Modern rocketry is an offshoot of ballistic missile development: upgraded V-2s for the Cold War. The High Ground. Jet engine development was military, not civilian. ARPANET was purely military: a secure system to enable MILITARY communications in the event of loss of other methods. Only if he's extremely dumb. The flight velocity of an RPG warhead is so low that target lead and allowance for wind is required. It will tend to turn into the wind and follows a marked parabola when compared to other weapons. "Point and shoot" is not an option unless the target is very close.
It is more complicated than that. The reason we have space stations is that the U.S. and Soviets invested in space travel because they feared what the other would do in time of war (or a "hot" war in any event). Look at ancient China. They invented many things that westerners were unable to come up with centuries before westerners could get their hands on it: paper, the stern-post rudder, the lateen sail, the magnetic compass, printing, gunpowder...China had all these first and yet they lwere not transformative there. When the west got them, the West was utterly transformed by them. It seems to me that the reason for that difference is that China was a huge nation with no serious threats to its leadership. The Chinese leadership developed a syste in which change was viewed as bad because they dod not want the leadership to change. In China, most changes came from internal changes and there was no reason to fear external forces as agents of change. The threat of war in Europe was a constant and so every leader was always vying for the next best technical advantage and encoouraging techical change for the sake of protecting his own position. Contrary to China the threats from political change coming from foreign forces was far greater than the threat of internal change (although that eventually caught up with the Europeans too). I would not say that war is the end all, be all engine of science or technology. War is too desctuctive of both economic and human resources that are vital to both. That said, it's not so easy as "Hey let's all cooperate towards a mass common goal" because that is like saying "Hey, let's all be a different species" -- as that is certainly not typical human behavior. Humans for social bonds in limited groups and tend to define ourselves in part by the bonds formed, as well as by those "outside" those bonds. Two scientists in the same field are as likely to be rivals as be colleagues, and rivalry has not necessarily a loss to productivity. Competition is every bit as important as cooperation in achieving success.
"You'll get more of what you want with a kind word and a gun in your hand than just a kind word" -Al Capone This is very true.
I fear that future wars may be with nano-robots. Imagine little nano-bugs that look like bugs flying around or on the ground that sneak up on you and inject you with a deadly poison. Or imaging nano devices smaller than the eye can see that deliver a poison that's released at some time in the future. An enemy, traitor, or terrorist gets millions of these, manages to pump them in an underground water supply used by a major city or even state, and ta-da, almost everyone dies a few months later. Or small nano robots that can rip apart almost anything, molecule by molecule, and reproduce themselves, are set loose and programmed to destroy an entire country and turn it and it's people into dust. The evil possibilties are endless with nanotechnology. Of course some of those later technologies mentioned are probably years and decades away.
pasta, dont watch sci fi even if its on the news, itll rot your brain. They have just made a computer chip small enough to operate in nanobots and it cant do anything cause its ineffective. Nobody will come up with nanobots in years, decades even, and no one would use them militarily. That was way, way off topic.
No? It's already being planned. http://mae.pennnet.com/Articles/Art...Articles&Subsection=Display&ARTICLE_ID=228231 http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2005/03/military_uses_o.html
dyw, you know what I mean, people would be whining that it is inhuman, is a WMD, and all that typical whining and after a while somebody would say screw it, and shelf it. People would be scared that billions of these things could destroy the population of a city, and we both know thats exactly what other countries would do. And so theyd declare it a WMD, right next to nukes, chemical weapons, and biological weapons.
Anyways, both your article really only included nanomaterials like nanotubes (which are cool beyond all freaking belief), a few mentions of nanobots but not many. And the second granted i only had 5 minutes to read, seemed to be listing the problems of nanotech than the positive things. And even then, between the two, I dont remember one mention of it being used against enemy military, more for medical or soldier based enhancements.
Yup, apologies. I linked to the wrong docs... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread117738/pg1 (Yes I know, ATS is more than a little cranky, but now and again they do give good pointers). http://www.wfs.org/trend2nd04.htm You think if the military's looked at what it can do for their own soldiers they haven't considered what it could do the other guy's? http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_11.html For Eric Drexler's take on it... Mr. Nanotech himself. Nothing specific in any of those links, but the thought is one step away.
Nanobots are a threat that would take a very long time to bring to fruition. Do you think they could make a regular size robot that was an efficient killing machine? Like, say, a roomba? How long will it take to (a) design a tiny robot that: (i) can move swiftly (on the ground is hard enough, but many sci-fi writers expect them to have directed flight), (ii) can be programmed in a sophisticated enough way to destroy and or kill under a wide variety of circumstances, (iii) has little "weapons" to make that a possibility (again, program as evil a roomba as you want, it ain't killing anybody), (iv) is EMP shielded (otherwise it's not an effective military weapon, just an expensive one and (v) over and above (ii), that can coordinate its efforts with trillions or more other nanobots. Imagine a simple task: Inject a poison into a local population. There is a chance that they all inject all their poison into the first person they see, and that is assuming that person doen't turn out to be a scarecrow or a mannequin (because the nonobots woon't know a "real" human from a facsimile) and even if they get a valid atregt they will likely keep injecting him well past the point of death (as they won't be able to tell a "live" target from a dead one). You can imagine them overcoming such problems, but things like object recognition aare a huge problem for computers, and getting one of the nonobots to recognize a thing on its limited processing power and then to communicate that informatioon to the rest of the group will be quite a task. I think sci-fi authors implicitly assume these things are all wirelessly linked in such a way that they act as an enormous single processing unit, but good luck with that on a nanotech scale as wifi has limited range at those scales. I'm sure the problems could be worked out in time, but I would imagine it would take a lot of time. It's probably faster to generically engineer swarms of killer insects (not that I am suggesting we worry about that).
Yah and also, if these things are the size of a nanometer, I cant imagine their power supply is any larger...
Indeed !. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! .
I do agree that it may be easy (relatively) to teach a nanobot the difference between a rock and a person, but a living person versus an already dead one? A human versus a scarecrow? The more similarlities there are, the harder it will be be to teach the nanite to distinguish, given that their memory is likely going to be quite limited.
It is time mankind found a way to put an end to wars before wars put an end to us. It won`t be easy but it can be done. Being a soldier does not come natural to people. Defending one`s self and loved ones does. Fighting prolonged wars does not. Taking orders from people you despise does not come natuarally. And so much more of what military training is really all about is a perversion of the minds of soldiers. I spent an hour writing about all this and it got disappeared. I am not ready to do it all over again. ...fellowtraveler
