I heard an interesting question the other day: how many cups of sugar does it take to get to the moon? Apparently it was a reference to a Goofy movie, but, like any awesome engineer who encounters an innocent question, I set down to actually think it through. First I decided the question meant how many cups would it take to get a person to the moon, and assumed the sugar would be the fuel for a ship that was not much heavier than this person. Of course, I quickly ran into the problem that to actually use any of that sugar's energy, the ship would have to be loaded with it, and at that point I decided I didn't really feel like solving any differential equations, so I let it go.
The only place that thought process could go was, of course, teleportation. It made me run across a ramification of teleportation that had never really crossed my mind: teleportation should (in my little world, anyway) allow for not only the instantaneous transfer of matter, but also of energy. That might seem like kind of a side note to instantaneous travel--I mean, who cares when you can go on vacation one day and be back in time for breakfast the next? More importantly, what's the point in beaming energy to transport something, when the very utility of teleportation lies in instantaneous transport?
But let's assume that teleporting is not an inexpensive thing energy-wise, and the only things you really want to teleport are small. Or, as I once read in a Ben Bova novel (whose name escapes me now), what if teleporting a person involves killing the original and just making an exact copy at the destination (making that vacation a tad bit less appealing)? At this point, we can begin to unravel some interesting applications of instantaneous energy transfer--beyond obvious ones like laptops with no battery handicap and wireless gardening tools that don't suck.
Like the issue of transportation. We've found how to transport things in ways unimaginable slightly more than a century ago--cars, planes, spaceships--but even with all the amazing technology, the need to lug around the energy to power it continues to be a hassle. And if you haven't heard it as a problem for cars, just read anything about the potential for electric cars and the issue of battery size and weight almost always comes up. Not to mention that while the gasoline in cars themselves might not be as big of a problem (though it might be, I just haven't ever read as much), getting it to the cars requires a whole transportation chain whose dimensions are themselves enormous.
But I digress (I know, I know, but I've always wanted to use it). In my mind, being able to teleport this energy would solve this slew of problems. What do I mean by teleporting energy? I mean teleporting its release. In a car, it would look something like having the combustion reaction occur in some special chamber offsite (maybe at your house), and having the explosion itself be teleported to the pistons in a timed manner that allows the car to keep rolling. It would basically be the same in a plane.
In a spaceship, it could involve having a controlled rocket thrust on earth be teleported to the back of a ship to move it forward. The sudden decrease in weight requirements to actually transport things might make space travel a viable approach to transport. Not having done much of the background math, I am still well aware that a major chunk of fuel on a spaceship is consumed just to transport the rest of the fuel which is needed to push the things of interest up. With the same amount of fuel, then, a whole slew of new things could be transported.
In another similar sense, teleported energy could allow for daylight during the night (just teleport the suns rays), or for strong light on other planets. It may also have more sinister uses (think: explode a bomb in one place, and transfer that energy to another), but the application would still be cool. And since in my world those teleportation devices themselves would be energy-intensive, they could basically self power.
Now, most of this discussion relies of a number of assumptions about how teleportation would work and what it could and couldn't do. It also sort of twists the bounds of pure energy being teleported versus mass (after all, one could argue that teleporting the explosion for a car engine just involves teleporting expanding gas particles). But as a concept, I think it's worth exploring.
Plus, it makes the question posed at the beginning much easier to answer: at 30% efficiency of the engine, with a 70 kg person (and thus ship), assuming reaching escape velocity is all the energy it takes (who cares about a controlled landing?), that the sugar is pure sucrose, and that all that energy of combustion (with efficiency loss) would be teleported in, it would take 2577 cups of sugar to get to the moon. Three and a half cups was a bit off, but, then again, who knows what could happen with teleportation?
No comments:
Post a Comment