@skywatch said in No more batteries....:
What started this was my research into Dark Matter and Dark Energy discussions with Astronomers and Scientists. I wondered why a simple atom made of one electron around a nucleus of one proton and one neutron could remain stable when the electric charges would mandate an attractive force between the positive nucleus and negative electron. The electron can 'somehow' sustain its distance and therefore gets energy to overcome the attractive force. It can do this for millions of years with no 'conventional' input of external energy.
You can move electrons around atoms and molecules with relatively low chemical or electrical energy...
Zero point energy is the equivalent of the remaining drops of gazoline in an empty gaz tank. If you have millions of cars with "empty" gaz tanks then you're looking at a lot of energy. But it will take you way more energy to retrieve those last drops of gazoline from each tank than you will get from burning them later.
It's the same with zero point energy, getting the matter in the right conditions to be able to extract any of the remaining energy will use more energy than you will be able to collect.
Right now the world could do with cleaner energy.
Yes we all want it. But it doesn't mean we have to fall in the hand of all the scammers who have pretended for centuries to have discovered all by themselves the secrets of infinite energy. They've been updating the buzzwords but the scam is always the same, with demos using an hidden power source. It's the case for ecat they never ran it unconnected from a power supply, pretending it's using only little external power but it's very easy to cheat.
I just hope the breakthrough comes in the west because if Russia or China leapfrog us on this tech then we are at a severe disadvantage.
Breakthrough will come from international cooperation that has been happening for decades, no single country has the resources and brains to make the breakthrough all alone.
I guess that 'solar power' would have been laughed at 2 generations ago (along with nuclear power, smart phones, space stations etc...)
Chose better examples, a working demo of photovoltaic effect was done in 1839, way more than 2 generations ago... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#History
And for nuclear power, smart phone and space station yes it would have been laughed at if someone in 1900 had come up saying he built a smartphone, a nuclear power plant or a space station all by himself in his garage.
But no one laughed at Hertz when he identified and described radio waves in 1886, 10 years later there were functional radios, and 15 years later it was getting widely available to the public.
No one laughed at Fermi in 1936 when he discovered nuclear fission, only 6 years later he was running the first nuclear reactor in the US, in 1951 they were producing electricity from a nuclear reactor and in 1957 the first commercial reactor was running at full power.
Only scammers make "revolutionary" discoveries in their garage while having no experience and education in physics, pretend to be victims of the "lobbies" so they have to recourse to crowdfunding, refuse to have independent testing of their devices and pretend to have been running decades of intense research but have never published anything in a half-decent peer reviewed scientific journal.
When there's real science and real scientists behind it, the technology can progress fast and they have no problem getting some funding.