>Clay, I think about this too, but remember, there is a lot
> of industry pushing for longer-lasting, more compact
> power sources in a LOT of different devices. A hundred
> years is ETERNITY in technological years.
Technological progress doesn't always move along smoothly. Sometimes it just makes a few giant steps and stops.
Take a look at a cartridge. The cartridge is technology. It incorporates a whole set of other technologies - the forged brass case, the use of an encapsulated primer, a propellant based on nitrated cellulose and maybe nitrated glycerine, and a flat or tapered base bullet, possibly jacketed. That's a long, long way from ramming a round ball down on some black powder and setting it off by scraping a rock against a piece of steel... and that cartridge is no different technology than one made 120 years ago, or 140 if you discount the powder.
Those subtechnologies I referred to are, in turn, based on two primary lines of technological development - the forging of metal, and modern chemistry. Hammered metal goes back to prehistory, but chemistry only goes back two or three hundred years, depending on where you want to place the origin.
We have so *much* technology, and it comes to rapidly, that sometimes it's easy to forget that it all depends on a smallish number of breakthroughs, which mostly come along by accident.
Richard Feynman was a young physicicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. Shortly after the war the Army called Feynman to the Pentagon and he met with a group of generals who wanted to know if he wanted to run his own mini-project. The Army wanted to him to find a way for them to run engines on dirt. The modern mechanized Army was dependent on trucks and tanks, and not only was it a hassle to get fuel up to the front lines, it was flammable and therefore dangerous to people occupying vehicles that were under enemy fire.
If all their equipment burned dirt, all they would need was a bunch of PFCs with shovels, and they were good to go.
The generals were all intelligent, well-educated men. They'd been briefed on the atomic bomb. And what they were asking seemed entirely reasonable to them - if scientists could spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make bombs of exotic metal that exploded really good, it should be simple enough to make dirt burn. It was just technology, right?
Well, no. Unfortunately, there's a lot of wishful thinking out there, some driven by unscrupulous grant-whores in white lab coats, some simply parroted by media flacks who don't know any better. Typical subjects are batteries, solar cells, and fuel cells. The technology for all of these is pretty much pushed to the limit. The only thing that's going to make more than an incremental change is a basic breakthrough, and not only can they not be predicted, sometimes they don't come at all. There *might* be a breakthrough that would let you shovel dirt into your Blazer and drive it to work, but you'd be better off waiting to win the lottery and hiring a chauffeur-driven limo; at least it *might* happen.
