[electronic beeping, buzzing]
[indistinct chatter]
[narrator] October 2021.
A US garrison in Syria comes under attack from an unpredictable, lethal adversary,
suicide drones.
Capable of flying up to 60 miles,
they come armed with deadly nail bombs or worse.
For military and civilian targets on land and sea,
the growing threat of high-tech terrorism is real.
[explosion rumbles]
[man] We have seen these kinds of attacks in the past.
It was complex. It was deliberate.
[narrator] But a new weapon is coming to the rescue.
Capable of spotting, tracking,
and instantly destroying even a swarm of these silent killers,
a device straight out of science fiction,
a weaponized laser.
But for most of us, lasers are not a devastating weapon.
They're an indispensable part of our everyday lives.
The 16-billion-US-dollar laser market
embraces everything from entertainment
to heavy industry,
medicine
to the Internet,
which only works as fast as it does
thanks to nearly four billion miles of laser-powered high-speed optical fiber.
Enough to wrap around the Earth 150,000 times.
Lasers are generally harmless, making our lives better,
but laser weapons are becoming ever more powerful.
The US Army is developing a laser ten times stronger
than their anti-drone ray,
powerful enough to destroy a helicopter
or a cruise missile.
And globally,
the laser-weapons market is worth about $4.37 billion,
a figure that's only growing with every year.
Sure, laser tag with friends is still a fun way to spend an afternoon,
but the latest laser technologies
have powers out of a big-budget superhero movie.
How dangerous are they?
Will lasers soon become too hot to handle?
They're pulling us up.
[narrator] In the 1940s and '50s,
before the laser is actually invented,
it already exists,
at least in fiction.
They set up an electronic screen!
[narrator] Writers and artists imagine ray guns so powerful
they can shoot beams of light capable of vaporizing anything,
from a human being to a battleship.
They're gonna hit us! They're gonna hit us!
[narrator] In science fiction,
death rays are so common, you'd think they were already a thing.
No!
[yells]
[narrator] But it isn't until 1957
that this fantastical idea of a deadly beam of hot light
becomes more than a fantasy.
I like thinking of things.
I like inventing.
[narrator] Columbia University researcher Gordon Gould
is fascinated by Einstein's radical quantum theory,
which explains how light is made up of photons
that behave in a particular way.
Gould wants to take Einstein's idea
and create a new light source of great purity
that will give humanity a powerful, focused heat source
and potentially a new weapon.
Gould knows that when energy is added to atoms,
they emit light or photons.
Like when a poker glows red-hot in the fireplace.
His big idea is to capture those photons
in a mirror-lined container so that they rebound,
triggering a chain reaction of photons
that can be focused into a concentrated beam,
one that he hopes could be capable of heating a target
to the temperature of the sun.
He gives his idea a name,
light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.
The concept of the laser is born.
But not the thing itself… yet.
The race is on to see who will be the first
to create a fully functioning, commercially viable laser.
And guess who sees the potential?
The military.
[man] You'll marvel at the superior intelligence
that unleashes its deadly ray.
Steve! Steve!
[narrator] In the late 1950s,
as the United States is in the grips of a Cold War arms race
with the Soviet Union,
the Pentagon starts pouring millions of dollars into laser research,
but… no luck.
The actual winner of the laser race?
Eccentric film producer and billionaire inventor Howard Hughes,
or at least a physicist in his California lab.
In 1960,
with a budget of just $50,000,
Theodore Maiman comes up with a simple design
based on the laser concept.
[man] A pencil-shaped rod of artificial ruby, surrounded by mirrors,
is energized by a type of photo flash.
The mirrors focus the flash onto the ruby,
and a beam of pure red light emerges at the ends of the rod.
This is reflected back and forth
until it builds up to the fantastic power source
known as the laser beam.
[narrator] The laser has arrived,
and researchers quickly discover
that various materials produce specific types of laser light
that are useful in different ways.
The original ruby laser is surgically precise.
Literally.
It can destroy a blood vessel without damaging surrounding tissue.
In 1961,
it's used to destroy a tumor on the retina of a very brave patient,
the first laser medical procedure.
Later, it will prove the go-to laser when you need to remove a tattoo.
The energized material doesn't have to be a solid like a ruby.
Gas lasers are more powerful,
making them useful for cutting steel plates
and welding metal.
Other semiconductor lasers actually use an electrical current
to generate low-power beams
that are perfect for, well, laser pointing.
[cat meows]
The laser is proving a handy thing to have,
but still, in the popular imagination,
there's an expectation that ultimately, they'll prove to be an effective weapon.
[man] We spotted a chap playing with a combination of laser tubes
and a toy construction set.
The range of this rather cumbersome toy is only five yards.
[narrator] The truth is, much to the dismay of the military,
real-world lasers just aren't powerful enough to do much damage.
And they're too complicated and expensive to build
for them to be useful outside of specific industrial applications.
At least that's what everyone thought.
But lasers are about to have a huge impact on people's daily lives
in the most ordinary way.
[Muzak playing]
June 26th, 1974.
The first real-life laser guns are not what anyone envisioned.
Instead of blasting aliens,
they're reading barcodes at a supermarket checkout.
Barcode scanners
are based on low-power semiconductor and gas laser designs
from the early '60s.
It may seem low-key,
but this cheap and simple bit of laser tech
will spark a revolution in commerce.
[man] In the marketplace, coded markings,
scanned and registered by the computer,
serve the consumer with a fast, accurate record
of all purchases.
[narrator] These low-powered lasers
will prove useful at scanning more than just barcodes.
In 1978,
the LaserDisc player arrives.
CD players appear the following year.
They work more or less the same way.
Lasers read discs by measuring minute changes in the distance
between the laser source
and tiny indentations on the disc's surface.
Changes that are translated into digital data,
ones and zeros.
The laser's accuracy in measuring distances
makes it a useful tool for surveyors and architects,
allowing measurements from the size of a room
to much vaster distances.
So why do lasers make such great measuring tools?
Laser beams travel at the speed of light.
So the time it takes to reflect off a surface
can be used to find distance.
That's why, when Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon
in 1969,
they not only left behind their footprints
but also installed a two-foot-wide mirror array.
Scientists could then bounce laser beams off the mirrors on the Moon
to keep track of how far away from the Earth it is.
FYI,
it's getting almost 1.5 inches further away every year.
Though born out of a desire to create the ultimate weapon,
by the early 1980s,
lasers have become an everyday technology
at the heart of music,
movies, medicine,
even laser pointers and printers,
but the death ray is about to make a comeback.
It's 1983,
and the Star Wars movies are a global cultural phenomenon.
Ask any kid, and they'll tell you what lasers are really for.
Lightsabers.
But real-life lasers might finally be catching up with science fiction.
If you'll pardon my stealing a film line, the Force is with us.
[narrator] March 23rd, 1983.
President Ronald Reagan announces a new approach
to deal with the Soviet nuclear threat.
He calls it the Strategic Defense Initiative
or SDI.
I'm taking an important first step to achieve our ultimate goal
of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles.
[narrator] At the heart of Reagan's SDI program?
Lasers.
The idea is that a network of satellites detects incoming Soviet missiles
then destroys them with space lasers
or by reflecting a powerful laser beam from the ground.
The trouble is
the technology is a fantasy.
It doesn't exist yet.
But that doesn't stop the government spending $250 million a month
to make it a reality.
In 1983,
work begins here in the California wilderness.
[man] This enormous accelerator is at the frontier of the laser technology
always seen as a key element in any defense against Soviet missiles.
[narrator] Not everyone is convinced it's a good idea.
Senator Edward Kennedy can't resist referring to SDI
as a reckless Star Wars scheme.
[man] But at the Pentagon, SDI officials reject this narrow interpretation.
[narrator] Despite the criticism,
SDI does achieve one of its key goals,
spooking the Soviets.
Soviet Premier Gorbachev pleads with Reagan to abandon SDI.
[man] It's future development of exotic technology like this
which the Soviet Union says must be limited
before they will agree to a treaty,
cutting the arsenals of the big strategic weapons.
[narrator] The truth is,
SDI is plagued by delays and technical problems.
[man] To shoot down missiles,
there must be a phenomenal increase in power.
The hardware must be a more manageable size.
[narrator] It turns out military lasers are still too unwieldy
and lacking in power
to work as weapons in the real world.
After serving its role as a largely diplomatic prop
to win concessions,
the SDI program is quietly dismantled.
Meanwhile, on the domestic front,
by the 1990s, lasers are common in our daily lives,
from serious science to laser-tag games.
And while the military hasn't been able to turn them into death rays,
lasers are proving useful for the targeting and aiming
of conventional weapons.
[man] An aircraft equipped with a laser illuminator
approaches the target and directs the beam on it.
The bomb is then delivered.
It continually corrects its course all the way down,
homing in on the target.
[man 2] See space-shaking last battle of Earth rockets versus flying saucers…
[narrator] Lasers hardly seem
the space-age invention of the future they once were,
but a new use for lasers is under development
that will go on to define the future of humanity.
Back in the early 1960s,
scientists discovered that data can be encoded in a laser
by making subtle changes in the pulses of the beam,
but sending data-encoded laser beams through the air proved problematic.
Atmospheric interference would disrupt the beam,
like weak sunshine on a hazy day.
But, by the 2000s,
scientists have perfected a way to send laser beams down a cable,
so the data gets through without a hitch.
It's the technology that makes the modern Internet possible.
High-speed Internet along laser-powered fibers
arrives in the 2000s.
In 2010,
Chattanooga, Tennessee, becomes the first city in the US
to offer one-gigabit speeds,
allowing citizens to download a movie in just 16 seconds.
It would have taken one hour and 13 minutes before fiber.
Laser-powered fiber will carry financial transactions,
better connect communities across the world,
as well as serve the ever-growing 24-7 global demand
for streaming video content.
[cat meow repeats]
By 2010, 1.25 billion miles of laser-powered fiber-optic cables
span the globe,
enabling humanity to communicate at light speed.
Without it,
our planet would be a very different, less connected place.
But despite all the wholesome things that owe their existence to lasers,
the search is still on for a laser-powered death ray.
The Reagan-era Star Wars missile-killer laser
may have fizzled out,
but the millions spent over the decades on R & D for laser design and fiber optics
leads to a major breakthrough in 2014.
[reporter] This is your DOD News web update.
A while ago, we brought you a story
about how the Navy was going to experiment with a laser system mounted on a ship.
[narrator] Laser-weapons researchers discover the crucial missing ingredient,
a technique called beam combining.
Let's break it down.
In the past,
creating a single powerful-enough laser was the hurdle,
but laser-weapon researchers discover that taking several smaller fiber lasers,
combining the beams,
and putting that through a system of mirrors that act like a prism
creates a single devastating beam.
A process that looks like the cover of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon
but in reverse.
November 2014.
The US Navy unveils a 30-kilowatt prototype
of this new type of laser weapon.
[reporter] The USS Ponce was in the Persian Gulf
from September to November
testing out the Laser Weapon System or LaWS.
[narrator] Test targets are lined up on the water and in the air.
First, radar locks on,
then the shipborne laser unleashes instant destruction.
[reporter] The trials went extremely well,
and it was able to destroy multiple moving targets
on the water and in the air.
[narrator] After decades of shattered Star Wars dreams,
it looks like weaponized lasers are now a reality.
[man] So I guess war waged in the future is gonna look like a Star Wars film?
[reporter] Yeah, especially since they wanna take this technology
and attach it to both ground- and air-based platforms,
not to mention the cost-effectiveness of the LaWS at less than a dollar a shot.
And may the Force be with you.
[narrator] As of 2022,
nine laser-equipped US Navy vessels are nearing deployment,
and the plan is to use lasers in aerial combat as well.
Lasers like these could change how war works.
As if that isn't enough,
lasers are revealing an even more jaw-dropping ability.
Meet one of the most powerful X-ray lasers on Earth,
the Linac Coherent Light Source.
[man] Our facility is an X-ray laser,
which in some ways is very similar to the lasers we're all familiar with.
You know, the red laser pointers that we use around the home.
But the wavelength is not in the visible part of the spectrum
but all the way down into the X-ray part of the spectrum.
[narrator] The X-ray laser beam is generated by accelerating electrons
along nearly one mile of tubing,
energizing them with high-powered magnets
until they begin emitting X-rays,
which are then focused into a beam
that can be 100 times as powerful as the sunlight that hits the Earth,
focused onto a spot the size of a thumbnail,
enabling scientists to create images and movies of chemical reactions
for the first time in human history.
[Mike Dunne] So we can image individual atoms and molecules,
studying chemistry and biology, and watch how they evolve in time.
You can build up the most amazing precision movie
of how the natural world works.
[narrator] The X-ray laser is awesomely powerful.
In 2017,
during an experimental test,
researchers are shocked
when the laser instantly strips an atom of its electrons,
leaving a void that sucks in electrons from the surrounding molecules,
like a microscopic black hole.
Laser-powered black holes might sound like a disaster movie waiting to happen,
but the Linac Coherent Light Source is being upgraded
to be 10,000 times brighter
and a whole lot faster,
from 120 X-ray pulses per second
to one million.
[Mike Dunne] A whole new world will open up for us.
Now this will become the go-to tool for the 21st century.
Looking at how the world works at the level of atoms and molecules,
we can look at how the cells in our body fight disease.
It means we can bring the stars and the planets here on Earth
and look at how they work in detail.
[narrator] Laser technology is on the cusp of a new era,
where it can reveal the foundations of the physical world,
but it can also unleash colossal destruction on Earth
and in space.
[man] From anti-satellite weapons and airborne lasers
to highly threatening on-orbit activities,
space is a war-fighting domain
just like the land, air, and sea.
[narrator] After decades, as an invention that appeared to be an underperformer
and, let's face it, a bit humdrum,
lasers are now revealing their remarkable powers
and potential for the future of mankind.
But as any superhero knows,
with great power comes great responsibility.
[downtempo electronic music plays]