the human body as power source
Gavin Bell
Friday, 09 March 2007 12:29 UTC
Lots of science fiction stories contain embedded computers, which must draw power from the host body. I’m not refering to internal batteries though kinetic devices like the Seiko Kinetic watches, which generate power via body movement are interesting. I’m interested in devices that convert energy directly from resources inside the body.
Some examples I’ve found pacemakers seem mainly to use embedded batteries it seems. Though this paper on kinetics shows that they may work for a pacemaker. Lastly biothermal technology seems to be viable.
What else is out there ?
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Replies
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How much power is there available? Food consumption for a day is about 12000 KJ. There are 86400 seconds in a day, so the mean power output (assuming no losses) will be about 140 W. Enough to illuminate a room. My guess is that generating power say by using an enzymatic generator (gluciose oxidase?) would ne pretty inefficient so we would only be extracting mW.
Stick with duracell!
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How about the ‘human as battery’ concept in Matrix? It was something I’d always sort of accepted without thinking until the last time I watched the movie.
Since humans cause The Matrix so many problems, wouldn’t it have made more sense for the machines to choose a more compliant species? I’m thinking electric eels might have been a better choice. All the same, I can’t imagine that the sum of power gained could have equaled the cost in power of maintaining The Matrix while keeping all those restless, troublesome human batteries alive, not to mention all the reboots.
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Oh, and why didn’t The Matrix just lobotomize the humans at birth? Maintaining The Matrix just seems a pointless effort all the way around.
Thus the entire irrational structure exists only to serve the plot.
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I think the humans-as-batteries element of The Matrix is Gothick rather thah Hard SF – all it has to do is be creepy and over-the-top – it doesn’t have to make sense.
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Well there were some cool scenes in the movies, no doubt, but once they started getting into the whys and hows in the second and third installments, the structure began to fall apart.
I like the idea. It’s just the humans-as-batteries concept that bothers me. I think they wrote that in at the behest of the marketing people who had sold a Duracell product placement.
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But it uses heat radiated by human as their power source. So, I was thinking, why use humans when they can create machines that can generate more heat!
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User removed
I am interested in been told if statins can also, among a large number of other action mechanisms, augment the Energy of internal human batteries, for instance activating respiratory chain in mitochondria.In other words what Matrix would do if treated with statins?
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It might downsize and reboot.
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