We’ve been waiting for the flying cars. We’re still wondering where the robots to vacuum our homes or clean our bathrooms are. And even though we can buy laser pointers the size of a pinkie, our garages aren’t yet stocked with household lasers to cut grass, shape wood or punch holes.
If you’re expecting a weapons-grade, hand-held laser, you’d better get used to disappointment. The problem, according to Elihu Zimet, head of the Naval Expeditionary Warfare Science and Technology Department at the Office of Naval Research, is twofold -- a bulky power supply and supporting gear that makes small lasers, at least for the foreseeable future, impractical.
"Short of nuclear power, we don’t have a compact source that could produce the necessary energy levels," Zimet said. "You can’t carry [a laser array] in your hand. The lasers themselves can be small, but everything associated with them that enables them to work makes them big."
That’s not to say that technological innovation couldn’t provide some kind of miniaturization breakthrough, either of energy supply, laser components or both. If so, then the ramifications would be broad. Any safe, efficient, palm-size source robust enough to generate thousands of watts of laser light would revolutionize power generation and delivery, conceivably eliminating altogether the need for centralized energy distribution.
Maybe then the robots could get to work cleaning the toilets.
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