Our civilizational message in a bottle, the Voyager Records and Pioneer Plaques will outlive their power sources by an incomprehensible amount. The record is estimated to survive for more than a billion years. The power source for less than 40 before it is rendered unusable.<p>The message will travel onwards forever, cloaked in dark, dashing the hopes of any recovery. Of bringing joy to alien beings. Of giving them certainty that they certainly weren't alone in the universe at some point in their past.<p>What if we could create something, some undefined means to generate a pulse ever X years for more than a billion years? Is it possible to make a billion year battery? Oxford's Electric Bell at a cosmic time scale? Could human ingenuity create a device that would make our next message in a bottle more discoverable for those beings who do not exist yet?<p>Is it possible for humanity, with current technology and scientific knowledge, to transcend its cradle and create something that functions for billions of years?
Discussion about this topic was posted/flagged yesterday, it was a different website.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24324684" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24324684</a><p>Discussion on reddit about this topic from 3 days ago with 350+ comments.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/iiedk4/energy_firm_says_its_nuclearwaste_fueled_diamond/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/iiedk4/energy_f...</a>
eevblog had a good video about this product: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzV_uzSTCTM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzV_uzSTCTM</a>
So the first problem is that power output is very low.
But the second problem is worse:<p>You cannot turn this power source off.<p>At 7% efficiency, if you had a 1W battery, it would dissipate somewhere around 13W of heat. If your smartphone needs 5W then it would dissipate somewhere around 65W of heat. Constantly.<p>Radioactive decay doesn't turn off.
Radioactive batteries are certainly possible (and some exist). Achieving power levels and safety requirements for everyday use is the difficulty.<p>I realized some years ago it would be possible to make rechargable hafnium batteries. They would be awesome -- but you have to figure out a highly effcient means of converting gamma rays into electricity.
Does not says anything about power levels?<p>There is debunking
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDFlV0OEK5E" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDFlV0OEK5E</a>
it saying that power level are impractical for anything large, therefore it is pipe dream in regards to removing all the nuclear waste.
Fun to think of a future civilization 1000 years from now getting an alert to change a battery, and then all the effort it would take them to look through ancient documents to figure out the process :)
I wonder if this is non-radioactive enough to be sealed inside the human body for things like a brain/computer interface. Implant the electrodes + transmitter inside the skull and seal it up, then have a receiver device outside the skull receive and interpret the signals to control things.<p>Hard part would be making it safe enough and just how many people would need something bad enough to do literal brain surgery for such a thing.
TLDR (kind of)<p>* Using alpha/beta decay in a diamond structure to generate electricity in the battery<p>* Utilizing nuclear waste in the process<p>* They say the battery is safe for civil use (e.g. not limited to military/industrial use)<p>* About the same price as a LiIon battery for a Tesla (~$9K)<p>* However, it recharges itself and shall last for decades !<p>* They want to do a pay as you go sales, but also extract revenue for the utilization of nuclear waste.<p>* Done with the PoC. Doing a commercial prototype. Outlook is ~2y time to market.<p>* Targeting the UPS market at big cloud datacenters as a first customer<p>* They say technology works from nano scale (bots) to cars and industrial applications. However military/industrial could be first large deployments (no need to comply with same regulations)
Perhaps useful to power sensors in remote areas that only need a bit of power but solar isn't a good option (maybe in mines or underwater). The power density is too low to handle anything than needs a lot of power.
I posted this a day ago and a great comment worth checking:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24320915" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24320915</a>
I wonder if this was the same company EEVblog debunked. It was mostly marketing claims, as these things make so little energy its pretty much useless on earth.
Wasn’t this debunked? As I recall, after some digging, it came to light that the amount of power offered by a typical-sized battery from this company even at 100% efficiency would be on the order microwatts. There was even an article paid for by the company with an illustration displaying 100 uW on the unit.<p>I’m not at my computer and can’t easily dig up sources at the moment, but I doubt they’re hard to find.
Unlike usual, this fake product at least is getting some comments about how it's fake.<p>But still there seems no emerging consensus it's fake, and this has been posted multiple time.<p>If nothing can be done about this egregious example, think about what happens to the other 99% of times where it's fake but it takes a little more thinking.
> Radiation levels from a cell, says the company, will be less than the radiation levels produced by the human body itself, making it totally safe for use in a variety of applications.<p>That makes sense until you put say 10 of these devices into and on your body...
A way better write up than this fluff piece: <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/are-radioactive-diamond-batteries-a-cure-for-nuclear-waste/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/story/are-radioactive-diamond-batterie...</a>
Whenever I see a headline like this, it makes me think of this paper: <a href="https://www.socmot.uni-konstanz.de/sites/default/files/09_Gollwitzer_Sheeran_Seifert_Michalski_When_Intentions_.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.socmot.uni-konstanz.de/sites/default/files/09_Go...</a>. TL;DR: sharing one's intentions and receiving attention/praise for them seems to make follow-through less likely.
One big problem -- I expect existing battery companies would make sure tech like this would never see the light of day, even if it were possible. Too much money to be made with disposable batteries.