By Rob Bricken in
Daily Lists, Tech
Tuesday, Dec. 2 2008 @ 5:00AM
By Cory CasciatoPulp science fiction is full of ill-conceived and improbable ideas, from death rays to undersea metropolises. As much as we enjoy the pulps and the wack-ass ideas and infeasible technology that populate them, it's obvious none of those ideas could ever get any traction in real life, right? Except that's not the case. History is full of completely insane ideas, some of them even too far-fetched for the pulpiest story, that received considerable support from the public, investors, learned institutions and even governments.
Way back in 1904, Nikola Tesla (inventor of alternating current and quasi-mad scientist) proposed a system of wireless power transmission and communication that would span the globe. By the use of some kind of standing wave phenomena only he understood, his system of towers would transmit electrical energy all over the globe, directly to the end user and throughout the home, without wires. He got as far as building a test tower, filing some patents and rounding up some investors, but couldn't get it operational quickly enough to keep the money men happy, and died before it ever got off the ground. Tinkerers and crackpots to this day are still trying to figure out his notes and get this, and some of his other crazy-ass ideas, working. Looking at the mass of cords behind my entertainment center, I hope they get it figured out soon.
9) Draining the Mediterranean Sea
In the '20s a visionary engineer named Herman Sörgel came up with a plan to solve Europe's problems by damming the Mediterranean sea to drain it down enough to lower its level a few hundred meters and expose more than half a million square kilometers of new land for settlement and development, not to mention generate a bunch of electricity via the dams it would require to achieve all of this. This ambitious plan was called Atlantropa and it got an amazing amount of public support and even some consideration by the pre-WWII Weimar Republic government of Germany. He also planned to "make Africa useful" to Europe by building a big-ass inland sea in the middle of it. Both plans were derailed by his death, and by the complete and total insanity and infeasibility.
8) Frozen Aircraft Carriers
Fed up with the Germans sinking their boats right and left during WWII, the British developed a novel plan to make an unsinkable aircraft carrier out of ice. The thought went that icebergs are strong enough to sink giant ships without suffering much damage, and hell, ice is buoyant, so how could it fail? It turned out that ice was too brittle, and even the ice/wood pulp mixture called Pykrete needed to be reinforced by steel. Plus it was slow, needed a gigantic rudder and, presumably, was cold as fuck to sail on. They did get as far as constructing a scale model in a lake in Canada but Project Habbakuk, as it was called, was eventually given the cold shoulder by the navy.
7) Exploding, Pissed-Off Bats
During WWII, someone decided to take the bats in batshit insane literally and the result was a little plan called Project X-Ray. The idea here was to drop bats equipped with timed incendiary devices over Japan, where they would roost until the incendiaries went off during the day, and burnt Japan's wood-and-paper buildings to the ground. They got as far as designing the tiny bombs and even running a few tests, one of which set an Army base on fire (whoops, sorry about that!). Ultimately the plan was abandoned for time reasons - they were running out of war, basically -- and the fact that the atomic bomb came out and made it look pretty stupid in comparison.
6) Drug-Induced Mind Control
The power to control minds and compel people to do your bidding against their wishes is the dream of supervillains and totalitarian despots everywhere. Naturally then, it's no surprise that our own government spent a lot of time looking into it. The CIA, aided by some friendly ex-Nazi scientists, spent about 20 years, starting in the early '50s, researching ways to make you do whatever they wished, under the not-at-all frightening name MK ULTRA. In pursuit of this noble goal, they unwittingly dosed people with powerful hallucinogenic drugs, practiced brainwashing techniques and generally acted like the supervillains they were apparently hoping to become. At least one person died. Luckily they never found anything useful ... we hope. Because they destroyed all the evidence in the late '60s, we'll never really know, unless we find ourselves acting on a strange, unwitting compulsion to kill someone, or perhaps compulsively drink something foul and unhealthy, like Mountain Dew.
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20 comments
Comments
astrokender said:
Yeesh...The Zombie Dog one is gonna haunt me for months. Thanks for the new nightmare fodder. *shudders*
NeoXorn said:
Fuck!
The puppy is obviously in so much pain!
Screw fucked-up, mad scientist!
pablitomm said:
the last link ("a book about it) in "1) Let's Blow Up the Planet and Stay in Big Elevators" leads to the rods from god project..
Jangles said:
Space exploration is full of wacky ideas. They have an idea of putting a laser array on the moon and using a hole bunch of these huge lasers they can push a ship to Mars where they can put more lasers to push it back.
Oh, and the nuclear bomb engine is still a proposed idea along with many other ideas for using fission reactors, fusion reactors and such.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion
But the wackyness doesn't end there. Ever heard of a generational ship or a cross-generational ship? If we never develop FTL Star Trek warp drives the only way we will get to other solar systems is by building really big ships, putting people and animals on them, sending them out into space knowing they will die before they get to the next planet and have to train their children to run the ship who then have to train their children, and so on, until they arrive at the planet.
Oh, no, I just went full nerd.
Frito said:
I saw on the history channel that the US government planned to US Homing Pigeon-Homing missiles. I think we even got as far as training the pigeons, but it never got off the ground. The History Channel made it seem like the project would actually work.
Then there are all the crazy tanks and weapons the Nazis invented.
dksp said:
Oh god that dog thing is absolutely horrible, if it is real. I found the video somewhat questionable, but I could believe it.
Also, that spear thing sounds a lot like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress to me.
Kurono-K said:
Oh wow, fucking real life.
Talanic said:
Hmmm. I'm a science fiction author; I actually knew about several of those beforehand. Some comments:
8: The Germans were also using magnetic torpedo detonators. Obviously enough, ice wouldn't have armed those torpedoes. The Habbakuk might have actually been finished if the Brits had needed it, but the war changed pace by the time the prototype in Canada was finished.
7: The Soviets also tried a similar thing by training stray dogs that they could find fresh meat under tanks, then equipping them with a harness that would explode when they went under something. Problems: 1. They used soviet tanks to train the dogs. 2. In actual battles, the dogs panicked and ran for whatever cover was nearest. 3. It was a totally bastardly thing to do.
6: A few things to add are that the project was initiated in response to reports that the Soviets already had such abilities, and that the conclusion was that, if mind control was possible, this was not the way to accomplish it. Personally, if mind control can be achieved, I think it SHOULD be studied, if only to figure a way to combat it--but trusting the CIA of the 50s isn't necessarily smart, so I'm telling my inner optimist to be quiet about this one.
5: Knew about the monkeys, not about the dogs.
4: It depends on the bomb, but some could be used to dig a hole with only minor fallout--which could then be dispersed to a safe level. Still not something that I'd be comfortable with by today's tech.
3: Know about that, and the fallout issue isn't actually a problem--as the ship would be somewhere outside of lunar orbit before the nukes detonated. Now, if one of those ships exploded on takeoff, THAT would be devastating--nukes don't detonate by hair trigger, but radioactive debris would be scattered all over the place. It might actually be a good, effective way to reach really high speeds.
2: Yup. Similar weaponry would probably be used in actual ship-to-ship space combat--if that actually gets to a point where it would be survivable by either side.
sal said:
zombie dogs? Fuck...
JEC said:
There are lots of loony ideas out there, some that got to prototype stage. Another interesting one was nuclear-power aircraft, the US and Soviets worked on it, eventually abandoning the projects. The Soviets built a prototype, but apparently it never flew under nuclear power, only on external engine power with the reactors aboard. Honestly it sounds like a brilliant idea, aside from the whole "what happens it one crashes?" problem.
The Nazis had some reaaaally weird ideas, most endorsed wholeheartedly by Hitler as a way of turning the tide in the later stages of the war. They built a flying wing prototype powered by two jet engines, which survives today (in bad shape but complete). Or how about a land battleship, a gigantic tank the size of a ship running on massive tracks and armed to the teeth? Never got off paper, but they did build the Maus tank, which was over 180 tons, armed with two main guns, and completely useless as anything other than a fuel sucking moving bunker. One (cobbled from the two wrecked prototypes) survives today in Kubinka. Despite wacky ideas like these, the Nazis did give us infrared combat equipment, jet turbine engines, and the basis of modern rocketry.
Ah, so much weird history out there. I love it.
Talanic said:
Ah, the Maus. It was potentially a VERY scary tank, as its armor was completely impenetrable, and it could have been an effective minefield cleaner...except...
Top speed: Roughly 1-3 miles per hour, approaching six in completely ideal conditions (which I take to mean, downhill). And it can't use roads, because it reduces them to powder in its wake. Same with bridges; it would bust straight through. Considering that they only finished a couple in the last stages of the war, the front line was almost approaching the tanks faster than the tanks were approaching the front lines.
anybot said:
What really makes me sad about the dogs is that the puppy head would try to eat, and then the food would just dribble out onto the adult dog's back.
Another great one is the electrified dead kitten.
Yes yes I am ghoulish. I read about this stuff this summer.
Friginator said:
What about Reagan's "Star Wars" plan? You know, the one that shot lasers from space to destroy enemy missiles?
ratbastrd said:
The "rods from god" thing is an old idea btw. It used to be called "Project Thor," I think, and Niven & Pournelle used it in "Footfall."
B-San said:
"we are learning to do a great many clever things. Unless we are much mistaken the next great task will be to learn not to do them." -G.K.Chesterton
Jason said:
We're still trying to do variations of the Star Wars thing.
The craziest thing I think the US military ever came up with is the Davy Crockett.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)
Eric said:
I'm currently reading a book about Project Orion, surprisingly titled "Project Orion". Despite what Talanic says, I don't think there's any way the ship could travel beyond the moon's orbit without using nuclear propulsion to get there. I could be wrong.
Briahlen said:
On # 5
Seriously? The mad scientists name was Vladimir?!?!? Vlad The Puppy Impaler?
Apparently zombie dogs wasn't enough for him... He also went & made himself 20 two-headed dogs over a 15 year time period.
Sean said:
Forget about all that other stuff about blowing up the Earth and zombie dogs... are they trying to mind-control me with my precious Mountain Dew?
Friginator said:
Maybe, but It's probably just to counteract the Mentos virus.
