Category: technology

The Slashdot question about this topic reminds me of the overwhelming array of 9 chargers and low voltage power supplies which power my equipment.

In the comments, it was mentioned that a connector manufacturer employs a lobbyist to foil any attempt to mandate standardization of the connectors and low voltage power supplies.

Another comment mentioned the 12V standard car cigarette lighters. This standard is currently usable only in cars, and most gadgets are not designed to be powered from them.

Solution?

1. Manufacture a splitter which allows 5-6 plugs (shaped like car cigarette lighter plugs) to receive power at the same time.  Those splitters are meant for use at homes,  and will allow several gadgets to be powered/charged at the same time.
2. Manufacture a DC to DC converter for each gadget, to allow most gadgets to be powered from standard car cigarette lighters. It may be possible to miniaturize those converters, as they don’t require a 110V/220V step down transformer.  People will prefer to carry those converters with their gadgets, rather than the bulkier manufacturer-provided power supplies.
3. Manufacture a car cigarette lighter lookalike socket, powered by a step down transformer, for use at homes.  This will allow homes to provide the same power connectors as cars.

Then, car cigarette lighter sockets will become the de-facto standard power supply for gadgets. Those three products will solve the chicken-and-egg problem of introducing a standard power supply for gadgets, which require DC power.

As I was reading yet another article about Shai Agassi’s Electric Car project (a Google search turned up several references, such as The Electric Car Acid Test and Israel Is Set to Promote the Use of Electric Cars), I asked myself what if we could design a “liquid battery”.

Such a “liquid battery” would really be a fuel cell. We pump in two liquids (in the following – liquid/chemical A and liquid/chemical B). As the car is being driven, it gets the electrical energy from combining liquid A with liquid B, creating a third liquid (in the following – liquid/chemical AB). Liquid AB would later be withdrawn. In a processing plant, liquid AB would be electrolyzed and separated back into liquid A and liquid B, effectively charging the system with energy.

Such a system already exists, but using hydrogen. Hydrogen is combined with oxygen to yield water. Water is then electrolyzed to recover the hydrogen for another round.

The challenge is to find chemicals (which can be liquid, gas or solid powder) A, B and AB with the following properties:

1. They store energy when separated rather than combined, so that no single chemical will be able to release energy uncontrollably i.e. explode. So, for example, ATP (used as energy storage medium by biological processes) would be out.
2. No one of them can release energy by combining with oxygen or nitrogen. This would eliminate the big safety risk of hydrogen.
3. Chemicals A and B can be combined in a fuel cell to efficiently release energy in the form of electricity.
4. Chemical AB can be efficiently separated into chemicals A and B in a power plant.
5. High energy storage density, relative to current technologies.

Existing discussion about total energy consumption by civilizations (such as the one summarized in Kardashev scale) neglects the accident and terror factor.

Disasters (both natural and man-made) are usually associated with uncontrolled release of energy. When a civilization deals with little energy, the scope of man-made disasters is limited. However, when a civilization has a higher Kardashev scale rating, it deals with a lot of energy. Then uncontrolled energy releases can wreak a lot of havoc. Example: meltdowns in nuclear reactors.

Traditionally, the way to mitigate against man-made disasters was to live away from dangerous locations. Dangerous locations are locations, in which a lot of energy is manipulated. However, once a civilization advances to type I or even type II, then it will be at its disposal enough energy to wreck an entire planet. Humans would have to live in far away space stations, and in those space stations use much less energy than is available to their civilization.

Therefore, development of force fields able to contain such explosions is critical to humanity survival as it strives to become a type I civilization. This is important not only because of the risk of accidents, but also because of terror acts.

Of course, I am limiting this discussion to PCs and other Internet nodes on the face of the Earth. Building a spaceborne network has its own special considrations, as well as a network of nodes deep inside the Earth.
An inexpensive replacement to the current networks of cables, cellular operations and telephone cables is mesh networks. In those networks, a PC communicates with its nearest neighbors, and they route packets to each other in a way reminiscient of the old UUCP protocol.

There is the problem of discovery of the topology of a mesh network, especially given its dynamic nature.

My suggestion: equip each node (a PC or other) with a compass or its equivalent (such as a GPS receiver) and a way to find the directions of its neighbors relative to it.

Nodes will select their IPv6 addresses from a block of addresses, and the addresses will depend upon their latitude and longitude. Thus, from the IPv6 address of a target node, the source node will figure out how to route data packets it wants to send to the target node.

Voila, no large corporations, no expensive infrastructures will be necessary (besides the GPS satellite network, if a GPS receiver is used).