[extropy-chat] Glucose into electricity (was: Computing Power: Moore's Law keeps going and going and going)

[Adrian Tymes]

(Thanks for the support, Brett - you said most everything I was
going to there. ;) )

--- Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> That's cool, of course, and lets you read under the blankets, if
> you're the 
> sort of person who sleeps in his suit jacket, as most of us here
> surely 
> are--but it can be a hassle, wearing clothes that require you to plug
> them 
> in to an indwelling catheter stuck inside a major blood vessel. So
> messy to 
> keep clean and bacteria-free.

Which is why the idea I was thinking of was entirely internal.
Seated in the belly/front of the gut, right in the middle of a
prime center of fat cells in most obese people (and thus where
glucose hopefully naturally diffuses to if there's an imbalance
in glucose levels in the body - like, say, if something in one
particular region is consuming more glucose than normal), it
would scavenge glucose that came by and break it down in the
normal glucose->ATP cycle - except, when you get to the step
where there's a free electron to convert ADP to ATP, it would
capture said electron for use as electricity.  (Although this
system's alterations to the process would of course have to be
tested, using the same enzymes as much as possible would
hopefully ensure the system's safety.  The study of the original
process's non-toxicity has been generating data for thousands of
years...)

The first version would just suck up energy and discharge
somehow (possibly, via induction to something passed outside the
skin every so often, so no breaching of the skin would be needed
after the installation surgery - and said surgery would be
minimally invasive, going no deeper than the fat layer...and not
really caring if a few of the cells around the install area died
during surgery, because the whole point is to get rid of that
fat anyway).  Later versions could be wired to cybernetic
implants, to be developed after this power source was proven and
available, so of course that development would take a while
(parallel to refinements to make the energy harvesting more
efficient and to shake out any undesired side-effects).