Month: December 2014

Under Armor

I was watching the movie Lone Survivor the other day where the Seal team was stuck in a major firefight in Afghanistan on some god forsaken hill.  The part that struck me was the damage those guys took from bullet wounds and kept going.  Simply amazing.

But my thought this morning (love those waking up ideas) was why can’t we develop some sort of light weight material that is either completely bullet proof or slows the bullet down significantly?  Sure the former would be best but might not be entirely possible.  The material I had in mind would be some sort of composite with overlapping layers on a molecular level.  I mean imagine taking something as strong as say a spiders web and figuring out how to do the same thing but infinitely smaller and tighter.  The ultimate goal would be to create a material like spandex that is light-weight but almost impervious to bullets and shrapnel.

Typical manufacturing concepts wouldn’t work given the composition of this.  Instead I would imagine it would have to be poured into a mold of some sort.  To maximize comfort/functionality you would likely do a body scan of the recipient and then the mold would be an exact fit.

What if you could also generate power from the wearers body heat and then convert that into electricity?  This could conceivably power anything from a communication/navigation device to  some sort of body regulating medical device.

Mind Your Thoughts

I read something the other day that said we were almost at the point where people could control things by thinking of them.  For instance, you place a device on your head and it reads your brainwaves/electronic pulses and when you think “play music” it could translate that and actually tell a media device to play.

Now take that a step (more like jog) forward and why couldn’t we develop a device that can read someone’s thoughts from a distance?  At first this would likely be pictures or interpretations of pictures and sounds based on patterns the devices detect.  This would likely be accomplished with the use of some sort of directed laser (love lasers 🙂 ).  Actually the first prototypes would probably need more than one laser triangulated on target.  Future versions would be able to do the same thing using some sort of spread spectrum thing based on cranial shape, size, etc. If you combined the laser aspect with say maybe inverse sound waves you might get a better resolution of picture/sound?

Imagine the implications this would have on human intelligence gathering (HUMINT) by a country’s intelligence apparatus.  Actually kind of scary if you think about it.  Maybe this is one of those things that shouldn’t be.

Then again what an amazing tool for law enforcement.  Instead of hooking a suspect up to a stupid lie detector machine (archaic and ancient) they could just sit them in a special room, ask them questions and see what the person remembers of the incident.  Not only could they ascertain someone’s guilt or innocence but they could also pull that one piece of critical information from a witness, say a license plate that the witness didn’t even remember seeing.

The worst part is once this is a reality, someone will ultimately figure out how to reverse the damned thing and push pictures, sound (false memories) out to people rather than collecting it. Bad thing.