Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gigaflop 1519 days ago
I feel like we should kill 2 birds with one stone: Bats and bat guano.

Guano used to be mined for gunpowder, to the point where the US annexed a few islands after the Guano Islands Act of 1856. If bat guano is usable as fertilizer, we could design some basic guano-collecting bat shelters that act like an automatic litterbox for cats.

The bats get a home, and the equivalent of a flush-toilet, while we get bats, less bugs, and plenty of batshit ideas.

1 comments

"...and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore"
Not a coincidence:

> The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) established the Plowshare Program in June 1957 to explore the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The program took its name from the Bible (Isaiah 2:4), "they will beat their swords into plowshares."

https://st.llnl.gov/news/look-back/plowshare-program

Strangely, Wikipedia makes no mention of the source of the name.