Albert Einstein once said, "In order to form an immaculate member of a fleet of BMWs one must, above all, be a BMW."
Well, ok, he may not have been talking specifically about BMWs -- or even cars for that matter -- but rather that one must first and foremost be a sheep to be a member of a flock. That's pretty much what our Bavarian buddies would have you believe as well, given their most recent announcement.
BMW's "Munich Madmen" (engineers) announced this week that they have made considerable progress on the development of a marketable hydrogen-powered internal combustion 7-Series sedan. They went on further to say that the product would be ready not "sometime after 2010," but "within" a scant two years.
Heck, it takes longer than that to receive a pre-ordered Ferrari F430.
Merely weeks ago this technology was considered so pie in the sky that unless your company is significant in size, it wouldn't have even registered as a blip on your radar yet. Alas, here is BMW happy to take the lead and not only make the "Ultimate" technology truly practical, but even produce its sedans with the advantageous capability of running on the world's most abundant element, as well as petrol (until, of course, society has tackled that pesky issue of how to farm hydrogen from other elements and build a worldwide distribution network for it).
To me, this sounds suspiciously like another example of technology becoming outdated even before you get it home and out of its liquid polymer packaging. Hydrogen-propelled vehicles are pretty much old news at this point. As a matter of fact, in the interest of staying ahead of the trend, I think I might just skip hydrogen altogether and focus on the next big thing in automotive propulsion (in case we quickly deplete our atmosphere of premium hydrogen).
After the mother of all matter, what will the next fuel be? Well, considering all the geo-political, environmental, and social issues, there seems to be an appetite for "naturally-occurring" phenomena. Mind you, though, that the requirements are grandiose. The issue BMW (and others) aspire to tackle is to fuel the world's ever-expanding fleet of vehicles. The staggering empirical measurement of resources required to complete such a task is so large (in any unit) that I can't fit it on my HP 17B II business calculator. This can only mean that it has entered the domain of exponential notation and long left my limits of comprehension.
So, to think outside the bottle for just a moment, how about lightning?
Not the wimpy-type bolts you see the guys attracting with rockets and wire on the Discovery channel, but the big ones that light up the sky over Kansas like an astronomical disco ball. These things carry some serious wallop and are peppering the earth more frequently than drivers are trading in their SUVs (roughly 100 per second somewhere on Earth, by some white coat's calculations).
If the average energy produced by a lightning bolt is anywhere from 30 to 100 thousand amperes (or 200 to one billion volts), then we are talking about another fairly meaningless measure, 250 to 750 kilowatt-hours per strike. In more relevant terms, this amount of power equals the energy required to toast approximately 160,000 pieces of bread, or move a 2,000 pound object the equivalent of 62 miles with every flash. If that object were a Civic, then one storm will easily propel the commute of an entire Wal-Mart parking lot.
And this energy is fast, too. The flash travels from ground to cloud at about 61,000 miles per second. Just image what that could do for illegal street racing.
The only real obstacle related to this technology is harvesting the hits and developing superconductors the size of Rhode Island to store them and disseminate the power. But don't forget, at one time the task of creating a device that would allow us to talk with friends or family miles, counties, or even states away seemed equally out of reach. We already know where the strikes generally occur. The electric companies need merely set up shop in the city of Teresina in Northern Brazil, in the central most region of Africa, and behind the 7th green at Silver Dollar Golf Club near St. Petersburg, FL.
Now, if you're thinking that containing a 6-mile bolt of electricity five times hotter than the surface of the sun might offer some logistical challenges, then you are probably right. But the fact that the word "superconductor" can be found in Webster's offers a positive to all those negative naysayers out there.
Who knows what the next fuel will be to power the Prius. Maybe it won't even power the vehicles themselves, but rather the rail (or air) they travel on (or in). Some form of magnetized conveyance with speeds surpassing modern aircraft might be cool...though they will probably have to redesign the parking lot at your local 7-Eleven.
The point is if we can imagine it, then we can do it.
Just think, there's an entire world out there that we can't even fathom yet. We haven't even gotten to the bottom of the ocean, save the limits of our environment. Consider for a moment outer space. What contains our universe? What contains that which contains our universe? What contains that which contains that which contains our universe? Our minds simply aren’t hard-wired to process the thought, never mind breach all that may be possible.
In short, if you are going to show up to brainstorm about the future of the automobile, you had better bring a big imagination. With Hydrogen on the doorstep, all of a sudden things like wind power, atmospheric static electricity and gamma rays hold new fascination, if not to drive cars then in other applications.
And if those don't float your boat, consider solar energy, which has come a long way since the ill-fated "solar-powered flashlight." As a matter of fact, the amount of sunlight reaching the earth's surface is 6,000 times the amount of energy used by all human beings worldwide.
The total amount of fossil fuel used by humans since the start of civilization is equivalent to less than 30 days of sunshine. Why not fill our tanks with some of that shiny goodness?


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