Invisibility Is Finally Here One of the dreams of humanity is to make invisibility possible. In the past several different ways were tried and currently we have partially accomplished this with the ultimate goal being creating invisibility using biology. Humans have been looking to create invisibility for thousands of years. It all started with using camouflage. Early hunters wanted to hide themselves from animals so they could sneak up on them and make their hunt successful. They did this originally by hiding behind bushes and trees and maybe even large rocks. When you look at this primitive attempt at not being seen it does show our early ancestors knew there was an advantage to being invisible. This idea progressed with the ancients as leaders of different armies set ambush traps for other enemy armies. The ambush might be planned by hiding armies in trenches and such, or on top of ridges where they couldn’t be seen as the enemy would enter, they would then rain down arrows on them and come running at them. As time went by someone got the bright idea dressing soldiers to match the backgrounds where they would fight because it would make them much harder to see, and in some cases invisible to the enemy. Snipers would wear suits composed of the elements around them which are called ghillie suits. This also rendered the sniper practically invisible. The problem is none of these attempts were actually real invisibility, but each type worked to a certain extent. In World War II some tanks were rendered invisible by using very bright lights. Tanks which shine very powerful lights forward which would cause the actual tank to be in an area which could not be seen. Ancient alchemists tried to create invisibility but obviously they never succeeded and the most famous alchemist of them all was Isaac Newton. I don’t know if he worked on invisibility or not, but chances are he probably did. Then there was magic. I think I can say for sure any attempt by magicians both past and present to create true invisibility failed and today magicians are just tricksters and everything they do is predicated on the fact they can fool us. Some of their tricks are more exotic than others and even if they are hard to figure out the answer to, they are still tricks nevertheless. There are different types of invisibility. There’s invisibility from radar for objects and there’s optical invisibility for objects and humans. In 2006 we had a huge breakthrough in the study of true invisibility. A British scientist named John Pendry invented a material which could bend microwaves. This was the start even though it only worked on tiny objects and could not produce optical invisibility. The original material is very bulky, but now materials are much thinner and more pliable. As the material was worked on it kept getting improved over the years and now it can actually deflect optical light and if you wrap it around someone, they do become invisible. Stealth planes have a certain degree of radar invisibility and while they still show up on radar, their signature looks more like a tiny bird not the advanced planes they are. The work doesn’t end here however, because there is a new material which has been invented which supposedly can completely cloak an airplane from radar detection and this material is being worked on to try and upgraded so it can also reflect visible light. This would make a future aircraft invisible to radar and also invisible to eyes on the ground. Some militaries are working on other ways to detect aircraft and one of these ways is by detecting the air movement around them as they fly. They might be invisible in the future, but they will always displace some air as they move through our atmosphere. If a detector of this nature can be created, it might render all this expensive invisibility technology useless. We are at the point where if soldiers uniforms could be made of a material which produces invisibility and the exposed parts of the body can be covered with the same material such as gloves for their hands and a mask for the face, soldiers could literally become invisible. Can you imagine two armies facing each other and neither one can see each other. It seems to me one important factor will be creating a way to turn the invisibility off when it is not needed. You wouldn’t want invisible soldiers running around the base and no one being able to see them as they bang into each other. Prior to the invisibility shield somebody decided they could make aircraft optically invisible and this could also be applied to certain weapons like tanks. They did this successfully by installing a television screen in front of the object and a camera facing behind the object. The idea was to send information from the rear to the screen on the front thus making the object invisible to the naked eye. Planes did it a little differently, they had screens on the bottom and cameras on the top which photographed the sky above the plane and showed it on the screens below the plane, thus the plane became invisible. Can you imagine if an invisibility cloak ever falls into the hands of a criminal? They could sit in a corner of a bank wrapped with the cloak and when the bank closed, they could then begin their robbery spree. It would probably take several people to accomplish since everything should be locked up, but getting these clothes into the hands of criminals would make it that much harder for law enforcement to prevent a crime and not only that even if cameras was stationed throughout the bank, they wouldn’t record what the criminals look like since they were covered with the cloaks of invisibility. It sounds almost like a crazy 1950s horror movie when I say that. Many times, when we produce new technology, there is a downside and I guess invisibility will also have one. That is why I mentioned invisibility cloaks could someday get into the wrong hands. What I didn’t mention was it might be a boon to spies. A spy might be able to get into a room where a secret conference was going to take place and record everything that went on without being detected. This makes me think that new methods of detection are also being developed to prevent this from happening. I don’t know whether body heat can still be detected if someone is wrapped in one of these cloaks, but if it can’t be picked up certain wavelengths might be able to allow a device to detect the cloak.
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