Notes by Austin Pocus

Double-A Batteries

Random thought: batteries are a powerful thing.

A battery is energy in your hand. I mean, with a double-A battery, you can power a light, a camera, a sensor array, and with two? A portable music player (what's that? the young ones ask)!

It got me thinking, we're all bundles of potential energy. We're all batteries. No, I don't mean like in the Matrix...that was a stupid idea. What I mean is, all of matter is just atoms, and what are atoms if not little packets of potential energy?

Of course, it's a lot easier to get energy from a Duracell than from a bunch of random atoms.

We've thought a lot about capacity and storage, when it comes to batteries, lately. With the focus on more sustainable energy sources like wind and solar, it becomes incredibly important to be able to store energy, no doubt. But: what if we could control and harness a larger source of energy on-demand?

What if we had fusion-powered cars?

This is getting into stuff that I very much do not understand, since I am not a scientist (IANAS). I'm sure controllable, usable fusion energy involves a wide array of problems that would take me years to understand. It's just an interesting idea, that since all matter can be converted to energy...

We're constantly surrounded by and composed of batteries, of a sort. They just aren't compatible with our devices.

This isn't just a "stoner thought", or some stupid half-baked idea -- well, maybe it's not fully-baked, but I do have a point. And that point is: we should be exploring other avenues to alternative energy sources.

We seem to be hitting quite a wall, a difficult hurdle, when it comes to energy storage. So...what if we just sidestepped the storage issue and had energy on-demand?

This is the sort of thinking I'd like to do on here, at least in part.