If you fire off a powerful enough laser that comes to a tight enough focus, you can yank the electrons off atoms of plain old air. This will create a little ball of plasma… a little bright, loud explosion. Handy enough if what you want is a little bright explosion in the air. If, however, you hit that ball of plasma with a second, properly tuned laser, you can manipulate that ball to plasma to explode in specific ways. Thus it need not just go “BANG,” you can – at least in theory, make it go “HI THERE.”
Unsurprisingly the DoD is interested in just such a technology. At a simple level, the ability to create a distressingly loud and unending series of BANGs in the air at a great distance would be a handy tool to harass the enemy. Imagine you’re hunkered behind your wall and all of a sudden a machine gun starts going off directly above you. Ya ain’t gettin’ no sleep tonight!
The eventual goal, though, is not simple BANG, but instead to make that little ball of fire *talk.* Using it for basic communications? Meh. What you want is to get it to say stuff like “Hey, this is God. Guess who’s pissed off at what you’re doing right now…”
The video below shows a series of tests. Most involve the creation of BANG at a distance… certainly of military value. But the two last bits are potentially the most interest. Second to last seems to show the creation of a stable little “ball lightning,” a glowing sphere on the order of a centimeter in diameter that just floats there in space (if I’m seeing it right). The last segment shows attempts to make something like a human voice. There is a series of rotating mirrors involved, which seems a little problematic as I doubt this is something you’re going to find the enemy normally equipped with. But one of those tests does create something somewhat like a human voice. It’s gibberishy and heavily buried in a high-pitched noise, but potentially promising. Even if they can’t make it talk as such, if they could at least get rid of the high-pitched noise, leaving just a ghostly “voice outta friggen’ nowhere” could have an entertaining effect on the enemy. Especially at night. Keep up the “machine gun fire” on them for a week or so, drive ’em buggo, then finally give them a chance to catch some Zzzz’s… then have ghosts start whispering nonsense to them. I can see this driving people batty, perhaps even causing the enemy to turn on each other like psychos.
From HERE.
