INVISIBILITY
– The Scientific Reality
Patrick
Rahall
Invisibility
is one of the most desirable of super powers.
Think of what you could do when no one else could see you. The only limit of what you could accomplish
is limited by your own sense of morality and ethics. You could solve your financial worries or
sneak into the Super Bowl undetected if you so desired. But not all applications have negative
implications, like I said it is all dependent on your morality and ethical
code. If you wanted to help people,
imagine the law enforcement applications.
You could go deep, deep
undercover and record or prevent crimes in progress. You could apply it to the military and use it
to infiltrate and spy on the enemy, or even assassinate enemy leaders. Imagine the possibilities.
But invisibility is just a pipe dream,
isn’t it? How ridiculous an idea is it
that you could, Harry Potter style, throw on an Invisibility Cloak and move
about unnoticed? Not as ridiculous as
you might think, actually. There are
currently many groups working on a technology that can actually reflect visible
light and render the object below the ‘cloak’ truly invisible to the naked
eye. The technology is made up of ‘meta
materials’ which acts as though it isn’t even there. When light strikes a surface, it reflects in
a single beam – picture a laser beam on a mirror or polished metal. Put something in the path of the beam with an
uneven surface and the light will break off in several beams instead of one
singular beam and that is what makes that particular thing ‘visible’. What the meta materials do is act as a
shroud, covering the uneven surface and refocusing the light back into a single
beam again. This makes the object under
the cloak invisible since the light cannot reflect off of it.
As of right now, the cloak of meta
materials is only capable of making invisible an object 1/100th the
width of a human hair. Not quite enough
to bring to life H.G. Wells’ ‘Invisible Man’ but it is a start. We do have other kinds of invisibility in
technology and nature. There are actual
life forms that are so small that they cannot be seen by the naked eye, but
they are indeed complex life forms. And
what about nearly invisible fish? There
are jellyfish that can easily be missed unless looking very closely for and at
them, in addition to the fish that are nearly ethereal in their makeup. And what about, say chameleons? They can blend into their environment and
there are animals that have evolved to blend in to their environments. But none of these are true invisibility. As of
right now, we do not have the capabilities to become truly invisible ourselves,
but advances in camouflage and stealth technology are indications that we have
always been striving for a way to achieve it.
With the advancement of social media
and the total immersion in technology of today’s world, who wouldn’t want to
become invisible? Who wouldn’t just want
to have some privacy, to not have their every move documented and put online
for anyone and everyone to peruse at their own leisure? The appeal of invisibility is not just
limited to those who want to rob banks or watch their neighbors undress without
being detected. Will we be able to
become truly invisible? Will meta
materials actually become useful and implemented in our lifetime? It’s a strong possibility. The real question is will it be helpful, or
will it be destructive?
You
decide.
THE TIME
TRAVEL REALITY
Patrick
Rahall
Back to
the Future. Terminator. The Philadelphia Experiment. The Final Countdown. The Time Machine, of course. All of these fantastic tales are centered
around the possibility of moving through time, both forward and backward. Now there are many other tales, published and
unpublished that involve time travel.
And why not? It is one of the
most intriguing concepts man has ever come up with. But is it a possibility?
First, let’s discuss the possible
paradoxes. The first is my favorite –
the Grandfather Paradox. It was first
posited in the 1943 Rene Barjavel novel Le
Voyageur Imprudent (Future Times Three).
In essence, it says that one cannot travel back in time to kill their
own grandfather before he has children.
Because if you kill your grandfather before he has children, then he did
not give life to his son- your father- and then you. So if you were never born, how could you have
gone back in time to kill your grandfather?
There is also the philosophical concept of autoinfanticide- killing the baby version of you. Again, if you kill yourself as a baby you
can’t ever grow up to become the adult that travels back in time to kill the
baby you.
The next paradox is the Temporal
Causality Loop. A great example of this
is the Black Sabbath song Iron Man. In the story of the song the protagonist
travels back in time via a magnetic field –which turns him into the mute Iron
Man- to warn humanity of impending doom.
But because he was unable to communicate, he was ignored and
mocked. This led him to become enraged
and destroy the world as we know it- causing the very cataclysm he traveled
time to prevent.
Another problem with time travel is
that while you might be going back to do something noble – killing Hitler or
preventing Martin Luther King’s assassination – could have far reaching
ramifications, the consequences of such are incomprehensible. It’s basically the Butterfly Effect – if a
butterfly flaps its wings in San Diego it causes a tidal wave in Tokyo. In essence it says that even the smallest
actions could affect life in ways that could be cataclysmic. You cannot possibly imagine what your actions
could lead to; by changing the past you are setting into motion an alternate
reality that may in fact be far worse than the reality before you changed things.
As far as time travel as a
scientific possibility – it has already happened. When an astronaut goes into space and travels
as fast as spacecraft actually travel when he or she comes back, they are
actually a fraction of a second younger than they would have had they stayed on
Earth. Not very impressive, I
understand. But based on Einstein’s
Theory of Relativity, time slows as speed increases. So if you could travel at the speed of light
in a spacecraft, you would age slower than you would on Earth.
Another way of manipulating time
would be with the creation of a worm hole.
A worm hole is like a shortcut in space.
It’s like a tunnel through a mountain; instead of traveling around the
base of the mountain you can travel directly through it drastically reducing
travel time. Imagine two points on a
piece of paper. Now fold the paper so
that the two points are touching. This
is the concept of a worm hole as demonstrated by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku.
Is time travel possible? In Carl Sagan’s book Cosmos he describes a craft called Orion which would be capable, at the time of the writing in 1980,
of attaining a speed of 18,600 miles per second, or one tenth the speed of
light. If there was a way to make this a
reality and also a manned craft this would provide a way to cheat time. Because of the vast distances in space from
planet to planet and the incomprehensible distance (and time it would take to
travel) the only way to get from one place to another in the galaxy is to travel
at speeds that would retard the aging process.
Scientists theorize that traveling through black holes is one way of
circumventing space and time. Of course,
there is no way of knowing where or when you will come out on the other side of
the black hole or a worm hole, should we find one or develop a way of
artificially creating one. Then of
course, we would need to then construct a craft capable of traveling through
the crushing gravitational forces of a black hole. Is this something that is achievable in our
lifetime? Is it something that could
even be accomplished at all or is it just science fiction?
You decide.
THE
POSSIBILITY OF CYBORGS
Patrick
Rahall
Cyborg. Cybernetic Organism. It is a term that has been used to describe
many different creations; James Cameron’s Terminator,
Robocop, The Six Million Dollar Man and even Darth Vader. It means a mechanical part interwoven into
organic, living tissue. In a way, there
have been cyborgs amongst us for decades.
Anyone with a prosthetic limb, pacemaker, or even surgical implant could
technically be considered a cyborg. But
when we think of the word, we do not think of surgical implants or pacemakers. We think of mechanized limbs,
shoulder-mounted laser cannons controlled by thought and the like.
But
what is the real reality of the
cyborg possibility? For years we have
had the ability to manufacture prosthetic limbs. If you like, you could technically consider
the first ‘cyborg’ as someone with a peg leg, or a hook hand. Granted, there is no mechanical aspect of a
wooden leg or steel hook but it was really the first attempt at enhancing the
human body by replacing it with a sturdier substance. We have for a while had the ability to make a
prosthetic limb that can move in ways that human limbs cannot. For example, there are prosthetic hands that
can rotate a full 360 degrees. In fact,
we have even been able to advance science and technology to include prosthetic
limb replacements for dogs, cats, horses, elephants and even a prosthetic tail
for a dolphin or flippers for a sea turtle!
It seems as though no limit exists for prosthetic technology.
Then along came Modular Prosthetic
Limbs. These leaps in technology are
truly modern marvels. They are actually
surgically implanted into a person’s neural cortex and allow the person to control
the limb via thought – making the limb truly a part of them. These prosthetics also have complex computer
systems in them that aid the limb in interacting with its environment by taking
readings and measurements and interpreting them and allowing the person with
the prosthetic to ‘feel’ by sending the computer signals into the person’s
brain. Using the complex system of wires
and circuitry to duplicate the human nervous systems is one of the most
spectacular uses of technology that humanity has achieved.
One thing that science is still
struggling with is the completion of a prosthetic eye. Scientists have been able to unlock the code
in the retina of blind mice to allow them to see. They have claimed to be able to do the same
with monkeys as well. Humans have not
yet been able to be ‘cured’ of their blindness, but medical science is
hopeful. The issue they face is
replicating the output cells of the human retina known as ganglion cells. So far all that has been achieved is
restoring rough sight that is blurry, like vision through tears that allows the
seer only to distinguish rough shapes.
It can be likened to not being able to distinguish shapes of people –
not being able to tell a man from a woman but being able to tell the difference
between a person and say, a car.
The other advancements in prosthetic
technology are those of exoskeletons.
They are sometimes no more than pneumatic braces to help people walk but
they do extend to fully wearable suits that augment strength and stamina. Not quite to the level of Tony Stark’s Iron
Man suit (no flight ability or hidden missiles) but a huge leap forward. There have been a couple of advances in the
technology of returning ambulation to quadriplegics.
Will cybernetics advance to the
level of Isaac Asimov’s The Bicentennial
Man? In this tale, humans and robots
become virtually indistinguishable as robots can get human parts, humans can
get robot parts and extend their own lives.
Granted the story is more a morality tale about what the concept of inalienable
rights really means, but the question remains.
Given the abilities we currently have to create these incredible feats
of technology, is it out of the realm of possibility to consider that we can
achieve Iron Man or Robocop levels? Or
even to extend life beyond natural limits?
Or if we do achieve it, should we
take advantage of that?
You decide.
