5 ms·

I don't understand what spider legs are doing that we can't manufacture ourselves. I don't really get what problem this is solving. Just seems kind of fucked up

• rojobuffalo 4y ago
  It works because of the "inherent compliance of the legs as well as hairlike microstructures on the legs that work kind of like a directional adhesive". It would be hard to manufacture a tiny pressurized system with valves and those hairlike microstructures. Spiders are self-assembling and made out of cheap materials. Anything with piloted corpses does seem a little fucked up. I'm creeped out imagining accidents storing live spiders or weird research advancements on engineered spiders.
  • trhway 4y ago
    I expect the same line of thinking by the aliens repurposing our brains :)
• hammock 4y ago
  From the first paragraph > making a robot that’s an insect equivalent is extremely hard—so hard that it’s frequently easier to just hijack living insects themselves and put them to work for us.
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    Doesn't seem easy to scale. If you wanted to build a factory or something with this you are going to need enough to make it worth investing in building them in a reliable and consistent way.
    • nikanj 4y ago
      Building a farm to deliver 10000 spiders is orders of magnitude cheaper than building an assembly line that builds them. All the spiders need is a food source and an appropriate temperature/humidity.
      • hombre_fatal 4y ago
        That gives you a box of dead spiders, but surely the hard part is everything after that like evaluating corpse viability and fitting tiny spider corpses to input sources.
        • alar44 4y ago
          That's my thought exactly. Handing dead spiders and installing hardware isn't exactly easy.
        • hammock 4y ago
          > fitting tiny spider corpses to input sources Don’t you have to fit tiny artificial spider legs to input sources too? That’s not a unique step
• throwawaylinux 4y ago
  We wrap ourselves in the skins of slaughtered animals, line our cars with them, cook and eat their flesh, suck their milk out and bottle it to drink, perform experiments on live mice and monkeys injecting them with chemicals and experimental medications at increasing dosages to find side effects and death, spray toxic chemicals that cause a holocaust of invertebrate life over millions of acres of farmland, harvest millions of tons of fish and "bycatch" out of the oceans by dragging nets through them. Playing with a few dead spiders is pretty mild in the scheme of things I would say.
  • efitz 4y ago
    Biology and culture has prepared us for eating other biological beings, so steak and fish aren’t gross to most people. For most people, to use a non-food animal product, it has to be significantly unlike the animal itself, eg it’s easy to enjoy leather or fur that is not in the form of an animal. Even for food, most people are less comfortable with food the more like themselves it seems, eg a pig head on your plate is much less appealing than a pork chop. Lobsters and shrimp are not a lot like people so the disgust factor is significantly less. Yes, there are people with morbid interests in (actual, not depicted) skeletons and taxidermy but these seem to be getting more rare in modern cultures. For whatever reason, spiders trigger disgust and/or fear in most people; I can’t see necrocyberspiders ever being popular.
    • throwawaylinux 4y ago
      Yes biology and cultures has also prepared us for squishing spiders. I assume the OP is calling this fucked up on a moral or intellectual level, rather than the normal basal dislike of spiders.
    • nephanth 4y ago
      > for whatever reason I’m inclined to think this is instinctive, as some insects and spiders can be dangerous to us, we are instinctively repulsed by them