The British are going to try beating back pirates with specially-crafted laser canons. I’m not kidding.
“We are using the laser as a kind of dummy sun that we can hide the vessel behind,” Roy Clarke, who works with laser-maker BAE Systems Advanced Technology Centre, told Britain’s Telegraph.
This got me thinking: What else should we be using lasers to fight?
- Lasers vs. FDLR — Coltan is shiny, but lasers are shinier.
- Lasers vs. Sudanese gun ships — A village beaming lasers would be pretty hard to target. On the other hand, they would also interfere with any satellite-paparazzi-against-genocide activity.
- iLasers vs. Mass Rape — Once we get the hang of it, we can downsize the technology so each woman can wear a laser, a la hands-free camping lanterns, on her head, “stunning” would-be rapists for miles?
This is not your mama’s laser. This is nuanced Laser 2.0. With this kind of laser power, we can be — what’s the word everyone loves? — surgical. Says BAE’s anti-pirate chief, “As the pirates come closer to about 400 or 500 metres of the ship, the power of the laser can be increased so that it affects their concentration and distracts them….We are also going to look at how different patterns and flickering can increase that affect.”
Lasers on the Golf Hotel could flicker Cote d’Ivorian would-be president Laurent Gbagbo into submission! Lasers that intensify as the LRA approaches! Hey, maybe if we had lasers quickly blinking subliminal dollar sign patterns installed on the Horn’s beaches, we might see a sudden increase in FDI in, oh, Djibouti. Just speculating…
There’s just one little glitch. Lasers, it turns out, aren’t fair war play, even against pirates. The Telegraph says the laser must be “approved for use under the UN’s protocol on blinding laser weapons before it can be deployed on ships.” In possibly the shortest UN document of all time, a laser protocol was added to a conventional weapons treaty in 1995. Who says the UN isn’t changing lives?
But don’t worry, getting a UN exemption in this case is worth it, and not just for multi-billion dollar corporations who ship stuff around the world. It’s also worth it for, you know, the little guy, because these lasers “could also be mounted on smaller yachts to help protect them from being targeted.”
Is someone writing George Lucas a thank-you card?
