The Logical Progression of Drones

Aviation is a funny thing.  We see repeated patterns in history and markets.

In a commercial aviation sense, we've seen cities thrive and then be bypassed in aviation as technology has enabled faster aircraft with longer range.  It happened to Gander in Newfoundland, Canada, and Shannon, Ireland and Prestwick in Scotland.  It's happening currently to London, Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam as the Middle Eastern airlines deploy high capacity, long range aircraft to operate routes such as Dubai-Los Angeles.  And their day will come as well sooner than anticipated, as BA has a scheduled London-Sydney non-stop on the books and Singapore Airline re-inaugurates Singapore-York.  (And you thought a 5 hour flight was long in economy, try 22+ hours)   In the future, the concept of the airline hub being ideally placed won't be something we think of any longer - like long distance phone charges.

But drones - surely they are different ?  Not so fast.  We're in a quickly evolving world where small remotely controlled flying machines are being tasked with various activities.  They'll one day make our local airspace look as congested as our highways no doubt.  It's compounded of course with casual or sport flyers - now drones are equipped with WIFI and cameras and can go where people can't - subtly and stealthily.  The 'observation-only' is a specific use-case for drones, and as the 'only' role of drones, its coming to a fast end - much as passive flying machines with people in them came to an end in WW1.  100 years ago, these flying observation platforms quickly became viewed as ideal places from which to throw a small bomb, or take some shots.  In return, ground defense started to appear, to defend against such unwanted incursions.  I guarantee some kook right now is looking to equip drones with automated weaponry capable of shooting or exploding a target from a safe distance for the operator.  There's lots of military precedence, the only thing missing is the operator that elects to commit a crime this way.

The logical reaction is the authorities being allowed to shoot down drones, legally.  And that set of laws is being enacted in Salt Lake City as we speak.

As drones become more mainstream in their uses and applications, we're going to see more and more rules, infrastructure (FAA-Drones?) and legislation around them.  And when the first terror activity is perpetrated by drones, everything will change.

Gravitational Waves

An incredibly big, interesting discovery was announced this week that has some eye opening implications.  Gravitational waves were detected from the collision of two rather large black holes in space.

It begs lots of questions - How do see black holes as they're well...black holes that light doesn't escape from.  And why are we all excited about finding waves in space..?  

You actually "see" black holes by the mess they create - and measure this by the warping and waves created - both visible and up until now invisible. 

A black hole's "edge" or event horizon sucks in matter and energy.  Nothing is supposed to escape, or at least nothing we have been able to perceive until now. (Small side note that there have been observations of energy streams coming out of black holes recorded, these are not confirmed or explained or understood).  The tremendous force and effect on energy causes surrounding areas to shear.  A little like when the tub drains and makes that sucking noise.  We can observe in various wavelengths that shearing, and infer the presence of a black hole.  So that's how they are seen and tracked and that's how we know what was creating these waves in space.  Black holes were hypothesized by Einstein, and while not yet conclusively proven, thee is general consensus now that they do exist. 

The gravitational wave that should be there (think of a big shark rushing to the beach under the water and while invisible, you can tell from the disturbance in the water surface that something big is there) were also predicted by Einstein and reflect a natural phenomena (gravity) that isn't itself sucked into the black hole. It's an attribute of all matter (visible and dark) in space / time.

The fact that sensitive enough equipment can see these ripples now is stunning not because of the black holes themselves, but for what else we may be able to "see" via gravitational waves.   It's like figuring out how to hear for the first time and hearing a screaming baby.  A big obvious thing we could already perceive via radio telescopes and a visual effect referred to as gravitational lensing.

The value of being able to detect gravitational waves will be to 'hear' what we can't today - the crickets and mice - specifically to stitch together an audio (or in this case) a gravity landscape.  There is so much hypothesis about various "dark" elements that we could not perceive and gravitational waves open an almost literal new dimension for us.  

This is an exciting opening that much future science knowledge will flow through.