Period 7 Group 3 - Brianna Curro, Emily Lottes and Ben Hart

Since our last blog post, we have focused our research greatly on potential application of a Lightsaber and feasibility of a Lightsaber. Our ultimate conclusions are that Lightsaber technology lies in the distant future and that, even if we had Lightsabers today their military application would be limited.

Lightsabers are extremely deadly weapons at close range, but modern warfare focuses intensely on artillery. Missile technology and drone technology have largely decreased the need for man-to-man combat. Even in man-to-man combat, long-ranged sniper rifles are preferred to assault rifles and close-quarters weaponry. Should Lightsabers be used for military purposes, they would be used as secondary weapons for close-quarters combat or as breaching tools for when explosive are unavailable.

Lightsabers are not only impractical application-wise, but they are also impractical scientifically. Man has access to various technologies that loosely resemble the effect of a lightsaber, but all fall short of an actual blade of light. The most common tool man has that resembles a lightsaber is a plasma torch. A plasma torch is a device that produces a directed flow of plasma, which is extremely hot and able to cut dense metals. Plasma torches are similar to thermal lances, but they implement different technology and have different applications. Thermal lances are used to cut iron by using superheated oxygen, while plasma torches are used to cut steel and other metals by using plasma, another state of matter. Plasma torches fall short of lightsabers in that they do not produce a solid “blade” of plasma and are rarely used as personal items, much less weapons.

Though man does not have access to lightsabers, man does have access to very advanced laser technology. The company Lockheed Martin is a company well-known for it’s Area Defense Anti-Munitions System (ADAM). ADAM is a short-ranged defensive laser used to detonate rockets and missiles before they reach their targets. It is fully portable, can track targets 5 kilometers away and can destroy targets 2 kilometers away. Though ADAM’s military application is impressive, it falls very far short of being a lightsaber because it is extremely large and is not designed to be used as a weapon.

Many people believe the key to inventing the lightsaber is learning how to bind light particles together. This is something that scientists at MIT and Harvard have succeeded at doing: They have invented a medium at which light particles react to each other so strongly that they clump together. When this breakthrough was announced initially, people assumed that the lightsaber had finally been invented. However, this is misleading. The objective of the research was to get two photons to bind with each other, and though this was achieved, they may not bind in enough quantity to produce a lightsaber and they may only bind in extremely exotic circumstances. To the disappointment of the public, the lightsaber has not been invented and most likely never will be.