Because I was talking about drone birds on Whatsapp, a friend of mine sent me a a YouTube videos of two birds chasing an actual drone and asked if the birds were drones as well. I said it's hard to tell but the more important question is what happens when the sky gets crowded with drones, whether bird designed or not?
Before trying to answer that question I zoned out for about 40 minutes and burned the food I was cooking in the process.
The sky may seem infinite to you because you're small, but there are certainly limits. The more I read about how many drones will be flying around in the next decade, the less I feel comfortable about this.
Birds have been navigating the skies for millions of years, using instinct based on pressure, wind and seasons. They have paths and they are stable in those paths. Drones will fill the sky with machines that were not there before and that do not have instinct to avoid something flying into them, like a warbler flying to its wintering grounds.
With so many drones and birds crashing into each other and with many drones crashing into each other too, there will be plastic falling from the sky almost everywhere and everyday.
There will be so much noise that the trees, which depend on sound to locate each cent and to communicate with each other, will not be able to communicate with each other. We will do to the skies what we did to the land, expanded into a place we did not belong without considering how our development will affect the world around us.
Ecosystems do not negotiate with new infrastructure like the ones we keep building. They simply collapse once they can no longer handle the pressure of development throughout time. The sky may seem to be open to us, but it has rules that we do not fully understand and we are already bending those rules.
