In the iconic 1990s TV series The X Files, David Duchovny’s FBI agent-paranormal investigator Fox Mulder has a poster on his office wall. It shows a flying saucer in flight, with the slogan “I Want To Believe”. It perfectly sums up the dilemma the character faces. And while I’m guessing that only a few Hackaday readers have gone down the full lizard-people rabbit hole, wanting to believe is probably something that a lot of us who love sci-fi understand. It would be a fascinating event for science if a real extraterrestrial craft would show up, so of course we want to believe to some extent, even if we’re not seriously expecting it to appear in a Midwestern cornfield and break out the probes any time soon.
By All Means Believe. But Don’t Wreck Your Career
Outside the realm of TV drama and science fiction it’s a sentiment that also applies in more credible situations. Back at the end of the 1980s for example when so-called cold fusion became a global story it seemed as though we might be on the verge of the Holy Grail of clean energy breakthroughs. Sadly we never got our Mr. Fusion to power our DeLorean, and the scientific proof was revealed to be on very weak foundations. The careers of the two researchers involved were irreparably damaged, and the entire field became a byword for junk science. A more recently story in a similar vein is the EM drive, a theoretical reactionless force generator that was promising enough at one point that even NASA performed some research on it. Sadly there were no magic engines forthcoming, so while it was worth reporting on the initial excitement, we’re guessing the story won’t come back.
When evaluating a scientific or technical breakthrough that seems as miraculous as it is unexpected then, of course we all want to believe. We evaluate based on the information we have in front of us though, and we all have a credibility pyramid. There’s nothing wrong with having an interest in fields that are more hope than delivery, indeed almost every technology that powers our world will at some time have to overcome skepticism in its gestation period. Perhaps it’s best to say that it’s okay to have hope, but hope shouldn’t override our scrutiny of the proof. Of course I want a perpetual motion machine, who wouldn’t, but as a fictional engineer once allegedly said, “Ye cannae change the laws of physics”.
An Example Here In 2024
All this introspection has been brought to the fore for me by something very much in the present, the so-called hydrogen economy. It’s difficult to ignore our climate emergency, and among the energy solutions aimed at doing something about it, hydrogen seems very promising.
It’s really easy to make from water by electrolysis, there are several ways to turn it into useful energy, and the idea is that if you can store it for later use you’re on to a winner. We’ve seen hydrogen cars, trucks, aircraft, heavy machinery, trains, and even the gas supplanting methane in the domestic grid, so surely the hydrogen future is well under way, right?
Sadly not, because as many a pilot project has shown, it’s difficult to store or transport, it makes many existing metal fittings brittle, and the environmental benefit is often negated by the hydrogen being generated from higher carbon electrical supplies. We still want to believe, but we can’t claim it’s delivering yet.
Whenever we feature a hydrogen-based story, as for example with this experimental storage tech from Swiss researchers, there is no shortage of comments about all of hydrogen’s shortcomings, and some even accuse us of somehow being the snake-oil salesmen shilling the questionable product. I feel this misses the point, that even though in almost all cases the battery is for now the better option, we cover interesting technology stories regardless of judgements over their eventual success. Hydrogen has enough real science and engineering behind it that its problems might one day be overcome, thus we’d be doing our readers a disservice if we didn’t cover it. There are sometimes newsworthy stories upon which we very much take a credible stand based on opinion, but when it comes to pure tech stories such as a hydrogen vehicle we’re simply reporting on the story because we find it interesting and we think you will too. We don’t know that the breakthrough engineering work won’t occur, but we do know that it hasn’t yet.
So when looking at a piece of technology that’s not delivered on its promise, ask for a moment whether there’s a likely “yet” on the end of the sentence without too much of a suspension of credibility. You might find yourself pleasantly surprised.
It’s perfectly fine to do some investigation on a long-shot probably-crank piece of technology, just in case.
But emdrive was 3000% BS from day one. I can’t understand people who fell for yet another reactionless drive with absolute nonsense Star Trek dialogue describing the mechanism of action. That mechanism was almost immediately proven wrong; after that, supporters defaulted to “We didn’t design the reactionless drive we were trying to design, so obviously we created a totally different physics-breaking miracle drive just by accident.”
Lol, lmao even
And while something does not work for the original purpose or the purpose people want it to work for (like hydrogen passenger cars), it might work for something else or at different scale.
I would argue this sentiment is one of the pillars of hacking.
If I may offer an assist, hydrogen is a battery, not an energy source. I’m not in favor of them but electric cars make more sense than hydrogen cars. Free lunches are for hobos and Hare Krishnas.
Hydrogen is a chemical and an element. A battery involves much more than just hydrogen, which is what people forget when they talk about hydrogen as a battery or an energy storage medium.
The reason why hydrogen is snake-oil is not because it doesn’t work as such, but because hydrogen is a stepping stone to much better things involving Power-to-X technologies that ultimately yield better fuels and other stuff. In other words, it’s not the hydrogen, but the idea of the “hydrogen economy” that is bunk.
It’s like discovering oil and expecting everything in the society to run on straight up unrefined crude. Sure enough, you can do that – large ocean ships can run on whatever sludge you can pump out of the ground – but there are better ways to do it.
Yeah, the “hydrogen economy” is something that does not make sense unless you just happen to have a large investment in part of the chain. Or you are an oil company trying to buy some vaguely-believable green PR.
Biodiesel makes about as much sense, and has a much safer and more mature array of technologies for use, storage, production, etc. It emits carbon, but if you grow algae to turn back into biodiesel it is re-absorbed as a closed cycle.. And it isn’t a frustratingly low-density gas that has to be stored at terrific pressures to be viable.
Hydrogen power has some amazing applications, like cryogenic liquid fuel for rocketry. I don’t buy into the fuel cell car stuff personally
Solid oxide fuel cells have a real potential to work, but ironically they can also burn other stuff besides hydrogen – you can even run a SOFC stack on coal dust if you absolutely must. Even if the input was hydrogen, you would rather convert the hydrogen to some chemical that stays liquid at room temperature than faff about with cryogenic fuel tanks and get 6 miles to the gallon on liquid hydrogen.
The reason why people rant about hydrogen is the illusion of efficiency, because each conversion step loses some energy, but the main issue isn’t thermodynamic efficiency – it’s cost – you simply pay more in other ways to deal with the problems of not converting the hydrogen. Money is energy, because money is the promise of work: if something costs more, it requires more energy to run a bigger economy to pay for it. It makes no difference in efficiency whether you spend the energy up-front or down the line.
Point being that it’s more conductive to the use of hydrogen to convert it into other stuff right at the point of production than use it as such. We’re going to be generating hydrogen, but it won’t be used as hydrogen – it will be converted almost instantly to more complex chemicals at or near the site of production to avoid all the problems of storage, transportation, explosive tendencies and low energy density. There’s so much more demand for it in these other applications that it seems like a waste to just burn the stuff in a turbine or a fuel cell.
But if it’s mainly used as an intermediate to other fuels and chemicals, can we talk of a hydrogen economy? Especially since there are methods to these chemicals via water gas shift reactions and direct synthesis where the hydrogen may be a step but it never leaves the process. Your car would be fueled by butanol or methanol, or whatever, and the only place where they handle hydrogen is at the refinery that turns water, CO2, and electricity into fuel.
I sometimes have encounters with aliens in my dreams ….. am I clinically psychotropic?
Many times science begins as a toy to become useful. (Drones converted into weapons)
This is where hack a day shows potential.
The industry knows. ¿free samples?
hydrogen has had many problems for many decades – and the physics of it hasn’t changed. Thus the disdain for any article that assumes we are going to move it/pump it around like petrol – that simply isn’t going to happen no matter how many press releases occur.
It’s probably even worse than fusion – which has been 10 years away (and still is) ever since I started reading about it in the 1960’s… At least with that there is a chance that one day we will make it work (in a large industrial setting, not in our car..).
“After numerous delays, a similar device dubbed the Quantum Drive did successfully make it to space last November. However, a failure in a satellite component unrelated to the drive scuttled that effort. To date, none of the propellantless drive inventions that physicists say shouldn’t work have actually been tested in space, including the infamous EMDrive, which Buhler believes his work may help explain.”
https://thedebrief.org/nasa-veterans-propellantless-propulsion-drive-that-physics-says-shouldnt-work-just-produced-enough-thrust-to-defeat-earths-gravity/
https://thedebrief.org/nasa-scientist-says-patented-exodus-effect-propellantless-propulsion-drive-that-defies-physics-is-ready-to-go-to-space/