In his 1963 scifi story “The Invincible,” the Polish writer Stanisław Lem imagined an artificial species of free-floating nanobots which roamed the atmosphere of a far-off planet. Like tiny bugs, the microscopic beings were powerless alone, but together they could form cooperative swarms to gather energy, reproduce, and ultimately defend their territory from predators with deadly force.
Unlike the story’s human protagonists, the “black cloud” of bots was incapable of reasoning beyond the simple logic of animal instincts. But when the two life forms inevitably come into conflict, literary critic Jerzy Jarzębski writes, human evolution proves its mettle over the mindless automaton — not by eradicating the deadly species, but by making a conscious decision to let it live.
Lem probably never imagined his evolutionary parable of living dust was just a few decades from becoming a reality — or that it would become the inspiration for the development of a real-life military technology known as “smart dust.”
Starting out as a theoretical research proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — the Cold War-era military tech bureau behind everything from GPS navigation to the modern internet — smart dust is now being developed for use in a wide variety of industries, from environmental studies to commercial mining.
That’s according to Interesting Engineering, which recently published a rundown of the state of present-day smart dust after decades of development. Though “dust” remains a bit of a misnomer — it’s more like a bunch of tiny sensors capable of delaying data to a central device — there’s a large body of theoretical and simulated work laying a path for practical microengineering that’s steadily coming into its own.
Case in point, while nanotech began as an effort to build relatively simple wireless receivers around the size of a grain of rice, thanks to decades of R&D, some motes being developed are now nearly invisible to the naked eye, measuring in at anywhere from 1 cubic millimeter to .02 cubic millimeters.
As early as 2003, micro-sensor platforms like Crossbow Technology, Inc’s “MICA” and UC Berkeley’s “Spec” have successfully detected all kinds of variables while measuring in at mere millimeters, recording changes in humidity, light and temperature.
Recent developments within the past 10 years have expanded these sensor’s abilities to record various levels of sound, and work is underway to develop motes capable of detecting the chemical composition of the air. They can be used individually to record changes in the human body, or deployed in swarms to identify biological compounds.
In the future, the mites are hoped to be able to report a near-infinite amount of data in suspended, 3D environments — like a microscopic version of Bill Paxton’s “Dorothy” sensors in the 1996 weather thriller “Twister.”
Per IE, the current “smart dust industry,” made up of tech companies like Emerson Process Management and Hewlett-Packard, was valued at around $115 million in 2022. By 2032, it’s expected to reach nearly $400 million.
While various militaries are keen on developing smart dust for intelligence reasons, much of the present research is carried in university and corporate labs. An Israeli firm called Stardust Solutions, for example, drew concerns from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists when it announced its intentions of releasing a variation on smart dust to block out the Sun — involving inert particular matter in conjunction with an atmospheric monitoring system — in violation of international geoengineering laws.
While the tech is pretty dystopian as it is, there’s a lot of room for improvement. The need to interface with a centralized data-processing unit, for example, means the tiny units can’t travel too far from their human controller. Their usable lifespan is likewise pretty short, though that’s changing with innovations in energy-harvesting capabilities via light, vibrations, and electromagnetic fields.
One thing’s abundantly clear: now might be a good time to invest in an air purifier.
More on tiny tech: Chinese Military Shows Off Fly-Sized Drones for Covert Ops
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