"Quickly, Robin, Deploy The Batnet!!"

"Holey punctured tires, Batman, our clever plan to flatten the Gambler's whitewalls has failed. The Gambler and his double-dealing evil minions are getting away!!" Robin pounded his fist into his other hand, leaving a bruise. "Yes, Robin, I see the Gambler has hedged his bets." Batman slowly articulated each syllable, his progress impeded by the difficulty of coming up with the copious amounts of gambling-related verbiage the current caper required. "He's doubled down on run-flat tires, but he over-played his hand. He didn't wager we'd have upped the ante and developed a safe, quick and effective way to stop his winning streak. He doesn't know it yet, but he's tapped out. Quickly, Robin, deploy the Batnet. It's time for the Gambler to cash in his chips."

It only took Robin twenty seconds to stretch the barbed net across the route which the Gambler had chosen for his escape. "Hah," the Gambler chortled, "Jackpot!! No mere net can stop me!" Little did he know, he was playing a sucker's bet. As the high roller's tires spun over the harmless-looking net, it's barbs grabbed hold of their targets, and the stringy snare rapidly wrapped itself around the radials, bringing the rushing Rolls to a hurried halt, without harming the car or a single hair of its evil occupants. "The game's over, Gambler," Batman delved deeply into the few unused gambling terms left from Friday night poker with the other superheroes. "Looks like you lost a hard way bet, and now it's time to pay up. I'm sure the Commissioner will comp you to a prison cell, where Hold'em poker is the name of the game, and the house always has the edge."

"Holy snake eyes, Batman," Robin exclaimed to the Caped Crusader as they left the prisoners in the hands of the police and drove off to their secret lair, "talk about playing the odds. That net is a sure thing! What on Earth gave you the idea? It's sheer genius!" "Don't tell Alfred," Batman replied with a touch of chagrin. "He thinks I came up with this one myself, but I read about it in Gizmag, and thought it was so cool I just had to use it here in Gotham City for fighting crime. It's QinetiQ's X-Net vehicle arrest system. The UK and US defense departments are using it, and now they have a tool that can completely stop possibly dangerous vehicles without harming the passengers, and without having to shoot anybody. It's really bat-tastic. Here, I'll give you the link to the article I read, and here's another to the video demonstration. Now, Robin, to the Batcave. I think Alfred is making meatloaf for dinner."

Human Upgrade

I'm not going to get lots of time to write today, so I can't explore this in depth, but I had to pass on this way cool article to you. Tom Maguire, guest-blogging at Instapundit, posted a link to WIRED, and a piece called "Be More Than You Can Be". Noah Shachtman relays his experiences with personally testing the Glove, a bio-enhancement device being developed for the U.S. military, along with other futuristic, sci fi-ish, totally amazing experimental attempts to upgrade human performance. Did I say attempts? What I should have said was successes. The Glove is able to help humans perform through extreme heat and exertion, and survive intense cold. You'll have to read the article to see how incredibly effective it is at helping people do the impossible. That's not the only "the future is here" kind of research going on, either. Experiments with hydrogen sulfide are sending mice into "suspended animation," allowing them to live for six hours with only 5% oxygen in the air. To give you some idea of how astounding that is, the mice who were part of the control group--no hydrogen sulfide--died after fifteen minutes! How can you not go read the rest?

A Giant Sunbrella

Do you ever stop and ask yourself, "What if all the climate prophets-of-doom are right?" What if all the worst fears about global warming come to pass and the world is threatened with killer temperatures, droughts, floods, and all the other scenarios that would make this time of partisan politics and the global War on Terror look like the good old days? One possibility, of course, is that a whole lot of humans would die off, and if people and their greenhouse gas-producing ways really are the root cause, then the Earth would balance itself out again with less pesky humans to mess things up. It could be, though, that humans aren't the culprits. It entirely possible that cosmic rays affect our climate, and phytoplankton could play their role, as well. Theories, theories, everywhere. Whether humans are the cause, or natural phenomenon over which we have no control, if the climate does warm up significantly (and I do believe that the words if and significantly are pretty important here), we might want to come up with some options to keep ourselves from becoming barbecue.

This is where the "smart people" enter the picture. NASA's Earth Observatory reports that University of Arizona astronomer Roger Angel has come up with a plan, a sort of emergency cooling system for the planet, which won him and his colleagues a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts grant. The grant will be used to further study the possibility of sending trillions of small spacecraft up into orbit, to form a giant cloud that would act as a sunshade, diverting a portion of the Sun's rays away from the Earth:

The spacecraft would form a long, cylindrical cloud with a diameter about half that of Earth, and about 10 times longer. About 10 percent of the sunlight passing through the 60,000-mile length of the cloud, pointing lengthwise between the Earth and the sun, would be diverted away from our planet. The effect would be to uniformly reduce sunlight by about 2 percent over the entire planet, enough to balance the heating of a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere.

One cannot fault the scientific community for lacking ambition, wouldn't you agree? Angel has the specs all worked out for composition, steering and delivery, and if the plan flies "as is," with all the current concepts intact, it will only cost about $100 billion a year to turn on the global air conditioning, "about two-tenths of one percent of the global domestic product." It sounds as if, were the Earth in such dire straits that implementation of emergency plans became necessary, the world's economy could afford to pony up that much, especially if the alternative was going to be factor 2,000 sunscreen, and/or a return to a pre-Industrial Revolution way of life.

In "science time" it wouldn't even take too long to pull the shades, once we were sufficiently motivated. According to NASA, it would only take about ten years to deploy all the flyers necessary for the job, if they can get the twenty electromagnetic launchers up and running that they would need to send the little life-savers into position. Twenty-five years could see the whole project developed and installed, and with a useful life of approximately fifty years, we'd only have to replace it once or twice a century for the duration of the heat wave. How's that for value, huh? Your average patio umbrella certainly doesn't last that long. Of course, your average patio umbrella doesn't cost $100 billion a year, either.

It's kinda comforting to know that whether or not all our technology is the cause of the potential climate crisis that's got the world in a dither, all our technology may also be the thing that saves the day. Wouldn't it be amazingly sci fi if we did end up with the equivalent of a giant parasol keeping the Earth's head cool? Mind you, since the global warming and cooling fears trade off every few decades, in a few years time we're going to be hearing about scientists who are figuring out ways to catch a few extra rays from the Sun, amplify them, and turn on the equivalent of a global heat lamp. Either way, it will be scientists who come up with the schemes to save mankind. Smart people are so useful.

Robot Swarm On The Horizon

Cool Tech Alert: Introducing the robot swarm. Have you ever watched a large flock of birds turning and swooping in tandem and wondered how that whole thing works? I think their ability to do that has got something to do with the Earth's magnetic field, or something equally scientific, but when I watch a whole group of birds moving as one, there's a part of me that starts believing in bird telepathy. Somehow they're talking; I just don't understand how. Little internal biological radios maybe? "Ready? Time to baffle the humans. Turn right 17 degrees, and down 5 degrees, on my mark. Three, two, one, mark." Then they all giggle and squeal hysterically in little birds cheeps. "Hmmph. Humans think they're so smart. Let them try that."

Well, it looks like humans are trying that, with mechanical proxies. Whatever method the birds use, the effect is obvious, and scientists are studying the flock of birds phenomenon and applying what they're learning to groups of flying robots. There is work on multiple fronts to get flying thechno-gadgets to share information and fly as highly complex units. David Hambling, at DEFENSETECH.org has a look at the current manifestations of the technology, complete with loads of links to projects that are in the works, as well as links to explanations of the more rudimentary definitions and scientific principles at work in the research. (I spent some time on these. Rudimentary is good.)

Hambling comments on the varied potential civilian uses uses for swarming technology, including firefighting and space exploration, but says that many of the most immediate applications will be military:

Swarms are extremely robust, have a high level of built-in redundancy and are well suited to complex and rapidly-changing environments. Swarming robots are a natural for the battlefield. Because the individual elements can be made small and cheap, swarms can consist of a very large number of units – and the success of this approach in nature hints at how effective it is.

That does sound extremely promising on the military front, doesn't it? Hambling spends most of the rest of the article looking at military applications. I'd love to focus more on the civilian applications, like how a swarm of robots could someday fly around and dust my house while I blog, but I did get this info from a site that specializes in "the future of the military, law enforcement, and national security," so I'm not too surprised that Hambling spends more time on security-related applications than on discussing ways that I might get out of housework. He's pretty enthusiastic about the potential of the technology though. He indicates that the advances are coming thick and fast, and that they will change things substantially, and not just militarily. Maybe someday when we see a swarm of something in the distance, turning and swooping in a complicated sky-dance, we'll have to look twice to see whether it's a flock of birds, or a flock of flying robots, mapping out terrain for a new drainage system, or looking for hot spots in the embers of an apartment fire. The applications are probably limitless. We just need to let our imaginations soar a bit.

Flying High

More missile defense system success to report, care of Captain's Quarters, via Instapundit.