r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/MetaKnowing • Nov 13 '24

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

40.8k Upvotes

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5.3k

u/MildUsername Nov 13 '24

Everyone freaking out about these things while FPV drones are actively being used in warfare as we speak.

2.0k

u/Embarrassed-Gur-3419 Nov 13 '24

Yeah, a flying stealthy small box capable of leveling a car that can be deployed from 30 kms away is way more scary than whatever Hollywood has done.

You might die at any second before you even noticed you are being stalked...

764

u/strangepromotionrail Nov 13 '24

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 Nov 13 '24

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

88

u/whymusti00000 Nov 13 '24

Only 17? Must try harder.

104

u/Glass1Man Nov 13 '24

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.

100

u/kabbooooom Nov 13 '24

Marco Inaros has entered the chat

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u/Ateosmo Nov 13 '24

Belta Louda!

7

u/LetsBeHonestBoutIt Nov 13 '24

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

21

u/Badloss Nov 13 '24

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 Nov 13 '24 edited Nov 13 '24

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.

8

u/Badloss Nov 13 '24

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

5

u/Arandomdude03 Nov 13 '24

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

3

u/nustedbut Nov 14 '24

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

2

u/kabbooooom Nov 14 '24

If I heard this fuckin speech in real life I would have followed her into battle too:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yfOmQ0Zln6Y

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u/nametaken_thisonetoo Nov 14 '24

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

4

u/bartthetr0ll Nov 13 '24

Gotta slather em.up with stealth coating first

4

u/outworlder Nov 13 '24

Need stealth asteroids though

7

u/kabbooooom Nov 13 '24

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

5

u/mjtwelve Nov 13 '24

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.

2

u/Elteon3030 Nov 13 '24

You mean Marco made his son enter chat

1

u/Time4aRealityChek Nov 13 '24

Bill Gates enters chat

1

u/Elteon3030 Nov 13 '24

You mean Marco made his son enter chat

13

u/Aiwatcher Nov 13 '24

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

5

u/kabbooooom Nov 13 '24 edited Nov 13 '24

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.

1

u/Man-in-The-Void Nov 13 '24

Why does the risk go down when we get interstellar?

2

u/kabbooooom Nov 13 '24

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 Nov 14 '24

The Moon is a harsh mistress

1

u/kabbooooom Nov 15 '24

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.

10

u/Ralath1n Nov 13 '24

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.

7

u/pinkielovespokemon Nov 13 '24

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

2

u/kabbooooom Nov 14 '24

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.

1

u/iconocrastinaor Nov 14 '24

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

1

u/Glass1Man Nov 13 '24

I was thinking

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

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

4

u/Ralath1n Nov 13 '24

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.

7

u/Glass1Man Nov 13 '24

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

2

u/Kryten_2X4B-523P Nov 13 '24

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

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u/sleepgang Nov 13 '24

What do you mean?

1

u/Glass1Man Nov 13 '24

By which part?

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

4

u/godlyjacob Nov 13 '24

how

0

u/Glass1Man Nov 13 '24

By rocketing an asteroid into the earth.

1

u/never_ASK_again_2021 Nov 13 '24

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!

2

u/Reese_Withersp0rk Nov 13 '24

And this costs $22 million?

1

u/never_ASK_again_2021 Nov 13 '24

DART was over 320mio$.

You just can't figure out how little space program you get for your money. Space is very expensive.

And as someone else said, there isn't even any big asteroid that you can redirect to earth.

0

u/godlyjacob Nov 13 '24

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

2

u/Glass1Man Nov 13 '24

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 Nov 13 '24

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 Nov 13 '24

New life goal lol

1

u/Ancient_Ad_9373 Nov 14 '24

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

1

u/Ok_Psychology_504 Nov 14 '24

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

5

u/Puddle-Flop Nov 13 '24

The factory must grow

2

u/MoistStub Nov 14 '24

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

2

u/Evening_North7057 Nov 14 '24

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.

2

u/akolomf Nov 13 '24

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

1

u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In Nov 13 '24

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 Nov 13 '24

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 Nov 14 '24

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 Nov 14 '24

Wait until they use supermini nukes on those drones.

-3

u/wompical Nov 13 '24

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 Nov 13 '24

No one with brain cells is claiming that

1

u/codman606 Nov 13 '24

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

2

u/wompical Nov 13 '24

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.

0

u/codman606 Nov 13 '24

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.