Utility Fog

Utility Fog is fascinating stuff. I shamelessly steal the concept, spindle, fold and mutilate it, in my books. I’m also serializing the second book of my SoulStone series @everittdmickey.

Shameless self-aggrandizement done...let’s talk about UtilityFog.



Foglet

Utility Fog was invented in 1993 by Dr. John Storrs when he was aggravated by seat belts. I know the feeling. I hate the damn things. I KNOW that our gooberment knows best and insists that we were them. I KNOW that studies have ‘proved’ that they save lives. I also KNOW that a great many goobermnet proclamations handed down from on high turn out to be WRONG. Globull Wurming comes to mind as well as the FDA Nutrition Pyramid...

But I digress.

Dr. Stoors is a heavy hitter and deep thinker and he knocked this one out of the park. (In my not so humble opinion)

Utility Fog is simple really. Think of it as being a mechanical octopus. Each foglet (octopus) has a brain, senses and long skinny grabby things. The long skinny grabby things are telescopic arms with Grippers on the end. The arms are designed wave about and to grip the grippers on the end of the arms of other foglets. Shake hands, in other words.

Seems simple?

Well it is, other than that there are Twelve Arms. Twelve of anything can become a little bit complex I would think, but that’s what computers are for. . The foglet has a computer in it’s core that control the arms. Not only does it have a computer it has senses. Who knows what type of senses they might be? There are many choices. It might have radar or something else to enable it to view the world around it. It might have more than one.

The foglets communicate among themselves in order to find each other and shake hands. Not only that but they do the wave... the wiggle.

people always want to see the downside. If there is not a downside they’ll make one up.

This guy is a bit more realistic I think.

more realistic yet? Well yeah. It’s happening.

Recall the little camera he cut in half in the first part of the show? That little camera has most of the components needed to make utility fog. “ve haf ze technology” ...only the foglets would be kinda large. How large? I dunno. Smaller than that camera for sure. Pretty expensive to.

As the rest of the movie indicates slowly but surely (actually pretty damn fast) it’s becoming possible to make stuff smaller and smaller.

In fact quite a bit of progress has been made.
Claytronics

Programmable Matter
and
Smart Dust to mention but a few.

Interestingly enough MEMS are being made in older Foundries

I have no doubt that pretty soon tiny foglets will be possible. Soon after that they’ll be cheap.

That will change everything.