In his 1963 scifi story "The Invincible," the Polish writer Stanisaw Lem imagined an artificial species of free-floating nanobots which roamed the atmosphere of a far-off planet. Like tiny bugs, the microscopic beings were powerless alone, but together they could form cooperative swarms to gather energy, reproduce, and ultimately defend their territory from predators with deadly force. Lem probably never imagined his evolutionary parable of living dust was just a few decades from becoming a reality or that it would become the inspiration for the development of a real-life military technology known as "smart dust." Starting out as a theoretical research proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) ... smart dust is now being developed for use in a wide variety of industries, from environmental studies to commercial mining. That's according to Interesting Engineering, which recently published a rundown of the state of present-day smart dust after decades of development. Though "dust" remains a bit of a misnomer " it's more like a bunch of tiny sensors capable of delaying data to a central device " there's a large body of theoretical and simulated work laying a path for practical microengineering that's steadily coming into its own. In the future, [smart dust is] hoped to be able to report a near-infinite amount of data in suspended, 3D environments. The current "smart dust industry" ... was valued at around $115 million in 2022.