There’s a new laser pointer in town that’s nearly 20 times more powerful than your typical laser used for presentations and amusing your pets (thanks Slashdot for the link).  You can buy it online, no special forms or permissions needed (yet).  While it’s not as powerful as other lasers you may encounter, such as vision-correcting or tattoo-removing lasers, it’s still not something I’d want pointing at my skin.

Laser technology itself isn’t anything new, it’s been around since the early 1960’s. The concept of energy beams such as ‘ray guns’ has been around a bit longer, coming from early science-fiction cinema. Today, lasers are found all over the place:  in CD/DVD players, medical applications (such as vision correction), vehicle guidance systems, military weaponry, range finding equipment, and of course those ubiquitous laser pointers.

As a kid I was captivated by the concept of lasers ever since I saw the movie Star Wars.  After playing with toy laser pistols in the yard for a few years, I was compelled to learn more about the actual technology in school.  In high school I participated in a team project where we built a computer-controlled laser drawing device.  We used an old Atari computer to control stepping motors that moved a mirror, reflecting a helium-neon laser beam (same type used in laser pointers today), to draw basic shapes on the ceiling (or on paper, depending on the orientation of the mirror).  It was crude, but a fun project nonetheless.  In hindsight, I am very glad that we didn’t have access to a stronger laser, like the one we drooled over from the movie Real Genius. (Which could “vaporize a human target from space.”  Yipe!)  But it was inevitable, I suppose, that publicly-available laser products would one day get more powerful than the ‘weak’ He-Ne lasers you see everywhere. 

I rank lasers up there with robotics as a fun and compelling area of technology that can inspire kids to learn more about science and, hopefully, develop practical and benevolent applications for them.  But just to be safe, let’s make sure we keep the lasers away from the robots.  Johnny-5 may have been a “nice” sentient-robot-with-a-laser, but I have a feeling that in the future he’d be a minority.

UPDATE [30-Dec-04]:

That didn't take long at all - Lasershoppe has stopped it's online sales of their new lasers due to recent stories involving lasers pointed at aircraft cockpits in flight. (thanks again to Slashdot for the link.) There is apparently no connection between this particular kind of laser sold by Lasershoppe and the aircraft incidents (apart from the all the laser beams involved being green), but as a precaution the seller is restricting sales to those people who supply a copy of their drivers license, write an essay on laser safety, and sign a waiver. 

For now, you can still get a weaker green laser pointer (~5mW) from Thinkgeek.com, and for a much more reasonable price.  This one would make a safer cat toy anyway.