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Will StarTrek Phasers be part of iPhones over next 30 years?
in Technology
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We already have what you might call 'laser cannons' on ships. They don't shoot fancy beams or anything like in movies, but they are essentially a laser cannon that works, is very cheap to shoot, and is basically like using a very large magnifying glass, to put it very simply. Lasers like in Star Trek are probably going to be a reality, as it would be much cheaper than ballistic weapons and it would save on metal. As for how they would work, well that's something we're just going to have to research.
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Technology has proven itself constantly to evolve as our knowledge expands. Naturally, there will be a limit to this, but I don't think we will approach it any time soon.
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There are a number of reasons for this:
1) There are weapons that could conceivably be part of an iPhone now, like a taser or hell even a flick knife. That Apple are not pursuing this approach indicates they have no interest in doing so.
2) iPhones are not weapons. it isn't part of the concept of the iPhone and there is no more reason to think that they will add a weapon to the iPhone than they will add a swiss army knife or a magnifying glass.
3) It would hurt sales. Many countries have bans or restrictions on weapons, including the USA where there are licensing restrictions, etc. By including a weapon they drastically reduce the market they can sell to. Not only that but even where it may be legal to do so, for ideological or safety reasons it will turn a lot of people off. For instance, how many parents will trust their children with a weapon? Not to mention all the people that just generally don't like carrying firearms?.
4) The physical requirements of a laser weapon functioning anything like a phaser's lower settings (completely ignoring the ability to disintegrate) are immense. The only things vaguely comparable are weapon systems like the XN1-LAWs. For a single burst that will have some marginal effect on a human we're looking at 30 kW. For reference, that's enough energy to power an average person's iphone for about 10 - 20 years. Even putting aside the feasibility of developing batteries which can sustain this and fit in an iPhone (we're a long way off and batteries have basic physical constraints to the amount of energy they can hold which makes this unrealistic) and shrinking down all the other components by a factor of about 10,000, is this really where they would want to spend the power even in the face of massive technological progress? I'm pretty sure for instance that an iPhone that never needed to be recharged would be far more marketable and profitable.
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