As we’re approaching the end of the first decade of the third millennium, many things which we had previously thought of as imaginary are already materializing before our eyes, such as commercial space tourism, men with wings, or the development of wireless electricity.
I want to dedicate this unique series of posts to the sorts of alternative energy that mankind might turn to in the foreseeable future.
Let us begin with “Quake Power” — Turning devastating seismic waves into usable energy.
As China faces the aftermath of a devastating earthquake last week, and Indonesia is still recovering from the 2004 Tsunami, the threat of unpredictable havoc coming from beneath remains a grave concern in almost every corner of the planet. Seismic waves are generated by a host of causes, such as gas migration beneath the earth, nuclear experiments, pressure building along fault planes, and more. Whatever the reason, the end result is the explosion of kinetic energy — a whole lot of kinetic energy! And turning kinetic energy into electrical energy is something proven theoretically by Einstein and done practically for many decades, in such examples as electrical dams or wind turbines. What if we could harness large amounts of clean energy, and by doing so, prevent earthquakes from reaching monstrous magnitudes?
The geography of the Earth’s fault lines is known to science and some faults are known to be more active than others. However, predicting major quakes is similar to predicting the weather — both are highly volatile predictions, which can be made about the near future alone. A better solution than capturing the big quakes would be capturing the continuous kinetic energy venting from the earth, and by doing so, to raise the threshold of a major kinetic eruption.
The greatest difficulty with such a futuristic method is the sheer size of the fault lines. Capturing “Quake Power” before it reaches the Earth’s crust will require large engineering projects never taken before by humankind. And that wouldn’t be enough — there are still many scientific questions to solve and methods to develop.
One possible solution might be the deployment of millions of crystals deep inside the Earth’s belly, which would serve to capture the kinetic energy and would have the ability to transmit this energy in a wireless manner onto special generators located above. Yes, it sounds completely fantastic, but it is absolutely feasible in theoretical terms, and energy transmission is already an everyday phenomenon, evident whenever we use our cellular phone.