Big Space

Remember the covers of those science-fiction paperbacks of the 1970s and 1980s, replete with Big Ships and Big Explosions, lots of Culminating Moments, and the occasional Heavily Armed Cyberwaif? Rest assured that Concept Ships does as well, and also highlights those who continue to make cover-ready art their mission.

It's Fantasy Tuesday!

And fantasy Tuesday means thinking about the best of all possible worlds:

Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and Ayman al-Zawahri signing a surrender document while sitting across a table from Admiral Mullen, General Petraeus and Secretary of Defense Gates. On the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri, of course. ...

Jerusalem in 2111

Thanks to Chris Hurwitz for referring me to Jerusalem in 2111, a contest to produce the best science-fiction short about what the world's most contested city will look like a century from now.

The winner.

The 2002 remake of Rollerball was pretty wretched, playing down the social commentary of the James Caan original while amping up the violence and spectacle. But the remake's future had one big plus: quick, clever glimpses of post-Soviet Central Asia as a new Wild West with Russian as the lingering lingua franca.

However, this morning's Times hints that tomorrow's sportif Great Gamers may speak Mandarin instead, as "China Quietly Extends Footprints into Central Asia". The pipelines, the highways, the consumer goods, the Confucius Institutes; here I was thinking Central Asia's future might look Turkish, but with Istanbul so far away I can just glimpse the hazy outlines of a Han Samarkand.

Planning for Vampire-Americans

The utter inescapability of vampire-related books, movies, TV shows, and so on implies that there actually are vampires out there somewhere and I just haven't met one yet.

So I think it's time for a scenario that ponders what kinds of public-policy moves the recognition of Vampire-Americans would require.

Oh wait, someone's already done it.

I Missed These Two Afghanistan Scenarios ...

... as published here in the Post. Luckily Global Guerrillas didn't, so thanks to GG creator John Robb.

I'll Take the Ventilator

ALL WOUND UP ABOUT HEALTH-CARE "RATIONING?" YOU HAVE NO IDEA.

Foes of a "public option" frequently raise the specter of "health-care rationing" to frighten those who are nervous about government-run healthcare. The scare-mongers try to create hysteria around the idea that soulless federal bureaucrats would rather gak your grandma than pay for her dentures. (As opposed to insurance-company bureaucrats, who also don't pay for grandma's dentures but allow her to live on, toothless.)

In calmer European or Canadian contexts, "rationing" means that, if five day-long elective surgeries are scheduled for today but only four surgeons, the fifth patient has to wait until tomorrow, or whenever a surgeon becomes available. This can mean waiting for weeks or months, which is harmless enough in non-emergency situations: You still get the surgery done, and life goes on.


However, today's Times features a timely discussion about "rationing" scenarios: In the H1N1 context, who can use the limited number of ventilators and flu shots on hand? In "Worst Case: Choosing Who Survives in a Flu Epidemic," Sheri Fink relates a tough scenario that medical professionals at New York-Presbyterian Hospital had to chew on:

A 32-year-old man with cystic fibrosis is rushed to the hospital with appendicitis in the midst of a worsening pandemic caused by the H1N1 flu virus, which has mutated into a more deadly form. The man is awaiting a lung transplant and brought with him the mechanical ventilator that helps him breathe.

New York’s governor has declared a state of emergency and hospitals are following the state’s pandemic ventilator allocation plan — actual guidelines drafted in 2007 that are now being revisited. The plan aims to direct ventilators to those with the best chances of survival in a severe, 1918-like flu pandemic where tens of thousands develop life-threatening pneumonia.

Because the man’s end-stage lung disease caused by his cystic fibrosis is among a list of medical conditions associated with high mortality, the guidelines would bar the man from using a ventilator in a hospital, even though he is, unlike many with his illness, stable, in good condition, and not close to death. If the hospital admits him, the guidelines call for the machine that keeps him alive to be given to someone else.

Would doctors and nurses follow such rules? Should they?

Fink goes on to quote from several federal and state officials and plans, nicely highlighting both the policy dilemmas and human factors that will come into play if items such as ventilators ever need to be rationed in a flu-related emergency.

For a more detailed discussion of the ethics of triage, see this surprisingly lengthy and thorough Wikipedia article. It covers several nations' triage systems, including military combat and non-combat guidelines. Some triage decision-making systems are dynamic, some relatively static—but all need to be thought about or revisited now, before any hospitals fill up and people start rioting over shots of H1N1 vaccine.

Today's Post also covers the world of H1N1, including:

An odd attempt to explain why Mexico's Isla Mujeres resort area is nearly deserted. The writer blames H1N1 flu fears and the recession, not even hinting at more serious concerns about kidnapping and running gun battles in streets across Mexico until paragraph 12 (of 15).

Ongoing, obsessive coverage (here, here, here, here ...) of local H1N1 vaccination efforts, in the best local-TV-news, ten-things-in-your-medicine-cabinet-that-can-kill-you tradition.

Image Credit.

Forests of Mount Everest

Here's a recent image of the Monongahela National Forest; is it what the Himalayas might look like around 2400 AD?

I just finished reading John Jerome's On Mountains. Jerome, a moderately successful author probably best known for Truck: On Rebuilding a Worn-Out Pickup and Other Post-Technological Adventures, used to edit Skiing magazine but later in life became a sort of more intimate, New England John McPhee.

In any case, On Mountains* includes a passage about montane plant life and, in a mid-1970s moment where concerns about global warming were hardly well-known, describes an interesting scenario about its consequences:

Disaster fans are fond of pointing out that a rise of only a very few degress in worldwide temperature would melt the ice caps, causing flooding of most of our major seacoast cities. Mountain lovers might take some small comfort from the realization that however disastrous that flooding would be in the short run—removing great quantities of useful land from our inventory—nevertheless, a subsequent development would restore at least some of the damage. A temperature change sufficient to melt the ice caps would also raise the timberline—worldwide—above the heights of the tallest peaks. It would take several hundred years to happen, granted, but the forest would inevitably climb right on up and conquer the same bleak and rocky peaks that the mountain climbers covet so dearly. Better make that several thousand years, to give time for the dawdling millimeter-by-millimeter process of soil building to permit the ascending forest a foothold. That same time scale won't do much for the inundated residents of New York and Tokyo, but compared to most mountain processes, it will happen quickly enough to be almost reassuring.

I'm not sure about how good Jerome's science is here, but it is an intriguing idea that one day you'd have dense forest canopy in zones where most animal life can only exist for a few hours, and where nearly any mountaineer whose last name isn't Viesturs needs bottled oxygen just to remain conscious.

* On Mountains is an excellent introduction to all things montane but, like most Jerome books, long out of print. I got my circa-1978 copy at the Rockville branch of Second Story Books, whose thousands of feet of used books are worth a side trip for anyone who has a few spare hours during a visit to D.C.

Photo credit.

FastForward: Heads-Up Displays, Augmented Reality

First in an occasional series of brief looks at a technology, its present and future, and its expression in science fiction. Today: heads-up displays and augmented reality, two technologies that differ in degree more than in kind. For example:

Today: HUDs for your bike helmet and augmented reality (AR) for your walk around Salzburg.

Tomorrow: Synthetic vision systems that replace reality altogether, such as this one showing pilots a "tunnel in the sky" to where they want to go.

As usual, science fiction got here long before science. Here I'm thinking primarily about the AR in Rainbows End, where high-school kids use wearable computers to navigate through real and imagined spaces. But Wikipedia jogged my memory that Charles Stross's Halting State includes Copspace, a heads-up display for law enforcement. And who could forget Iron Man's in-flight HUD or his armor's simultaneous takedown of a half-dozen or so thugs in 2008's Robert Downey Jr. vehicle?

More ominously, you get HUDs so compelling as to keep the remainder of humanity in their chairs—their entire lives—in WALL-E.

Even though WALL-E is satire, it's not that far; witness my wife and I walking near the Verizon Center last night during rush hour. An oncoming pedestrian was so absorbed in texting that we had to split apart and duck out of her way at the last second. The ped never noticed us. Playing World of Warcraft? Shopping for jeans? Searching for a date? We'll never know.

Jane McGonigal and SuperBetter

Jane McGonigal creates alternate reality games (ARGs), basically MMORPGs that you play in reality rather than on your desktop.

She creates ARGs that operate on a global scale (The Lost Ring) or just around Times Square or downtown San Francisco (CryptoZoo).

And she also is pretty brave.

This past summer a collision with a cabinet door concussed her pretty badly. Post-concussion symptoms included crippling vertigo, blurred vision, mental fogginess, an inability to read, write or jog. The initial onset lasted five weeks until, she thought, "I’m either going to kill myself, or I’m going to turn this into a game."

So she created a superhero ARG, with herself as Buffy the Concussion Slayer while friends and family played Buffy's allies. She assembled a secret identity, missions, a superhero to-do list, "power-ups," and villains in the form of her symptoms. Here, in a nutshell, is why:

In an alternate reality linked to our favorite superhero mythology, we’re more likely to stay optimistic, because we’ll set more reasonable goals and keep better track [of] our progress.

And you know what? It worked.

Read her completely inspiring blog entry, "SuperBetter—or how to turn recovery into a multiplayer experience," complete with YouTube videos explaining the process.

Epidemic as Teacher

THE "GOLDEN SHADOW" AND "DARK WINTER" SCENARIOS BOTH LOOKED AT BIOWARFARE RESPONSE—BUT FROM COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES.

Last month I met Eric Rasmussen of InSTEDD at the Gov 2.0 conference here in DC. He mentioned a bioterror exercise that InSTEDD and some San Francisco Peninsula agencies had conducted in 2008 called Golden Shadow, which immediately reminded me of 2001's Dark Winter exercise (see Comparison, below).

I asked Eric and his colleague Mary Jane Marcus for the scripts participants had used for the exercise—considering that InSTEDD is fairly modest about Golden Shadow on its Web site—and they were nice enough to oblige.

Golden Shadow examined how newer technologies might help first responders better coordinate their response to a pneumonic-plague attack on a rock concert in San Jose. This exercise was intensely local, as opposed to Dark Winter's National Security Council bunker, all-the-president's-men approach.

Besides InSTEDD, participants included the Menlo Park Fire District, San Mateo County's public health department, three area neighborhoods, a health clinic and a school. Participants went out into the field, knocked on doors to assess the epidemic's progress, distributed "antibiotics," and sent and received both planned and ad hoc messages to an emergency communications center (ECC).

Notably, InSTEDD developed software that let volunteers report from the field via online forms, text messages, GPS-linked photos, and blog entries. "This field information was then portrayed in Google Earth at the Emergency Communications Center, ... the headquarters for first responders. For the first time, firefighters and public health officials could see the crisis in real time as it unfolded in the field." In other words, Golden Shadow emphasized information-sharing from the field and among agencies, and visualizing that information at a central location to enhance decision-makers' situational awareness.

Interestingly, Golden Shadow assumed a great deal of friction—Clausewitz's "fog of war"—from the outset. For instance, all computer-based information was transferred through donated INMARSAT satellite time rather than landline-based Internet, reflecting the possibility that landlines may be unusable during a disaster.

(This assumption helps agencies operate better in disasters, a topic I touched on in the SF Weekly 13 years ago and that Lin Wells and STAR-TIDES have elevated into an art form.)

Golden Shadow also assumed that ordinary people make data-entry errors, run out of antibiotics, wonder what to do with victims' bodies, and get spooked by the epidemic; one participant reads this note during the scenario's second hour: " You develop symptoms—a cough (not bloody) but you are concerned."

In addition, edgy civilians complicate matters by "approaching" volunteers in the field demanding prophylaxis, or take the law into their own hands by confining people they think are sick to their own houses.

These touches are a refreshing change from scenarios that assume you start with your full complement of capabilities—all your day-to-day technology operational, a focused and rested staff, and citizens who act altruistically as well as selfishly.

So how did Golden Shadow go? Given that it explicitly focused on whether certain tools could be used in a disaster-response setting rather than how well they did, and on social as much as technological factors, this exercise generated a lot of useful information:

Pluses
—First responders communicated well among themselves using FRS (walkie-talkies) and SMS (text) messaging, preferring more advanced forms of data communications to report outside their own communities.

—Geo-blogs, micro-geo blogs, and GPS-linked photos helped make field reports more intuitive by correlating data immediately with geographic location.

—People will use what they're most familiar with, meaning old favorites such as walkie-talkies and ham radio got a workout compared with their higher-tech brethren. This implies that more-intense training on technologies such as Google Earth could turn that technology into a real aid to situational awareness.

Minuses
—That said, Google Earth didn't function as well as hoped, primarily because it requires some training to use and participants had difficulty loading different layers of data into it. In addition, Google Earth's latitude/longitude system didn't play well with the fire department's geographic system, which centers on street addresses.

—Volunteers sent much information "upstream" to the ECC, but didn't receive much in return fromITAL the ECC, which was overwhelmed by a data flow purposely designed to have a wide range of relevance.

—Volunteers questioned which modality to use to transmit different types of information; for example, one volunteer used SMS to announce that riots were beginning in her neighborhood when ham radio or a cell-phone voice call might have gotten more attention.

To paraphrase one participant, you can see the an interesting new future peeking out around the edges of this exercise. Hopefully, when more funding can be found (or cash-strapped California resumes its statewide Golden Guardian exercises), we'll see more of this type of scenario used to test both new technologies and old-fashioned interagency cooperation.


Comparison
Dark Winter (2001): Top-down, Andrews Air Force Base, simulated three National Security Council meetings over 14 days of real time. Checked how well federal, state and local governments worked together vs. smallpox attack. Former Sen. Sam Nunn played a U.S. president who, amidst news of rising geopolitical instability, receives word that cases of smallpox have been detected in Oklahoma City, Atlanta and Philadelphia. Produced some rather grim findings.

Golden Shadow (2008): Bottom-up, northern California, simulated operation of first responders and emergency command center over several "days," taking four hours of real time. Checked how well bottom-up reporting worked vs. pneumonic-plague attack. No politicians or celebrities involved; further notable for including the wretched stepchild of Peninsula cities, East Palo Alto, in a marquee exercise. Produced some encouraging prospects for future exercises.

Let Me Count the Futurists

If you were in danger of thinking there was just one type of futurist, AccelerationWatch offers a nice corrective with its list of a dozen major types of futurists here. Pick one social type and one methodological type to create your own. Color me both Predictive and Professional. ...

Job Voyager

For a long-term look at where occupations have been and where they're headed, check out Job Voyager, a riff on the phenomenally useful Name Voyager. Watch 1850-2000 job data in horror as blacksmiths vanish and bookkeepers swarm! Farmers plummet and machinists dwindle while "Professional-Misc" and gardener/groundskeeper take up the slack!

Four Easy Pieces

SELF-ASSEMBLING ROBOTS? TO THWART DETECTION, THE PARTS REALLY MAY BE GREATER THAN THE WHOLE.


While heavy-duty cockpit doors and air marshals have made life more difficult for potential skyjackers, defenses against explosives and criminal passengers remain focused on detecting them when they first enter the air-travel system.

TSA sniffs for explosives and scrutinizes passengers fitting certain profiles; use cash to buy a one-way ticket the same day as your flight and you'll see this system in action first-hand.

In other words, TSA is looking for a nutcase with a suitcase.

While such profiling may indeed screen out lone bombers, past attackers have exhibited much more patience than TSA practice indicates. 9/11-type conspirators might not want to bring a bomb on board at all, knowing that TSA is geared to precisely this type of attack.* With sufficient patience, though, attackers may devise other ways to destroy aircraft in flight, such as by carefully stowing pieces of a specialized, non-explosive device aboard a specific aircraft over time.

Summary: In the next five years, disassembled, metal-poor robots may challenge point-based, explosives-oriented security checks at airports. Assembled aboard an aircraft over days or weeks, such semi-autonomous devices represent an emerging type of slow-motion threat.

Assumptions: Advances in miniaturization and autonomy of small, tool-using robots.

Scenario: United flight 38 was sufficiently full that the blue-eyed terrorist had to stow his carry-on bag beneath the seat in front of him.

But had the Chicago-Los Angeles flight been empty, Blue Eyes would still have stowed his bag there. Doing so allowed him to fiddle with the bag's zippers, in the process extracting a very small robot from his bag and carefully attaching it to the bottom of the seat in front of him.

There, the robot, which could be mistaken for a particularly stylish wine-bottle opener, would sit until an opportunity arose to hook up with three of its mates, which others had clipped beneath the same seat on previous flights.

It had taken awhile to determine which flights a given aircraft would be used for, but al-Qa'ida eventually started tracking a United Airlines MD-11 whose call letters were NMV 4523.** Its agents started buying tickets online and choosing the same seat each time they flew. Al-Qa'ida passengers then found that harmless items attached beneath seats (pens, prescription eyeglass cases, cell phones in clip-on holsters) went unmolested for several weeks, at least if the aircraft was between federally mandated safety inspections.

So Al-Qa'ida graduated to placing more threatening items beneath those seats.

Once United 38 leveled out, Blue Eyes touched a button on his BlackBerry that phoned the cluster of four hidden robots. The hitchhikers signaled back that they had not been detected or tampered with.

Blue Eyes's work on this flight was done, and he sat back to enjoy his new copy of Sports Illustrated.

The four robotic components were programmed to wait until their sound and light sensors indicated that the passenger compartment was probably empty, as when the plane was parked to one side for maintenance. Such a quiet period might not occur for weeks, but then the four would unfold and self-assemble into a single larger unit, then re-fold into an innocuous-looking package beneath the same window seat.

At this point, the robot would go back to sleep until its GPS-based altimeter told it that it was riding at 30,000 feet or more, with a course indicating a lengthy transcontinental flight. It and a second assembled robot—Blue Eyes didn't know about the second team of agents and their efforts to emplace a device—would then awaken and get to work.

The nearby roar of the MD-11's three engines would lessen their chance of being detected. In fact the robots had intentionally been placed toward the MD-11's rear, near the stabilizer-mounted third engine that offered such a wealth of associated controls and fuel lines.

Despite their mostly plastic construction, the robots would have sufficient power to employ small saws or drills—Blue Eyes didn't know which—to cut their way out of the passenger compartment toward the MD-11's fuselage. With such access, they could hunt for pre-programmed targets to sabotage such as hydraulic cables or other controllers.

Since the MD-11 was primarily a long-haul aircraft, al-Qa'ida's planners felt that the robots could work slowly and quietly for hours without being detected.

Optimally, the robots would cause this MD-11 to crash—and Blue Eyes didn't know whether other planes had been targeted for this type of attack. Even if the robots were detected or their attacks failed, experience showed that such an incident would probably ground the U.S. air fleet for weeks. Every inch of every aircraft would have to be re-inspected and security-checkpoint protocols adjusted, causing billions in economic damage to an economy that really couldn't afford the hit.

It was all a matter of being patient.

Technical and Policy Issues: Security checkpoints currently search for banned materials (metals, and explosives and their precursors) and suspicious shapes. How would we design a functioning robot that didn't have sufficient metal or a sufficiently revealing shape to trigger alarms? This shouldn't be terribly difficult; most of the metal would be in the robots' power sources and tools (e.g. drill bits, saws), and self-assembling robots are getting to be old news.

The devices described in the scenario above could be designed to take highly creative actions depending on their circumstances. For example, scientists at both SRI and Carnegie Mellon have developed divergent technologies that let small robots adhere to and climb most types of walls.

Note also that the hugely popular, kid-friendly Lego MindStorms robots already exhibit great diversity and high functionality. It is possible that a crew member detecting a terrorist robot could mistake it for a toy and turn it in to his airline's lost-and-found department rather than the TSA.

References: Minority Report’s tiny walking robots. Lego MindStorms NXT. Science fiction that deals with independent, self-reproducing "von Neumann machines," including “Crabs on the Island” (1958?) by Anatoly Dneprov.

* "Shoe bomber" Richard Reid straddles the lone-nut and organized-attacker categories: equipped and nominally ready, but ultimately too agitated to detonate himself out of the sight of passengers and crew—say, in a lavatory.

** The "United flight 38" above is a fictional composite; for example, no U.S. airline currently flies the MD-11 in passenger service. The MD-11 was included here because its rear-mounted third engine makes it uniquely vulnerable to certain types of problems, as accidents involving its similarly configured predecessor, the DC-10, have demonstrated.

Photo courtesy of and copyright 2004 by the LEGO Group.

Pretext for Tyranny!

Fox News's Katie Cobb manages to gasp out just a dozen words of a "worst case scenario" about swine flu before using the words "martial law." Following hot on law's heels are forced detention, pretext for tyranny, mass graves and, most disturbingly, inflatable mortuaries:

An uncontrollable, deadly virus ravages America, shutting down civilian institutions and triggering martial law. Vaccinations are compulsory, and there are mass quarantines throughout the country.

It's the stuff of Hollywood — but rumors that it could be real are spreading like the flu in the blogosphere, where some people are loudly expressing their fears that the federal government is seriously considering such measures as it maps out a worst-case-scenario response to the swine flu pandemic.

During the bird flu scare of 2005, the Bush administration added novel forms of influenza — including the swine flu — to the official list of "quarantinable communicable diseases," clearing the way for the forced detention of people who exhibit symptoms of the disease.

Now a proposal awaiting Defense Secretary Robert Gates' approval would allow the military to set up regional teams to assist civilian authorities in dealing with the impact of the swine flu pandemic. And some observers see this level of government preparedness as little more than a pretext for tyranny.

"The implications are far reaching," Michel Chossudovsky wrote on the Global Research Web site, which averages 18,000 visitors daily. "The decision points toward the establishment of a police state," he said.

Astonishingly, after Cobb allows adults a brief appearance in her story to admit that using the military is unlikely and that government planners must think in worst-case terms to avoid being unprepared, she ends with a non sequitur that indicates her editor's probably sucking down umbrella drinks on some Caribbean vacation:

So rewrite the script: An uncontrollable, deadly virus ravages the population, triggering martial law to protect a handful of survivors lucky enough to get a vaccination.

Fun with Forecasts

To continue for a moment on the hazards of straight-line projections—atomic power will be too cheap to meter!—see "The Lost History of Alternative Energy in America," which looks back at all those blue-sky predictions about how nuclear/solar/wind/etc. would liberate us from fossil fuels.

And yes, even Amory Lovins gets it wrong sometimes, although at least he had the sense to hedge.

Robert McNamara Dies

Robert S. McNamara, one-time Whiz Kid and secretary of defense for both JFK and LBJ, died this morning here in Washington.

McNamara's relevance to a blog about scenarios is that his obsessiveness about numbers and straight-line projections, so useful to him in relatively predictable environments such as Ford Motor Co., drew him to disaster as SecDef.

McNamara can be seen as the Anti-Scenarist, someone who believed his basic model of the Vietnam War was correct and that better input (more troops and bombing) would assure better output (North Vietnam knuckling under). He seemed unwilling to consider that a World War II model of warfare might not apply to post-colonial Vietnam.

Only later in life did McNamara wrestle with his responsibility for escalating the war, and I can't recommend Errol Morris's The Fog of War enough for its window into McNamara's thinking and repentance.

Joseph Campbell's "Mythos"

It's a truism that looking at the future and even the present means examining the past. Luckily Joseph Campbell's Mythos series examines the storytelling of the past--the creation scenarios so crucial to every culture large or small--in 10 episodes that the Montgomery County Public Library has on DVD. ... Gotta go pop some popcorn.

Behind the Curve

I've had fun thinking Very Advanced Thoughts about military applications of robotic technology, particularly with biomimetic design of individuals and flocking-and-schooling algorithms for groups.

What I've really been thinking are Laughably Behind the Curve Thoughts, though, judging from a set of videos by German robotics developer Festo: penguins of the water and air, rays, and jellyfish.

Incidentally, biomimetic design isn't the exclusive province of German scientists; check out this bit of footage of robot fish schooling at the University of Washington.

Pickets' Charge

IN WHICH UAVs TRICKLE DOWN TO NON-STATE ACTORS, THEN BACK UP TO ROGUE STATES.


Advances in UAV technology among non-state actors—from California farmers to Hezbollah to Silicon Valley writers—imply the tiny unmanned planes will also see greater use by large companies that need cheap ways to peek over the horizon from their operations.

Internationally, commercial shippers and offshore oil rigs are logical users of commercial UAVs. Both types of businesses are capital-intensive and vulnerable to human threats, and the cost of UAV-based surveillance and defense is small relative to the replacement value of company facilities and employees.

It’s not hard to imagine that blue-water freighters and offshore drilling rigs may soon deploy their own pickets—screens of UAVs that extend their hosts’ alertness and increase warning times in trouble-prone waters. Since UAVs are on their way to becoming fully automatic (particularly since they’ve long performed complex tasks such as crossing the Atlantic on their own), it’s reasonable to expect they might also be programmed to work with one another closely.

However, these concepts can also translate to offense, as this next scenario posits.

Assumptions: By 2015, rogue states mimic Western advances in UAVs and robotics.

Scenario: The South Korean Navy P-3 banked slowly over the crippled freighter. At this distance the P-3’s pilot could easily read the name painted in big white letters near the ship’s bow: MV Maersk Global.

The massive container ship appeared much as its crew had warned it would be, and the P-3’s radio operator started relaying his observations back to the plane’s base at Pohang Airport.

Pohang, Recon One Four here. Target ship is in sight below us in calm seas. Hull appears undamaged. No crew on deck and pilothouse is empty. Burn marks, possibly from small explosions, at several points along decks. Pilothouse window appears blown in and there are burn marks on superstructure nearby, over.

The reply came instantly, since many high-ranking officials were monitoring the P-3’s mission.

Recon One Four, Pohang. Acknowledged. Continue.

The pilot swung around for a pass over the ship’s rear as the radioman continued his assessment.

Pohang, Recon One Four. Blast marks around rudder and possible damage. Screws are not turning and ship is adrift, over.

Recon One Four’s pilot mused that the decks were clear and the ship adrift for good reason: Thirty hours ago the crew had barricaded themselves belowdecks to ride out an attack by a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Yesterday morning, the Global’s crew was startled to see about 10 prop-driven UAVs flying around their ship. Since their ship was in international waters east of North Korea, the crew assumed the small planes had somehow strayed from an exercise by Pyongyang.

Still, the Global’s navigator triple-checked their location, confirming that the ship was well away from North Korean territory. In fact, it was on almost exactly the same line from Vladivostok to Pusan that it had traveled a dozen times before, always without incident.

So for the next 10 minutes, the crew treated the buzzing UAVs as an interesting nuisance—until the small aircraft turned out to be armed. Crewmen reported later that the UAVs fired a few small but potent missiles at the deck, causing the sailors to scatter. The UAVs then specifically targeted the ship’s rudder, damaging it so that it was stuck in a shallow left turn.

Once the crew realized they had no defenses and couldn't steer, they’d idled the ship’s engines, locked themselves below, and called for help. They would have happily surrendered to human attackers, but none appeared.

Nearly blind, the crew had no idea whether the UAVs were still present and no taste for finding out, considering that some of them had suffered minor burns and one apparently had some light hearing damage.

In the day or so since then, the Global had drifted westward and now was just about in North Korean waters.

The Maersk company quickly persuaded Danish diplomats to contact the North Korean government, which denied knowledge of any incident and any UAVs. Although multiple countries were ready to blame Pyongyang anyway, none of them had monitored any transmissions to or from the UAVs. The aircraft certainly communicated with each other—they had coordinated an attack—but seemingly not with anyone else.

Yes, it was difficult to blame Pyongyang, which also professed outrage that someone had attacked a peaceful commercial vessel so near its territory. To the world’s great surprise, North Korea told Denmark that it would allow anyone into the North’s waters to aid the Global—South Koreans, Americans, whoever the Danes thought might help.

Unfortunately, the North said, since the rescue might be hazardous—UAVs had attacked a freighter, and who knew where they might strike next? The North had to protect its own coast in case they reappeared!—Pyongyang’s own navy would stand off and observe while other nations aided the Global.

And that was how a South Korean P-3 came to be loitering, unmolested, over a giant, abandoned-looking Danish container ship in North Korean seas.

Recon One Four, Pohang. Global crew ask that you verify no UAVs in the area.

Pohang, Recon One Four, that’s affirmative, no UAVs or other aircraft in target’s area. We are alone, over.

The pilot looked down again moments later to see two Global crewmen peering cautiously from behind a heavy-looking hatch that opened out from the superstructure. They waved, and the pilot waggled the P-3’s wings to acknowledge them.

It was remarkable, the P-3’s pilot thought: Zombie aircraft had created a zombie freighter.


Policy Issues: In one stroke, Pyongyang broadcasts that its technological prowess has jumped and that its coast is off limits, all at minimal cost in manpower or political capital.

Tactical Issues: How do you handle attribution in the above case? What countermeasures can a civilian ship’s crew take to defeat the UAVs? Must commercial ships begin to carry their own UAVs for safety? Are dueling automated UAVs a possibility in the next 10 years?

Technical Issues: In the animal kingdom, swarming, flocking and schooling are governed by simple algorithms that regulate an animal’s speed, course, and distance from its peers and other objects. What algorithms would enable aggressive yet useful swarming by UAVs? Can targets employ countermeasures that disrupt those swarms, fooling them into “believing” they are too close together, too close to a target, or acting too aggressively?

Fictional References: The late Michael Crichton’s Prey, which deals with ludicrously advanced swarming, learning nanobots.