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Seeing through walls — 6 Comments

  1. That is only one path towards spying…

    There will be a day when surveillance devices, less than half the size of gnats, will be cheap to deploy and virtually undetectable.

    Then what will our world be like?

  2. Only a moral society can rein in technology’s dark side. DNA is just one potential example.

    In 1942, SciFi author R.A. Heinlein envisioned a future “world where genetic selection for increased health, longevity, and intelligence has become so widespread that the unmodified ‘control naturals’ are a carefully managed and protected minority.”

    “Transhumanists: Superhuman Powers And Life Extension Technologies Will Allow Us To Become Like God”

    “Could it be that we’ve been tricked into pouring our innovative energy into making ourselves better slaves? If the digital elite achieves its dream of a perfect union with machines, what becomes of the rest of us who either can’t afford cyborgification or who actually enjoy life as a regular human being? Would one Singularitized human be expected to handle the workload of 100 unenhanced workers? Robots will have of course taken the rest of the jobs.”

    “In fact, robots are already taking our jobs at a staggering pace. This is even happening in low wage countries such as China…

    “Chinese company Hon Hai, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer, has announced it intends to build a robot-making factory and replace 500,000 workers with robots over the next three years.”

    “Don’t be afraid of robots–be afraid of becoming one”

    But transhumanists are not really concerned with such matters. They insist that we will become so intelligent that we will easily figure out the solutions to such social issues.”

    “US scientists create ‘human-animal hybrids’ by growing human organs inside sheep and pigs”
    “The technology could one day be used to save the lives of people waiting for organ transplants”

    Of course, that tool will not be used in any horrific manner… such as creating new life like a real centaur… half man and half horse. Can’t you just hear it? “I mean, how cool would that be?”

    The Left drools at the prospect of intelligence so elevated that it transcends outdated concepts like ‘morality’.

    “Better to rule in hell, than serve in heaven” is indeed the path they embrace. I’d bet that even Lucifer started out with ‘good intentions’.

    “There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.” Proverbs 14:12

  3. Yeah, but as it turns out, there’s a reason our eyes evolved to see the narrow spectrum of visible light: it turns out wavelengths shorter than violet and/or longer than red really suck at telling common solid, liquid, and gaseous substances apart from one another. Radio waves are scattered by air, turning the clearest day into a fog that makes vision impossible at more than 600 feet away (which is the reason your wireless router has a limited radius). Broadcast transmitters have to put out more lumens in that part of the spectrum than the surface of the sun to overcome this, and a few other curious properties of the gases that make up our atmosphere (specifically, the ionosphere reflecting radio waves like the surface of a lake reflects light) have to be taken into account as well.

    Ultraviolet wavelengths have the problem of passing through many solid objects, including the eyes of the creatures that see them (insects mostly), which is why point sources of ultraviolet light confuse them so badly. Their method of focusing scattered ultraviolet light into an image, compound eyes, can pick out and focus an image even if their eyes are transparent to the spectrum they see; lens and retina eyes, by contrast, require all but a tiny aperture to be opaque, and all light entering through that aperture filtered so that only light from a specific direction reaches any given rod/cone on the retina, otherwise all that’s seen is a big dark blur or a big light blur. But compound eyes have the weakness of requiring the illuminating light be mostly parallel to form a picture from the scattered results of hitting solid objects; if the light source is close enough for the illumination to be non-parallel, scattered light becomes indistinguishable from the illumination, and the compound eye suffers the same big dark/light blur problem.

    So, yes, the police can see through walls with this, but they can’t see much unless they’re close enough to be seen in return. It’s the neighbors in adjacent apartments getting hold of this tech that you should really worry about.

  4. “It can basically scan a room with someone’s Wi-Fi transmission…”

    My decision to not install WiFi at my place wasn’t as paranoid as it may have seemed.

  5. @Tatterdemalian – learned something new.

    “So, yes, the police can see through walls with this, but they can’t see much unless they’re close enough to be seen in return.”

    And, just in time, the TSA announces they will be asking travelers to take more out of their carry on bags, as they cannot tell between organic material and explosive material.

    Presumably people are packing more into their carry-ons.

    Guess why?

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