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Where I live we simply use windows rather than radar for looking through walls.
I understand that there are law enforcement and military applications for this kind of tech, but I really wonder if we need to add the ability to see through walls to the long list of privacy invading technology that is already available.
There are very few good applications for this technology and lots of bad ones.
Stopping scientific discovery because you (or anyone) believes the result will be abused is a bad idea IMHO. Also while you're imagining snooping police, I'm imagining rescue workers locating survivors of a building collapse.
The tech will probably have some peaceful uses, but I don't think they will outweigh the uses for military, law enforcement, espionage etc.
More generally, I think it's a mistake to believe that tech advances are always good overall. An extreme hypothetical example: advances in torture technology. A real-life example: television.
Pragmatically though, you'll never be able to stop new advancements from seeing the light of day. Blocking MIT from researching this won't stop the NSA or defense contractors, and even with a fair government, it wouldn't stop criminals. So far, the best path for dealing with potentially dangerous tech has been to keep it open and studied.
I'm skeptical. If it were very simple in terms of materials to create, say, biological weapons of mass destruction, I'd be in favor of keeping the knowledge under wraps.
You do have a good point there, but
"For the most part, though, at least according to Charvat, the radar array is all about more efficient killing: “This is meant for the urban war fighter … those situations where it’s very stressful and it’d be great to know what’s behind that wall.”", direct from the horse's mouth.
Research like this has implications far beyond the primary application. There's a significant amount of knowledge and technology developed in order to implement the primary application, and most of the value is likely there, in improved processes, small bits of applied tech, and the growth of the students themselves.
These applications generate news, but they're really just the tip of the iceberg.
"the researchers are now working on the output imagery: instead of blobs, they want each moving target to be represented by a cross" -- That can't really be that hard to implement. I'm sure they have bigger issues than this to deal with.
I suspect the real problem is just that those images are so noisy - in the demo with two people moving around, for instance, it's almost impossible to tell at times whether there's one, two, or more blobs. Certainly it wouldn't be very reliable from a single frame, you'd have to use the movement information.
Personally, I wouldn't waste my time on that, that's a rather straightforward image processing problem that could be made much easier by improving the output quality of the machine, which I imagine would be necessary anyways for this to see any real use in the field.
btw: I would also guess S-band was chosen for a reason. Three are all sorts of atomic vibrational resonances as you scale up in frequency, which might make it harder to get the desired view.
Why cannot it be invented in this positive context in the first place then. I can imagine the reason is money and in that sense it just shows how screwed up our world is.
Developing new tech is expensive. The military has a lot of money. Firefighting departments don't traditionally have trillions of dollars to spend on R&D.
our brain development was triggered when the ape discovered how much effective stone and stick in fight and hunt, and it [weapon development] has been the primary driver of the human brain since then.
>Why cannot it be invented in this positive context in the first place then. I can imagine the reason is money and in that sense it just shows how screwed up our world is.
Animals - libido.
Humans - libido plus ability to kill at will (mortido is partial, very incomplete, identification of that fundamental driver) .
Super-humans - libido plus ability to kill at will (highly developed and extremely self-controlled, necessary to avoid the fate of Neanderthals who lost to the much more violent and better at weapons development species - Cro-Magnon) plus the ability you're talking about - the ability to invent, more generally - create in the positive context, ie. "creatido". Creation for the sake of creation, exploration, ...
A few humans through the history have manifested the basic elementary "creatido" thus providing us with the glimpse into the future human species which would evolve from [and will overtake because peaceful co-existence with bloody Cro-Magnon is just impossible ] ours species.
I get the cynicism, but military != bad. The NEED for military is the bad thing. Don't mix them up.
At its best, the military serves to protect citizens from foreign threats. Like with police, some people are bad and sometimes we have to kill them to defend the good people.
In the hands of the ideal military, technology can serve to lessen civilian casualties, save troops' lives, avoid using troops at all, or act as a deterrent. And yes, we're all aware that no military is ideal.
Ensure your military -- and police -- stick as closely as possible to their strict and just duty... any power can and will be abused. But it strikes me as naive to react against military as an abstract concept. The ostensible goal of protecting a free nation hardly seems ignoble.
Edit: I should have added that MIT LL has a long history of work in microwaves, going back to the invention of radar in WW2.