25 KiB
[BST][MK] Munchkining an Invisibility Cloak
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Author: u/DataPacRat Amateur Immortalist*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2t199t/bstmk_munchkining_an_invisibility_cloak/
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Score: 6
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Created: 2015-01-20T09:01:07
Post:
(While my computer's in the shop, and since this seems to be the current fad here...)
Given the existence of a technological invisibility cloak, what entertainment and/or Munchkinry can you come up with based on it?
For the sake of argument, let's say that the technobabble involves arrays of miniaturized light-field cameras and colour-changing quantum dots; that it's effective with visible light and infrared (the latter by incorporating a substance that acts as a heat sink) but not ultraviolet; and that its existence is not yet public knowledge.
Comments:
u/chthonicSceptre [+3] Highly Unlikely (7 hours later)
Use it for violence. I'm pretty sure one of the Greek philosophers posited that if you had a ring of invisibility (okay, checked it, it's Plato and the Ring of Gyges), you would become totally immoral. That said, if I had an invisibility cloak I would presumably also be rich, either because I was able to finance an invisibility cloak or because I have technology that can be used to create an invisibility cloak.
So aside from money, I would use it to get away with things, and if I could get away with things then right now I would be assassinating people. I'm not sure who (haven't researched who needs to die because I don't have the One Ring) but I'm sure they exist.
Use it to enact the world's greatest coup and install all of my trusted friends as powerful politicians. Obtain blackmail material. Cripple certain corporations. Change the world.
And look at naked people. I would be lying if I said that wasn't on the agenda. What about you, /u/DataPacRat?
u/Rhamni [+2] Aspiring author (7 hours later)
Yeah, I love Plato but I wish he was still around so I could yell at him. He argued that what you should do if you had a ring like that was to not use it, but I wonder what he'd say if someone came up to him and said "So, found the ring. Killed off the rightful heir who's been killing people 'for teh lulz', seized power, and now I want your help in setting up a school where we actually educate people instead of teaching them sophistry."
u/autowikibot [+2] (7 hours later)
#####
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#### Ring of Gyges:
The Ring of Gyges is a mythical [magical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(paranormal)) [artifact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artifact_(fantasy)) mentioned by the philosopher Plato in Book 2 of his Republic (2.359a–2.360d). It granted its owner the power to become invisible at will. Through the story of the ring, Republic considers whether an intelligent person would be moral if he did not have to fear being caught and punished.
^Interesting: ^Philosopher ^king ^| ^Chariot ^Allegory
^Parent ^commenter ^can [^toggle ^NSFW](/message/compose?to=autowikibot&subject=AutoWikibot NSFW toggle&message=%2Btoggle-nsfw+cnv0o83) ^or [^delete](/message/compose?to=autowikibot&subject=AutoWikibot Deletion&message=%2Bdelete+cnv0o83)^. ^Will ^also ^delete ^on ^comment ^score ^of ^-1 ^or ^less. ^| ^(FAQs) ^| ^Mods ^| ^Magic ^Words
u/fljared [+3] United Federation of Planets (18 hours later)
Everyone else has some rather practical ideas, buts lets Weaponize it.
Hack the damn firmware and change it so I can directly affect the output of the quantum dots.
You never gave an maximum amount of light it could output, but suppose for a moment that it can at least hide you if you're between the observer and the sun.
The solar output at the equator is 1368 Watts per square meter. The earth's average albedo is about .31, so we have an output of 834 watts per square meter. Supposing a two square meter cloak, we've got 1668 Joules per second coming off of this thing.
Turn the cloak inside out. Bind a human inside it. Turn it to maximum.
A human being weighing in at 70 kg will increase by about...
.005 degrees centigrade a second, which rather dampens my "Cook them alive as torture" idea. In hindsight, this thing is putting out about what you'd get if you sunbathed in equatorial Brazil, and there's a lack of people melting to death ala Ark of the Covenant.
But you never did give a maximum, and regular old spotlights can put out a lot of heat and light...
Up the maximum output by about 2 orders of magnitude and you've got quick cooker. Assuming the heat sink can keep the cloak itself from overheating, in two minutes your prisoner is long dead and beginning to boil. Useful for the next guy's decision on whether to tell where the rebel base is.
Up it a two more orders of magnitude, and you have a viable weapon. Forget not being seen, you're too bright to even look at. Run up and tackle someone, they'll get burns just from a fraction of a second of contact.
Wrap it around your fist and time it to active when you hit something. Become the superhero THE MIGHTY SOLAR FIST. (Would be pretty cool, actually- Invisibility, Brightness, Energy attacks, all centered around the same BS weapon)
The heat sink itself is pretty valuable, too (Assuming similar power levels I did above)
Given that the cloak is able to absorb a lot of light, and some fraction of that as IR, if the heat sink is controllable, you could flash freeze something wrapped in the cloak by rapid cooling. Emergency cryonics?
Wrap the cloak inside-out around a supercomputer and overclock like hell, or use as an improved cooling system for a reactor-
Hell, just turn it to maximum, toss it in a well-insulated reactor as a heat source and generate electricity. (I am, at this point, assuming xenotech energy sources giving us all this power- and that method seems safer than trying to directly temper with the power source.)
u/Charlie___ [+6] (28 minutes later)
In descending order of reasonableness:
Mass-produce it, make a brazilian dollars, buy things I actually want.
Rent it, make tons of money, get super famous, write a book.
Set up a corporate espionage network, make reasonable amounts of money off insider trading.
Steal stuff all the time.
Graffiti the White House with demands for better funding for education and a reorganization of the school year.
Stalk people, while humming that creepy song about how if I was invisible I'd just watch you in your room. Or maybe Every Breath You Take. Really, the soundtrack is the important thing here.
Attempt to solve North Korea's complicated problems through untraceable violence.
u/kaukamieli [+2] (3 hours later)
Mass producing would work only if you actually know how to make one.
Renting... I wouldn't probably even tell anyone I had one. That's a good way of not having one in future. I could sell it though, for a few metric shittons of money.
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (8 hours later)
Bet on basketball games, then hide in the middle of the court and help my team win. For amusement and money. Watching the reruns and listening to the commentary as the announcers react to the ball stopping in midair would be worth it.
For serious things? I don't really know. There are so many possibilities.
u/kaukamieli [+4] (10 hours later)
And three players run through you and you can't evade. You fall down and the cloak flew off. Someone screams when they think this player's hand dropped off somewhere but they calm down when they notice there is no blood. You try to grab the cloak, but the guards are there already and you see the audience is starting to come closer...
You wake up on quantanamo bay.
u/ulyssessword [+8] (15 hours later)
You wake up on quantanamo bay.
Quantanamo Bay: Where Quantum Terrorists are held.
u/kaukamieli [+2] (17 hours later)
The last prison of Time Lords.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (19 hours later)
Nah, they put the Daleks in that one. And then lost it. Yeesh.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (11 hours later)
Situational awareness is certainly required, and you would have to be in pretty decent shape. Trying to steal from players dribbling probably wouldn't be smart, but getting in the way of long passes or returning the ball to play from out of bounds could work.
u/notentirelyrandom [+1] (3 days later)
And, like, the other team is probably almost as good. You don't need to make a lot of changes.
u/xamueljones [+2] My arch-enemy is entropy (8 hours later)
There's a real-life device that can make nearly anything invisible. Also its design is clever enough for people to be able to make their own version at home. Check it out! ;)
u/duffmancd [+2] (17 hours later)
You can create the same effect with four mirrors (think of two periscopes looking at each other, you can't see what's between the eye pieces) or a bunch of fibre optics. I personally would not call a fixed device (that you can see) that only effects views from a small range of angles an invisibility cloak.
u/awesomeideas [+1] Dai stiho, cousin. (a day later)
/⇒⇒⇒⇒⇒⇒⇒⇙\
⇒⇒⇒⇖|XXXXXX|⇒⇒⇒⇒⇒⇒⇒⇒
u/Sira- [+2] (9 hours later)
Put one solar panel inside the cloak and one on the other side of the cloak. Shine a flashlight at both panels for unlimited free energy. (The flashlight would emit whatever wavelength of light needed for the best absorption rate.)
u/kaukamieli [+1] (10 hours later)
Huh? Why would it give unlimited free energy?
u/Chronophilia [+1] sci-fi ≠ futurology (11 hours later)
Light would fall on the panel inside the cloak, but also pass through it and fall on the panel behind it, thus doubling your energy output.
I don't think that should work, but... how do you see things when you're inside the cloak?
u/DataPacRat [+2] Amateur Immortalist (12 hours later)
It's technological. The data gathered by the light-field cameras and fed to the quantum dots can also be used to construct images on the inside of the cloak.
I should probably also note that as a technological device, the cloak is battery-powered - when the battery runs out, no more invisibility.
u/kaukamieli [+1] (13 hours later)
I'm pretty sure it would be pretty dark inside the cloak. The technological cloaks bend the light around the object, so there's no light to the panel.
Also, pretty sure solar panels are pretty inefficient, so it would still not give infinite energy. Wasn't the current maximum something like 30%? But they work by absorbing the light, so there is no way to cheat them by not letting them actually absorb the light.
u/E-o_o-3 [+2] (18 hours later)
Ugh. Honestly, I'd probably give it to the scientists right away. There's just no way to justify not acquiring the tech as fast as possible, before anything goes wrong for any reason.
But yeah - as others have said, you can get fairly large amounts of money betting on events that you ordinarily couldn't influence.
You can fake supernatural events and you need not necessarily tie those events to your personal self unless you want to. Anything going on that you don't like? God / ghost of Mother Theresa/ etc doesn't like it either now, and can publicly say so. Have fun massively influencing public opinion on anything.
Better yet, just restrict yourself to individuals to reduce chances of being caught. You can also convince all but the staunchest atheists that they are getting supernatural messages to do things, and this includes most important figures. This allows you to accomplish a great deal without getting your hands dirty.
If you have a partner in crime and no life otherwise, you can keep the cloak on indefinitely and be very bold and straightforward about pretending to be a supernatural phenomenon for a fairly long time. I don't think they'd actually try and rip off your "skin" or anything, and it's not weird of x rays show you are humanoid.
You can non-violently influence any public election via shenanigans, or otherwise hilariously thwart anyone's efforts to do anything and make them lose all influence through embarrassment or make them lose all their money without actually harming them.
u/Ozimandius [+2] (a day later)
The first stage is information gathering: infiltrate high level meetings in government and private industry and get a feel for who's doing what and how. Then, corporate espionage first, steal as many important plans and prototypes as possible and trade them to a smaller companies of my choosing. I would invest heavily into said companies and short the stocks of the other companies. Release videos of any backroom deals or illegal goings-on that I observed companies doing after investing in options and shorts for those companies. Make a bundle that way. Use other videos as blackmail to gain power and access with some of my more successful small business companies that I helped with prototypes etc.
Mostly gain access to powerful people and learn their secrets, and use those secrets to gain money and power.
u/NocturnalAviator [+2] (3 days later)
First off, Technology like this could be subverted to record information.
The device that can capture not just the amount and frequency of light hitting any point of it, but also the incidence, from as many points of view as the object is large. The information to digitize an environment from a particular cloud of viewpoints is there to process. The information to see around obstacles via scattered ambient light is also there. Given that the surface is also an ideal light source, the ability to chemically analyze anything within line of sight is there, as is the ability to light up a room for analysis without giving away exact location to a known observer.
Note that the display elements are capable of sending different light in all directions at once, from all angles, on all surfaces. The detectors compliment the ability. A pair of things like this could transmit a lot of information, full duplex, multi-frequency, without aiming, in a free space optical system, with as many data streams as can fit in in line of sight, and as broadband as the resolution of the device permits.
Additionally, the device is a virtual lens with capability of emulating any virtual light source in the visible range. The device could be used as a sort of telescope that is pre focused on all points and at all distances within line of sight, with capability to go further via analysis of scattered light. Stepping outside at night would generate enough information to keep a lot of astronomers very happy for a long time, and getting a few good vantage points during the day could be as good as mapping out to the horizon and providing a complete environmental and partial toxicological census using ambient light. The virtual lens capability also makes the previous ultimate Free space optic application that much more useful, as any device, no matter how small, is just as good as a telescope of a particular lens size pointing at any node you can spot, with automatic tracking, and as much illuminating ability as the surface can provide.
The ability to emit light at all angles to any specificity can be used to direct energy onto a single point, or multiple points. Anything in line of sight can face the full wrath of whatever the maximum light output is for a point multiplied by cross-section of the device. The abilities of this sort of not-quite-laser fall into the same industrial and weapon use cases of an actual laser, albeit one that can point in all directions at once and be multiple frequencies at the same time. Manufacturing via laser sintering, photon driven chemistry, and propulsion via chasing an object with superheated atmospheric plasma come to mind. If SHTF, you could set up in a high tower and try dazzling everyone in a ten mile radius, popping their tires, downing their aircraft, destroying their ranged sensors, branding them with the mark of your order, burning their hair, etching your demands on every tree bordering your domain, and just cooking anything that doesn't get the idea to back off. It would only take kilowatts to pull off, unless you wanted to do everything at the same time, but then I suggest some good heatsinking and a mind for just how hot you can get the air surrounding the device.
On the less extreme but definitely creepy side, If you could manufacture these things and sneak a visor or contacts or a wall made of the stuff in front of someone, it'd have the same applications as really good AR gear. Like, potentially, people could go around not seeing real things, seeing fake things, and seeing things that are in a different place entirely. Combine with an audio solution (plasmic heating of air might work in a pinch) and you've got mind control that works as long as you maintain enough control over the physical environment that they don't reach out and touch a discrepancy.
On the subject of AR. A dim room with a small amount of the stuff at a good viewpoint or two could project on any surfaces, while simultaneously capturing a lot of information about a user. Pocket holodeck.
To save energy and provide a more immersive scenario for users in a portable, non-worn, holodeck scenario the material could track users eyes with a bundle of tight little cones of light for retinal projection. A small amount of the stuff worn, if the observers were known, could mask a person in a crowd at very low power, though they might still appear as a distortion in peripheral vision if the person to be hidden only has a few small patches of the stuff.
Things would be more interesting if a crowd of people were hiding from known veiwers using worn or thrown devices, since the scene could be reconstructed for the viewers from a wide range of vantage points, and free space optical communication could transmit the information to other nodes. Potentially, given enough nodes nearby, malicious individuals could be tricked to fall down stairs, crash military vehicles, mistarget air strikes, shoot dirt, or chase targets over open wells.
An invisibility cloak is basically like saying "I don't just have complete optical power regarding any light that touches this thing, I also have formidable optical power over anything that can be touched by light that touches this thing."
u/Topher876 [+1] (4 hours later)
assuming you know how it is made, patent the shit out of every component and every process in its construction then pick up a massive defense contract for next gen active camouflage. That's probably the most efficient way to make money, if you really need some quick cash though enhanced theft is probably the fastest way to get a couple grand.
u/itisike [+1] Dragon Army (16 hours later)
Most efficient lol. That would take years and only net you at most a couple billion. You could steal bitcoin private keys for a faster earning rate, then multiply it by options on a large company, and killing the ceo. You should be able to do that a lot faster. I've got more details in my top level reply.
u/Topher876 [+1] (16 hours later)
No, I bet that less than 1 percent of people own bitcoin, of that most people probably don't have more than a few hundred dollars. Now how are you going around getting these bitcoins, if you go high profile then you'll attract interest from the wrong sorts of people, then your cloak gets taken as evidence and ends up out of your control. Sure you can stay small but do you have any idea how big a billion is, your saying a couple billion so I'm assuming you want a lot, I'm not sure you could steal enough small time accounts in a year to get your big B.
u/itisike [+2] Dragon Army (17 hours later)
Market cap of bitcoin is in the billions, and much is concentrated among the top few (1000) hodlers. I'm talking about sneaking into the computer room and copying the keys. Once you have the keys you can spend it from anywhere anonymously over tor.
5 million was stolen just a few weeks ago from bitstamp, without any of this. You do a few larger ones, you get half a billion (and kill bitcoin, but you got your money quickly.) That's the target I aimed for in my other post. That should take much less time than producing in bulk, and is enough to fund the other ways I outlined for making money.
u/JosephLeee [+1] (6 hours later)
Can I use it to make myself look like someone else?
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (8 hours later)
It sounds like if the technology is good enough to make you invisible, then it should be able to make the cloak look like anything. But the question/post was how would you use an invisibility cloak, not a camouflaging cloak. So I would learn how to imitate famous celebrities' voices and say embarrassing or out-of-character things while standing invisibly next to them.
u/distributed [+1] (a day later)
Can you see out? For the sake of this argument I will assume yes.
This implies that the light coming in is duplicated and sent out. Put a solar cell inside the cloak (or a water boiler depending on the energy levels used), surround the cloak with a large mirror array and a laser.
Laser goes into the cloak and gives of energy, this you convert to electricity, however this is an invisibility cloak so there must be no indication that the cloak is there, so the laser also continues undiminished on the other side of the cloak. It hits the mirror array, passes through the cloak gives of energy, hits the mirror array again undiminished, passes through the cloak ...
BOOM, you have a self powering energy source assuming you can fit something capable of converting the laser to heat inside the cloak.
TL:DR, a self sustaining energy generator. Completely waste free.
u/itisike [+1] Dragon Army (16 hours later)
First step is to obtain enough money for a reasonable attempt at world takeover. Let's try for $500 billion. We first gain a smaller amount ($500 million, or so) by going into big bitcoin hodlers computers and getting private keys. I'm assuming we'd get only a fifth of the market cap before it crashes. Definitely hundreds of millions. (It ddn't crash too much with the recent $5 million hack.) Use that to get into trading houses, and set up some of the high speed trading programs to make a "mistake" on some trades, which you are on the other end of. (Chase lost $6 billion the other year due to something similar, and everybody believes it.) Let's say we get $20 billion out of this before hst is shut down due to "risks". All in different accounts under many names, of course.
We also steal lots of gold from wherever it is held, making a few billions in the process.
As I've said before on this sub, we can profit a lot if we know when important people will die. Heavily short big companies, then kill the CEOs. Shorts should double your money, options could multiply by hundreds. I estimate 6 months before we hit our monetary goal.
Then proceed to world takeover. My detailed plan on this is not to be posted online until takeover is complete, so you'll have to wait a few years.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (19 hours later)
This went very quickly to a very dark place.
u/itisike [+1] Dragon Army (a day later)
I had that "kill ceos" plan lying around from that thread about getting rid of a name, and it still seems one of the most efficient way of multiplying money. Where else can you even hope to make in the billions quickly besides trading? I suppose we could use invisibility to destroy product plans and cause destruction that way, but getting rid of the CEO does seem the most efficient way to kill a stock temporarily.
It would be even more dark had I included the "how to take over the world with $500 billion" part. I chose that number because no current billionaires rule the world, and surely some with over a few billion have tried, so the amount needed must be greater. Wonder how much the Vatican has.