From the xkcd blag (I’m a Blahgger, he’s a blagger – we just don’t want to fit in with those filthy bloggers, I guess) comes this fascinating look at using lasers to lift squirrels in to space.
Amazingly enough, without taking advantage of reflection, the method described uses the Doc Brown approved 1.21 gigawatts of energy to lift a squirrel. Using a sufficiently focused beam of light along with properly placed lasters, that power requirement can be cut a few orders of magnitude, down around 1 megawatt. 
This is a far less interesting number, but much more economically feasible. Understand I’m all for using gross amounts of power to lift squirrels in to outerspace, but I realize the country might not share my willingness to drain from the entire power grid for such a useful pursuit.
Nicely, the blag post transcends merely levitating squirrels, advancing to such necessary topics as generating lasers from the sun, tying them together via Dyson sphere manipulation to create a death ray, and sending a message to our celestial neighbors.
Why settle for interstellar communication when you can have interstellar war? And we could modulate the beam to carry a message  in this case, “FUCK YOU GUYS!â€Â
And ultimately, isn’t that the real purpose of advancing laser studies? Inter-stellar war and Parisian-level offense directed at other galactic entities? Well, that and frikkin’ shark/laser hybrids.
[tags]xkcd, blag, lasers, 1.21 gigawatts, squirrels, frikkin’ shark, Dyson sphere, death[/tags]