STEM and Politics

When people usually talk about electricity, they talk usually about fossil fuels and climate change, or renewable sources like Solar, Wind, and Nuclear. In this post, I'm not going to focus on anything like that. Instead, in this series, I will focus on wacky things, like running, and the futuristic, like fusion. (TL;DR tips: read only the bold.) RUNNING Believe it or not, running is more efficient than you think. A 150-pound person running at 6 miles per hour will burn 681 calories an hour. That person is a  792 milliwatt  generator,  which, if that person runs for one hour, would cost 0.01 cents. If that person were to run a hundred hours a year, it would be one cent of extra cash. That doesn't seem like much? How about all marathons? I will assume that 500 thousand people run every year and that there is an equal number of men and women, to keep things simple. (Also that the average person is 170 pounds.) Then, there are more than 1.6 billion calories, e...

NOTE: Read Part 1 before you read this. In the last post, I discussed how our progress is growing at an exponential rate. This means the progress of the future is going to be faster than it is now. Now, is this world going to be good or bad? People are generally pessimistic when it comes to new technology. Also, they underestimate the pace of it. If you told someone in the 1970s that there would be a collection of all of human progress and more in just 40 years, they'd probably just think you were crazy. Then teleport them 40 years into the future, and they would find out that you were right all along. Then you can tell them about digital video games, AI being as smart as 4-year-olds, machines that can “learn” from themselves, and Virtual Reality. Compare this with progress between 1930 and 1970. Yes, nuclear bombs were invented and used, but the nuclear bombs themselves weren't as powerful as today's. And that leads us to the future. If the progress from 1977 to 2...