Wry Dan McCarthy asks below:

Won’t it be a wonderful victory for civil liberties when the problem of intimate searches is solved and we can all go back to being X-rayed whenever we fly?

Alas, long before we manage to un-encumber ourselves of such as the TSA, x-ray technology will have become our grand-children’s steampunk. From Danger Room, a developing nanotechnology combines bee venom with nano-fiber to sniff bombs at the molecular level. Nanotechnology has inspired its own “runaway replicator” theory and is carbon-based, like us. But then some worried the first atomic explosion, if hot enough, would ignite the atmosphere and flambe Earth (now we know it isn’t possible); fortunately sterner souls prevailed and we now have nuclear weaponry.

The technology could do away with invasive searches (“beats having your junk touched” says Danger Room; “not necessarily”, says my creepy Uncle Del). I don’t know; all I see is Quantum Realm (where nanotech operates) + Bees (the Wermacht of the insect world) + State Surveillance. This is how it ends. Someday we’ll smile, if we’re still capable in our new status, recalling our childhood fears of mechanical robots gaining autonomy and making us their slaves…