Nightmares and Realities

We all know that art imitates life. The great portraits, frescos, plays, screenplays, songs… many are based on the events and scenes of real life. It is actually fairly often that life imitates art too, wherein the things imagined by others in the pages of books or on the silver screen eventually become reality. The internet is probably the most prevalent example, and the appearance of the Smart Watch portends to possibly ascend to similar levels if afforded the right technological advancements.

Lockheed Martin division Skunk Works falls in one or the other category, depending on who you talk to; art imitating life or life imitating art. On November 1^st, Lockheed Martin published this press release.

If you are a part of the art imitating life camp, then the publishing of this story about a hypersonic unmanned jet aircraft is nothing new. You’ve heard this story a countless number of times ever since Area 51 became part of the common lexicon and the Blackbird was still flying CIA missions. The Aurora was a subject of many alleged sightings, and even in some cases alleged to be involved in secret military actions.

Many of those stories set the Aurora as a piloted aircraft like any other, just really, really, fast. The Namco game Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere involved in part an Aurora controlled, most of the time, by a computer A.I. That would place it in the same company as the now real thing.

As far many conspiracy theorists go, this announcement from Skunk Works only validates their long-standing conviction of an already in place reality. That is to say, they are doing a great big “I told you so” dance. What they always said was the case but was greeted with disbelief and skepticism has been shown to be so.

If you are from the life imitating art camp, then Skunk Works has pulled off a great, if not fearful, feat of making reality out of fiction. It is as though this defense contractor was reading through old stories, playing old video games, and got to work building this terrifying weapon.

I can tell you right now that if they keep things up, we very well could end up in the same world of Ace Combat 3, whose story in whole is all about the dangers of corporations and private military contractors attaining such powers and freedoms to be able to amass, furnish, and operate a military without restriction. Once you actually get into the story of Ace Combat 3 you realize that science is on the precipice of the so many of the breakthroughs laid out there. Downloading a person’s mind into a computer interface, the 3D environment recreation like with the Oculus Rift which becomes AC3’s COFFIN system, high powered laser weapons… the coming decades portend to offer very amazing advancements that can be either amazingly useful and beneficial, or absurdly destructive.

Life imitating art and art imitating life. For now, this is an interesting story. No military has placed orders for it yet, and thankfully no one has spotted them testing a Night Raven yet either, but you have to imagine it won’t likely be very long until the Air Force gets its hands on at least a few. The press release sets a date of 2030, but you have to believe that if the Air Force or CIA shows particular interest and shows up with appropriate funding, that timeline could be advanced by a good bit. Let’s just hope we learn a lesson from our fiction so that we don’t run headlong into that least favorable aspect of the fiction.