Imagine a world where instead of concrete roads you have solar panels. One company is working to make this a reality and has already received some funding from the US federal govrtnment. Check out this imgur link that outlines this awesome technology. There is also an indiegogo link at the bottom of the page.
http://imgur.com/a/vSeVZ

Yesss, off course. So much surface area is now being wasted, while all that surface area COULD
be generating solar electricity. These panels could probably ALSO double as pressure pad-generators,
so that not only sunlight hitting it would generate electricity, but the pressure of cars, bicycles &
pedestrians passing over them would also generate electricity.

We would never need a mililiter of fossil fuel again....except maybe to destill organic solvents from
I know it sounds cliché, but aren't big oil companies lobbying against these sort of developments like
there's no tomorrow?

Haven't they lobbied against it since Tesla proposed he could broadcast it wirelessly for free or is that a myth?

I don't know how feasible tesla's plans to draw electrons from the ionosphere and broadcast them wirelessly were.
I haven't looked into it deeply enough to be the judge of that.


Solar panels covering every rooftop, square, road & pavement would generate tremendous amounts of elecricity.
The trick would be to find ways to produce them as cheaply as possile without compromising their effetiveness.

In the darker, colder northern hemisphere, the lack of sunlight in the wintertime could be made up for with wind power,
which there is plenty in the wintertime across coastal areas. Wind power could probably be improved to harness electricity from wind much more effectively than those common windgenerators we have now.
Windmills with vertical blades that have close to 0 friction because they use magnetic levitation to hoover
for instance.


I'm sure if enough roofs, squares, roads and pavements were layered with these solar cells and with plenty of effictient low-friction windgenerators all city lights, trains & metros, electric car recharge stations, houses and facilities could be powered. I heard scientists have been successful at tapping electricity from plants using carbon nano-tubes. It needs to be fine-tuned and perfeted, but I'm sure they can nail it within the next decade or so.
So that could add to the powergrid together with solar- and wind-power and at the same time make our cities greener again.


It would defenitely be more than enough if you also drastically decreased energy consumption. Genetic manipulations
on some plants have been performed that yielded specimens that glowed brightly in the dark. Lots of these glow in the dark trees & bushes could illuminate much of the streets at night, instead of so many electricity-consuming streetlights. The lines & markings on roads could be painte with glow in the dark paint. This would require less powerfull illumination by streetlights on roads and fastlanes.

Obviously energy is one of the biggest challenges humans face: our current system (oil/gas/coal) contributes to war, climate change and childhood asthma, and funnels $ to the Saudi Arabia (16 of 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia).
No doubt humans need a better/safer source of energy.

Last year I believed solar roadways was a great idea, but since then, I saw the topic on a Cannabis forum & the thread included a couple videos (most by thunderf00t) explaining how this isn't really feasible or practical. This is a different video than I watched, but has some of the same points.

I believe solar is a good alternative, but not best utilized on the roads. [roadside, above parking lots, every building roof].
A great idea is nuclear fusion, which I saw on Beyond the Wormhole can power large cities for a year with the water molecules in a glass of water (this is likely the best alternative).

I remember reading about this in popular science several years ago... back then they said if you replaced every road in the US with solar panels you could power the entire world seven times over or something crazy like that. Sounds great to me! I remember one of the problems they mentioned was that the roads would require constant cleaning because of exhaust from cars building up and blocking out the sunlight. In an ideal world where this thing was actually implemented we would all be driving electric cars anyway. But yeah, the people who don't want it to happen have a lot more money and therefore influence than those that do.

I think this technology will probably find application more on a private level than a large scale government funded one. It's more likely that people/businesses will pay to have their sidewalks/patios/driveways/parking lots/whatever replaced with solar panels that hook directly into their house/building than that the government will pay to have large areas of concrete completely converted.

Personally, I think anything nuclear is bad news.

We clearly aren't responsible enough to manage all the variables of that type of energy safely.

Not to mention, it's not necessary. Solar, Hydro, Wind, and Water could give us thousands of times more energy than we can use globally. We simply don't harness it. We don't, because nobody owns the sun, or the wind, or the oceans. To allow that industry to thrive would be the death of the gas and oil industry, which has a stranglehold on the globe, and isn't going to let that happen without a long, hard fight.

Solar freakin roadways are a fantastic idea and I've seen all the stuff that talks about how they are not practical also and it's ridiculous. It's absolutely practical, but people see certain things as impossible to change when they really aren't.

There's no reason why with today's technology, we have to endure hundreds of thousands of deaths each year due to auto-accidents. Every vehicle could be driven automatically with the guidance of a computer system.

But you know who would suffer?

Automobile manufacturers, the automobile repair industry, automobile insurance industry, gas/oil because the cars would likely be electric, a diminished revenue generation for municipalities like police departments and highway patrol, and on and on..

My whole point is that most people think changing the world is impossible. And it's not, we truly can do it.

I was very, very close to becoming a nuclear engineer. I had dreams of the future with nuclear fusion; not only could cities be powered, countries could be powered with a glass of water.

And it's more than theoretical nonsense like "oh well a virus could take out humans."

http://www.geo.cornell.e...page/nuclear_fusion.html

If we harnessed the power through confinement and/or the tokamaks, we could power Earth for billions of years with nothing more than sea water. And the Earth will be unlivable in just a few hundred million years, but hopefully we would have died out, moved on to a new dimension, or expanded across space, or whatever by then (let's hope they're not on the iPhone 10^20).

Solar is not preferable because the chemicals used in the solar panels themselves are limited and not environmentally friendly. Wind is great, but of course it's not windy everywhere. Hydropower is awesome, but just as with anything there can be dam issues and construction deaths.

I truly think nuclear will be the future whether we want it or not. Is gas/oil limited? Yes, but I very much doubt we will run out in the next 500 years. It's always, "Oh jeez we're going to run out of oil, let's raise the price on you fools" but when BP has an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico it's, "Oh jeez if this isn't fixed the oil will spurt out for 200 years." That always made me go HMMM?

Of course it will probably be a combo of renewables, nuclear, and oil, but with nuclear fusion there would be a seemingly infinite amount of power. Hopefully we figure it out soon so the planet doesn't take as much of a toll!

There is a group called "Coal Rollers" who delight in enveloping random people in black sooty exhaust from their hopped up diesel vehicles. You can look it up if you wish.

I'm certain this type of mentality would have people doing burnouts just to block as much light from the roadways as possible.

Another good video to watch is Pandora's Promise, which details the pros of nuclear.

At least where I'm at, frost heaves would cause a decent problem for solar (freakin) roadways. Also, transmitting the energy amongst the roadways seems as if it would be a hurdle.

I wish that the amount of time and energy that has been put into automobiles and roadways was put into trains and railways. Also, having humans in closer physical proximity with each other (within shared spaces such as some versions of rail cars) precipitates vibrational intermingling in which the waves will have a stronger tendency to harmonize.

I loved Pandora's Promise; I watched it when I thought I was going into Nuclear. It didn't teach me a lot of new information, except for how much the oil/gas companies really, REALLY lobby against nuclear because it is really the only power source that offers firm competition for them.

A lot of the nuclear scares/propaganda were actually funded by the oil/gas companies instead of by environmental groups! Especially in the earlier days, so the beginning nuclear infrastructure was hurt. And if you compare deaths from energy sources, nuclear kills the least amount of people of any source per tWh, including water. This is even with nuclear accidents that only occur in outdated plants.

http://physics.kenyon.ed.../PHYS102F12Lecture15.pdf

The air pollution alone kills and gives illness to more people than Fukushima/Chernobyl ever will. Everyone is so quick to point at a couple deaths from something "so scary" like nuclear when deaths from coal and oil are clumped together and ignored.

Fusion is preferable to fission, of course, because it's much cheaper and cleaner. But because the two are assumed together by a lot of uninformed people, it's harder to get the needed funding for fusion research. I have hope, but it probably won't happen for another one or two hundred years.

I totally understand that the benefits to nuclear are endless. I also understand that we'll likely see heavy nuclear development in the near future.

It's just my opinion that we will do more damage to ourselves and our home than it's worth.

I'm not saying that the problem lies in nuclear, but in the people who are going to be in charge. After all, if there's money to be made, then corporations can't be bothered with things like the health of the earth or its inhabitants.

Look at Fukushima. I don't care what anyone trying to minimize the problem says, it was a MAJOR fuck up. And there will be long-lasting results.

Solar, Wind, Hydro, and Water are so much safer for ourselves and environment, are in never-ending abundance, and are the closest things we have to free energy.

They can tease you all day long about nuclear energy being the way to free energy for all - that's just a marketing ploy. If there's a way to make you pay for it, they will.

Unless of course, it's like,...a post-revolution nuclear program


Hey DMT I'm curious what as to what sounds cooler than nuclear engineering? Which path did you choose?

As sick as it may sound to many people in general and on this forum, I decided to pursue Financial Mathematics with the goal of working on Wall Street.

I've always been very skilled with mathematics, and I've been investing since quite a young age. My father also trained me in the ways of the stock market and financial field, although he never had the temperament to go into such a career.

I am a minimalist and view money as analogous to points in a video game. I have no aspirations of driving racecars, having mansions all over the country, wearing $20,000 watches, etc. These things do not interest me. My goal is to make ungodly amounts of money and give it to charity.

Many sit back and whine about how guys in finance are destroying the country and so on. But this does nothing productive. The system will not change. As Denzel Washington said in Training Day, "...you can change things. But it's gotta be from the inside."

I see that people need help. I feel tremendously terrible for the involuntary homeless in particular. I would also like to fund organizations like MAPS and various other psychedelic projects. I do not want to help out of selfishness either; drugs showed me what true empathy is and although it's difficult to practice, I can try.

Also engineers are quite odd people; I did not fit in.

The currents in the Gulf stream provide enough waterflow to power the world.
this would be much easier to keep functional than solar road ways.

to be fair, adjhart:
if the US decided to go with thorium when it started developing nuclear power, things like fukushima would never have happened

don't blame nuclear energy, blame uranium

DMTheory, sounds like a noble choice

yeah this is a pretty quick 4 minute video detailing some benefits of Thorium:

4 Minute Discovery Video

Also as I was watching this I realized how funny it is that we classify a difference between solar, wind, and tidal power but ... what puts the wind and tides into motion? THE SUN!