Page 88 - MODERN ELECTROCHEMISTRY

ELECTROCHEMISTRY 31

the basis for understanding much in molecular biology. The fixing of and its
photoconversion to methanol (a fuel) is also a prospect.
It is worthwhile thinking also that urban areas are likely to develop as a function
of the availability of electricity from solar or nuclear sources. There will also be an
12
increasing need to invest resources in preventing the exhaustion of many vital metals.
The forms in which energy will be transmitted will be electricity with hydrogen
as a storage medium. Towns in the 21st century will tend to be self-contained. Little
material mass will leave or enter them. The processes on which towns will run will be
all electrical, and those involving matter therefore electrochemical. Transportation will
use energy stored in hydrogen and in condensers. Manufacturing and machining
processes and recovery of materials used or discarded will all be electrochemical.
Polluted liquids will be cleaned in packed bed electrolysers (Fig. 1.16). Wastes will
be processed electrochemically in molten salts. Medical electronics—the electronic-
electrodic combination in medical research—will be highly developed toward various
combinations of humans and machines.
Thus, it seems reasonable to expect the achievement of several electrochemically
based innovations by 2050: the provision of cheap heat electrically from storage units
charged during off-peak times; electrochemically powered vehicles, including ships;
an economical and massive solar conversion system; hydrogen storage and transmis-
sion to avoid systems that add further to the atmosphere; extensive use of
electrochemical machining and electrochemically based tools; an internal fuel-cell-
powered heart; and electrometallurgical extractions of materials on a large scale from
the moon (their transfer to earth will be easy because of the moon’s low gravity). An
immediately developable area lies in the electrochemical aspects of molecular biology
(the replacement of electrically functioning body parts) and in the development of
circuitry that will join the brain and its electrochemical mechanisms to artificial limbs
with their electrochemical functions and perhaps even to circuits not connected to the
body. Cyborgs, the person-machine combination, will become a part of life.
Let us therefore read this book with some sense of where we are on the scale of
time, in the development of that great revolution begun in the eighteenth century. For
it was then that we discovered how to make heat give mechanical power. However,
this great discovery, and all that it has produced, has brought with it an unacceptable
penalty—the pollution and planetary warming caused by the use of heat to produce
mechanical power. We are just at the point on the time scale where we must wean
ourselves away from oil (that mother’s milk) and other producing fuels that ran
the first century of technology and find how to support the population of our
overburdened planet by the use of fusion energy (from the sun, itself, or perhaps from
the benign energy of low-temperature nuclear reactors). However, as we move away
from pollution, and planetary warming, it is certain that a greatly enhanced
12
Only iron and aluminum are present in amounts to last hundreds of years. Unless they are recycled, many
metals will be exhausted in the twenty-first century.