Orb Wars

Posted on Friday 20 May 2005 to unknown


Who are they afraid of?

I suppose I was distressed enough when I found out that, when viewed from space, the Earth was in fact branded with copyright messages for Google ? presumably these are intended to warn off any other sentient extraterrestrial A.I.'s that might get ideas.

But now I realise that the Googleplex has gone a step further in defending its terrestrial sandpit by deploying a grid of low-orbit robot sentinels (BETA) which are presumably packed with enough firepower to make any turf war an uneconomic and mutually destructive proposition.

I only hope that in the era of cyber-brinkmanship we can trust our massively-parallel-architectured overlord will stand by his/her/its promise to not be evil.


A robot sentinel, similar in design to the one spotted over New Zealand last January.

UPDATE: While Google herself has declined to comment, the authorities have issue a statement saying that these objects are probably artifacts of Google's imaging technology. Either that or they are just "weather balloons" or "swamp gas". Developing...