The spiders are coming!

[aaronpsych]

Something to look forward to.........I'm gettin me a big gun!

2060: Humvee-sized, bulletproof meat-eating spiders attack • The Register

 

[methshin]

flamethrower.

 

[Jeff Crowell]

Raid, Sams Club quantity.

This article would have been better with pictures!! I wanted pictures.

 

[cyberknight]

Armour plated spiders.. wtf..?? You know people are going to bring some home as pets.... then the war begins.

And here I thought 'Starship Troopers' was just a movie....

 

[MVoltage]

If guns won't kill them, then I am going to get myself a very, very large slipper!

 

[skunkape]

Not even Ron Jeremy will be safe.

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[atomic_annie]

OMG! I think I'm going to pack my bags now and catch the next rocket to Mars!

 

[Stagger]

Heheh
Well, a pretty good way to kill a spider would be to make it humvee-sized, it wouldn't be able to cope physiologically with that level of upscaling (neither would we, shrunk down to spider-size). But that's boring!!!

Although, the science involved with scaling things up/down by a factor of 10^6 or more is pretty interesting and often counter intuitive. Like why would you use diamond (rather than steel) for nanobots and what challenges (the dreams of) space-elevators face. Going OT here sorry

 

[Double Nought Spy]

Don't nobody throw away any more disco records. Maybe we can make their heads explode.

 

[thefoundryman]

This is nothing short of ridiculous! What we know about massive insect life from fossil record has taught us that 3 foot long dragonflies did exist, but only because our atmosphere was several times thicker than it already is. Thick atmospheric conditions allowed for mighty insectoids to thrive because they were able to get more oxygen in through the millions of tiny holes in their bodies which connect to the circulatory system of the big bug.

Imagine if you will, a drop of water sitting on a screen, it's hydrostatic properties allow for it to remain a sphere, larger than the holes around it. increase the size of those holes exponentially until the droplet falls through the screen, and you've just demonstrated why giant insects cannot thrive.
The 'screen' here represents the insects' outer shell, with billions of tiny holes all connected to it's ichor system, an insect's size cannot exceed the threshold of the hydrostatic bond required to keep it's 'blood' or ichor inside it's body.

So no humvee sized spiders.

 

[MVoltage]

"........So no humvee sized spiders."

Harumph....Spoil sport........