Throughout history, the main source of power in humanity was rotating a stick.
Driving a car means providing fuel to an engine. The engine, simplified, is a stick placed in a special chamber where explosions happen when fuel is provided to smaller chambers with a small pipe. In those chambers, there are pistons that compress air and fuel, a small... thing... lights a mixture of fuel and air, which causes an explosion, which rotates the stick, providing movement to the car, power to the batteries, which in turn power the pistons, and a lot of other things that I don't know. A car, in its most simplified description, is a box that moves thanks to a smaller box that rotates a stick.
Humanity has always rotated a stick.
I'm no history buff, so I can't really provide numbers or absolute facts, just things I read some time ago, and that information is mixed by now. I could be wrong, there's no doubt.
Quite some time ago, humanity rotated a stick using a small army of prisoners who climbed stairs. In those prison camps, one of the means of punishment was making prisoners go up "stairs" that rotated a stick. Incidentally, because the stairs were neverending, kind of like an escalator, we have the word "treadmill".
If you ask me, I think they should've called those "stairs" an escalator, which would make more sense in today's language, but who am I to tell people what to call certain things?
If I recall correctly, the treadmill was used to harvest barely somehow.
Today we have power plants. Power plants also rotate a stick in some manner.
Fossil fuel power plants heat a giant pot of water by burning coal or some other material. Water boils, this makes steam, pressure rises, and that pressure rotates a stick. This stick has magnets on it, and it's rotating in a sort of cylinder that also has magnets in it. Some sorcery happens and electricity is produced!
Nuclear power plants work in the same manner, except instead of burning fossil fuel, humanity puts some radioactive rocks into a large pool of water. Those rocks are hot because they're radioactive. How being radioactive makes those rocks hot, I don't know, but those radioactive rocks heat a giant pool of water that, again, makes steam, steam pressure rises, which rotates a stick with magnets.
At least that's how I understand power plants. Feel free to correct me on how power plants work, but what happens, either way. is that in power plants a stick is being rotated and that somehow produces electricity.
Wind farms are a bit easier - the stick is rotated by wind, that passes through this large fan. Inside the windmill, the cylinder with the magnets is already present, so there's no need to go through too much trouble to bring either the stick to the cylinder or the other way around.
Solar farms are confusing to me, to be honest. I don't know how they rotate a stick. This may be the only exception in history so far: there are reflective rectangular windows. In those windows, there are strips of blue substance, and... something happens. What happens, however, I don't know.
A lot of the electronic goods are also about rotating sticks: blenders, drones, electronic bikes, hard drives, fans, vacuum cleaners, and so on.
Other kinds of things need at least one rotating stick to function - the computer I'm writing this on, for example. It has fans and a hard drive. It also has a DVD player, but I never really used it except for the occasional formatting and backing up.
I've just double-checked my stats and reached a horrifying conclusion: backing up 3tb on DVDs is going to be quite a task. That, of course, is if I'm seeking to back up EVERYTHING. I'm probably not.
Humanity IS slowly evolving beyond spinning sticks, though: the SSD, as far as I know, doesn't require spinning a stick, but we still need a way to operate it without a mechanism that does require a rotating stick in it somewhere. Until humanity figures out how to move past its obsession with rotating sticks, there's not going to be any form of peace on this planet, and the situation of the earth's pollution isn't going to change any time soon.
Driving a car means providing fuel to an engine. The engine, simplified, is a stick placed in a special chamber where explosions happen when fuel is provided to smaller chambers with a small pipe. In those chambers, there are pistons that compress air and fuel, a small... thing... lights a mixture of fuel and air, which causes an explosion, which rotates the stick, providing movement to the car, power to the batteries, which in turn power the pistons, and a lot of other things that I don't know. A car, in its most simplified description, is a box that moves thanks to a smaller box that rotates a stick.
Humanity has always rotated a stick.
I'm no history buff, so I can't really provide numbers or absolute facts, just things I read some time ago, and that information is mixed by now. I could be wrong, there's no doubt.
Quite some time ago, humanity rotated a stick using a small army of prisoners who climbed stairs. In those prison camps, one of the means of punishment was making prisoners go up "stairs" that rotated a stick. Incidentally, because the stairs were neverending, kind of like an escalator, we have the word "treadmill".
If you ask me, I think they should've called those "stairs" an escalator, which would make more sense in today's language, but who am I to tell people what to call certain things?
If I recall correctly, the treadmill was used to harvest barely somehow.
Today we have power plants. Power plants also rotate a stick in some manner.
Fossil fuel power plants heat a giant pot of water by burning coal or some other material. Water boils, this makes steam, pressure rises, and that pressure rotates a stick. This stick has magnets on it, and it's rotating in a sort of cylinder that also has magnets in it. Some sorcery happens and electricity is produced!
Nuclear power plants work in the same manner, except instead of burning fossil fuel, humanity puts some radioactive rocks into a large pool of water. Those rocks are hot because they're radioactive. How being radioactive makes those rocks hot, I don't know, but those radioactive rocks heat a giant pool of water that, again, makes steam, steam pressure rises, which rotates a stick with magnets.
At least that's how I understand power plants. Feel free to correct me on how power plants work, but what happens, either way. is that in power plants a stick is being rotated and that somehow produces electricity.
Wind farms are a bit easier - the stick is rotated by wind, that passes through this large fan. Inside the windmill, the cylinder with the magnets is already present, so there's no need to go through too much trouble to bring either the stick to the cylinder or the other way around.
Solar farms are confusing to me, to be honest. I don't know how they rotate a stick. This may be the only exception in history so far: there are reflective rectangular windows. In those windows, there are strips of blue substance, and... something happens. What happens, however, I don't know.
A lot of the electronic goods are also about rotating sticks: blenders, drones, electronic bikes, hard drives, fans, vacuum cleaners, and so on.
Other kinds of things need at least one rotating stick to function - the computer I'm writing this on, for example. It has fans and a hard drive. It also has a DVD player, but I never really used it except for the occasional formatting and backing up.
I've just double-checked my stats and reached a horrifying conclusion: backing up 3tb on DVDs is going to be quite a task. That, of course, is if I'm seeking to back up EVERYTHING. I'm probably not.
Humanity IS slowly evolving beyond spinning sticks, though: the SSD, as far as I know, doesn't require spinning a stick, but we still need a way to operate it without a mechanism that does require a rotating stick in it somewhere. Until humanity figures out how to move past its obsession with rotating sticks, there's not going to be any form of peace on this planet, and the situation of the earth's pollution isn't going to change any time soon.
