[Top19]

Wireless charging on a level not seen yet. The idea might be for a wireless charging network similar to what we already have for cell phones, so each tower has a 3 mile or so radius. You’ll never be without power in a sense that you’re not, most of the time, without cell coverage.

This would help a lot with the limits we are approaching with batteries, as well as the environmental effects associated with their production.

Long term, people are proposing the collection of solar energy in space, and the resulting energy beamed down in microwaves to the “cell towers” so described above.

[sgillen]

Maybe you are aware of a breakthrough that I am not, but the technology you describe does not sound feasible to me. If you're transmitting power everywhere that's an R^2 relationship under ideal circumstances, you'd have to pump a HUGE amount of energy into the air to charge everyone's cellphones in a three mile radius.

Maybe you can do beam forming and try to direct the energy at the phone you are interested in? Still seems like a big challenge though.

[sova]

Wireless Energy Transmission by Nikola Tesla pointed to an entirely different approach. Using the earth as a resonant cavity, signals of electric conduition could be intoned and subsequently amplified by "striking" at the appropriate time and place on the globe, eventually saturating the well of the earth with such strong ambient electrical potential that anyone could stick an antenna into the ground and harvest electricity. Of course, no one has really demonstrated this yet, and these findings are based on my own research, but Tesla surely thought he was onto something and it does seem like a logical endpoint of wireless energy, that it would be freely and easily available anywhere on the planet. It is very much different from putting up cell towers and blasting powerful radiation, but maybe we will compromise with a hybrid approach.

[nolok]

My original comment was meant to remind you that many who looked at that part of tesla's work concluded it was mostly not going to work and kind of a dream.

Then I reminded myself that many of the technologies I'm using to tell you that suffered the same so, eh, I don't believe it will but who knows! And I hope it does.

[sova]

:D Precisely!

[chatmasta]

There is no need to blindly send energy into the air; the cell towers can already triangulate a phone's location. A phone could share its battery percentage with the cell towers, and the cell towers could optimize power distribution to phones, sending targeted beams of energy to those in need of a charge.