Be careful..even someone on the board denied me the opportunity to post in the physics section..another reply called me a troll!

http://peakoil.com/alternative-energy/plasma-battery-inventors-disappearing-regularly

Maybe because everything in that and the referenced documents were fraudulent. The few people calling them legit are the ones trying to make money. The rest understand science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Meyer's_water_fuel_cell

 

I have a few tube driven guitar amps that use step-up transformers, but that's probably not a common household item unless you have a guitarist in the house.

It's a common household device here since I am a guitarist but I'm not yet ready to dismantle my amplifiers just yet out of mere curiosity!

 

Buy solar panels and harvest the energy from a fusion reactor 92,960,000 miles away.

I'm already playing around with that and it's pretty good but not good enough just yet in relation to our current technology, panel wise. There has got to be a more efficient way to collect what is coming from that fusion reactor so many miles away!

 

The energy harvesting question gets asked with some regularity. Some energy can be harvested, but the process is inefficient and it produces so little power that it is hard to figure out what to do with it once you have actually gone to the trouble of collecting it.

A typical weak signal from a distant radio station might have a power level of -110 dBm. If you are not familiar with that unit, it stands for Decibels with respect to 1 milliwatt. In this case the incoming power is 11, count 'em eleven, orders of magnitude smaller than a milliwatt. That's 10^-14 watts or 10 femtowatts. Another way to look at it is that it would take 100 billion harvesters in parallel to make a milliwatt. That's a whole lotta solderin'

I get what you are saying, but what I did this morning with a single germanium diode hooked up to a homemade digital TV antenna was far better than that and I thought about the results all day while at work. When I came home after work I improved on the output nearly 100 fold! I was initially researching chemical ways to improve upon it but in the course of doing so I thought about the so called quackery in relation to the Hutchison effect and ended up wandering into his site. It helped me quite a bit and something he was doing boosted the output of my idea to a mouth dropping level on such a small scale. It reminded me of something Tesla once said about vibrations being the key. At any rate, after work I tested some of my ideas formulated while I was working and took them outside. I was not only capturing RF or Electromagnetic energy but also sunlight coupled with the RF waves at an incredibly larger level! Still too miniscule to be of any serious use but hey, it was only one diode being utilized to test ideas. I was totally impressed with the results! So I thought about the HAARP project and how the wires are arranged up there in Alaska and am planning to build a similar array on a smaller scale and see what happens in relation to voltage when I hook up the single germanium diode to it when time permits.

 

To harvest the amount of energy that an AA cell holds you'd probably have to be sitting in the dish of a powerful radar transmitter for hours on end . Of course, you wouldn't survive to enjoy the fruits of your labour .

I respectfully disagree.

 

We'll just get oil from Titan when the earths reserves run out.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20080213.html

Well, you and I would have to take apart one hell of a lot of smoke detectors in order send our now affordable drones to Titan so we can bring the oil back to earth for useful purposes!

 

Impotent govts? Ours is becoming less impotent everyday. They've already erased our border, seized control over a large chunk of the U.S. economy, just this week seized control over the internet, and they are actively buying and banning ammunition so that the 2nd amendment won't matter anymore.

Out government is VERY impotent when it comes to what the founders intended and "UP'holding the constitution. I'd say they are impotent as hell in relation to that!

 

Look at who owns a large portion of the solar power industry?

It's the oil industry.

They aren't dumb. Ya think when their current energy product runs out, they're just going to shrivel up and die? No, they'll simply begin selling another energy product.

True. At an exorbitant price as well. But the beauty of it all is that we have this information highway at our fingertips in order to figure out that which has been suppressed! Oh wait, what just transpired in relation to the internet over in D.C.? Hmmm....

 

I respectfully disagree.

A tiny piece of piezoelectric can generate thousands of volts..that's how your cigarette lighter works, just converting mechanical energy to high voltage DC. Even a potato with two different nails can beat your Ge diode.
A toy pinwheel can do as well coupled to a coil and magnets on the pinwheel blades, or drops of water on a tiny waterwheel.
If you are getting high voltages(>1.6V) from a Ge diode, then it is likely not capable of delivering any of usable energy, just creating a voltage potential with no current to back it up.
On the other hand if you are getting even a LED to light steady, really think above moving to another place, if you care at all about passing on your genes to the next generation.

 

Maybe because everything in that and the referenced documents were fraudulent. The few people calling them legit are the ones trying to make money. The rest understand science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Meyer's_water_fuel_cell

The earth is flat... everyone knows that! And there are of course sea monsters that eat ships with one gulp but if you are lucky enough to escape the monsters you will surely die when you hit the waterfall at the end of the ocean! What we know now and what we claim are axioms may not be. Remember, Einstein was full of it until he ultimately proved his point and he flunked out of math because the teachers of the day were wrong! John Lennon flunked out of music school and went on to found a band that changed the world, for better or worse depending upon individual outlook. I'm a conservative at heart but at the same time I dream and in dreams everything is possible. So the main question is this, how do some people turn dreams into realities that change the course of history when all the while they are told that it isn't possible? I'm not sure, but it seems to me tenacity, curiosity and belief in what you are doing (or attempting to do) plays a major part in it.

 

A tiny piece of piezoelectric can generate thousands of volts..that's how your cigarette lighter works, just converting mechanical energy to high voltage DC. Even a potato with two different nails can beat your Ge diode.
A toy pinwheel can do as well coupled to a coil and magnets on the pinwheel blades, or drops of water on a tiny waterwheel.
If you are getting high voltages(>1.6V) from a Ge diode, then it is likely not capable of delivering any of usable energy, just creating a voltage potential with no current to back it up.
On the other hand if you are getting even a LED to light steady, really think above moving to another place, if you care at all about passing on your genes to the next generation.

I'm not sure about thousands of volts and I'd rather eat the potato in order to charge my internal electrical system as opposed to denying myself the power which my body needs to sustain itself. At the same time it is important to play around with what happens to be available somewhat cheaply in an attempt to figure things out. Salt water and two differing metals will light an LED (and also produce chlorine gas which is harmful) but I can eat a potato and utilize the energy more efficiently. You seem to chastise me for testing a simple (non edible mind you) diode. Why? If I can do something and prove something on a small scale what could happen if I found a way to make the non edible diode usable in parallel or series somehow? There is potential out there and though I may not be the one to figure it out at least I have the curiosity to try with the limited time available to me. I feel that it is counterproductive to attempt to make my efforts seem silly in a forum that exists to help people learn about things and which encourages others to experiment on their own in order to find out for themselves what works and doesn't work. My life was once saved from someone else's accident when the petri dish was placed on a window sill and in the process became contaminated with a certain mold we now know as penicillin. Never make fun of fools such as I because often the fools in the midst of curiosity can change the world through happy accidents like the poorly placed petri dish.

 

Political Thread Morph Warning!

 

So the main question is this, how do some people turn dreams into realities that change the course of history when all the while they are told that it isn't possible? I'm not sure, but it seems to me tenacity, curiosity and belief in what you are doing (or attempting to do) plays a major part in it.

They do it by hard work and standing on the shoulders of giants to see what's been missing to make what they see possible. Simply tilting at windmills with tenacity, curiosity and belief won't get you anything but ridicule and exhaustion. Nobody is saying that everything has been invented or all laws of science are known but any new discovery must account for past theories that were not wrong just incomplete. The fraudulent energy schemes are just windmills and most of the harvesting schemes are pipe-dreams.

 

Political Thread Morph Warning!

Hehehe... we may be able to find a way to generate stray power from the political positive and negative outlooks on either side of the coin if we can find the proper electrolyte!

 

They do it by hard work and standing on the shoulders of giants to see what's been missing to make what they see possible. Simply tilting at windmills with tenacity, curiosity and belief won't get you anything but ridicule and exhaustion. Nobody is saying that everything has been invented or all laws of science are known but any new discovery must account for past theories that were not wrong just incomplete. The fraudulent energy schemes are just windmills and most of the harvesting schemes are pipe-dreams.

Guess I'm still relating to Don Quixote and I don't see myself not relating until I'm dead and buried.

 

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Hamlet Hamlet Act 1

 

"Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition."
Isaac Asimov

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Hamlet Hamlet Act 1

Thank goodness the natural philosophy of Shakespeare's age is not today's science. You can reason all you want but 5 plus 7 will always equal 12.

 

We'll just get oil from Titan when the earths reserves run out.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20080213.html

Excellent article nsaspook... I'm a big fan of the cassini mission...

 

There has got to be a more efficient way to collect what is coming from that fusion reactor so many miles away!

Solar cooker (water/food at focus of parabolic reflector)?

 

The thread is kindof political. Since the commercial industry is not exploiting it, the arguments are suppression of innovation, and disappearance of scientists.

Of course, on behalf of "political" powers. Or is it?
"Resisting" common ways of reasoning also is political- its a call to step out from what we know as normal.

Put it more blatant- anyone who doesnt applaude to the at times schizophrenic ideas (lacking scientific reasoning), is a troll and supressor.

Oh well, I saw "Meyer" again...

What is all this nonsense about free energy and novel ways of harvesting it?