Art restoration is one of those professions that requires a great deal of knowledge and skill to be done correctly. Restoring a painting, statue, or structure often requires an understanding of various art techniques, but also chemistry, architecture, and many more subjects.

When it’s done well, the public is none the wiser, but if it’s done terribly by unqualified “professionals,” it becomes a cautionary tale, and more often than not, a meme. These ten attempts at art restoration are some of the worst catastrophes to befall some of the world’s greatest works of art.

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10 “Ecce Homo”—Zaragoza, Spain

This is one that most people are somewhat familiar with, and it has everything to do with how spectacularly bad the final image became. The painting has come to be known as the “Monkey” image, but it didn’t start out that way.

Before the self-titled amateur art restorer, Cecilia Giménez got her hands on it, the fresco painted by Elías García Martínez was called Ecce Homo (Behold The Man), and it featured a lovely image of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, time and the elements had damaged much of the fresco, and it required restoration.

Giménez saw the fresco and wanted to repair it to preserve the lovely church in which she was married, so she began working on the painting with no formal restoration training, whatsoever. She coated it with thick blobs of color, which gave it a globby look it now features.^[1]

Unfortunately… or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, she wasn’t able to finish. She had to leave town, and while she was away, the local historical association saw what she did. Mrs. Giménez became infamous and also Internet-famous.

On the plus side, she significantly boosted tourism in her town, as people come from all around to see the travesty.^[2]

9 “The Virgin Mary And Baby Jesus”—Sudbury, Canada

A sculpture of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus was vandalized, and someone broke off the head of the infant. This left a decapitated child sitting in His mother’s lap. While the original head was gone, numerous photos existed, so a restoration was attempted.

An artist named Heather Wise volunteered her services in making the new head. She got to work, and while there were plenty of pictures to go off of, the head she created looked nothing like the original sculpture.

More than that, it didn’t exactly look human either. What was once a beautiful statue became a frightening example of what not to do when it comes to restoring broken statuary.

The head is cartoonish in its appearance, and it’s made of terracotta, so it doesn’t match the statue in any way. She was planning on crafting the new head from stone but spent a single afternoon creating the monstrous head as a placeholder.

Fortunately, the story went viral, and the thief returned the original head, so Wise’s “restoration” was quickly removed to allow for a proper restoration.^[3]

8 The Great Wall Of China

Many portions of the Great Wall have succumbed to the ravages of time… and the Mongols. Still, China has spent a great deal of time and money, preserving various sections for prosperity and the benefit of tourism. Some restorations have made the wall look as it did originally while others… not so much.

One of the most beautiful sections of the wall that received a massive “fail” in terms of restoration efforts came in 2016. The restoration’s goal was to maintain the pristine look of the wall, but keep it from crumbling. The result was a mess.

The 780-meter-long portion of the wall wasn’t rebuilt using any of the original pieces of stone. Instead, it was paved over with concrete. The smoothed out top of the wall is less of a restoration and more of a complete and total destruction.

The long section of wall no longer looks anything like it once did. Instead, it looks more like a slightly elevated sidewalk with no historical context whatsoever. Fortunately, this particular instance of “restoration” came under investigation, and future projects relating to the Great Wall will fall under greater scrutiny.^[4]

7 The Beard Of Tutankhamen’s Death Mask

The Mask of Tutankhamun is arguably one of the most beautiful and best-known artifacts and works of art in the world. The mask was found in 1925 in the young pharaoh’s tomb, and it is a beautiful example of skilled ancient artistry.

When it was found, the mask was already 3,248 years old, but it was in pristine condition. Unfortunately, that didn’t last long, and in 2014, the beard broke off, and the mask had to undergo restoration efforts to preserve it.

The plaited beard weighed in at 5.5 lbs. (2.5 kg), so reattaching it required the knowledge and skills to make sure it was done properly. Instead, the museum staff hastily glued it back onto the mask in as inexpertly a way possible.

The repair resulted in more damage, and it was done so poorly, the people involved were charged with negligence and violating professional standards over the incident. Their “work” in fixing it left deep scratches and gouges where they tried to remove built-up glue.

Fortunately, a team of experts out of Germany was able to work on the mask in 2015. Their work repaired the damage and reattached the beard properly.^[5][6]

6 The Castle Of Matrera, Spain

Restoring ancient buildings is no easy task, but there is a proper way of doing it, and there is the Castle of Matrera way of doing it. The castle was built in the 9th century to defend Iptuci, and by the 13th century, it had been rebuilt, though it fell to ruin in the intervening years.

In 2010, the castle still stood, but only barely. A few walls remained standing, and the remaining ruins were damaged by the weather, so a restoration project was launched. At its head was architect Carlos Quevedo Rojas, who managed the project for five years until it was completed in 2015.

His goal was to “recover the volume, texture, and tonality that the tower would originally have had. The essence of the project is not intended to be, therefore, an image of the future, but rather a reflection of its own past, its own origin.”

The end result absolutely enraged the locals, who saw the ancient castle as completely ruined. Spain’s cultural heritage organization Hispania nostra called it “absolutely terrible.” Architecturally, it was done well, but culturally and historically, the national monument was all but destroyed.^[7]

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5 “Saint George And The Dragon”—Estella, Spain

The Church of St Michael in Estella, Navarre is the home of a 16th-century polychrome statue of Saint George and the Dragon, but after centuries, it fell into disrepair. The color had largely faded, so restoration efforts began in 2018.

A local artist was called upon to repair the statue, but the end result looked nothing like how it was supposed to. Instead, it had a largely cartoonish appearance, which left St. George with rosy cheeks, making him appear more like Tintin than St. George.

The restoration was a disaster, and it was done so poorly, the statue had to be “unrestored,” so that it could be properly restored later. Painstaking work had to be done to undo all the damage done in the initial restoration. Still, after 1,000 hours of work, it was mostly fixed.

Much of the original paint was lost in the restoration/unrestoration/restoration effort, but the statue looks better than it did before any attempts were made to fix it. Ultimately, a restoration that should have cost around €10,000 cost closer to €33,000. On top of that, the archdiocese of Pamplona was forced to pay a €6,000 fine for the damage.^[8]

4 “Santa Bárbara”—Fortaleza De Santa Cruz, Brazil

The Santa Cruz da Barra Chapel was once home to a 19th-century wooden statue of Santa Barbara, and by 2012, it needed restoration. Over time, the paint had faded, so conservators from the Museu Histórico do Exército in Rio were tasked with restoring it.

They spent six months detailing the statue to bring it back to its former glory, but the end result was far from what the chapel wanted. The restorers removed four layers of paint, which they replaced with an odd coloration that’s been described as Barbie, not Santa Barbara.

The statue received what can only be described as a bad makeover. The skin was colored white, and it was given an excessive amount of eyeliner. The robes were garishly colored, making the statue look out of place in a chapel.

The worst part of the restoration was that it wasn’t needed — at least, not to the extent that was done. At most, it needed a thorough cleaning with some touch-ups. Instead, the restorers completely stripped and repainted the statue, destroying its original beauty in the process.^[9]

3 “St. Anthony Of Padua,”—Soledad, Colombia

A wooden statue of San Antonio de Padua in Soledad, Colombia, was in need of restoration in 2018, as the coloring had largely faded. Structurally, the statue was sound, but without the proper coloring, it had lost much of what made it stand out in the chapel.

The statue was carved in the 17th century, so it had some wear and tear by the time the church managed to commission an artist to repair it. That’s an artist, not a professional restoration expert, and there is a difference.

The work that the artist did certainly restored the statue’s vibrancy, but not in a way that the parishioners appreciated. Comments surrounding the work often labeled it as “too effeminate,” It looked as if San Antonio was wearing makeup.

Indeed, a close-up examination of the statue makes it look as if he’s wearing shiny lip gloss, eyeshadow, and additional coloring on his cheeks. One parishioner described the statue, saying, “He is no longer the same patron that I have prayed to for the last 12 years, they applied eye shadow, blush and even gloss on his lips, he looks effeminate.”^[10]

2 Ocakli Ada Castle, Sile, Turkey

The Ocakli Ada Castle in Sile, Turkey, was first constructed as a watchtower, which was built some 2,000 years ago by the Genoese. The castle was eventually conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1396, and it has undergone two separate repairs/restorations over the years.

The most recent restoration attempt was completed in 2015 following major renovations, but it looked … different. Gone were the stones used to construct the castle millennia ago, and in their place, a sleek, shiny new building appeared.

The new castle may look something like it once did (had it been constructed using modern tools 2,000 years ago), but it no longer resembles the tower it once was. What it does resemble, according to the masses on the Internet, is Spongebob Squarepants.

When the restoration was revealed in 2015, that’s all anyone could say about it online when the story went viral. The original castle was arguably destroyed and replaced with a new one, but the local municipality has defended the project.

Professor Kemal Kutgun Eyupgiller, who worked as an advisor on the project, said in a statement, “What needs to be criticized here is the neglect that the castle suffered since the 19th Century.”^[11]

1 Buddhist frescoes, Chaoyang, China

The 270-year-old Yunjie temple in Chaoyang, China, was once home to some beautiful Qing Dynasty frescoes, but time had worn them mostly away. What remained were the figures, but most of the coloring had faded long ago. They were a classic example of the period, and restoration was attempted in 2013.

Instead of restoring the original images, it seems the restorer took it upon themselves to completely paint a new image over the faded one. While that might have been somewhat acceptable had it been in the original painting style, that’s not what happened.

The new fresco looks like a cartoon. It uses bright colors more reminiscent of something you might see in a Disney movie, but that’s actually giving them too much credit. The original paintings were destroyed, and the new ones were a painful reminder of what was lost.

An official in charge of temple affairs and another working as the head of the cultural heritage monitoring team in Chaoyang were sacked over the unauthorized restoration. Unfortunately, the damage was done, and the original frescos are completely destroyed.^[12][13]

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It’s no surprise that the universe is a violent arena of destruction. After all, it was born out of the grandest “explosion” that was ever possible. The Big Bang materialized out of nothing and for no reason, producing exotic matter with energies of trillions and trillions of degrees. About 400,000 years later, the universe settled down into stable hydrogen, helium, and a dash of lithium and beryllium. But the peace didn’t last long, and chaos soon resumed.

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10 A quasar that eats the equivalent of a star every single day

Imagine the power required to destroy and consume our Sun. Now imagine a celestial body doing that every single day. An entity like that exists, and it’s called J2157.

J2157 is the fastest-growing black hole ever discovered. And it’s unimaginably massive: 34 billion-times the mass of the Sun. It’s also the brightest quasar yet discovered, a ravenous star-destroyer devouring the equivalent of one star per day.

And it’s just as mind-warpingly distant as it is destructive: 12.5 billion light-years from Earth. It wasn’t expected that such an early black hole, from the days when the universe was about a billion years old, should be so massive.

To get an idea of just how stupidly monstrous J2157 is, it’s 8,000 times more massive than Sagittarius A*, the 4-million-solar-mass black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. Even with the equivalent of 4 million suns in its belly, Sagittarius A* would need to consume more than 60 percent of the Milky Way’s stars to become as massive as J2157.^[1]

9 A planetary collision births a world of iron

The cosmos is full of world-shattering acts of interplanetary violence. But planetary collisions create new worlds: bizarre ones, ten-times as massive as Earth and made mostly of metal.

Kepler-107c resides in the Kepler 107 system, which contains four planets orbiting a Sun-like star, 1,700 light-years away. And by measuring the shift in wavelengths of light arriving from Kepler 107, astronomers detected the first-ever evidence of a planetary apocalypse occurring outside the solar system.

A crash of cosmic bodies birthed Kepler-107c, which measures about 1.5 Earth-radii but is made of 70 percent iron, by mass. It’s super-dense, holding 12.6 grams of material per cubic centimeter, compared to Earth’s modest 5.5.

107c has a similarly-sized but lighter (only about 3.5 Earth-masses) sibling, Kepler-107b. Its density is a more Earth-like 5.3 grams per cubic centimeter. And its iron core only accounts for 30 percent of its mass.

This suggests that the unexpectedly-iron rich Kepler-107c suffered a major collision at speeds of nearly 40 miles per second. The accident stripped Kepler-107c’s light silicate mantle, leaving a scarred, iron core with little else on top.^[2]

8 A black hole is ripped from its galaxy

Black holes dictate the structure of the universe. With their immense gravity, they lay the foundation for massive galaxies by literally punching a dent in the fabric of space-time. And that’s why they’re usually found in the center of galaxies.

But celestial forces can wrench even black holes from their galaxies and send them hurtling through space. Which is what happened to black hole XJ1417+52. It was spotted by the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the XMM Newton X-ray observatory, two space-born instruments that observe the universe in, you guessed it, X-rays.

Black hole XJ1417+52 is located 4.5 billion light-years away in the outer reaches of a galaxy called GJ1417+52. It’s throwing off a stupendous amount of X-rays and smashing two cosmic records: it’s 10 times farther away and 10-times brighter (in X-rays) than any rogue black hole yet discovered.

XJ1417+52 has the mass of 100,000 Suns and once anchored its own galaxy. But that galaxy collided with the much bigger galaxy GJ1417+52, which stole the black (along with its orbiting stars.^[3]

7 Galaxies tear each other apart around the Milky Way

The Milky Way has many smaller satellite galaxies attracted to its monstrous pull. And the two most famous, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), smashed into each other a few hundred million years ago.

And the damage from that ancient collision is still occurring. The southeast portion of the Small Magellanic Cloud, or “Wing,” is floating away from the rest of the galaxy. The stars populating this region are moving in the same direction and at similar speeds, preserving the evidence of a collision hundreds of millions of years ago.

If the stars were moving in a perpendicular direction, it would suggest that the SMC and LMC passed each other closely, but didn’t collide. But the runaway region of the SMC is moving toward the LMC, proving that the two galaxies collided head-on.^[4]

6 Gravity dismantles small galaxies

Speaking of bad things happening to the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), it’s dying before our eyes. Some galaxies die glorious Viking deaths, torn apart by the gravity of some more massive object. But the SMC is dying a slow and undignified death.

Even though the 200,000 light-year-distant SMC is one of the farthest objects visible to the unaided eye, it’s still not massive enough to retain all of its gas and dust. So it’s quickly hemorrhaging its life support, hydrogen gas, into space.

The galactic assassin is gravity because the SMC doesn’t command enough of it. For every single star that the SMC produces, it loses ten times that amount in gas.

But the SMC may yet enjoy a warrior’s death and earn its place in galactic Valhalla. Researchers believe it will be absorbed by the Milky Way before it dissolves into nothingness. Many other small galaxies will not be as lucky.^[5]

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5 Solar systems throw planets thrown toward their star

Our innermost planet, Mercury, orbits the Sun in 88 days. But numerous observed super-Earths complete an orbit around their stars in just a few days. And now, new evidence points to a strange phenomenon that sends unsuspecting planets hurtling toward their sun.

Solar system formation is, not surprisingly, tricky, with many forces at play. Magnetic forces, collisions small and large between swirling bodies, and good-old gravity are among the primary shapers. And when conditions are just right, these forces can push multiple planets into a conga line toward their star.

The disk of particles that planets are born from, and the planets themselves, occasionally get locked into synchronized orbits. This “resonance” occurs as the planets and disk push and pull on each other.

And the planets go tumbling inward. They gradually migrate to the inner reaches of their solar system, ending up in an orbital berth that’s too hot and barren to form planets.^[6]

4 Clusters of galaxies smash into each other

Clusters of galaxies are zipping through space at millions of miles per hour. Sometimes they smash into each other and merge. Some ridiculously rare times, four galaxy clusters combine into one of the most massive structures the universe may ever see.

About 3 billion light-years from Earth, the universe is assembling a massive mash-up of clusters called Abell 1758. Each cluster contains potentially thousands of stars, and they’ve all been caught in an irresistible gravitational embrace.

Abell 1758 is split into two pairs of clusters. In the northern pair, the two clusters already swung by each other in the previous 300 million years. And they mixed their heavy elements together in a gravitational swirl, like a cosmic pinky swear, promising they’ll reunite once again.

The sonic boom-like shockwave from the ancient encounter reveals the mind-boggling forces at play. The clusters, each a collective body of thousands of stars, passed each other at 2-3 million miles per hour. Gravity is pulling them back together again and will eventually smoosh them into the other two galaxy clusters, forming a quadruple-cluster-deluxe.^[7]

3 Black holes gorge and spew like a fountain

Black holes appear to be surrounded by a calm donut-shaped disk. But in reality, black holes are vomiting super-hot matter all over themselves, like a fountain.

When presented with a Golden Corral-amounts of gas and dust, even the most voracious black holes can’t consume it all. The debris accretes into a disk of in-falling gas, which plunges into the black hole’s maw with ferocity. It’s heated to millions of degrees and stripped into its constituent atoms and ions, which are expelled back into the galactic environment.

Some of the black hole’s throw-up escapes into space and is never seen again. But some of the insanely-hot atomic gas is pulled back in by the insurmountable gravity to continue the cycle, circulating like water through a city fountain.^[8]

2 Millions of stars explode into life as galaxies collide

Galactic collisions invoke images of destruction. And even though galaxies may be torn apart, and stars flung into space, collisions also ignite a mass birthing of stars. The earliest example comes from when the universe was a youthful billion years old,

Even at the dawn of time galaxies, were already locked into a chaotic celestial mosh pit. Two of these galaxies, located 13 billion light-years away, have crashed into a gassy blob known as B14-65666. The bi-galactic blob isn’t huge. Its two constituents combined are only about 10 percent the mass of the Milky Way, which is expected at such an early stage in space-time.

But despite its size, the blob is 100 times more active with star-birth than our own much more massive galaxy. Galactic pile-ups cause the compression of vast clouds of gas, triggering bursts of stellar birth by literally smashing stars into life.^[9]

1 Jupiter-like planets are roasted to death

NGTS-10b is the closest-orbiting hot Jupiter ever discovered. This gas giant is 20 percent bigger and twice as massive as Jupiter. And it zooms around its 10-billion-year-old parent star so closely and quickly that its year only lasts 18 hours.

When a planet is so close to its star that a year is 25 percent shorter than an Earth day, that planet is probably scorchingly hot. And NGTS-10b is getting roasted. Luckily, its star is 1000 degrees colder than our Sun. And 70 percent less massive. But, to scale, the planet is 27 times closer to its star than Mercury is to the Sun.

So the average temperature on NGTS-10b is only around 1000 degrees Celsius (1800 degrees Fahrenheit). But since it’s (probably) tidally locked, the temperatures differ wildly between the permanent-day-side and the permanent-night-side.

As we see it today, NGTS-10b could be serving the very last portion of its death sentence. In only 10 years, astronomers might be able to watch NGTS-10b’s final death-dive, as it spirals into its star’s fiery bosom.^[10]

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Everyone knows what you mean when you refer to a weapon of mass destruction these days. We typically categorize them in one of three ways: either nuclear, chemical, or biological. Essentially is any weapon that can cause mass death and destruction fairly quickly. The term dates back to 1937 when it was apparently coined by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

At the time, he was referring to aerial bombardments in Spain that used what today we would think of as standard ordinance. Obviously those weapons evolve to become bigger and more destructive. And in the future, we can look forward to those weapons evolving to be even worse.

10. Antimatter Weapons

The term antimatter brings to mind some kind of Star Trek science fiction imagery. It barely sounds like a real thing. Unfortunately, it is real and the potential for antimatter to cause serious damage is ripe for the picking.

Antimatter is any material composed of what you would call antiparticles. The theory behind antimatter is that every particle in the universe has kind of a mirror image of itself. It is the same thing with an opposite charge. The example most often given is that an electron has a negative charge but a positron has a positive charge. They both have the same mass but they are opposites. This is significant to the world of weapons of mass destruction because when matter and antimatter meet they can no longer exist together so they destroy each other in a spectacular way.

Antimatter was considered theoretical for a long time until evidence of its existence was discovered. When cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere they produce antimatter. Thunderstorms also seem to produce positrons sometimes. And the Large Hadron Collider is able to produce matter and antimatter as well.

When matter and antimatter meet the result is not just destructive, it’s bafflingly destructive. Particle physicist Frank Close has been quoted as saying that if you destroy a kilogram of antimatter it produces about 10 billion times the amount of energy that you get from destroying a kilogram of dynamite. That works out to 1,000 times more energy than nuclear fission. So if you were able to harness enough antimatter you could probably destroy the entire planet with not a lot of effort.

9. Genetic Weapons 

Genetic weapons are what happens when you take biological weapons to the next, terrifying level. These are weapons that are targeted to specific genetics, which means that you could take a standard biological weapon (anthrax, for instance) and tailor it so that it would only infect people with certain genetic traits. That means if you wanted to only eliminate a certain ethnic group you would be able to do so.

The idea of genetic weapons was dismissed in the past as being something that was not feasible or realistic. Advances in genetic science has proven that to be incorrect. According to a report called Biotechnology, Weapons and Humanity II, our research into the development of vaccines and attempts to cure genetic conditions has enabled scientists to accurately map the human genome in a way that exposes certain genes that are specific to different ethnic groups. This information can then be exploited by rogue scientists to target those genes rather than use them to benefit mankind and cure diseases. The belief is that in the future, using this information, ethnic-specific biological weapons could be developed.

Other genetic weapons don’t have to use existing diseases; they can interfere with human RNA. By exploiting something called RNA interference, a genetic weapon could shut down important genes that are needed for you to live and function. This could be unleashed on an enemy population and have no effects on the attacking population. It wouldn’t be able to completely eliminate one side, but data suggests that as many as 20% of a population could be affected right away. And that certainly enough to cause some serious damage.

8. High-Powered Microwave

Star Trek made the word phaser part of everyday language. When you hear the word you know exactly what it means even though you’ve probably never seen such a thing before because what even is a phaser? Well, now PHASER is a real thing and the US military has it. It’s their name for a high-powered microwave weapon.  

Looking like a satellite dish fixed atop a shipping container, the PHASER is a cannon that emits radio frequency in a cone-shaped beam. Rather than using heat to destroy a target it can disrupt circuits with a burst of energy.

Currently this technology is being used defensively, the idea is that you would use the PHASER to destroy enemy drones. It takes one single microsecond for a shot from the PHASER to disable a drone’s electronics and destroy it. It’s also able to take out multiple drones with a single shot because of the shape of the beam it produces.

The PHASER is the first direct energy defense weapon that has ever been fielded. The Air Force spent just over 16 million dollars producing it in, and testing was set to be finished by the end of 2020. If the technology is able to prove itself in the field and it’s scalable then the future could see mobile PHASERS being used with regularity. Aircraft can fly over a population and with just a few bursts effectively destroy every piece of technology below, sending any city back to the Stone Age. 

7. Directed Energy

PHASER is not the only direct energy weapon that the military has in its arsenal these days. This umbrella term covers weapons including electro-magnetics, lasers, and microwave. Between 2017 and 2019 the US military doubled its spending on research into direct energy weapons. That went up to $1.1 billion. China and Russia are of course also investing heavily in these systems as well.

The benefits to using direct energy weapons over traditional munitions are fairly clear. To start with, they work at the speed of light. Unlike a traditional missile which could take some time to travel from source to target, a direct energy blast is going to hit a target almost immediately. As well they can be targeted far more precisely. You can use a laser to shoot somebody in the foot from space if you want to. The weapons are also scalable to take one small target or a much larger area as needed.

In May 2020, the US Navy released a video of USS Portland firing a high-energy class solid state laser at a drone, destroying it. The military is also developing what it calls the Indirect Fire Protection Capability High Energy Laser, which is said to be about 10 times more powerful than the one that the Navy uses. This kind of laser would be able to destroy incoming cruise missiles,  disable boats and helicopters, and blind enemy combatants. 

Because these weapons are powered by electricity they’re far more cost-effective in the long run than using bombs which can cost billions of dollars. It costs about $10 worth of energy to fire a laser. As long as you have electrical power, you always have ammunition. But it also means if you are on the attack with lasers, the enemy will never have that moment when you need to reload or you run out of ammunition.

6. Hypersonic Kinetic Energy

Back in 2004 the media called this weapon Rods from God. And for a long time nothing was heard about the hypersonic kinetic energy weapons system. However, it’s still in development and still poses an incredible destructive potential that rivals nuclear weapons.

Back in 1967, 107 countries signed the Outer Space Treaty. This treaty included a prohibition on using weapons of mass destruction from outer space. At the time, however, weapons of mass destruction were listed as nuclear, biological, and chemical. And a hypersonic kinetic energy weapon is none of those things.  In fact, these weapons are just tungsten rods. Twenty feet long and 1 foot in diameter. If these were to be launched from ,by the time they hit the earth they would bring with them the power of an intercontinental ballistic missile, laying waste to anything below.

Known as Project Thor, this was inspired by Lazy Dog bombs used during the Vietnam War. Those were pieces of steel that were two inches long and dropped from airplanes.  As they gained velocity they would hit the ground at about 500 miles per hour. No explosives needed and they could penetrate concrete nearly a foot deep.

Project Thor, or Rods from God, involves dropping tungsten rods the size of telephone poles from satellites in space. They can reach 10 times the speed of sound before they hit the ground. And when they hit the ground, they would go several hundred feet into it as well. That means if some target is hiding in a bunker they’re still not safe. Enough force would be released when the rods hit that it would rival a ground-penetrating nuclear weapon. And the added bonus  is that there is no fallout from the blast.

5. Geophysical Weapons 

The concept of geophysical weapons sounds a bit like the kind of stuff you might expect from a 1970s James Bond villain. These are the kind of weapons that are able to affect the climate and the environment, as well as the Earth itself in the form of seismic weapons.

It has long been believed that the US military has a facility located in Alaska known as HAARP which stands for the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. Conspiracy theorists believe that this facility is researching high frequency radio waves and how they can affect the ionosphere in terms of being used as a geophysical weapon. 

Beyond Alaska, China has been making strides with technology that many feel could be used as geophysical weapons. They just recently  reported that they’ve had success controlling the local weather. So while it may sound a lot like fiction, it seems like China has at least had some success moving forward with these plans.

4. Cyber Weapons

In the modern world, mass destruction doesn’t have to take place in a way that can be described with explosions and rubble and big craters in the Earth. If you really want to cripple an enemy all you need to do is lay waste to their infrastructure. While destructive physical warfare with bombs and bullets will probably never go out of style, cyber warfare can cause more damage in a shorter period of time.

In theory, if you have the capability, launching a cyberattack can destroy an enemy from within. Communications systems, military systems, even a country’s power grid and financial infrastructure can all be either shut down or even erased. There’s just short of nothing in the modern world that is not run by computers and managed over a computer network. The ability to control an enemy’s weapon’s arsenals, to cripple their economy, to leave them literally in the dark can all be done from the other side of the world with a team of skilled cyber attack specialists.

3. Isomer Bombs

To understand what an isomer bomb might be you have to know a little bit about how nuclear works. Isomers are atomic nuclei that have the same mass and atomic number but different radioactive properties. If you were to design an isomer bomb, you would be able to rapidly change the state of these nuclear isomers. They call it triggering, because normally these nuclei decay very slowly but if you trigger them and If it works successfully you would be able to receive a massive burst of gamma and x-ray radiation.  So essentially it would be stable enough until you needed it to blow up on demand. The resulting burst of energy would be incredible.

At present, the idea of an isomer bomb, typically linked to the nuclear isomer of hafnium, is thought to be at least one hundred thousand times more energetic than a chemical reaction. One gram of hafnium contains the equivalent energy of 660 pounds of TNT. The energy produced is a transition of energy between nucleons so it’s actually a different kind of nuclear energy than either fission or fusion. It’s also entirely theoretical at the moment.

There’s something called the hafnium controversy that occurred in the ’90s, in which a team of researchers claim to have actually been able to cause an isomer reaction. No other scientists were able to duplicate the results however and many scientists consider it impossible.  That said, Russia has apparently been continuing research into the idea of an isomer bomb 

2. Psychotronic Weapons

If you have weapons that can destroy buildings, control the weather, destroy a country’s infrastructure, and scramble electronics, what else might be left?  The only thing you’re missing at this point is a weapon that can destroy your enemy from the inside. That’s where the field of psychotropic weapons comes in. These are weapons that are meant to affect the minds of soldiers in enemy combatants. Anything that’s meant to affect the consciousness and the brain of another person. Laid out like this it sounds utterly preposterous. What kind of weapon can control another person’s mind? Or make them see things that aren’t there? 

In 2018, research conducted into unexplained injuries suffered by American diplomats in Cuba concluded that there was a possibility the diplomats had been subjected to psychotronic weapons. It was believed that a microwave device was used and the resulting effect was brain injuries. When you’re subject to one of these attacks you can hear noises that sound natural but are actually coming from inside your own head. Even deaf people can hear when they’re being attacked with a microwave device. Sounds and words can be beamed directly into someone’s head. The effects can be painful and debilitating, even to the point of rendering a victim incapacitated. 

1. Brain Drones

Drones are fairly ubiquitous in warfare these days and have proven to be quite destructive. An unmanned aircraft flown from potentially the other side of the world capable of dropping bombs on any target is definitely something out of nightmares. The only thing that could make it worse is if that person on the other side of the world who is controlling it wasn’t actually there. And that’s what apparently DARPA has been working on for some time.

Autonomous drones powered by a neuromorphic chip are essentially artificial intelligence machines. This is all in the very early and rudimentary stages right now, and we’re not quite at the point of having Sentinels from the Matrix just yet. But the groundwork has been laid and the technology will continue to advance. The neuromorphic chips are hoped to be able to help these drones recognize their environment and respond accordingly. One extremely off-putting line from a 2014 article stated that there was hope that the chip would offer the potential ability for the drone to feel different levels of safety or affinity for different places. And while safety and an affinity for a place is good, it also implies that a drone might be able to feel the opposite at some point in time as well and potentially react defensively to that.

So while no one is promising the future of warfare is going to be emotional drones that know where they are and can react with fear to confrontation, it does seem like that is the road we’re heading down.