The Prepper Journal has posted a number of articles on the coming of drones to our daily lives and if you put your ear to the west wind, and have really excellent hearing, the buzz from Australia is getting louder and louder.
Alphabet, Inc., the holding company that owns Google, is using Australia’s capital city as a test bed for that which we all saw coming – delivery by drone of almost anything that does’t exceed the lift capacity of the craft. Wings, the Google company is actively doing testing by delivering everything from hot chocolate (in aerodynamic containers) to sunblock in Canberra.
And reading the news story on Wings (link provided above) this is becoming more and more of a reality coming to us all, and perhaps a concern when we think of our privacy and our personal security. Even Hollywood has long understood this and has been using drones as the tools of bad guys with bad intentions in movies from Star Wars, to Oblivion to Upgrade.
For our part our past posts on drones have been:
Force Multipliers – Should Preppers Consider Using Drones
We Promise No Armed Drones in America
Power to Do Good
This is one of the “brave new world” items that we will get to see from its humble beginnings to its ubicious coming of age, much like people born in the 1970’s and early 1980’s saw the spread of cellular phones and mobile devices, as the people at the turn of the 20th century saw the horse replaced by the automobile.
The applications are as endless as the imagination, from search and rescue, to delivering supplies to places where other vehicles can’t go, to clearing flight paths and runways of hazards. As preppers their application for scouting, security and area control and hunting are just a few of the ways they will make TEOTWAWKI a different animal in the very near future. I joked when Amazon first floated the idea of delivery by drone “trap shooting with prizes” was a favorite (in spite of all the city ordinances on firing weapons, noise, and on and on.)
Other robots have been work horses for decades, like bomb squads robots, complete with mounted weapons that can be aimed and fired remotely. We’ll leave the military drones that deliver Hellfire missiles and are controlled through our satellite networks by operators thousands of miles away to others, thought a re-read of Pat Henry’s post on “We Promise No Armed Drones in America” is worth a review.
Edmonton International Airport, like many others, is using robirds to keep bird flocks away from runways. But they also annoy neighbors and scare dogs.
NASA is already developing a biodegradable drone:
A lot of interesting possible uses with this one. Can’t quite cast your lure/bate from shore to that sweet spot where you know all the fish hide, well, there is a drone that can help. What better way to access crop damage after a violent hail storm? How better to search for that one cow who moved away from your herd? Again the benefits are endless.
The Realities
These are perhaps as close to flying cars as those of us alive now are going to see and of course as soon as they are making money there will lawyers involved, right-of-way issues, definition of operating zones to not only define where they can be used but where they can’t because of other structures (above ground utility lines, airports, no-fly government zones, etc.) NASA is already developing an Air-Traffic Management System for Unmanned Air Vehicles. And we could go on almost forever on the liabilities, the insurance required, operator licensing for those designated as commercial vehicles (politicians licking their chops as to licensing fees, taxes, right-of-usage airways, pretty much anything they can tax they will.)
The Preppers Reality
As in the articles above we still have two basic issues, the advantages of drones to be our eyes and the disadvantage that they can be others eyes. They are Big Brothers dream come true. In London there are few public places where a government camera is not photographing you, and now they are adding drones to their network. Has it provided a benefit? The crime statistics don’t support that premise and are misleading as they don’t single out London because well, the public doesn’t need to know.
With drones becoming as commonplace as cell phones, the testing in Canberra being a long step forward, one can envision a world where the government will have the ability, as we do now on our computer devices, to “Point, Click and Delete” just about anything and anyone anywhere. Just a few minutes on YouTube will bring this home to non-believers. Is getting sunblock delivered in 9 minutes as opposed to having to spend 25 minutes to drive to the store and get it worth the loss of anonymity and privacy, on our own property? Sadly the question is moot as market pressures and money are going to bring this about. All we can do is add it to our planning, dig deeper into effective countermeasures and get on with our lives.
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