A Cut from the Past

I used to say flying cars was the answer to everything. What would make me happiest, when leaving this earth, is knowing that living being that requires clean oxogen to survive has that and more. Also having the ability to travel to anywhere in the universe without a single molecule of pollution would be cool too. The ingredients to do just that have been sitting right under everyone’s feet since the very first fire smoldered out. Ceramics, aka heated dirt, can bind carbon molecules together in such a way to build crafts of any size or shape. Carbon molecules can store electrons, aka electricity. What if removing the need for electric lines and redefining the past is exactly what we need to help propel a sustainable future for all? My Fiskers helped me figure this out, and for that, I am eternally grateful.

I was raised by a lovable family of hot-air balloonists. Spending time at hot air balloon manufacturing facilities when I was a kid allowed me to see the beautiful hand crafted manufacturing of fabric based aircrafts that would allow my imagination to soar. Especially when that stitching is holding your life safely 10,000 feet above the surface of the earth. People were using Fiskers for cutting and then sewing together bright nylon fabric to be built into flying machines that harkened back to a past in aviation dating back earlier than the first engine powered crafts from Kitty Hawk. The first hot air balloon dates back to France in 1783, the first power lines appeared in Portland, Oregon in the west United States nearly one hundred years later in 1889. Nearly one hundred years after that, I witnessed my first death of a hot air balloon pilot from flying into electrical lines. Then in 2021 151 people died from loss of electricity during the Texas power crisis and multiple winter storms in an area that was completely unprepared for that. We now live in the mobile age, why shouldn’t our electricity generation and storage also be as mobile as we are?

Growing up in the midwestern United States I never knew then just how fortunate I was to have amazingly clean oxogen to breathe and be surrounded every summer with some of the most vibrant vegetation on earth, then I moved to Los Angeles. Like many of the newly minted highly industrialized cities of the last 100 years, the Los Angeles basin in home to an extremely dense area of geographically contained automobile exhaust. Somewhere I read a statistic that if you’re raised in Los Angeles, near the 101 and 405, your lung capacity is automatically 10% less than if you grew up anywhere else because every oxogen molecule is much less effective. Every two oxogen molecules are suppressed with one molecule of carbon throughout the atmosphere, and we’ve been plotting them out the back of our cars for over 100 years now.

Now back in the middle western United States, that is technically more eastern than western, but because back when the non-natives founded Saint Louis they thought that was pretty far west from New York… and all these years later it’s still called middle west even though we can all now very clearly see on every map that it’s technically east… anyways, a great many locations around here are named after native tribes that once tended the living garden of what is now called North America, until the governing bodies had them sign treaties in a language foreign to them about them being moved and “reserved” to much less farmable land in Oklahoma, but by golly if that movie of the same name doesn’t have some enjoyable tunes. The Iroquois had a rule, a law, or a guideline that they lived by that said that they wouldn’t make any decisions before first determining how that decision would affect/effect the next seven generations of living beings… Let’s think about the auto exhaust in Los Angeles. That city, at one time had built the most expansive electric train car system in the world, the Pacific Electric Railway Company, also called ‘the Red Cars’ that ran from 1901 - 1965. Tire manufactures did everything they could to shut that down and now the Los Angeles road system is more of a parking lot than it serves as an effective means of transporting goods and services. Please see Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) for further details. Now back to the topic of scissors, crafts, and the idea of cutting from the past.

Every single human to ever exist who has ever seen a smoldering bon fire has witnessed the two ingredients necessary for making structures that store not only energy, but carbon as well… locally. That means, if there is ever a storm, or some power lines get knocked over for whatever reasons, there will still be more than enough electricity stored within the structure to power anything necessary for comfortable living. Right now I’ve made a prototype of just a small tile, but this could be made into bricks, cylinders, whatever… flying cars?

My first prototype is just a small tile, but like any good ceramics class I’m now building bowl shapes that could be scaled up to manufacture flying, bulletproof living rooms of tomorrow. Each layer with a graphene or hemp current separator that would build in more strength and more capacitance per layer. Imagine having your own flying saucer living room that stores more than 90 days of energy in the very hull of the craft? Much like a baby chick, or any shell born animal, surviving off the nutrients of the inner shell, these self contained living spaces could store large amounts of energy cleanly and greenly. Then you could have Dyson style drones airlift them to a new location, have built in rafts to allow them to float, and wheeled chases to allow them to drive like ground stuck cars of the past. If it wasn’t for Fiskers, we’d have never cut those ties to our outdated thinking and we’d have never got to the future that is necessary for all creatures that breath oxogen and enjoy what electricity afords them.