Kyle Brady: A Blog

Hmm, invisibility cloaks?

Granted, they’re a long way from being even remotely useful, let alone human sized, but it still presents an interesting question…

How will you control a population (and by association, the military) that has access to invisibility? How do you prevent rampant bank robberies by invisible people? How do you fight an enemy that is invisible? How does a cop pull over your car if it suddenly disappears?

“Big Brother”? More like “Worthless Brother”.

This is bordering on the “cloaking” used in Star Trek (on a large scale), and the invisibility cloak seen in Harry Potter (on a personal scale). On one hand, the cloaking is very useful and very much a defense mechanism (i.e. Star Trek), but it can also be used for mischief and cause immense problems (aka Harry Potter… depending on how you view his activities, of course).

There’s only two real ways this can play out in the future, and still have a functioning non-apocalyptic world:

• Government Control
• A Change in Defense Architecture

Government Control

The microwave, satellite communication, cell phones, the Internet, and many many other devices have all started as devices created, controlled, and kept confidential by the U.S. Government / Military. However, they were eventually made public and declassified for general use… a good thing. But what if the U.S. Government wants to treat this similar to, say, rocket launchers and outlaw them for public use? Realistically, it would be an exercise in failure, because the moment Special Agent Johnson brings one home to show his kids… someone’s going to find it and replicate it. And this doesn’t even take in to consideration other countries that may have access to, or license, the engineering plans (Russia, China, England, etc.)

A Change in Defense Architecture

You’ve heard about how England has spent immense amounts of money creating and monitoring a large CCTV network, becoming the “most watched” country in the world? Well, here’s a newsflash: those fancy cameras become pretty worthless once portable invisibility is possible. The only way cameras could still be useful, from a security standpoint, is to have a filter on them to monitor things other than the visible spectrum: infrared (for body heat), sonar-ish (brain waves), or some other biometric configuration.

So… is it worth it to develop an “invisibility cloak”? Are you kidding? Definitely! But it has the potential to cause many many problems, especially if there’s an attempt to control it’s usage (the drug situation, anyone?).

It goes over your clothes… duh.

A piece of business advice: if you’re in the security / monitoring / CCTV area, start developing systems that are more dependent on things other than the visible spectrum. Maybe those giant XRay scanners you see in movies with The Governator. Or “breach detection” systems of epic proportions you see in movies like Star Wars or Star Trek.

Maybe celebrities should start hiring people to protect them from invisible things. Tom Cruise already has.

posted on October 4th, 2007 at 2:07 pm by Kyle

Tags: Future, Invisibility, Physics, Technology

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