Thursday, March 12, 2009

Clicks Recycled

Today, I've been obsessing about keyboard and keypad clicks. To see what I mean, just assume that about one billion people around the world use a computer or some other keypad device every day, and that each person makes approx. 2000 keystrokes per day. That translates into approx. 2,000,000,000,000 clicks per day. If you then multiply that figure by 365 days per year, you're quickly looking at 730,000,000,000,000 -- in other words, 730 trillion -- clicks per year. That's a mighty big number.

Which leads me to wonder...how much of our worldwide need for energy could be covered by harnessing all this excess click energy and channeling it into electricity to power to...hmmm, say, to power all our computers and nighttime streetlamps. Of course, the major obstacle there is to find out how to capture all that energy and put it to good use.
Just to put one idea out there, assume that we could all wear special gloves that capture the excess energy involved each time a finger hits a key, and the energy could then be fed into a household battery system to drive the very computer you are working on. Or just to make this proposal more flexible, assume that the captured energy can be stored on a special battery integrated directly into the glove. Thus, you wouldn't have to worry about unwieldy connectors and cables. You could click anywhere you want without feeling guilty about losing even a tiny bit of that valuable energy.

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