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I've been dreaming about that to kill mosquitoes since I was a teenager. Then I wondered: "how to prevent firing the laser into someone's eye?" and my idea was

I've been dreaming about that to kill mosquitoes since I was a teenager. Then I wondered: "how to prevent firing the laser into someone's eye?" and my idea was to only shoot laser from 2 meters high and to only ever shoot towards the ceiling, never downwards, while having the ceiling having some kind of paint/material that wouldn't be reflecting the laser too much. Make the paint/material all white to makes mosquito detection easier. And it'd be probabilistic: considering that, at some point, the mosquito is bound to fly at a height higher than 2 meters in your room. And then boom, the laser. A pipe dream but I hate these little fuckers.

dumbfoundded 5y ago
We use lasers in lots of consumer products, we don't really have any with exposed lasers. You just can't guarantee that someone doesn't flip a quarter and blind themselves. It's a cool idea but pretty impossible to be safe.
- feupan 5y ago
  I think the chances of a quarter’s reflection aligning to your eye while the laser is on and pointing at it are pretty damn slim. If that’s still too high, you better eliminate all corners in your kitchen because someone is going to lose an eye. And don’t get me started on forks.
  - bmitc 5y ago
    Lasers are assigned a classification and regulated. You can't just get a lower classification just because. You can severely damage your eye (and more) with a laser, which may not even be visible. If corners and forks were invisible, traveled at the speed of light, propagated over large distances, were regulated, and could affect aircraft, then maybe your analogies would work.
  - true_religion 5y ago
    The laser is designed to shoot small things in the air. If you flip a coin, and the system has a bug that determines the coin is a bug then it'll shoot. Since you're surely planning on caching the coin, you'll look directly at it in flight. Now... you're blind.
    - feupan 5y ago
      That’s not how reflections work. Also there’s no bug as big as a coin that such a system could/should kill, so it’s pretty easy to not misdetect that. Again, corners have a higher probability of ending up in your eye than even just someone flipping a coin in 2022.
      - 14 5y ago
        The comment said your system has a bug as in it malfunctions and decides to shoot the coin anyways, and his other point was you will be looking at the coin wide eyed so perfect chance for a reflected laser to hit you in the eye if by chance the correct angle happens to line up and send it back to your eye. Also, I've seen too much unbelievable stuff actually happen so nothing is unbelievable in 2022. Yes we are talking highly unprobeable but with 7 billion people on earth we have to account for the unprobeable to happen.
        CamperBob2 5y ago
        And how many of those 7 billion people will die of mosquito-borne diseases...? It's time to wipe out them out. We don't need mosquitoes, and neither does Mother Nature. Use gene tech to do the job, not Rube Goldberg hacks with lasers.
        14 5y ago
        Oh I am all for laser defense, I was merely pointing out that op is correct in that a system like this will likely go wrong some how. But I honestly don't think they would use them in household setting but rather use them on the outskirts or around ponds and use it for other pests in fields away from human eyes.
        tabulatouch 5y ago
        Ok.. So bats die of hunger, we don't need them either, and all the way up to humans (AI said...)
        5y ago
jcims 5y ago
You might be able to create a vortex cannon with enough shear force to rip their wings off.
- taneq 5y ago
  After abandoning the laser idea due to the aforementioned “fully automated blindness / house fire machine” issues, I’ve often idly wondered if you could use a phased array of small subwoofers to generate a precisely targeted region of extreme pressure drop. That way you could just instantaneously and explosively decompress the suckers in such a way that’s probably safe for mammals.
  - _dain_ 5y ago
    Couldn't that damage the eardrums of someone who stood in the wrong spot?
  - nescioquid 5y ago
    That's a fascinating idea! Do you have an idea about the intensity and how "loud" the system would need to be to generate the compression/rarefaction necessary for that effect (or could the Hz be lower than audible threshold)? Also, I'm uncertain what behavior the array would yield (other than maybe expanding the area of effect)? Apologies if my questions are too deep in the well of ignorance to address.
    - taneq 5y ago
      No idea what pressure change over what timescale would be required to actually injure a mosquito, I guess someone will have to torture a bunch of mosquitos for science. The reason to use an array is to precisely control the timing of each speaker so that the sound waves from each of them interfere constructively at a single point. Then by varying the timing you can target that focal point wherever the mosquito is, hopefully without causing the sound to be painfully loud anywhere away from that point.
  - usrusr 5y ago
    Domestic freak wave. Interesting idea!
deepnotderp 5y ago
You could fire a pulse with lower power to check what the return distance is to see if there’s anything in the way. This is what some wireless power transfer approaches do essentially iirc
mLuby 5y ago
Wipe them out, all of them. The ecosystem will survive mosquitoes' extinction. On the subject of laser safety, can you make one weak enough that a human will naturally blink or look away without getting blinded but powerful enough that it'll overheat the mosquito its trained on for a few seconds? If the Joules are spread out linearly over a few second, I expect it'd exponentially decrease the risk of chance reflections blinding unprotected eyeballs. As for the mm accuracy and IFF detection, a low power laser-as-microphone has been shown capable of differentiating the distinctive whine of female mosquitoes (the only bloodsuckers) from everything else. See a previous discussion will a link to my notes on demo here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016210.
- zxcvbn4038 5y ago
  You shoot a nuke down a bug hole, you got a lot of dead bugs. — Ace Levy
- WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
- titzer 5y ago
  > Wipe them out, all of them. The ecosystem will survive mosquitoes' extinction. Reminds me of the Chinese's brutally misguided attempts to stave off the famines during the Cultural Revolution. One of their worst ideas was to eradicate sparrows, thinking that sparrows were eating crops. No, sparrows were eating insects that were eating crops. So with sparrows gone, the insect population exploded, resulting in even worse destruction. Just a reminder that when it comes to ecosystems, we really don't know what the fuck we are doing. There are hundreds of similar stories, e.g. destruction of wolves, bison, pigeons, and other organisms we consider "pests". It's a wonder that the worldwide ecosystem doesn't consider us the pests.
  - kragen 5y ago
    That was the Great Leap Forward, eight years before the Cultural Revolution. Agreed about the complexities of ecological engineering.
egberts1 5y ago
Your efforts are better spent on developing fixed-distance laser. Perhaps something like a million steerable ultra-low-powered laser beams focusing on a target.

dumbfoundded 5y ago

We use lasers in lots of consumer products, we don't really have any with exposed lasers. You just can't guarantee that someone doesn't flip a quarter and blind themselves. It's a cool idea but pretty impossible to be safe.

feupan 5y ago
I think the chances of a quarter’s reflection aligning to your eye while the laser is on and pointing at it are pretty damn slim. If that’s still too high, you better eliminate all corners in your kitchen because someone is going to lose an eye. And don’t get me started on forks.
- bmitc 5y ago
  Lasers are assigned a classification and regulated. You can't just get a lower classification just because. You can severely damage your eye (and more) with a laser, which may not even be visible. If corners and forks were invisible, traveled at the speed of light, propagated over large distances, were regulated, and could affect aircraft, then maybe your analogies would work.
- true_religion 5y ago
  The laser is designed to shoot small things in the air. If you flip a coin, and the system has a bug that determines the coin is a bug then it'll shoot. Since you're surely planning on caching the coin, you'll look directly at it in flight. Now... you're blind.
  - feupan 5y ago
    That’s not how reflections work. Also there’s no bug as big as a coin that such a system could/should kill, so it’s pretty easy to not misdetect that. Again, corners have a higher probability of ending up in your eye than even just someone flipping a coin in 2022.
    - 14 5y ago
      The comment said your system has a bug as in it malfunctions and decides to shoot the coin anyways, and his other point was you will be looking at the coin wide eyed so perfect chance for a reflected laser to hit you in the eye if by chance the correct angle happens to line up and send it back to your eye. Also, I've seen too much unbelievable stuff actually happen so nothing is unbelievable in 2022. Yes we are talking highly unprobeable but with 7 billion people on earth we have to account for the unprobeable to happen.
      - CamperBob2 5y ago
        And how many of those 7 billion people will die of mosquito-borne diseases...? It's time to wipe out them out. We don't need mosquitoes, and neither does Mother Nature. Use gene tech to do the job, not Rube Goldberg hacks with lasers.
        14 5y ago
        Oh I am all for laser defense, I was merely pointing out that op is correct in that a system like this will likely go wrong some how. But I honestly don't think they would use them in household setting but rather use them on the outskirts or around ponds and use it for other pests in fields away from human eyes.
        tabulatouch 5y ago
        Ok.. So bats die of hunger, we don't need them either, and all the way up to humans (AI said...)
        5y ago

jcims 5y ago

You might be able to create a vortex cannon with enough shear force to rip their wings off.

taneq 5y ago
After abandoning the laser idea due to the aforementioned “fully automated blindness / house fire machine” issues, I’ve often idly wondered if you could use a phased array of small subwoofers to generate a precisely targeted region of extreme pressure drop. That way you could just instantaneously and explosively decompress the suckers in such a way that’s probably safe for mammals.
- _dain_ 5y ago
  Couldn't that damage the eardrums of someone who stood in the wrong spot?
- nescioquid 5y ago
  That's a fascinating idea! Do you have an idea about the intensity and how "loud" the system would need to be to generate the compression/rarefaction necessary for that effect (or could the Hz be lower than audible threshold)? Also, I'm uncertain what behavior the array would yield (other than maybe expanding the area of effect)? Apologies if my questions are too deep in the well of ignorance to address.
  - taneq 5y ago
    No idea what pressure change over what timescale would be required to actually injure a mosquito, I guess someone will have to torture a bunch of mosquitos for science. The reason to use an array is to precisely control the timing of each speaker so that the sound waves from each of them interfere constructively at a single point. Then by varying the timing you can target that focal point wherever the mosquito is, hopefully without causing the sound to be painfully loud anywhere away from that point.
- usrusr 5y ago
  Domestic freak wave. Interesting idea!

deepnotderp 5y ago

You could fire a pulse with lower power to check what the return distance is to see if there’s anything in the way. This is what some wireless power transfer approaches do essentially iirc

mLuby 5y ago

Wipe them out, all of them. The ecosystem will survive mosquitoes' extinction. On the subject of laser safety, can you make one weak enough that a human will naturally blink or look away without getting blinded but powerful enough that it'll overheat the mosquito its trained on for a few seconds? If the Joules are spread out linearly over a few second, I expect it'd exponentially decrease the risk of chance reflections blinding unprotected eyeballs. As for the mm accuracy and IFF detection, a low power laser-as-microphone has been shown capable of differentiating the distinctive whine of female mosquitoes (the only bloodsuckers) from everything else. See a previous discussion will a link to my notes on demo here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016210.

zxcvbn4038 5y ago
You shoot a nuke down a bug hole, you got a lot of dead bugs. — Ace Levy
WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
titzer 5y ago
> Wipe them out, all of them. The ecosystem will survive mosquitoes' extinction. Reminds me of the Chinese's brutally misguided attempts to stave off the famines during the Cultural Revolution. One of their worst ideas was to eradicate sparrows, thinking that sparrows were eating crops. No, sparrows were eating insects that were eating crops. So with sparrows gone, the insect population exploded, resulting in even worse destruction. Just a reminder that when it comes to ecosystems, we really don't know what the fuck we are doing. There are hundreds of similar stories, e.g. destruction of wolves, bison, pigeons, and other organisms we consider "pests". It's a wonder that the worldwide ecosystem doesn't consider us the pests.
- kragen 5y ago
  That was the Great Leap Forward, eight years before the Cultural Revolution. Agreed about the complexities of ecological engineering.

egberts1 5y ago

Your efforts are better spent on developing fixed-distance laser. Perhaps something like a million steerable ultra-low-powered laser beams focusing on a target.