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DARPA, the extreme arm of the Pentagon’s military technology research are fully underway in creating the world’s first Terminator. Or at least they’ve started to.

DARPA are in the second stages of a 5 month old project into creating solid’s that can fold themselves and build themselves into shapes without the need of human interaction. Akin to origami. Except this is for military purposes.

The project is being headed up by researchers in Harvard University, MIT and DARPA themselves and looks to have a working model of a “morphable object” ready by Spring 2010.

For the sciencey part and the applications of such technology, here is a section from Wired.com’s article

One day, that could lead to “morphing aircraft and ground vehicles, uniforms that can alter themselves to be comfortable in any climate, and ’soft’ robots that flow like mercury through small openings to enter caves and bunker complexes.” A soldier could even reach into a can of unformed goop, and order up a custom-made tool or a “universal spare part.”

 

One team from Harvard is working on a kind of “generalized Rubik’s Cube” that can fold into all kinds of shapes. Another is trying to order large strands of synthetic DNA to bind together in a “molecular Velcro.” An MIT group is building “self-folding origami” machines that “use specialized sheets of material with built-in actuators and data. These machines use cutting-edge mathematical theorems to fold themselves into virtually any three-dimensional object.”

So who’s to say that Skynet isn’t in fact bang on time? Who knows. Either way, I say this is bad for humanity. Especially if DARPA, a military research corporation is backing in.

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