Manifesto

[Ed Jewett]

Thanks, Magda.

Here is what I came up with, more for newbies than your assortment, which will be pasted onto my stuff.

For HAARP , simply Google the phrase.

For “terminator seeds”, simply Google the phrase.

For “Ten thousand Indian farmers have committed suicide”, simply Google the phrase.


In the category of pulsed-beam weapons, I found the following:

Several modern experimental particle beam weapons were tested at scientific laboratories such as the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico by both the United States and the USSR from the 1950s to the 1980s[citation needed].

The U.S. Defense Strategic Defense Initiative Organization put into development the technology of a neutral particle beam for strategic defense applications. In mid 1989, it was to be part of the Beam Experiments Aboard a Rocket (BEAR) in New Mexico. [14]

Sandia National Laboratories part of Lockheed Martin Co., in Sandia New Mexico. Dec. 15, 2008 Ground Breaking on a $40 Million Ion Beam Facility at Kirtland AFB. It will house six Accelerators; and is scheduled for occupancy in 2010. [15]

^ G. J. Nunz, "BEAR (Beam Experiments Aboard a Rocket) Project. Volume 1: Project Summary". Storming Media LLC., 2001.
^ http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/rel...8/ibl.html Ground to be broken for new Ion Beam Laboratory at Sandia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_beam_weapon

Directed Energy Weapons
http://www.milnet.com/lasers.htm

Weaponization Of Space
From the original paper in the U.S. Air Force War College Occasional Papers catalog online at: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/cst/occppr06.htm

http://www.milnet.com/pentagon/laser/occppr06.htm

Introducing the Particle-Beam Weapon
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchro...ug/roberds.html

In the category of laser weapons I found that there are ample resources on the web describing the development of these weapons.

See also:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/tag/darpawatch/
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/tag/lase...-ray-guns/


In the category of super-soldiers, I found vague references to the development of super-soldiers by prior totalitarian regimes (Russia and Nazi Germany) and reference to East German Olympian efforts, but no quickly-found, concrete or credible sources.

But I did find this, which describes the early stages of interest and development:

July 16, 2008
$3 billion super soldier program: 10 times muscle endurance, 7 foot vertical leap, wall crawling, personal flight and more

DARPA today has a long-term, $3 billion program to help make such a "Metabolically Dominant Soldier." In other words, the military is studying how to use technology and biology to meld man and machine and transcend the limits of the human body. Described the project director, "My measure of success is that the International Olympic Committee bans everything we do" The $3 billion program is definitely trying to achieve transhuman performance goals.

The wearable gear would enable running at 100 meter olympic sprinter speed for hours and the 7 foot vertical leap, the wall crawling, personal flight, invisibility, greatly enhanced strength, better body armor and carrying bigger and more powerful weapons.

UPDATE: Advanced gene therapy could provide cheetah or gorilla quality muscles in people for 45 mile per hour speed or five to ten times strength

There are suitable engines for powering the exoskeleton described in this article

Coverage of the billion and soon to be multi-billion dollar transgenic medical, agriculture, industrial industry. [Mixing genes between animals to make cheaper drugs or for more productive agriculture]
END UPDATE

The drugs and genetic enhancements and some technology which gets applied would allow for regeneration, faster healing, muscle strength enhancement up to current olympic levels, endurance of an Alaskan sled dog, cognitive enhancement, operate without sleep for many days without performance degradation, the metabolic energy of twenty year old for a forty or fifty year old and immunity to pain.

The Metabolically Dominant Soldier program is managed by Joe Bielitzki. He is talking about fixing your cells so that you could live off your fat. Bielitzki acknowledges the potential for spin-off technologies. "Forty billion dollars a year goes into the weight loss industry in this country," he muses. "This will change it."

Regeneration, better healing, better immune systems would all revolutionize healthcare costs and healthcare effectiveness. So trillions in economic benefit as a side effect of supersoldier success. DARPA is also trying to enhance cognition, training and giving the energy levels of youth to the elderly. Those could provide multi-billion or even trillion dollar per year boosts to the US and world economy.

Projects in pipeline range from drugs that will boost muscles and energy by a factor of 10, akin to steroids…on steroids (the project is jokingly termed the "Energizer Bunny in Fatigues") to wearable, cooling gloves that regulate body temperature and prevent soldiers from getting overheated (and thus tired) even on the hottest desert day. [Keeping the body cool increases endurance]

This program is going well beyond some current relatively safe and conservative forms of performance enhancement. [Safer SARM/steroids, endurance enhancing drink]

A major focus is on helping the soldier's body to better deal with trauma and damage. One such is the "pain vaccines" coming out of a program at Rinat Neuroscience [Pfizer acquired Rinat Neuroscience in 2006]. Researchers are hopeful these "will block the sense of pain for almost a month," describes DARPA's Michael Goldblatt.

The substance does is block intense pain in less than 10 seconds. Its effects last for 30 days. It doesn't stifle your reactions. If you touch a hot stove, you still have the initial shock; your hand will still automatically jerk away. But after that, the torment is gone. The product works on the inflammatory response that is responsible for the majority of subacute pain. If you get shot, you feel the bullet, but after that, the inflammation and swelling that trigger agony are substantially reduced. The company has already hit its first milestones in animal testing and is preparing reports for scientific conferences.

Army Soldier enhancement systems

The plan is for new body armor that, instead of Kevlar, is filled with nano-materials that are connected to a computer. [Computer controlled liquid armor] It would normally be as flexible as regular uniform made of fabric. But, like how a crash-bag works inside a car, it would activate whenever the system detects a bullet strike and turn as hard as steel in an instant.

Gloves could turn into real-life brass knuckles.

The fabric could even be woven in with "nanomuscle fibers" that simulate real muscles, giving soldiers more an estimated "25 to 35 percent better lifting capability." So myostatin strength boost to get to olympic athlete strength levels and then 25-35% boost from a soft suit. Use better exoskeletons for more strength enhancement.

From deflecting bullets to powers of invisibility, as military analyst Max Boot writes, such a suit truly "would give ordinary mortals many of the attributes of comic book superheroes.

Our wimpy little Achilles tendons allow the average human to run somewhere between 6 to 8 miles an hour and, unless your name is LeBron James, leap only a few feet in the air. New "bionic boots" and "spring walkers" in development are hoped to solve this. These attach outside the leg and mechanically mimic the enlarged Achilles tendon of a kangaroo, one day perhaps giving the wearer the ability to run as fast as 25 miles per hour and leap 7 feet.

The "Z-Man project." Creating gecko inspired gloves and boots for wall crawling.


Robotic gecko demonstrator




Exoskeleton flying vehicle with a maximum speed of maximum Speed 113 mph, range of 184 miles and endurance of endurance 2.2+ hours.

The Mesoscopic Integrated Conformal Electronics (MICE) program has already succeeded in printing electronic circuits on the frames of eyeglasses and helmets, weaving them into clothes, even putting them on insects. These include electronics, antennas, fuel cells, batteries and solar cells.

The Biological Input/Output Systems program is designed to enable plants, microbes and small animals to serve as "remote sentinels for reporting the presence of chemical or biological" particles. They'd do this by changing color, lighting up fluorescently, dropping their leaves or changing the color of their flowers.

The Brain-Machine Interface program is investigating how you would put wireless modems into people's skulls.

And that's just the Defense Sciences Office, the department of DARPA most directly involved with human enhancement. Meanwhile, on the floor where the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) resides, its director, Ron Brachman, former research vice president at AT&T Labs and previously at Bell Labs, and president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, wants to complete DARPA's vision from the sixties. When the original IPTO was created in 1962, its director, J.C.R. Licklider, focused the office on his novel conception of computers and humans working in symbiosis. That idea resulted in the Internet. Now the new IPTO "wants to realize this vision by giving computing systems unprecedented abilities to reason, to learn, to explain, to accept advice, and to reflect, in order to finally create systems able to cope robustly with unforeseen circumstances," according to Brachman. The object of the game is to produce machines—and the italics are his—"that truly know what they're doing.

A project is regarded as "DARPA-esque" only if few others would tackle it, but it would be earth-jolting if it did work. DARPA's attitude is if an idea looks like a sure thing, let somebody else fund it. The "special focus area" is for really extreme projects.

FURTHER READING
Darpa supports the Raytheon Sarcos XOS exoskeleton

Of the three teams that took part in a seven year $75 million project (Sarcos, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the University of California at Berkeley), the XOS emerged in 2005 as the suit closest to the agency's initial vision. It is the only full exoskeleton the military has moved into the next development stage; Sarcos is now working under a two-year, $10-million Army grant.


During XOS demos the suit is tethered to a hydraulic pump that draws electricity from an external power supply. The suit can operate from batteries, but only for 40 minutes at a time.

The country's other two top exoskeleton designers, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Hugh Herr and Homayoon Kazerooni of the University of California at Berkeley, began with the power problem.

Herr is trying to build a leg-powering machine that uses as little energy as possible—the first iteration draws a mere two watts, comparable to a portable radio—but can support 80 percent of an 80-pound load on a user's back. Herr thinks that within the near future, he can improve the mechanics so that the machine actually saves the wearer effort.

Kazerooni has made the Human Load Carrier (HULC) which is a lower-body exoskeleton that can operate for more than 20 hours without recharging. He says it allows the user to carry 100 pounds on his back and burn 15 percent less oxygen than if he was supporting the added weight alone. A three-year, $2-million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology is being used to modify as a wheelchair replacement.

The army is now performing live fire tests of new body armor

Currently : the Army issued the Improved Outer Tactical Vest, a redesigned version of Interceptor body armor, starting in late 2006. The soft body armor protects against 9mm ammunition and fragmentation. IOTV is also equipped with front, rear and side armor plates known as Enhanced Small Arms Protective Inserts. When worn together, the IOTV will stop 7.62mm armor-piercing rounds.

Several vendors have demonstrated they can produce body armor that can outperform the protection offered by IOTV with ESAPI.

The Land Warrior system was sent in to battle in spring 2007 with the 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment, 4th (Stryker) Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division. At that time the deployed system weighed 10 pounds (down from 17 pounds). The weight has been dropped to seven pounds, and they expect to reduce it even further.

Program Executive Office (PEO) Soldier was created by the Army with one primary purpose: to develop the best equipment and field it as quickly as possible so that our Soldiers remain second to none in missions that span the full spectrum of military operations. PEO soldier currently has 400 programs.

The Soldier Enhancement Program (SEP) is to identify and evaluate commercially available individual weapons, munitions, optics, combat clothing, individual equipment, water supply, shelters, communication and navigational aids which can be adopted and provided to Soldiers in three years or less.

Source:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/07/3-billion...program-10.html

Comments not included here.

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as well as this:

Genetic Vetting and MRI Finals for Future Soldiers?
Harnessing science to create the ultimate warrior

NewScientist

BATALLIONS of super-soldiers could be selected for specific duties on the basis of their genetic make-up and then constantly monitored for signs of weakness. So says a report by the US National Academies of Science (NAS)...

...Selection by genotype could be fraught with difficulty - applicants rejected for certain jobs might try to sue on the grounds of genetic discrimination, say. Anders Sandberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, says the military also needs to choose the traits it wants to optimise with care. "The battlefield is changing quite a lot right now. Wars are becoming more like computer games, which means that in the future having the genes that make you a good physical fighter might not be so important as having excellent hand-eye coordination."...

...Perhaps more sinister is the possibility of neuroscientists creating cognitively manipulated warriors, whose emotions have been blunted, for example...

...Zak emphasises that the panel was not asked how to turn soldiers into better "killing machines", although "the whole purpose of maximising and sustaining battlefield capacity is to gain superiority over opponents", admits Floyd Bloom of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, who chaired the panel...

...Another possibility might be to use brain imaging to work out which recruits have understood new training concepts. In a recent study, fMRI was used to compare the brain activity of physics students and other students when they watched film clips of two different-sized balls falling at either the same or different rates...

There are also recommendations, looks like this is an area of interest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_...tic_stimulation

Source:
http://gladerebooted.boardzero.com/people-...iers-t3261.html

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and this:

In the Journal Nature: Programming cells by multiplex genome engineering and accelerated evolution

Researchers created over 4.3 billion combinatorial genomic variants (of E Coli) per day. They isolated variants with more than fivefold increase in lycopene production within 3 days, a significant improvement over existing metabolic engineering techniques.

Multiplex automated genome engineering (MAGE) is used for large-scale programming and evolution of cells. MAGE simultaneously targets many locations on the chromosome for modification in a single cell or across a population of cells, thus producing combinatorial genomic diversity. Because the process is cyclical and scalable, they constructed prototype devices that automate the MAGE technology to facilitate rapid and continuous generation of a diverse set of genetic changes (mismatches, insertions, deletions). We applied MAGE to optimize the 1-deoxy-d-xylulose-5-phosphate (DXP) biosynthesis pathway in Escherichia coli to overproduce the industrially important isoprenoid lycopene

Researchers (Harvard Medical School, MIT and Georgia Institute of Techonology) rapidly turn bacteria into biotech factories

The E. coli bacterium contains approximately 4,500 genes. The team focused on 24 of these—honing a pathway with tremendous potential—to increase production of the antioxidant, optimizing the sequences simultaneously. They took the 24 DNA sequences, divided them up into manageable 90-letter segments, and modified each, generating a suite of genetic variants. Next, armed with specific sequences, the team enlisted a company to manufacture thousands of unique constructs. The team was then able to insert these new genetic constructs back into the cells, allowing the natural cellular machinery to absorb this revised genetic material.

Some bacteria ended up with one construct, some ended up with multiple constructs. The resulting pool contained an assortment of cells, some better at producing lycopene than others. The team extracted the best producers from the pool and repeated the process over and over to further hone the manufacturing machinery. To make things easier, the researchers automated all of these steps.

"We accelerated evolution, generating as many as 15 billion genetic variants in three days and increasing the yield of lycopene by 500 percent," Harris says. "Can you imagine how long it would take to generate 15 billion genetic variants with traditional cloning techniques? It would take years."

Wired magazine has a good diagram and article on the work.

The technique could also be used to design models of diseases — in tissue cultures, or animals — that have large-scale genomic changes.

Church said that MAGE might end up being more useful than building entire genomes from scratch. That approach is flashy and powerful, but unnecessarily complicated.

11 pages of supplemental information.


Source:

July 29, 2009
Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering : Accelerating Evolution Millions of Times to Make Biotech Factories in Days

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/07/multiplex...ngineering.html
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/07/multiplex...ngineering.html