Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
Speaker 1: the podcast that looks at the future and says, here
Speaker 1: is a mind that can see across space. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
Speaker 1: I'm Lauren Vocab, and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about power and wirelessly transmitting power across vast
Speaker 1: distances as a means of being able to achieve things
Speaker 1: that so far seem unachievable. I don't want to be disrespectful,
Speaker 1: but I think you misspoke. It sounded like you said wirelessly. Yes,
Speaker 1: I guess you meant like, uh, some other word. You mean,
Speaker 1: like wired power. Yeah. Sure, I can see why you
Speaker 1: would say that, seeing is how our infrastructure is heavily
Speaker 1: based around wired power. Joe, But nay, say I to you.
Speaker 1: I am talking wireless, as in, get that wire that
Speaker 1: transmits said power to your house and throw it out
Speaker 1: the door, for you shall need it no longer. So
Speaker 1: you're talking lightning. I don't know what is this. Look.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you lightning harnessing the energy of the heavens
Speaker 1: themselves is going to make my cell phone never run
Speaker 1: out of battery. Okay, you know, broadly speaking, yes, uh no, no, no,
Speaker 1: we're gonna we're gonna talk about wireless power because it is. Yes, okay,
Speaker 1: so not thor but Tesla. Okay, all right, let's let's
Speaker 1: ease into this first before we before we get into
Speaker 1: the Tesla discussion. And don't worry, folks, there will be
Speaker 1: one I want to this actually still has to do
Speaker 1: with Tesla. Tesla was one of the minds working on
Speaker 1: making alternating current a workable, uh feasible means of transmitting
Speaker 1: electricity as opposed to direct current. Right, So, like the
Speaker 1: grid electricity that you get out of your wall socket
Speaker 1: is going to be alterning eating current, but to use
Speaker 1: it in a lot of things, you need to translate
Speaker 1: it to direct current. So here's the here's the reason
Speaker 1: why there's alternating current in the first place, because I
Speaker 1: know there are a lot of people who get confused
Speaker 1: about this. Back in the day, back when electricity was
Speaker 1: first starting to be understood and uh and and harnessed
Speaker 1: in a usable way, there was a lot of discussion
Speaker 1: about what's the best way to deliver electricity from the
Speaker 1: place where you generate it to the place where you
Speaker 1: need it. Direct current is one way. This is the
Speaker 1: way that batteries work. Right. The current flows in one direction.
Speaker 1: It goes from the negative terminal to the positive terminal.
Speaker 1: That's how electricity works with direct current. So you're anything
Speaker 1: that's ronning on a fuel cell or a battery, that's
Speaker 1: that's how it goes. Alternating current the essentially you get
Speaker 1: it switching so that the current flows in two different directions.
Speaker 1: First one direction than the other. Its cycles. Okay, it alternates. Uh. Now.
Speaker 1: The reason why alternating current is the is used in
Speaker 1: transmission is because if you wanted to transmit direct current
Speaker 1: and across vast distances, you had to use really high voltage,
Speaker 1: which back in the day was not really easy to do. Okay,
Speaker 1: it would require a lot of energy, it wasn't very efficient,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't very economical. It meant that you were
Speaker 1: limited to about a miles worth of distance across the
Speaker 1: lines at the time. So that meant that you would
Speaker 1: have had to build a whole bunch of generators or
Speaker 1: power stations to serve even a relatively small city. Now,
Speaker 1: alternating current, what you can do with that is build
Speaker 1: something called a transformer. Transformers allow you to change the
Speaker 1: voltage by stepping it up or stepping it down. And
Speaker 1: if you are using a really high voltage alternating current,
Speaker 1: you can then transmit this electricity over long distances, use
Speaker 1: transformers to step it down to the voltage that you
Speaker 1: need wherever you're going to use it. Because your house
Speaker 1: does not need to have a hundred thousand volts going
Speaker 1: in through the outlet, and if it did, it wouldn't
Speaker 1: last extraordinarily long. Honest, I don't know intuitively how much
Speaker 1: a volt is. Okay, so you know you've heard of
Speaker 1: like one twenty volts or two forty volts there you go,
Speaker 1: So you don't need a hundred thousand coming through that
Speaker 1: out So the idea here is that you would have
Speaker 1: these transformers to change the voltage. You can do that
Speaker 1: with alternating current, you cannot do it with direct current.
Speaker 1: It all has to do with electromagnetism. So just one
Speaker 1: last thing that I need to cover for this, because
Speaker 1: direct current will become important in the rest of this conversation.
Speaker 1: When you have a coil of wire and you run
Speaker 1: electricity through it, that generates a magnetic field. Okay, if
Speaker 1: you have an alternating magnetic field and that the magnetic
Speaker 1: field itself is fluctuating. Or you move a magnetic field
Speaker 1: within and away from a conductor, you induce electricity to flow.
Speaker 1: So if you took take two coils of wire, a
Speaker 1: primary coil and a secondary coil, and you run an
Speaker 1: alternating current through the primary coil, meaning that the current
Speaker 1: flows one direction and then the other, this creates a
Speaker 1: fluctuating magnetic field. The secondary coil is within that fluctuating
Speaker 1: magnet field, so that induces electricity to flow. And the
Speaker 1: relationship of the number of coils in the primary coil
Speaker 1: versus the secondary coil determines how much voltage is going
Speaker 1: to flow through that secondary coil. If it's the same
Speaker 1: number of coils, it's a one to one conversion. If
Speaker 1: there are more coils in the secondary coil than there
Speaker 1: is in the primary. Let's say that you've wound wound
Speaker 1: the primary ten times, but you've wound the secondary twenty times,
Speaker 1: you get twice the voltage. Okay, So that's how you
Speaker 1: can step up or step down the voltage based upon
Speaker 1: the number of coils in that secondary coil compared to
Speaker 1: the first one the primary coil. An interesting way to
Speaker 1: tie this into our discussion is that what you've just
Speaker 1: described is what's called a transformer, and this actually does
Speaker 1: transmit current wirelessly, albeit over a very short distance, through
Speaker 1: electro magnetic induction. Right, So these these wires are not
Speaker 1: actually connected to one another. The man magnetism created by
Speaker 1: one creates the electricity in the other wire coil. But
Speaker 1: we'll talk about that. Yeah, we'll talk about more of
Speaker 1: that in a little bit. I just know that it
Speaker 1: works with alternating current, but not with direct current, because
Speaker 1: direct current only creates a magnetic field that's stable, not fluctuating.
Speaker 1: All right, So now we can have our discussion about
Speaker 1: the big bad boy of the Internet of technology, the
Speaker 1: guy who just got ground down by the establishment, the
Speaker 1: guy who had all the ideas to save the world
Speaker 1: or destroy it, Nikola Tesla. Yeah, so, just like all
Speaker 1: these other great technology stories, Nicola Tesla figures into the
Speaker 1: history of wireless power transmission. But there's a problem whenever
Speaker 1: you want to find out something about Nikola Tesla, I've discovered,
Speaker 1: which is the the Internet Tesla fog. Yeah, there is
Speaker 1: sort of this fog of dubious information about Gala Tesla,
Speaker 1: and it's really hard to tell what actually happened with
Speaker 1: this guy. There's just a lot of websites. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: just gonna say stuff. And all right, So part of
Speaker 1: the problem here is that a lot of the info
Speaker 1: about Tesla is from a biography called The Strange Life
Speaker 1: of Nicola Tesla that was published in nineteen seventy three
Speaker 1: by one Arthur H. Matthews. UM. That became the first
Speaker 1: bio of Tesla on the internet because it was transcribed
Speaker 1: from a photo copied booklet by one John Roland Penner. UM.
Speaker 1: If this already sounds shady, that's because it absolutely is. Uh. Now, Now,
Speaker 1: both of these contain certain omissions and weird additions from
Speaker 1: Tesla's actual autobio biography called My Inventions, which was published
Speaker 1: in six parts in a magazine in nineteen nineteen. UM. Now,
Speaker 1: all of this should be should be understood through the
Speaker 1: filter of alright, so Tesla was a crazy showman. I mean, like,
Speaker 1: this dude was very fond of saying these big impressive
Speaker 1: things and making these statements and being kind of wacky
Speaker 1: to begin with, um as part of his personal stick.
Speaker 1: And on top of that, by by nine nineteen UM
Speaker 1: he was perhaps not perceiving um reality the way that
Speaker 1: I would say that most human people on average perceive
Speaker 1: reality to be had some stuff going on. To be fair,
Speaker 1: being a showman and being in technology in this era
Speaker 1: was by no means limited to only Tesla. This was
Speaker 1: an arrow where Edison would take the stage to try
Speaker 1: and while the newspapers and and other form of audiences
Speaker 1: into buying into direct current. I mean Edison of course
Speaker 1: famously would use alternating current to show how dangerous it
Speaker 1: was zapping animals to death. Yeah, that one time he
Speaker 1: had one of his assistants kill an elephant. Was she
Speaker 1: had she did nothing? Well? Okay, no, she actually did
Speaker 1: kill a couple of trainers, but to be fair, the
Speaker 1: trainers were probably not so nice either. To complicated issue
Speaker 1: at any rate, Um, anything that you read online about
Speaker 1: Tesla and his inventions should be um considered critically. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because some of the things that are famously attributed to
Speaker 1: him have no actual documentation apart from people relating a story,
Speaker 1: So you might get something second or third hand or worse,
Speaker 1: and not actual documented evidence. So the reason why we're
Speaker 1: even laying all this out in the first place is
Speaker 1: because a large part of Tesla's mythos centers around this
Speaker 1: idea of broadcasting power wirelessly more than one method, I believe, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's one that sort of used the earth. So how
Speaker 1: how did that's That's that's really the big one. There's
Speaker 1: the other one, which is just zapping the hell out
Speaker 1: of anything that happens to be nearby, also know as
Speaker 1: the Tesla coil um. But no, if you're talking about
Speaker 1: like warden Cliff Wardencliffe Tower, which was meant for a
Speaker 1: couple of things. Primarily it was meant to find a
Speaker 1: way to transmit speci tifically, not really radio waves, but
Speaker 1: transmit waves transatlantically. Uh. There were a lot of financial backers,
Speaker 1: including JP Morgan, who were interested in this possibility. This
Speaker 1: is the earliest days of radio. Yeah, yeah, this was
Speaker 1: mostly being thought of as a method of communication, but
Speaker 1: as of course it would turn out to be. But
Speaker 1: the kind of secondary proof of concept sort of things
Speaker 1: surrounding it was like and maybe energy, right right, Tesla
Speaker 1: was saying that, you know, he had this kind of
Speaker 1: interesting Yeah, he was thinking of the Earth is having
Speaker 1: its own electric charge, all right. He essentially thought of
Speaker 1: the Earth in a way that future scientists would kind
Speaker 1: of prove he was on the right track. He didn't
Speaker 1: have a he didn't really have the right view of it,
Speaker 1: the accurate view, but he was on a track to
Speaker 1: enough things that it gives enough credibility to this makes
Speaker 1: people question right or not it's real. So his idea
Speaker 1: was like using the Earth essentially as the means of
Speaker 1: transmitting electricity. And before we get too technical, essentially just
Speaker 1: imagine that you have a transmitter and a receiver that
Speaker 1: are precisely tuned to one another so that you you
Speaker 1: can't be even a smidge off or else that nothing works,
Speaker 1: and you transmit this using the transmitter, you send electricity
Speaker 1: through the Earth, and then really no matter where the
Speaker 1: receiver is, as long as it's tuned into the right frequency,
Speaker 1: it would pick up that transmission and you would get
Speaker 1: power transmitted from one point to the other. This is
Speaker 1: not the same as free energy, which is what some
Speaker 1: people say. You would in fact have to generate the
Speaker 1: electricity on the transmitting end and then transmit it through
Speaker 1: and you would lose power this way too, just as
Speaker 1: you would through any other transmission means where converting energy
Speaker 1: from one form to another you tend to lose some,
Speaker 1: usually in the form of heat, kind of resistance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's usually some sort of resistance there. There would have
Speaker 1: to be if you were generating electricity and then putting
Speaker 1: it through a transmitter, and then you probably lose more
Speaker 1: on the receiver end as well. So it's not a
Speaker 1: efficient it's not free energy, but it would be a
Speaker 1: wireless means of transmitting power. All that being said, I
Speaker 1: know of no one who has ever been able to
Speaker 1: make it work the way Tesla was saying. I know
Speaker 1: there are a lot of people who are looking at
Speaker 1: similar approaches, but nothing. For one thing, Tesla. Tesla did
Speaker 1: put out a patent on this, but you know, patents
Speaker 1: describe a general way of achieving something, right, they don't
Speaker 1: necessarily outline the entire process. Yeah, and so especially back
Speaker 1: in that those days, Tesla's patent is refreshingly very short
Speaker 1: compared to today's patents. You might see a patent today
Speaker 1: on something as simple as, uh, an electric toothbrush that
Speaker 1: doesn't even have you know, a wireless charging and it
Speaker 1: could be you know, thirty pages long. Tesla's is relatively tiny.
Speaker 1: But anyway, uh, yeah, as far as I know, no
Speaker 1: one has replicated anything that Tesla was playing. And you know,
Speaker 1: there there were stories that Tesla was able to use
Speaker 1: an enormous Tesla coil in Colorado that lit something like
Speaker 1: um light bulbs that were twenty six miles away or
Speaker 1: something two light bulbs. But again that's second, third hand information.
Speaker 1: There was no actual documentation of it. Um. Also, I
Speaker 1: mean there are stories that Tesla like created a winged horse,
Speaker 1: and just I love the story about how Tesla went
Speaker 1: on this long journey trying to get home and was
Speaker 1: distracted several times throughout that journey by a cyclops and
Speaker 1: there were some and uh there was like a big
Speaker 1: whirlpool thing. Okay, okay, but but for first, an actual
Speaker 1: quote from Tesla about this Warden Cliff tower. Um Uh,
Speaker 1: this is according to PBS, who I trust to have
Speaker 1: done their fact checking. In this system that I've invented,
Speaker 1: it is necessary for the machine to get a grip
Speaker 1: of the earth, otherwise it cannot shake the earth. It
Speaker 1: has to have a grip so that the whole of
Speaker 1: this globe can quiver. Yeah, I not dramatic at all.
Speaker 1: And also I'm not sure why he was kind of
Speaker 1: British there, but but I think Russian, British whatever. Actually,
Speaker 1: what I was going to say was that fueling the
Speaker 1: the mythology around Tesla is the fact that his financial
Speaker 1: backers pulled out so warden Cliff was being constructed, it
Speaker 1: was taking longer than anticipated, it was costing more money
Speaker 1: than anticipated. And meanwhile, a little fellow named Mark Coni
Speaker 1: had figured out how to transmit a single letter transatlantically
Speaker 1: just like some dudes holding a pole right well, essentially
Speaker 1: that he found it using a system that was that
Speaker 1: worked and was cheap comparatively speaking. So if you are
Speaker 1: our financial backer and you're looking at this unproven technology
Speaker 1: that is taking huge amounts of your money and still
Speaker 1: you haven't seen any progress unless just talking about the
Speaker 1: earth quivering, and then you look at this other dude
Speaker 1: with with this stick, and you're like, oh, I get
Speaker 1: a stick. I understand that right, right exactly? Why do
Speaker 1: I waste all this money on this thing that may
Speaker 1: or may not work when I can get this thing
Speaker 1: that totally works. So that was you know, it wasn't
Speaker 1: It wasn't like it was a malicious attempt. There are
Speaker 1: some people who framed this as the uh like like
Speaker 1: Edison and his cronies were able to infiltrate all of
Speaker 1: this and pull strings and that's why um Tesla was abandoned.
Speaker 1: But here's the deal, guys think there were certainly many
Speaker 1: times during which kind of underhanded business stuff like down
Speaker 1: in Tesla's life. But but you know, here's the thing
Speaker 1: is that that's not why people remove their money. That's
Speaker 1: not why people remove their financial backing. Because I don't
Speaker 1: care if you're Edison or not. If you're JP Morgan
Speaker 1: and Edison comes up to you and says, hey, I
Speaker 1: want you to pull your support out of from Tesla.
Speaker 1: But you're JP Morgan and you think, no, Tesla is
Speaker 1: gonna make me little ten times more money than I'm
Speaker 1: putting in. You tell Edison like, go pound sand buddy.
Speaker 1: So so I'm pretty sure there wasn't a conspiracy. It
Speaker 1: was more of a in a decision. Okay, So I
Speaker 1: want to climb our way out of the Tesla fog,
Speaker 1: if that's all right, that's fair because a minute ago
Speaker 1: you mentioned electric toothbrushes. Yes I did, And that brings
Speaker 1: me to the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Coming
Speaker 1: away from the winged horse Tesla mythology, I want to
Speaker 1: come right down to the most mundane wireless power transmission
Speaker 1: we've got the same junk that charges your electric toothbrush
Speaker 1: and really is wireless electricity? How does it work? Okay,
Speaker 1: so this is essentially what I was talking about before
Speaker 1: inductive coupling. You have imagine that you have a a
Speaker 1: a device that is able to put an alternating current
Speaker 1: through a coil of wire. You've got a secondary device
Speaker 1: that has a coil of wire in it that's connected
Speaker 1: to some sort of energy storage device like a battery
Speaker 1: actually really should just say a rechargeable battery, and then
Speaker 1: you run that that alternating current through the first coil.
Speaker 1: As long as the second coil is close enough to
Speaker 1: be within that magnetic field, then it will induce electricity
Speaker 1: to throw flow through the coil and thus charge the battery.
Speaker 1: So with your electric toothbrush, the actual the primary coil
Speaker 1: would be the one that's in the base that you
Speaker 1: set the toothbrush down upon once you're finished brushing your teeth,
Speaker 1: and then as long as it's plugged in, it's going
Speaker 1: to be drawing current and then running this little alternating
Speaker 1: current through the primary coil. Secondary coil picks up that
Speaker 1: it's induces electricity to flow charges the battery. Okay, but
Speaker 1: so this is actually charging the toothbrush without making conductive contact. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's it's just using that magnetic You could you could
Speaker 1: do this with anything. You could have a lightbulb plug
Speaker 1: screwed into a base that has a coil in it.
Speaker 1: You could have a secondary coil where there is no
Speaker 1: physical contact between the two coils, and you could run
Speaker 1: electricity through that primary coil and that light bulb will
Speaker 1: light up. Just the magnetic energy from the first creates
Speaker 1: electricity in the second. Just that that basic uh, that
Speaker 1: basic relationship between electricity and magnetism. Yeah, okay, so that's
Speaker 1: really cool, But it seems like that only works at
Speaker 1: short distances, right, well you yeah, you in general, if
Speaker 1: you're using basic, this basic approach, yes, because the secondary
Speaker 1: coil has to be within the magnetic field generated by
Speaker 1: the first coil. Is there a way we could make
Speaker 1: it work at longer distances? Okay? Well, I guess um,
Speaker 1: I don't know what you're saying. Resonates with me, but
Speaker 1: oh no, oh dear alright, So, so resonance actually adds
Speaker 1: potential to this entire inductive coupling concept. Yeah, um, and
Speaker 1: and resonance is just um an object size and shape
Speaker 1: will determine the frequency at which it naturally vibrates, right, right,
Speaker 1: So this is the same concept behind if you if
Speaker 1: you ring a glass and you hear the tone it makes,
Speaker 1: if you're able to generate that same tone at a
Speaker 1: strong enough amplitude, you can make the glass deform and break.
Speaker 1: H Yeah. Or for example, if you have a second
Speaker 1: glass that has the exact same resonance, then pinging the
Speaker 1: first glass should make the second one also begin to vibrate, Yes, exactly, Okay,
Speaker 1: and now for power. The idea here is to get
Speaker 1: yourself some two curved coils of wire. Yeah, except you
Speaker 1: put a capacitance plate at the end of each one,
Speaker 1: um and and place the coils within an appropriate range
Speaker 1: of each other. Once you're working with resonance, this can
Speaker 1: be up to a couple of meters or about seven feet,
Speaker 1: which is that's huge because again you're you are outside
Speaker 1: the usual magnetic field. I mean, unless you're putting bookoos
Speaker 1: a power through a coil, that magnetic fields not going
Speaker 1: to normally extend that far. So certainly not that far
Speaker 1: right right, this is pretty good. Um And if these
Speaker 1: if these coils resonate at the same frequency, and you
Speaker 1: run electricity through that first one, then it should jump
Speaker 1: or more precisely transmit or stream to the second one.
Speaker 1: UM M I T has been working on prototypes of
Speaker 1: this since um the early two thousand's. But um, even
Speaker 1: with this method, the distance at which you can transfer
Speaker 1: power is dependent on the on the diam or of
Speaker 1: that coil. So that's not going to like electrocute you
Speaker 1: if you walk in front of it. No, because it's
Speaker 1: not electric fields. It's a magnetic field, and you're not
Speaker 1: resonating hopefully at the same same odd if you had
Speaker 1: something on you or in you that resonated at that frequency, uh,
Speaker 1: that would not be good. But I can't imagine you
Speaker 1: having anything that would make being the setup for a
Speaker 1: really interesting techno murder mystery. I think I think there
Speaker 1: should be an episode of Sharlock about this, absolutely where
Speaker 1: this necklace. Let's not get off on the subject of Sharelock,
Speaker 1: because I just watched the first episode season three, and
Speaker 1: I'm I could talk about that. We're wearing to go okay,
Speaker 1: But so it's a it's a pretty much one to
Speaker 1: one ratio of the diameter of the coil that you're
Speaker 1: using and the distance at which you can make a
Speaker 1: second coil resonate, gotcha. So in other words, you that
Speaker 1: that is a limitation obviously, because if you're talking about
Speaker 1: larger distances, you would need larger coils, which means a
Speaker 1: larger form factor for whatever it is you're using. It
Speaker 1: gets pretty ridiculous and expensive pretty fast. But there might
Speaker 1: be ways around that. Even just this month January, researchers
Speaker 1: at Duke published a paper which is a tongue twister
Speaker 1: that I'm just going to try to say anyway because
Speaker 1: it entertains me so much. Magnetic meta material superlens for
Speaker 1: increased range wireless power transfer. First, take y'all um and
Speaker 1: and this described the design of a sort of focusing
Speaker 1: lens for electromagnetic fields. It's it's sort of like a
Speaker 1: cubic honey comb. And and each cell of this of
Speaker 1: this sort of weird giant flat Rubik's cube um is
Speaker 1: etched with spiraling copper wire um. This this this is
Speaker 1: called a meta material, and it kind of funnels the
Speaker 1: field into this narrow cone that can transmit power a
Speaker 1: distance of some twelve times the diameter of the coils.
Speaker 1: All right, that's kind of cool. So we're talking like
Speaker 1: coils and what like the eight or ten inch range
Speaker 1: something like that. Oh, they're about two centimeters in diameter
Speaker 1: right now, which is about point eight inches. Um, little
Speaker 1: smaller than I was thanking, But all right, but that's
Speaker 1: a total transfer distance of of centimeters are about a foot,
Speaker 1: which is still really impressive considering that they're only two
Speaker 1: centimeters to begin with. Sure, okay, so so we're still
Speaker 1: pretty much live. It's not like you're going to be
Speaker 1: able to have a power station that's on one side
Speaker 1: of your house and be able to use that to
Speaker 1: transmit power to a light bulb on the other side
Speaker 1: of your house right now, not this year. But this
Speaker 1: is a step in that sort of direction. Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's really cool. But we're still basically on the hield,
Speaker 1: not outside my yard certainly, right right, Well, why don't
Speaker 1: we think about maybe going a little further, like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, from outer space to the Earth. What. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have thought about this before, because if you'll recall
Speaker 1: our our podcast about the Kardashiv scale. Yes, we talked
Speaker 1: about what it takes to advance a civilization to sort
Speaker 1: of the next stage of energy production and use. Um,
Speaker 1: So what happens when we need to power all kinds
Speaker 1: of vehicles and colonies all over the solar system. Clearly,
Speaker 1: we would have to be able to tap into power
Speaker 1: beyond just what's available here on Earth. And we're already
Speaker 1: even though even though you you can easily argue that
Speaker 1: we're not nearly tapping all of the Earth's resources as
Speaker 1: far as energy production could theoretically go, we might not
Speaker 1: even be tapping the best ones. Right. But even even so,
Speaker 1: even if we were to do that, that would still
Speaker 1: limit us on how far we could expand outwards. If
Speaker 1: that's all we depended upon, we would need to find
Speaker 1: other ways of harvesting and transmitting energy. Right. You can't
Speaker 1: run a chord out from Earth to the colony on
Speaker 1: the Moon, not after that one visit I had from
Speaker 1: federal authorities who said it was a noble attempt, but
Speaker 1: I should knock that off. Versus versa. You also can't
Speaker 1: run a chord from the solar harvest on the Moon
Speaker 1: to Earth if that's what you want to do. Right, So,
Speaker 1: you might even be able to design this amazing device
Speaker 1: that can float out in space unimpeded by the Earth's atmosphere,
Speaker 1: that has a diameter that is so large that's it's
Speaker 1: capturing more solar energy just from this one device than
Speaker 1: all of the solar farms on Earth. But how do
Speaker 1: you get that power down to the planet where we
Speaker 1: can use it. Well, let's talk about some beaming beam
Speaker 1: we get Scottie, he's chief Archief O'Brien. Yeah, that they
Speaker 1: are very important as far as beaming goes. Now, so
Speaker 1: we're talking about using uh different forms of energy to
Speaker 1: transmit uh something that where we store. We we gather
Speaker 1: energy from one source, we convert it into another kind
Speaker 1: of transmission, whether it's electromagnetic or something else, send that
Speaker 1: down to a receiver which then can convert it back
Speaker 1: into electricity that then can be used. That's the basic idea,
Speaker 1: right Is this for real? This is for real? Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is something we can do right now.
Speaker 1: In fact, one of the one of the methods is
Speaker 1: through microwave transmissions. Yeah, okay, So microwaves are basically their
Speaker 1: electromagnetic radiation, so they're along the electromagnetic spectrum the same
Speaker 1: as light and radio waves. Um, so we know that
Speaker 1: we can transmit them around. I mean that they're like
Speaker 1: your cell phone sends a signal based on microwaves. Sure,
Speaker 1: lots of other cable signals like television come in can
Speaker 1: be beamed by microwave. Y yep, you can do it
Speaker 1: that way, and you can actually have a way of
Speaker 1: generating or all not generating, but transmitting electricity this way. Okay,
Speaker 1: So how does it work? How does a device receive
Speaker 1: microwaves and turn that into usable electricity? First, you have
Speaker 1: again a DC generator, all right, something that's going to
Speaker 1: create DC electricity, that converts that. You then have a
Speaker 1: converter that converts the electricity into microwaves, sends the microwaves
Speaker 1: towards wherever it is that you're you want it to go,
Speaker 1: all right. On the other end, you have a rectifying
Speaker 1: antenna or a rectenna that can receive this and then
Speaker 1: convert those microwaves back into direct current, which then can
Speaker 1: go and to whatever application you were planning. Granted, if
Speaker 1: you were planning on transmitting that through, say like a
Speaker 1: power grid. Let's say that we've got some sort of
Speaker 1: um orbiting space station that's beaming power down to generate
Speaker 1: electricity specifically for the power grid here on Earth, then
Speaker 1: you would probably need to at least the where infrastructure
Speaker 1: is based right now, you would need to then put
Speaker 1: the power through an inverter to make to change it
Speaker 1: from DC power to a C power so it could
Speaker 1: be transmitted across the grid. As it stands now, still
Speaker 1: pretty cool. If you're getting there from space, I'd say, oh, no,
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty awesome. I mean you have to keep
Speaker 1: in mind that any anything that's a multi stage process
Speaker 1: like this, where you're transmitting power, you're losing energy along
Speaker 1: the way, so your efficiency is never going to be
Speaker 1: I want to make that clear. Uh, you should think
Speaker 1: about changing energy between different media, like trying to hand
Speaker 1: somebody a pile of sugar. Like you can hand it
Speaker 1: to them, but they're never going to get all of it, right, Right,
Speaker 1: You're gonna lose a little bit, usually in the form
Speaker 1: of heat. That's the that's the big one, right, But
Speaker 1: there are other ways you can lose energy as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And microwaves actually do better than a lot of other forms. Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In fact, in space they're great because you don't have
Speaker 1: to worry about like when it moves through the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: You can actually lose some microwaves and transmission that way.
Speaker 1: Not enough for it to be a huge loss, but
Speaker 1: it would mean that you would take a hit and efficiency.
Speaker 1: Each stage you would lose a little bit of energy
Speaker 1: and efficiency. But I think i've read that the ideal
Speaker 1: like it's say that everything's working at all, the equipment
Speaker 1: is top notch. Yeah, it's working as good as it
Speaker 1: possibly could, which means we'll never get there. But you
Speaker 1: know it's it's the This is the ceiling would be
Speaker 1: an efficiency of around seventy Because you're talking about converting
Speaker 1: electricity to microwaves, the microwaves back into electricity. It means
Speaker 1: there are a couple of different stages there, and of
Speaker 1: course that also will depend upon whether the transmission is
Speaker 1: through space where you don't have to worry about the
Speaker 1: atmosphere getting in the way, or if it's atmosphere to
Speaker 1: space or space to atmosphere. Because we could use this
Speaker 1: microwave transmission for a lot of different purposes, not just
Speaker 1: beaming out to space. Wouldn't have to just be that.
Speaker 1: But but that's one way. How about unmanned aerial vehicles?
Speaker 1: How about them? You can beam microwaves to a ua
Speaker 1: V and keep it a lot I can surely this
Speaker 1: is crazy science fiction. No, this idea has been around
Speaker 1: for a long time. Actually in nineteen sixty four, the
Speaker 1: electrical engineer William C. Brown, who was working for the
Speaker 1: Raytheon Corporation at the time, gave a demonstration showing that
Speaker 1: he could power a small electric helicopter by beaming microwaves
Speaker 1: to the vehicle from an antenna. So it had a rectenna,
Speaker 1: it received the microwaves, convert to them to d C
Speaker 1: current and power the rotors of the helicopter. And this
Speaker 1: was how it stayed aloft. Uh. And so that's not
Speaker 1: the only one there's been. The Sharp vehicle. It was
Speaker 1: the stationary high altitude relay platform that was created by
Speaker 1: the Canadian Communication Research Center in the nineteen eighties, and
Speaker 1: it was given a huge boost by new printed circuit
Speaker 1: technology that allowed um, those those rectennas to become lightweight
Speaker 1: enough to really benefit the vehicle, right, because I mean, obviously,
Speaker 1: if you have a device that adds weight to the vehicle,
Speaker 1: then you have to take all of that into account.
Speaker 1: It changes everything, right every time you are thinking, oh, well,
Speaker 1: here's a solution, but it adds weight weight. Now we
Speaker 1: need more power than the solution would allow us to have,
Speaker 1: and then we have to go back to the drawing board. Right,
Speaker 1: this one could circle for like months at a time.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, So I think that's really the bottom line
Speaker 1: with this is you've got to figure out how to
Speaker 1: reduce the size and mass of the rectenna and um
Speaker 1: how to increase the efficient right, And so if you
Speaker 1: can maximize both of those, these could have some really
Speaker 1: interesting capabilities. Like save for micro aerial vehicles. Sure, so
Speaker 1: you can have teeny tiny ones because you wouldn't need
Speaker 1: a battery on board at all. Yeah, I want to
Speaker 1: give just one example. I was looking at some of
Speaker 1: what are some of the really cool micro aerial vehicles
Speaker 1: out there. One is called the Dell fly Explorer, and
Speaker 1: that's an autonomous flying vehicle. Weighs about twenty grams, so
Speaker 1: your average empty soda can is fourteen or fifteen grams,
Speaker 1: not much heavier than an empty aluminum can, right, And
Speaker 1: this is a an autonomous, tiny flying vehicle. It's got
Speaker 1: stereovision so it can see obstacles and avoid them. But
Speaker 1: the main problem is the battery life is only nine
Speaker 1: minutes at that scale. Yeah, that's not very long. But
Speaker 1: imagine if you could scale down and efficient enough rectanna
Speaker 1: at that size that you could beam microwave power and
Speaker 1: keep this thing going. I don't know if that's achievable.
Speaker 1: I'm not an engineer. I don't know if you can
Speaker 1: get Erectina to that size and the right efficiency, But
Speaker 1: if you could, it seems like that would be a
Speaker 1: good alternative to the battery power. And another is, uh,
Speaker 1: this is true of all of our broadcast abilities, the
Speaker 1: ability to to transmit power over fast distances. But another
Speaker 1: potential application is in construction in space. Oh yeah, actually,
Speaker 1: because a lot of the things you want to have
Speaker 1: in space, it is not very feasible to build on
Speaker 1: Earth and send up whole right. Yeah, even even building
Speaker 1: in part and sending it up and being constructed in
Speaker 1: parts can be problematic depending on the size of the parts,
Speaker 1: because you know, you're you're limited by whatever payload capacity
Speaker 1: your vehicle happens to have. Right. So, if we're able
Speaker 1: to get to a point where we can either ship
Speaker 1: raw materials up into space, or if we get into
Speaker 1: that asteroid mining world where we're able to even get
Speaker 1: raw materials out there and process us them some way,
Speaker 1: we need to have energy to fuel those processes and
Speaker 1: not having to send fuel up along with whatever we're sending,
Speaker 1: because then again you need more fuel to send up
Speaker 1: the fuel. As we're right back to that energy problem.
Speaker 1: But if you're if you're able to beam the energy
Speaker 1: either from Earth or you're able to generate it through
Speaker 1: some other space orbiting uh platform. For example, you know,
Speaker 1: a space orbiting platform that's collecting solar energy. You could
Speaker 1: beam it from there to the site and you would
Speaker 1: be able to provide energy for everything from uh uh
Speaker 1: you know, refining the materials that you're mining out of
Speaker 1: asteroids to actually giving the energy you need to for
Speaker 1: the construction of various stuff out in space. If we
Speaker 1: could get to a point where we could actually construct
Speaker 1: spacecraft in space where you don't have to launch them
Speaker 1: in the first place, then you you're really on your
Speaker 1: way toward a viable exploration and even colonization sort of
Speaker 1: civilization of that. You know. Otherwise you have to sit
Speaker 1: there and figure out how to get the thing off
Speaker 1: the planet before it can even start on its journey
Speaker 1: to wherever it's going to go. Yeah, the the construction
Speaker 1: thing seems like a big potential application to me. But
Speaker 1: the other one is the one we touched on earlier,
Speaker 1: which is energy harvesting space. Sure, um, so we're not
Speaker 1: getting all of the potential solar energy we could be
Speaker 1: getting on the surface of the Earth, are we not nearly?
Speaker 1: You know? For one thing, obviously one, we can't cope
Speaker 1: the entire Earth with solar panels, so we can't get
Speaker 1: all of the solar energy that's saying earth. Plus there
Speaker 1: are these things called clouds, the clouds. There's also, yeah,
Speaker 1: the atmosphere. There's also the fact that solar panels reflect
Speaker 1: some lights, so you're not gonna get you're not getting
Speaker 1: of the sunlight that's even hitting a panel, much less
Speaker 1: of the sunlight that's hitting the Earth. There's this other
Speaker 1: thing called nighttime. Yeah. Yeah, it happens first when the
Speaker 1: Sun goes down, right, it's not when the Earth turns um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, if if we were able to create, uh,
Speaker 1: like I said, these these kind of solar harvesting platforms
Speaker 1: out in space, then that could definitely help. Or if
Speaker 1: we were able to harness uh, some of the other
Speaker 1: real estate that's out there, like the moon. Yeah. H
Speaker 1: the idea of a space based solar power plant is
Speaker 1: also we're not just spitballing like this is something that
Speaker 1: NASA actually talks about. I want to give one example
Speaker 1: of a cool paper I was looking at it's called
Speaker 1: the SPS alpha. So it was in an early evaluation
Speaker 1: of this thing called the Solar Power Satellite via arbitrarily
Speaker 1: large phased array. I don't know why it has to
Speaker 1: be arbitrarily large. I think it should be specifically large.
Speaker 1: I think the basic idea about that was that you
Speaker 1: could keep adding modules to make it larger. Okay, that
Speaker 1: makes sense. Okay, So it was investigated by NASA's Innovative
Speaker 1: Advanced Concepts Division in two thousand and eleven two twelve,
Speaker 1: and so essentially, imagine a flower shaped array of modular
Speaker 1: mirrors that direct solar energy inward towards solar cells and
Speaker 1: then convert that energy into microwaves and then beam it
Speaker 1: down to Earth and that would be up in geostationary
Speaker 1: orbit UM, so it would have direct access to this
Speaker 1: clean sunlight. UH. And in the official report, the authors
Speaker 1: stayed in their conclusion quote, if the SPS alpha can
Speaker 1: be developed, solar power in the range of hundreds of megawatts,
Speaker 1: two hundreds of gigawatts could be harvested in space and
Speaker 1: delivered efficiently to markets on Earth, and to enable energy
Speaker 1: rich operations throughout the inner solar system, transforming all aspects
Speaker 1: of government and commercial space. All I need is one
Speaker 1: one gigawatts, that's megawatts, Yeah, I need one one of them.
Speaker 1: But they think that microwaves are the way to do this.
Speaker 1: Huh Yeah, so they went with microwaves. Now, are there
Speaker 1: any other ways that you could transmit something that far
Speaker 1: other than microwaves space hamsters? I think that that's the
Speaker 1: most accurate and scientific method of energy transfer. I have
Speaker 1: a ridiculous story to tell you, guys, but we'll save
Speaker 1: that till after the podcast is over. Actually, the other
Speaker 1: one another, well, the other one, there are multiple suggestions,
Speaker 1: but another big one, which another big one would be lasers,
Speaker 1: right right, because lasers are, after after all, working on
Speaker 1: just another range of the electromagnetic spectrum that's within the
Speaker 1: light spectrum, super focused. In this case, it would be
Speaker 1: directed infrared or near infrared laser beams, so would not
Speaker 1: be visible to the naked eye, right, But that could
Speaker 1: activate photovoltaic cells, you know, basically solar cells, and that
Speaker 1: would convert the light into electricity. So in other words,
Speaker 1: we're just kind of being able to create fakes on
Speaker 1: light beam it down to a specific place. Now, I
Speaker 1: got a question for you, guys. So it's a laser
Speaker 1: based system. Um, what am I looking here? What are
Speaker 1: my limitations? Well, you know with with this or actually
Speaker 1: with microwaves, to you need a direct line of sight
Speaker 1: between your power source and your receiver. So anything that's
Speaker 1: based on light is obviously limited by line of sight.
Speaker 1: You know, if if if the receiving station is on
Speaker 1: the side of the Earth that's facing away from the
Speaker 1: transmitting station, you have to wait until the two are
Speaker 1: in alignment. Now, normally you would get around this by
Speaker 1: having whatever it is in uh direct line of sight
Speaker 1: all the time, sure, or if you had some kind
Speaker 1: of um array of dishes, you could use those to
Speaker 1: beam the lasers. Yeah, if you had an array and
Speaker 1: you were able to direct the transmitting antenna toward a
Speaker 1: specific point, then you could do that. So um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's certainly one something that you'd have to take that
Speaker 1: into consideration. Obviously it's an issue. M Also efficiency is
Speaker 1: an issue. Um, your photovol takes optimized for the wavelength
Speaker 1: of an R are near and for a beam can
Speaker 1: capture about half the power. So again we're looking at
Speaker 1: that that loss of energy through various stages of transmission.
Speaker 1: I mean even converting energy into a laser, you're going
Speaker 1: to lose some of that energy already, right, depending upon
Speaker 1: however you're doing it. But you know, some of the
Speaker 1: electricity that you would go into creating a laser, you
Speaker 1: lose some of that. And then on the other end,
Speaker 1: you've got the common problems with photovoltaics being you know
Speaker 1: that the materials that we have right now aren't quite
Speaker 1: as optimal as they could be. Yeah, and even that
Speaker 1: at top level, like even if you were to optimize
Speaker 1: it to the ideal, again, you're never going to reach.
Speaker 1: So the question is whether or not the efficiency adds
Speaker 1: up to it making being a practical solution. Um. And honestly,
Speaker 1: you know, all of these things are things we're thinking about.
Speaker 1: We don't have a whole lot of experience actually putting
Speaker 1: major versions of this into place. I mean, obviously in
Speaker 1: the lab we've used quite a bit. Yeah, what's actually
Speaker 1: been done in terms of laser transfer, Well, for lasers,
Speaker 1: they did a test run of a tiny little radio
Speaker 1: controlled aircraft at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in two
Speaker 1: thousand three that that proved that the concept was solid. Um.
Speaker 1: They they totally flew that little thing around inside a
Speaker 1: building for a good while, right, and and I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm talking about it like it was silly,
Speaker 1: and it was a tiny bit silly, but it was
Speaker 1: really cool. I mean, like that was a laser powered airplane.
Speaker 1: That's awesome. It's a proof of concept, right, that's how
Speaker 1: these things start. Also also very cool. Um. Back in
Speaker 1: two thousand nine, there was a robot that climbed nine
Speaker 1: that's that's about half a mile or so UM cable
Speaker 1: that won some funding from NASA for going towards space
Speaker 1: elevator research because we need to be able to provide
Speaker 1: energy to climber, and that robot was laser powered. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: see that that makes a lot of sense too, because
Speaker 1: if you have a space elevator and you've got a
Speaker 1: robotic climber that needs to climb that cable, one way
Speaker 1: that you can reduce some of the weight is to
Speaker 1: remove the need for it to carry its own power,
Speaker 1: so able to provide power some other way than that
Speaker 1: would lighten the load of the space elevator uh that
Speaker 1: needs to climb up this this cable and thus in
Speaker 1: the long run, it will only take sixty four weeks.
Speaker 1: In well more importantly, it means that you are, it
Speaker 1: won't be let's it won't be as much of an
Speaker 1: energy drain, right, Yeah, ultimate expense will be less so
Speaker 1: uh so. Yeah, really cool ideas here, and the you know,
Speaker 1: the important thing to remember is that all of this stuff,
Speaker 1: it's all in the prototype stage, the experimental stage. Obviously,
Speaker 1: we've been harnessing solar power for ages now, so it's
Speaker 1: not like all of these are untested ideas. The ideas
Speaker 1: themselves have been tested. It's just being able to implement
Speaker 1: them on a large scale is still that's a big deal.
Speaker 1: I think I know the main thing that's holding them back,
Speaker 1: which is when you build a microwave power plant in
Speaker 1: some city two thousand, it inevitably gets blast by this
Speaker 1: thing from from above where you can see, and it
Speaker 1: sets half your city on fire. That does you know,
Speaker 1: we have to we have to crack that nut. We
Speaker 1: have to crack that nut, and once we do, then
Speaker 1: we're ready to install sim City and it will not
Speaker 1: require an online connection for you to play, even if
Speaker 1: you're playing a single player campaign, that's just connect part.
Speaker 1: Part of this brings up an important issue, which is
Speaker 1: the public perception of things like microwaves and laser beams,
Speaker 1: because when you say words like that to a lot
Speaker 1: of people, they think microwave. That's what I used to
Speaker 1: boil food. I go back to Tesla's death ray. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing, which is not how that would work. Yeah. Uh, Now,
Speaker 1: I can't conclusively rule out any risks because I don't
Speaker 1: really know, but I have not read anything that suggested
Speaker 1: there would be major risks of death rays from space
Speaker 1: if we were to use microwave transmission. Yeah, I death
Speaker 1: rays from space would make an awesome album title though.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, you know, the important thing I think
Speaker 1: to remember here is that these these methods are not
Speaker 1: science fiction. I mean, this is the stuff that is
Speaker 1: going to make a lot of the future, specifically stuff
Speaker 1: like space exploration really viable, at least in the near term,
Speaker 1: unless we come up with a way of creating you know,
Speaker 1: fusion reactors aboard distant um spacecraft and space stations. So
Speaker 1: I'm really excited about it. I think that it's got
Speaker 1: some interesting applications. I don't think necessarily that we're going
Speaker 1: to see it replace all the power cables that are
Speaker 1: here on Earth anytime soon, unless someone comes up with
Speaker 1: a brilliant means of transmitting power safely that I think
Speaker 1: that infrastructure is going to stick around for the foreseeable future.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's kind of so tied into everything we
Speaker 1: do right now. There are are infrastructure yeah right, I
Speaker 1: mean even now that we can transmit direct current more
Speaker 1: efficiently than alternating, well, our infrastructure is based off alternating currents.
Speaker 1: So while we have the technology to do it, it
Speaker 1: would mean having to replace a huge amount of stuff
Speaker 1: that's been established for you know, decades now. So uh so,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know that we're gonna see a
Speaker 1: change on our day to day lives in the near future,
Speaker 1: but it has incredible implications for the far future, particularly
Speaker 1: when we're talking about space, which we like to do
Speaker 1: on this podcast from time to time. So guys, if
Speaker 1: you have enjoyed this episode, go to FW thinking dot com.
Speaker 1: Do me a solid. Go there, because we've got blog posts,
Speaker 1: we've got the podcasts, we've got videos, we've got a
Speaker 1: lot of other stuff on that site that's all related
Speaker 1: to the future. It's related science and technology, and we
Speaker 1: want you to be a part of it. Go look
Speaker 1: at that and then also join in on the conversation.
Speaker 1: You can find us on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter,
Speaker 1: and Google Plus. We have to handle f W thinking.
Speaker 1: We look forward to hearing from you, and we'll talk
Speaker 1: to you again, Nellie Sen. For more on this topic
Speaker 1: and the future of technology, visit Forward Thinking dot Com
Speaker 1: Problem brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places