What happened to the robot that was supposed to do all of my house work? Where's my flying car?
My food pills? Moving side walks everywhere?
Apartment buildings supported on 2 thin stilts
1000 feet high? Holographic projectors? The
house of tommorow?

This is the board to discuss all of those
cool retro future gagets that never made it.

Well...in 15 years, we should have hover boards and hover cars. Teenagers wil wear their pants inside out. Jackets will blow dry themselves. SHoes will have laces that tie themselves.

Not to mention roving gangs of cyborg-enhanced
punks with motorized baseball bats.

I hope fashion and archetecture dosen't look
as bad as in this movie 15 years from now
Yechhh... X{

As for flying cars, there's a guy named Paul Moller who's been developing them for about 30 years...
You can look him up at..
http://www.moller.com

Jane...stop this crazy thing!!!

What, you don't have an outdoor treadmill? Great for walkies!

For that matter, this is the year 2000, where is a decent voting machine, where you don't need a committee to decide what a vote is?

How about KITT? (Knight Industries Two Thousand) I want a car that does everything for me!

Answer:Gilligan and Cindy Snow were put in charge
of the R & D and had Lenny and Squiggy working
for them.Of course the reason why nothing got
done was that Gilligan kept either forgetting
or fumbling things away,while Cindy kept banging
into everyone causing massive damage in the lab.
Of course Lenny and Squiggy proved to be no help
whatsoever;as a result they ended up flash freezing Lenny and sending him to the Delta
Quadrant...

The Robot that does dishes is called a Dishwasher, Mark. Lots of homes have them. ;-)

margie: I'd rather have a car like the original Mach 5.

Me? I'd rather have both K.I.T.T. and the Mach 5!


A young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless in a world of criminals who operate above the law.

Here he comes
Here comes Speed Racer.
He's a demon on wheels.
Chasin after someone.

The Robot that does dishes is called a Dishwasher, Mark. Lots of homes have them. ;-)
>>>>>>>>>>>>

But they can't load themselves, can they?

Where's my "Rosie" robot maid?

I have a science question. Is there a way to store the energy of an explosion? For example, when a tanker truck is in an accident, the fuel might explode. But they could have some sort device or material which would absorb the heat of the explosion...

Or when a volcano erupts they could have something underground which would absorb the heat so the magma cools off and doesn't erupt into the air.

Does that make sense?

Subject to the restraints of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the design, size, and strength of the device contemplated, the answer is "Probably, at least in theory." Containing the energy of an explosion is seen in any internal-combustion engine, and capturing the energy of volcanic and other underground heats is geothermal energy.

However, the restraints I mentioned in the first sentence are considerable. To capture the energy of an exploding tanker truck, you need a device that is larger than the truck, and the larger the device, the thicker it's walls must be. At the size required, the walls would have to be far too thick to be practical. (Not to mention that you have to get the device to the truck before it explodes.) Similarly with geothermal devices large enough to draw off as much energy as you asked about.

But an even bigger restriction is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is the science of energy. There are different forms of active energy: light, heat, and other electro-magnetic waves, kinetic energy, electricity, etc. There are also stored forms of energy, mostly chemical and "potential" energies.

Any form of energy can be converted to any other, but any such change includes some heat energy that is "lost" into the rest of the system that is not usable. In addition, not all heat energy is usable, but only the portion that represents the heat difference between two parts of the system. And the "lost" heat energy tends to eventually move toward the cooler portions of the system, making the differences between parts smaller. So less of the total heat energy is usable. So less of the total energy is usable. Eventually all energy will have been converted to "lost" heat energy, and this "lost" heat will eventually be evenly spread throughout the system, and unusable. The conversion of "lost" heat to unusable temperature gradients is called "entropy."

The usual way to state the Second Law is "the entropy of a "closed" system always increases." The sentence in blue is an alternate way to state it. It predicts a time when when all energy has been converted to unusable heat energy. This final state is called the heat death of the universe.

Note: this answer has been simplified. Different people simplify in different ways, so someone else might have posted an answer that reads completely differently, and (since this is a nit-pickers' forum) might strongly disagree that I have included the most important concepts. That does not, in itself, mean that either or both simplifications are "wrong."

For completeness:
The First Law: In any process in an isolated system, the total energy remains the same.

The Third Law: As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant minimum.

Or as it has been somewhat humorously:

The First Law: You can't win.
The Second Law: You can't break even
The Third Law: You can't even quit the game.

---

Lisa, in this house we obey the Laws of Thermodynamics!

By the way, there's also a Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics, which states that if two systems are in thermodynamic equilibrium with a third system, then they are in thermodynamic equilibrium with each other.

The "game description" of the Zeroth Law is: "You have to play the game".