Is the lack of efficient, leight-weight and dense energy storage the biggest bottleneck on our current technology?

Is the lack of efficient, leight-weight and dense energy storage the biggest bottleneck on our current technology?

Feels like robotics in particular is dead in the water without some kind of battery breakthrough.

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Yes

arc reactors never

Certainly ONE of the major bottlenecks.
Asimov's robots ran on a tiny "proton micropile" in the chest cavity, but they're as hard to obtain as "arc reactors".

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US military has batteries that are 10x better than what we can buy on the market.

Even 10x better isn't nearly for general purpose or military robots. We need something like a hundred or a thousand times better batteries.

Batteries need to be made smaller until they're like synthetic mitochondria desu

It's good enough for most operations. If an operation lasts 5 hours then the robot can stay and help throughout the entire time. Another example can also be for sending supplies, if a camp is a few hours away then a robot can do a drop-and-return trip and recharge for the next trip.

The army has been testing these types of "mule robots" already. There's videos of them released a few years ago. It's my belief that they're already being used in Syria and Iraq.

Make the robot out of battery.

Doesn't sound like much of an obstacle given engineers were somehow able to go from 1,800 square feet / 50 tons for the earliest computers to 6 inches / 5 ounces for modern smartphone computers while also making them 1,300 times more powerful.
If we have a good historical track record for solving any one particular sort of problem, it'd have to be scaling.

Is the answer - as for all questions in life - once again nuclear power? Some radioisotope batteries can output 120 kW of heat per kg.

That's fine except there's not enough uranium to go around. It would get used up in less than 50 years. Also it's extremely difficult to work with ie: make safe.

Robots (and most other things) don't run on heat. You need a power plant, waste heat radiators, etc. as well.

Yes but currently we are at the point where quantum tunneling is becoming an issue due to the fact that our transistors are now so small.

>It would get used up in less than 50 years.
I think you vastly overestimate the rarity of uranium.

Flawed analogy. Not everything scales like microelectronics. Power plants (big ones that make the juice in your wall socket) are only marginally more efficient than the plants of 50 years ago. Same applies to rockets, airplanes, and ships. Major change has been better materials.

Old joke:
Bill Gates claims that if Microsoft built cars they'd cost $20, max out at 1500 miles/hr, and get 200 miles/gallon.
Only downside: they stop dead every 50 miles and you have to get out, then get in again before they'll start.

What kind of break through would be required for wireless energy transfer to be feasible in this realm? I envision Google building a fusion-powered city where just about every surface is a resonator and robots/cars/electronics simply tap into it with a lightweight antenna.

Losses. Wasted power. Maybe not too critical when you need only milliwatts, but to run cars and everything else....

Anyway, we already have transports which don't lug their massive and heavy powerplants around. They're called subways ("Underground" to Brits), trains, and trolleys.

>Wated power
If you've got multiple reliable fusion generators, does it matter?

Also on a more sci-fi level I've thought that the surface of a Dyson shell might have these, with robots and humans inhabiting its surface.

Dyson never proposed a shell, just a whole bunch of individual objects/habitats orbiting in sufficient numbers that any ray of sunlight was bound to hit one of them.

Yes, it does matter.
Read "Ringworld", where the Puppeteers are roasting in their own waste energy.
Read "Waldo" where beamed power is killing people. People are getting hysterical today over the feeble signals from cell towers.
Both examples are fictional, of course, but they illustrate real world problems.

In "Seetee Shock", the Solar System is enveloped in a "power field" which only affects special receivers and only when they're turned on. If there's no load, the field is static and self-maintaining and the central power plants shut down. That would be ideal! But radiation in Real Life doesn't seem to behave like that.

Where does this stupid meme come from? Don't you realize the government is balls to the wall, pants on head retarded and incompetent? They're not ahead in anything.

its my belief your belief is based on nothing

Technology that breaks the known laws of physics, you cant simply beam energy around to whatever you want and scale it up because it would literally kill people who crossed the beam.

Why would you beam it? It'd be near-field, which I'm pretty sure is safe since it's already in consumer electronics. Resonators could be along the feet.

Wew lad

It still requires an alternating electromagnetic field and that takes energy to maintain even when nothing is utilizing the power.
You can get away with that at the low power levels used for communications intended to be received at no more than a few centimeters.
QUITE another story when kilowatts are involved. It's the difference between listening to a radio and sticking something into a microwave oven. One is safe and the other isn't.

Just wear a Faraday cage.

stay with me: coils and springs

The government buys their shit from civilian companies.

The thing with technology and science is that it is actually really easy. This is evidenced by how fast technology developed once certain key elements were in place. The difficulties come from the fact that people want more from the science than what can exist in reality. This is due to flawed understandings of theoretical physics and good old science fiction stories. Which is why all the amazing space ships, robots, and gadgets in sci-fi hinge on the pure fantasy of an amazing power source that doesn't exist in the real world and never will.

>Anyway, we already have transports which don't lug their massive and heavy powerplants around. They're called subways ("Underground" to Brits), trains, and trolleys.

This is the largest problem with society today. Too much of it is based on individual vehicles for everyone instead of centralized mass transportation.

>Is the lack of efficient, leight-weight(SIC) and dense energy storage the biggest bottleneck on our current technology?
Yes, the next bottleneck is specific torque.

>easy
No, it's just scientists are always ahead of the curve. The anticipate their limitations and know exactly what they need to improve their theories. So when new technology comes along they use it right away to test their predictions and develop their theories. So it sometimes seems like we're discovered a bunch of new shit really fast but it's long overdue.

>and never will
Someday, y-you'll see.

>People are getting hysterical today over the feeble signals from cell towers.
It's not hysterical, its real physiological effects

It's only been the white race that has pushed science forward
If we didn't exist, the world today would be as it was 500+ years ago

It's never been something "easy", it is something that absolutely requires stable governments, certain cultural mores that encourage science/development & high IQ populations.
All these things are being destroyed in the modern west.

It's funny seeing liberals talk about "Where are all the alien civilizations" while they ignore that they are in the process of wrecking human civilization.

>Not having the plasma globes as lightning boobs

SHE HAD ONE JOB

I've talked to people, in person, who were born in the 1800s. People who grew up before all the amazing shit we have now. People who lived to be 80-90 years old and saw the moon landing. That explosion of technology only really happened in the past 150 years out of the past 10,000s of years. We've hit a ceiling with science and technology that we will never get past because this is reality, not fantasy.

If it wasn't so easy, we'd still be struggling to get internal combustion engines to work.

>it is something that absolutely requires stable governments, certain cultural mores

I already said, "This is evidenced by how fast technology developed once certain key elements were in place."

There might be ceiling on technological advancements but science is still going strong.

Power supply (e.g., batteries) has always been the bottleneck on technology. Just build them to consume and transform energy on the go.

And make autonomous decisions without hard code limitations.

And reproduce.

And vote and own property and...

Faraday cage won't stop anything whose wavelength is smaller than the mesh.
You can still see her, right?
You want everyone to wear conductive burqas?

"its my belief" or just a total unjustified mental spasm.