DARPA And Its Inventions
There is an agency in the US government which is responsible for many inventions, it is known as DARPA or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The agency was created in 1958 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and named the Advanced Research Projects Agency or ARPA. It was created not only to formulate and execute research and development projects it was also given the mandate to develop projects that would be far beyond immediate military requirements. Its area of expertise was to be science and technology. In 1957 the Western world was frightened by the launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union and this led to the creation of this agency. The idea was to make sure that we wouldn’t fall behind the Soviets again in technology. Over the years DARPA has been given credit for many different inventions, some of which probably don’t even exist. Some people claim DARPA invented the flying saucer and others say they have developed technology which allowed us to colonize Mars. When one looks at the amount of people working at DARPA they realize it is not a very big agency. It has been estimated they have about 240 people working there and have a budget of somewhere around $3 billion annually. To illustrate how important DARPA was felt to be when it was created, its first director Mr. Roy Johnson left his $160,000 a year job at General Electric to work for the then ARPA for $18,000 a year. Mr. Johnson was interested in space related matters and when DARPA lost that mandate to NASA when it was established Johnson resigned.
Donald Ingber is a professor of bioengineering at Harvard Medical School and he says DARPA is the only place that understands that true revolutionary leaps require you not always know where you are going and eight or nine projects fail, but then one changes the world. This is rather heady stuff. DARPA handles hundreds of inventions at a time and is a sort of clearinghouse. One of the great inventions to come out of DARPA was ARPANET. When it was created it was called a decentralized communication system design protect for the flow of information among scientists. Today it has a much shorter name, it is called the Internet. We all know what affect this invention has had on human life. The Internet may be the ultimate tool which pulls together everyone on this planet. We have all gained a better understanding of each other because of the Internet and many of us now know how the other half lives, but before we had no idea. It has been said in one way or another DARPA was responsible for about half of the inventions which have to do with computing. It is said even the handy computer mouse actually came from DARPA.
One of the most interesting things about DARPA is how program managers are treated. It is said the agency contains about 150 of them, but they only serve for about four years and then they are rotated back to the corporations and universities they came from. The reason for this is to always have fresh ideas and that is why new brains are brought in so often. We certainly don’t know everything that DARPA has been responsible for, since many of their inventions are classified, but there are plenty that we do know about and I am sure at least some of these will surprise you. The virtual personal assistant is one of the things they are responsible for. Siri is on the iPhone and is a voice recognition system, but it wasn’t created by Apple as many think. Siri was born in a government lab. It came from a DARPA funded program which was called Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes. The project was to create a digital assistant which could learn over time.
DARPA is responsible for creating what is known as 3-D mapping. This may seem innocuous to many of us, but it has become invaluable on the battlefield. DARPA began by doing what Google does now. They had cars outfitted with special cameras to drive around urban areas taking pictures. Two years ago DARPA announced it was creating the Urban Photonic Sandtable Display. This is a 360° 3-D holographic display designed to assist battle planners. It doesn’t require glasses, is completely interactive and allows all users to rotate the display and zoom in on specific details.
One of the things DARPA is working on is a patch which releases instant nutrition through the skin. This will allow soldiers to be able to continue their mission without worrying about stopping to eat. The scientists at DARPA are also trying to figure out a way where the human body would not need food at all. This new branch of science is called “cellular energetics.”
One of my favorite DARPA projects is one which they have given a $24 million grant to researchers at Duke University for. The study has to do with controlling machines using telepathy. There is an owl monkey named Belle which has been taught to move a robotic arm just by thinking about it. This reminds me of the movie Firefox in which Clint Eastwood had to think in Russian in order to fire missiles from a Russian plane he was flying. After the monkey accomplished this task, 100 sensors were implanted in its brain which allowed the monkey to control equipment which was 600 miles away. The idea is to allow fighter pilots to fly missions just by thinking about them. It is hoped the pilots might even be able to stay on the ground. The plane would become a sort of drone controlled by a human brain.
Another project DARPA is working on is how to stop the need for sleep in a soldier. Their aim is to let soldiers be able to function for up to seven days without needing sleep. They are researching dolphins and whales, because these animals can survive on “hemispheric sleep” which is a state where one side of their brain is awake while the other sleeps.
Some of the other great things they are working on are painless wound technology inspired by animals and insects and robots for the battlefield along with smart weapons. Next there are all those projects which we know nothing about.
