• pelya@lemmy.worldEnglish
    57·
    11 months ago

    Those abilities from the article are useless for a soldier.

    You don’t feel much stress shooting the enemy. You feel a lot of stress when the enemy shoots back, especially the artillery. So you get less stress when your artillery has more range, because you don’t get shot at.

    Using painkillers is just ignoring the problems with your health. If you want to stay in the army for more than a year, go to the doctor and get a proper treatment.

    The food is not a problem, we got ten thousand variations of canned meat.

    The most pressing problem for soldiers in the field is the lack of hygiene. If you can shower once per month without getting sick, you’ll make a better soldier.

    It’d also help if you’re short and can carry heavy stuff.

    So, I imagine actual super-soldiers to be muscly gypsy dwarves who eat a lot and complain when they get health issues.

    Source: has been in the army.

  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
    38·
    11 months ago

    This shit is a silly fantasy:

    a slide behind her showed off a “soldier of the future” whose body is “flooded with pain-numbing stimulants” and has the “ability to regrow limbs & quickly heal wounds like a lizard.”

    Next to this was a quote that referenced Robocop. “Enhanced soldiers would be reduced to bionic men, who run fast, do not need to sleep, eat and drink very little, and can fight all the time. A new species is born: Homo robocopus,”

    The whole thing is full of pop culture references:

    McKinely, the non-invasive brain stimulation expert, said that The Matrix was starting to become real. Think of the iconic scene where Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, is instantly uploaded with proficiency in kung fu.

    It’s like a bunch of teenagers writing a sci-fi fanfic. Too many movies and video games, not enough actual science and technology. They literally have a picture of Master Chief.

    A good deal of the conversation revolved around the ethical and legal boundaries of creating super soldiers.

    Because that’s all you can talk about when none of this has any practical application.

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
      15·
      11 months ago

      This very much reeks of government kickbacks. They know what company they want to give the grant to and are preparing the call.

      But having given quite a few presentations to the government: The pop culture references are what you want. You are talking to idiots, many of which were high school dropouts who realized they could get a commission after surviving a few years of enlistment, who are surrounded by yes-men who are required to polish the knob of their superiors because they all just love America so much.

      It is very much a balancing act of technical and puff. You want to make sure that the people who make decisions NEVER feel confused. While having diagrams and supplementary information that answer the analysts’ questions. Your goal is for the officer in charge to love you and want to take you out for drinks while making sure their analysts don’t have any “gotchas” to raise when you leave the room.

      Basically: imagine that you are giving a presentation to Michael Scott. And Jim and Dwight were bad conduct discharged years ago and everyone left will actively say he is a genius. You aren’t leading with the data on long term usage of pain medication and stimulants.

        • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
          12·
          11 months ago

          Assuming you replied to the wrong post but:

          There have been plenty of studies over the years of initial findings. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-limb-regeneration-ins/ is a recent one. And you can find plenty of others with a bit of a google.

          Would I fund any company that claimed they could do it? Hell no. But this is very much the kind of topic where university research groups should be regularly getting grants to advance the state of science. And this is exactly the kind of topic where you can convert some of that massive military overspending into science and research.

  • cyd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    11 months ago

    “At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus”

  • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    6·
    11 months ago

    Such a last-century worldview. Biological soldiers? That’s just more meat to feed.

    The future is in semi-autonomous, semi-intelligent “AI” driven drones which you can program with a vague general mission and they can improvise the rest.

  • TWeaK@lemm.eeEnglish
    41·
    11 months ago

    archive.today and all its aliases (including archive.md) actively sabotages DNS queries from many 3rd party DNS providers, so your link doesn’t work reliably.