Quote:
Originally Posted by OLD BOY
Thank you, Chris, that has thrown some light on why you believe that the future I have described cannot come about.
However, as with so many arguments on this thread, there is an assumption that we will still have the same problems in the future as we have now. New technologies will see us through in the end and there are innovations that no-one has yet thought of that will overcome issues that some believe will mean that ideas expressed on here can never come about.
For example, a quick look at the internet this morning revealed this interesting piece. Took me 3 minutes to find it.
http://www.treehugger.com/clean-tech...dio-waves.html
This may or may not be how the problem is eventually overcome. The issues may alternatively be resolved by a system of demand dispatch or a whole host of other methods that are currently being investigated to resolve problems such as these.
To say that 'it will never happen' based on what we have and what we know now is not a credible position to take on its own. Sure, there's work to do, but we are talking about 20 years' time. Hell, we didn't have broadband 20 years' ago!
The problem you identify is a real one, but it will be overcome in the fairly near future. |
It took you three minutes to find a link that doesn't address the problem, let alone propose a solution. Again, I suspect that you're not engaging with this issue any deeper than "I like it, therefore everyone will like it, and everyone's home will become like mine". You go on the Internet and look only as far as you think you need to, to find something which on first glance, appears to support your pre-conceived beliefs about the future.
Harvesting a few watts from stray radio transmissions is all very well, but the developers themselves see this as a means of powering small, low-power devices such as wireless sensors and security cameras. It isn't going to get anywhere near the 70+ terawatt-hours per annum that our national Internet infrastructure is projected to require within the next 20 years, at current rate of expansion.
You can't get around the simple, practical obstacle here: the only thing that can generate the kind of power needed to bring about your vision of the future is a power station. Actually, lots of power stations. Big ones. They are very expensive to build, and take years from planning to commissioning.
And here's one for you, Sherlock: the developers are mostly harvesting power from TV transmissions (presumably because these are the highest-powered and most widely dispersed).
What will happen to their experiments if all the TV transmitters are switched off, as you keep predicting?