It's a wonderful world. All this amazing technology and yet the
average
human -- or at least humans working for the government -- are no more
morally advanced than the garden variety Neanderthal of the Middle
Paleolithic.
Instead of stone tools, our Neanderthals are in the process of
developing nanofabricated photonic material capable of negative
refraction in the blue-green region of the visible spectrum. In other
words, our Neanderthals in white lab coats are able to bend light
in
such a way as to make things invisible.
If you're an old geezer like me, you may remember the Star Trek series.
According to the storyline, in the year 2267 the Klingons, a warrior
race dreamed up by science fiction writer Gene Coon, made a deal with
the Romulans and got their paws on cloaking technology, an advanced
stealth system which causes a spaceship to disappear. Gene Roddenberry,
the creator of Star Trek, depicted a Starfleet taking the moral high
ground, opposed to such a devious technology. But then Roddenbury
produced his show, and passed to the world beyond, well before the
neocons arrived on the scene, although there was no shortage of shady
FBI types, even in Roddenberry's day.
Of course, presented with such a technology -- now apparently possible,
if we are to believe applied physics researchers Henri Lezec, Jennifer
Dionne, and Professor Harry Atwater -- Klingons working for the NSA,
FBI, and the CIA may soon possess the ability to cloak themselves
and
thus become Super Spooks of a degree only previously imagined by science
fiction writers.
In the not too distant future, cloaked snoops may be standing beside
your lazy boy in the living room as you plot, in league with al-Qaeda
and Osama, the destruction of the world, or more likely as you tell
your
wife and brother-in-law you plan to attend next weekend's antiwar
demo
or other such seemingly innocuous (and mostly irrelevant) behavior
considered treasonous or at minimum increasingly suspect by our rulers.
And you thought the NSA spy room at the San Francisco switching center
was a big deal, especially the nearly incomprehensible act of scooping
up all those petabyte and exabytes of data, right down to your neighbor
calling the local pizza joint for two large pies with olives and extra
cheese, hold the anchovies.
Lezec, Dionne, and Atwater imagine beneficial applications for this
technology, such as the manufacture of a "perfect lens"
that could have
a huge number of biomedical and other technological applications,
for
instance checking out DNA and protein molecules or perfecting such
advanced methods as X-ray crystallography.
But because we now live in Bushzarro world, and are engaged in what
is
shaping up to be a forever war against tenacious -- if not preposterous
-- forever enemies, scoping out DNA and protein molecules will likely
remain in the province of the university lab.
In the meantime, my bottom dollar is on the use of nanofabricated
photonic material in military and intelligence applications. Imagine
a
legion of soldiers marching undetected into Tehran or Damascus. It
is
simply a Trojan Horse too alluring to leave to eggheads on government
grants, out of touch with the exigent state of political affairs,
never
mind they might actually cure cancer or something.
But then, considering several trillion of dollars went missing from
the
Pentagon, and some believe the government has had a pile of exotic
technology under its wing for some time -- including secrets gleaned
from the innards of UFOs -- what's to say cloaked men in black are
not
snooping over my shoulder right now as I write this?
Maybe. But more likely not, as the government has bigger fish than
me to
fry, even if they are listening in -- or at least collecting the data
--
of my last cell phone call to the wife, asking her if she wanted a
pint
of cottage cheese while I was out at the grocery.
