If you ever look at the names of the authors here at MiddleEasy, you’ll see that there are a few different writers and we all have our own obsessions and idiosyncrasies. Zeus had a professional interest in quantum physics and has listened to nothing but Wu-Tang Clan for the best part of his life. Jason and Dave essentially live on Steam. Gary loves his cat. Mine? Most certainly the end of the world as we know it due to a war with autonomous machines.
The evidence for this apocalyptic event is mounting. Self-assembling robots are one thing but they require power to do this. Enter self-healing batteries. Although the researchers believe we need to wait quite a while until they have batteries which can power vehicles, they have developed a high-capacity battery which heals itself on every charge.
High-capacity batteries are what self-driving tanks will use in the future in order to track us down and erase us from the surface of the planet. But for the moment, we are pursuing their development so our Tesla can travel further between charges and our iPhones don’t die halfway through the day because we dared to listen to a few songs on the way to work that morning.
I can’t pretend to be smart enough to understand every aspect of the technology which will eventually hunt me down and try to wipe me out like a dirty cockroach. Luckily, the folk over at MIT Tech Review write about this stuff for people like me to understand. As they said on this topic, “the self-healing battery’s negative electrode, or anode, combines silicon with polymers that act like chemical zippers, healing cracks that form when the battery is used and recharged.”
The current batteries can only last around one hundred charging cycles before they are worn out completely but the researchers think that they need to get up to a few thousand before it is suitable for vehicles. You can read more about this amazing yet terrifying advancement over at MIT Tech Review if you want to prepare for the approaching robot war.
