NARRATOR: Telephone
pole-sized rods streak down from outer space
and obliterate targets on Earth. It would be the
ultimate bunker buster. NARRATOR: Powerful
lasers instantly blast enemies in any direction. You'll get zapped
at the same time that you see the Zapper
in the shape of zapping. NARRATOR: Missiles traveling
near the speed of light deliver massive blasts
without the aid of explosives. It starts to become
possible to hit things with the energy
of an atomic bomb without actually having to
use any sort of radiation. NARRATOR: And space pilots
battle to the death in a very different kind of dogfight. These aren't just
sci-fi fantasy. They are the future of
space wars in the universe. It's 100 years in the future and
the final frontier has turned into the ultimate battleground. A rogue colony on
the moon has already attacked neighboring colonies. A spacecraft from Earth
has moved into position after negotiations
have broken down. As we travel out into
the solar system and maybe even the stars, there
are going to be people who disagree with other people. And the potential for
warfare is just as great there as it has been anytime
through human history. NARRATOR: Before the rogue
colony takes any more innocent lives, the spacecraft releases
a weapon of unimaginable power, an antimatter bomb. Antimatter is the
same as normal matter except with the
opposite atomic charges. Instead of negative electrons
and positive protons, antimatter has positive
electrons and negative protons. When matter and
antimatter touch, they instantly
annihilate each other, releasing a huge
amount of energy. When you have antimatter
colliding with matter, all of the mass gets converted
into energy, 100% efficiency. That's a lot of
bang for the buck. Even nuclear weapons are
only about 1% efficient. Chemical weapons are a tiny
fraction of a percent in terms of their efficiency. NARRATOR: A warhead
of normal matter would simply explode
when it came in contact with the antimatter inside. The antimatter bomb streaking
toward the rogue colony is a mass of
antimatter surrounded by an electromagnetic field. Just before impact, the
field is turned off. You don't even need a fuse. You just need that antimatter
to reach the desired destination and hit it. And it will then convert
all of its energy and the energy of
the object that it hit into this explosive
energy, producing a tremendous explosion. NARRATOR: Other spacecraft
in orbit around Earth target smaller remote outposts
loyal to the rogue colony with powerful laser weapons. An advantage of a laser weapon
is that the laser beam travels at the speed of light. So you could have these light
beams going across very large distances in a very
small amount of time zapping the enemy before the
enemy realizes what's going on. NARRATOR: Light races
across the universe at 186,000 miles per second. So the futuristic laser weapons
fired from orbit nearer Earth take just over a second to
blast holes in their targets on the moon about
240,000 miles away. But just because we're
100 years in the future doesn't mean simple
projectiles have disappeared from the battlefield. They inflict damage by slamming
into the enemy using what's known as kinetic energy,
the energy of motion to destroy a target. If we accelerated
some kind of mass up to a sizable fraction
of the speed of light, wouldn't even hit a warhead
just the kinetic energy of the motion of that
object itself would have incredible destructive power. NARRATOR: Like an asteroid
impacting a planet, the more an object weighs
its mass and the faster it's going its velocity, the
more kinetic energy it has. But velocity has an
advantage over mass in the kinetic energy equation
since mass is multiplied by the square of the velocity. [gun fires] So something
traveling twice as fast as 4 times the kinetic energy
of something of equal mass. So you get something up
to very high velocities. It has a lot of kinetic energy. NARRATOR: The different
amounts of kinetic energy are easy to see when hitting
a target with the same type of projectile traveling
at two different speeds. [gun shot] This firearms expert is going
to fire two identical lead balls. The first, from this
smoothbore pistol. The second, from this
smoothbore musket. Now, with its longer barrel
and larger powder charge, it's going to fire
that ball much faster. Let's see. NARRATOR: First, the pistol
sends the ball down range [gun shot] at a relatively slow speed. [gun shot] Now, the musket fires the same
sized lead ball at a higher speed. [gun fires] On the back of
the target you can see the damage caused
by the lead ball fired from the pistol. But now look at what
happened with the lead ball from the musket-- much higher kinetic energy,
much greater damage. NARRATOR: And out in
the vacuum of space, there's no atmosphere
to slow things down. So another ship in Earth orbit
launches a telephone pole sized projectile
made of dense metal at the rogue colonists'
underground headquarters. It's known as a rod from God. After a brief rocket boost,
the acceleration of gravity gets the non-explosive
rod moving at more than 10,000 miles an
hour by the time of impact. As we're able will get heavier
and heavier objects moving at faster and faster
velocities, it starts to become
possible to hit things with the energy
of an atomic bomb without actually having to
use any sort of radiation. NARRATOR: The heavy metal rod
penetrates layers of moon rock to destroy the underground
command center. Without explosives,
kinetic energy alone has devastated the area
like an asteroid creating a huge crater. But no matter how advanced
space weapons become, one of the basic principles
of warfare and technology will probably still apply. I think it's an inevitable
fact of human nature and human history that the
invention of one weapon in its use triggers a
countermeasure or a way to try to defeat it
or build a better one. So you're going to see that
space weaponry, no matter how far in the future you go. [suspenseful music] A fantastic countermeasure
against a directed energy weapon like, say, a laser
would be a cloaking device like we see in many science
fiction shows like Star Trek. If we can render
a ship invisible, then electromagnetic energy
just passes right through it. NARRATOR: But the technology
to make entire spaceships invisible or the power needed
to create lasers strong enough to blast big targets
from vast distances are well beyond our
current capabilities. And right now, there aren't
any offensive weapons stationed in space. But war could still come to
space within the next decade or so. The future of space warfare
may look a little different. At first, I think it's
going to be satellites and anti-satellite systems,
missiles, and satellites, not manned systems at all. NARRATOR: And why
would satellite weapons that can destroy them likely
be the focus of the first space war? Because satellites are already
essential to fighting wars on Earth. America, in particular, is
extremely dependent on space. Our military cannot operate
the way it does today without satellites. We use them for communications,
navigation, intelligence gathering of all kinds, whether
it's photo intelligence, whether signal
intelligence, a lot of it is done by satellites. Even ground maneuvers require
very accurate positioning, GPS signals. NARRATOR: Since 2007,
China and the United States have proven they're capable
of destroying satellites in low Earth orbit
with missiles. They each taken out one
of their own satellites. It's no easy feat since the
satellites are streaking across the sky a few hundred
miles above the Earth at about 17,000 miles an hour. Without fast computers, people
wouldn't stand a chance. [tennis ball bounce] [tennis ball hit] Hitting a satellite
in space with a missile is as difficult as hitting
someone else's tennis serve with yours. Getting the timing,
getting the speed right, it's virtually impossible. But for a modern missile
with advanced technology, it's not that difficult. These
missiles have sensors that allow them to determine their
own location and the target location and changes and
make split-second adjustments and hit. Imagine if you had a smart
tennis ball using the same kind of sensor technology, adjusting
its location hundreds of times a second to make sure
it hit the target. NARRATOR: And once a missile
intercepts a satellite, a big explosion is needed. In fact, many
anti-satellite missiles are designed to simply ram their
target without any explosives at all. [explosion] Space-based materials are
designed to be fairly light. It's very expensive to
lift things into orbit. It takes about
100 pounds of fuel to lift 1 pound into orbit
so one of the things lightest possible which makes them also
usually comparatively easy to knock out. And back on Earth, the
effects of an all-out Spacewar in the next decade
would be severe. [explosion] If countries begin blasting
each other's satellites out of the sky, the
problems would quickly spread beyond making it
difficult for the military to wage war. Today's global society is
definitely dependent on space. If we were to start losing
satellites, not just military satellites,
but commercial and civil satellites, what would
happen to daily life? Suddenly, ATM
machines don't work. Many cell phones don't work. Pay at the pump no longer works. Financial transactions
all over the world that use the GPS timing signal,
all of a sudden are disrupted. So the whole world slows down. NARRATOR: And if a space
war escalated totally out of control missiles might carry
nuclear warheads into space to make sure important
targets were knocked out with a big blast. But you won't believe how
different a nuclear blast in space looks and how
destructive it can still be back on Earth. [blast sound] There's one weapon
in today's arsenals that might still be used
to annihilate targets in massive space battles of
the future, atomic bombs. But anyone used to seeing
atomic explosions on Earth would have a hard time
recognizing these blasts in space. [blast sound] One of the creepy things
about exploding a nuclear weapon in space is it doesn't look
like anything you'd expect. Here on the planet Earth, you
see this iconic mushroom cloud but in space, with
no atmosphere, there are no clouds, instead,
you have an expanding bubble of radiation, a single
flash of light like a star, very small, going supernova. [explosion] NARRATOR: In the
first few nanoseconds, high energy gamma rays
explode in all directions along with a flash of light
followed by an expanding cloud of radiation. The shockwave that rips
buildings apart on Earth is gone since there's
no atmosphere in space. But the sphere of radiation
expands faster and farther than on Earth. [explosion] You can just think
of almost like bullets but their radiation
particles going out and they will travel a long
way, gamma rays, neutrons. They will penetrate satellites,
some go blasting right through, others hit electronics,
and cause a lot of damage. NARRATOR: With an
average-sized nuclear bomb, any satellites within a 50-mile
radius will be destroyed. But an atomic blast
in space wouldn't just destroy equipment. Astronauts flying
through the debris from an exploded
nuclear weapon in space would be subject to extreme
levels of radiation, in particular, there
are gamma rays coming from radioactive decay
of radioactive nuclei and they can interact with
skin and cause cancer. Also, they're energetic
electrons and other particles coming from these radioactive
nuclei and all of these things are damaging to living tissue. [explosion] NARRATOR: Without any wind
or other atmospheric effects that expanding
sphere of radiation would stay at dangerous
levels for months. Today's missiles can carry
nuclear warheads into space and due to the way atomic
bombs interact with Earth's upper atmosphere, one country
might decide to target another with a blast in space because it
actually causes a lot of damage all the way down on Earth. When a nuclear weapon goes
off above most of the Earth's atmosphere, it releases a bunch
of gamma rays, very high energy electromagnetic radiation,
but ionized the gas in the atmosphere. That is they kick the electrons
off of the atoms and molecules. Those electrons are kicked
largely in a downward direction and they're moving at
a substantial fraction of the speed of light. But that creates an incredible
electric current and that can set up big voltage
differences and big surges of current in electrical
equipment here on Earth. [explosion] NARRATOR: So if America
were the target, there'd be a sudden
spike of current known as an electromagnetic
pulse or EMP coming down like a massive
invisible ball of lightning. It destroys electronics
and anything else carrying an electric
current in an instant. [music playing] Atomic blasts on
Earth also create EMPs but with more limited ranges. By exploding above
the atmosphere, a single atomic blast could
devastate the country. It's been estimated that
if you let off a one-megaton nuclear weapon 100
kilometers over Kansas, you would render most if not all
the electronics in the United States inoperative. [blast sound] NARRATOR: The damage on Earth
from atomic explosions in space isn't just theory. Starting in the late 1950s,
during the height of the Cold War, both the United States
and the former Soviet Union became the only nations to
use space as a nuclear testing ground. [blast sound] One of the last tests in
1962 above the Pacific Ocean created an EMP that knocked
out electronics all the way from New Zealand to Hawaii. So you can affect a large
area with these currents, these sharp currents not
just the immediate area right below the bottom. NARRATOR: Because of the
widespread damage in space and on Earth both
countries stop these blasts after less than two dozen tests. [explosion] To avoid hitting friendly
satellites or spacecraft with big imprecise
nuclear blasts, conventional firearms
could be used in space. But if you were in charge of
security outside of a Space Station, would a
normal handgun even fire without atmospheric oxygen
in a microgravity environment? Gunpowder has its own oxidizer
built into it so it would fire. If you managed to get the
firing pin to hit the end of the bullet, it would go off. Now, would it eject the
slide and the next bullet go into the round,
and would that work? That's a good question. I'm not really
positive that it would fire more than a few times
before it seized up and quit working. NARRATOR: A big
part of the problem is that the metal moving
parts and site guns need lubricants to work smoothly
but the harsh extremes of space would probably cost
the lubricants to fail. TRAVIS TAYLOR: If a handgun got
in the sunlight, for example, it would get really
really hot and the parts would seize together probably. If it were not in the sunlight,
it would get really really cold and the parts would
seize together probably and lubricants just
have a hard time working in the vacuum of space. The biggest problem
is they bead up. They turn into little
balls because there's no gravity or any
other atmosphere that it can adhere to. [music playing] NARRATOR: Astronauts have
demonstrated the same thing when they drink liquids
in microgravity. Instead of flowing
evenly, the liquids separate into a
series of spheres. [suspenseful music] But there is one system
that would work well for keeping away the bad guys
in space, launching bullets with a real gun. Real guns use a series
of strong magnetic fields rather than gunpowder
to repel bullets. [explosion] Current real gun projectiles
can already race down range about three times faster than
a bullet from an M16 rifle. [gun fires] The idea of a real gun as
you take a small pellet that's maybe metal and maybe plastic,
maybe whatever but you have to have it wrapped
in aluminum foil because you complete an electric
circuit between two long rails, and the magnetic field created
accelerates that little pellet at the end of the rails and it
can accelerate it very fast up to-- some people believe close
to the speed of light. NARRATOR: Similar systems are
at work in certain bullet trains and roller coasters. Have a series of
magnets and the magnets propel an object either
a roller coaster car or this giant slug
of a bullet you want to use to hit
something in space from one to the other
accelerating as it goes and by the time it's reached a
certain number of accelerators, a certain number of pairs
of magnets it's really going as fast as you needed to go. NARRATOR: Mounted on
a large spacecraft, the rail gun could become the
naval cannon of the future. Long rows of powerful magnets
could propel big projectiles to millions of miles an hour. But would that kind of
gun be enough to take out an alien civilization before
it could destroy the Earth? 100 years from now,
space ships at war may blast away with Ultra
high-speed rail guns that destroy targets without
explosives just by slamming into the enemy at many thousands
or even millions of miles an hour. They'll release incredible
amounts of kinetic energy, the energy of motion. [explosion] In, 2008 the US Navy tested
the most powerful rail gun that now exists using
a series of magnets and strong electrical currents. It launched a
seven-pound projectile at over 5,000 miles an hour. The guns estimated range
when fully operational will be 200 miles. A slog moving at seven
times the speed of sound does a lot of damage. It's one of those things
where you're glad. It's on our side. NARRATOR: It's the kind of
weapon that could really do some damage to
the capital city of a violent alien civilization. You can envision the big
mothership having a real gun and runs along the periphery
from one end to the other and it could shoot a very
large projectile like the size of a car or a bulldozer. That you could then accelerate
on that rail gun maybe 10%/20% speed of light and add much
kinetic energy could likely destroy the whole city. I mean, it's a lot of energy. NARRATOR: But such
an advanced rail gun is obviously a long way off. So are there any
kinetic energy weapons that could come to space
in the near future? Remember the telephone
poles sized rod pummeling the underground bunker
in our moon battle set 100 years from now? Well, that weapon
known as a rod from God is simple enough that it could
show up if a war comes to space in the next few decades. A small rocket boost would get
the aerodynamic rods started. That's basically just a
big metal rod and probably something like tungsten or some
really strong and heavy metal that we can put in orbit and
drop it on to wherever you want, whatever the
is and from space and just let gravity
accelerate the thing. [explosion] NARRATOR: Gravity's ability
to speed up an object and increase its
destructive power can be seen in a weapon
from centuries past. The trebuchet which
is a type of catapult used to rate down
destruction from on high. Gravity acts upon an
object like this rock at a rate of 10 meters
per second squared. Roughly, 30 feet
per second squared. So if we take it
and drop it, it's falling for less than
a second, has not come close to reaching
30 feet per second. But take that same rock, launch
it with the trebuchet higher, further. It will have a
chance to accelerate to 30 feet per second, 60
feet in the second seconds, 90 feet in the third second. When it hits, it'll leave
a much bigger crater. [suspenseful music] [rock launching] This rock traveled through the
air for about 5 seconds, which means that by the time it
hit it was traveling close to or around 150
feet per second. And with that added
kinetic energy it left a much bigger crater. NARRATOR: In the battle,
100 years from now, the rock launched at the moon
has an advantage over the rock from the trebuchet on Earth. Since the moon doesn't
have any atmosphere the rod keeps
accelerating until it impacts the underground command
post of the separatist colony. [explosion] It burrows into the moon rock
and destroys the command post. But one of the Separatists on
the moon returned the favor and launch a rod from a
space platform at Earth. Earth's atmosphere
will slow the ride. But will it be enough to
prevent a knockout blow to an underground
headquarters on Earth? When it hits the
upper atmosphere it's doing about mach 25,
25 times the speed of sound, slows down as it comes down
through the atmosphere. But if it were to hit the Earth,
it would bore way down in there because it's going to hit like
5,000/7,000 miles per hour. So the amount of energy that's
dumped in a very small space, in a very short
amount of time is equivalent to a
small nuclear weapon. [explosion] Something like this would
have a lot of penetrating power would be the ultimate
bunker buster. NARRATOR: But as impressive
as the speeds of rods from God and real gun projectiles are [explosion] nothing can compete with the
laser speed, the 186,000 miles per second speed of light. Lasers have always been the
favorite weapon of science fiction space battles. The idea of having
personal lasers is just fascinating
and attractive. I would have loved one
at the age of 12 myself. It is the same way that
kids sometimes want to be Cowboys and gunslingers. There's something very
fun about the idea of having a weapon that is
quick painless instantaneous and makes you the
toughest SOP in the mouth. NARRATOR: But what
exactly is a laser? Lasers can be thought of as
a high-tech flashlight but all the waves are in phase. You've got all the
wave crests lining up. So that makes the radiation
really intense for a given amount of power. See, normal light from a
flashlight or from the sun is all out of phase. It's incoherent. Some wave crests are like this
the wave troughs of other waves are like that. They tend to largely cancel out. And what you see is the leftover
parts that didn't cancel out. [suspenseful music] NARRATOR: Most
visible light laser beams appear as a certain
color since only the light in that specific color
frequency is lined up and coming out of the chamber. And different types of
lasers can damage targets in different ways. This green light laser
at Stanford University's high powered laser lab pulses
on and off in powerful bursts. Is actually not
delivering a lot of heat what it is though is a
very strong electric field. And this one can provide a
strong enough electric field by creating a high electric
field you can rip apart atoms, can rip electrons off
of atoms of your wish and you can break down materials NARRATOR: The strong electrical
field even rips apart air molecules. They come back together
between each pulse. And that's when
you get the splash. That's when the
energy comes out. You see the light and you
get the report that way, much like thunder light. [thunder light sound] NARRATOR: And
these strong fields are especially good at knocking
out electronic equipment. In fact, the laser
beam is so powerful. It actually damaged our camera
as we recorded these images. When dust particles
deflected part of the pulse into the lens, it left a
permanent green imprint on the camera's
light-gathering CCD imager. Another laser at the lab
demonstrates the power of continuous waves
instead of pulses. [suspenseful music] It's an infrared beam. So it's not visible
to the human eye but its effects certainly are. It's very similar to the one
the military is developing, only the military is about
50,000 times stronger. Right here, we have a lens. And so as we go
through the lens, the beam is focusing
down in this plane here. If I put a target
in that plane, you can see that we end up burning
it because of the heat, and I can then take out
an ice smoothly edged piece of cardboard
from this card stock. [laser weapon sound] NARRATOR: The laser weapons
of future space wars would likely work
in the same way. But sci-fi movie fans
maybe very surprised to find out how real laser
weapons will actually work in space. In science fiction, we
often see a laser bolt, a bolt of energy. Whereas, in reality,
with a laser, you'd see a beam
connect and disconnect. I mean, the light is the
fastest thing we know of. If you were to see someone
about to shoot you with a laser beam, you would have to react
very quickly when you see their finger beginning to
twitch toward the button, otherwise, you'll get zapped
the same time that you see the Zapper initiate the zapping. NARRATOR: But in a duel
in the vacuum of space, even the beams of laser
weapons using visible light will be seen. [blast sound] So the reason that we
can see this beam here is that it's scattering off of
the dust particles in the air. In space, there are no dust
particles, it's a vacuum. So you wouldn't see the beam
except for at its target and reflections
off of its target. NARRATOR: And since sound
can't travel through a vacuum, none of those cool sci-fi
laser sound effects will be part of a real
laser battle in space. [laser weapon sounds] But even though laser
weapons in space won't look and sound like
they do in the movies, they'll still be fast and
deadly on the battlefield. So what will a real
space dogfight look like? You'll have to see
it to believe it. No weapon has fascinated
generations of science fiction fans more than
high energy lasers. [laser weapon sounds] And it's possible that as
soon as the next few decades lasers will be powerful
enough to knock out satellites and near-Earth orbit
in the blink of an eye. [suspenseful music] No weapon is faster than
a laser's beam of light traveling at 186,000
miles per second. If we can build a weapon that
had the capabilities to punch through armor plating then
you really are onto something. Because if it is
just electrical power that you need to
drive the thing, you haven't what we call
an infinite magazine. If you're talking about the
big gun on a battleship, you have to cap
bullets and gunpowder. You can run out of those. If you simply use electrical
power to create a laser system but not work best by
bringing us more bullets. And where do you
store those bullets? [laser weapon sounds] NARRATOR: Laser weapons
for use on Earth may begin showing up on
battlefields any day. In 2008 and 2009, the
United States Air force conducted limited tests
with a weapon known as the airborne laser system. It's a high energy laser fired
from the nose of a modified Boeing 747 that identifies
and tracks targets. So it can blast them with
a precise beam of energy. [blast sound] It can put an awful
lot of laser energy out. The airplane flies
at high altitude and it can shoot up
and take out missiles. So it's a counter
missile system. So the day is coming as
technology allows us to package lasers in smaller
and smaller systems. We can't put them on satellites
and theoretically take out missiles coming up
out of the atmosphere. [laser weapon sounds] NARRATOR: And with their speed
of light striking ability, lasers would be a great weapon
for space ship fighters. But futuristic dogfights
between spacecraft will have little in common
with today's aerial battles or what you've seen in
science fiction movies. [blast sound] [laser weapon sounds] 200 years in the
future, a supply ship and her escort fighters on
their way to colonies on Mars are intercepted by space pirates
looking for a quick payday. [laser weapon sounds] Today, in an atmosphere planes
need to generate lift which is why they have wings. Because they have
wings, because you also want to keep your
pilots conscious, you have long banking terms. In space, you don't
need to do that. You might have a spacecraft
flight on its way turn around and shoot
the guy behind it. [laser weapon sounds] Those are the kinds of things
you can do when you don't require an atmosphere. NARRATOR: As the pirates
attack the supply convoy, the outlooking fighters
on both sides face off. Probably, the best would be
a cube, covered with thrusters or little rockets and sensors. It doesn't have an
atmosphere to worry about so drag is not an issue. But you want to be able to see
360 degrees, 3 dimensionally, and be able to fire and
all of those directions. It would be a cube. NARRATOR: With these strange
looking craft fighting in the vacuum of space,
the movements of the fire will also look much different
than an aerial battle over the Earth. We're going to have
much more jerky motion where we're allowed to suddenly
just shoot off to the left, suddenly shoot off to
the right while keeping our forward motion. We can throw rockets on to
randomly break without having to worry about crashing
down to a planet like you have to worry
about within an atmosphere. [laser weapon sounds] NARRATOR: But without any
atmosphere to slow spacecraft down, could space dogfights
reach such high speeds that the human pilots
would begin to fall apart? That's what Nicholas Beatty from
Ziggler, Illinois wanted to-- So he texted, Nicholas, your
question actually is about a common but very
understandable misconception. It turns out that atoms
are stable at any speed because, in their own frame
of reference, they're at rest. However, humans die
if they're subject to sustained acceleration
is greater than about 10G. So I would say that's
the practical limit for accelerations during
interstellar travel, 10G. NARRATOR: But how
could there be G-Forces in the emptiness of
space with there's barely any gravity at all? It's all because of
Albert Einstein's equivalence principle, a key
part of his theory of General relativity. It states that gravity and
acceleration are equivalent, like an elevator accelerating
up making a passenger feel like there's additional
gravity pushing them into the floor. [space movement] So if you moved around
too quickly in space and you jerk real quick and your
brain would move around inside your skull so quickly
that you could kill yourself and so you might
want the guidance system of your spacecraft
to keep you from making those types of maneuvers. NARRATOR: Or future strategists
may decide to keep pilots out of the fight entirely. So then what would a pilotless
battle in space look like? [space movement] and dangers of dogfightingofs and space, pilots may be left
out of future space battles altogether. Imagine now a pirate
ship 200 years in the future trying to
take over the supply shift while all of the people remained
on the two main spacecraft. Assuming you had a large
manned or piloted spacecraft that was engaged in
combat operations with another vehicle
of the same size, you wouldn't launch
fighters at it. You would throw some tiny
space mine maneuverable vehicle the size of a suitcase
that would be stealthy, would float up to the
enemy spacecraft detach itself and blow up. That would be the way you do it. [space fight sound] But even though piloted
space fighters may not be a dominant weapon
in the future, lasers are still likely to play
a role if war comes to space. Although, they will have
some challenges to overcome. [space fight sound] 30 years from now, a
ground station on Earth is trying to destroy an
enemy satellite with a laser. But before it
reaches its target, the beam will have to deal
with Earth's atmosphere. If you've ever stuck a
straw into a glass of water and looked at it
from the side, you might have noticed that
the straw appears to bend as it goes to the surface. This is because light gets bent
as it goes through one material and into another. Well, lasers passing
through the atmosphere have to deal with the same
sort of problem, refraction. So when we're trying
to point lasers from the surface of the
Earth out into space, we have to take into
consideration how much the atmosphere bends light. [suspenseful music] A laser weapon already in space
will be much more effective at taking out satellites
or spacecraft. [space fight sound] Up in space, there
would be no atmosphere and so there'd be no
attenuation of the laser light as there is when it's going
through the atmosphere. NARRATOR: But until
scientists come up with a strong lightweight
energy source for use in space, lasers won't be powerful
enough to blast anything. And the same kind of
energy limitations will likely keep
laser weapons out of the hands of space soldiers. Until we create a fusion
reactor in a cell phone-sized battery, we're not going to be
carrying those things around any time soon that do
real damage like captain Kirk's handheld phasor
that he shoots and destroys and completely
disintegrate somebody. That takes a lot of power. I'd like to know what
power source those things have in them. NARRATOR: So if
lasers don't turn out to be the dominant space
weapon of the future, then what might a battle
on the surface of the moon look like 100 years from now? As colleagues often do
they get into a dispute and have some kind of war. You would think it
would be fairly short. The environment is so
hostile, to begin with. You're lucky to be alive. [suspenseful music] NARRATOR: The attacking force
approaching the rival colony will probably be fairly small
due to the harsh conditions and the huge cost of
bringing people and equipment into space. And for the same
cost-saving reason, the colony will also be
made from lightweight thin materials. That cost way too much to
send stainless steel or whatever would be heavy armored-plating
and it's not what the first colonies are going to be
and they're going to be very fragile. NARRATOR: So even a simple
attack could be very effective. I think you would just find
somebody trucking a bomb over to the wrong place and sneaking
it in and setting it off. Or launching a small
missile at somebody. It would be incredibly
hard to stop. It would be incredibly easy
to get everybody killed. NARRATOR: But if the strike
force isn't able to take out the colony right away, they
might face a counter-attack out on the surface of the moon. [fire attack sound] Here in the vacuum of space,
even the smallest wound can be a death sentence. [explosion] If a hole punched in the
spacesuit, it would leak. And by the way, what punched the
hole in the spacesuit probably kept on punching through to
the person inside it, right? So how do you help that person? How do you perform first aid on? NARRATOR: But the space
wars of the distant future, they move beyond the technology
of man and machine altogether. After all, the destructive
power of natural phenomena of the universe goes far beyond
any weapon people have ever made. [blast sound] Looking hundreds of
years into the future a belligerent alien civilization
is using Mars as a staging area for their coming
invasion of Earth. One might imagine redirecting
an asteroid or a rock flying through the solar
system so that it hits Mars. We could imagine firing a rocket
to an asteroid deflecting it ever so slightly
in its trajectory so that after a number of orbits
it would finally hit Mars. NARRATOR: But is it
inevitable that man will turn the final
frontier into a battleground or could our advances in
destructive technology be matched by advances in
wisdom and self-preservation? Human beings always think
that one day soon we're going to move beyond
the need for conflict. We haven't done it
here and I don't think we're going to
move beyond it in space. [space fight sound] Most countries of the world have
already signed what's commonly known as the 1967 Outer Space
Treaty preserving space, the moon, and other planets
for peaceful purposes. But as space travel in the
future becomes more routine and if valuable untapped
resources are discovered beyond Earth, will
a treaty be enough? Only time will tell if this
arsenal of exotic space weapons is a preview of our future
or a dangerous fantasy world we can avoid. [fire attack sound]
