Well, actually, power from the people:

I've always thought it'd be cool if we had giant turbines powered simply by brawn, sort of like that mill-thingy that made Conan so strong in the first Conan movie. I'm not talking slave labor, but if we could work out the technological kinks we could hire people at minimum wage to push a giant wheel around and around generating electricity much the same way dams do. Teenagers who couldn't find other work could do it. They'd get in shape, stay out of trouble, and earn a few bucks. Unemployed people would always have at least one fall back job available to them. It would help with health care costs as it would provide ample exercise. There would be no damage to the environment and pretty much the only foot print would be, well, footprints. People who worked nights or in bad weather would be paid a bit extra. PIRG hippy volunteers could do it too, in their spare time. Every human turbine spin is one less gallon of oil pumped from the ground.

Though, as he notes in the preamble graf, he's not sure about the economics of it. I can assure him that it's nuts.

But it reminds me of an idea I and some colleagues at Rockwell had back in the eighties about how to get the public more involved in space. Since one can view the space program as the modern-day equivalent of a cathedral, or building pyramids, why not get the masses into the act? Instead of using those big diesel engines on the Crawler at the Cape, why not harness human muscle power? We could have hundreds of people--volunteers--pulling on ropes, hauling the giant vehicle down the causeway. I think that it would be quite symbolic of...something.

It could even be sponsored by the Chiropractors Association of America.

Rather than build special generating facilities, would it be cost-effective to hook up all the exercycles, etc. in health clubs to small generators and feed the power back into the grid? This is truly wasted energy at present. Dynamic braking on hybrid cars would also capture a substantial amount of energy that is currently entirely wasted.

The economics of human power generation are a bit skewed, since we are expending energy to grow crops to feed humans far more calories than they actually use. Some of those calories are burned off in exercise; if they were captured it would be a net gain.

I had a US Navy diver on an ergometer putting out over 800 Watts for 20 minutes, but real humans can generate about 200 W for extended periods. That's a KWHr every 5 hours, for a retail value of 12 cents. It's just plain silly to consider the economic reality of human power.

> We could have hundreds of people--volunteers--pulling on ropes,
> hauling the giant vehicle down the causeway.

'Twould be an improvement on the current system, where it is pulled down the causeway by millions of taxpayers -- none of them volunteers.

I saw GWB hyping hydrogen as a power SOURCE again on the news the other day. If the educational system of this country actually taught it's citizens, everyone would understand the difference between a source and a store.

Dynamic braking on hybrid cars would also capture a substantial amount of energy that is currently entirely wasted.

All hybrid cars do that already. In fact, regenrative braking is where most of their fuel economy comes from.

Maybe while those people are pushing turbines they could be experiencing some kind of virtual reality simulation to keep their minds off of what's actually happening. I bet no one's ever thought of that before.

Jerry Pournelle discussed something like this idea many years ago in a book called "A Step Further Out" (iirc). The book was a collection of articles and at least one of the articles was on "appropriate technology". This was a big buzzword at the time about developing technology that was appropriate to 3rd world countries, but which would've had the effect of keeping poor people poor by limiting their access to modern technology.

Pournelle attended an expo on these technologies and one of the displays had someone operating a petal powered generator. A friend (Niven?) mentioned something to the effect of, "All you need now is for someone named 'Massa' to be standing over him."

Getting the masses involved by letting them send things to Space and back is how we see getting them involved. Although images of The Ten Commandments with Mr. Heston are now spinning in my head. Ouch!

As someone else pointed out, why not allow prisoners to work off their sentence that way? It's not economical but they'd at least be doing something positive. ;->

"We could have hundreds of people--volunteers--pulling on ropes, hauling the giant vehicle down the causeway. I think that it would be quite symbolic of...something."

A crawler like the ones that NASA uses/used for Apollo and Shuttle produces 5000 horsepower, or 3.73 megawatts. Using Dan DeLong's numbers above, you'd need about 19,000 people to produce that much power. (Ironically enough, that is just slightly more than NASA's current workforce...)

But how are they going to make solid rocket fuel without straw?

As someone else pointed out, why not allow prisoners to work off their sentence that way? It's not economical but they'd at least be doing something positive. ;->

I can see the headline now:

Assailant charged with battery, sentenced to reciprocate

If you want to reduce oil consumption / save money you spend on gasoline, walk distances less than 1 km and use a bicycle (if the weather's good) for distances less than 3 km. I bet the oil consumption savings would be significant. Plus a lot of health effects and savings in health care costs. Just 20 minutes of light excercise like walking per day does wonders, I've heard one of my city's health committee members say.

As someone else pointed out, why not allow prisoners to work off their sentence that way? It's not economical but they'd at least be doing something positive. ;->

Because prisoners can do much more productive things.

No US prison AFAIK runs at a profit, but some lose a lot less money than others. Your suggestion would be a spectacular money-loser even by the prison standards.