What’s On My Mind

Wireless Charging

A new prototype charging system from Nokia could enable a mobile phone to power itself on nothing more than the waves around us, charging itself using the weak radio waves emitted by TV’s, mobile phones and radios.

Instead of harvesting a few microwatts of power from dedicated transmitters, it is thought that Nokia’s prototype can conduct large amounts of power from signals that individually are tiny but mount up when harvested across a wide range of frequencies.

The resulting charge is quite small but is enough to power a mobile in standby mode without ever having to plug the handset into the mains, according to researchers from the Nokia Research Centre.

A nice survey of futuristic low power electrical sources and improvements. But the above entry on wireless charging got to me to thinking again about how we live in a sea of radiation (chiefly thanks to that big yellow glowy thing in the sky). In recent years though (recent being defined as roughly a hundred) we humans have been adding to that great big swimming pool of radiation we're all wading through; dramatically so in the last twenty years. We love our wireless gadgets and we want more.

Now, I'm not going to go down the road of the fools who think cell phones are causing cancer. Consumer radio devices are very low power emitters and the inverse-square power law insures that, unless we embed cell phones in our brains, there's no way a cell phone or any consumer RF emitter can be considered a health hazard. Oh, and then there's the fact that we're talking about non-ionizing radiation. Unlike ionizing radiation (again, see that big yellow glowy thing up there?), non-ionizing radiation doesn't knock electrons out of their orbits so it doesn't damage our DNA. At its worst, it can only heat us up but thankfully we don't live inside microwave ovens.

But what if we did? I'm thinking of Fred Pohl's Heechee, the enigmatic aliens from his series of Gateway novels. When the Heechee's abandoned ships were discovered inside the tunnels running through the Gateway asteroid orbiting Venus, it was a mystery why all the seats had v-shaped indentations. Were they some sort of insectoid race?

Not quite. Later on, after finally meeting some Heechee (inside a black hole, natch) humans discovered that they all wore trapezohedron-shaped microwave emitter packs between their legs. The reason is that the Heechee evolved on a planet close to a large naturally occurring microwave radiation source. They were dependent on the radiation without which they would become sick and die.

As humans continue to swell the microwave seas, and as we move out into space where radiation exposure is unavoidable, will we adapt? Will we become dependent on the added radiation? I don't know. It seems unlikely to me. More likely, if the radiation exposure is great enough to drive evolutionary selection (i.e. kill enough people over a long enough period of time who can't handle the added radiation before they reproduce), I think that selection would simply favor those who can withstand higher doses. On the other hand, maybe there could be some sort of clever mutation that could make use of the radiation, perhaps even as an energy source. I can't imagine what it might be though.

Still, it's fun to imagine how humanity's technology is changing us.