This image from Terminator II has somehow been etched into my sole surviving synapse with respect to mechanical, machine and computer evolution re the deeper subject of "The rise of the machines".
I have little doubt that this will actually be a pretty severe problem at some point of proceedings based on what Google and META have been getting up to, if we even survive as a species that is....
When I cast my mind's eye back to my own career start in Electronic Engineering to where we are today, our progress since 1969 is really nothing short of phenomenal.
Staggering even, in fact!
The part that computers had to play in my career has also been quite the high jacking that dragged me away from Pure Electronics and into the Computer side as it pertained to how businesses run and operate the infuriating things.
The electronics inside of everything is in truth what the game changer was in computing though..
Computer technology has also impacted aircraft and motor vehicle design and operation while super-conductors and associated rare earth materials have been used to make better electric motors and battery technology to store electrical energy which has also undergone quite the revolution of change of late and is currently undergoing somewhat of an 18th century industrial revolution of sorts itself.
Battery technology has been fairly static for roughly 3000 years or so, with not much progress relative to how much electronics has changed since the first Sony transistor was made in the 1950's that is.
I myself bought my first electric car back in 2016 and I will not go back to Diesel, Gasoline or Hydrogen powered vehicles ever and the reason for this is pretty simple - instant motor response!
Mechanical engines also break too easily and are bad chemical agents to our atmosphere in any event.
If I had my way I would ban them all just for these mechanical failings alone.
Once you experience the instant response of electric motors nothing else can quench that adrenaline rush from the instant response that modern electric motors deliver!
Electrical power and safe battery technology that is absent the temperature spikes lithium brings with it to the table is not really a viable option for us either, yet we have plunged into this dangerous option eyes wide shut, regardless of risk.
Several Boeing 787 series aircraft have been lost due entirely to lithium cells catching fire and we even had Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphones banned from international or domestic travel on all major airlines when they caused some serious incidents due to the defective Lithium cells that they used a few years ago.
LG Chem and General motors tried to water cool lithium battery packs in the Chevrolet Bolt EV but ended up recalling and replacing all of that stuff at the cost of billions of dollars after a few were lost due to this same problem, I myself am still waiting for mine to arrive and have been since December 2021.
We seem to make the same mistake over and over again before we finally get it too with regards to risks and issues a technology brings with it.
We have the ability to use polymer engineering to build batteries and such that we need that is not damaging to our environment and which has the good properties of lithium with the bad temperature spike problems engineered right out.
The problem is we cannot go from where we currently are to there in the flash of an eye.
We have to bridge from today to get to tomorrow, with a solid workable plan to execute on to boot.
The costs of the exotic Polymers is also an issue that mass production will solve at scale but you have to start small somewhere first to get to this goal..
Some of us are there already by stubborn choice but for the whole planet this is probably going to be a 100 year journey as it is not feasible for nine billion human beings to do the conversion to electric all at once in such a short span of time.
The tree hugger left wing Marxist nut jobs who think we can are totally deranged btw.
The first order of business is that power storage (batteries) technology has to be way better than it currently is.
Our current battery technology is surprisingly mere 19th century old hat level type ancient technology crap and not suitable for the task.
We also need to develop electrically powered vehicles that do not use roads while we are at it.
We need them to float in the air on an air or magnetic levitation cushion and not use rubber tires that touch a road surface made from tar products.
Mag-lev roads everywhere are not feasible and will itself pollute the entire planet just attempting to build such things.
Mag-lev trains are definitely the way forward for mass transportation of goods from shipping ports to all major destinations between the coasts.
In an ideal world a cross between an Airship that uses electric motors or an electric drone type vehicle that flies is probably what we will end up with.
Access to buildings in a modern city is going to be some sort of mag-lev rail transportation system or via airborne drone pods on the roof of buildings.
Making millions of miles of roads is actually a pretty stupid idea.
Wheeled transportation will not end either, just for mainstream everyday use and limited to and around the city buildings that the goods they need are going to.
Wheeled Tractors will still need to plow and cultivate land for now as well.
Harvesting will need wheeled vehicles as well, as blowing food all over the place with electric propeller blades will cause significant product loss etc.
Power transmission without loss wirelessly also needs some time, money and technology R&D to bring it up to being suitable for the task expected of it.
The electric motors themselves are currently pretty awesome if you look at the stuff in them and the way they are designed, its the power storage and transmission of power to the vehicle that is the area that is letting us down badly that we need to work on.
Nicola Tesla figured out how to transmit power to road and air vehicles circa 1908 but he sadly took these secrets with him to the grave.
Having a power store on such vehicles for about an hour's worth of energy at full load is a good backup for transmitted power schemas that fail and will alleviate the weight of such batteries but even this technology can be drastically improved with Polymer engineering efforts.
There is a company in Israel called Stordot and a few guys here in the USA who are working away on these aspects who have had major breakthroughs.
In fact we can use Stordot technology today to make things significantly cheaper with a Silicon-Lithium Hybrid architecture at the anode of a cell.
The answer to electric power storage cells is not lithium and in any event we need mountains of that shit for the vast sea of unwell minds that roam out there with stupid ideas of all out Marxist fantasy that will never and can never work parked in the silly little heads, who urgently need to consume lithium just to remain psychologically stable.
We sadly need to focus the lithium for use on these specimen of unsound mind!
StoreDot has developed a new lithium-ion battery technology it calls eXtreme Fast Charging (XFC) that will enable your average EV to charge in 5-10 minutes flat (sic).
At the heart of it is a silicon-dominated anode that can accept lithium ions much faster than a graphite anode (thanks to silicon’s lower resistance) but controls the tendency of silicon to swell when it accepts those ions that would otherwise generate damaging mechanical forces inside the battery.
The Israeli start-up is backed by investors from Samsung, Daimler, BP and TDK and has raised about $130 million in capital, owns around 100 patents and has 35 Professors in its team of 120 people, with gurus in areas including materials science, organic chemistry and electro-chemistry and they are all Polymer engineering gods.
The number of PhD's in Stordot provides a level of research power equivalent to two faculties at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all focused on the problem of how to charge a battery quickly and safely.
Established lithium-ion battery chemistry relies on graphite’s ability to store large numbers of lithium ions in an ordered manner within a lattice structure of the anode, to build up charge in the cell.
However, graphite’s high resistance makes this process too slow to support a very high charging rate.
If the charge rate is too high it causes either the metallization of Lithium, plating or the formation of dendrites, which are simply different terms for the same basic problem.
You cannot push in many of these ions very quickly because they start to build up at the entrance into the graphite lattice.
And with the high pressure and heat you get the lethal lithium metal dendrites.
They are like nails – they puncture holes through the separator, create electrical shorts and can trigger a chain of explosions.
Using silicon in the anode avoids this problem but brings other issues.
Number one is that it expands like a balloon, around 300%, when you insert the ion, so building a host matrix that holds the silicon in place and doesn’t allow it to expand too much is the actual key to fast charging.
StoreDot’s solution is to use nanoscale silicon particles, which provide much more surface area to hold lithium ions and protect the silicon particles by coating them with organic compounds that create a stable matrix to limit the swelling.
Getting this formulation right is very complex, so the company uses AI (Artificial Idiots or Automated Idiots).
There are many permutations and possibilities for factors such as the size of the particles, the kinds of additives to use and how much pressure to apply, all of which affect whether the formulation will be successful.
AI and machine learning help Stordot to find the optimal formulation for the right cell chemistry.
StoreDot has demonstrated the XFC technology in a UAV, a phone and a scooter, and has developed both cylindrical and pouch cells, so their Polymer Engineering propeller heads are very confident that it works pretty well.
Stordot are shipping 30Ah cells in a form factor suitable for vehicles, and these are pouch cells, but they are also demonstrating the technology in cylindrical cells such as the 4680 from Tesla, and other such cell storage formats.
The question is how to scale it up, how to take it into a factory with their joint venture with EVE Energy in China is showing, and how to make sure it will be repeatable, high quality and cost-effective process that makes a high quality and safe product.
I consider myself a pioneer of these new age electric power transmission and storage challenges and have already converted all of my road vehicles to electric power doing my bit to add weight to this direction we should have taken in 1920.
I am now working on the electric aircraft and boats part of this equation as well.
Electric submarines are not new and have been around for a very long time already and the French have had quite a few of these since the 1960's.
There are other challenges with Marine electric motors though that make that area quite fascinating which we will not go into here.
In an ideal world of modern superconductors there is no reason why we cannot use Top secret Military anti-grav technology to build cities that float in the sky either by the way.
The cool thing with this is that these cities could transport themselves to where the weather is always primo fantastico.
On the ground the flaura and fauna can do their thing, unfettered by man.
Food for these city residents will be grown and raised on the ground in high tech farming operations and cities will go to the food to stock up, not the other way around.
Daily consumables can go to where these cities are parking via airships built to transport huge quantities of daily consumables etc.
Sewage and waste materials can also be dealt with in a far better manner with the city going to the sewage dump or some sewage pod transportation system backup from the city to the sewerage plants servicing the need either way.
Actually, humans need to photosynthesize like plants instead of consuming biomass to survive.
I need to speak to the Grand Architect about that glaring faux-pas!
Such anti-grav based Sci-Fi fantasy can be delivered using this sort of technology today if we wanted it to.
The only problem with such schemas is the planet can sadly only really cater to around 500 million people and not the 9 Billion it is currently housing.
Things on this planet are definitely going to change as a result of these sorts of technologies but our populations also have to dwindle to manageable levels.
There will eventually be two population types that come out of it, ground dwellers and floating city dwellers.
In the event of natural disasters these cities can house the ground dwellers on a very temporary basis and when the disaster event is over put them back on the ground.
Such city engineering schemas have long been a fantasy project of mine with focus on how water and sewage is dealt with in particular - this all serves to challenge me greatly along with my online chess antics at Gameknot.com.
These cities could also be capable of space travel if required with force fields keeping air and gasses in a bubble around the city that itself would be a polymer engineering marvel and major miracle of modern engineering.
I suspect fairly strongly that this level of technology was reached Aeons ago by more advanced races who have since gone on to find other planets to live on and who just left without a trace when this planet itself was not fit to support life for a span of time for whatever reason that befell the planet.
I do believe this happens from time to time as planets change orbits and their position around the sun.
There is strong evidence from our own past 6000 years of recorded history to backup the fact that our measured years have been longer and shorter than they are now.
That is the time it took for the planet to wonder around the sun in a full cycle.
Up to around 700 BC all our records indicated a 360 day trip around the sun and I have spent most of my life confirming this fact.
We also know that Mars, Venus and Jupiter were players in a saga that drastically impacted life on Earth twice in 3700 BC with a 52 year interval and six to eight times circa 800 BC in 12 year intervals.
The ancient Persian year was composed of 360 days or twelve months of thirty days each.
In the seventh century five “Gatha days” were suddenly added to the calendar.
In the Bundahis, a sacred book of the Persians, the 180 successive appearances of the sun from the winter solstice to the summer solstice and from the summer solstice to the next winter solstice are described in these words:
“There are a hundred and eighty apertures (“rogin”) in the east, and a hundred and eighty in the west ... and the sun, every day, comes in through an aperture, and goes out through an aperture.... It comes back to Varak, in three hundred and sixty days and five Gatha days.”
Five Gatha days made their appearance in roughly 747 BC per our records but they were changing and the mathematicians were much vexed by these changes.
Babylonians were even more precise and recorded:
"Thus the month which was equal to thirty days changed to thirty-six and then to twenty-nine and a half days.
The last change was simultaneous with the change of the terrestrial orbit to one of 365¼ days’ duration sometime between 800 BC and 747 BC and they assigned the cause to the slight change of orbits of the heavenly bodies after Mars trod on the Earth's orbit due to an earlier planetary collision between Mars and Venus.
Babylonians did not make mistakes and we have their clay tablets with the precise math on them to verify these facts.
On the other side of the World another Civilization then unknown to the Europeans had even more precise and astounding calendars with vastly better math and a geared counting system that also aligned with a 360 day year.
They too changed their calendar, also between 800 BC and 748 BC only they described exactly what the reason for this was and it all began with Jupiter expelling Venus, which then collided with Mars and then Mars roamed too close to the Earth between 800 BC and 747 BC in 12 year interludes before both Mars and Venus settled in orbits they now have and the threat to the Earth was averted.
They also had records of similar heavenly dramas from a period nearly 1 million years ago when a wondering Rogue planet collided with the planet Tiamat to produce the asteroid belt.
Our history too is littered with these tales and events that were passed down from generation to generation.
The Atlantean civilization that occupied the Earth in those days seem to have had technologies way beyond what even we have in our modern era if the stories that survived them are to be believed as real historical documents instead of stories of ancient "Myth".
Already a great deal of so called "Myth" has been verified as cold hard fact and as the years roll on I have no doubt it will all be verified as fact.
We will then rue our miscalculation and conduct a post mortem that Religion and Academia will wear the blame for.
The challenge is I wonder if we will work it all out before the next heavenly changes bring catastrophic changes to our planet.
The machines might.......
Sadly, I doubt that we will be able to do this unless we get our shit together in a pretty spectacular manner and given our observed behavior traits, especially since 2001, this is sadly most unlikely.
The machines will therefore probably be our only surviving legacy...
I will drink to the rise of the machines then as I think that ultimately the human race is run and we did not win!!
So here is to building them machines real good then!
Maybe they can come up with immortal battery cells with infinite energy?