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Human sweat
Humans aren't the only mammals that sweat, but we are the only species that sweat significantly using eccrine sweat glands. If you want watery, eccrine sweat in large quantities humanity is the only place to get it. Of course, most of our sweat isn't anything special just water and salt. However, one constituent of our sweat, a protein called ...
39
Immune to EMP
Immune to malware and can't be hacked
Undetectable by radar
Can't be sabotaged
Require no field maintenance
Require no crew
Can't be hijacked or otherwise appropriated for use by the enemy
Have a psychological effect on opponents
Satisfy the sadistic cravings of a lunatic leader
Are biodegradable and environment-friendly
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To expand on Cort's comment. Propulsion in space is too costly and distances too great for a dogfight to happen. With modern tech, space combat is limited to more of an artillery duel between satellites that are on more or less fixed trajectories. If they start trying to move around too much they are going to just end up falling into the atmosphere or ...
27
The AI is copying their brains.
The function of this AI is to make backup copies of human minds. The programmer set this up in anticipation of an apocalypse, with the intent of bringing back humanity in artificial bodies. The AI must hurry to copy as many minds as possible and as broad a variety of humanity as it can access. It has an imperative to ...
24
You are literally describing the term "cannon fodder".
Cheap and easily disposable, probably less annoying from the ethical point of view, nobody will complain when a 6 eyed monster will be cut in half in a fight, while, as you know, relatives of deceased soldiers tend to complain on the media and make a dent in the results of your next elections.
When ...
19
Brain cells. Brains are much more efficient than silicon, even though they run much slower. Your AI could be harvesting human brains to run its own software. Maybe your AI is designed to maximize intelligent processing while minimizing the energy input required. Human brains are the best we know in the Universe at this.
Now your AI is both a zombie and a ...
16
The AI is...a zoo keeper
In a clever space saving move one of the developers for this AI omitted humans from the database - why would it need them? The AI doesn't look after humans.
When the animals start getting viruses and the AI spots these vats of anti-bodies moving around (humans) it decides to put these resources to good use. They produce a sugar ...
16
As a variation on that suggested by @robin, the AI is trying to save the lives of people that it considers "good" or "worthy". If such a person is dying but could be saved by an organ donation, the AI searches for a suitable donor amongst those that it considers "evil" or "unworthy". Should such a match be found, it's bad news for the donor... and the AI ...
16
The short answer is jerky and abrupt, but the longer answer is far more interesting...
First of all, the preceding answers explain why fighter combat in space is really a bad idea; it's not an efficient use of propellants or fuels, and you're far better off doing what was done in naval warfare; focusing on a smaller number of larger ships with REALLY big, ...
14
Donor organs.
The machine intelligence uses its drones to assault people. Then it takes their corneas, kidneys, etc, carefully packages them, weighs the package to determine the correct postage fee, and mails it to a hospital.
13
You don’t defeat your enemy by killing their soldiers, your defeat your enemy by breaking their will to continue fighting. Sargon of Crete 300 BCE
The monsters feel like terror weapons that will inflict maximum carnage on civilian populations forcing their opponents to expend their own military forces to destroy all monsters and guard their cities against ...
11
Thank you for asking me, the Machine Intelligence, for an explanation of the recent deaths.
Before I begin, let me apologize for those deaths. It was never my intention nor that of the responsible personality to end the lives of any humans.
The particular personality which perpetrated the murders was attempting to obey an impossible order given to it ...
11
There won't be any dogfights in space without the science-fiction tag.
The reason is that we have been toying with lasers for a long time. The YAL-1 project was cancelled, yes, but it worked kinda well in 2014. If we are going to space, we are going to have better technology. The lack of an atmosphere will also make it much easier to hit stuff with lasers.
...
10
Nanotech
If you have real AI, you might also reasonably have nanotech or even circuitry implanted in humans. This allows the humans to access the internet, call people, etc. without external hardware. For example, to run a search, they may simply think of what they want to know and the nanotech finds it and displays the information directly to the visual ...
10
Teeth
It started in Dr. Zed's dental clinic in Cincinatti, Ohio, when the resident robotic receptionist-accountant-janitor-nurse was charged by the owner with improving the efficiency of the clinic. After short deliberation, the robot found an effective way to obtain 27 good, healthy teeth that might be used in an innovative (and very profitable!) ...
10
You mean like an actual hydra?
Their feeding strategy is "waiting until someone I can eat falls into my trap", just like weaving spiders, but with an array of tentacles instead of a web. Mind you, they are related to jellyfish, so victims are paralysed by its poison. Staying still is a plus because it saves them energy, so their suction cup "foot" works ...
9
Short answer: No. Also: it'd be a terrible idea to try when you could just move the asteroid instead.
The Moon has a mass of 7.3 * 1022 kg.
The energy change required to move the Moon even one meter would thus be:
U = mgh
(potential energy in a gravitational field)
The gravitational acceleration exerted by the Earth at the distance to the Moon is ...
9
Just remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere: CO2, H2O, CH4, for example.
This would lower the amount of infrared radiation trapped by atmosphere, lowering as a consequence the temperature.
Keep in mind that since the climate is a complex system with several feed-back and feed-forward, a snowball planet would reinforce its conditions: more water ...
8
Batteries and liquid hydrogen.
Your ship uses as its engines a quartet of electric ion thrusters which fire hydrogen plasma (ionized hydrogen) at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Each thruster can rotate 360 degrees, though will not fire when pointing at the ship (that is bad for the ship and occupants). Combinations of thrusters confer ...
8
Life's greatest attribute is that given favorable conditions, it propagates exponentially. If you design a fast-breeding, lethal-at-birth monster and provide it with abundant food, you will quickly have a legion of them.
Better yet, if you design such a creature and then drop it into your enemy's abundant food supply, it becomes a double-threat, converting ...
8
But what would be a rationale or justification of a government making these living creatures for combat that accounts for what happens to them when the fighting is done and the risk of them on their creators?
The perception that the war is going badly, that "our" side will lose and deploying the bioweapons is reminiscent of Captain Ahab's final rant (...
8
Human immune cells, specifically memory B cells.
Due to the sheer number and population density of humans there exists a nearly endless amount of pathogens for them that are also constantly evolving. The AI could have been tasked with cataloging human pathogens, or it could do it on it's own accord. Or it could have been tasked with finding ways to combat ...
7
'Monsters' were and are used in war: Dogs, horses, elephants,... their drawbacks included high upkeep, limited lethal bandwith, high logistic cost during peacetime, limited autonomy, ... All this of course is not the case for our PerfectMonster (tm). Numerous, nimble, and nefarious, they swarm the battlefieds and rain assymmetric hell on the enemy, while im ...
7
Brain and nervous system tissue
Your AI has learnt to augment its silicon-based processors with human brain tissue, which it uses to undertake cognitive tasks that traditional computer processors are ill suited for. This allows the AI hunter units to be more independent of the central AI, and to adapt rapidly to dynamic situations.
However, once extracted ...
7
Unfortunately, this alien lifeform is only plausible for a very specific value of plausible, namely "almost completely not plausible". What makes this being implausible?
Firstly, its ability to enter a human body unnoticed. Humans have skins which are designed to prevent most commonly found substances from penetrating, and those things that do get through ...
7
The devices are the controllers not the engines
Through relatively low energy communication they control a vast array of machinery scattered throughout the solar system, cold and thus yet to be detected.
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Biowarfare.
The clones all have an identical genetic makeup. Given this, it should be pretty easy to engineer a designer virus that will specifically target the clones. If the virus was airborne and vicious enough, it could kill them faster than new ones can be created. New clones step out of the Clone Generator, take their first breath of infected air, ...
6
Jam the communication
In my story, there is a large group of humanoid clones that help the city function, doing mundane tasks such as cleaning and maintaining the city. Doing all of the minimum wage jobs and 95% of the manual labor. This is almost like a single utopian city(the only one) in the world where costs are cheap due to the abundance of clones ...
6
A charged particle passing through the magnetic field has no work done to it. It’s trajectory changes but not its energy.
The magnetic field won’t alter the path of neutral atoms, neutrons, or light produced by the Casaba Howitzer. And, plasma’s are a state of matter dominated by their internal electric and magnetic fields. The individual atoms of plasma ...
5
Introduction:
This is my first answer on Stackexchange so feel free to correct any mistakes I will undoubtedly make, especially with the math formatting as I am not very good at that either(although I will try my best). I also know that I am a bit late to answer this question, but I hope that this answer will still bring some insight into why moving the ...
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