Comment by LB232323 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LB232323 | Hacker News Reader

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Because you have to start somewhere, if these technologists took these armchair physicist internet comments to heart, then what progress would they make?

Having worked for defense technology contractors in the area, these people want ideas. They want brand-new, sci-fi level ideas. These militaries and defense companies will literally hire sci-fi writers for inspiration.

It's not like SV where the primary focus is profit. It's less limited than that, these researches are on the cutting edge, it's where we received the internet itself. Remember, researchers in this league led the use and development of radio in its early stages for military reasons.

The truth is, in order to attract defense funds, you have to oversell an idea way, way down the line. Imaginative people with bold ideas of the future. It's beyond market trends, publicly-funded technological development is pure and machine-like. Blows any selfish, boyhood fantasies of the world's richest men out of the water.

This is optimist fantasy hyperbole. You can’t imagine physics into existence. And also the military is well known for spending on ideas that don’t even have a hope of working out whatsoever. We can use goat staring as a fine example of military thinking.

Having also worked for clearly larger and more respectable defence contractors, one of whom had a big stake in early radio, in an RF engineering capacity, this stuff is laughed off the table. No one really wants or needs this capability nor believes it will work. It’s fringe garbage.

Defence projects start with capabilities and then work out what you can deliver within those capabilities and client expectations.

Knowing when to tell the client they are lunatics rather than taking the money and dragging a project out while paying subcontractors is where things are divided in the market.

Exactly.

I worked on a huge project to beam power into the body, wirelessly, for an implanted blood pump /artificial heart.

It works for small amounts of power, like for pacemakers or nerve stimulators. But for any kind of real power, the power needed to move motors and do real work, it's just not feasible.

No matter what fancy math or physics you do, no matter if you work with a fancy tech firm that has decades of IP in this field and was founded to make this technology specifically (like wiitricity). None of those things changes the fundamental underlying physics. Energy in the EM spectrum decreases with the square of the distance, period.

If you need to beam a tenth of a watt one foot, that's possible, if you want to beam 10 watts 2 or 3 feet, that's possible (both with very large losses, 50% or more). Anything beyond this in distance or power is just wasting energy. It's like heating up 500 gallons of water, carrying it one mile and using the last 2 degrees of delta temperature left to do something. Instead it's far smarter to just take the 50 gallons of fuel one mile, heat the water there, and use its full energy.

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