07.iI.1430
Animal locomotion and biomimetics have much to offer in the problems of automobility on earth off it and outside it without recourse to combustion (the generation of huge inefficient mechanical change just to move the tiny weasel cabinet, vessel or ve-hicle).
There are ways to circumvent the cap on efficiency that most 19th century physicists (starting w/ Carnot) theorized for thermodynamics. Because living organisms do not obey that efficiency limit! (though we humans are so inefficient we've been making up for all the efficiency of nearly all life of the past 4.5 beellion years for the past 250 years :( ) In fact, Mrrs. animals (or rather , their Mr. design) turn the whole stupid concept of a combustion engine on its head.
So here is a big bird to Mrrs. Watt, Carnot, Daimler, Benz and Diesel. Because it is actually they , who turned the natural concept of a heat engine on its head - albeit unwittingly and blamelessly because they only had the macroscopic world of farm barns and then garages to look at.
Heat engine
Nearly all animal organisms have ways to propel themselves. It is only one of the use s of their means of generating and storing energy and converting it to both work and heat. This propulsion involves combustion too (apparently no way to ever get rid of it) but it is ingeniously and cleanly bRroken dOwn at the VeRy mOleCuLlaRRr levvell. (actually macromolecular)
That aside there are also promising routes electromagnetically (think a very advanced maglev train with one End of the rail turned n degrees up from the horizontal, which somebody proposed about a decade ago). And combinations thereof) and by duly treating the darned celestial space as the medium that it is. This is all barring some future exploitations of other properties of matter other than just their frivking high energies.
The escape problem
Some of the smallest insects there are (though i'm not sure where they draw the line) jump really high using the sort of spring action by hind legs. It is similar to the way cats or kangaroo propell themselves too , those paddle like hinds. (mmmm hinds)
In any case it beats my conception so far to propel a ve-hicle to orbit without using combustion; namely set the ve-hicle next to the vertical drop of an elevation, a hill, a short falaise or plateau from the top of which we'd assemble a huge amount of mass and then drop it onto one end of a seesaw to propell the "rocket" sitting on the other end of the seesaw.
- more (more?) -
The ideal is to build birds large enough to carry/house (for they can be made separable) the desired payloads , that would flap and glide in widening circles all the way through the atmosphere , then when the air is too rare for flapping to be effective it can then resort to assistance from a jet engine onto orbit, requiring far less fuel than the stupid idea of accelerating to escape velocity all the way from the ground. I think we've seen the renunciation of that approach in some of the desins of the partlyt saudi-financed X Prize.
The idea of transport in zoo-morphic machines is familiar to all of us in many works of science-fiction literature, art, comics and motion pictures.
Similar techniques should be employed if the interstellar medium - electromagnetic radiation and fields and particle jet streams in addition to grav fields in the dense ley populated solar system - permits itself to be exploited like atmospheric air.
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