An engineering issue...

[RedComet]

You're forgetting the most important rays of all - gamma rays! HULK SMASH!  

I had to.

[Tintenfisch]

I love the Hulk :]

Now you see what's wrong with having a guy pedal a bike for energy? sure he may get tired, but that's what whips are made for.

[TechMaster]

Heh.  Btw, for the fourth year engineering project someone successfully transmitted electricity using some kind of wave/ray but I forgot which.  Even though it was for a short distance, at least it shows that method of transmitting electricity is possible.

[Destructers]

You guys brought up some good points concerning about solar and wind generator, and here is a something I learn a couple quarters ago in the power class.

Solar panel is as efficient as we can make right now and generally use for heating up water in the house. The cost for an entire solar panel system on the roof of a house alone could cost more than $10000 if I remember it right, so it is really expensive and requires daily maintain to use solar panel. One example I can remember is that some rich engineering people with alot of houses actually tried to implement both the solar panel and wind generator in their spare houses to try to sell electricity, but the result is really bad considering the maintain cost is a little below the money they earned from selling electricity.

As for the electric cars, alot of people have the wrong knowledge about how electric car will save the environment. First of all, electric cars don't save the environment, they are merely shifted the location of pollution from the street to the power plant. Since the electric cars also consume energy, so the power plant also need to burn more coal to generate enough electricity to meet this new demand. Like someone said earlier, we are really in the stone-age of electricity. Unless we can find a better way to generate and store electricity, all we can do now is slow down the process of our destruction.

Finally, about the discussion on the solar sattelite to power the earth, this is all about the matter of security. The most effiecient way to transmit power from orbit to the ground is to use beam energy tranfer technology. This is very much like the senario in the 007 movie where the villians can use solar sattelite beam to destroy things on earth. Asides from that, the relationship between countries in the world are very fragile and despite all good intention, there are alway people  who will plan to use them for their own benefit. The technology we have right now can make this type of technology possible, but we merely chose not to for the sake of misusing such technology until the world learn to behave a little better.

My head hurts now, all that thinking from 2 months vacation really killing me, and please excuse my grammar, I suck at language classes.