Is the Future Invisible?

a great topic, right. You know. The other option is she might be here and we don't even know about it. That is true. She could be sitting immediately to my right, your left, Joe, just to peek behind the curtain there for those of you out there in podcast land. She

could just be in her normal spot. But she could be undetectable to the naked eye, right because she has been granted a helm of darkness by the goddess Athena, or perhaps a cloak that she's inherited from her father who went to wizarding school, or perhaps a suit made out of some kind of bizarre nano material that that renders you invisible to the naked eye. No, I was going to go with the one ring, but that's way more realistic. Okay, So yeah, we're gonna talk about wait, wait, no,

I got a better one predator. That's the ultimate technological invisibility, right, because then you become like late eighties early nineties computer effect. Yeah, which, that's that's all I ask for. Really, I don't. I don't demand perfect invisibility. In fact, I want just near perfect invisible. Right. You want little ripples where they can

see the outline of your wrist spikes. Yeah, the same sort of thing that you had see in some of the Star Trek films, right, because because if you had perfect invisibility, it's hard to convey a sense of terror when you just have a you know, calm looking environment. You folks are so lucky that didn't just go down the path of making hollow man jokes. But anyway, it should be obvious that we're talking about invisibility tech today. What is the future of invisibility? We know the past,

which is that everybody wanted to be invisible. It shows up in folklore. There is, as I mentioned, their Greek myths about you know, a helmet you can put on to become invisible. Um, there are other sort of invisibility capes and magical cloaks and things like that. There are there are entities that are capable of disappearing to mortal man. Yeah, you know, it goes way back the desire to disappear, And that's not really all that surprising because it actually

goes back further than humans. You don't even have to look to folklore. You can look to nature because it's inherently great to become invisible because it provides you an advantage. It's pretty simple. It's easy to get to drop on somebody if they don't know where you are, but you know where they are. Or it's easy to evade someone getting the drop on you because you're able to hide away and the the the potential predator that would have doubled you up is none the wiser and just continues

on its predatory path. So yeah, there there are certainly advantages to being able to blend in with your environment and fade into the point of invisibility. I mean, that's that's pretty clear now with us humans. I think a lot of it tends to be power fantasies, but but let's set that aside, right, Maybe at the end we can talk a little bit about the actual ethics behind invisibility technology. What are we talking about here? What would

invisibility technology entail? Well, you won't hear the term invisibility a lot in people among engineers and researchers investigating this, they tend to speak more in terms of quote cloaking. Yeah, because I think that's a little more it's a little more realistic, sort of accurately conveys more of what they're trying to do. They're trying to somewhat shield your detectability,

not so much make you invisible like the folklore. Well, yeah, and especially since cloaking gets around, uh, the the belief the invisibility is all about the visible spectrum. Invisible, You've got the word visible there. Cloaking can be about making a device or or structure undetectable from very specific means as opposed to, or or even more general means as

opposed to something like the visible spectrum. So a cloaking device might be effective for something that is outside the visible spectrum, meaning that we would be able to see it with our naked eye, but using other means we would be unable to detect it, right, say if we sensed things by heat or something, or microwaves or radio waves. So, for example, stealth technology can be considered at least on a certain level as cloaking technology. It's just as you

can see a stealth bomber. But that's not really what they care about. They care about radar, right because I mean, you're the chances of you spotting a a stealth fighter or stealth bomber in the air are very low because they fly very high and they move very quickly. So they're really worried about being detected by by artificial means, by radio means, and that's where the clothing homes. Yeah, I assumed radar, maybe some other kind of means too.

I'm not up on all that military tech. It's really radar because it's all about beaming out of a frequency of radio waves and waiting to hear back the echo. And if you never hear the echo, then you just assume, all right, there was nothing there. And so stealth stealth technology is all about either absorbing or redirecting those radio waves so that they don't bounce back to a receiving station and then therefore they have no idea where you could be. Yeah, okay, so let's back way up and

start with the simplest idea, which is camouflage. Okay, Camouflage is basically biommetic. I know this is always in danger of turning into the bio memetics podcast, but that really is the future. People look into nature because nature has got a lot of good stuff going on. Yeah. Um, it's like being one of those animals that can blend in with its surroundings. So in this method, the goal is to appear such that a landscape with you in it doesn't look much different from a landscape without you

in it. You want a predator to be able to look at you without realizing you're an object distinct from your surroundings. So how do you do that? Well, the easiest form would be passive camouflage. This is the kind of camouflage. You know that your cousin Wardrior wedding and that they sell an army surplus stores. It's the kind of camouflage most common in the animal kingdom too. You can tell that that Joe and I are both from the South, where I didn't link an eye at the

idea of my cousin wearing camouflage to my wedding. No cousin of mine actually wore camouflage to my wedding. I was that was a legit. I didn't invite my cousins. So well, good idea. So let's think about maybe, uh, not so much the gray or the green and brown army camouflage, but say, like like a polar bear or an Arctic fox, they have white fur which comes in handy if you're trying to stalk prey on the snowy

tundra or out on an ice sheet. So animals can passively blend in with their surroundings by color patterns or maybe by physical structures, say think of the phasmatodia, right sure, yeah, or a combination of both of course, right yeah, you can. Even there are animals that have patterns on their hides that help them blend in with their surroundings. It helps break up the shape of the animal, especially like something

in the savannahs of of Africa. You know, you have these these animals that have different shapes that help them kind of blend in, uh, And it breaks up the outline of the animal shape itself, thus cutting down on the chance they'll be spotted by a predator. Um, so there's not like just a single approach to passive camouflage. But this particular type of camouflage tends to only be really effective in specific geographic regions. Yeah, or maybe even

only in specific parts of those geographic regions. Like, passive camouflage might work really well on tree bark, but then if you crawl onto a leaf, it doesn't work so well because it doesn't change. So the Arctic fox wanders onto green grass or onto an asphalt parking lot, it sort of loses its edge. Got a great example of this polar polar bear found on a tropical island. Lost. So that's not a great form of camouflage. Scary and

certainly raises some questions that I think are never sat answered. Spoiler, are never answered. That's exactly right. But what if the fox could change the color of its coat to blend in with its surroundings. Well, actually a fox sounds more active than passive there. Yeah, a fox can actually do that on a slow time scale. So when the seasons change in the snow melts, the Arctic foxes coat changes color.

It gets darker during the warmer months, so it can blend in with rocks and grass and dirt and stuff like that. But it turns white again next winter. That's nice, but of course that's not very useful minute to minute or second very gradual we were talking. If we want to talk about an animal capable of hiding its presence as it moves from one environment to another, or at least the environment itself has a gradation of different colors, you need to take something a little more drastic than

a gradual change of your your coat's color. Right, So now it's time to look into things like cephalopods. Okay, so now we're looking at your your critters like a like your octopus, and same things that are capable of changing the color of their of their skin or their outer surface and a very uh well like in real time. Yeah, exactly. I mean this is truly nature's active camouflage. It's not passive.

Their skin dynamically changes to respond to their surroundings. I don't mean that all speak sees of these families of animals do that in the same way. But within these groups there are animals like that. So if they suddenly need to vanish against the pebbly texture of the sea floor, they can or if they need to blend in with a pile of rocks, they can do that too. They're

pretty amazing. In fact, if you just want to have your mind blown and you've never seen this before, go to YouTube and just type in camouflage octopus and sit there and watch it over and over again. You won't be able to stop. It's unbelievable. This isn't really camouflage either, but the mimic octopus also does something really interesting. I don't know if you've ever seen this. It doesn't just

blend in with its surrounding it. It actually mimics other animals, so it'll pretend to be a poisonous sea snake or something like that. Um, and I think that's also really interesting. But there are technological ways to mimic the moment to moment dynamic camouflage of these animals. Your Yeah, there are, And the question is how good are they? Okay, well, let's let's start by talking about what they do, and

then we can critique how good they are at doing it. Okay, I think we should start with the one you're probably sitting there imagining right now. Okay, I ask you to design a system for active camouflage and give you a few hundred bucks to put it together. What do you do well, I mean, with a few hundred bucks, I probably scoff in your face. But what I would have to bucks, okay, whatever, what I would attempt to do is I would want to set up a projector and

a camera. All right, Let's say, let's say, for argument's sake, that I want to make James Bond's car disappear, and you've only given me a few hundred bucks. So I would pretty much have to coat the car with something that would make it act like a screen, retro reflective material that would be preferable. I don't know that I can manage that with a couple hundred bucks, but we'll see what we can do. Maybe it's just a tarp,

but well, we'll try. And then I would set up a camera behind the car are pointing at whatever happens to be behind it. From the perspective of the person who's going to be looking at this vehicle in front of the car, I would set up the projector so the feed from behind the car would go directly to the projector, which would project that feed onto the car. So from the perspective of someone looking at it from behind where the projector is. It would just like a

projector that's shooting out light at nothing. The idea being that that the the images behind the car would be projected onto the car, so it would be as if the light were passing straight through. Right, And so, video equipment has reached a point of sophistication where you can legitimately do this pretty well. You can get a high resolution, real time feed with no significant delay, run it through a computer projected onto a reflective surface. This is pretty

much doable, but there are a few problems with it. Yeah. Number one, I mean what if I stepped to the side. Yeah, you just ruined everything, Joe, you gave me a couple hundred bucks? What do you want? No, No, that This is exactly the issue. Right. The the illusion is broken if you are viewing it in any plane other than the one that has been set up specifically for this purpose. So you need to be looking directly in the way

that the image is being projected, right. Yeah, So if I'm coming at it from the side, I'm just gonna see the set up with the projector and the camera and the the car with the retroflective material draped over it in the center, and to me, there's gonna be I'm just like, well, uh, I could see what you're trying to do. But that's the problem is I can see it. And so in order to make this a realistic illusion from all angles, you would have to have

something that's really impossible to achieve practically. You would have to have cameras from every conceivable angle, uh, and and projectors from every conceivable angle, and also the rest of the equipment that would be used to facilitate this, to support it um and all the power and all this kind of stuff. It just quickly becomes uh impractical. You know, even if you could possibly do it, where from any given angle, you wouldn't be able to see the car.

You'd see all this equipment everywhere, and you think something's going on here. I don't know what. Maybe they're setting up for another like a matrix movie where they want to get that sixty degree panning thing going on, but otherwise I'm not really sure what's what's supposed to be happening here. Yeah, there's another problem with it, which is that, in addition to the fact that you have all this

bulky equipment and things like that. If you've ever seen this, because people have made systems like this years and years ago. It was covered in an early house stuff works article. Um, there was a I believe a group at the University of Tokyo that built a system like this, which I don't want to as usual, I don't want to downplay their achievement. It was good work that they did. But you can see that this is not necessarily going to be invisibility as much as it's sort of helps you

blend in a little more. Yeah, I mean it could. You can still see somebody wearing a cloak like this. You can tell there's a person there wearing a cloak. They just have projected on their cloak what's behind them. It could be really cool for specific non strategic purposes, like for for a marketing thing, it could be really neat or if you if you actually know, like if you can control the perspective at which people are going

to be viewing something, then it could be effective. So it might be effective as another additional means of camouflage for a stationary U exhibit or stationary uh you know, uh,

like a base or something. But it would again you'd have to be really good at at expecting where people are going to be viewing this set up from Yeah, one way, maybe you could get around this is looking at instead of doing just standard two dimensional projection if you had a way of creating dynamic holography, so projecting

a more three dimensional image onto a surface. Maybe maybe have you ever seen any of the three D mapping technology where uh, it's it's it's used just really for publicity steak, but it's uh it's a technology where a team will come out and project an image against a three dimensional object that's been digitally mapped specifically for that projection, and it ends up making the object look like itself

is interactive. It's usually used against enormous buildings, so the effect is that you can see things like the bricks in the building appear to fall down or or start to twist in place. It's really an interesting effect, and you could use something like that as a means to project against it whatever is behind that object, making that object seem to disappear. But it would be a lot of effort for something that would again only work if

you were standing in the right spot. If you were unless you had mapped every side of that object, and you had a really good coverage of it. It would not be effective for someone who happened to be coming from the opposite side. So um. I have, however, seen a really cool implementation of this that was not meant for cloaking, but it was meant for a costume effect. So I saw a guy who was dressed up as a zombie and he had mounted a like a go pro style camera on his back, on the small of

his back, and then on his stomach. He had mounted essentially a tablet device and the feed from the went to the tablet, so that way it looked like he had a gun shot, like a shotgun wound in the middle of his torso, and you could see through it because of the live feed from the camera behind him. It's pretty good. Yeah, it was really clever, But but that was not obviously not cloaking or invisibility. It was just a cool costume trick. All right, let's talk about

flexible optoelectric camouflage skin. Well that sounds promising, Joe, but what is it? So let's go back to the cephalopods. Okay, how do they do it? I mean, an octopus has to have. It's not magic. It has some physical structure that allows its skin to mimic what's below it and project that image onto the skin. It doesn't need external projectors anything like that. Right, um, so why don't we just look at how they do it and try to mimic that. Well, have you ever tried to interrogate an octopus?

Those suckers are really tight lepped. They are actually very crafty and sneaky. Even if you've ever heard of somebody who tried to keep an octopus as a pet. You cannot keep these things contained. They're so smart and nimble. They will find a way out of your house and you find them again. They're running a con operation somewhere downtown. It's usually it's usually three card Monty because they're really good at that, right, but bad card Monty. But now

they we are we are making fun of it. But they are quite uh, quite good at problem solving and there and their skin is just as smart as are basically so. Researchers including Kunjong You of the University of Houston and John Rodgers of the u of Illinois published some findings in a paper in p N A S this past August, and the paper was called Adaptive opto Electronic camouflage Systems with designs inspired by cephalopod skins awesome biommetics. I love it so looking at how cephalopod skin works.

They designed a system of thin, flexible material they can match the color patterns of its environment automatically without projectors. The sheets have essentially three layers. The top layered displays color to the observer. This is done with pixelated temperature sensitive material that changes color based on heat. The middle layer does the work of changing the top layers color

by way of electrical actuators. So it supplies some electric current that changes the temperature of the top layer and it's color changes. And the bottom layer is the sensor layer. This contains photosensitive elements that react to external light signals and tell the actuators what to do. So this is the layer that's actually sensing what the color is of the surrounding environment. Right, So it's it's essentially uh, an input layer, oh do in the work layer, and an

output layer. That's really awesome. Yeah, And it's very thin, very flexible. It apparently works like a charm, except the prototype is only in black and white so far, and it's not very large, but it demonstrates that the principle works. The researchers said they could potentially upgrade it to provide more surface area and more color diversity. And I think that's really interesting. So the black and white, you don't mean that it's just going to be either a solid black, right.

And also if there's a pattern, it'll pick up that pattern on the black and white. Oh yeah, exactly. So, so if you had a pattern of squares and circles, it's going to match that pattern of square. Yes, it's really really neat. I would love to see that stuff in action. There's a video you can look up. It's out there on YouTube. You can google the names of the researchers I mentioned and and it will come up

on YouTube. All right, well, we'll definitely link to that as well on our our website and on Twitter, because this is something I've got to see and share. Yeah, but sometimes camouflage won't cut it. Yeah, because even advanced optical camouflage has limitations. It might require bulky equipment or probably only work in one directions, just hard to look convincing. Basically, it may take time for it to make that change,

Like it may not be so instantaneous. If you are in motion, then clearly, you know, even wearing camouflage, you're going to break up that that scenery that someone's looking at, and then they're going to see that something is there, even if they can't immediately recognize what that is. That's right. So with camouflage, remember you're not disappearing. Even if your camouflage works really well. The observer is still looking at you.

They're seeing you. They're just not recognizing that you are what you are, that you're separate from the environment that you're in. What if you actually wanted to literally disappear, to to appear as if there was nothing there at all, the light just passes straight through you. So, Joe, I have a feeling, especially since I'm looking at my notes and I see how it's laid out, that you want to talk about meta materials. Meta materials they're one of

those magic things in current engineering. Yeah. I never met a material I didn't like, Joe, but thank you. So meta materials are synthetic. Let's get that all the way first. These are synthetic materials that have been made by man. You are not going to find them anywhere in nature. Yeah,

it's uh. And it's the interesting thing about meta materials is that it doesn't so much matter what they're made out of, as it matters the structure, the actual physical structure of the tiny elements that make up the overall

whatever material you're making. So in other words, like if I have a gold bar, it's going to have certain properties because it's gold, right, Well, the reason gold looks like gold, the reason has the color it has is the chemical properties of the molecules and atoms that make it up. Yep. And so that's the way it is with most materials we come into contact with. You know,

it's it. It behaves a certain way, it tastes a certain way, smells a certain way, looks a certain way because of what elements or compounds make up that material. But that's not the case with meta materials. No, it doesn't matter so much what the individual materials are, it's how they're put together. So we're talking about tiny structures on the nanoscale or sometimes even on the atomic scale, and we're talking about structures that are repeating over and

over again. And if you want to kind of visualize this, imagine scaffolding. So if you've ever seen scaffolding up against the building. Think of that, but think of it repeated in three dimensions. So it's not just the height and width of the structure you're looking at. It builds outward as well. So if you want to think about you

can also think. You know, if you've ever watched a building being constructed and it has that that just that skeletal structure first before anything else has been laid out. It's kind of like that, but on a nano scale. Yeah, So what happens when you look at something, say it is a brick or a gold bar, You're not actually seeing the thing. You're seeing light rays that are scattering off of it. Yeah, so it's just photons hitting this object,

bouncing off of it and hitting your eyes. Your your eyes are detecting those photons, and that's what eventually, uh, and it ends up activating some some different systems in your brain that ultimately your brain says, hey, that's a brak, right. And so if you can manipulate what these photons do when they hit an object surface, you can potentially manipulate the way we see some thing, or if we don't see it at all. Right, So how could this how

do meta materials come into manipulating photons. So all right, we have to talk about electromagnetic radiation. Visible spectrum of light is part of the full electro magnetic spectrum, which is much larger than just the visible spectrum of light. That's just a tiny slice right all the way from these big long radio waves up to gamma waves. So and that that's exactly it. That's the whole spectrum there.

So visible spectrum is just one tiny little bit of this, with infrared being on one side of the of the visible spectrum outside of it, and ultra violet being on the the shorter ridge of it also outside of it. Everything in between that is the visible spectrum from the good old ROYGBIV with red being the longer waves and violet being the shorter waves. So, uh, your meta materials are able to interact with electromagnetic radiation in different ways

than what our traditional materials are. Electromagnetic radiation has two different components to it. There's an electric field and a magnetic field. Now, most stuff in nature tends to only react to the electric field. Stuff some of it does react to the magnetic field as well, but not a lot of it. Stuff like magnets that would be one of them. Uh. So many materials can have the potential of acting with either one or the other or both, giving you a lot more options. And depending upon the

size of those structures. I was talking about those repeated structures, you can interact with those electro magnetic waves in very interesting ways. So you may have you may be familiar with this, Joe, you know that uh antenna radio antenna. Do you realize that the length of the radio antenna is very specific. It's made so that can pick up specific frequencies of radio waves. Yeah, so the length of your antenna is dependent upon, in part, the length of

the radio waves you're trying to to pick up. Many materials are kind of similar. They have to be the essentially smaller than whatever wavelength you're trying to manipulate. Now, you can create meta materials that will allow wavelengths to pass through them as if nothing were there. And we've done this with microwaves largely. So what are we talking

about in sort of a model form here? The way I've heard it explain, and I think this makes pretty good sense, is try to imagine that you have a rock in a stream, and so when the water comes

to the rock. It doesn't splatter off the rock and go back in the opposite direction, but it flows around the rock right and then reforms on the other side as if there's not a rock and before it's if you're further down the stream and you're just looking at the way the water is flowing, you would never be able to tell that that rock was further up the stream. It would just seem as if there was nothing that

had interrupted the waters flow in the first place. And and I think that's basically the idea behind how a meta material cloak might deal with light waves hitting an object. Instead of allowing the photons to scatter off the object and shoot back towards you, they would gather all those incoming light rays and guide them smoothly around the outside of the object and to pass along back out the

other side. So from an observer, it would seem as if the light is just moving straight, that it never bent in the first place, and so you would clearly see things that are on the other side of the object and not be aware that there's an object there

at all. And if you had constructed the metal materials properly and arranged them properly around the object, the person could do a full three sixty degree walk around of this and it would seem the same from every angle that you would just have a clear view straight through whatever it was that was being cloaked. Right, So that's the idea in principle, But we don't have anything like

that yet. No, I mean we we've seen some work with very long frequencies and the visible range, and by very long we're talking no, I'm talking there's been a little bit into the the red range, but it's very specific and that it doesn't go beyond that. And also there's not been a lot of paperwork to actually suggest that it was a success. I'm talking about there's been

some experimentation that in that arena. Now, the again, like I said, the red waves are the longest of the the the visible spectrum wavelengths Infra red has had more work done in microwaves are where most of the work has been done because that's where the longer wavelengths and this electromatic spectrum are until you get to the radio waves. Right. Well, I believe we have working meta material cloaks for microwaves. So imagine if you were a creature that saw in

microwaves instead of saw invisible life. You we could create a pretty functional invisibility cloak for that creature, and that creature will be bumping into stuff all the time. It would be really irritated. Uh. Yeah. They can build meta materials that go around, like a little rod or something in a lab, throw microwaves at it in the sensor on the other side doesn't really see it well. And they've talked about using that for radio telescopes things that

would uh end up having interference otherwise. And so that if you have it tuned to a very specific frequency and you don't want other frequencies interfering, and you make it out of this stuff, those other frequencies just pass

right through and then you ignore it. Uh. So there are applications for this, but when you get down to visible range, it gets trickier because you have to build those structures smaller and smaller, and when you're talking about the wavelengths of visible light, you're talking about nanometers, and it's gets increasingly hard to build something with that kind of precision on the nano scale with especially without running

into other problems in the nano scale. And then once you're able to build that structure scaling it up so that you can build something that's actually usable and three dimension right, yeah, nano scale you're talking about like if you're talking about a line of something on the atomic scale, you're essentially talking about one dimension. You don't even have width, you just have length. In that case, scaling that up so that you're talking about three dimensional object is not

a not a not an easy challenge. I've got another problem for you. Hit me with it, okay, So right now we can't build meta materials that are small enough to take advantage of visible light. We also might have a problem covering enough of the spectrum to fool our eyes. So right now, meto materials, mostly in the past, have been able to attack a very narrow frequency of light waves, so they can get a narrow frequency of microwaves and bam invisible to that. But what would this look like

on the visible spectrum. Let's say you could get just red light. I try to imagine this. You're wearing a cloak that guides red light straight around your body, but it doesn't work for green light and yellow light an orange light. Well, first of all, I mean that that would be very strange. So I think of it the shadow of this thing would be read the red light was the red light would pass through, so you would

get red light going through this object. So anything directly behind the object, assuming that you have assuming your light sources behind you, and you are looking at the object, if you had someone hold their hand up behind the object, their hand would appear to be reddish in color because the red light would be passing through it. Everything else would be bouncing back off of it, so you wouldn't have any red hues in whatever it was you were

looking at. It would be all orange and beyond. So the color of the object would look off to you because all the red color would be out of it. So think of it like if you were think of adjusting, say a display, and you're playing with the different levels of red, green, and blue, Like if you've ever played with that just to kind of see like the different the different levels, then you know you're like, oh my gosh, now now I look green and blue instead of like

a human colors. I was trying to imagine what it would be like and wondered if it would be sort of like when the weather man walks in front of the green screen with the wrong color tie and and it kind of fades in. Well, it probably probably not like that. That seems too clean. Well, yeah, because you would you would actually be seeing through in that case, right,

You wouldn't see through this thing. You would just you would because all the other colors, unless unless you had made something that was perfectly red so that all the color just goes straight through anyway, then you'd be you know, then I guess you can make it invisible. But if it's any other color, like if any other uh wavelengths would bounce off of it, you're gonna get those wavelengths

and you're gonna see that something is there that's so interesting. Anyway, there are big challenges in creating meta material cloaks, but that doesn't mean people aren't trying. And I have some confidence that with some of the smartest people working on this, this might actually be a doable thing. Yeah, we may not ever get the full visible spectrum, but we might get some really interesting uh uh you know applications of it. Right, I'm at least very interested to see where it goes.

But let's be optimists for a comments and just assume yeah, we've done it. The meta material cloak for the whole visible spectrum. O, what what does this entail? Okay, well, first of all, here's the mind bender. And this was a question that was posed to us by a forward thinking fan when we had the video of invisibility go up, and they said, all right, let's say that you've got this mat of material working and you're inside the structure. So so you've got you've got all the man materials

surrounding you, so that you are in effect invisible. Would you be able to see anything because it's bending, but you must be blind? Yeah, because if it's if it's bending all the light that comes at you so that it continues through and goes out the other side, thus giving the the perspective of someone who's looking at you as if there's nothing there. Wouldn't that also mean that all the light that normally would be going to your eyeballs is being bent around you, so you are in

perfect darkness. I'm not talking that it's dark. I'm saying there's no light, no light at all unless you have a light inside, like you've turned a light on inside, which I don't know how that would look at anybody outside. I tried to imagine. Okay, so what if you just cut out a little people to look through, and then you'd be a pair of floating eyes. Yeah, maybe you could manufacture it in such a way where some of the light that was coming in was being bent into

the center so that you could see. But if that's the case, where does the light go right? So let's say that you are in a let's just say a parking lot. You are in the middle of a parking lot on a nice some reason, in the middle of a parking lot, because you don't know how you got there. It's flat and you can see a lot of different Well, if it's in Georgia, there's not for some reason, it's because it's hot and humid. But no, the the parking lot examples just so that you can have a nice

clear field of view around you. All right. But if you're in the parking lot and you've got this on you, and you this the structure of meta materials around you, and it's bending light around, and it's bending some light into the center, presumably you don't want that light to be able to escape again, because then if it could, it's going to reflect some of what you are to somebody looking outside. It might not look like a person, but you might think that's really weird, so you wouldn't

you would want that light to stay inside. But if the light is staying inside and it's just getting absorbed over and over and over again, nothing is Eventually nothing is allowed to reflect out. It's just essentially becoming a cooker. That light is just coming in and it has to be absorbed. It can't be reflected. You're absorbing more and more light energy you would cook in there. Now, maybe there's a way around that. Maybe I don't, but I don't know. And this is, by the way, is completely

based upon me thinking about the question. There could be experts out there shaking their head saying he's got it all wrong, and that's very very likely. But this is just me kind of puzzling it out in my mind. You know. Questions like this get me thinking that, Okay, I start to wonder that even if you had a pretty good cloak that worked along these lines, I don't know if it would actually translate as invisibility. It might translate instead as something that doesn't look like a person

standing there but does look very odd. That might be uh, you know. Oh, HP Lovecraft's dreams have come true once more, and now the the unspeakable things that that Lurk did his imagination have come alive and are walking around. Yeah, or what what I'm just imagining is that you've got a person with a cloak on standing in the corner, and instead what you see is this strange, shadowy mass that's kind of like different shades from what's around it.

It's it's definitely an interesting thought experiment. Whether or not we ever have something practical to look at and just see if it works, that's another question. But yeah, as a side note, though, I don't think that people should get the impression that this is all meta materials are

useful for. Meta materials are a whole other field in materials science that's fascinating and highly useful, and there's some really cool research about it going into interacting with stuff that's in waves that has nothing to do with electromagnetic radiation, because it's possible that you can build meta materials that can interact with physical waves in uh in different interesting ways,

including waves in the ocean. So the U. S. Navy, for example, is looking into using meta materials to create vessels that can pass through water without leaving awake. So, in other words, it's it's as if the water can just flow flow around, as if there's not something there, And that would be very useful if you didn't want, you know, a reconnaissance aircraft to notice the wake of a giant vessel that happens to have sailed through in the last you know, hour or so, then that that's useful.

But it's also useful for things like a ship stability. Uh. And there's also been talk of of meta materials for seismic waves as in earthquakes, So you can help make a building more earthquake resilient by letting seismic waves pass through it as if it's not there, which I can't even imagine. I mean, I don't know what that would be like. Yeah, I don't know either. If you can, you imagine, like walking by looking outside the window, you see like people falling over for no apparent reason because

you're you're in a building that's perfectly steady. That's hard for me to imagine. Maybe it protects the building but not the people inside. Yeah. Maybe, But if you really are curious about meta materials, you want to hear more. Lauren and I did a text stuff episode about it, and it was published on July six, fourteen. It's called tech stuff gets meta parentheses, material in parentheses. Everybody give

that a listen. Yeah, but I want to transition away from meta materials real quick and get meta about invisibility. Let's do it. I think there is a real question to ask here, not saying we shouldn't pursue this technology, but at least in considering the implications of it, are there actually good, peaceful uses for invisibility or should we be thinking about the development of invisibility as if it's essentially the same as developing a weapon. I think it

all depends upon, again, the definition you're using. If you're talking about invisibility as an invisible to the visible spectrum, Uh, it's tricky. I could see it being very useful for something like observing a natural habitat without having any kind of visible presence there, so that you can get as much of a natural the idea of what's going on

as possible. But maybe if you want to cover up a nature documentary camera, Yeah, yeah, exactly, if you wanted to get a real look at how wildlife interacts with its environment without detecting you, then that would be obviously some A good a good use for this. I think most of the cloaking technology is going to be used for things that are outside the invisible spectrum anyway, and again that could involve things like making sure radios are more attuned to the frequencies they need to and are

avoiding interference that kind of thing. I see that as being really useful, potentially really useful for things like space exploration in ways that we can't necessarily anticipate. Not again, not the cloaking device of the cling on bird of uh the bird of prey or the or the Romulan bird of prey, which I think preceded the cling on one,

but rather just again for communications sake. But when it comes to the visible one, there are only a few very specific applications I can think of that are that either that don't come across as either a weaponized use of technology or a super creepy use of technology basically

weapons or criminal usespige. Yeah, espionage would be a big one, which you could argue is not criminal at least it's not criminal for the nation that you know that that trained this spy, but it might be criminal and whatever nation the spy is working in. But yeah, it's it's definitely.

I mean, surveillance would be a big one. But again, these are these are more you know, gray areas, if not outright unethical areas, depending upon your your own uh you know, kind of touchstone for that sort of thing. It definitely like it kind of says something about us that this is one of the future technologies that people get really excited about. Yet it's also one of the

hardest to imagine non illegitimate uses. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's hard to imagine something that wouldn't be catering to some of the less noble human traits, right, So it's it's one of those where I think if we were to achieve it technologically, that would be astounding because it would show that we have a full understanding of something that is incredibly complicated, and I think the achievement would be phenomenal. But yeah, like you said, I don't think the applications

lend themselves to the more noble pursuits. Okay, one last questions, Sure hit me. You get to pick one of two superpowers. You can fly or you can be invisible. Fly. It's always been fly. It's always been fly for me. That's as a kid, I always love the idea of being able to fly. Well, they say you're one of the good people if you pick that. Yeah, the nice people pick fly, the creepy people pick invisibility. Now, I gotta also say that there's a third superpower that I would

pick over either of those in a heartbeat. But it's a major superpower that doesn't often come up because if you give it to your character, your character immediately becomes overpowered, which is time control. Time control, time control wins out over everything else. That's boring. That's just to the point of you know why, I'd say, I tell you why because I like do over. The best superpower I've always thought this is teleportation because it can essentially mimic any

other superpower. Yeah, I guess like you can. If you can teleport to anywhere at any time, you can simulate flying. Now you can't. Are you able to tell other things

besides just yourself? Yes, that's a very specific power because you know that in in in good old comic book lore, there is the ability to teleport yourself, and then there's the ability to teleport other things, and then there's the ability to do well, if I couldn't teleport other things, you'd show up everywhere you went naked and thus terminator style, right, yeah, but I mean if you uh what I'm talking about

being able to teleport something without teleporting yourself. So in other words, in other words, are you able to teleport like someone's double parked and you're like, okay, well guess what your Porsche is now on Saturn's moons in pieces, So good luck with that. I think we've sort of gone off the rails maybe a little. But the takeaway is invisibility very interesting. Don't know about the implications of it for practical uses, but I still like the technological angle.

It's really cool science. Yeah, and again, we we learn even if we never get to a point where we have an invisibility cloak, and and frankly, there are a lot of people who who feel that that is the most likely scenario. Again, like we always say, we learned so much along the way. We learn everything from more about how electromagnetic radiation works, to engineering to manufacturing processes, lots of stuff that can benefit us in ways beyond we were we were able to make an invisibility cloak.

So I'm full in favor of the pursuit um and mostly because I don't think we're ever going to achieve it, so I don't have to worry about someone you know, spooking me. So uh, I think this is a fun conversation, um,

and it makes me want to talk about superheroes. So it's too bad that that's not really the the the subject that we cover here on Forward Thinking, Though, we got a listener request for an episode about about technology that mimics the various powers of the X Men, and I think we should do an episode on that challenge accepted, we will do an episode. Do not make that the episode that you and Lauren recorded. I will be so disappointed if I come back and find out you've done that.

All right, Well, if you guys out there have any suggestions for us, Maybe you've got a suggestion like that one. There's something about the future you've wondered about. Maybe is there a technology that can give us this thing that we've heard about in literature, or maybe it's just you know, I'm curious what the future of I don't know Mexican food is gonna be. I'm saying that because I'm hungry. Maybe you're saying it because you really want to know. Ask us we will look into it and we will

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