whyroots

Yes, I joined Model United Nations because the UN reminded me of the United Federation of Planets. And I read The Physics of Star Trek. Thus, talk, via Ezra Klein and the Economist, of plane-mounted lasers and the like has me thinking of phasers and warp drives. 

On a different note, the idea that the government will soon be running around with truck-, and plane-, and satellite-mounted beam weapons is frightening. Maybe it's purely an illusion that a dedicated group of citizens could mount an effective resistance, even if it's deep in the wilderness of Montana, to a fascist, authoritarian regime. But it's an illusion threatened to the core by the dramatic asymmetry made possible by complex beam weapon systems. These systems require incredible technology and infrastructure, and sources of vast energy. In the quickly vanishing days of gunpowder warfare, you didn't need all that -- just guns and ammo, both stockpile-able and poach-able. 

I am not a gun-toting, militia-loving nutjob. But I think it's worth noting that the more effective high fixed-cost military and industrial systems become, the more power can be concentrated in fewer hands, and the higher the returns to creating giant conglomerates and the lower the cost of creating and maintaining Big Brother governments. 

Happily, I think the nature of technology is to concentrate power first, and disperse it second. Take computers. In the '50s, only academic institutions and the government could afford electronic computing systems. In the '80s, only military researchers had access to the power of the internets, in the form of ARPANET. As the costs of computing power came down, and firms entered to provide it to the masses, we are now speculating on lasers with laptops and the web. So, if we can just survive the development of satellite-mounted lasers without the rise of human or robotic overlords, we'll one day have ray guns of our own. Of course, by that point, there might be anti-gravity platforms and uber-powerful gamma lasers. 

But then the Vulcans will arrive, provide us warp technology, and open our eyes to interstellar civilization.