Directing a flight of crows into a jet engine on takeoff is one thing. A
replay of "The Birds" is another level of command and control which is
vulnerable to jamming. The measure/countermeasure escalation can put the
game out of reach of terrorists.
I was thinking the same thing last week when I wrote that you would have to have a few hundred people hidden in the United States to pull off this attack. However, over the weekend I thought about some more while I was watching our Roomba robot vacuum cleaner at work. See:
http://www.irobot.com/consumer/why_roomba.cfm
This gadget has a remarkable level of artificial intelligence. It finds its way around the room, feels along the wall, and recognizes dirt and sharp drop-off. It knows how to back out of tight corners and untangle itself from electric wires, cloth and tassels. I would say it is roughly as intelligent as a wasp. And a wasp, needless to say, can easily & effectively recognize and attack a person.
The terrorists in our scenario would not care which 1,024 people they killed on Day 7. If they could make control electronics as smart as Roomba's, with something like an IR camera, I do not think it would be difficult for these machines to recognize individual human beings and to distinguish between them and other warm objects such as automobiles or dogs. All the terrorists have to do then is be sure the robots are widely separated to prevent two of them from selecting the same victim. They could launch them from anywhere on earth, have them proceed to different towns and cities with a built-in GPS system, and then on a given date attack the first human being they sense.
The only way the US could interfere with this would be to turn off the GPS system, and there are probably other navigation systems that would work almost as well, such as inertial guidance. Actually, you hardly need a navigation system. You could tell the robots to head off in the general direction of the US and strike at any person anywhere, in a town, city or isolated countryside. The robots might kill a few cows and deer, but they will find people everywhere, and it would be hard to miss a target as large as the US. If they killed a few people in Canada or Mexico it would actually enhance the attack.
Carrell mentioned advanced insectlike flying machines with flapping wings. I describe these in the book. The terrorists would not need anything like that. They could use ordinary propeller driven it aircraft the size of model airplanes and model helicopters. As far as I know, these things could easily fly halfway around the world war all the way around the world even now. Of course some would be lost in storms, and once the US was alerted some might be intercepted, but plenty would get through.
- Jed
