>>64011259>Wouldn't anti-pest measures be able to stop them?No? I can't think of basically any anti-pest measures designed to deal with something of human level intelligence and tool use. They're not going to take a drink from that suspicious container of sugar water conveniently placed on the wall. They're not going to step on the obvious sticky stuff or snap traps sitting in plain site. They can employ gas masks and SCBA systems to bypass poison gas or the like. They can employ mini-cutting tools to get through chicken wire etc. In places that humans can get to yeah they might be stopped by active security systems (though not necessarily, such systems might be tuned to ignore mouse-level stuff to avoid false positives). But necessarily (because IRL such things don't exist yet) we have lots of blind spots in places we just don't consider possible. Ie, you have a 6" pipe going through concrete/rock, a few hundred feet, a base designer isn't even going to consider a human crawling through that because it's obviously impossible. It may have some wire mesh and screen in place to deal with pests sure, probably some filters if it's used for air, but it's not going to address problems believed addressed by physical reality. It also isn't super easy to renovate that after the fact compared to building it up front right? Or vehicles, how well can a naval ship or the like notice a 6" high stowaway vs a typical human?
So I strongly suspect a lot of secure environments could be infiltrated for a good while. Serious players like America would react pretty fast on the most important things, and modern tech would make it easier, but even then there'd probably be a long tail and habits to deal with.
The IRL equivalent to this fwiw might come from ever advancing drones. Some pretty serious computational power, ever better cameras, and ever more energy can be packed into very small packages now. Micro spy drones are no doubt an area of active research across the world.