DARPA invented the Internet and a lot of other stuff.

According to DARPA's Strategic Plan as of February 2003:

".... IAO is developing and integrating information technology that largely consists of three parts &endash; advanced collaborative and decision support tools, language translation technologies, data search and pattern recognition technologies. Together, these three parts effectively comprise the Total Information Awareness (TIA) project. ...

... Many elements of the information technology revolution that have vastly increased the effectiveness of the U.S. military and transformed American society &endash; time-sharing, interactive computing, the ideas behind the personal computer, the Internet &endash; were spurred on by the vision of a scientist at DARPA in the 1960s and 1970s, J. C. R. Licklider ...[ no, really, Al Gore didn't do it ]...

... DARPA's Software for Distributed Robotics (SDR) program is developing robot behavior and software to enable very large groups of very small, very inexpensive robots to perform useful tasks. SDR will allow human operators to control robot "swarms" without having to consider what each individual robot may be doing. ..

 

.... The Global Hawk and Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have been prominent in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and other parts of the world. ...

... DARPA's space program ... Responsive Access, Small Cargo, Affordable Launch (RASCAL) ... is designed to place small payloads in orbit on a moment's notice by launching them from a highspeed, high-altitude aircraft that eliminates a large and expensive first stage booster. ...

 

... DARPA's Continuous Assisted Performance (CAP) program illustrates how the Bio-Revolution is aimed at helping U.S. warfighters. CAP is investigating ways to prevent fatigue and enable soldiers to stay awake, alert, and effective for up to seven days straight without suffering any deleterious mental or physical effects and without using any of the current generation of stimulants. ...

 

... Licklider's vision was of people and computers working together symbiotically. His concept was of computers seamlessly adapting to people as partners that handle routine information processing tasks. This frees people to focus on what they do best &endash; think analytically and creatively &endash; and, thereby, greatly extend the powers of their minds, i.e., what they can know, understand, and do. ...

... DARPA's ... Brain Machine Interface program ... is finding ways to detect and directly decode signals in the brain so that thoughts can be turned into acts performed by a machine. Essentially, this program is working on ways for machines to synchronize with minds and then act directly on thoughts. This has actually been demonstrated, to a limited degree, with a monkey that has been taught to move a computer mouse or a telerobotic arm simply by thinking about it. The long-term Defense implications of finding ways to turn thoughts into acts ... are enormous: imagine U.S. warfighters that only need use the power of their thoughts to do things at great distances. ...

... DARPA's new Enduring Personalized Cognitive Assistant (EPCA) program will launch the creation of intelligent personalized assistants ... These assistants will learn about preferences and procedures by observing their partner humans, but will also accept direct, naturally-expressed guidance. They will anticipate the human's needs and prepare materials to be ready just in time for their use. ... Successful implementation of an EPCA will help finally realize Licklider's vision of human-computer symbiosis. ...".

 

According to a 5 June 2003 article by William Safire in The New York Times: "... Darpa's LifeLog initiative is part of its "cognitive computing" research. The goal is to teach your computer to learn by your experience, so that what has been your digital assistant will morph into your lifelong partner in memory. Darpa is sprinkling around $7.3 million in research contracts (a drop in its $2.7 billion budget) to develop PAL, the Perceptive Assistant that Learns. ... "To build a cognitive computing system," says proto-PAL, "a user must store, retrieve and understand data about his or her past experiences. This entails collecting diverse data. . . . The research will determine the types of data to collect and when to collect it." This diverse data can include everything you ("the user") see, smell, taste, touch and hear every day of your life. ... "... Users are in complete control of their own data-collection efforts, decide when to turn the sensors on or off and decide who will share the data." ... The human user may have opt-in control of the wireless wire he is secretly wearing, but all the people who come in contact with PAL and its willing user-spy would be ill-used without their knowledge. Result: Everybody would be snooping on everybody else, taping and sharing that data with the government and the last media conglomerate left standing. And in the basement of the Pentagon, LifeLog's Dr. Gage and his PAL, the totally aware Admiral Poindexter, would be dumping all this "voluntary" data into a national memory bank, which would have undeniable recall of everything you would just as soon forget. ...".

 


According to a 22 February 2003 article by Duncan Graham-Rowe in the New Scientist:

"... US Air Force plans nuclear drones ...

... The USAF hopes that such a vehicle will be able to "loiter" in the air for months without refuelling, striking at will when a target comes into sight. ... UAVs ... don't put pilots' lives at risk ... The US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has funded at least two feasibility studies on nuclear-powered versions of the Northrop-Gruman Global Hawk UAV ... In the 1950s both the US and the USSR tried to develop nuclear propulsion systems for piloted aircraft. ...[They found that shielding would have made]... the aircraft too heavy. ...

... in 1999 ... Carl Collins and colleagues at the University of Texas in Dallas ... found that by shining X-rays on to certain types of hafnium they could get it to release 60 times as much energy as they put in ... The reaction works because a proportion of the hafnium nuclei are "isomers" in which some neutrons and protons sit in higher energy levels than normal. ...

... now ... instead of a conventional fission reactor ... AFRL ... is focusing on a type of power generator called a quantum nucleonic reactor. ... This obtains energy by using X-rays to encourage particles in the nuclei of radioactive hafnium-178 to jump down several energy levels, liberating energy in the form of gamma rays. A nuclear UAV would generate thrust by using the energy of these gamma rays to produce a jet of heated air. ...

... If shot down ... would an anti-aircraft gunner in effect be detonating a dirty bomb? ... hafnium has a half-life of 31 years ... equivalent to caesium-137 ...".

 

 

 


 

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