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Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid. It's not the military that could really end up abusing invisibility, it's non-state actors who could literally act as ghosts. If there was just one broad daylight murder on the streets of Manhattan then, well, 14 years ago there were four plane hijackings and look what that did to air travel. Imagine the same fear when stepping out for a cup of coffee.

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A terror attack on the streets is a fairly easy thing to plan and you don't need extreme cutting edge technology to pull one off. People do it all the time, just usually not in the west.

As the article points out, this isn't real invisibility - the object being hidden from specific wavelengths is still in front of something that isn't, so while you may not be able to a guy on the street, you'd see a guy shaped hole in from of that starbucks he is walking by.

So how does that asterisk stop someone from dropping in, taking their shots, and fleeing without any way to identify them?

If I understand the article correctly, the material can be designed to absorb, rather than reflect, certain frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. When this occurs in the visible spectrum, we call such materials, "black". If it were really effective, clothing made from it would appear to be so dark that it couldn't get any more black--aka none more black. Existing clothing might not be quite that dark but it probably gets pretty close in terms of human visibility.

The article would probably be more accurate to call this advancement a potential improvement to stealth technology since it sounds like the intent is to conceal planes from radar.

It doesn't, but it's no different than using a mask these days to hide your identity.

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