If you’ve been to the Wiess Energy Hall recently, you’ll remember the energy music video that starts off with “Energy is all around us.” Energy is all around us. It’s in the news every day. It’s also a prominent feature in sci-fi, comics and steampunk.
For more than 45 years, we’ve had a certain Scottish engineer talk about the need to power his engines. The mighty Starship Enterprise was propelled across the galaxy by warping space around it using a matter-antimatter reaction. (Antimatter has the same mass as matter but is oppositely charged — positron to electron and antiproton to proton).
We currently use antimatter in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans. While an antimatter reaction can give us 9×10^16 J/kg (note: dynamite is about 4.6×10^6 J/kg and a nuclear reactor is 5.6 x 10^9 J/kg ), it’s hard to bring into existence and even harder to keep around. In 2011, CERN was able to get about 300 anti-hydrogen atoms to hang around for about 17 minutes. While far less time than Dan Brown had it around for, it’s still a great achievement — especially since you can’t hold antimatter in a container made only of matter. You have to use a combination of electric and magnetic fields to make sure it does not go “boom.” NASA is looking into this as a propulsion system for interstellar transportation (possibly because rocket scientists grew up watching Star Trek), but it’s still far in the future.
Some of us have a fond memory of Rodney McKay yelling about the zero point module (ZPM) not having enough power to protect the city for long. (If you just got that reference, smile, because you are a nerd.) To get even more nerdy, there is such a thing as zero point energy. It is the least amount of energy a quantum system may have, or the energy produced when all is at rest. This is because of the wave-like properties of matter. It’s also the reason that liquid helium will not freeze.
Is there a way to harvest all this background energy? Unfortunately, not yet. Because of the zero point in the minimum amount of energy the system can have, if you were able to take it away, the amount of energy would drop below its limits. In Stargate, they get around this by containing microuniverses in a handheld containment vessel and harvest the zero point energy from them (what happens when the ZPM runs out of energy? Is that universe dead?).
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no, it’s a solar-powered man!
Superman, one of the most iconic and archetypal characters, receives his power from our yellow sun (and in Miller’s Batman Returns, he can take it from sunflowers as well). Because he uses green fuel, he can lift cars, leap buildings, be directed by Zack Snyder, and get Amy Adams. If only this were true for everyone who goes green. *Sigh.*
It is nice to have a superhero, even from the ’40s, that is looking toward the eventual infrastructure shift to renewables. Just as Superman’s war against falsehood and injustice has yet to be completed, we still have to wait for the switch. Unlike fighting against Doomsday and General Zod, we can do things to help speed the switch over to renewables.The easiest thing is to use less energy. If you’re more adventurous, you could look into the tax rebate programs for buying solar panels.
Steampunk is perhaps the most focused on energy. It’s in their very name. “Steampunk” is a sub genre that focuses on having mechanisms only powered by steam. While most steampunks look back either to Victorian times (call ‘em Vickies) or to the post-apocalypse, we are still in a steam age.
Almost all of our electricity is steam-powered. Coal, natural gas plants, and nuclear power plants all create electricity by turning water into steam and having that steam turn a piece of metal around a magnet (albeit on a large scale).
It can be exciting to see how you would come up with a steam driven alternative to a lot of modern technology. How would you construct a large airliner if it has no electronics and could only rely on hydraulics? Personally, I always hope for a dirigible-like air ship in which to battle sky pirates, but that may just be me.
An institution that you may readily associate with both a comic convention and energy is the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Museums may have a reputation of being dusty old cabinets of curiosities, but not us. So drop by our booth at Comicpalooza on May 25 and see what we’re up to.
