Fighting fire with futurism

January 26, 2012

If cold fusion and quantum tunneling were not topics of your breakfast table conversations, you'reobviously not hanging with the right crowd.

Yes, there are people who actuallytraffic in such information, and they're not just Star Trek fans.While it's been a punchline for years, there really is an arm of themilitary called DARPA, which gets to play with scientific and theoretical toys like the wand in the photo below that can extinguish fires by using electromagnetism. They've also experimented with ways to use social networking, including thischallenge in 2009 to find a dozen red balloons (like the song?)throughout the country by using crowdsourcing.

Forget fire hoses, this DARPA-created wand uses electromagnetism to extinguish fires.

And because they're supposed to be researching developments for the military to use, they're developing new ways to communicate on the battlefield, including a cool way to summon a fellow soldier using vibrations from a football-field's distance. There's also this report of a new idea for a weapon that is straight from science fiction: a projectile of molten lava. Its code name is MAHEM. Can't make this stuff up.

Like some of their conceptual weapons,the folks there (where?) are currently toying with the idea of a spaceship that will travel and explore the galaxy for 100 years. No joke. Volunteers?

Yet just like the rockets you built and shot onto the roof of your neighbor's house as a kid, not all of DARPA's cool experiments work the first time. This hypersonic “plane,” which traveled 13,000 miles per hour and could theoretically get from LA to New York in 12 minutes, the FalconHTV-2, was lost over the Pacific Ocean last year.

In the absence of new Star Wars movies, DARPA is grooming the next generation of conceptual scientists through competitions like this high-school level robotics challenge,in which astronauts will actually use the winner's experiment. How cool is that?