Robot insects and augmented reality for canine soldiers, plus zombie sharks and the U.S.
Army’s dinosaur collection!
Here are ten of the most bizarre military projects!
10: Robot Insect Army In case you didn’t think your tax dollars
were going to fund worthwhile causes, check this out: The United States military is trying
to create a robot insect army.
At least, something fairly similar.
I don’t know how I feel about that as a reasonable piece of research, but here’s
the deal: One of the most bizarre military projects going on right now involves artificial
intelligence and small flying insects.
We don’t know the end results of the project because it’s still ongoing, but we do know
it began with DARPA reaching out to the scientific community to see if anyone was able to map
the brain of an insect and figure out how the extremely complicated sensory and nervous
systems of flying insects could translate to robotics.
In other words, an army of robot insects.
The idea is to create extremely tiny AI systems.
Imagine a drone, except it’s a fly – and there are millions of them.
They would operate with a type of hive mind protocol, as a singular entity.
We don't know how far the military has gotten with this bizarre project or what they even
intend to use their robot army for.
But besides, once they’ve assembled their army, they probably won’t tell us anyway.
9: Military Mind Control The United States military recently funded
a project to create a helmet that can read minds.
Oh yes, the military is diving deep into mind control.
However, it's a bit different from what you might expect.
The helmets are designed to allow soldiers to fly drones and to control other robots
using telepathy.
The idea is that once the helmet is on the soldier’s head, it will read the signals
in their brain to operate the robot or whatever other piece of machine the helmet is connected
to.
Here's how the project just got started.
First, researchers in Texas are trying to make the helmet read the vision of a person
and then transfer what they are seeing into the brain of a person who’s visually impaired.
In other words, the person wearing the helmet, whatever they're seeing, it will be transmitted
into the brain of a blind person.
This is some seriously futuristic stuff.
The helmet works by utilizing light and magnetic fields to interact with neurons in the brain.
The ultimate goal is to have a scenario similar to the science fiction novel Ender’s Game.
If you’ve read that book or know the story, it would basically result in a single soldier
controlling huge war machines while sitting in a room somewhere with a helmet on.
Would you sign up to command real military equipment with your mind?
It seems a little scary to me, but what do you think?
8: Augmented Doggie Reality Dogs having a place in the military is nothing
new.
However, a new project being managed by the Army Research Office is trying to create cyborg
dogs.
Well, at least dogs that can make use of augmented reality.
On the modern battlefield, military dogs are used to search for explosive devices and to
help with rescue operations.
However, a human is usually needed to be present to give the dog its instructions.
Scientists want to create augmented reality goggles that can be placed on a dog’s head
so that its handler can give it commands remotely.
How does it work?
The augmented reality glasses are fixed to the military dog’s head.
Think of it like the heads up display in a video game.
The handler will be able to transmit instructions to the goggles, which the dog then sees overlapped
with the real world.
Think of visual cues that the dog has been trained to follow.
The dog will see commands come up in the goggles, telling it where to go, what to search for,
and when to return to base.
I don’t want to see any friendly dogs get in harm's way more than they need to, personally.
Wouldn’t you rather just have robots do these kinds of tasks?
Let me know your thoughts.
7: The U.S. Camel Corps Way back in the 1830s, the expansion into
the American West was difficult and dangerous.
Moving from east to west involved inhospitable terrain, a bleak climate, and nearly impossible
routes through desert, mountain, and river.
To allow the army easier passage into the west, Lieutenant George H. Crosman had the
bizarre idea in 1836 to establish a camel corps, one of the weirdest experiments in
the history of the U.S. Army.
It wouldn't be until 1855 that Congress finally agreed to give $30,000 to purchase and import
camels for military purposes.
Soon after, the Navy transported a collection of camels to the United States for use as
military transport.
33 camels were brought back, then months were spent acclimating the animals to their new
home and teaching the locals how to properly care for them.
It was when the military decided to build a road from east to west that camels came
in especially handy.
They could travel farther than horses and mules and could still carry about 700 pounds
(300kg).
They also traveled across the rough terrain more easily.
They could go about 40 miles (60km) a day while only drinking water once every two weeks.
However, by 1864, there wasn't much use for the camels anymore.
There were some suggestions to use them for the postal services, but that never happened.
It wasn't that the camels were useless or less useful than horses, it was just that
people didn't really like them.
They stank and had bad attitudes and, quite frankly, weren’t as pretty as horses.
In the end, the camel corps was scrapped and the camels were sold for $52 each.
But imagine if the camels were friendlier or had caught on with the soldiers and cowboys
who lived in the Wild West!
We would have a very different image of our frontier pioneers.
6: The Iceberg Boat Back in the 1940s, German submarines were
terrorizing the Allied forces, sinking their ships in the Atlantic Ocean and threatening
to win the war with their powerful navy.
The Allies wanted something that was too big to fail, and so a British inventor designed
what came to be known as the “Bergship,” an aircraft carrier carved out of an iceberg.
It would be a giant, unsinkable ship, more like an island, made completely out of ice.
As insane as it is to think about, the prototype was actually approved by Winston Churchill,
then built in secret.
The inventor of the ship was Geoffrey Pyke.
He envisioned an aircraft carrier over one mile long and made entirely of ice.
But it proved significantly harder than anticipated.
The prototype was commissioned in 1943 and was to be constructed in Canada.
A model was built on Patricia Lake in Alberta, 60 feet long and 1000 tons.
To create the larger vessel, scientists would need 35,000 tons of timber, 10,000 tons of
steel, and 25,000 tons of insulation.
Oh, and 300,000 tons of wood pulp.
However, the project just kept getting more and more complicated and expensive.
In the end, there just wasn't enough money or material to build the iceberg boat and
the plans were scrapped.
Still, theoretically, the ship could be built today.
I have to imagine that spending a lot of time and money to build an iceberg aircraft carrier
only to have it eventually melt into the sea doesn’t sound that appealing, though!
What do you think?
Let me know in the comments below and be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already!!
5: North Korea Killer Dolphins Evidence has recently emerged that in North
Korea, the military has begun training dolphins for an unknown but probably pretty nefarious
purpose.
Believe it or not, this isn't the first time a nation has tried to bring dolphins into
the military.
The Russians did it and so did the U.S. Navy.
But that was a long time ago.
Fighting dolphins are a thing of the past, except for apparently in North Korea.
They are just catching up folks.
Plus, who doesn’t want to work with dolphins all day??
Satellite images revealed the program in North Korea dates back to at least 2015, when a
dolphin enclosure was spotted near a naval base on the west coast.
North Korea has yet to comment on their bizarre dolphin program, but intelligence suggests
it is part of the naval modernization that has been going on under the leadership of
Kim Jong Un.
What exactly the North Koreans are training the dolphins to do is anybody’s guess – but
knowing them, it's probably pretty ridiculous.
4: Supersonic UFOs Up until recently, UFOs have been strictly
myths, along the same lines as the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot.
But after the U.S. government declassified some documents, the public got their first
look at something called Project 1794, when the army tried to make their very own flying
saucer.
The government decided enough time had passed and released the actual schematics for a flying
device that was part of an operation in the 1950s to make a sophisticated military vehicle.
So, what happened to the UFO?
It was to be built by a Canadian company on Canadian soil, though the U.S. was heavily
involved.
The saucer was to take off vertically, reach a ceiling of over 100,000 feet (30km) in the
air, and reach speeds of Mach 4.
It would have been an incredible device.
But unfortunately, UFOs aren't really that practical.
The government wasted about $26 million in today’s currency on the project only to
have the UFO get about five feet (1.5m) off the ground.
The plug was pulled in 1960 and the information was buried.
3: Zombie Sharks The United States military has figured out
how to create zombie sharks.
At least, they’re trying to make zombie sharks.
According to information from DARPA, they were working with Boston University on a project
that involved controlling fish by electronically stimulating their brains remotely.
In other words, they were turning the sharks into zombies by using a type of mind control.
By stimulating the brain of a shark, particularly by stimulating their sense of smell, researchers
could make the sharks move wherever they wanted them to go.
This is obviously horrifying.
If scientists can remotely stimulate an animal's brain to make it move in a certain direction
and attack a certain target, it's only a matter of time until they figure out how to do the
same thing with people, collecting an army of zombies.
As for what became of the zombie sharks, the project actually went dark and skeptics are
fairly certain they must have made some kind of progress that they aren't interested in
everyone else knowing about.
What do you think?
Are there likely to be armies of mind controlled animals soon?
What will the military do with them?
Tell me your thoughts in the comments below.
2: Superpowered Soldiers A new smart contact lens is being developed
as part of a military project to give soldiers superpowers.
The device was revealed by an engineering school in France.
They showed off what they called the very first contact lens with a micro battery.
As you can imagine, this caught the attention of the United States military.
They are interested in using the contact lens to increase the visual capabilities of troops
on the battlefield.
As you may already know, the military has been searching for some way to create an augmented
contact lens for years, a way to dramatically increase what soldiers are looking at while
in the field.
Imagine having binoculars in the form of contact lenses, while also being able to see at night,
to read information transmitted to the lenses, and much more.
The possibilities are endless, though the military hasn't actually revealed the exact
capabilities of the lenses or when they’ll be available to their soldiers.
1: U.S. Dinosaur Army Did you know that the United States military
owns a shocking number of fossils?
It actually began in the 1950s when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the Coralville
Dam to provide flood protection for the Iowa River Valley.
After they built the dam, they discovered a treasure trove of fossils dating back 375
million years on their property, revealed because of the floods before the dam was built;
the flooding wiped away several feet of limestone to reveal the fossils beneath.
According to Nancy Brighton, an archaeologist with the U.S. Army Corps, the military owns
a collection of fossils that spans the entire paleontological record.
They have everything from trilobites to dinosaurs.
But what does this mean?
Is the army planning to create their very own Jurassic Park?
Or what about an army of Tyrannosaurs.
rexes?
We don't actually have an answer for that.
While it's definitely interesting to imagine what the military could do with a limitless
supply of dinosaur bones, they haven't revealed any plans for creating any hybrids or bringing
any creatures back to life.
But that doesn't mean it won't happen.
30 years from now, we could see soldiers riding into battle on some kind of shark/dinosaur
hybrid!
Or cyborg mechanized t-rexes in war zones to try to keep the peace in unstable areas.
I know I wouldn’t mess with something like that, would you?
What do you think the army would do with living dinosaurs?
Let me know in the comments.
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