Sunday, September 19, 2010
Break?
Blog activity is low, and I think it may be a good idea to take a break until next semester. Opinions?
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Testing Technology: Hyperspeed Transportation
I think just about everyone has at one point in time wished they could get somewhere faster. How fast will we be able to go places? What is the best form of extremely fast transportation? In this topic we can look at multiple options.
Let's start smaller first. How fast could we get cars to go? The first challenge would be obtaining as much energy as possible in a car without building an extremely large engine. This is tough, so I think we need to rely on multiple resources.
We need to use a combination of fossil fuels, solar power, wind power, hydroelectric, and other forms of fuel. If we could have a neverending supply of renewable energy going into the car's battery/engine, we could use a lot more energy for a longer amount of time.
With this in mind, we could get a car to go 300 mph if we wanted to. Then there's dealing with friction. As we increase the speed, we have to make sure a car doesn't overheat and that the g forces do not rip a person's face off. That wouldn't be good.
For the overheating, I think we need to have the hydroelectric power also act as a cooling agent. The water would help cool the engine. Also that wind powering the car could cool it. Just throwing out some ideas for keeping the engine cool.
To control the g forces, we pressurize the air in the car, sort of like they do in a plane. With really fast "hyperspeed" cars, we need to build them more like airplanes, but as smaller personal ground jets. Cars would be more like a jet than a car.
Another option for really fast transportation would be to have a very extensive network of super fast trains. It would be sort of like the road system we have today. A few mainlines of super speed trains branch out into smaller branches with even smaller branches of trains. These trains could get away with having much larger engines and would probably be allowed to pick up much more speed than cars, but the trains are a form of public transportation, and are required to make stops at certain areas, while the cars are not.
What about teleportation? If we built teleportation pads at thousands of locations all over the globe, then it would be the ultimate fast way to get somewhere. The problem with that idea would be that the energy that the people were turned into while teleporting could collide, causing a major problem. I think that form of transportation, although the fastest, is unsafe in many ways.
What if we gave everyone a jetpack (provided they earn their jetpack license)? Traffic would be a lot easier to avoid. However, it is not necessarily very fast transportation, and the amount of fuel necessary to power a useful jetpack is quite large. That is a problem, and we can't put a lot of fuel into it without making it far too heavy to be propelled in the air.
Those are just a few options. What do you think will become the fastest form of transportation?
Let's start smaller first. How fast could we get cars to go? The first challenge would be obtaining as much energy as possible in a car without building an extremely large engine. This is tough, so I think we need to rely on multiple resources.
We need to use a combination of fossil fuels, solar power, wind power, hydroelectric, and other forms of fuel. If we could have a neverending supply of renewable energy going into the car's battery/engine, we could use a lot more energy for a longer amount of time.
With this in mind, we could get a car to go 300 mph if we wanted to. Then there's dealing with friction. As we increase the speed, we have to make sure a car doesn't overheat and that the g forces do not rip a person's face off. That wouldn't be good.
For the overheating, I think we need to have the hydroelectric power also act as a cooling agent. The water would help cool the engine. Also that wind powering the car could cool it. Just throwing out some ideas for keeping the engine cool.
To control the g forces, we pressurize the air in the car, sort of like they do in a plane. With really fast "hyperspeed" cars, we need to build them more like airplanes, but as smaller personal ground jets. Cars would be more like a jet than a car.
Another option for really fast transportation would be to have a very extensive network of super fast trains. It would be sort of like the road system we have today. A few mainlines of super speed trains branch out into smaller branches with even smaller branches of trains. These trains could get away with having much larger engines and would probably be allowed to pick up much more speed than cars, but the trains are a form of public transportation, and are required to make stops at certain areas, while the cars are not.
What about teleportation? If we built teleportation pads at thousands of locations all over the globe, then it would be the ultimate fast way to get somewhere. The problem with that idea would be that the energy that the people were turned into while teleporting could collide, causing a major problem. I think that form of transportation, although the fastest, is unsafe in many ways.
What if we gave everyone a jetpack (provided they earn their jetpack license)? Traffic would be a lot easier to avoid. However, it is not necessarily very fast transportation, and the amount of fuel necessary to power a useful jetpack is quite large. That is a problem, and we can't put a lot of fuel into it without making it far too heavy to be propelled in the air.
Those are just a few options. What do you think will become the fastest form of transportation?
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