Apparently in 1998 the city of Woking installed a full-size Martian fighting machine to commemorate the 100th anniversary of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.

Figure 1. The Woking Martian

No word yet on whether Grover’s Mill is planning anything for 2038, but the US Army has just doled out $2 million-plus in grants for the development of a gasoline-powered mechanical dog.

Figure 1. Boston Dynamics “Big Dog”

Fossil-fuel robots to fight over oilfields — I have to admit that in this twenty-first century, that’s starting to look like a very twenty-first-century idea.