very defensive about this just chill out and accept that we are just discussing some of the possible dangers of such a system. We are, after all, talking about lasers and it would be totally irresponsible if such a system was built and all the modes of failure not explored. Not likely to happen does not mean you do not discuss it. Have a happy new years.
And how many of those 7 billion people will die of mosquito-borne diseases...?
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.
Oh I am all for laser defense, I was merely pointing out that op is correct in that a system like this will likely go wrong some how. But I honestly don't think they would use them in household setting but rather use them on the outskirts or around ponds and use it for other pests in fields away from human eyes.
After abandoning the laser idea due to the aforementioned “fully automated blindness / house fire machine” issues, I’ve often idly wondered if you could use a phased array of small subwoofers to generate a precisely targeted region of extreme pressure drop. That way you could just instantaneously and explosively decompress the suckers in such a way that’s probably safe for mammals.
There are a number of DIY instructions for building a phased array ultrasonic manipulator, eg [1]. You might be able to 'tweeze' the offender into a capture apparatus or high voltage deanimator.
Why not the same idea with lasers, if you have an array of low power lasers but they all focus on one 3D location, if you are not at the focus location you will not be exposed to a dangerous laser power. An array of hundred to a thousand low end laser diodes using a an array of mems mirrors to aim the beams will ensure the focus point will fry the bug.
At that point you're deliberately removing the collimation and I'm not sure how much the coherency really adds so you might as well just focus a heat lamp on them.
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?
That's a fascinating idea! Do you have an idea about the intensity and how "loud" the system would need to be to generate the compression/rarefaction necessary for that effect (or could the Hz be lower than audible threshold)? Also, I'm uncertain what behavior the array would yield (other than maybe expanding the area of effect)? Apologies if my questions are too deep in the well of ignorance to address.
No idea what pressure change over what timescale would be required to actually injure a mosquito, I guess someone will have to torture a bunch of mosquitos for science.
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.
The wavelength of subwoofers is way too long (meters) for something the size of a mosquito. Mosquitoes are ultrasound-sized. A mosquito destroying phased array of ultrasound transducers may be physically possible but probably even less practical than lasers.
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.
A small stoichiometric mixture of oxygen and hydrogen (created from electrolysis) might be able to create a shockwave or vortex with supersonic components for a range of 1-3m.
Dan! Always wanted a tour of his place, I can’t even count the number of times I thought about grabbing an old projection TV to upcycle the fresnel into a solar death ray.
You could fire a pulse with lower power to check what the return distance is to see if there’s anything in the way. This is what some wireless power transfer approaches do essentially iirc
Wipe them out, all of them. The ecosystem will survive mosquitoes' extinction.
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.
Generally removing a species completely has downstream effects, but as far as I'm aware mosquitos aren't occupying any unique role as either food, pollinator, or keeping other insects at bay.
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.
> Wipe them out, all of them. The ecosystem will survive mosquitoes' extinction.
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.
Realistic implementations use a cabinet with a generous intake and force air (and flying insects through into a controlled, confined space. After going around a corner or two, laser exposure issues are limited, and you can be close enough to aim effectively with limited optics.
Why not just use a mesh screen with a fan? Bugs generally don't fly with a lot of thrust to weight so they get trapped against the screen and die. I think NightHawkInLight has some videos about this on yt, though its definitely not some new idea.
Ya I saw this Dan Rojas video linked on HN a while back when the laser mosquito idea came up. He uses an open bottle of carbonated water to attract them to the fan/screen trap https://youtu.be/6BhV-o77RqQ
That video is absolutely hilarious, a total spoof on all those tell-sell nonsense videos they would play at night on idle channels of the local cable TV systems.
Thanks for sharing this, but is a comedy skit from almost two decades ago - or any time period - really a valid method of debunking potential scientific progress made within that same time period? It reminds me of when people post SNL skits as proof of why [insert person inaccurately being made fun of either in a biased or exaggerated manner for the purpose of humor] is Actually A Bad Person. I mean yeah, the technology at face value is hilarious to think about, and goofy, but so are a lot of things that actually work pretty well.
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.
It says the prediction is accurate to 1.4cm, but it doesn’t say at what range. 1.4cm at 1km is great, but 1.4cm at 1m likely isn’t usable.
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.
In a flat area, you could imagine designing a system so that it couldn't aim below horizon, and then mount it 10-15 feet up to mitigate the risk of blinding.
Shouldn’t be too hard to pull FlightAware data or similar and just not ever shoot within n degrees of aircraft… if it was really much of a concern to start with. Big sky theory.
If it has IR it should also be able to spot aircraft trails but either way if there is any risk of blinding a pilot then they should tread extremely lightly (or non-startup-ish, i.e. obvious potential for "move fast and kill people").
Also, can we get a laser that's collimated badly enough that the beam is ~harmless at distances where an aircraft can be, while still collimated well enough to fry the insect? (In the spirit of "the best radiation shield is r squared".)
The original article was published a month or so earlier, and sounded a bit like the angular resolution for whatever machine was already determined, and they worked their way back to suitable bugs and the use case, rather than having a specific issue in mind and designing the setup around.
[1]. Upon re-reading this, they don't even have the actual laser rig, just a camera and a methodology to estimate future locations to compensate for [camera] latencies with accuracy that conveniently fits within average body sizes of specific spices of a bug. This is also funded by "Moonshot R&D Program" and its sub-programs[2][3] ran by the Cabinet Office of Government of Japan.
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.
Thanks. I was able to read [1] with the help of Google Translate. From what I understand, this is an announcement of the project being funded within the Moonshot program and thus it is expected that the capabilities discussed are the goal, not what the researchers have already demonstrated.
Everytime this idea comes up, I can’t imagine a laser powerful enough to kill even small insects not running the risk of collateral damage, burning things around it.
Maybe if several low power lasers were fired together, to converge at the predicted position, it would moderate the risk of collateral damage. Even a few millimeters away from the target position, the radiative flux (W/m²) would be much lower, likely at safe levels.
Is there a max angle at which two lasers could pass through the pupil and strike the retina? That's assuming that strikes elsewhere don't pose a blinding risk for the energy level required to kill a mosquito, which I have absolutely no support for. But if that is the case, you could place your lasers and define a kill zone where no two can converge with less than a safe angle.
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.
IIRC (can't find a reference), the idea was noty to be able to kill teh mosquitoes outright, but to damage their wings so they couldn't fly. _Much_ less power needed.
Perhaps if the laser light were put through adjustable optics to set the focal point at the target. That way, anything sufficiently closer or further than the target along the laser's path will see non-dangerous intensity. Still don't want the thing accidentally targeting eye balls though.
It never took off because a) Mosquitos are small and hard targets and b) because philanthropists realized they could buy mosquito nets for billions with the funding required to develop it. If it gets developed for mosquitoes, it will be a solution for rich people for decades.
It never took off because the lab was a PR whitewash for the patent troll firm Intellectual Ventures, which wanted to appear less criminal and parasitic. They never had any intention of bringing it to market as a product. They've never brought any product to market, only extorted money from people who do.
IV has not, as far as I know, broken any laws, a fact which deeply undermines the legitimacy of the US legal system.
Do you have a source for that? My understanding was that the technology worked just fine, and that it wasn’t expensive because the system comprised of consumer electronics, like the laser from a Blu-Ray player and the GPU from a PlayStation.
Anything with electronics is going to be orders of magnitude more expensive than insecticide treated nets, which cost cents. https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1... is one of a number of studies measuring the efficacy. To compete in the quest to end malaria it needs to be cheaper per-capita, off-grid, and at least as effective. I think nets, mosquito or parasite eradication and vaccination are the only approaches anyone is seriously pursuing.
"... 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've heard enough parables to know how this will play out, if it does happen: lots of dead bugs on the ground, bugs that will feed another species in the food chain. The lack of mosquito population and reproduction will starve species that depend on them. That change in the dynamic will ultimately be worse for ag production...
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.
It doesn't have to be used to kill all insects, just the few mosquitos that are in my bedroom when I try to sleep. I'll remove any dead mosquitos the next morning and probably won't really alter the ecosystem, while it can make sure I have a good night's sleep.
Edit: after re-reading the article I see the main subject is killing moths to improve agriculture, not mosquitos in my bedroom
You should buy an electric mosquito racket. Basically any standing mosquito is a dead mosquito because you move the racket over the mosquito, the bug gets scared and flies into the racket, game over. The only problems left are those invisible mosquitoes that manage to hide and fly only when the lights go off. Notwithstanding that a racket greatly improves the quality of life.
For indoor pests we have had good results with diffusing lavender oil at night and peppermint oil by day. Mosquitoes in particular hate those smells and it makes it difficult for them to smell CO2 emitted from your skin pores which is their main attractant.
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.
I wanted to do something similar but it was related to an idea I wanted to also try. The project was a dashcam that could determine the velocity of other vehicles. Some implementation of OpenCV is what I thought may work. It was the triangulation part I wasn't sure about which I think is vital to get it to work.
"It is expected to break away from dependence on pesticides by means of applying this method to technology for exterminating pests with high-power lasers, etc. Thereby we can realize sustainable agricultural production that can balance both pest control and environmental conservation."
“Solutions” like these are fun technological toys treating the symptoms of the damage we’ve done to the ecosystem. Far better, and more difficult because it’s less fun, is changing culture so we do less damage. There are many other living things that will gladly eat mosquitoes, they just need homes.
The damage we've done to the ecosystem is also causing insects to die. If we repair this damage (and we absolutely should) I would expect an increase in mosquitoes.
One key thing is that flying bugs might be hiding under leaves, which doesn't even require any tracking, but matching their favorite plants... and hopefully scaring them with an optical flash so they can be tracked.
I think this system (laser) will work from the ground (where there're the crops) to the sky, before the bugs will touch the leaves, not froun ground to ground level. So there will be no trouble in shoot down the bugs when they're flying some meters above the ground.
Oh neat, you can even see their horrible little mosquito ghosts go shooting out of their cursed bodies. (it is OK to be completely spiteful toward mosquitos, right? They are like the #1 all-time human killer)
Unless you can get mm accuracy and perfect non-foe detection it's useless with the multi-watt lasers generally required.