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US Army To Push X-Files Tech Development
An anonymous reader writes "The US Army is ramping up the development of technology right out of the X-Files; 'making science fiction into reality' as Dr. John Parmentola — Director of their Research and Laboratory Management — puts it. The list of things currently in the works is amazing: regenerating body parts on 'nano-scaffolding,' telepathy through electronic impulses in the scalp, and self-aware virtual photorealistic soldiers that can be deployed in the battlefield through 'quantum ghost imaging.' To test these they want to use them into a massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft or Eve online."
> To test these they want to use them into a massively multi-player online games like World of Warcraft or Eve online."
Doesn't that violate the TOS?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I believe the director of DARPA typically leaves with a change in administration, and it wouldn't surprise me if that was the case in other such agencies. Then there's the whole change in funding thing that may happen.
I know a lot of people in the defense research community are a bit nervous now. Be interesting to see what happens after January.
sweet, i can finally get my own holoduke. too bad there's no shrink-ray on that list.
Step 1: Read theoretical physics journal Step 2: Claim principles could be adapted to military uses in unrealistic time frames Step 3: Profit! No ??? even needed.
Heh. You're modded "funny", but you're right on the money (so to speak). This is typical [grant|budget|*] fishing behavior. Nobody's department ever gets funded by saying "we think we may be able to develop and field a 15% lighter combat boot in the next 5 years". No, you get money by saying "we are on the verge of being able to make our soldiers capable of three currently humanly impossible things that would have our enemies cowering before us--- if only we had the funding..."
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
technology-enabled telepathy, techlepathy, or whatever you want to call it, is still manipulating objects with your mind. and there are many instances where directly transmitting commands with neural impulses would be preferable over verbal commands. for instance, if you were trying to control a UAV drone it would be far more intuitive to be able to make the plane turn via thoughts than with clumsy voice commands. you'd have a much wider range of control that's both, more natural and also quicker, than voice commands.
i'm more disturbed by this:
--yea, that and carrying out cover ups.
Faced with cuts in military funding by the upcoming Obama administration, this is deigned to convince people that the defense department comes up with a lot of gee-whiz things they really shouldn't let their representatives eliminate.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
I'll believe it when they manage to do it on the budget they're gunna have in a few months.
My guess is it will be paying for
Hadn't encountered "Quantum Ghost Imaging" before. (If it provides a practical system for imaging a objects without exposing that an observer exists and/or without the observer having a clear line-of-sight for ordinary optics, the military applications would be obvious.)
But building replacement body parts and organs on nano-scaffolding is working fine in the laboratory. It's just a little engineering development and regulatory approval from deployment. The military knows how to fund and direct practical engineering development, can fast-track or sidestep regulatory approval, and has a continuing supply of people who need replacement body parts or substitutes to recover function. It makes perfect sense for the military to drive the final development and deployment of this technology, bringing their wounded back to full health rather than giving them a prosthetic and a pension.
The military is already flying and driving vehicles and aiming and firing weapons in difficult environments using "mechanical telepathy" - magnetic sensors in a helmet detecting the fields from the currents from the firing of nerves in - guess where - the speech center (among others). (While you're strapped into a fighter plane doing a 5-G maneuver or a helicopter shaking from flack: Look at a target and/or point a finger at it. When the targeting marker in the heads-up goggles is on it, think "BANG!". Just for one example.) Meanwhile the same technology is doing a very good job of speech recognition on subvocalization. So why not use it to drive a radio to "think-talk" to another guy in the unit?
Since at least the Vietnam era the US military has been a consumer and designer of role-playing game system products and video games, for good reason and with very good results. After noting that the soldiers who played the most on the video games in the PX were also some of the best shots, pilots, tank drivers and gunners, etc. they commissioned videogames with realistic weapon characteristics as training aids: Fun and effective, and a LOT cheaper than full-blown simulators. Role-playing game systems, meanwhile, greatly improved "war games" strategy practice and military planning, and they stay current with developments in the field (and are a major customer of some of the companies as well). Using a MMORG to do a Turing test, along with further development, on a computer-simulation of a soldier (in preparation for deploying AI weapon systems) fits right in and makes perfect sense to me.
So it looks to me like somebody is "pulling a Proxmire" - finding some government research that SOUNDS screwy and characterizing it to make it sound as ridiculous as possible in the public press.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Can someone please exlplain how it is that a bunch of irregulars with poorly maintained AK-47 rifles and surplus Katyusha rockets that date back to the cold war can keep us on our toes in Afghanistan when we have all of this high tech and expensive army gear? Heck, the amount that we spend to equip and train one US soldier would probably equip a whole company of Taliban. If the army wants more and better soldiers then how about doing simple things like raising base salaries for our military, improving the quality of our training programs, and taking back control of supply and logistics from Halliburton and KBR who seem to be much more interested in how much they can possibly bill the government and much less interested in actually helping our fighting men and women.
If it provides a practical system for imaging a objects without exposing that an observer exists and/or without the observer having a clear line-of-sight for ordinary optics, the military applications would be obvious
It does not, and anyone who implies it does is either ignorant or a liar.
Quantum ghost imaging requires a light source and detector that both have line of sight to the object being imaged. The "magic" comes from the second detector, where the image is formed, NOT requiring line of sight to the object, although it does require line of sight to the light source, and it also requires a classical communication channel to the detector near the imaged object.
So given you have to have a detector near the imaged object anyway, why not make that detector a camera, and dispense with the millions of dollars being wasted on this research?
The simple question for anyone advocating the use of quantum ghost imaging for stealth purposes is, "Are you claiming that quantum ghost imaging requires NO DETECTOR OF ANY KIND that has a clear optical path to the object being imaged?" If they say YES they are either a liar or an ignoramus.