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I don't really understand how there can be so much back and forth on this issue. We already know directed-energy weapons are possible [0], what are the challeng

I don't really understand how there can be so much back and forth on this issue. We already know directed-energy weapons are possible [0], what are the challenges in exploring the space until you're able to build an approximate match for what people report having experienced? The most scary thing about these kinds of systems seems to me to be the potential for urban terrorism. If it doesn't leave any trace and it can penetrate walls, it could be used to attack people working for rival organizations as well as general harassment. Imagine a tool that lets you disrupt someone's sleep, using that over months would be enough to drive them insane or at least seriously hamper their productivity and performance. For example: if a rival sports team is visiting and you're able to disrupt their sleep that might be enough to give your team an edge. How far are people really willing to go in order to win? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon

vkou 2y ago
> The most scary thing about these kinds of systems seems to me to be the potential for urban terrorism. A mortar or backpack has a thousand times the potential for urban terrorism.
- richardw 2y ago
  Depends. A mortar going off once will be an incident, but have a hidden mind ray targeting random 10 people a day in a big city and you’ll get a lot of panic, and it’ll gum up the works. Anytime someone gets a headache they’ll head to an ER. A mortar is a somewhat known danger, and doesn’t trigger imagination and fear as much as a danger you can’t identify.
  - portaouflop 2y ago
    There are people already imagining this - look up “targeted individuals”
  - vkou 2y ago
    > a hidden mind ray targeting random 10 people a day in a big city and you’ll get a lot of panic, You'll get just as much panic by having friendly press start pretending that this is happening. A significant portion of the population does not have a working bullshit filter, and will believe all sorts of stupid garbage. You don't actually need to build a child trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza shop, you just need to tell people that one exists and tens of millions of people will believe you. And in this case, your side business of selling ubermensch supplements and tinfoil helmets will be cracking.
shawnz 2y ago
How do you falsify mass hysteria with that strategy?
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  Maybe you don't, and maybe that's part of the terrorism, even a placebo effect could frighten many.
- arthurcolle 2y ago
  Maybe by design
Willingham 2y ago
Can’t you make these weapons with the magnetron out of any old microwave? I’ve always wondered why these devices aren’t more prolific than they are…
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  No.
- vibrio 2y ago
  My guess is there would be a strong selection against impulsive non-experts. That’s on my “No-MacGyver” list with garage door springs and AC unit capacitors .
- grobbyy 2y ago
  Yes, I could, but I'd have a 90% chance of hurting myself. Ditto for giving some cancer with radiation, many covert poisons, and similar. I can name a dozen ways I could kill or harm you, but: 1. I'd need to be wacko enough to want to harm you 2. I'd need to be sane enough for a major engineering project 3. I'd need to be competent enough to succeed without hurting myself The set of individuals with all the traits required is small. It's not zero -- we had Ted Kazinsky -- but very small. Most major crimes are also never solved, and many more people can just take a gun and shoot someone. That's probably even harder to track down since a lot more people have guns than labs and PhDs. Esoteric technologies make for easy investigations. So in the end, I think state actors have these. They also make good plot lines for a novel or video game (I have about a dozen I came up with in the context of a half-baked creative project). But for real life individuals, I don't see how they'd become prolific. We'll probably see a crazy someday, but nowhere close to gun homicides. They just don't make much practical sense for an individual.
- whycome 2y ago
  The top of my “I’m surprised it’s allowed” list is large lithium batteries in airplanes. If phones weren’t already so ubiquitous, they would have been mostly banned.
- itishappy 2y ago
  Yes, and you don't even need to dig into the dangerous bits (microwave transformers are some of the biggest killers of electrical hobbyists), just remove the door and defeat the interlock.
ptero 2y ago
I think having a long range explosives laden drone hit that sports stadium is way more scary. And more likely to come to an urban center as urban terrorism. Unfortunately. My 2c.
- mcmcmc 2y ago
  [flagged]
- TechDebtDevin 2y ago
  This is one of my biggest concerns for our future. What happens when the costs of drones or 3D printing become so cheap, and the learning curve shrinks to the extent that a terrorist, crazy person or school shooter can semi easily deploy their own deadly drone swarms.
  - eru 2y ago
    Cars are really deadly and readily available without raising any suspicion. (And only fairly recently have we really seen anyone use cars for terror attacks. And they are still fairly rare, considering how ubiquitous cars are.) See also https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror and https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-effective https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-effective
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      Cars are traceable. Poison would be the alternative for those that dont want to be apprehended. I think many people misunderstand the degree to which society is contingent on the good faith participation of most people. It is like a prisoners dilemma where we have managed to convince 99.9% of people to cooperate and the whole thing can easily fall apart if they dont.
      - potato3732842 2y ago
        >It is like a prisoners dilemma where we have managed to convince 99.9% of people to cooperate and the whole thing can easily fall apart if they dont. That should give people who want to impose their will on others more pause than it does.
polemic 2y ago
Maybe you've answered your own question. Directed-energy weapson exist - but the agencies that would have developed this particular capability have said that it isn't possible or doesn't match the reported symptoms. It would be fairly surprising if, between them, they didn't already have a wealth of research on the topic. It's hard to say what the reality is though - e.g. maybe they didn't want to reveal an existing capabilty.
- arthurcolle 2y ago
  Intelligence agencies minimizing effects of deployed secret technology, that would be a first
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- gonzo41 2y ago
  Directed energy weapons already exist, they are called guns and rifles. Sci-fi electro weapons don't make practical sense. If you want to secretly kill someone, just get them drunk and have them have a car crash. This is spy stuff 101. Havana Syndrome always struck me like they had people working too close to a secret transmitter by accident.
  - OutOfHere 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - antonvs 2y ago
      Direct matter is directed energy.
      - Onavo 2y ago
        You are drawing a false equivalence and being willfully obtuse. It's clear and obvious that the conventional sense of the term refers to technology like lasers and microwave. Please don't try to split hairs over semantics. Unless you are one of the spiritual nuts who claim "we are all creatures of energy" just because of the mass energy equivalence. Unless you are building a nuke in your kitchen, there's a clear difference in meaning in the conventional usage of the term "kinetic" weapon and "direct energy" weapon.
eru 2y ago
> [...] urban terrorism. If it doesn't leave any trace and it can penetrate walls, [...] That's obviously bad, but it's not really terrorism. There's no one universally agreed on definition of terrorism, but instilling terror is commonly a big part, and for that you want people to notice.
- angelsbrood 2y ago
  It's not terrifying to take EM brain-damage, have no way of proving it even in principle, and alienate your loved ones, employer, polity etc.?
  - tunesmith 2y ago
    It's the distinction between the terror of the victim, and the terror of the witnesses.
- aspenmayer 2y ago
  Perhaps you want people to notice for overt action, but deniability is useful for covert action. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be considered a hostile act, and if it results in what would otherwise appear to be a psychosomatic illness that causes distress in order to muddy the waters to conceal the affiliation of the actors involved, I think it’s fair to call it a terror attack.
  - eru 2y ago
    Yes, it would be a hostile act. But it wouldn't be terrorism. Not everything bad is terrorism.
  - amyames 2y ago
    I think many people would go along with dragging anyone responsible for funding or terrorizing people with this stuff out into the streets by their hair. Not sure I’m expecting an “oh yeah haha, about that-“ anytime soon. At least not until everyone’s welded inside their homes like China.
burkaman 2y ago
I guess one challenge is you'd have to test these weapons on people to see if it causes the reported symptoms
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Workaccount2 2y ago
Speaking from the point of view of other idiopathic chronic conditions....if it doesn't show up in a blood test or a scan, many doctors will just call it psychological.
- coldtea 2y ago
  Mass hysteria should not be ruled out. If they expected such a weapon after the reports, they'd have sensors for all kinds of emissions up the wazoo in those buildings. And yet, they still haven't recorded anything.
portaouflop 2y ago
Look up “Targeted Individuals” - the human mind is an amazing thing
late2part 2y ago
There's no chance this is disinformation muddying the online argument to prevent people from intelligently concluding that this is a directed energy weapon, of course.
ALittleLight 2y ago
You don't have to use it just for winning - consider sports betting, you can definitely place multi-million dollar bets, on the team that isn't a favorite, then use your Havana Ray to disturb a couple key players - make millions, repeat. Short a company's stock - melt the brains of their c-suite. When the news comes out, you'll make millions.
- coldtea 2y ago
  >Short a company's stock - melt the brains of their c-suite For many companies that would be an improvement
abarker 2y ago
The technology could also be used by oppressive governments to harass dissenters (and anyone else they might target). Essentially modern, high-tech COINTELPRO.

vkou 2y ago

> The most scary thing about these kinds of systems seems to me to be the potential for urban terrorism. A mortar or backpack has a thousand times the potential for urban terrorism.

richardw 2y ago
Depends. A mortar going off once will be an incident, but have a hidden mind ray targeting random 10 people a day in a big city and you’ll get a lot of panic, and it’ll gum up the works. Anytime someone gets a headache they’ll head to an ER. A mortar is a somewhat known danger, and doesn’t trigger imagination and fear as much as a danger you can’t identify.
- portaouflop 2y ago
  There are people already imagining this - look up “targeted individuals”
- vkou 2y ago
  > a hidden mind ray targeting random 10 people a day in a big city and you’ll get a lot of panic, You'll get just as much panic by having friendly press start pretending that this is happening. A significant portion of the population does not have a working bullshit filter, and will believe all sorts of stupid garbage. You don't actually need to build a child trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza shop, you just need to tell people that one exists and tens of millions of people will believe you. And in this case, your side business of selling ubermensch supplements and tinfoil helmets will be cracking.

shawnz 2y ago

How do you falsify mass hysteria with that strategy?

satvikpendem 2y ago
Maybe you don't, and maybe that's part of the terrorism, even a placebo effect could frighten many.
arthurcolle 2y ago
Maybe by design

Willingham 2y ago

Can’t you make these weapons with the magnetron out of any old microwave? I’ve always wondered why these devices aren’t more prolific than they are…

CamperBob2 2y ago
No.
vibrio 2y ago
My guess is there would be a strong selection against impulsive non-experts. That’s on my “No-MacGyver” list with garage door springs and AC unit capacitors .
grobbyy 2y ago
Yes, I could, but I'd have a 90% chance of hurting myself. Ditto for giving some cancer with radiation, many covert poisons, and similar. I can name a dozen ways I could kill or harm you, but: 1. I'd need to be wacko enough to want to harm you 2. I'd need to be sane enough for a major engineering project 3. I'd need to be competent enough to succeed without hurting myself The set of individuals with all the traits required is small. It's not zero -- we had Ted Kazinsky -- but very small. Most major crimes are also never solved, and many more people can just take a gun and shoot someone. That's probably even harder to track down since a lot more people have guns than labs and PhDs. Esoteric technologies make for easy investigations. So in the end, I think state actors have these. They also make good plot lines for a novel or video game (I have about a dozen I came up with in the context of a half-baked creative project). But for real life individuals, I don't see how they'd become prolific. We'll probably see a crazy someday, but nowhere close to gun homicides. They just don't make much practical sense for an individual.
whycome 2y ago
The top of my “I’m surprised it’s allowed” list is large lithium batteries in airplanes. If phones weren’t already so ubiquitous, they would have been mostly banned.
itishappy 2y ago
Yes, and you don't even need to dig into the dangerous bits (microwave transformers are some of the biggest killers of electrical hobbyists), just remove the door and defeat the interlock.

ptero 2y ago

I think having a long range explosives laden drone hit that sports stadium is way more scary. And more likely to come to an urban center as urban terrorism. Unfortunately. My 2c.

mcmcmc 2y ago
[flagged]
TechDebtDevin 2y ago
This is one of my biggest concerns for our future. What happens when the costs of drones or 3D printing become so cheap, and the learning curve shrinks to the extent that a terrorist, crazy person or school shooter can semi easily deploy their own deadly drone swarms.
- eru 2y ago
  Cars are really deadly and readily available without raising any suspicion. (And only fairly recently have we really seen anyone use cars for terror attacks. And they are still fairly rare, considering how ubiquitous cars are.) See also https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror and https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-effective https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-effective
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    Cars are traceable. Poison would be the alternative for those that dont want to be apprehended. I think many people misunderstand the degree to which society is contingent on the good faith participation of most people. It is like a prisoners dilemma where we have managed to convince 99.9% of people to cooperate and the whole thing can easily fall apart if they dont.
    - potato3732842 2y ago
      >It is like a prisoners dilemma where we have managed to convince 99.9% of people to cooperate and the whole thing can easily fall apart if they dont. That should give people who want to impose their will on others more pause than it does.

polemic 2y ago

Maybe you've answered your own question. Directed-energy weapson exist - but the agencies that would have developed this particular capability have said that it isn't possible or doesn't match the reported symptoms. It would be fairly surprising if, between them, they didn't already have a wealth of research on the topic. It's hard to say what the reality is though - e.g. maybe they didn't want to reveal an existing capabilty.

arthurcolle 2y ago
Intelligence agencies minimizing effects of deployed secret technology, that would be a first
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
gonzo41 2y ago
Directed energy weapons already exist, they are called guns and rifles. Sci-fi electro weapons don't make practical sense. If you want to secretly kill someone, just get them drunk and have them have a car crash. This is spy stuff 101. Havana Syndrome always struck me like they had people working too close to a secret transmitter by accident.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - antonvs 2y ago
    Direct matter is directed energy.
    - Onavo 2y ago
      You are drawing a false equivalence and being willfully obtuse. It's clear and obvious that the conventional sense of the term refers to technology like lasers and microwave. Please don't try to split hairs over semantics. Unless you are one of the spiritual nuts who claim "we are all creatures of energy" just because of the mass energy equivalence. Unless you are building a nuke in your kitchen, there's a clear difference in meaning in the conventional usage of the term "kinetic" weapon and "direct energy" weapon.

eru 2y ago

> [...] urban terrorism. If it doesn't leave any trace and it can penetrate walls, [...] That's obviously bad, but it's not really terrorism. There's no one universally agreed on definition of terrorism, but instilling terror is commonly a big part, and for that you want people to notice.

angelsbrood 2y ago
It's not terrifying to take EM brain-damage, have no way of proving it even in principle, and alienate your loved ones, employer, polity etc.?
- tunesmith 2y ago
  It's the distinction between the terror of the victim, and the terror of the witnesses.
aspenmayer 2y ago
Perhaps you want people to notice for overt action, but deniability is useful for covert action. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be considered a hostile act, and if it results in what would otherwise appear to be a psychosomatic illness that causes distress in order to muddy the waters to conceal the affiliation of the actors involved, I think it’s fair to call it a terror attack.
- eru 2y ago
  Yes, it would be a hostile act. But it wouldn't be terrorism. Not everything bad is terrorism.
- amyames 2y ago
  I think many people would go along with dragging anyone responsible for funding or terrorizing people with this stuff out into the streets by their hair. Not sure I’m expecting an “oh yeah haha, about that-“ anytime soon. At least not until everyone’s welded inside their homes like China.

burkaman 2y ago

I guess one challenge is you'd have to test these weapons on people to see if it causes the reported symptoms

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Workaccount2 2y ago

Speaking from the point of view of other idiopathic chronic conditions....if it doesn't show up in a blood test or a scan, many doctors will just call it psychological.

coldtea 2y ago
Mass hysteria should not be ruled out. If they expected such a weapon after the reports, they'd have sensors for all kinds of emissions up the wazoo in those buildings. And yet, they still haven't recorded anything.

portaouflop 2y ago

Look up “Targeted Individuals” - the human mind is an amazing thing

late2part 2y ago

There's no chance this is disinformation muddying the online argument to prevent people from intelligently concluding that this is a directed energy weapon, of course.

ALittleLight 2y ago

You don't have to use it just for winning - consider sports betting, you can definitely place multi-million dollar bets, on the team that isn't a favorite, then use your Havana Ray to disturb a couple key players - make millions, repeat. Short a company's stock - melt the brains of their c-suite. When the news comes out, you'll make millions.

coldtea 2y ago
>Short a company's stock - melt the brains of their c-suite For many companies that would be an improvement

abarker 2y ago

The technology could also be used by oppressive governments to harass dissenters (and anyone else they might target). Essentially modern, high-tech COINTELPRO.