 Thank you. Oh, I'm on, good. Can I tell you something just, you know, in private, you and me and the internet? It's kind of intimidating standing up here with this full hall and I don't know, nobody ever mentioned it, but it's actually a little bit scary. It is. But I guess it's my own fault cause last year I spoke over in hall G about Soviet encryption in World War II and I got a lot of very positive feedback and people were like more historical topics please. So I guess the CCC thought that would be a good idea and promoted me to hall two to speak about history once again. Unfortunately, we only have 30 minutes tonight so I would love to go into much more detail about technical stuff, but I'd have to shorten it a little bit. I'll try to talk about my topic for 20 minutes so we have 10 minutes for Q&A afterwards. If that's not enough we can go somewhere and have a talk. So now let's see if this, yes it works. What I would like to talk about. First of all, I would like to introduce to you a kind of living drone used extensively in World War I and World War II pigeons as you can see, used as messengers and also as spies to take aerial photographs of enemy territory. Secondly, I'd like to very quickly elaborate on animals used to deliver and drop bombs on enemies in World War II such as bats, cats and dogs. And finally go into the present situation and talk about things that are being worked on right now such as cyborg drones actually surgically altered animals and ask a few questions about what these animals might be doing. Couple words about pigeons, so-called homing pigeons are a variety of domestic pigeons that are bred especially to fly very fast over very long distances. These pigeons, what they do basically they fly home. They have an innate homing ability. They've always fly back to their home nests also known as their pigeon loft. One more term, a person who breeds and keeps these pigeons is a pigeon fancier because he fancies pigeons. So pigeons have been used as messengers since ancient times. Let's not go into that. Let's go back 100 years to World War I starting in 1914 where communication was a bit different from today. Radio communication and also wired communication was still very crude and unreliable. Imagine you're going into enemy territory with your troops. You're going into battle and you need means of communication with your back supply. You'll have to actually carry big rolls of wire and string wire around to communicate and obviously that can be cut once you get into a really tough battle situation that's not going to work. But something that did work was pigeons. Pigeons were used by all countries in World War I, kept behind the front lines in these mobile lofts and then carried into battle in these kinds of wicker baskets. And what you did, once you're in the trench, you need to get a message to your back supply. You take out the pigeon, you write a little note, you attach it to the pigeon and send it off. And these pigeons were so reliable that about 95% of all messages got through. And they were so important that in 1914, the French Army alone kept 72 of these mobile pigeon lofts behind the front. The United States Army alone used about 600 pigeons in France in 1917 and 18. And even more so in World War II, the United Kingdom used about 250,000 pigeons. And it was so important that you had these kinds of posters, don't shoot the carrier pigeon because it would be a broken link in vital communications. And the United Kingdom actually had fines for killing, wounding, or molesting homing pigeons. Six months in prison or 100 pounds, which was a lot of money back then. Very quickly, one pigeon, which was actually awarded the French Croix de Guerre after the war was Cherami, which is French for dear friend. She was actually female, but it was only discovered after she died that she had been female. She delivered crucial messages despite being shot by German troops. She saved 200 American lives of American troops trapped behind German lines surrounded by German troops who could not communicate in any other way. And who were actually caught under a friendly fire in October 1918. So all they could do was send a little message, I don't know if you can read it. We are along the road parallel 276.4. Our artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven's sake, stop it. And they send off Cherami with this message. Cherami took one hour to her home loft, delivered the message, and the American troops could stop shooting their own people behind enemy lines and find a way to evacuate them. So as you can see, sometimes these pigeons were shot down, they were wounded, and they were actually captured as prisoners of war. Here you have captured German war pigeons in a victory parade in New York City in 1919. When the Second World War came around, pigeons were still used for messaging, although communications had improved. But armies started thinking about other ways of using animals in their war effort, especially in the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. People began to think about how can we retaliate, how can we find a way to bomb Japanese cities just like they bombed Pearl Harbor, we need to do something. And a civilian who was actually a dentist had a brilliant idea. He proposed to the president, which was obviously normal at that time, that he had found a way to fire bomb Japanese cities. And the answer is, bat bombs. This was actually researched, not in that exact way, but the United States started a military project thinking about ways to use bats. The idea was find lots of bats, put them into hibernation by cooling them down, clip a tiny little incendiary bomb to their chest, release them over Japanese cities, they are going to wake up, and then as bats do, they will try to find a hiding place and hopefully hide in the attics of Japanese houses, which at that time were mainly constructed of wood and paper. And this actually worked. It worked really well because one day on a military base in New Mexico where this project was being researched, a couple of bats with live bombs attached to themselves were accidentally released and they found a hiding place under a fuel tank and the military base burned down. Eventually this project was, although successful, superseded by the atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities as you know in 1945. Another idea which very shortly I'd like to mention was the Soviet Union training dogs to carry bombs under German tanks during World War II. They were trained with food put under tanks to run there and eventually they had these kinds of bombs strapped to their bodies and they were supposed to run under German tanks and explode. This did not work well because in actual battle situations the dogs were confused and scared of the noise and the moving tanks. Some of them ran back to their trainers and their timers went off and they exploded. Some of them attacked Soviet tanks because they knew how these tanks were supposed to smell because Soviet tanks ran on diesel, German tanks ran on gasoline and they were used to diesel tanks so not very good. Nonetheless, this project was followed until 1996 in Russia for whatever reason. One more idea during World War II was cats. If you can use dogs, why not use cats? And the single idea behind this project was cats don't like water, do they? So how about we put a cat with a bomb next to, we just drop it in the ocean next to the enemy's ships and the cat because it doesn't like water is going to jump onto the ship and then explode. So what do you think? Good idea? No. Those poor cats drowned. Moving to the present, let's take a step to the present. The thing about all these projects in the past hundred years is that for the longest time the use of animals as these kinds of drones delivering messages, dropping bombs, starting fires was always limited to a creature's natural behavior and what you could train an animal to do. You can, in a very limited way, you can train pigeons, you can train dogs, cats not so much. But there was also, there was always this limitation. For example, these pigeons, they only fly home. You cannot send them anywhere. But as of 2014, scientists are actually working on finding a way to remedy that. Working on these kinds of insects, you see here, attaching tiny electrodes to the insects from a very early moment in their lives and are monitoring the electrical signals these insects use during flight. And the idea behind that is that eventually scientists are hoping to reverse engineer this and use these same electrical signals to steer these insects in a certain direction. So they could be used, for example, as researchers say, for search and rescue missions. Yes, sure. The thing is, the questions that all these projects involving animals pose, if you want to use insects for search and rescue missions, what else can you use them for? What other animals can you use in the same way? There are, of course, ethical questions of animal protection, who's responsible, who's morally responsible for surgically altering these animals and using them, possibly, for malevolent purposes. And the situation, as of now, is that already seven years ago, Charles Higgins of the University of Arizona, who works with insects, predicted that around 2017 until 2022 hybrid computers using, on the one hand, computers, on the other hand, live tissue would actually be operational. And we're talking, obviously, about, for example, a computerized hand, but also about these kinds of insects and other animals being controlled beyond their own means. Somebody, yesterday, somebody sent me a very interesting link, a video about a guy who turned his dead cat into a helicopter. It's hilarious. I can't show it because of time reasons, because we only have five minutes. I'm almost done. I'll include the link with the slides. I'll upload it. So this guy had his dead cat stuffed and prepared and turned it into a helicopter. It flies. And this video poses the question, what is the difference between shoes made of cow and helicopters made of cats? Many of us eat animals. And so where's the limit? Where's the difference between eating cows and using insects, dogs, pigeons, bats for other purposes, military purposes, for example. As of 2014, the CIA, they just tweeted a couple days ago that their pigeon missions are still classified. Why? What are they doing still with these pigeons? The question is, who is working on what right now? In an interview about drones last year in 2013, Norm Chomsky asked the question, if you look at the public reports, you can imagine what the secret reports are. So the question is, all these things that can be researched that I could present here, how much of what is really being researched, is that? Thank you very much. We have a few minutes for Q&A. If you have any questions, please do line up at the hall microphones. We have six of them on the ground level. Are there any questions from the internet? No. Any questions from the audience? No. Come on, guys. No. No questions? No. Okay. We do have a question at microphone three. Yes, hello. Well, I was thinking, what does the Geneva Convention say about the use of animals in war? Or is it saying something about it? Question is, what does the Geneva Convention say about this? Have to say, I have no idea. Or is there any other war rules that would? I have not come across anything. Is anybody here into an expert on these kinds of, are there any laws on using animals in these? Even the United States, the United States did never sign the Geneva Convention. They say they are following that anyway. Yeah, that's another thing. I have to say, I have come across these questions. What are, well, what are the moral implications of doing this to these animals? Who is responsible? I have not come across anything in writing that would actually regulate these kind of thing. You were saying something. Okay. Yes. Yes, the gentleman just said, there is a draft to the Geneva Convention about the protection of wildlife in war situations, but it's not in the officially signed version as of yet. Thank you. Another question from microphone number five, please. Yeah, you mentioned pigeons that were used in World War I, and then there's the Olympic discipline pigeon shooting. Is there any relationship between this? So does this Olympic discipline or this kind of sports, yeah, was invented in World War I because the enemies had to shut the pigeons? They shoot pigeons? Yeah, I think so. When they were used as spies, they should shoot them. So is this where the sports discipline come from? I'm shocked. They shoot pigeons in the Olympics. I mean, really live pigeons, not just these. No, no, no, no. It's forbidden to shoot live pigeons for sports, but they use solid pigeons, so they shoot something in the air and it's called pigeon. I thought these were clay pigeons. Yeah, yeah, it is, but it's. Oh, okay. So to be clear, they're not shooting live pigeons in the Olympics. Thank you. Oh God. That's good. I think clay pigeon shooting is actually older than World War I, but I would have to look it up. Clay pigeons. Yeah. No. I mean, sure, in World War I, you shot down your enemy's pigeons whenever you saw them, because everybody was using them, so the troops knew that the enemy was probably using pigeons. So if they saw pigeons rising up from the enemy's trenches, they try to shoot them. They also sometimes had falcons to hunt these pigeons and bring them down. Okay, we have another clay pigeon at six. Please shoot. How much of this cyborg moth work is being done in the public domain? And how much of this neural interface work can be used to assist those with, say, neurodegenerative diseases? Well, that's actually the point behind all this part of it. This is research that is publicly done. I believe it's the University of North Carolina that's working on it as well as the University of Arizona. Professor Charles Higgins is doing this research. And of course, one part is, as it is said, to use these insects in search and rescue missions where humans cannot go in to gather information about catastrophes, earthquakes, and stuff like that. But it's obviously technically very similar to the research being done to, for example, disabled people to regain control of their muscles. It's a very similar process in working together in that area. Microphone number two, please. Yeah, I'm wondering about the detail with homing pigeons. The way I understood it is that they always return to their home. But now I saw that you can actually transport their home somewhere else. Yes. And they just accept this. You have to train them. Well, these are special pigeons. They are bred. They have certain genetic material. And you can train them to get used to these mobile lofts. But you can only move these for a couple of times. So you can use one of these pigeons for a couple of weeks at the front, and then you have to, they get confused after a couple. If you move the loft around three, four times, they get confused about that. So you can use one of those pigeons for a couple of weeks, and then you have to retire them. We have a question from the internet via our signal intro. Thank you. Actually, I've got two questions. First one is how long would it take to train or retrain a pigeon into a life drone? And the second question is, is the time of life drones over? The drones are advancing very fast. First of all, training these pigeons starts about at the age of four weeks. When they are four weeks old, they are taken away from their nest, and they are trained to accept a new loft, which takes about another four weeks. So when they're eight weeks old, they are fully trained, and you can, in these war situations, you can take them to the front and use them for another couple of weeks. That's why you needed so many of these. You had 250,000 in World War II because they had to be trained for a couple of weeks, and after a couple of weeks, they were obsolete. The second part is the era of life drones over. I'd say yes and no. The era of these pigeons or bats is obviously over. I mean, the United Kingdom stopped its pigeon army in 1957. The Swiss army kept it till 1996. But as of today, nobody uses these pigeons anymore for armies. But if we look at what's being done right now in 2014 working with these insects, it's obviously a different kind of life drone that's being developed. And I think that's going on really strongly. And the question is, is this all what's being done, these insects for search and rescue missions? I mean, if the CIA says its pigeon missions are still classified, you have to ask yourself, what might they be working on? And I'm very skeptical. I think there might be a lot going on that's not in the public domain. Microphone number four, please. I don't know if it was already answered correctly. I just wanted a clarification for how long do you have to, well, have a pigeon at a loft so it accepts it as its home? About four weeks. No, I mean, when the company moves somewhere and do you have to stay there for some time so that the pigeons will, this is where we live now. Yeah. This is, that's the four weeks. A thing is, as far as I understand, science does not, still not fully know how these pigeons find home. It is considered to be a mixture of possibly using the electromagnetic field of the earth, also using smell and using some sort of map, visual keys. But as far as I understand, it takes about four weeks to get a pigeon used to its new home so that it will go back there and not to where it was born. OK, thanks. Microphone number three, please. Yes, again, a question on pigeons. How could you distinguish between friendly and the pigeons of the enemy? That just because of the direction where they fly from? Yeah, I mean, they look like pigeons. No, in your presentation it was forbidden to shoot a pigeon. So how could the people know it? Yes, that's fine for shooting pigeons that apply to the United Kingdom. So inside of England, people were fined if they killed or molested homing pigeons because these were needed for the war effort. Obviously, at the front, well, it might have happened that friendly fire caught some pigeons, I guess. Microphone number six, please. I was wondering if you have found out anything about dolphins. Yes, I read something about dolphins and bombs, dolphins being trained to find. So I understand, I don't know if that's what you mean. It was just too much material. There's a lot going on. There's obviously a lot of animals being used or that were used. I don't know if you could say something about that or... No, I've just heard it from a reddit somewhere. And so I thought you'd have something. Yeah, I came across it, but I chose to focus on birds and just do the little excursion on dogs and those cats. But yes, dolphins also. Dolphins are considered very intelligent animals and can also be trained to do certain tasks. We're running out of time. One last quick question here from microphone two, please. Thank you. Did you find any evidence of actual use, abuse of animals as biological warfare carriers or something like that? Biological warfare carriers, yes. Like the traditional diseased animals with the catapults. It was after World War II, the British actually did research in that area to use pigeons to drop bacteria or what have you. But since other technical means were being developed at that time, we're talking about the 1950s where technical developments were becoming better and better and these pigeon programs were eventually stopped in the 1950s. But yes, people thought about using pigeons also to spread whatever diseases, biological warfare. Thank you for your talk, Anja. Please give a warm round of applause.