Warning to alien worlds: the Earthlings are coming to bore you.

So, to a casual observer on the surface, a laser drill as conceived by the Gas Technology Institute might appear conventional. Like any drill, it would be raised and lowered through a narrow shaft in the ground. But those cables running down from the base aren’t carrying electricity – they are optical fibers carrying powerful beams of light. And the drill bit doesn’t rotate, but instead lasers in rows along the flat cylinder head blast stone without any need to twist like conventional tools. That saves a lot of energy and maintenance work. Lasers or laser lenses are activated in sequences like a theater marquee, and leave a ring of craters in the stone surrounding the bit.

But the issue of energy consumption, a huge obstacle for lasers in space exploration since the two sciences grew side by side in the 20^th century, plagues lasers even today.

"In the literature of drilling technology, [lasers] appear to be a few orders of magnitude out of the running, compared to rotary/percussive," Wilcox observes. Not that there’s no clever way around this.

"However, this may not be fundamental," Wilcox said. "Generally, the specific energy (energy per unit volume) required to destroy rock is proportional to the number of chemical bonds broken. One can imagine a laser system which cuts very narrow slots between relatively large grains to reduce the number of bonds broken."

In other words, equipping the bit with sensors that can find rock fissures and faults to exploit might save huge amounts of energy. And, of course, the lasers never dull, so there’s no need to stop and replace the bit, a shaft-lifting process that costs lots of energy.

Right now, the chief focus is on developing the laser drills as a way of getting to oil and gas reserves 10 to 100-times faster than conventional methods, with cost reductions of between 10 percent and 25 percent compared to metal screw drills. The drill could plunge through stone at a rate of 100 feet per hour, says Brian Gahan, project manager for the Gas Technology Institute, which is one of the partners leading the effort. Other partners include the Colorado School of Mines; the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory; Houston-based Halliburton Energy Services (which was recently run by now Vice President Dick Cheney); and Petroleos de Venezuela SA.