Stay away from the ocean!

     This post is a sort of follow-up to my last post, Death Rays.  I found an article at dvice.com that described a laser project that the Navy is working on.  The Navy has designed a pretty incredible free-electron laser (free-electron lasers are pretty cool, and you can check out how they work at Wikipedia.).  The article says that the Navy laser "produced a 200 kilowatt beam capable of burning its way through 20 feet of steel per second."  Holy crap!

     That's not all.  The article claims that the Navy is trying to build a laser that will do 100 times as good.  That's right; cut through 2,000 FEET OF STEEL PER SECOND.  Now I know you're thinking, "death rays are as good as real with that kind of technology!"  Just imagine if you sent that thing into space, along with one of those programmable mirrors that they put in laser TVs to direct the laser.  There's your death ray. 

Here's the only problem with that:

     The 20 ft steel/sec laser was the size of a football field, and can only, as of now, fit on a Navy aircraft carrier.  No other vehicle could hold the thing!  Imagine how much power it takes too.  So putting one of these in space is not probable, which means satellite death rays are a ways off.  However, the article reassures us that,

"as improvements in technology enable the laser to shrink, it'll also become more efficient, and by 2015 the goal is to get it down to 50 feet by 20 feet by 10 feet. And by 2020? It might be smaller still, able to fit into helicopters and drones, and it's not too much of a stretch to imagine something small enough to be handheld by 2030."

     That sounds like a world I would want to live in!  The one where terrorists with helicopters could blast through buildings and houses from a distance in a few seconds.  Airborne Gatling gun times a billion!

     I am a bit skeptical about the availability of handheld lasers that are this powerful even by 2030.  Think of the battery that would need to be on them!  The one I show in They're Out There only gets 30 shots, is a little bulky, and is waaaaaaayyyy less powerful.

Still... the fact that these projects are being developed is a little scary.  This stuff might actually end up working, and that might not be a good thing.

Star Wars! Death Rays! THE END OF THE WORLD!

     You have got to see this!  I found an article from the St. Petersburg Times, and several related ones from other sources, that describes an attack on U.S. satellites from Russia!  Here is the excerpt:

     The article is from the November 22, 1976 issue of the St. Petersburg Times newspaper.  According to the article, in 1975, Russia took out two U.S. satellites with a high-powered laser beam.  Scary, huh?  Especially the part about "hunter-killer satellites" and "death rays!"  Well, those predictions that the magazine made were pretty wild.  To my knowledge, we don't have "death rays" even today.  The only thing that comes close is the Boeing laser from Weaponizing Lasers. 

     This is a perfect representation of what journalists will say to get their story heard (and an interesting look into past journalism too).  The blinding of the satellite really boiled down to some burning (similar to the video in Weaponizing Lasers) on the satellites sensors or transmitters.  The image that comes to mind when reading the article, however, is that the laser completely annihilated the satellite!  I mean, the laser beam was "10,000 times as strong as a natural blaze!"  Wouldn't that be like an explosion, if a natural blaze is taken to be a small flame?  An excerpt from the Nov. 22, 1976 issue from the Milwaukee Journal said that the beam could "vaporize metal and produce destructive shockwaves."

     Wouldn't the reader get a sense of fear from this article, especially back in 1976, when the average man's understanding of lasers was not at all like what it is today.  People could not do a quick Google search back then to see how far lasers have come.  All they could do is imagine an evil Russian scientist sending a laser into space and killing every American that went outside!

I just found this interesting science communication about lasers from the seventies.  Pretty far-out, huh?