Maybe so. It certainly opens the door for robots/exoskeletons and prosthetics. Of course still lots of details unknown. But certainly interesting stuff.
What makes you think batteries are nearing limits? There is a ton of battery technology with multiples higher densities than anything which is in mass production today. We are currently nowhere near the theoretical max chemical energy densities.
Energy density yes, plenty of things have higher energy density, but I'm also considering re-charge time, safety, durability, shelf-life, and production process/cost.
For instance: Hydrogen is the densest of the dense, but that shit explodes literally if you look at it wrong. It doesn't catch fire, it just explodes. Maybe they can figure something out but, I will not be an early adopter, I'll tell you that.
Aluminum-ion is dense as hell and charges super fast, but degrades quickly.
Human fat is super dense too, and fairly stable, but is slow to discharge so also a bad choice.
I know human fat is sort of a silly one, but, it's also why I brought up better energy efficiency, especially in the case of muscle fiber. Think about how much work a single human being can do with muscle fibers powered by a molecule that's created on the fly by burning fat. How efficient must those muscle fibers be? Can that efficiency be carried over to the artificial?
And I think that's at least one of the primary points of the artificial muscle research anyway. Fast, accurate, efficient. And yeah, that's great for robotics and prosthetics, but you could apply the same technology to just about anything mechanical. Most machines work via some form of pulling or pushing, when it comes down to it, including the machines that make the energy that power other machines. Almost all electricity we use, is steam power. Pushing hot air through a turbine, essentially.
Just realized I went on a tangent there so I'll STFU, whole point I guess being that efficiency gains are more easy to attain than better batteries. If you know of any new battery tech, drop it on me, I'm not invested in li-ion or anything.
Replies like that are great. I disagree on some of what you said but it's great we're doing so in a congenial manner. Opinion is opinion and you at least justified why you have it.
Poal could use a lot more like this.
Yeah, how about that, nobody got called niggerfaggot, still disagree, and both our egos are intact. That's called "having self-esteem," I believe.
Poal could use a thorough cleansing in general. I've got notes.
Can fiber optics put out IR light?
Imagine that? The strands of larger muscles are organized around fiber optic cables? "My bones are made of titanium, and my nanosynthetic polymer muscles are powered by light itself!"
Announced the overly boastful terminator.
I wonder if they can manufacture catalyst surfaces that convert sugar into heat or IR in the presence of light?
And that way the heat energy of sugar water can be used as a much more efficient transport of energy, while fiber optics are used to activate the catalyst?
(post is archived)