this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

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127
We are living in the Pre-"Drone 9/11" era. (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 day ago by DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
44 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Planes were used in the world wars, then we have 9/11. This is the post 9/11 era where air travel sucks so much.

Similarly:

Drones are now being used in the Russo-Ukrainian war. Eventually, there will be a "9/11" with multiple coordinated drone attacks and then the way drones are treated will be forever changed. Civillian ownership of drones will likely be heavily restricted or entirely banned.

History rhymes.

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[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

The vehicle is almost irrelevant. They can be box trucks, planes, cars, suicide vests, backpacks, parcels, any number of things, including drones. Any mobile form can be brought close to an intended target.

Drones are more of an assassination weapon as far as FPV drones go. They can be built if you have the knowledge from available parts, but do require quite a bit of skill to fly. Their ability to only carry a small charge (yes, there are huge drones, buy flying one of those monsters around is a completely different animal) is probably only going to hurt a couple people or kill one person in particular.

I don’t disagree that they can be used as weapons of terror, however I just don’t see FPV as weapons of mass terror.

OTOH the large winged drones that can be launched from miles away that are essentially “cruise missile” drones could certainly be used as mass terror weapons, but those aren’t the kind used by regular people for fun or photography.

[–] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

You underestimate the destructive potential of even small drones. Quantity has a quality all its own. Imagine a swarm of thousands of drones, all cheaply built 3D printed things, made by a single individual or small group. They have one task. They fly to a fixed set of GPS coordinates and land. No targeting needed. No AI facial recognition to target some specific politician. No auto-gun mounted beneath a large drone. Just a dirt simple task. They just fly up, over, and down. Once landed, they send a small electrical signal to a small incendiary device, perhaps a thermite charge, installed at the base of the drone. Such drones could be made quite cheaply if made on a large scale.

Imagine fires being started atop the roofs of every building in a city. Oh, and the attack starts with each fire station being attacked by a dozen such drones. Imagine every building in a city being lit on fire simultaneously. Soon a firestorm develops, and the fire starts feeding itself.

Let's say you needed 10,000 such drones. Maybe you make them for $50 each. That's $500k to burn down a city. For the cost of a single building you can burn down every other building in a modest sized city.

We are approaching a point where a single determined individual, using the scale of resources regularly available to a single individual, could recreate the firebombing of Dresden.

[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago

Yeah, I didn’t need to envision every movie supervillain mastermind’s plot to create havoc and terror. You seriously underestimate the resources needed to pull off such a thing and keep it secret even if it’s technically possible. Why make “10,000” little drones when you can make a half-dozen bigger RC plane types that can do an incredible amount of destruction? The point is to start terror, which requires far less than your elaborate plot and conditions like “facial recognition”. You went off the deep end of a Marvel movie plot to wipe out a city. We all know that just a couple well-placed hits is enough to send the country into a spiral.

[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca -1 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

3000 killed and $1T property damage/rescue expenses in a day doesn't need to be matched by drones to make an impact. A single, Luigi style, untraceable, car or house impact, would make the oligarchy apoplectic. Though car bombs and hand grenades/molotovs have existed for a long time.

[–] DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

3000 killed and $1T property damage/rescue expenses in a day doesn’t need to be matched by drones to make an impact. A single, Luigi style, untraceable, car or house impact, would make the oligarchy apoplectic. Though car bombs and hand grenades/molotovs have existed for a long time.

Not sure why you are comparing 9/11, a terrorist attack that targeted innocent civillians, to the shooting of one evil CEO which is a surgical strike that have resulted in zero innocents dead.

[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 0 points 7 hours ago

OP is the one that made comparison. Terrorism gets more attention if victim is oligarch.

[–] BrainInABox@lemmy.ml 64 points 1 day ago

Eventually, there will be a “9/11” with multiple coordinated drone attacks

Israel has done that repeatedly, westerners just only care about white people

[–] IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Terrorism is all about terror.

Imagine a major league football or baseball stadium packed to capacity. Two or three drones, each with a relatively small explosive charge surrounded by shrapnel fly in, crash into the spectators, and detonate. You end up with a small number of immediate casualties like what happened at the Boston Marathon. But the stampede of tens of thousands of panicking people trying to rush out of the stadium will probably injure and kill many more. Have a car bomb or two strategically located a couple blocks away where you expect those crowds to run and you’ve succeeded in your terror plans quite nicely…

[–] LilB0kChoy@midwest.social 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Imagine a major league football or baseball stadium packed to capacity. Two or three suicide bombers/inside people ~~drones~~, each with a relatively small explosive charge surrounded by shrapnel fly in, crash into the spectators, and detonate. You end up with a small number of immediate casualties like what happened at the Boston Marathon. But the stampede of tens of thousands of panicking people trying to rush out of the stadium will probably injure and kill many more. Have a car bomb or two strategically located a couple blocks away where you expect those crowds to run and you’ve succeeded in your terror plans quite nicely…

We should understand anything is possible but drones complicate a simpler version of that plan that has worked many times previously.

[–] XeroxCool@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

A sports stadium is different in the sense that customers are screened for weapons before entering and escape routes are very limited. It's a confined and defined space. Having a trash can bomb is scary, but it's gonna be hard to stop people from going outside their homes. On the other hand, being in a specific place where drones were able to circumvent security measures? That scares people from events themselves.

[–] LilB0kChoy@midwest.social 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There are countermeasures and protections in place against drones too.

A suicide bomber doesn't need to escape. Inside people could plant remote detonated or timed devices between any final sweep and the start of the event.

Personally, I wouldn't put my trust in the security theater at sporting events; not in the US at least.

[–] XeroxCool@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

The combination of security theater (metal detectors) and captive sales (no outside thermoses) makes it somewhat difficult to sneak something substantial into a closed event. As for not needing to escape, well if suicide is already on the table, then a drone operator doesn't need to survive either.

[–] LilB0kChoy@midwest.social -3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The combination of security theater (metal detectors) and captive sales (no outside thermoses) makes it somewhat difficult to sneak something substantial into a closed event

Lol

[–] XeroxCool@lemmy.world 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

So have you been to one of these places? Especially in a globally renowned city such as LA or NYC? Whatever hoops you're jumping through to walk in with something sound about the same difficulty as what comes with a drone plan.

[–] LilB0kChoy@midwest.social 1 points 9 hours ago

Have you tried flying a drone into any kind of protected airspace, like these places? I can engage in whataboutism too.

If you really believe it's that hard to get into a sports stadium or other high profile event you might want to read up on Dion Rich.

Or maybe think back to the recent past about Thomas Matthew Crooks.

Maybe consider how loud and conspicuous drones actually are.

Or maybe read the US Army's land warfare paper about drone attacks.

There might, maybe even likely will, come a day when drones can be used effectively in the manner proposed but it's not today.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 34 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

I think you're overestimating how easy explosive material is to get.

[–] BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org 25 points 1 day ago (2 children)

That strongly depends on where you live, how much you need, and how good of a home chemist your are. Enough to take down a large building? Hard in most places. Enough to kill a bunch of people in a crowd? Quite easy.

[–] Venus_Ziegenfalle@feddit.org 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Enough to take down a large building? Hard in most places.

It's a case by case thing of course but incendiaries are also an option sometimes and these are laughably easy to make. Strategically placed near fire exits the results could be devastating.

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Fireworks sales are legal in Ohio. Setting them off is illegal.

However buying them and harvesting the gun powder seems pretty easy.

[–] j4k3@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

nitric acid and cellulose or most organics. I'm sure there is a relatively simple way to get from liquid nitrogen to nitrogen compounds. Air is mostly nitrogen. Two air conditioner compressors can work in series to with the second running ethylene glycol IIRC to get low enough to liquefy air for nitrogen. It probably only takes something like hydrochloric acid and a few steps to get somewhere useful. Probably written in a high school chemistry textbook.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm sure there is a relatively simple way to get from liquid nitrogen to nitrogen compounds

These days we do have the means to do it, though I don't know how achievable they are to the home-gamer

But historically this was actually a huge chemistry problem

I'm not a chemist, so I gotta gloss over some stuff I don't fully understand

But nitrogen tends to form bonds with itself and makes an N~2~ molecule. That's what the nitrogen in the air is, that's what liquid nitrogen is.

And unfortunately for us (for chemistry purposes) that molecule is very stable, it doesn't like to react with much, for most practical purposes it can basically be considered inert.

However, nitrogen is of course part of a whole lot of other chemicals as well, very important chemicals that plants and animals need. You probably heard about the nitrogen cycle in middle or high school science class at one point, and how nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil can convert atmospheric nitrogen into stuff that plants can use, and then animals eat the plants, and their waste also contains nitrogen compounds that can feed plants, etc.

But for us to do that through chemical processes isn't easy. We can't just pour some liquid nitrogen into a beaker and mix in some other stuff and it reacts to make ammonia or whatever other nitrogen compound you desire.

Until around 100 years ago, we basically couldn't turn atmospheric nitrogen into anything else, at least not at any kind of scale and not in any commercially viable way. Which was a huge problem as the world's population was growing and growing enough food to feed everyone was hard without being able to make synthetic fertilizers. The US actually has a law saying that they're allowed to just claim uninhabited islands that are covered in bird shit because that guano was rich in ammonia and other nitrogen compounds and so immensely valuable as a fertilizer.

Then along comes Fritz Haber, who comes up with the Haber process to turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. This was a huge deal and he won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for it. I don't think it's a stretch to say that if you've eaten pretty much anything grown on a farm you owe it to the Haber process.

And it's still a huge deal to this day, the haber process is responsible for around 2% of the world's energy consumption, and about the same amount of our greenhouse gas emissions.

If you've got a quick and easy way to turn pure nitrogen into something else, there's probably another Nobel Prize waiting for you.

[–] Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Far easier ways to make/acquire gun powder, and far better explosives available. Fireworks make a lot of noise and light, but they aren't particularly strong explosives.

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago

But the ensuing video will be so pretty!

[–] BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago (2 children)

And yet we've had numerous terrorist attacks in the UK involving explosives. That is both northern Ireland related terrorism and Islamic terrorism.

We just had the 20th anniversary of the 7!7 bombings of the London underground where 3 separate suicide bombings detonated.

Such events are thankfully rare and very difficult to pull off, but unfortunately it only needs to happen once to be a "success" for terrorists. While the police and intelligence services have to stop every single potential attack to be successful.

Sadly I think OP is right. There will eventually be a successful terrorist attack involving drones. After which, attitudes to drones will harden.

It's very difficult to get explosives and it's very difficult for terrorists to get a explosive to a target. Unfortunately drones make the both potentially easier.

[–] jonne@infosec.pub 4 points 1 day ago

You need compact explosives to effectively deliver by drone. The attacks you mentioned will typically use the homemade stuff that use fertiliser and is less compact (which is easier to deliver by van, as shown by Breivik and the guy that did the Oklahoma bombing).

[–] HasturInYellow@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think you're underestimating how easy it is to make.

[–] IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world -2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

No, I think you're underestimating how hard it is to make small explosives.

If you can point out where in history a small explosive that could be delivered via drone has been used by the public that would be fantastic.

[–] HasturInYellow@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

Isn't that the whole point of those past? That it hasn't yet, but plastic based explosives are easy enough to make at a quantity that could kill several people and could be delivered with a drone to do so. This would be a new form of terrorism (new in the sense that it is available to the public and not just state actors) that would be similar to 9/11 if perpetrated at scale.

[–] fubbernuckin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think you're overestimating how difficult it is to make your own.

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I make my own black powder for shooting.

2 KNO3 + S + 3 C

Stump remover, sulfur, charcoal. Few bucks to make a kilo.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Consumer drones can't carry that much weight, the explosives would have to be very, very powerful.

[–] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 1 points 8 hours ago

Not if they're incendiary drones meant merely to land on a roof and set a building on fire.

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Fair enough! I was going to edit and say that black powder isn't technically explosive, just burns real fast.

[–] ryathal@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago

There will be terrorist drone attacks in the US or Europe, but I highly doubt they will be at a 9/11 scale. The destructive power of a drone is nowhere near the power of a fueled jet, you can get close with a swarm, but that adds several new problems.

  • getting high yield explosives is pretty hard. 9/11 stole the bombs on the day, which is much harder to respond to. You could try using drones to take out aircraft on takeoff, but that's already controlled and monitored airspace.
  • getting enough drones to be a large attack isn't trivial even with readily available parts in small numbers. There's already systems in place to monitor large orders of potentially dangerous materials like fertilizer or smoke detectors.
  • coordinating hundreds of thousands of drones is actually pretty hard to do in a clandestine way. Sanctioned drone shows have problems occasionally while not having to hide and having to avoid countermeasures.
  • Drone countermeasures already exist and are deployed for large events like the Superbowl. Target selection to be big enough but still insecure is also difficult. Security is more of a priority for iconic places and not all of it is theater.
[–] iii@mander.xyz 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Civillian ownership of drones will likely be heavily restricted

They're very easy to DIY though. Much easier than a plane.

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Eh, that depends. I feel like Boeing doesn't put much craftsmanship in. How hard could it possibly be to build a boeing quality aircraft? Some styrofoam and some duct tape, right?

[–] zout@fedia.io 7 points 1 day ago

Sure thing, McGyver...

[–] j4k3@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

AI alignment is authoritarian now in a very dangerous way. That combined with drones is what scares me. Without reasoning AI is far more dangerous. Politics is pushing it that direction and it will turn on us. Normalizing authoritarianism is mass murder of future millions.

[–] shrugs@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

oh boy, imagine this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA

[–] DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Lol I guessed what it was before clicking on it, that video never gets old, just like the dissidents that gets killed.

[–] nik9000@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

Oh that hurts to read.

[–] cronenthal@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 day ago

I've already given up on FPV freestyle as a hobby, since it's getting ever heavier regulated and the authorities have very little understanding or tolerance when it comes to bending the rules. It was fun while it lasted.