A group of high school students with a shoestring budget have made a totally self-sustaining hydrogen powered car (truck, actually). It uses sunlight and water to produce it's own fuel. It's a bit ungainly, but it works. Hey, they weren't concentrating on pretty, they were concentrating on functional. All the "experts" figured it'd take 20 years.
Looks to me like all it needs now is a little polish and miniaturization. We can dang sure do that (and if we can't, the Japanese or the Taiwanese can). Heck, the PDA in my pocket is so far in advance of the first room-size digital computers it's not funny. (Say, does that make PDAs "bonsai computers". You know what bonsai trees are; trees that are miniaturized and trained and shaped to be tiny versions of real trees many hundreds of times larger.)
Anyway...If I were the oil industry, or the Arabs, I'd be quaking in my boots right now. Sell your oil stocks now!
I've always thought that with the research I saw on solar cells that are much more flexible and conformable (almost like plastic) that you could use it as some or all of the car body (hell, make the sunroof be a solar cell!). Your car sits outside 8-10 hours a day at least....use that time to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen. Use the solar cell to power a condenser to get pure water out of the air, and a compressor to store the hydrogen. It doesn't have to TOTALLY fill your car yet....we have to let the oil industry down easy, so let them switch to selling hydrogen. Oh, and use a bit of that electricity to put a blasted low power fan in your car to exhaust the hot air that builds up, so that you don't have to fry in the summer when you get in your car to to go lunch. And perhaps use the heat/cool differential to condense water. There are electrical devices that COOL (Pilzer effect or something like that). What happens with cool surfaces in an otherwise hot humid environment (like Iowa in summer?) Condensation! Water (and nice clean water too). And the rest of the year? Shovel some of that good old Iowa snow into a hopper and let the sun melt it. Make hay (or hydrogen) while the sun shines. Hell, design the car right and you could have the snow melt into channels to fill up your water tank for cracking. Take a look at the neat little heating elements on your rear window sometime. Get the idea? Put those on your roof, trunk, whatever, and let them drain into the water tank.
Hell, with a little good ol American ingenuity, we could even make an engine that works on either gas or ethanol or hydrogen. Don't tell me it can't be done. You're wrong. As someone will prove presently, if you're silly enough to say ANYTHING can't be done.
Ain't science wunnerful?
Necessity is the mother of invention, and people are starting to ANTICIPATE necessity now. Hot damn, the world's not entirely going down the crapper (despite Bush and Cheney Inc.'s attempts) now is it?
I wonder if the GOP (Greed Oil Power) will change their acronym to GHP?
Dang, maybe those rumors of a car that ran on water WERE true.
Now maybe that space drive (the Dean Drive) that was rumored, or those anti-grav devices that you hear about from time to time will turn out to be true, too. Or cold fusion? (Hot fusion sure isn't going anywhere...fa$t!)
Oh well, if they aren't, true, I'm sure we'll invent them presently.
And private companies like Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites are making private spaceplanes and winning the $10million X-Prize, and Bigelow is working private space stations and funding a $50 Million prize for the first private orbital craft (the next step for Mr. Rutan, I hope.....he's certainly someone who can get the job done right and without gorging at the public trough, too). And Johns Hopkins Univeristy appears to be creating the first private deep space probe, with a mission to Pluto, Charon and the Kuiper Belt. And about time too...NASA seems to have lost the Right Stuff. (Even more so this week, as "Gordo" Cooper passed away...on the same day that Spaceship One won the X-Prize no less. I think Gordo's spirit might be looking after SpaceShip One!)
Ad astra per aspera! Illegitimi non carborundum!
