Brett, very simple concept( though complicated in reality) photons are generally considered massless, though it has been argued for years whether they have mass or not, but in the particle world they have no mass. light hits a solar cell and releases energy which is then sent to the physical storage facility(the battery) though I am quite rusty in this area and there may be new insight, it would be impossible to store ‘light’, instead as previously noted we converti light into a storable medium. photon>solar cell>battery>chemical where later we convert back chemical>electrical. perhaps in the future someone would have a way to do that but since you are in essence dealing with something which has no mass, how could you conceivably store it. a container to hold nothing…lol. remember e=mc2 that in the subatomic world it is possible to have energy without mass, and that mass can be converted to energy and vice versa. storing as such is a whole different concept though.

Ahhhh….I have an invention that does just that….been using it for years! I put on a light show every 4th of July….you should come see it.

Ron Komorowski
Inventor of Handi-Straps
www.handi-straps.com

Oo, I just remembered an idea of mine. Somehow (and it’s a big “somehow”!) trap light in a mirrored loop, like a donut. The problem is immediate: there are no mirrors that work 100%, so you’d lose light with every “bounce”, and it would quickly reduce to zero light and a little heat.

And glass isn’t completely transparent, so you’d lose light just by passing it through a glass torus (donut).

Haven’t they slowed down the speed of light a lot? I wonder if they’ll be able to slow it down to zero? That would trap them photons! Or slow it down to a few miles an hour, so it doesn’t bounce off the mirrors as frequently, so we wouldn’t lose as much. Hmm.

Shawn

i dont know about storeing light.

but how about this. you know how a magnifying glass will burn leaves and so on. why dont we have like roof top mounted magnifying glasses that heat water or like solution to a boiling point then use it to operate steam generators
or such
i`m aware of solar heating and so on but it doesnt magnify it.

robert, they have roof mounted solar water heaters which i saw a while back even on a cool day in seattle raised water to 105 degrees. the magnifying glass idea would be good except for the weight. they are however using parabolic reflectors at stirling energy systems out west to direct sunlight onto stirling engines to generate electricity. each unit generates approx 25kilowatts and they are planning to place thousands of these units in the desert to generate. technology is there but sometimes the adverse effects of cost and or weight and timing can make a difference. parabolic reflectors do the same as magnifying glass but less weight and easier to manufacture.

Shawn

you are still talking about reflective light light!

is it magnified ?i could not imagine the heat that a 100 foot magnifying glass would give off!

Shawn

i no more than typed the last words and hit send

then i realized what it would be like to grind a lens that size. da

well, strictly speaking using a magnifying glass and a parabolic reflector have the same effect. in the sense of the magnifying glass you are focusing the light the same way a parabolic reflector does, so the effect is the same. plus a 100 foot magnifying glass would weigh tons.

Shawn

yea but the space shuttle weighs tons to and we send it to space and bring it back!

there used to be a science project where you put a nail with wire wrapped around it and put it in salt water to make electric or something like that.
so the ocean is salt water right then why dont we use it to our advantage ?
who thinks that in our life time we`ll see this deep oil and gas drilling that they are doing hit a major pressure point in the inner earth and cause an unforeseen nightmare?

well now youre talking about electrochemical energy, to do that with the ocean you would still have to have a means of conduction and would require much more energy to obtain than what you would get out. you could use an orange as a battery, but the voltage is quite low you would have to use a lot of them to get a reasonable amount of energy. as for the drilling, the size of the earth compared to the size of the drilling would be like pulling a hair on a 500 pound man, chances are it wont make a difference. it is possible but highly unlikely that it would cause a major problem as we are only drilling the very surface of the earth, about like the top layer of our skin.

Good answers Shawn.
Ron, I assume you are joking, but if you realy have something like that forget handi-straps. You puting your efforts into the wrong invention :)

Shawn
i had seen where they were gonna see how deep they could drill. i`ll have to go back and see where i read this but i was like they are out of their minds.
compare the earth to a nerf football. you can pock a hole or 2 or 3 in it doesnt matter but “at some point” it will. i would love to know how many wells have been drilled in the US alone .
water gas oil. i bet it look like a porcupine

thanks, i majored in chemistry and physics, though quite rusty on much of it from not using it as much most of the knowledge is still there somewhere in my cluttered mind. though somewhere in the future perhaps technology could become good enough to find ways to extract that energy from the oceans. one way would be similar to a geothermal heat pump where you would take latent heat from the ocean and use it to heat homes or other things. since they use these systems in underground systems where temperatures remain relatively constant, it may work on oceans where temperatures vary enough that there is a constant supply of heat available.

I saw a fantastic underwater wave-energy generator in Popular Science recently. A bunch of pumps are anchored to the ocean floor (not the surface!) 100-200 feet from the shore. As waves move in and out the motion causes these pumps to operate. They simply pump seawater through a common pipe and up onto land. The immense pressure they create spins a turbine on land and generates a LOT of electricity. And the water is just returned to the ocean.

Since the pumps don’t float on the surface, it doesn’t matter the height of the waves, just the horizontal motion towards shore and away from shore. Brilliant!

yes, i was reading a while ago some city, and i cant remember where or many details was using small generators on water lines, i believe return lines and wastewater lines, that small amounts of electricity add up. there was also a show on the science channel or planet green where a couple of women made a generator and put it on a revolving door. if you have a lot of revolving doors might make a small difference too.

Hat’s off to Lene Hau for slowing light down to a crawl. Can’t really be useful for storing energy, like a battery. But what an incredible feat! Slowing light down to nearly a stop.
http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/02.18/light.html

robert, the earth has a surface area of over 500 million kilometers, it would take a lot of drills to make even a small dent in this size and the radius over 6000kilometers, means a diameter 12000kilometers. the deepest we can drill at present i believe is only several miles, not sure but not more than 10 and i am quite sure it is less. again you have to look at the total mass of the earth and the sheer size to get a good picture. the mass is about 6×10 ^24kg(or 13200000000000000000000000 pounds) would take a lot of drills and a lot of energy to make even a small dent in this. that would be like trying to drill a bunch of 1/1000 inch holes in a rock the size of a house. very unlikely it would have any impact. environmentally speaking more damage is done by the by products of the drilling such as runoff from the process, pollution from using the oil and other products, wastewater contamination, groundwater contamination, surface damage etc. than from the act of drilling.

Shawn

i have to say you have a vast amount on knowledge .

good to have you aboard.

but then again it wouldnt take much to pull the wool over my eyes lol.

then if all of this is right on how could they even begin to think we are close to being without
the natural resources that they claim?

Robert, I think “without” isn’t quite the right word in your last paragraph. I remember hearing that the center of the earth might be nearly completely made of gold. But the cost and time and resources to get to the center of the earth are beyond our ability, so that gold is off limits. Similar story with “resources” that are 20 miles deep in the earth: we might be able to get them, but the advantage of getting them is completely overshadowed by the cost of getting them. We’d wind up at a net loss. So those can’t really be considered resources.

very true brett, but the truth is we really dont know. there may be tons of oil under mountains, deep oceans, and other areas which would make reaching it impossible. i am sure this is the case but just our abilities are still limited. i would bet there are many billions of gallons of oil that we don’t know about nor have the ability to find.

Another aspect to this is that much of the area where oil may be, where there used to be oceans and dense jungles, are now either underwater or in very inaccessible areas. I know they are drilling for natural gas up in northern canada where the only way in is an ice road accessible a few months out of the year for transport of materials. it would be interesting to know just how much is under our earth which we dont know about.