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Biological organisms have quite a lot of energy stored in a small amount of space. A lot of inventions were based on nature, e.g. wings for flying. Who knows,
by Aardwolf 14y ago
Biological organisms have quite a lot of energy stored in a small amount of space.
A lot of inventions were based on nature, e.g. wings for flying. Who knows, one day maybe a battery invention will also be based on biology.
- dpark 14y agoBiological organisms aren't batteries. We manage to store lots of energy by storing it chemically. Internal combustion engines are already based on this. I burn fats, proteins, and carbohydrates for energy. My car burns gasoline. The issue is that we want to get away from that design, because it's not particularly sustainable. If we could come up with a reasonably-efficient way to produce gasoline (or an equivalent) in a renewable way, that would be wonderful, but it wouldn't be a battery.
- dspeyer 14y agoUsing something like cytochrome c reductase to turn hydrocarbons (bio- or geo-) into electricity and then into motion would be a big efficiency improvement over our current heat engines. Still, it's only half the problem. We also want an efficient and compact way to turn electricity into energy-dense chemicals. AFAIK, that doesn't exist in nature; we'd have to start from scratch.