The largest remaining impediment to truly wireless information technology is the need to recharge. We already know how to send information wirelessly, and we’re getting better at it all the time. But sending power through the air remains problematic.<\/p>\n
There have been major advances in recent years. Collimated beams of microwave or infrared laser light can do a pretty decent job in the right conditions, and the field of wireless power transmission<\/a> is by now well understood.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, bad things can happen when people get in the way of a power beam. But it occurs to me that soon this may not be a problem.<\/p>\n We tend to think of people as fairly fast moving. The typical human can run across a room very quickly, and turn their gaze to stare into an unfortunately placed laser beam in literally the blink of an eye. So placing people and high powered energy beams in the same room would seem to be a bad idea.<\/p>\n But “fast” is relative. A blink of an eye is rarely faster than 1\/10th of a second, and typically takes three or four times longer. No matter how fast the fastest human can move, thanks to Moore’s Law<\/a> we can now easily track where people are in a room, and actively re-aim energy beams so that no human could ever “cross the streams” (to quote Dr. Egon Spengler).<\/p>\n I have no idea whether people are working seriously in this direction. But it’s clear, if you think about it a bit, that no “science fiction” level of technology is required.<\/p>\n We already have the technological capability to provide perfectly safe ubiquitous wireless power transmission. All that is needed is a little engineering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The largest remaining impediment to truly wireless information technology is the need to recharge. We already know how to send information wirelessly, and we’re getting better at it all the time. But sending power through the air remains problematic. There have been major advances in recent years. Collimated beams of microwave or infrared laser light … Continue reading “Don’t cross the streams”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14284"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14284"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14285,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14284\/revisions\/14285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}