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If we collected all the insects in the world and distributed
them evenly, each person on Earth would get about 15 billion crawly creatures of their very own. Married couples would get 30 billion, of course, and parents would get an additional 15 billion for each child. (This could reinvigorate planned parenthood.)
I think I am on to something.
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) conceived the idea of putting remote controls on a flying insect, attaching a miniature camera, and creating the “spy fly.” Ha, ha, aka lesser known as the cyborg beetle.
The University of Michigan, working on government funding one would suppose, came up with a better plan. They convert bugs into batteries. Well, of course, it is still experimental, but they plant little coiled spiral wires on the back of the Green June Beetle, the Cotinis nitida (Linnaeus). This is a much prettier bug than the cyborg beetle. The rapidly moving wings of the Green June Beetle (GJB) cause the rods to oscillate, energizing a piezoelectric (pee-AZO-electric) crystal, and produce energy. This energy can be transmitted elsewhere or used, in situ, to operate tiny electronics.
How long does the bugger (I mean battery) last? Well, I guess as long as the beetle lives. That would be about three years, assuming your lawn survives to munch on.
How powerful is this little green giant? Well, if he is well fed and energetic, he can churn about 45 microwatts (45 one-thousandth of a milliwatt). That is not much energy, but then again, we have allocated 15 billion bugs to you. If you are smart and ask for your entire allotment in GJB’s, you can harness your little team (uneducated southerners call them “swarms”) to generate about 225 kilowatts of electricity. This would be enough enough energy to run an entire community.
(Advisors from the ACLU and SPCA were, of course, on hand during my calculations. No bug would be permitted to work more than eight hours a day. The rest of their time would be spent ingesting your lawn and producing little young’uns. While no bugs were killed in my research the rules of the ADA Act of 1990 had to be swept under the rug because little GJB’s do not take kindly to gluing devices on them.)
Now, an even better idea than the GJB Battery is the use of cockroach spies. They are not as pretty as the Green June Beetle but more useful, as you shall see. The cameras are a little large now, but with a tad more miniaturization you would have the perfect spy machine. Since those nasty creatures can crawl through any crack imaginable, you just release them in the room at lunch time and all the secretaries depart screaming. A woman’s natural inclination will be not to even get near your R-Team. You can spy in peace. Pretty soon your guys are crawling into every file cabinet and drawer and taking pictures of, well, who knows what? You know, secret documents and the like. The real truth behind the JFK assassination, what the Air Force did with the Roswell aliens, and where Elvis is.
This idea is going to make it big.
What I like about it is all those bugs that used to bug you can now bug you.