Have Electricity, Will Travel

holovision in Actifit • 3 years ago

First, the really awesome takeaway from the Isaac Arthur video about portable power sources: biogamma-voltaics. An organism such as a fungus that is able to absorb gamma radiation and convert it into biochemical energy. That seems strange but it's difficult to artificially convert gamma radiation into electrical energy similiar to how solar cells convert visible light into electrical power. We already have examples of simple celled organisms surviving in high levels of ionizing radiation such as Chernobyl.

The most common portable power sources today are processes such as chemical batteries, mechanical flywheels and gas generators.

Using metamaterials it should be possible to create better atomic batteries that generate electrical power from radioactive decay. The video gives examples such as tritium betavoltaics and "diamond batteries" based on carbon-14. Small modular nuclear reactors can also be designed to generate power through fission.

Some of the more exotic sources of power which are theoretically possible include extracting energy directly from the vacuum of empty space. Perfect mirrors can "bottle" light. Concentrate enough light into a small enough volume and a Kugelblitz micro-black hole can be created and the Hawking radiation can be tapped for power.

This report was published via Actifit app (Android | iOS). Check out the original version here on actifit.io

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Daily Activity, Walking

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3 years ago in Actifit by holovision

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jfang003 3 years ago

I am wondering on how energy development evolves. We use chemical, light, wind, gas and many other sources. If it continues to develop, the energy costs should keep decreasing eventually to almost free.

I heard some stories that people expect our kinetic energy from walking and moving our body to eventually be used to power some of our electronics. Do you think it's a viable future?

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holovision 3 years ago

The kinetic energy harvesting of body movement seems great but I have one caveat with the idea: it assumes everybody can generate that type of body movement. Right as the pandemic began I received my certification as an assistive technology specialist so I am now trained to view technology in terms of how it can be used to assist disabled individuals. There are people who are paralyzed or in wheelchairs who can't walk around to generate that level of small amounts of energy for wearable sensors. For those individuals that is still going to have to come from batteries or be harvested through another method such as thermal body heat.

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jfang003 3 years ago

For kinetic energy, I was thinking of it more as an extra source of energy. We will still have many other sources of energy but lets say you were going to shop and were walking around then you would be charging up your phone at the same time. This would reduce costs and allow energy to be used where it is needed such as for those who are disabled.

I also think thermal heat could be a good source to help reduce costs in the future.

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holovision 3 years ago

Moving your body to generate power makes more sense for running low power sensors or some LEDs than charging an android or iPhone. It takes several watts to charge a phone and that should be a continues stream of power. I'll have to find the numbers to do the math for kinetic energy harvesters but it seems to me that the body movement activity to sufficiently charge a smartphone would be closer to vigorous dancing than casually shopping. A typical electric wheelchair motor is 250 watts so it uses roughly the power of 100 smartphones when operating.

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1 vote

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holovision 3 years ago

There is a concept of "energularity" similar to the technological singularity. Ray Kurzweil talks about exponential growth of solar power. I am sure electricity will continue to get cheaper to produce. It will always cost something but the cost can be spread out over many users. Sort of like water. I can take a water bottle and fill it up at a public drinking fountain for free. I didn't directly pay for the public drinking fountain, its installation, maintenance or even pumping the water from its source and filtering it. A small fraction of everyone's taxes went toward those costs. A bunch of people paid a few cents for water to be given out for free.

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jfang003 3 years ago

Yea technology is deflationary and it is causing the prices of everything produced down. Yes the government will end up paying for part of these costs and it would be great if the decrease in costs can also be passed down from the government to the people.

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3 votes

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