November 29, 2013 • 38 mins
Is there a safe way to stun? In Star Trek, setting phasers to stun was a way to incapacitate a threat safely. Where are we on stun technology today?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey, there ever be one? And Welcome to
Forward Thinking, the podcast that looks at the future and
says strange love A star Woman teaches. I'm John in Strickland,
(00:20):
I'm Lauren Vocal, and I'm Joe McCormick. Hey, did you
guys know that the Star Trek theme has lyrics to it?
That's what I just quoted. Yeah, oh yeah, Michelle Nichols
does a great version of it. Sometime. I'll play it
for you guys. Sure she does, because when she does things,
they're great things. So, hey, you know why I brought
up Star Trek because we're talking about stunned technology today
(00:43):
and you know in science fiction we see it all
the time, right, Star Trek does it? Star Wars does it?
Depends on what science fiction you're watching, because if I
recall correctly, Star Wars does it once ever? Yeah, when
it was the main character a k a princess, but
it was also to keep around. It's also the once
ever when a Stormtrooper was able to hit something. So
(01:03):
it's obviously significant because in every other instance I can
a member of a Stormtrooper firing with the with the
exception of the nameless guys who die at the very
beginning of episode four, they don't hit anything. Maybe they're
all pacifists. Lauren makes a good point. It's because stormtroopers
are always shooting at the main characters who are not
supposed to die, So you're saying that they're protected by
(01:25):
plot significance. Exactly. I got to get me some of
the plot shields. But okay, so if you will call.
At the beginning of Star Wars and New Hope, Princess
Leiah's chilling in her corvette and the stormtroopers come on
and they say there's one set for Stun, and she
blasts one of them, I guess kills him. And then
and then they shoot her with They don't look like
(01:48):
those normal, you know, blaster bolts. There these rings they
come out of the gun. That's how you know it's Stunn. Yeah,
so the rings come out and then she just falls
over like she's just taking a little nap. So yeah,
stunt technolog g right, I mean that's the whole ideas
you incapacitate your target without killing him or her. Yeah,
I think that's the idea. So it's um it's a
form of science fiction non lethal uh warfare, I don't know,
(02:13):
maybe not ware non lethal. It's it's designed to incapacitate
or paralyze someone. It's a good humane way of putting
someone who's being unreasonable um out of the plot line,
or if you need to, you know, take them on
board your ships that you can torture them to discover
the location of the rebel base. But but humanely you
can torture them and find out the location the rebel base. Well,
(02:36):
there's a very weird Geneva convention that guided the imperial action.
Sure if the Imperial forces were really following yeah, I
don't know at any rate, any start Trek we had
it as well, where the there and clearly the crew
of the Enterprise was all about exploring the universe and
learning about it, not killing everything that came across its path. Everything.
(03:00):
They did some killing, oh sure, but only after like
eight or nine Red Shirts died. So really it was
just coming on after either Kirker Ryker had had slept
with it. So okay, depending upon whether we're talking original
series or next generation, that's fair so okay, But uh
so I just kind of I don't know, about y'all.
I kind of grew up believing that this had some
(03:22):
real life analogy. Well, let's let's talk about all right, Lauren.
I know you've looked into the biology of of what
we human beings work on and stuff and like the
gooey mess that keeps us going. What exactly how would
stun technology interact with a body to incapacitate us in
some way? Okay, well, so your your body uses electrical
(03:42):
signals to get things done. Um, your your brain communicates
with your nerves via electrical signals, and those signals spur
the release of neurotransmitter chemicals that control your muscles. So
so we are we are walking squishy electrical systems, is
really what's going on. And the the idea of modern
and stun guns anyway, is to disrupt those electrical communication systems.
(04:04):
So you're kind of overloading the electrical grid of a
human being, right, which, you know, which is a pretty
effective way of doing it. You know, you can hypothetically
also or I mean you you literally can also use
chemicals that are going to either be unpleasant enough to
make you stop doing what you are doing temporarily or um,
you could if you wanted to be kind of smart
(04:25):
about it or or very dangerous about it, depending on
the situation, use neurotransmitter chemicals or otherwise disrupt that process
to to make that that mess up on gotcha. So
in other words, we're talking about just interrupting the body's
communication system between one way and and and the muscular story.
So you know, in this case, we're talking about using
(04:45):
high voltage low amperage kinds of right on modern existing
stun weapons. That's what we're aiming to do. And so
so what what what does a high voltage low amperage?
So if you want to think about electricity into like water, uh,
and you know that that that's helpful when you're talking
about voltage. Voltage is pressure. That's how much water pressure,
(05:07):
Like if you were to look at a water system,
it's kind of analogous to that. Voltage is how much
you've got behind it. Amperage is sort of the intensity
of that electrical current. And I know those two things
sound a little confusing, but essentially, if you have high
voltage and low amperage, it is for a given definition
(05:27):
of the word safe safe and that it will pack
a wallop and it will make your your nervous system
kind of go into a little bit of a short
term freak out mode. But it shouldn't cause lasting damage
for your average healthy human. But but you know, if
you had high amperage, that's deadly stuff, right, Okay, So
(05:50):
so what this means is that this is gonna This
can really affect you in two different ways. And in
the body, this current can mimic the pulse frequency of
the electrical signals that you're getting from your brain, which
can make the body's muscles and this is the technical
term crazy go nuts. Um, it's you're talking about involuntary
muscle contractions and at the standard sixty hurts or so
(06:11):
it's going to occur with shocks of between six and
sixteen millie amps um. This is a little bit painful,
and um, the main action of it is is that
I will okay, you know, as opposed to extreme pain,
which I can talk about a little bit later, I
can talk about how painful it is from personal experience.
You have been shocked with a personal was do you
(06:33):
want now? You want to know the story was trying
to get too close to Brent spin Or at a convention,
and uh, it was Jonathan Frakes and you know it. No, U, No,
that's not the case. And Joe knows this story because
I've already related it earlier today. But I know what
happened was I was at is that a camping event,
and a bunch of people sitting around the campfire, and
(06:55):
the discussion turned to, you know, non lethal weapons, as
it is on your typical camping trip. In case Jason
Vorhees comes out of the woods, you need to find
some way of slowing him down so he gets the
weaker of the group so the rest of you can
get away. Why didn't you bring a magic dagger with you?
Turned out that I did not have a magical dagger.
(07:15):
In fact, right now, we don't even have our mystical acts. Yeah, yeah,
how is it? The tiger are not with us at
any rate? So what happened was one of one of
the people there had a stunt gun and explained that
the juice had run down quite a bit to the
point where it was no longer really an effective deterrent
in any sense, and then demonstrated by stunt gunning himself
(07:36):
in the leg uh and uh, and just made his
leg twitch a little bit. And he said, see it's
not even really effective. And then the person next to
him said, let me see that and took it and went, oh, yeah,
it kind of hurts, but that's it. And then the
next person said, let me see that. And I was
about two more people down the line, and of course
by then I'm like, well, the peer pressure is already
gained to the point where I cannot just no thanks,
(07:58):
and handed to the next first said, so I also
did it. It felt like kind of a beasting and
it made my muscles in my thigh contract. But like
I said, the juice and this one, the voltage was
much lower than what it should have been to be
a true deterrent. So at this point are our decision
was that if if any attacker were hit by this thing,
it would only encourage them to hurt you more. It
would really only make them angry. Yeah, what what you're
(08:21):
really looking to do with a stun gun is to
um to deplete a person's muscular energy reserves with these contractions,
therefore making them temporarily too weak to move um. And secondly,
the current in the brain it can it can introduce
kind of like random noise into the brain's ordered signal
system and that can cause a sense of of confusion
(08:42):
and and off balancedness. It's sort of temporary mental paralysis.
So this is kind of like the concept of getting
UH interference on a radio signal. It's where you you
can you're still getting a signal through, but you might
have a competing signal that's that's coming in on it
and it starts getting all jumbled. That's sort of the
same sort of thing. It's like, you know, you've you've
(09:03):
kind of done a little power surge in the body
and your brain can't quite handle it exactly. Yeah. Um, So,
so that covers the electrical system. On the chemical end,
you know today we use stuff like tear gas and
pepper spray sometimes in in terms of UM attacker or
crowd control. And the idea is that these these chemicals
are strong but non lethal irritants UM more precisely mucous
(09:26):
membrane inflammatory agents which are going to cause UM pain
eye swelling to the point of swelling shut for fifteen
to thirty minutes and UM throat and no swelling that
can compare breathing for about five to thirteen minutes. And
I I do have the names of the two most
common tear gases in use. If you guys really want
to torture me and everyone else by saying seventeen syllable chemical,
(09:50):
I don't think that's necessary. I think we get the point. Yeah, really,
when you get down to it, When you get down
to it, these chemicals aren't so much stunning people as
convincing them they want to be any where other than
where they are right then at that moment. Now, those
those nerve agents, the kind of things that we um
saw in Syria, work by inhibiting an enzyme that breaks
down the narrow transmitter that's released to signal muscles to contract. Therefore,
(10:15):
they prevent muscles from relaxing, which leads to a lot
of really nasty stuff, but but most critically to suffocation. Yeah,
that's not stun day. We're looking for non lethal stun
technology the source stuff we see in Star Trek. That's
clearly not the case. So right, but most of the time,
when you're talking about messing with neuro neurotoxins, it's going
(10:37):
to be on the level of death pretty soon, not this,
not this. Yeah, So do we have anything that's a
little bit closer to what this stunt technology would be? Like,
I mean well, is there a way to zap somebody
and knock them out? Yeahout hurting them? No, Now you
made it tricky. I was. I was ready to talk
about and then you made it more difficult. Okay, So
(11:00):
stun guns are kind of the basic that we basic
unit we need to talk about. And I chatted about
it a second ago when I talked about stunning myself
in the leg like an idiot. By the way, just
in my defense, I was a stupid teenager at the time,
all right. So also, kids, don't use stun guns on yourself. No,
it's not it's not a good plan. Don't be like Jonathan.
Don't be like me. I mean, look at me. I
(11:20):
stunned myself in the leg and became an incredibly successful
and famous person. So don't do that. Um, those two things,
by the way, not not no causation there, And just
just keep that in mind. I had not told that
story for like fifteen years, so um at any rate.
The the stun gun is your sort of basic stun weapon,
(11:42):
and it's kind of a bad name for it, stun gun,
because it it is not the same effect as you
would imagine a stunned phaser like it doesn't harmlessly render
someone unconscious exactly. And you know, like in Star Trek,
not only are they just harmlessly rendered unconscious, they slump
over in such a way that doesn't cause them physical damage. Yeah,
(12:03):
they kind of sit down. Yeah, I don't know. I
don't know if you've ever seen anyone actually lose consciousness
while upright. It is nothing like that. Sometimes they're allowed
sounds when like skull bone hits the ground. Yeah, it's
not good. So anyway, the basic stun gun is designed
where you have two sets of electrodes generally speaking uh
(12:23):
an outer set and interset, meaning that there are two
that are closer together and to their further apart. The
two that are further apart of the ones that are
actually designed to make contact with your target. The two
that are closer together are meant to allow sparks to spark,
thus acting as a deterrent. So if I hold up
a stun gun, not not all of them have these
(12:43):
two sets, by the way, but a lot of them do.
So if I hold up a stun gun and I
hit the button and you hear that d get noise
and you see the sparks across, Yeah, that's just it's
meant to be. It's really meant to to for the
person who's wielding it to say, please, please, please, don't
make me use this, because it's not going to be
(13:05):
pleasant for you. The outer set of electrodes are what
would actually pass the electric current through the body of
the target. Uh. So you've also got a capacitor. Capacitors
are very useful in electronics. They store up energy and
then release it all at once, So they're different from batteries.
Batteries release energy gradually through a chemical uh. Usually you know,
(13:25):
we talked about it as being a chemical reaction that
releases electricity. A capacitor stores up electricity and then releases
it all at once. There are a lot of electronics
that use capacitors. For example, your camera flash is a
capacity uses a capacitor because you know, you want that
energy released in a very quick burst to get that flash.
Otherwise the light would come on slowly and then go
off slowly and not be useful for photographs. So in
(13:48):
this case, the capacitor is there so that you can
actually release a shock all at once to the target.
You have a battery that actually stores the electricity usually
gets a certain number of charges. Each charge tend to
be a little weaker than the one before it until
you can recharge to full or replace the battery, usually
a standard nine vault battery. I think yeah, nine volt
batteries pretty common. They also have oscillators that fluctuate the
(14:11):
current to provide pulses of electricity, and the pulses of
electricity are what create that pattern that makes muscles wear
out faster because they contract for while the pulses going.
Then they stop and they contract again, and it's really
really rapid, so it exhausts the muscle very quickly. So
that's your basic stun gun, but there are, of course
(14:31):
some variations. There's the Taser, which is actually named after
a science fiction weapon, but the Taser is uh adds
another element to your basic stun gun, which is that
has a little air canister in it that allows it
to project those electrodes out from the base unit, and
they are connected to the base unit by wires, so
(14:54):
that means you can actually have a range to this
thing as opposed to just being you know, face to
face with whoever you are trying to zap. They could
be fifteen feet away and it fires the electrodes attached
to the target and it's about as pleasant as it sounds.
And then electricity passes through the wires to the electrodes
and causes the target to go through the same convulsion, right, right,
(15:18):
So in all of these cases you need physical contact
of some kind. It's it's not like it's not like
a Star Trek phaser, where you know there's a there's
there's a ray and you can be a long way away.
You have to physically make contact so that these electrodes
can use the the person that you are using it
on as the as the connection point. It's completing the circuit. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
(15:40):
So these the handheld unit has like all the battery
and everything in it, so you and you can actually
usually at least with the Taser one, you can administer
additional shock if you have to. In other words, if
someone is still being combative and in a danger to
either themselves or to other people, then you can admit
stir another couple of apps. Um, pretty serious stuff. But
(16:04):
I mean even that, you know, you're still talking about
a range of ten to fifteen feet maybe, Um, if
you want to go beyond that, then you could look
at their shotgun taser, which is a pretty interesting piece
of technology. I got to see it at c e
S before it was rolled out as an actual product.
They were showing it off as the prototype stage. Absolutely
(16:25):
fascinating technology. Very scary stuff too, obviously, because you think
about this, not less scary, I would say, than an
actual shotgun blast, but um so imagine a shotgun shell,
but instead of it having shot inside of it, it
has this little plastic device that's got two electrodes on
the end of it, and when you fire it, a
(16:45):
little fins pop out to stabilize its flight and it
flies to its target. Once it impacts the target, the
back half of this device separates and it's connected to
the front half that has the electrodes by wires. So
in a way, it's like having a handheld taser unit,
but it's mantorized and it's all on the target, and
(17:06):
it's like you throw if you were going to throw
the taser, and so the wires are not insulated, so
in other words, if you reach to try and pull
the taser unit off of yourself, you're gonna get shocked
by the wires too. Uh. And it also has enough
juice in it to administer several pulses of electricity through
(17:27):
it to render the target immobile. So, uh, it's a
I'll put it this way, it's effective. Uh So this sounds, though,
I guess, intended to be not lethal somehow not quite
as humane as the stick and spans star treks done gun. Well,
I mean yeah, I would say if you're talking about humane,
(17:50):
as in the target experiences no discomfort or pain, then
obviously this is not that same world. We're talking about
two totally different things here. Uh. It's an incredibly tricky
situation because if you're talking about situations where there are
a lot of people out of control and they are
(18:11):
a potential threat to innocent bystanders, and yet they themselves
are not necessarily criminals or otherwise dangerous. It's just the
situation has gotten out of control. What are people who
are supposed to keep the peace to do about that
kind of situation that minimizes the impact of their own
(18:32):
actions keeping things in control, limiting the damage that's done.
It's a really tricky problem. I don't know that stun
technology is necessarily the right approach for that, but it's
at least an attempt for people to try and find
a way of dealing with something that is truly a
sticky situation, right, and an electrical stunt technology in particular
(18:55):
is very tricky because you're working with UM within very
limited parameters of what is going to be effective without
being permanently damaging. UM. You know, it's and and the
exact numbers can vary depending on what source you're looking at,
but about one to two million amps is the threshold
of human perception that you're going to feel a tingle,
(19:16):
but it's not really going to going to be painful. UM.
Below five million amps, most people retain control of their muscles.
That's probably about what you guys were delivering to each
other with that with that stune gun way back. Maybe
a little bit more, but not by much. UM six
to sixteen is is the range at which most electrical
stun weapons fall into. If you go above that, you're
(19:36):
going to involve UM a lot of pain and and
risk throwing the person into respiratory arrest or paralysis and
UM death can even occur at this range, depending on
the length of the shock that's delivered. When you get
up above a hundred million amps, you're you're going to
risk ventricular fibrillation, which is erratic or uncontrolled heartbeats right. Well,
and also I mean to to add to the complexity
(19:59):
of this issue and the fact that stun technology uh.
While you know, the the premise is something that I
think is easily agreeable, like the idea of a technology
that can incapacitate a potentially dangerous target humanely. Uh, I
think that you know, most people would say, well, I
(20:20):
that's something I think would be good because it may
be a weird set of circumstances that brought this all about.
And you don't want to necessarily use lethal force or
hurt the person you but you definitely want to stop
them from being able to hurt someone else. I mean
that part I agree with. Yeah, these are these are
real problems that we face and know. There are other
(20:41):
ones too that are you know, different levels of they
give me different levels of squak. Uh. They're riot shields
that have capacitive strips on them that can administer a shock.
Uh so for riot control that would be used. There
are other one that there's one type of right shield
(21:02):
it's called let's see, I think I actually have written
down what it was called. Um, it's sell extraction shields.
Or capture shields. So imagine a riot shield, but the
curve is in the opposite direction of what it normally is,
So instead of being convex, it's concave, so meaning that
since it's concave, you could use it to corral someone
using the capacity of bands on it. And so these
(21:24):
are things that are are troubling not at the same time,
it's also troubling to think of people who have to
deal with uh, truly violent offenders and how do you
do that in a way that keeps the person who
has to you know, deal with this person safe? Like,
how do you do that in a way where the
guards not put in physical danger uh, while still being
(21:47):
as humane as possible in the dealing of of prisoners.
This is tough stuff. I mean, obviously this is not
an easy thing to talk about. UM. And then there
was one other sun technology I wanted to talk about
before we get into some the future stuff. Actually to
I'll talk about one is um flash bang grenades. You
guys heard about this, right, I mean, like you know,
(22:08):
they're used in video games, you see him in movies.
They do exist. They're meant to give off a bright
flash of light and allowed noise to disorient the targets somless.
So yeah, you know, like in the in the movies,
you might see something like a team of bank robbers
and one of them tosses a flash bang grenade into
a bank and it immediately disorients everyone. Then they rush in,
(22:31):
or or it could be a task force that's about
to come in on a criminal gang and they toss
one in and it ends up causing enough confusion for
them to execute a maneuver or whatever. Um In truth,
these things can cause massive amounts of damage. I mean,
they are explosives. They're meant to just do light and
sound really, but there's a concussive force that goes along
(22:53):
with that. So I've seen some videos of like training
video where someone was using a flash bang grenade within
a a hallway that like an office hallway, and they
toss it into the room and the explosion was so
great that all of the ceiling tiles fell in on
the team outside in the hallway. Yeah, so that would
be disorienting for both the people in the room and
the people who are out in the hallway that are
(23:14):
supposed to be ready to rush in. Um Uh, that
that's a da know, obviously danger anytime you're using concussive
force to knock someone out, that is dangerous. Concussion concussion essentially,
any sort of concussive force attack is essentially you're you're
accelraing the skull so that the brain collides with the
inside of the skull, and that can cause permanent nerve
(23:35):
and brain damage. Sort of like hitting them on the head. Yeah,
it's the knock them on the head with a hammer
cartoon thing. We would like to note for the record
that whenever you see in in perhaps your favorite television show,
someone knocking out, especially a friend of theirs, for for
some brief period of time by just cracking them one
on the knoggin, um, that's a bad plan. Don't don't
(23:55):
do that. That can cause permanent damage. I mean that.
I mean you're talking about making the brain collide with
the skull so that it shorts out the nervous system.
That's essentially what you're talking about. So anything with cacussa
force is already by its very nature not you know,
it's not harmless. It's going to cause some form of harm.
It may be temporary, but it could be permanent. And
(24:15):
then the last one we're going to talk about, which
is you know, less harmful, it's more truly disorienting and not.
I don't really consider it a stun technology as so
much as again it's something that just truly disorients the
target is using light, high intensity light. So for example,
Genesis Illumination developed a strobe light that uses powerful lights
(24:36):
to create a disorienting effect that's effective up to a
d fifty feet away and they use xenon gas plasma
bulbs to generate the light. And you know, a right
you know, like a car headlight. When it's on high,
this thing is about twenty three times more intense than
that ouch, so intense that if someone were pointing when
at you and you were a mile away, you could
(24:59):
read to buy it in the middle of the night.
That's how bright this thing is. Uh So, the idea
is that you hina that the target and it's so
bright that the target cannot look in that direction at all,
and it's disorienting. So if you are behind the light,
then you're essentially invisible to that person because they cannot
see due to that light. So that's a that's one
(25:20):
that you know, it it's a deterrent for the person
to behave in a particular way, but not truly a stunt,
but not a physical overload. Yeah. Alright, So so that
kind of catches us up on the technology being used
right now. And obviously this is not ideal because like
we said, we would love to have the technology that
would this is kind of grim. Um does does the
(25:42):
future hold anything perhaps less terrifying? Well, I was trying
to think of what might be more similar to the
actual style of stunted phaser we see and say Star Trek, which,
if you'll recall, is a directed energy weapon, you know.
So what we're talking about mostly is like stunned guns
where you have to stick somebody with something and pumping
(26:05):
physical contact with something that's generating electricity. Yeah, so that's
one part of it. Also, as as we've just been discussing,
it is potentially painful and potentially dangerous. So so it's
not as as clean as the Star Trek portrayal. Is
there anything like that? Well, short answer, as far as
I can tell, no, Keep in mind, there's stuff that's
(26:30):
classified that we can't know about. Um, So there may
be things like this in development. There may be things
like this we discover in the future. But h but
here here's a few things I found that that are
sort of getting close as far as the directed energy
weapon goes. I mean, one thing about the stun setting
on the Phaser and Star Trek is that you can
be pretty far away, um and you can zap somebody
(26:53):
and and and put them out that way. Uh. Is
there anything like that, like a like a sort of blast.
Well could Yeah. So in two thousand five, the U. S.
Department of Defense announced that they developed a thing called
a personal Halting and Stimulation Response Rifles. That was the
Phaser acronym there phaser without any so it's like faster uh.
(27:22):
And basically this would be a low energy pulsing laser.
And what they claim is that it was a non lethal,
non permanent blinding effect. So would temporarily blind the enemy
or the victim or whatever you would call them, blind
someone temporarily without permanent damage, and that would incapacitate them.
(27:43):
Now again, that's not the same thing as a yeah,
the strobe disorienting um and uh so yeah, it would
simply the quote they used was dazzle the victim um
like a mutant from X Men. Yeah. The funny thing
that that was that there was a little buzz about
(28:05):
this when it came out, but I haven't read a
whole lot about it since then. Um And so it
wouldn't introduce paralysis or unconsciousness. Also, it sounds a little fishy,
like I'd be worried that the purveyors of this technology
might be a little overly sanguine about its supposed harmlessness. Right,
(28:26):
I'd say that in general, the the inventors of things
like this are more willing to sign off on on
the safety than perhaps entire teams of of third parties
that are you know, a little bit more that aren't
aren't directly interested in whether or not the project succeeds
or fails. Um. So yeah, so that's a sort of
(28:47):
at least that is directed energy. Right. So would that
be a laser thing? You could do it at a
distance and um and it would be non lethal and
supposedly not cause any permanent damage. Okay, but on the
other side, wouldn't knock you unconscious? And don't know how
actually non damaging? Well? Well, what else? Uh, there's the
(29:09):
active denial system. Okay, what's this? I have not but
that sounds amazing. I go through every day. It's a
combination of amazing and messed up. Yeah. So basically this
is an idea of incapacitating people, but again it's not
going to make them unconscious. The idea is that you
(29:31):
blast a sort of focused beam of millimeter wave radiation
and what's the effect When it hits you. It causes intense,
non damaging pain. So did I tell you guys about
the time I went camping and hit myself in an
active denial system ray? I mean it was going around
(29:52):
the whole group, and I thought, well, okay, it was
it was low power. Anyway, I've actually seen one of these,
and not personally. I have seen one of these used
in a video where it was something similar to this anyway,
may not have been this specific implementation you're talking about,
but there was a reporter who was talking about this
(30:12):
technology and was being shown how it works, and the
the reporter was first told to stand in this one
position and they were going to turn the ray on
on him. The ray, by the way, it was just
connected to a big truck. It was not what you
would call portable. Um not well, I mean not portable
in the sense of a single person. A team could
move it around, but anyway, the ray was directed at him,
(30:34):
and he immediately needed to jump out the way. So
it was like a kind of a very hot sensation
that he like, it was just too hot to to
to stand. Yeah. And so then they gave him various
types of stuff to hold in front of him as
he would advance on the position of the ray to
see like if help. Yeah, so you had like plywood
(30:57):
or a mattress or all this other kind of stuff
because I again, this was a sort of a kind
of a riot dispersal sort of of tool. And uh,
and he couldn't He couldn't do that either. He couldn't
withstand it much longer than he could if it was
just standing there, and he was wearing it was a
cold day, so he was wearing layers of clothing too.
It was clear that this thing worked quickly. Yeah. Uh yeah.
(31:21):
So again interesting in that it's directed energy, so you
can do it at a distance. Um. It is non lethal, um,
but some similar objections as the other one. It's not
going to render you unconscious. The ethics of it or
a little questionable in that it is intentionally meant to
cause pain pain right the same way that that tear
(31:43):
gas or something like that is meant to cause you
such extreme discomfort that you want to be anywhere else. Yeah,
And I think there's also a question, even though it's
generally agreed to be non lethal, there's a question of well,
I mean, could it's in some sorry, could it in
some cases cause injury that could there be cell mutation
(32:05):
that could lead to very serious problems down the line.
I mean you're talking about things that could potentially have
implications years later. Yeah, all right, well, okay, so we've
got we've got pain, and we've got light. Is there
anything else out there? There's another light? One actually can
still be directed energy. It's a version of don't remember
in Minority Report the six stick. Yeah, yeah, I have
(32:29):
no memory of this. Actually I remember Minority Report, but
for some reason, this is not coming back to me.
It's a non lethal weapon where basically it's designed to
instead of injuring you, just to make you sick so
I can suddenly become nauseated. Yeah. It incapacitates you by
making you double over with nausea and vomiting and dizziness
(32:50):
fun times. Yeah, and so that's in a way it's
similar to active denial. You might say and that it's
supposed to cause you discomfort that makes it unable for
you to continue doing whatever you're doing. After effects of
a frat party, yeah, but without injuring you in any
permanent way, unlike the after effects of a front party. Right.
(33:12):
But apparently you can sort of recreate some of this
experience by creating what some people have, which is a
a display of pulsing led lights, and if you have
them pulse at different frequencies, can actually it'll sort of
cause waves of sea sickness to I know people who
(33:34):
who replicate this effect on a weekly basis, but they
do it voluntarily. Um. So that's that's another one. So
that could be directed energy at a distance. And supposedly,
how if you could get this to work really well,
you could incapacitate someone with a wave of sickness just
(33:55):
by light. Um. So that's interesting. But again, it it's
not quite as clean as Star Trek. It's I mean,
it's not nice to make people double over with vomiting. Um.
I think it might be preferable to killing them, I guess,
I guess, but it's still right, a little bit less
than humane. Yeah, I'm looking forward to a directed energy
(34:18):
weapon that just shoots Internet cat memes into the eyes
of the attackers, so they just stop and go oh
that's interesting. Yeah. I wonder if there there could be
like a procrastination gun, so that what whenever somebody has
designs to do something really bad, like they're running at
you with a knife, you display images that make them
(34:40):
really distracted and want to click. You know, there is
a procrastination gun, but you can't actually fire it because
you always put it off till later. I I think
that this will have great application when we all have
Google Glass and etcetera wired directly into our brains. So
oh yeah, somebody could like hack your vision huh yeah
(35:01):
and just just send you straight to the like cute
ducks riding room bows channel or something just like. It
would just be that for the next three hours. Suddenly
we just go out. I was going to commit violence.
U it's the only thing better? Is the only thing
better is cute ducks riding doom buzz Oh No, we're
back to the dark place again. Guys. All right, let's
(35:23):
let's get out of this. All right. Well, you know
that do you have anything other than the various forms
of ridiculous? No, So I just wanted to report after
all that that I, as far as I know, there's
nothing like a phaser set to stunt out there. There
is no such technology that we know of, and I
haven't I haven't even really found anybody saying here's how
(35:46):
it might be done. Well, here here's what I how
I want to wrap this up. I mean, first of all, obviously,
if we have to have these kind of tools, then
I would prefer it if we could find a way
where we could have that wonderful Star Trek approach where
you know where it is safe and and you know,
you just gently kind of sit down right, and then
(36:06):
you wake up and you're in the holding cell until
you're calmed down and then everything's okay, or you're you know,
con and you end up taking over the enterprise from
the holding cell. Whatever. But what I really hope is
that we can strive for a future where this sort
of becomes a moot point anyway, where we don't even
need to worry about this kind of thing because we've
gotten to a point where we're able to have conversations
(36:29):
and work things out. And I mean, obviously that's like
the touching clearly Star Trek future, but that's more. Really,
I really strive for that there aren't the kind of
socioeconomic factors that drive the kind of riots that make
the story exactly we're talking. We're talking about a world
that is dramatically different from the one we have, and
I think it's one that I honestly think it really
is something that is attainable if we if we really
(36:51):
put our minds to it. And uh, you know that
certainly can sound a little pollyannish to some people, but
I don't care. You know what, I'm reading Jim Hinson's
by aography and it's really affecting me. So if the
dude thought that puppets could change the world, I think,
you know, why don't we all give that a shot.
So we've had some fun talking about this, and of
(37:12):
course we've also addressed the very real concerns about this
kind of technology, but ultimately it's one of those that
we hope eventually phases out onto the phase thing I did,
I see exactly what you did there? Well, that wraps
up this discussion. A forward thinking guys go to f
W thinking dot com. That is the website where we
have all the blog posts, the videos, the podcasts and
(37:35):
other material related to the things we talk about. Check
that out. We're really proud of it. There's some awesome
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W Thinking. Let us know what you think, Let's know
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we will talk to you again really soon. For more
(38:00):
on this topic and the future of technology, visit Forward
Thinking dot Com Problems, brought to you by Toyota. Let's
Go Places
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey, there ever be one? And Welcome to
Forward Thinking, the podcast that looks at the future and
says strange love A star Woman teaches. I'm John in Strickland,
(00:20):
I'm Lauren Vocal, and I'm Joe McCormick. Hey, did you
guys know that the Star Trek theme has lyrics to it?
That's what I just quoted. Yeah, oh yeah, Michelle Nichols
does a great version of it. Sometime. I'll play it
for you guys. Sure she does, because when she does things,
they're great things. So, hey, you know why I brought
up Star Trek because we're talking about stunned technology today
(00:43):
and you know in science fiction we see it all
the time, right, Star Trek does it? Star Wars does it?
Depends on what science fiction you're watching, because if I
recall correctly, Star Wars does it once ever? Yeah, when
it was the main character a k a princess, but
it was also to keep around. It's also the once
ever when a Stormtrooper was able to hit something. So
(01:03):
it's obviously significant because in every other instance I can
a member of a Stormtrooper firing with the with the
exception of the nameless guys who die at the very
beginning of episode four, they don't hit anything. Maybe they're
all pacifists. Lauren makes a good point. It's because stormtroopers
are always shooting at the main characters who are not
supposed to die, So you're saying that they're protected by
(01:25):
plot significance. Exactly. I got to get me some of
the plot shields. But okay, so if you will call.
At the beginning of Star Wars and New Hope, Princess
Leiah's chilling in her corvette and the stormtroopers come on
and they say there's one set for Stun, and she
blasts one of them, I guess kills him. And then
and then they shoot her with They don't look like
(01:48):
those normal, you know, blaster bolts. There these rings they
come out of the gun. That's how you know it's Stunn. Yeah,
so the rings come out and then she just falls
over like she's just taking a little nap. So yeah,
stunt technolog g right, I mean that's the whole ideas
you incapacitate your target without killing him or her. Yeah,
I think that's the idea. So it's um it's a
form of science fiction non lethal uh warfare, I don't know,
(02:13):
maybe not ware non lethal. It's it's designed to incapacitate
or paralyze someone. It's a good humane way of putting
someone who's being unreasonable um out of the plot line,
or if you need to, you know, take them on
board your ships that you can torture them to discover
the location of the rebel base. But but humanely you
can torture them and find out the location the rebel base. Well,
(02:36):
there's a very weird Geneva convention that guided the imperial action.
Sure if the Imperial forces were really following yeah, I
don't know at any rate, any start Trek we had
it as well, where the there and clearly the crew
of the Enterprise was all about exploring the universe and
learning about it, not killing everything that came across its path. Everything.
(03:00):
They did some killing, oh sure, but only after like
eight or nine Red Shirts died. So really it was
just coming on after either Kirker Ryker had had slept
with it. So okay, depending upon whether we're talking original
series or next generation, that's fair so okay, But uh
so I just kind of I don't know, about y'all.
I kind of grew up believing that this had some
(03:22):
real life analogy. Well, let's let's talk about all right, Lauren.
I know you've looked into the biology of of what
we human beings work on and stuff and like the
gooey mess that keeps us going. What exactly how would
stun technology interact with a body to incapacitate us in
some way? Okay, well, so your your body uses electrical
(03:42):
signals to get things done. Um, your your brain communicates
with your nerves via electrical signals, and those signals spur
the release of neurotransmitter chemicals that control your muscles. So
so we are we are walking squishy electrical systems, is
really what's going on. And the the idea of modern
and stun guns anyway, is to disrupt those electrical communication systems.
(04:04):
So you're kind of overloading the electrical grid of a
human being, right, which, you know, which is a pretty
effective way of doing it. You know, you can hypothetically
also or I mean you you literally can also use
chemicals that are going to either be unpleasant enough to
make you stop doing what you are doing temporarily or um,
you could if you wanted to be kind of smart
(04:25):
about it or or very dangerous about it, depending on
the situation, use neurotransmitter chemicals or otherwise disrupt that process
to to make that that mess up on gotcha. So
in other words, we're talking about just interrupting the body's
communication system between one way and and and the muscular story.
So you know, in this case, we're talking about using
(04:45):
high voltage low amperage kinds of right on modern existing
stun weapons. That's what we're aiming to do. And so
so what what what does a high voltage low amperage?
So if you want to think about electricity into like water, uh,
and you know that that that's helpful when you're talking
about voltage. Voltage is pressure. That's how much water pressure,
(05:07):
Like if you were to look at a water system,
it's kind of analogous to that. Voltage is how much
you've got behind it. Amperage is sort of the intensity
of that electrical current. And I know those two things
sound a little confusing, but essentially, if you have high
voltage and low amperage, it is for a given definition
(05:27):
of the word safe safe and that it will pack
a wallop and it will make your your nervous system
kind of go into a little bit of a short
term freak out mode. But it shouldn't cause lasting damage
for your average healthy human. But but you know, if
you had high amperage, that's deadly stuff, right, Okay, So
(05:50):
so what this means is that this is gonna This
can really affect you in two different ways. And in
the body, this current can mimic the pulse frequency of
the electrical signals that you're getting from your brain, which
can make the body's muscles and this is the technical
term crazy go nuts. Um, it's you're talking about involuntary
muscle contractions and at the standard sixty hurts or so
(06:11):
it's going to occur with shocks of between six and
sixteen millie amps um. This is a little bit painful,
and um, the main action of it is is that
I will okay, you know, as opposed to extreme pain,
which I can talk about a little bit later, I
can talk about how painful it is from personal experience.
You have been shocked with a personal was do you
(06:33):
want now? You want to know the story was trying
to get too close to Brent spin Or at a convention,
and uh, it was Jonathan Frakes and you know it. No, U, No,
that's not the case. And Joe knows this story because
I've already related it earlier today. But I know what
happened was I was at is that a camping event,
and a bunch of people sitting around the campfire, and
(06:55):
the discussion turned to, you know, non lethal weapons, as
it is on your typical camping trip. In case Jason
Vorhees comes out of the woods, you need to find
some way of slowing him down so he gets the
weaker of the group so the rest of you can
get away. Why didn't you bring a magic dagger with you?
Turned out that I did not have a magical dagger.
(07:15):
In fact, right now, we don't even have our mystical acts. Yeah, yeah,
how is it? The tiger are not with us at
any rate? So what happened was one of one of
the people there had a stunt gun and explained that
the juice had run down quite a bit to the
point where it was no longer really an effective deterrent
in any sense, and then demonstrated by stunt gunning himself
(07:36):
in the leg uh and uh, and just made his
leg twitch a little bit. And he said, see it's
not even really effective. And then the person next to
him said, let me see that and took it and went, oh, yeah,
it kind of hurts, but that's it. And then the
next person said, let me see that. And I was
about two more people down the line, and of course
by then I'm like, well, the peer pressure is already
gained to the point where I cannot just no thanks,
(07:58):
and handed to the next first said, so I also
did it. It felt like kind of a beasting and
it made my muscles in my thigh contract. But like
I said, the juice and this one, the voltage was
much lower than what it should have been to be
a true deterrent. So at this point are our decision
was that if if any attacker were hit by this thing,
it would only encourage them to hurt you more. It
would really only make them angry. Yeah, what what you're
(08:21):
really looking to do with a stun gun is to
um to deplete a person's muscular energy reserves with these contractions,
therefore making them temporarily too weak to move um. And secondly,
the current in the brain it can it can introduce
kind of like random noise into the brain's ordered signal
system and that can cause a sense of of confusion
(08:42):
and and off balancedness. It's sort of temporary mental paralysis.
So this is kind of like the concept of getting
UH interference on a radio signal. It's where you you
can you're still getting a signal through, but you might
have a competing signal that's that's coming in on it
and it starts getting all jumbled. That's sort of the
same sort of thing. It's like, you know, you've you've
(09:03):
kind of done a little power surge in the body
and your brain can't quite handle it exactly. Yeah. Um, So,
so that covers the electrical system. On the chemical end,
you know today we use stuff like tear gas and
pepper spray sometimes in in terms of UM attacker or
crowd control. And the idea is that these these chemicals
are strong but non lethal irritants UM more precisely mucous
(09:26):
membrane inflammatory agents which are going to cause UM pain
eye swelling to the point of swelling shut for fifteen
to thirty minutes and UM throat and no swelling that
can compare breathing for about five to thirteen minutes. And
I I do have the names of the two most
common tear gases in use. If you guys really want
to torture me and everyone else by saying seventeen syllable chemical,
(09:50):
I don't think that's necessary. I think we get the point. Yeah, really,
when you get down to it, When you get down
to it, these chemicals aren't so much stunning people as
convincing them they want to be any where other than
where they are right then at that moment. Now, those
those nerve agents, the kind of things that we um
saw in Syria, work by inhibiting an enzyme that breaks
down the narrow transmitter that's released to signal muscles to contract. Therefore,
(10:15):
they prevent muscles from relaxing, which leads to a lot
of really nasty stuff, but but most critically to suffocation. Yeah,
that's not stun day. We're looking for non lethal stun
technology the source stuff we see in Star Trek. That's
clearly not the case. So right, but most of the time,
when you're talking about messing with neuro neurotoxins, it's going
(10:37):
to be on the level of death pretty soon, not this,
not this. Yeah, So do we have anything that's a
little bit closer to what this stunt technology would be? Like,
I mean well, is there a way to zap somebody
and knock them out? Yeahout hurting them? No, Now you
made it tricky. I was. I was ready to talk
about and then you made it more difficult. Okay, So
(11:00):
stun guns are kind of the basic that we basic
unit we need to talk about. And I chatted about
it a second ago when I talked about stunning myself
in the leg like an idiot. By the way, just
in my defense, I was a stupid teenager at the time,
all right. So also, kids, don't use stun guns on yourself. No,
it's not it's not a good plan. Don't be like Jonathan.
Don't be like me. I mean, look at me. I
(11:20):
stunned myself in the leg and became an incredibly successful
and famous person. So don't do that. Um, those two things,
by the way, not not no causation there, And just
just keep that in mind. I had not told that
story for like fifteen years, so um at any rate.
The the stun gun is your sort of basic stun weapon,
(11:42):
and it's kind of a bad name for it, stun gun,
because it it is not the same effect as you
would imagine a stunned phaser like it doesn't harmlessly render
someone unconscious exactly. And you know, like in Star Trek,
not only are they just harmlessly rendered unconscious, they slump
over in such a way that doesn't cause them physical damage. Yeah,
(12:03):
they kind of sit down. Yeah, I don't know. I
don't know if you've ever seen anyone actually lose consciousness
while upright. It is nothing like that. Sometimes they're allowed
sounds when like skull bone hits the ground. Yeah, it's
not good. So anyway, the basic stun gun is designed
where you have two sets of electrodes generally speaking uh
(12:23):
an outer set and interset, meaning that there are two
that are closer together and to their further apart. The
two that are further apart of the ones that are
actually designed to make contact with your target. The two
that are closer together are meant to allow sparks to spark,
thus acting as a deterrent. So if I hold up
a stun gun, not not all of them have these
(12:43):
two sets, by the way, but a lot of them do.
So if I hold up a stun gun and I
hit the button and you hear that d get noise
and you see the sparks across, Yeah, that's just it's
meant to be. It's really meant to to for the
person who's wielding it to say, please, please, please, don't
make me use this, because it's not going to be
(13:05):
pleasant for you. The outer set of electrodes are what
would actually pass the electric current through the body of
the target. Uh. So you've also got a capacitor. Capacitors
are very useful in electronics. They store up energy and
then release it all at once, So they're different from batteries.
Batteries release energy gradually through a chemical uh. Usually you know,
(13:25):
we talked about it as being a chemical reaction that
releases electricity. A capacitor stores up electricity and then releases
it all at once. There are a lot of electronics
that use capacitors. For example, your camera flash is a
capacity uses a capacitor because you know, you want that
energy released in a very quick burst to get that flash.
Otherwise the light would come on slowly and then go
off slowly and not be useful for photographs. So in
(13:48):
this case, the capacitor is there so that you can
actually release a shock all at once to the target.
You have a battery that actually stores the electricity usually
gets a certain number of charges. Each charge tend to
be a little weaker than the one before it until
you can recharge to full or replace the battery, usually
a standard nine vault battery. I think yeah, nine volt
batteries pretty common. They also have oscillators that fluctuate the
(14:11):
current to provide pulses of electricity, and the pulses of
electricity are what create that pattern that makes muscles wear
out faster because they contract for while the pulses going.
Then they stop and they contract again, and it's really
really rapid, so it exhausts the muscle very quickly. So
that's your basic stun gun, but there are, of course
(14:31):
some variations. There's the Taser, which is actually named after
a science fiction weapon, but the Taser is uh adds
another element to your basic stun gun, which is that
has a little air canister in it that allows it
to project those electrodes out from the base unit, and
they are connected to the base unit by wires, so
(14:54):
that means you can actually have a range to this
thing as opposed to just being you know, face to
face with whoever you are trying to zap. They could
be fifteen feet away and it fires the electrodes attached
to the target and it's about as pleasant as it sounds.
And then electricity passes through the wires to the electrodes
and causes the target to go through the same convulsion, right, right,
(15:18):
So in all of these cases you need physical contact
of some kind. It's it's not like it's not like
a Star Trek phaser, where you know there's a there's
there's a ray and you can be a long way away.
You have to physically make contact so that these electrodes
can use the the person that you are using it
on as the as the connection point. It's completing the circuit. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
(15:40):
So these the handheld unit has like all the battery
and everything in it, so you and you can actually
usually at least with the Taser one, you can administer
additional shock if you have to. In other words, if
someone is still being combative and in a danger to
either themselves or to other people, then you can admit
stir another couple of apps. Um, pretty serious stuff. But
(16:04):
I mean even that, you know, you're still talking about
a range of ten to fifteen feet maybe, Um, if
you want to go beyond that, then you could look
at their shotgun taser, which is a pretty interesting piece
of technology. I got to see it at c e
S before it was rolled out as an actual product.
They were showing it off as the prototype stage. Absolutely
(16:25):
fascinating technology. Very scary stuff too, obviously, because you think
about this, not less scary, I would say, than an
actual shotgun blast, but um so imagine a shotgun shell,
but instead of it having shot inside of it, it
has this little plastic device that's got two electrodes on
the end of it, and when you fire it, a
(16:45):
little fins pop out to stabilize its flight and it
flies to its target. Once it impacts the target, the
back half of this device separates and it's connected to
the front half that has the electrodes by wires. So
in a way, it's like having a handheld taser unit,
but it's mantorized and it's all on the target, and
(17:06):
it's like you throw if you were going to throw
the taser, and so the wires are not insulated, so
in other words, if you reach to try and pull
the taser unit off of yourself, you're gonna get shocked
by the wires too. Uh. And it also has enough
juice in it to administer several pulses of electricity through
(17:27):
it to render the target immobile. So, uh, it's a
I'll put it this way, it's effective. Uh So this sounds, though,
I guess, intended to be not lethal somehow not quite
as humane as the stick and spans star treks done gun. Well,
I mean yeah, I would say if you're talking about humane,
(17:50):
as in the target experiences no discomfort or pain, then
obviously this is not that same world. We're talking about
two totally different things here. Uh. It's an incredibly tricky
situation because if you're talking about situations where there are
a lot of people out of control and they are
(18:11):
a potential threat to innocent bystanders, and yet they themselves
are not necessarily criminals or otherwise dangerous. It's just the
situation has gotten out of control. What are people who
are supposed to keep the peace to do about that
kind of situation that minimizes the impact of their own
(18:32):
actions keeping things in control, limiting the damage that's done.
It's a really tricky problem. I don't know that stun
technology is necessarily the right approach for that, but it's
at least an attempt for people to try and find
a way of dealing with something that is truly a
sticky situation, right, and an electrical stunt technology in particular
(18:55):
is very tricky because you're working with UM within very
limited parameters of what is going to be effective without
being permanently damaging. UM. You know, it's and and the
exact numbers can vary depending on what source you're looking at,
but about one to two million amps is the threshold
of human perception that you're going to feel a tingle,
(19:16):
but it's not really going to going to be painful. UM.
Below five million amps, most people retain control of their muscles.
That's probably about what you guys were delivering to each
other with that with that stune gun way back. Maybe
a little bit more, but not by much. UM six
to sixteen is is the range at which most electrical
stun weapons fall into. If you go above that, you're
(19:36):
going to involve UM a lot of pain and and
risk throwing the person into respiratory arrest or paralysis and
UM death can even occur at this range, depending on
the length of the shock that's delivered. When you get
up above a hundred million amps, you're you're going to
risk ventricular fibrillation, which is erratic or uncontrolled heartbeats right. Well,
and also I mean to to add to the complexity
(19:59):
of this issue and the fact that stun technology uh.
While you know, the the premise is something that I
think is easily agreeable, like the idea of a technology
that can incapacitate a potentially dangerous target humanely. Uh, I
think that you know, most people would say, well, I
(20:20):
that's something I think would be good because it may
be a weird set of circumstances that brought this all about.
And you don't want to necessarily use lethal force or
hurt the person you but you definitely want to stop
them from being able to hurt someone else. I mean
that part I agree with. Yeah, these are these are
real problems that we face and know. There are other
(20:41):
ones too that are you know, different levels of they
give me different levels of squak. Uh. They're riot shields
that have capacitive strips on them that can administer a shock.
Uh so for riot control that would be used. There
are other one that there's one type of right shield
(21:02):
it's called let's see, I think I actually have written
down what it was called. Um, it's sell extraction shields.
Or capture shields. So imagine a riot shield, but the
curve is in the opposite direction of what it normally is,
So instead of being convex, it's concave, so meaning that
since it's concave, you could use it to corral someone
using the capacity of bands on it. And so these
(21:24):
are things that are are troubling not at the same time,
it's also troubling to think of people who have to
deal with uh, truly violent offenders and how do you
do that in a way that keeps the person who
has to you know, deal with this person safe? Like,
how do you do that in a way where the
guards not put in physical danger uh, while still being
(21:47):
as humane as possible in the dealing of of prisoners.
This is tough stuff. I mean, obviously this is not
an easy thing to talk about. UM. And then there
was one other sun technology I wanted to talk about
before we get into some the future stuff. Actually to
I'll talk about one is um flash bang grenades. You
guys heard about this, right, I mean, like you know,
(22:08):
they're used in video games, you see him in movies.
They do exist. They're meant to give off a bright
flash of light and allowed noise to disorient the targets somless.
So yeah, you know, like in the in the movies,
you might see something like a team of bank robbers
and one of them tosses a flash bang grenade into
a bank and it immediately disorients everyone. Then they rush in,
(22:31):
or or it could be a task force that's about
to come in on a criminal gang and they toss
one in and it ends up causing enough confusion for
them to execute a maneuver or whatever. Um In truth,
these things can cause massive amounts of damage. I mean,
they are explosives. They're meant to just do light and
sound really, but there's a concussive force that goes along
(22:53):
with that. So I've seen some videos of like training
video where someone was using a flash bang grenade within
a a hallway that like an office hallway, and they
toss it into the room and the explosion was so
great that all of the ceiling tiles fell in on
the team outside in the hallway. Yeah, so that would
be disorienting for both the people in the room and
the people who are out in the hallway that are
(23:14):
supposed to be ready to rush in. Um Uh, that
that's a da know, obviously danger anytime you're using concussive
force to knock someone out, that is dangerous. Concussion concussion essentially,
any sort of concussive force attack is essentially you're you're
accelraing the skull so that the brain collides with the
inside of the skull, and that can cause permanent nerve
(23:35):
and brain damage. Sort of like hitting them on the head. Yeah,
it's the knock them on the head with a hammer
cartoon thing. We would like to note for the record
that whenever you see in in perhaps your favorite television show,
someone knocking out, especially a friend of theirs, for for
some brief period of time by just cracking them one
on the knoggin, um, that's a bad plan. Don't don't
(23:55):
do that. That can cause permanent damage. I mean that.
I mean you're talking about making the brain collide with
the skull so that it shorts out the nervous system.
That's essentially what you're talking about. So anything with cacussa
force is already by its very nature not you know,
it's not harmless. It's going to cause some form of harm.
It may be temporary, but it could be permanent. And
(24:15):
then the last one we're going to talk about, which
is you know, less harmful, it's more truly disorienting and not.
I don't really consider it a stun technology as so
much as again it's something that just truly disorients the
target is using light, high intensity light. So for example,
Genesis Illumination developed a strobe light that uses powerful lights
(24:36):
to create a disorienting effect that's effective up to a
d fifty feet away and they use xenon gas plasma
bulbs to generate the light. And you know, a right
you know, like a car headlight. When it's on high,
this thing is about twenty three times more intense than
that ouch, so intense that if someone were pointing when
at you and you were a mile away, you could
(24:59):
read to buy it in the middle of the night.
That's how bright this thing is. Uh So, the idea
is that you hina that the target and it's so
bright that the target cannot look in that direction at all,
and it's disorienting. So if you are behind the light,
then you're essentially invisible to that person because they cannot
see due to that light. So that's a that's one
(25:20):
that you know, it it's a deterrent for the person
to behave in a particular way, but not truly a stunt,
but not a physical overload. Yeah. Alright, So so that
kind of catches us up on the technology being used
right now. And obviously this is not ideal because like
we said, we would love to have the technology that
would this is kind of grim. Um does does the
(25:42):
future hold anything perhaps less terrifying? Well, I was trying
to think of what might be more similar to the
actual style of stunted phaser we see and say Star Trek, which,
if you'll recall, is a directed energy weapon, you know.
So what we're talking about mostly is like stunned guns
where you have to stick somebody with something and pumping
(26:05):
physical contact with something that's generating electricity. Yeah, so that's
one part of it. Also, as as we've just been discussing,
it is potentially painful and potentially dangerous. So so it's
not as as clean as the Star Trek portrayal. Is
there anything like that? Well, short answer, as far as
I can tell, no, Keep in mind, there's stuff that's
(26:30):
classified that we can't know about. Um, So there may
be things like this in development. There may be things
like this we discover in the future. But h but
here here's a few things I found that that are
sort of getting close as far as the directed energy
weapon goes. I mean, one thing about the stun setting
on the Phaser and Star Trek is that you can
be pretty far away, um and you can zap somebody
(26:53):
and and and put them out that way. Uh. Is
there anything like that, like a like a sort of blast.
Well could Yeah. So in two thousand five, the U. S.
Department of Defense announced that they developed a thing called
a personal Halting and Stimulation Response Rifles. That was the
Phaser acronym there phaser without any so it's like faster uh.
(27:22):
And basically this would be a low energy pulsing laser.
And what they claim is that it was a non lethal,
non permanent blinding effect. So would temporarily blind the enemy
or the victim or whatever you would call them, blind
someone temporarily without permanent damage, and that would incapacitate them.
(27:43):
Now again, that's not the same thing as a yeah,
the strobe disorienting um and uh so yeah, it would
simply the quote they used was dazzle the victim um
like a mutant from X Men. Yeah. The funny thing
that that was that there was a little buzz about
(28:05):
this when it came out, but I haven't read a
whole lot about it since then. Um And so it
wouldn't introduce paralysis or unconsciousness. Also, it sounds a little fishy,
like I'd be worried that the purveyors of this technology
might be a little overly sanguine about its supposed harmlessness. Right,
(28:26):
I'd say that in general, the the inventors of things
like this are more willing to sign off on on
the safety than perhaps entire teams of of third parties
that are you know, a little bit more that aren't
aren't directly interested in whether or not the project succeeds
or fails. Um. So yeah, so that's a sort of
(28:47):
at least that is directed energy. Right. So would that
be a laser thing? You could do it at a
distance and um and it would be non lethal and
supposedly not cause any permanent damage. Okay, but on the
other side, wouldn't knock you unconscious? And don't know how
actually non damaging? Well? Well, what else? Uh, there's the
(29:09):
active denial system. Okay, what's this? I have not but
that sounds amazing. I go through every day. It's a
combination of amazing and messed up. Yeah. So basically this
is an idea of incapacitating people, but again it's not
going to make them unconscious. The idea is that you
(29:31):
blast a sort of focused beam of millimeter wave radiation
and what's the effect When it hits you. It causes intense,
non damaging pain. So did I tell you guys about
the time I went camping and hit myself in an
active denial system ray? I mean it was going around
(29:52):
the whole group, and I thought, well, okay, it was
it was low power. Anyway, I've actually seen one of these,
and not personally. I have seen one of these used
in a video where it was something similar to this anyway,
may not have been this specific implementation you're talking about,
but there was a reporter who was talking about this
(30:12):
technology and was being shown how it works, and the
the reporter was first told to stand in this one
position and they were going to turn the ray on
on him. The ray, by the way, it was just
connected to a big truck. It was not what you
would call portable. Um not well, I mean not portable
in the sense of a single person. A team could
move it around, but anyway, the ray was directed at him,
(30:34):
and he immediately needed to jump out the way. So
it was like a kind of a very hot sensation
that he like, it was just too hot to to
to stand. Yeah. And so then they gave him various
types of stuff to hold in front of him as
he would advance on the position of the ray to
see like if help. Yeah, so you had like plywood
(30:57):
or a mattress or all this other kind of stuff
because I again, this was a sort of a kind
of a riot dispersal sort of of tool. And uh,
and he couldn't He couldn't do that either. He couldn't
withstand it much longer than he could if it was
just standing there, and he was wearing it was a
cold day, so he was wearing layers of clothing too.
It was clear that this thing worked quickly. Yeah. Uh yeah.
(31:21):
So again interesting in that it's directed energy, so you
can do it at a distance. Um. It is non lethal, um,
but some similar objections as the other one. It's not
going to render you unconscious. The ethics of it or
a little questionable in that it is intentionally meant to
cause pain pain right the same way that that tear
(31:43):
gas or something like that is meant to cause you
such extreme discomfort that you want to be anywhere else. Yeah,
And I think there's also a question, even though it's
generally agreed to be non lethal, there's a question of well,
I mean, could it's in some sorry, could it in
some cases cause injury that could there be cell mutation
(32:05):
that could lead to very serious problems down the line.
I mean you're talking about things that could potentially have
implications years later. Yeah, all right, well, okay, so we've
got we've got pain, and we've got light. Is there
anything else out there? There's another light? One actually can
still be directed energy. It's a version of don't remember
in Minority Report the six stick. Yeah, yeah, I have
(32:29):
no memory of this. Actually I remember Minority Report, but
for some reason, this is not coming back to me.
It's a non lethal weapon where basically it's designed to
instead of injuring you, just to make you sick so
I can suddenly become nauseated. Yeah. It incapacitates you by
making you double over with nausea and vomiting and dizziness
(32:50):
fun times. Yeah, and so that's in a way it's
similar to active denial. You might say and that it's
supposed to cause you discomfort that makes it unable for
you to continue doing whatever you're doing. After effects of
a frat party, yeah, but without injuring you in any
permanent way, unlike the after effects of a front party. Right.
(33:12):
But apparently you can sort of recreate some of this
experience by creating what some people have, which is a
a display of pulsing led lights, and if you have
them pulse at different frequencies, can actually it'll sort of
cause waves of sea sickness to I know people who
(33:34):
who replicate this effect on a weekly basis, but they
do it voluntarily. Um. So that's that's another one. So
that could be directed energy at a distance. And supposedly,
how if you could get this to work really well,
you could incapacitate someone with a wave of sickness just
(33:55):
by light. Um. So that's interesting. But again, it it's
not quite as clean as Star Trek. It's I mean,
it's not nice to make people double over with vomiting. Um.
I think it might be preferable to killing them, I guess,
I guess, but it's still right, a little bit less
than humane. Yeah, I'm looking forward to a directed energy
(34:18):
weapon that just shoots Internet cat memes into the eyes
of the attackers, so they just stop and go oh
that's interesting. Yeah. I wonder if there there could be
like a procrastination gun, so that what whenever somebody has
designs to do something really bad, like they're running at
you with a knife, you display images that make them
(34:40):
really distracted and want to click. You know, there is
a procrastination gun, but you can't actually fire it because
you always put it off till later. I I think
that this will have great application when we all have
Google Glass and etcetera wired directly into our brains. So
oh yeah, somebody could like hack your vision huh yeah
(35:01):
and just just send you straight to the like cute
ducks riding room bows channel or something just like. It
would just be that for the next three hours. Suddenly
we just go out. I was going to commit violence.
U it's the only thing better? Is the only thing
better is cute ducks riding doom buzz Oh No, we're
back to the dark place again. Guys. All right, let's
(35:23):
let's get out of this. All right. Well, you know
that do you have anything other than the various forms
of ridiculous? No, So I just wanted to report after
all that that I, as far as I know, there's
nothing like a phaser set to stunt out there. There
is no such technology that we know of, and I
haven't I haven't even really found anybody saying here's how
(35:46):
it might be done. Well, here here's what I how
I want to wrap this up. I mean, first of all, obviously,
if we have to have these kind of tools, then
I would prefer it if we could find a way
where we could have that wonderful Star Trek approach where
you know where it is safe and and you know,
you just gently kind of sit down right, and then
(36:06):
you wake up and you're in the holding cell until
you're calmed down and then everything's okay, or you're you know,
con and you end up taking over the enterprise from
the holding cell. Whatever. But what I really hope is
that we can strive for a future where this sort
of becomes a moot point anyway, where we don't even
need to worry about this kind of thing because we've
gotten to a point where we're able to have conversations
(36:29):
and work things out. And I mean, obviously that's like
the touching clearly Star Trek future, but that's more. Really,
I really strive for that there aren't the kind of
socioeconomic factors that drive the kind of riots that make
the story exactly we're talking. We're talking about a world
that is dramatically different from the one we have, and
I think it's one that I honestly think it really
is something that is attainable if we if we really
(36:51):
put our minds to it. And uh, you know that
certainly can sound a little pollyannish to some people, but
I don't care. You know what, I'm reading Jim Hinson's
by aography and it's really affecting me. So if the
dude thought that puppets could change the world, I think,
you know, why don't we all give that a shot.
So we've had some fun talking about this, and of
(37:12):
course we've also addressed the very real concerns about this
kind of technology, but ultimately it's one of those that
we hope eventually phases out onto the phase thing I did,
I see exactly what you did there? Well, that wraps
up this discussion. A forward thinking guys go to f
W thinking dot com. That is the website where we
have all the blog posts, the videos, the podcasts and
(37:35):
other material related to the things we talk about. Check
that out. We're really proud of it. There's some awesome
stuff there, and also join in on the conversation. Find
us on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus just look for f
W Thinking. Let us know what you think, Let's know
what's exciting to you about the future, what you want
to hear about. We want to hear from you, and
we will talk to you again really soon. For more
(38:00):
on this topic and the future of technology, visit Forward
Thinking dot Com Problems, brought to you by Toyota. Let's
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Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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