Tag: work

Describe a mosquito plant…

A mosquito plant is the place where, like an automobile plant, they manufacture mosquitoes. They have these huge, industrial-strength machines with levers and widgets and carburetors and assembly lines, to stamp out millions of bodies, and abdomens and thoraxes and eyes and wings per minute, but in these tiny, microscopic details. These are the places where those minute particles then feed over to another automatic assembly line, half a dozen conveyor belts all converging on various spots, like rivers flowing tributaries flowing into one big collector. The legs get on first, because they’re the hardest to do. They come in six different varieties, right front, right middle, right back, and they are attached one at a time to the body as it moves. Well – the body thorax does not move. It is held in a firm grip of a miniature pincers 1.2 millimeters wide, and this process of this whole assembly is moving, because that’s the only way to make sure the plane moves fast enough.

The arm swings down, picks up a thorax off the belt; it is guided by laser-sights, just like everything here. Precision is a must – there’s no room for error when you are dealing with trillions of transactions / actions each day. The laser-guided pincer swings down, grasps with a pressure precise to the one 1/10,000th of a kilo pascal, and then lifts the body. This happens 7,427,323 times a second, as this massive assembly swings and clangs and bonks and spits out exhaust from the other side. Once the thorax is secure, the legs approach. Again, these are held in micro pincers, and the connection process is laser-guided to the 1/100th of a millimeter. There is only so much we can get. We’d go to the 10,000th of that as well, but it would cost God far more in energy and resources (natural) to develop the technology, and we don’t have significant wastage to make that [illegible], anyway.

Legs approach. Thorax waits. In less than a second, all six legs are slotted into their receptacles, click-click-click-click-click-click. But, being only exoskeleton of biological material, and not anything metal, they don’t actually click – I just imagine they do.

After the legs are in, the head, and the wings slide in in a similar manner. Last stop is to animate the heart, which is done with a 0.000317 ampere shock delivered via two tungsten-coated diodes that are, yes, laser-guided to the opposite sides of the animal, and the wings start flapping, beating, pulsing (we’ve not yet landed on an agreeable terminology), then we release the pincer and out flies another mosquito. Success!

At least, until it finds its way to your backyard. But don’t worry – we have plenty more where that came from.