[ExI] Accelerando

[Mike Dougherty]

On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 11:17 PM, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> Still, I'm sure there are new ideas waiting to be explored, or old ideas
> waiting to be examined in depth--but it's not obvious what they are. (I'm
> waiting eagerly for Keith to tell us what his current idea for cheap energy
> is.)

Seconded.

I was thinking about electricity generation hooked to hamster wheels,
but the unwanted waste output is a considerable design challenge (not
so much per unit, but when you scale that operation up to 1GW you have
a real logistics issue)

Perhaps updating all floors with piezoelectric tiles that generate
small amounts of current under the cyclical stresses of people walking
around.  Imagine: mall-walkers could be producing useful electricity.

Also a way to get "half the price of coal" energy is to simply raise
the price of coal until it is twice the price of the biodiesel
alternative.  That one is a lawyer/politician solution, Keith is an
engineer.  I'll reserve my prediction here, it might be increasingly
viable as we approach the worldwide delivery date - the literal "drop
dead" date, as it were.

I hope with Keith's engineering propensity for numbers that he didn't
take The Matrix too seriously, else those numbers about the electrical
output of a neuron multiplied by the number of idle neurons in a human
brain times 7B people start to be interesting.  If you think today's
grid power is unreliable, imagine what it would be like when one Neo
can destroy the whole network.

Anyway, I also wait eagerly (perhaps not idly) for Keith's next energy solution.