[Filligree]

I don't know about you, but I'd rather be blinded than die.

[joncrocks]

I don't think you get a choice:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Certain_Conventi...

[gambiting]

If I absolutely had to pick, and the choice was between 1) get shot and maybe survive; or 2) 100% chance of getting blinded - I'd pick the first one.

[stavros]

Why are you comparing a weapon that has to hit a whole person and misses to a weapon that has to hit a 5mm retina and somehow never misses?

[jdietrich]

It's not difficult to track eyes consistently using computer vision. It's not difficult to aim a laser beam using a mirror galvanometer. If you're struck in the eye with a UV laser beam, the blink reflex doesn't kick in - by the time you've noticed the pain in your eyes, it's already too late. The beam doesn't have to track with particularly high accuracy to cause certain blindness, especially if there's an array of beams.

A decent hardware hacker could build an area-denial laser turret in a long weekend with a couple of hundred bucks of parts. I hope to god that nobody ever does.

[wnkrshm]

A UV-laser would be humane, since UV (and shorter wavelengths) will interact with the outermost portion of your eye - visible light or the near IR (up to 1500) is what your imaging system operates on and it's focused onto the retina.

Edit: Also, the blink reflex isn't fast enough to save you from damage if the Class is higher than Class 2 (and even then it's a roll of the dice, since there are some who don't have that fabled reflex).

[gambiting]

Can you expand on why that would be humane?

[wnkrshm]

Shorter wavelengths (UV, extreme UV) are absorbed at the surface of organic tissue (and many other materials) and lead to ablation or heat transfer at the surface. So with shorter wavelengths, it'll mostly scar the cornea, which can be reshaped again using short wavelengths with a LASIK.

It might also cause damage to the lens and lead to cataracts, which can also be partially compensated today by getting a lens implant.

These ways of damaging your eye are extremely more preferable than having your retina or your nerves damaged in any way, since for that, no method of remedy exists yet.

[Filligree]

At a guess, it might be possible to at least partially fix the damage afterwards, by scraping off the damaged cells.

I wouldn't call that "humane", and it is a guess; it might not work at all. Nothing to do with war is 'humane', though.

[pjc50]

A sufficiently powerful laser - over 0.5W - can cause blindness from diffuse reflection. A 100W laser fired into a room with white walls for a fraction of a second can permanently blind everyone whose eyes were open at the time.

[wnkrshm]

cause

a) you can't see when you're being shot at b) it suffices if there is a sufficiently large (to you invisible) reflection within your field of vision c) you can automatically scan a whole field very quickly, invisibly, silently d) the laser spot gets larger at a distance, so the laser is not a pointer but a shotgun cone with 2m diameter

[matthewmacleod]

I think the thing is though that it doesn't. It just has to scatter off of something else in the wrong way, and boom.

[atemerev]

Because lasers are usually continuous and even reflections are very dangerous.