In general, I’ll take any excuse to go see a kid’s motion picture. Aside from the fact that I’m currently at the stage in my life where I find 6-year-olds to be annoying, content created for them often seems to be extremely pleasing. Proving, once again, that since I’m a grown-up now … it’s my turn to decide what that means.
So, obviously, as chief geek here at EcoGeek, I had to go see ‘Wall-E,’ the story of a tiny solar-powered robot left behind to take care of the mess remaining on Earth. The result, aside from a wonderful and humorous love story in which the robots seem considerably more human than humans, contains some interesting ideas about the environment and technology.
In the movie, the Earth is abandoned around 2110 … about 100 years from now. In that time, we’ve made some good advances in renewable energy, and even efficiency, but it wasn’t enough.
Wall-E himself is the most prominent example of clean technology. We’ve covered robots that might help to sort trash or break it down into more manageable chunks. But obviously Wall-E’s finest clean technology is his exceptionally (in fact, impossibly) efficient solar panels. Just like the Solio charger, Wall-E’s panels expand and fold-out to become larger than the surface area of Wall-E himself.
However, the surface area of the panels, at most two-feet square, won’t ever provide enough electricity for Wall-E’s roving and trash compacting (never mind his high-powered laser). To actually renewably charge the army of self-sustaining robots (of which Wall-E is the last remaining survivor), a big solar array would need to be maintained (by other robots), and Wall-E would have to visit it regularly for recharges.
Alternately, it’s possible that an invisible and undiscussed satellite array is collecting massive amounts of energy in orbit around the earth. And when Wall-E needs a charge, he calls down a super-powerful beam of photons or microwaves. That would grant him to charge for a full day’s work in a matter of minutes.
Additionally, on the post-apocalyptic earth, advertisements are solar-powered and holographic projections for the mega-corps who have taken over as our government and are only turned on when they detect movement.
Aside from the disturbing idea that Wal-Mart may one day be our government, it’s true that it’s using similar technology to turn off display lights when there are no shoppers, saving tons of electricity. And it has what may turn out to be the largest privately owned collection of solar panels in the world.
For more visit Source:[green.yahoo]
Share This
Share This
Entries (RSS)