Wireless electricity has been bounced around for years and it rarely ever comes to anything. Although I did see a recent demo where batteries could be remotely charged by placing them on a mat (which was like an induction loop) and things charged. So you basically take your phone, mp3 player, palmtop and put them on this mat to charge them. It's extremely early days for that sort of thing and the efficiency of transfer is probably so appalling that even the biggest global warming denying nut would think it was excessive.
I don't think you saw the TED video though.
The guy was powering a TV screen at two meters or so. Nothing like the induction loop chargers that we have today.
He also says that the efficiency can be 95% and I believe him because I got the impression that what he does, does not actually "radiate" energy. He is not constantly microwaving anyone or illuminating the space with photos, like routers do.
So if energy gets transfered only when another coil "resonates" with it or something, then you actually have a form of energy transfer minus all the friction of the cable.
(and of course the charging/decharging efficiency of batteries is pretty terrible)
I meant what it will end up as in the future I bet it won't stay mid range for long. On the plus side though, it might finally clear those god damn pigeons out of Trafalgar Square!
Which I think is quite far away, until they find a way to make you pay for it.
WiFi did not destroy Servers and cables (yet), and it took a really long time before we had 3G internet.
But this happens because it (data) can be encrypted and decrypted individually. Wireless power on the other hand is just that... power. It either is there or it isn't. Even if they hide "the frequency" or something, someone would still simply have to "scan the frequencies" until he finds the right one.
That said, yes, I do think it would be cool if electricity was a "human right" (tax funded. Perhaps subdisized by government owned oil rigs?) and we covered the planet with it.
Powered by nuclear reactors, lots and lots of nuclear reactors (who, dammit, were supposed to be "power too cheap to meter") whose byproducts then we can use to form plutonium bombs, which nuclear bombs we can then use to power Orion spaceships. So that electric cars *did* re-charge as you drove them and your gadgets out in the open *did* charge out of the thin air. And it would probably come mighty useful later when we will be having nanoclouds and such.
Compasses. We can do without. We have GPS which gives much more, and more accurate, information. And in this case it wouldn't even be running out of battery. In fact, we will also have GLONASS and GALILEO as well and as we form the inevitable One World Nation these systems are only going to become redundant to each other. (Random fact: Recently the EU launched EGNOS, that improves the already in existance US GPS signal with some satellites of its own)
Birds. Well. That's their problem.
Now that said. I like birds. I am a nature lover, who loves all this complexity and multitude of shapes, forms and colours evolution has created in millions of years. Destroying them is an act of vandalism and it would lead to a poorer and more miserable universe. So here is what I propose we do:
We save the templates of all these forms and shapes, and when our genetic engineering technology becomes a little bit better, we recreate every species that has gotten extinct. (including the dodo, the dinosaurs, and unicorns). Further on, we improve on them so that they can use the new mag-field lines. Or GPS (if a biology based receiver can be made). We might even stick some kind of distributed bio-A.I. there doing and something useful apart from controlling bird bodies (watching for fires perhaps?) but that's a bit too futuristic.
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What was the subject again?
