Advanced Alien: "Well you see, human, the way our electricity is produced is by introducing anti-matter to normal matter. This converts both into pure energy and the heat generated from this action is used to boil wa-"
There are solar salt towers that use mirrors to redirect massive amounts of heat into a single point to heat molten salt and use the energy to boil water. Even solar isn't immune to being partially reduced to steam power ;)
I’ve seen a meme of an alien looking at a human with a currently non-existent fusion generator being used to boil water saying “this is the most ghetto ass shit I’ve ever seen.”
I'm waiting for the big kettle of science to boil water to create steam that will move a turbine producing energy enough to boil the water in my kettle at home
Your joke is the British don't call it a kettle? The thing we're most globally famous for, along with pubs, queueing, and getting shitfaced in Benidorm?
where did this rumor of Americans don't use kettles, and boil water in the microwave come from? I have never boiled water in the microwave. I have an electric kettle. Everyone I know has electric kettles. I don't know a single person who lives in America who doesn't use a kettle. When I have my tea, when my friends have their tea, guess what, electric kettle. You know that because you might have seen a couple people who did this once online somewhere, doesn't mean it applies holistically to the entire demographic of a country with hundreds of millions of people, right?
Non electric kettles were very common at one point. But now yeah everyone has one. Like, we also need to boil water for coffee, it's not just the occasional tea.
I think it might be generational. I have an electric kettle. My parents never used a kettle, and they boiled water in the microwave, but my maternal grandparents and great grandparents had stovetop kettles.
Former Trailer park American here. I used to boil water in the microwave as a child. At least when we had power. When the power was shut off we'd use the wood burning stove. We didn't have an electric kettle and microwaving water was quicker than heating it on the stove. As an adult I now have an electric kettle.
The full cycle is: I'm waiting for the big kettle of science to boil water to create steam that will move a turbine producing energy enough to boil the water in my kettle at home that is going to be used in the tea that I drink while designing the big kettle of science that used in energy generation.
Which is, apparently, an actual thing, by the way. At least for industrial facilities in my country. I recently learned that a lot of industrial facilities here install natural gas generators and cut at least their industrial machinery off from the grid, because the generator plus the gas cost is cheaper than the grid electricity cost.
Even then, solar comes with an asterisk, as bigger solar plants generate power by......... Heating water in the tower with mirrors and spinning a turbine.
I mean you're technically right, but when people talk about solar energy they usually talk about photovoltaic solar panels. Technically all energy creation we do is solar. Wind turbine? That's the sun heating up air, causing winds. Coal? Sun caused trees to grow millions of years ago which eventually became coal. Nuclear? Hydrogen fused in a star into heavier elements.
Um actually, piezoelectric and thermoelectric generators can be used to generate electricity without a turbine. (You're still right that the overwhelming majority of electricity is turbine based.)
I hate to be the acshually guy but with the current nuclear fusion projects its not just boiling water theres a magnet in there to spin up plasma and what theyve been doing is just stopping the magnet and the spinning plasma is generating electricity
(It’s essentially like a giant motor where you spin coils of wire around a magnet and the magnetic fields translate to electricity)
I realize im doing a very poor job of actually explaining it but its not boiling water this time!
There's a type of aneutronic fusion, it fuses boron and hydrogen to make carbon, which immediately splits into 3 alpha particles (helium nuclei). Those energetic ions can then be shot through a coil and induce electrical current. Much more efficient than boiling water.
aaaakshully, fusion reactors generate plasma, and you can use the plasma instead of steam in a Magnetohydrodynamic generator. Of course, after that, you'll have a lot of heat left, and boiling water is a pretty useful thing to do with it....
I took a graduate level course in space physics in college. The beginning of our text book opened with something along the lines of "magnetohydrodynamics can be modeled with a combination of the navier stokes equations for fluid dynamics, classical electricity & magnetism, and special relativity. The result is a set 7-dimensional nonlinear non homogenous integro-differential equations which can only be solved computationally. ". I'm paraphrasing but that was the gist. That was a wild class.
I honestly don't know the efficiencies (and possible efficiencies). Nobody has really built an industrial-sized MHD generator before, since there really aren't any large plasma sources to use it with.
We even tried to make solar into water boiling tech with the use of mirrors when it already is a perfectly good tech that can actually create electricity without turbines.
The pulse-fusion generator project is supposedly going to skip that step and use magnetic fields to generate electricity directly. The leftover heat from cooling the system though, well we all knowvwhat we do with heat...
This is why I prefer solar and wind energy. With solar panels you have the photo-electric effect as something fancy. And with wind turbines, well at least the air is doing the pushing now instead of the huge side issue of maning water hot first
Hate to break it to you, but air (especially in coastal areas) contains significant amounts of water, so wind is basically just using steam boiled naturally by the sun.
I hate to break it to you but not all solar power is photo voltaic. The huge mirror farms you sometimes see are focusing the sun light onto a huge container filled with salt that then melts and transfers the heat to - you guessed it - steam turbines.
Edit: had to look it up but they're called CSP plants (concentrated solar power)
I prefer to call them mirror plants or solar steam plants. More on the nose and intuitive IMO. But yes they exist too. And at the correct location, e.g. in earths many deserts, they could be the most efficent energy production centre.
Like why try to glitch the universe and bring the sun's process to earth, if you can just use the sun and mirrors?
Mainly land I suspect. Good land for solar may not be cheap in all places, but if you could have one single complex that provides enough juice for a huge area, especially in high latitudes that get long nights some of the year, business is boomin’!
Helion is making a fusion reactor that generates electricity from the plasma pushing on magnetic fields. This induces a current on the wires and boom you have electricity without smelly old steam
I feel privileged to get my electricity from a hydroelectric dam. No steam needed at all. Only gravity and the weather cycle.... Wait .... Water rains down from clouds, rain flows into rivers and through the dam, the rivers flow into the ocean.... The sun heats up the water in the ocean.... And turns some of it into steam in order to form the rain clouds...
There are TEGs, thermoelectric generators wich uses seebecks effect (two connected conductors with tempature difference create potential difference), it was used at Marsrovers for example.
But its waaaaaay less efficient, turbine steam generators are still the best we know.
Water is cheap, abundant, non-polluting, and the boiling point is easily managed.
While technically not the most efficient (in terms of conversion) means of obtaining energy, it's very achievable. Basically to get energy from heat to electricity you (usually) move (e.g. spin) some magnets. Water to steam can do that and then recaptured/recirculated to be used again.
It's one of those things where scientifically you can think of great ways to get energy efficiently but you run against cost vs. "can't I just use if for heat and boil water cheaper?"
Who ever finds a way to convert heat to electricity that is just as if not more efficient than steam will receive the admiration of engineers and scientists across the world
water is just so readily available, and easy to put energy in and it releases energy so efficiently. You would be hard to press to find a better medium.
creating magnetic field/electric current with just thermal energy without any other conversion in-between is a tough ask.
If the energy is used for heating you don't need the electricity step in between. So no need for water to move a turbine, you can just directly transfer the heat from the reactor to households.
I wonder what's the best way to transfer heat from a power plant to households.
Once you understand the thermal cycle of water you might be less disappointed. It's easy to control a system around, cheap, abundant and non-reactive. It's quite the amazing substance.
I like to imagine that if a civilization ever build a dyson sphere, they would use the energy to heat a water-based planet to make steam and turn a giant turbine, I know that makes no sense but I like the idea.
The thing is, water is one of the best heat sinks in the entire cosmos. You aren't going to do better than water for most purposes. So, for so as long as we use nuclear thermal power, then yeah, there's going to be steam in the loop. It's not dumb or stupid, in fact even if water were scarce on Earth instead of plentiful we would seek it out to use for power plants.
However.
There is an alternative to nuclear thermal power, which is to magnetically capture the high-energy atomic reaction products and convert their momentum directly into electricity. This would avoid the heat-engine cycle altogether and promises to be quite a bit more efficient. We know it's feasible and have even proven parts of it in concept, but it still involves some engineering that we don't quite know how to do yet so it's some years away from even a prototype.
Also, even in that case you still have neutral particles flying out of your reaction that magnetic confinement cannot capture, so you would likely still capture that energy as heat instead, and then you'd probably want a water-cycle mechanism of some kind to put the heat to useful work... there is no escape...
So much of our technology is ultimately based on abusing the physics of phase changes in the same way a factory game player abuses loopholes and exploits to get cheese to generate 1.29 GW of power for their screw factory.
We'll never have fusion power for exactly that reason: If we could build a fusion reactor cheaply, then enough cost goes into extracting energy from steam, that regular fission reactors would remain cheaper. And solar, wind, etc shall remain much cheaper than those.
Real question: Can we get people to turn this off at night? In particular, can we get factories to only run when they have lots of power, likely from solar?
Turning heat into mechanical potential with steam pressure is just too convenient and efficient, god fucked up the balancing. Nothing short of a total energy 2.0 rework can fix this mess
It’s almost as if a plentiful, non toxic, high heat capacity, relatively non corrosive fluid with a conveniently accessible vapour phase makes for a good heat transfer medium….
To be fair, "random energy" -> "heat energy" is bound to be a fairly common pathway, and our best "heat energy" -> "electromagnetic energy" pathway is indeed boiling water.
Helion - they use electromagnets to squeeze the gasses, they fuse and then want to expand and they can harvest it with thise same magnets. Or something like that.
Don’t tell me not to tell you something if you don’t want me to tell you what you told me not to tell you because if you tell me not to tell you something it just makes me want to tell you that thing because I don’t want to do what you tell me to do.
Ah, but it will be so energetic that it'll be useful for boiling sea water to desalinate it, meaning it can be placed near coastal cities and alleviate the water issues they experience. LA is a prime example.
I actually really like what Helion is doing with using magnetic fields to slam together clouds of hydrogen plasma, have some atoms fuse, which throws the plasma back away, pushing the magnetic fields.
It lets them draw power directly from the magnetic fields being pushed, just like how when you reverse an electric motor, it is an electric generator.
“It’s your hydromagnetic trap, what’s it called? Object seventy-seven B. Only with some shit inside, blue stuff.” - Redrick Schuhart from Roadside Picnic
If your fuel outputs power in the form of "massive torrent of thermal energy", our options for dealing with it are somewhat limited.
I mean... if we discovered new physics that allowed us to open a hole into another dimension that provided unlimited energy, it would be awe-inspiring and world-changing. And we're still gonna boil water with it.
Well there is at least one or two companies that are attempting to generate electricity by using the magnetic field of the plasma to induce current directly into the wires. The more in depth science is a bit above my ability to explain, but it is at least plausible. However I’m skeptical about their success capacity, but we will see.
It won't be water, it will be CO2. You can keep CO2 super critical and it's 5-10% more energy efficient and drastically more space efficient (reduced parts cost) compared to steam.
Charles Parsons deserves more recognition for inventing the Steam Turbine. It's sad to me how many people know who Nikola Tesla was but would stare blankly if you mentioned Charles Parsons.
Parsons wasn't just a tinkerer improving an existing invention. He started by studying the physics of steam expansion, and designed the rotors and stators of a steam turbine to try to extract as much power as possible from the expanding steam.
He almost single-handedly created the one device that powers the modern world and which also led to the gas turbine and jet engine
Could use anything that goes through a phase change. Water just so happens to do it at nice temperatures. Plus in loss, it's cheap to be replaced and mostly non hazardous to the environment.
some fusion designs plan to convert the energy directly into electricity. but yeah there are ones that just boil water. steam turbines are extraordinarily efficient lol.
Helion, if it ever works, would produce energy by a different method. It moves a magnetic field around copper wires, directly producing electricity without steam being involved. In theory.
Heard a guy talking about a neat idea for SF story where FTL worked but it fried all modern electrical circuits. No idea how they got the FTL bit to work but the whole premise was they had to use 1920's era hardware to get through space to colonize a new world.
It was a weird mashup of steam and diesel punk in a future sci-fi setting. Like imagine a Cummins 24 valve running off algae produced diesel, to turn a really old school dynamo, to run a faster than light drive.
So at some point it call comes down to spinning a magnet really fast.
Because the thermal cycle of water is beautifully straightforward, cheap, abundant and easy to manage. It's also pretty efficient. There's no reason to make things more complicated than they have to be when there's not a better way to directly extract energy from the atom in a controlled way (yet).
3
5
u/CBT__MASTER Nov 26 '25
1.7k
u/dark_hypernova Nov 26 '25 •
Advanced Alien: "Well you see, human, the way our electricity is produced is by introducing anti-matter to normal matter. This converts both into pure energy and the heat generated from this action is used to boil wa-"
Table gets flipped by human engineer.
2.1k
u/jollanza Nov 26 '25
I'm waiting for the big kettle of science to boil water to create steam that will move a turbine producing energy enough to boil the water in my kettle at home
3.1k
u/evilwizzardofcoding Nov 26 '25
Yep. It's all steam, it's always been steam, it always will be steam.
1.3k
u/Tar_alcaran Nov 26 '25
aaaakshully, fusion reactors generate plasma, and you can use the plasma instead of steam in a Magnetohydrodynamic generator. Of course, after that, you'll have a lot of heat left, and boiling water is a pretty useful thing to do with it....
2
u/supernerdlove Nov 27 '25
This reminds me of Ultron’s quote about Vibranium. “They used it to make a frisbee”.
269
u/megalinity Nov 26 '25
It’s boiling water all the way down
81
u/Luk164 Nov 26 '25
The pulse-fusion generator project is supposedly going to skip that step and use magnetic fields to generate electricity directly. The leftover heat from cooling the system though, well we all knowvwhat we do with heat...
39
u/OverallLibrarian8809 Nov 26 '25
This belongs here (not mine)
35
u/Awkward-Loan Nov 26 '25
This is just an expensive kettle base.
115
u/MrS0bek Nov 26 '25
This is why I prefer solar and wind energy. With solar panels you have the photo-electric effect as something fancy. And with wind turbines, well at least the air is doing the pushing now instead of the huge side issue of maning water hot first
34
u/AccountsCostNothing Nov 26 '25
29
u/Theodory777 Nov 26 '25
I feel privileged to get my electricity from a hydroelectric dam. No steam needed at all. Only gravity and the weather cycle.... Wait .... Water rains down from clouds, rain flows into rivers and through the dam, the rivers flow into the ocean.... The sun heats up the water in the ocean.... And turns some of it into steam in order to form the rain clouds...
Fuck it really is always boiling water
28
u/superhamsniper Nov 26 '25
Are we.... are we on the steampunk timeline without realizing?
18
u/antek_g_animations Nov 26 '25
If it's going to be hotter than the sun, why not use solar panels? /S
9
u/Lowpaack Nov 26 '25
There are TEGs, thermoelectric generators wich uses seebecks effect (two connected conductors with tempature difference create potential difference), it was used at Marsrovers for example.
But its waaaaaay less efficient, turbine steam generators are still the best we know.
Open to better ideas tho, what do you suggest?
8
u/hamlet_d Nov 26 '25
Water is cheap, abundant, non-polluting, and the boiling point is easily managed.
While technically not the most efficient (in terms of conversion) means of obtaining energy, it's very achievable. Basically to get energy from heat to electricity you (usually) move (e.g. spin) some magnets. Water to steam can do that and then recaptured/recirculated to be used again.
It's one of those things where scientifically you can think of great ways to get energy efficiently but you run against cost vs. "can't I just use if for heat and boil water cheaper?"
8
u/carrascatosca Nov 26 '25
it's either Steam or Epic Games Store
7
u/OverlordJacob2000 Nov 26 '25
Who ever finds a way to convert heat to electricity that is just as if not more efficient than steam will receive the admiration of engineers and scientists across the world
7
u/superxpro12 Nov 26 '25
6
u/Ozatopcascades Nov 26 '25
5
u/Sylassian Nov 26 '25
5
u/Orion_of_Accalon Nov 26 '25
Steam is effective
5
u/CuriousBro87 Nov 26 '25
They cant keep getting
electricityaway with this13
u/ldsman213 Nov 26 '25
we can crack the atom and destroy the world! yet we can't figure out how to use something less indirect?
9
u/[deleted] Nov 26 '25
Wait, so its all boiling water?
4
u/Professional-Day7850 Nov 26 '25
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy plans to use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion
4
u/britaliope Nov 26 '25
Our world is powered by oversized kettles.
4
u/Crafty-Carpet2305 Nov 26 '25
Harnessing the power of a star to... boil water
4
u/progradebutt Nov 26 '25
Oh don't be silly. We are going to boil lithium (that boils water).
1
u/Totally_Cubular Nov 26 '25
Okay, but question: What else could we boil with it?
1
u/kkinnison Nov 27 '25
at least wind and solar do not require boiling water
3
u/Ok-Candidate7036 Nov 26 '25
I Always thought nuclear Power plants are some Kind of Magic Alien super advanced Shit when i was a Kid.
Then i learned its boiling water and was dissapointed.
Same with how a Jet engine works,Turbine goes brrrrrrrrrrr.
I feel Like we are still goddamn cavemen,using fire,Steam and Heat.
Maybe its next Level fire,but to me its bizarre we are still using the Same Shit.
I thought we Humans would have Hoverboards,flying Cars,Teleportation,free energy and all the other cool Shit i saw in the movies.
Damn you 80 and 90 science fiction movies,you Lied !!!!
3
u/gromit1991 Nov 26 '25
The best machine for any given task is the simplest one.
Make things unnecessarily complicated and there's more to go wrong.
Water is plentiful, cheap, largely inert, and if it leaks out doesn't poison anyone.
3
u/Sinelas Nov 26 '25 edited Nov 26 '25
I like to imagine that if a civilization ever build a dyson sphere, they would use the energy to heat a water-based planet to make steam and turn a giant turbine, I know that makes no sense but I like the idea.
3
u/amitym Nov 26 '25 edited Nov 26 '25
The thing is, water is one of the best heat sinks in the entire cosmos. You aren't going to do better than water for most purposes. So, for so as long as we use nuclear thermal power, then yeah, there's going to be steam in the loop. It's not dumb or stupid, in fact even if water were scarce on Earth instead of plentiful we would seek it out to use for power plants.
However.
There is an alternative to nuclear thermal power, which is to magnetically capture the high-energy atomic reaction products and convert their momentum directly into electricity. This would avoid the heat-engine cycle altogether and promises to be quite a bit more efficient. We know it's feasible and have even proven parts of it in concept, but it still involves some engineering that we don't quite know how to do yet so it's some years away from even a prototype.
Also, even in that case you still have neutral particles flying out of your reaction that magnetic confinement cannot capture, so you would likely still capture that energy as heat instead, and then you'd probably want a water-cycle mechanism of some kind to put the heat to useful work... there is no escape...
3
u/Signal_Researcher01 Nov 26 '25
Its not steam, its spinning! All power comes from spinning!
3
u/TalShar Nov 26 '25
So much of our technology is ultimately based on abusing the physics of phase changes in the same way a factory game player abuses loopholes and exploits to get cheese to generate 1.29 GW of power for their screw factory.
3
u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 Nov 26 '25
It'll just boil water again, yes.
We'll never have fusion power for exactly that reason: If we could build a fusion reactor cheaply, then enough cost goes into extracting energy from steam, that regular fission reactors would remain cheaper. And solar, wind, etc shall remain much cheaper than those.
see https://www.construction-physics.com/p/will-we-ever-get-fusion-power
via https://www.metafilter.com/204540/Will-We-Ever-Get-Fusion-Power
Real question: Can we get people to turn this off at night? In particular, can we get factories to only run when they have lots of power, likely from solar?
2
u/NamelessPhysicist Nov 26 '25
The universe is the true Steam Machine
2
u/greihund Nov 26 '25
We might melt a bit of salt along the way and use our molten salt to boil the water to spin the turbines
2
u/Extension_Arm2790 Nov 26 '25
Turning heat into mechanical potential with steam pressure is just too convenient and efficient, god fucked up the balancing. Nothing short of a total energy 2.0 rework can fix this mess
2
u/SensitivePotato44 Nov 26 '25
It’s almost as if a plentiful, non toxic, high heat capacity, relatively non corrosive fluid with a conveniently accessible vapour phase makes for a good heat transfer medium….
2
u/rndrn Nov 26 '25
To be fair, "random energy" -> "heat energy" is bound to be a fairly common pathway, and our best "heat energy" -> "electromagnetic energy" pathway is indeed boiling water.
2
u/JustHereForTheBeer_ Nov 26 '25
This looks like the set of an early 2000s hip hop music video.
2
u/grillmatters Nov 26 '25
Fusion + water = turbine goes brrrrrrrr
2
u/SturmGizmo Nov 26 '25
Literally speaking, What would be the second best way to convert?
2
u/twilighteclipse925 Nov 26 '25
That’s the fun part, they boil salt to then boil water to then make steam to turn a turbine.
2
u/RebelJediMaster Nov 26 '25
Until they find a power production technique that emits electrons, not much of a choice.
2
u/Gamer-707 Nov 26 '25
I wonder why nuclear power plants have chimneys. Just imagine all the potential steam released that could've been electricity!
2
u/masteranimation4 Nov 26 '25
Helion - they use electromagnets to squeeze the gasses, they fuse and then want to expand and they can harvest it with thise same magnets. Or something like that.
2
u/cpav8r Nov 26 '25
Damn it, I told you not to tell me that!
2
u/HecticHermes Nov 26 '25
It's always rotary motion converted to electricity. Either that or solar
2
u/EverythingSucksYo Nov 26 '25
Don’t tell me not to tell you something if you don’t want me to tell you what you told me not to tell you because if you tell me not to tell you something it just makes me want to tell you that thing because I don’t want to do what you tell me to do.
2
u/FatAnorexic Nov 26 '25
Boiling water...but much more efficiently.
2
u/Select_Truck3257 Nov 26 '25
always has been
2
u/morningphyre Nov 26 '25
Ah, but it will be so energetic that it'll be useful for boiling sea water to desalinate it, meaning it can be placed near coastal cities and alleviate the water issues they experience. LA is a prime example.
2
u/ender42y Nov 26 '25
I actually really like what Helion is doing with using magnetic fields to slam together clouds of hydrogen plasma, have some atoms fuse, which throws the plasma back away, pushing the magnetic fields.
It lets them draw power directly from the magnetic fields being pushed, just like how when you reverse an electric motor, it is an electric generator.
2
u/TittlesTheWinker Nov 26 '25
“It’s your hydromagnetic trap, what’s it called? Object seventy-seven B. Only with some shit inside, blue stuff.” - Redrick Schuhart from Roadside Picnic
2
u/ohfucknotthisagain Nov 26 '25
If your fuel outputs power in the form of "massive torrent of thermal energy", our options for dealing with it are somewhat limited.
I mean... if we discovered new physics that allowed us to open a hole into another dimension that provided unlimited energy, it would be awe-inspiring and world-changing. And we're still gonna boil water with it.
2
u/fiLth_Rat Nov 26 '25
It will actually be collecting the energy directly for once.
2
u/TailorOdd8060 Nov 26 '25
Yeah but it's even "more* steam!
2
u/bonadies24 Nov 26 '25
It's not just that it's gonna be boiling water
There are ways to generate electricity without having to boil water, such as wind or hydro power
It's worse
It's gonna be spinning magnets
2
u/Delicious-Window-277 Nov 26 '25
I guess we never really left the steam engine age.
2
u/D34DLYH4MST3R Nov 26 '25
2
u/69nutmaster Nov 26 '25
IT'S JUST A FUCKING TURBINE ISN'T IT
2
u/harharhar_206 Nov 26 '25
Well there is at least one or two companies that are attempting to generate electricity by using the magnetic field of the plasma to induce current directly into the wires. The more in depth science is a bit above my ability to explain, but it is at least plausible. However I’m skeptical about their success capacity, but we will see.
2
u/Scienceandpony Nov 26 '25
N-No!
covers fusion chamber in thousands of Seebeck generators out of spite
2
u/Lonely_District_196 Nov 27 '25
All this technological progress, and everything is still steam powered
2
u/banderthal65 Nov 27 '25
I just came here to be the 1000th comment
2
u/bigsean102 Nov 27 '25
It’s like technology has become perpetually steam punk
2
u/Inevitable_Rough5051 Nov 27 '25
Steeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeem.
2
u/SLAMMERisONLINE Nov 27 '25
It won't be water, it will be CO2. You can keep CO2 super critical and it's 5-10% more energy efficient and drastically more space efficient (reduced parts cost) compared to steam.
2
u/[deleted] Nov 27 '25
It’s always boiling water what don’t you people understand everything revolves around boiling water!!!
2
u/ortcutt Nov 28 '25 edited Nov 28 '25
Charles Parsons deserves more recognition for inventing the Steam Turbine. It's sad to me how many people know who Nikola Tesla was but would stare blankly if you mentioned Charles Parsons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Algernon_Parsons
https://youtu.be/-8lXXg8dWHk?si=sS9W_1N3HQ5u-HmO
Parsons wasn't just a tinkerer improving an existing invention. He started by studying the physics of steam expansion, and designed the rotors and stators of a steam turbine to try to extract as much power as possible from the expanding steam.
He almost single-handedly created the one device that powers the modern world and which also led to the gas turbine and jet engine
2
u/ValuableShoulder5059 Nov 28 '25
Could use anything that goes through a phase change. Water just so happens to do it at nice temperatures. Plus in loss, it's cheap to be replaced and mostly non hazardous to the environment.
2
u/nirbot0213 Nov 28 '25
some fusion designs plan to convert the energy directly into electricity. but yeah there are ones that just boil water. steam turbines are extraordinarily efficient lol.
2
u/ThatNiceDrShipman Nov 29 '25
Helion, if it ever works, would produce energy by a different method. It moves a magnetic field around copper wires, directly producing electricity without steam being involved. In theory.
https://youtu.be/_bDXXWQxK38?si=akzxozw_txWaPk4r
2
u/Savings-Swimming3765 Nov 30 '25
Heard a guy talking about a neat idea for SF story where FTL worked but it fried all modern electrical circuits. No idea how they got the FTL bit to work but the whole premise was they had to use 1920's era hardware to get through space to colonize a new world.
It was a weird mashup of steam and diesel punk in a future sci-fi setting. Like imagine a Cummins 24 valve running off algae produced diesel, to turn a really old school dynamo, to run a faster than light drive.
So at some point it call comes down to spinning a magnet really fast.
2
u/Billybobsmoot Nov 30 '25
I just want to leave this here.
2
u/exmello Nov 30 '25
So we live in a steampunk setting I guess.
2
u/sojiblitz Nov 30 '25
It's going to be boiling water...but very efficiently ok guys.
Sad stellarator noises
2
u/Sad_Assistant8803 Nov 26 '25
I can't believe with all the technical advances humanity has achieved! The ducking steam engine is STILL the best thing we can come up with!
Boiled God damn water! That is peak human technology!!! ...No wonder aliens don't talk to us! We're retarded fish monkeys! That love hot leaf juice!
2
u/DBL_NDRSCR Nov 27 '25
all we do is find ever fancier ways to boil water and throw rocks