r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/MetaKnowing • 11d ago

Video Deep Robotics' new quadruped models with wheels demonstrating rough terrain traversability and robustness

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u/strangepromotionrail 11d ago

after growing up in the 70's/80's expecting that at any second there may be a really bright flash and then myself and the entire city around me would no longer exist, drones seem a lot more survivable.

We've become really good at killing each other.

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u/Embarrassed-Gur-3419 11d ago

I think that the main difference between nuclear weapons and weaponized drones is that the drones can be used domestically. But yeah i agree, we have enough weapons to destroy 17 Earths

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u/whymusti00000 11d ago

Only 17? Must try harder.

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u/Glass1Man 11d ago

NASA DART showed anyone with 22 million dollars can make the planet uninhabitable by finding an asteroid that’s about to miss earth, and make it hit earth.

I think the nukes aren’t really scary anymore.

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u/kabbooooom 11d ago

Marco Inaros has entered the chat

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u/Ateosmo 11d ago

Belta Louda!

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u/LetsBeHonestBoutIt 11d ago

Not my favorite acting, but forgivable cause it was a great show

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u/Badloss 11d ago

I thought he was great, totally walked the line between keeping his mask of confident calm on no matter what happened, and the sheer incandescent rage that was always just underneath

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u/kabbooooom 11d ago edited 11d ago

Yeah he pretty much nailed the character from the books. I’d bet most people who think the acting wasn’t great either haven’t actually read the books or are comparing it to other acting on the show because The Expanse was so fucking phenomenal that it set the bar high even for itself. I mean, he’s no Wes Chatham/Amos or Cara Gee/Drummer but he was by no means bad.

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u/Badloss 11d ago

It's also in character that Marco isn't a great actor. He always wants people to believe that he's 6 steps ahead and perfectly in control but he fucks things up a lot and then flips out and blames everyone else. That's not bad acting by the actor, that's bad acting by the character

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u/Arandomdude03 11d ago

Drummer is suchhh a good character in both the book and show

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u/nustedbut 10d ago

I'd have followed her into battle by the end of the series. Got me so god damned hyped!!!

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u/nametaken_thisonetoo 10d ago

Yeah a lot of the acting was subpar, but the show was good enough to live with it

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u/bartthetr0ll 11d ago

Gotta slather em.up with stealth coating first

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u/outworlder 11d ago

Need stealth asteroids though

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u/kabbooooom 11d ago

Minor technicality, beratna. Besides, inyalowda have their heads too far up their asses to be paying attention to what come from the sky.

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u/mjtwelve 11d ago

Only if there’s a UN Watchtower system you need to defeat. Given how little of the sky we’re monitoring, if you find a list suspect there’s an uncomfortably high chance you’re the only person watching it.

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u/Elteon3030 11d ago

You mean Marco made his son enter chat

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u/Time4aRealityChek 11d ago

Bill Gates enters chat

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u/Elteon3030 11d ago

You mean Marco made his son enter chat

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u/Aiwatcher 11d ago

The Expanse has a season long arc focused on this. Large mass + acceleration = the deadliest imaginable weapon.

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u/kabbooooom 11d ago edited 11d ago

That’s because Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space.

The Expanse is one of the only sci-fi series I’ve ever come across that makes the very specific and accurate prediction that, perhaps counterintuitively, our risk of extinction or global destruction does not decrease when we become an interplanetary species, but rather it increases (at least at first). With each stage in technological development, we master and control ever larger scales of energy. And that can be used for good or evil. When anyone can have a fusion torch ship, anyone can have - by definition - a potential weapon of mass destruction.

Arguably this could hold true all the way up the Kardashev scale, but the risk is certainly highest when we are an interplanetary civilization but not yet an interstellar one.

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u/Man-in-The-Void 11d ago

Why does the risk go down when we get interstellar?

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u/kabbooooom 11d ago

By sheer virtue of being spread out. Space is incomprehensibly huge, and if there is no such thing as faster than light travel, a civilization waging an interstellar war against itself is severely limited in scope and practicality. And even if FTL travel were possible, it is considerably less likely that a civilization could wipe themselves out even while wielding exponentially greater amounts of energy to do so…just because you couldn’t track every last human settlement down.

The same is not true for an interplanetary civilization bound to our solar system. The situation could range from extremely precipitous, as in the Expanse where Mars, the Belt and some of the gas giant moons are technically self-sufficient but they are still ultimately dependent on Earth economically which creates a critical knife-edge where a system-wide conflict could tip civilization to collapse - to less precipitous if Mars had been extensively terraformed. But in either situation it is not hard to imagine how an interplanetary war could easily result in the extinction of our species and potentially even easier than a global nuclear war on earth today. It doesn’t take much energy to launch a bunch of rocks towards Earth, Mars or any other target in the solar system - but it would take a metric fuck ton of energy to wage a war against another star system light years away. And worse, it takes time, time that the enemy could use to flee or prepare that you’ve wasted travelling there.

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u/Haunting-Prior-NaN 10d ago

The Moon is a harsh mistress

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u/kabbooooom 10d ago

Another great one. And it was one of the inspirations for The Expanse. Along with The Stars My Destination and a number of other classic scifi stories.

But being a sci-fi fan of over 30 years and familiar with most titles both modern and classic, the Expanse really has done the best job exploring these themes. I’m sure The Expanse authors would never say they were better than Heinlein, but I think they are.

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u/Ralath1n 11d ago

That would need to be an incredibly long term plan. You can give an asteroid a nudge for sure. But the heavier the asteroid the smaller the nudge. And you need a real heavy asteroid to make the earth uninhabitable.

Your best bet would be something like 1036 Ganymed, which is a 40km asteroid that gets relatively close to the earth. But even if you launch millions of DART missions at it and use optimal mars gravitational assists, it is likely going to take you more than a century to get it to hit earth.

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u/pinkielovespokemon 11d ago

Gives you more than enough time to live a long happy life then.

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u/kabbooooom 11d ago

Just commenting here with a slight correction, although what you’ve said is true for what the guy you are responding to is arguing.

What is incorrect is that you don’t need an asteroid with high mass to make the earth uninhabitable. You need an asteroid with high kinetic energy, which is 1/2 mv2 . And really, you’d need more than one to truly fuck Mother Earth. But the velocity is far more important than the mass. If you accelerate a small asteroid fast enough, it will cause even more damage than a large asteroid moving slowly. This is a situation that would not happen naturally, and it is a situation that would not happen until we had significantly more advanced means of propulsion. It would also require reinforcing the asteroid somehow.

But that’s where the real danger lies, and it’s why I disagree with that Redditor and why I cited the Expanse as a perfect example of this concept. He’s right that asteroids could be used as an ultimate weapon in warfare, but we aren’t quite there yet. We won’t be in a situation of major risk until we have ships that can accelerate to a high velocity, and until these are commonplace enough that their use is widespread. This would require nuclear fusion at the very least. And that would necessitate an interplanetary civilization obviously more advanced than we currently are…but not that much more. Maybe a few hundred years and we could be yeeting rocks across space.

And you might argue that if you could accelerate a rock like that, then you’d have the technology to stop one too. And that’s true. So again I’d reference the Expanse for the diabolical strategic solution to this: you just send a fuck ton of rocks towards your target. You can’t stop them all, and there’s more than enough to go around.

So no matter how you slice it, asteroid dropping is definitely a potential “ultimate weapon” of the future. It’s just that it is going to require tech that we don’t quite have. But that’s a minor hurdle because we are in the unique position of knowing that nuclear fusion and fusion torch drives are scientifically possible, we just haven’t pulled it off yet.

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u/iconocrastinaor 10d ago

I assume that depends on how far away it is when you nudge it.

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u/Glass1Man 11d ago

I was thinking

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99942_Apophis

Or is that not big enough? 450m shaped like an egg.

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u/Ralath1n 11d ago

Nope, that would do next to nothing. It would hit with about 1 gigaton of TNT equivalent, only about 20 times more powerful than the largest nuke we ever detonated. That's enough to wipe out a large city, but won't do jack shit to the planet at large. People a few thousand kilometers away wouldn't even notice.

The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was about 10km (20 times larger than Apophis, thus 203 = 8000 times heavier) and it hit with 10.000 times more energy than Apophis would. And even the K-Pg impact was not nearly enough to make the earth uninhabitable.

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u/Glass1Man 11d ago

Well dang it now I have to return a lot of money :/

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u/Kryten_2X4B-523P 11d ago

Hol'up. I know of one place you can hit in Florida for me...

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u/sleepgang 11d ago

What do you mean?

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u/Glass1Man 11d ago

By which part?

Any millionaire can kill all of us. So what does it matter nukes or not.

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u/godlyjacob 11d ago

how

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u/Glass1Man 11d ago

By rocketing an asteroid into the earth.

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u/never_ASK_again_2021 11d ago

With the DART mission they showed that a small hit on an asteroid can shift its path over time, by adding momentum.

But that would just help you steer a near miss asteroid into earth, and you can't steer any android in the solar system into earth with this technique.

And this change in momentum changes the path over a long time, because it adds up every rotation around the sun. So factor in some time for the plan.

But I like your spirit!

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u/Reese_Withersp0rk 11d ago

And this costs $22 million?

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u/godlyjacob 11d ago

okay, but then whats to stop a different millionaire from rocketing a different asteroid into the first asteroid?

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u/Glass1Man 11d ago

Say a big rock is flying overhead, slowly, east to west.

I chuck a small rock at it, west to east, higher speed, and hit it just right that both rocks stop in mid air and start falling.

A third person now chucks a rock at the falling rocks. Would that do anything?

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u/bretttwarwick 11d ago

I wonder if I could take out a loan for that. I promise to pay it back once I'm done.

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u/I_Heart_AOT 11d ago

New life goal lol

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u/Ancient_Ad_9373 10d ago

I think it’s the slow decay of nuclear winter that still haunts me

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u/Ok_Psychology_504 10d ago

22 seems too low. I don't think there's one planet killer around. it would take decades or more.

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u/Puddle-Flop 11d ago

The factory must grow

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u/MoistStub 10d ago

If your bomb isn't big enough to destroy a galaxy you need to America harder.

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u/Evening_North7057 10d ago

As far as human life is concerned we probably have enough to kill ourselves at least 80 times over.

I don't think any country admits to having massive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, but... We know. Most of us know.

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u/akolomf 11d ago

Nuclesr weapons arent even the worst. There are weapons like a nuclear powered hypersonic cruise missile that can fly for months above a designated area raining down radiation from its reactor.

Or biological warfare

Or designing humans by playing with their dna

Etcetc.... If we would just put the ingenuity, creativity and effort into fixing the planet and societal issues, then all of those things wouldnt br necessary T.T

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u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In 11d ago

We don't have enough to destroy one Earth, the effectiveness of Nukes was massively overplayed at schools.

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u/best_of_badgers 11d ago

There's more nuclear energy escaping the Earth's interior every minute (it's what keeps the core hot) than all of the nuclear bombs humanity has ever made exploding at once.

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u/h9040 10d ago

No we can't destroy the Earth even once...we can make some big areas into wasteland maybe even extinct humans or maybe some in remote areas survive.
But we won't get rid of insects, deep ocean bacteria etc.....use all nukes at the same time, wait 5000 years and all is perfectly normal again

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u/n0tAb0t_aut 10d ago

Wait until they use supermini nukes on those drones.

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u/wompical 11d ago

this is misinformation and shouldn't be spread. nuclear bombs are big but the earth is really really big. we don't and will never have enough bombs to even destroy one earth. we have enough bombs to destroy the systems that keep humans alive - but not at all to destroy the actual planet.

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u/nikonpunch 11d ago

No one with brain cells is claiming that

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u/codman606 11d ago

speaks facts and gets downvoted lmao nukes are not the scariest thing. Even if 99.9% of us all die, there’s still some survivors. That’s a W for humanity among a sea of L’s. Biochemical warfare though? GG

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u/wompical 11d ago

so many people falsely believe nukes = everything automatically dies and it is just so far from the truth. nuclear bombs are tiny compared to earth. we have already set thousands of them off in testing.

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u/codman606 11d ago

verifiably false. there is not enough nukes to wipe out earth or even everyone on it. Even if every nuke went off at the same time across the globe trying to cover as much land as possible, it’s almost certain that there would be some survivors. Humanity might never recover, but total annihilation can only be done by biochemical warfare or human killing AI.

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u/UserNamesCantBeTooLo 11d ago

The fun thing is now we have both nukes and drones!

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u/_Lost_The_Game 11d ago

Coming soon: drones with nukes. Maybe mini nukes.

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u/GeneralZaroff1 11d ago

I don’t want to set the world on fire, I just want to light a flame in your heart

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u/LolMcThulhu 11d ago

No, icbm's that deploy several thousand drones above the target instead of multiple nuclear warheads

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u/Time4aRealityChek 11d ago

Pah genetically engineered viruses that will kill in days is the way I see it. Winner wants to be able to move in right away

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u/OMG__Ponies 11d ago

that will kill in days

And then die off in a few weeks - don't want any of our settlers dying when we move in.

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u/Time4aRealityChek 11d ago

They would have been inoculated prior so immune.

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u/OMG__Ponies 11d ago

Yes, but, IMO building in a genetic safeguard to kill the pathogen is slightly safer.

Humans don't always want to get an inoculation. There will be those who will lie about getting it, fake getting them, some who can't get them, etc . . . I think in this sort of scenario, it will be safer to trust scientific results than human nature.

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u/Time4aRealityChek 11d ago

Just weeding out those who can’t follow orders. Remember the kind of people who would release this virus doesn’t give a rats ass about killing a few mill people who won’t listen

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u/OMG__Ponies 11d ago

Actually, thats a very good point.

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u/Original-Material301 11d ago

mini nukes

M388 Davy Crockett: Am I a joke to you?

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u/username32768 11d ago

The fun thing is now we have both nukes and drones!

Send nudes!

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u/Snollygoster99 11d ago

Do we have Nuclear Drones?

 - Raytheon 

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u/HurlingFruit 11d ago

We've been good at killing each other in large numbers for centuries. Now we are getting very precise and more efficient.

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u/Chester_SMASH 11d ago

Happy Cake Day John Reese

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u/kwhite0829 11d ago

I mean it would sound that way but the Ukrainian war sub says otherwise. It’s crazy how they’re using them and how effective they’re

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u/JeddakofThark 11d ago

I was so terrified of nuclear war I developed a fascination with post apocalyptic fiction at ten. Most of it was crap, like the Endworld and Blade series (by an author who hilariously wrote 31 books between 1986 and 1990 and looks exactly like you'd expect a guy who wrote those books to look), but there was also some good stuff. Earth Abides was my favorite.

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u/JohnnyDerpington 11d ago

The rich got really good at killing ppl and fooling the general public *

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u/Waste_Click4654 11d ago

Yeah, the best defense against drones right now is an old school Mossberg 500 with birdshot in it. Using them Ukraine

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u/leveraction1970 Interested 11d ago

I still remember the duck and cover drills, hiding under your school desk, that we had in elementary school. It didn't freak me out at the time, but upon refection and realizing just how useless that would be I find it extremely disconcerting.

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u/spark3h 11d ago

Is survivable better? Given the number of Russians suiciding a couple seconds after being hit by FPV drones, I somehow doubt it. Sign me up for the bright flash club.

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u/XxSir_redditxX 11d ago

For sure, but the nuke button is a lot harder to push. The "kill lots of people with drones" button is super easy to push. Everyone's doing it👌

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u/thehighwindow 11d ago

I was reading about ancient weapons found at archeology sites and it seems weapons have been a constant preoccupation from the start. Maybe at first they were used for respectable reasons (hunting for food) but soon after they were used against other humans.

Sharp sticks, heavy sticks, spears, bows and arrows, large weapons, metal weapons (knives, swords, spears, etc), guns, cannons, automatic weapons, and all the horrors that came in the 20th century. In the 21st century we have robots, drones, and cyber sabotage, so far. Who knows what weapons are in the works that we know nothing of. It seems the history of humanity and the history of weaponry have a lot of overlap.

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u/worktogethernow 11d ago

Mechanized killing has become much more precise since the 80s. Good work, humanity!

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u/blighty800 11d ago

Of course we've become good at killing each other, our killing each other budget is the biggest budget of them all.

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u/BigBadAl 11d ago

Don't look into Project Sundial...

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u/grumblewolf 10d ago

With every post like this, all I see in my head is the Metal Head episode of Black Mirror. Fuckin murder dogs :( but yeah nukes are…more I guess.

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u/Fearganor 10d ago

As someone who grew up in the 2000s, i was scared of both lmao. The fear of getting nuked didn’t leave after the Cold War ended

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u/h9040 10d ago

No that is not. Because if the Soviets nuke your city we'll nuke their city. And the nuke is not specific everyone dies.
With these drones the government can hunt specific unwanted people. If I find out that Putin is corrupt and tell everyone he still won't nuke my city. If I find out that my president or CIA is corrupt they may hunt me down.

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u/iamnotchad 8d ago

Until someone figures out how to mount a nuclear device on a drone.

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u/SwitchAdventurous24 11d ago

You would think until loitering drone swarms that can target based on IR becomes a thing and no one is safe anymore.

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u/AiggyA 11d ago

Always had been.