Monday, June 26, 2006

Alternative Fuels

After lunch the other day, a colleague stated that we should be using Alternative Fuels and should investigate any possible Alternative Fuel that we can. Well, I'm not one to pass up the challenge of an offhanded hyperbole, so I said "What about a car that ran on baby kittens?" Sure, at the time it seemed like a funny idea, but the more I thought about, the more I realized that baby and kittens are really redundant.

This morning, I finally thought of how we could harness this untapped resource. See, you strap a few kittens to your feet, the furrier and cuter the better (just for aesthetics). Then, as you walk down the street, you have the kittens run. The idea being, that if you were standing still, you would move at the speed of the kittens. But, when you walk or run, you get to add the their speed to your speed! Like a greased bullet, you will be purring down the street. Sure, there is the care and maintenance cost of your new set of wheels, but it is better for the environment - more natural than a car. Isn't the environment worth any cost or do you hate The Earth?

People are switching to biodiesel, but we also have bio-motion. We can walk or ride a bike! Surely any of the aforementioned energies are more efficient than the releasing the sun's energy? I mean, what are fossil fuels anyway, but the sun's energy converted into chemical energy via plants a lot time ago. All this talk of solar energy... and yet we have been using nothing but! Truly, we are the living in the future!

-Edward

PS Unless you count nuclear power, which comes from radioactive decay, or more correctly, the heat that we use to boil the water to turn the turbines can come from radioactive decay. That is the advantage of our current level of energy technology! No matter what form of energy we encounter, we can always use its heat byproduct to boil water. Which I guess is why we get most of our energy from burning coal. Sure, there is that photoelectric effect that solar panels can use, but without water somewhere in the process, I can't imagine it taking off. I mean, really, power without water? That would be like alchemy without candles! I personally can not wait until 3182 when there is a giant space station turning most of the sun's output into power for us - it will take a steam pipe the size of Jupiter to harness all of that Power! Until then, I say we go with kittens, it just seems too efficient to pass up right now. Unless we can get the kittens to boil water...

1 comment:

Aravind Krishnaswamy said...

I'm all for kitten power. Sadly their size to power ratio is terrible and with the energy they consume through food I don't think they would pay off in the end.

Now burning kittens to boil water to turn a turbine... now that has possibilities....