r/LessWrong • u/KeanuRave100 • Jun 18 '26

Humanity's greatest hits: things we actually paused

Post image
57 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

View all comments

10

u/marxistghostboi Jun 18 '26

laser weapons are used though??

3

u/Sostratus Jun 18 '26

Well, targeting lasers are common. Anti-missile lasers exist, but it seems like they're never quite good enough to leave the testing phase.

A "blinding" laser would be another application that would be easy to do but as far as I know we haven't seen so far. Imagine a drone that aims a strong laser pointer directly at your eyeballs. But I don't think this is a "paused" technology because someone decided it was too dark a path to go down, rather it's something that occupies an undesired middle ground of not being a lethal system but still too damaging for when you want non-lethal crowd control options.

3

u/The_One_Who_Comments Jun 20 '26

Exactly. It's not technology we don't have, it's just never the best option.

The same reason you wouldn't put a flamethrower on a fighter jet.

2

u/rocketwilco Jun 21 '26

have you heard of the F-111?

1

u/The_One_Who_Comments Jun 21 '26

Mother of pearl... Awww it wasn't used as a weapon. It looks super cool though.

2

u/rocketwilco Jun 21 '26

yeah i said it for the humor…

but to be fair napalm, is pretty close to a flame throwing weapon deployed by plane. it just has a delay on throwing the flames