www.egs.edu Michael Hardt, the author of Multitude and Empire talks about love, how can love function as a political concept, why love, the proper and improper ways love has functioned politically, love as activism, and evil and its relationship to love. Public open video philosophy lecture for the faculty and students of the European Graduate School, Media and Communication Studies Department Program, EGS, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Europe, 2007. Michael Hardt. Michael Hardt, born 1960 is an American literary theorist and political philosopher based at Duke University. Perhaps his most famous work is Empire written with Antonio Negri. The sequel to Empire, called Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, was released in August, 2004, and details the idea of the multitude (which Hardt and Negri initially elaborated in Empire) as the potential site of a global democratic movement. Sometimes referred to as the “Communist Manifesto of the 21st Century”, Empire proposes that the forces of current class oppression, namely – corporate globalization and commodification of services (or “production of affects”) have the potential to fuel social change of unprecedented dimensions. Born in Washington DC, Hardt attended Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland. He studied engineering at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania from 1978 to 1983. In college during the 1970s energy crisis, he began to take an interest in alternative energy sources. Talking about his college …
Question by Jason G.: How come they aren’t coming up with more alternative fuel sources for cars, or designing cars that use them?
They have battery-powered cars, which is good,but how come they don’t have:
solar-powered cars
hydro-powered cars
remote contorlled cars?
RC cars would be practical- you wouldn’t have to be concerned with using the steering wheel or putting your foot on the gas peal or brakes. Your hands and feet would be free.
What about coming up with new fuel sources, that are safe for the environment?
Okay Zarn, then all they’d have to do is go to charging stations.
Best answer:
Answer by Zarn
Solar-powered cars were invented a long time ago.
Hydro-powered cars would have way too much mass to be efficient – and you’d drop water everywhere. Hydroelectric power is best for stationary, large-scale power generation.
Remote controlled cars like you’re envisioning have been in development for many, many years. The term usually used is ‘autonomic steering’ or ‘self steering’. There has also been tests of swarm-style algorithms to plan this better. Google’s working in this field, but they’re newcomers to an old field of research.
New fuel sources isn’t really the answer. Improving those we already know about is imperative. One is working on improving fuel cell technology using nanoscale manufacturing, and electricity or hydrogen seems to be the two only really viable alternatives to fossil fuels (or ethanol) – thus anything that improves batteries will also lessen our need for fossil fuels.
The problem is not charging stations either – the problem’s generating the electricity in the first place. If you have a coal-fueled power station, then the power station can generate electricity – but that electricity wouldn’t be “clean” by any stretch of the imagination. Fusion (probably hot), Thorium-based nuclear reactors, and wave-based power stations are likely to be important generators of electricity in the coming decades. If one ever gets fusion to work over sustained amounts of time, that is.
Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!