Every once in a while my mind wanders into the world of "what if". I'll look at something and wonder "what if it was x was used for y". The latest of these thoughts occurred to me when I walked inside my house during a break from work. As I walked in, my dog greeted me with his tail wagging feverishly. As I lounged back into the livingroom couch and repeated his name in an excited tone, his tail wagging reverted to full velocity wagging.
Then came the "what if" thought. What if we could harness the inertia of a dogs tail to generate electricity? Taking a break from problem solving at work, I laid back in my couch further, yet my mind was still in problem solving mode. A few ideas came immediatly, one involved a device to be placed on the end of the dogs tail similar to the inner workings of a hand cranked flash light. This thought was quickly rejected as it would require a wire of some sort connected to a battery or power grid of some sort. Following this thought came an idea to attach a magnet to the dogs tail which would react with a metal lever of sorts, causing this lever to move up and down or side to side in some kinetic energy turned electricity generating contraption.
Realizing that a variety of methods could be implemented to generate electricty, my mind continued down the path of this thought experiment towards attempting to understand the ethical implications. A dog wags their tail when they are happy, so tail wagging generated energy could only result in a positive experience for the dog whos tail wagging is to generate energy. Right?
Then came the thoughts of the human element. At some point in time, if this fictional form of energy creating contraption did become a reality, some brilliantly genius human would devise some way of producing tail wagging generated energy at a mass scale.
This of course lead towards thoughts of something sinilar to the movie sci-fi movie The Matrix, where humans were mass farmed for the electrical synapses in their brains, and their minds existed in a simulated world while their bodies existed in a dim existence of reality where technology had become self aware and overtook humanity. I envisioned a chicken coop warehouse-esque setting where millions of dogs lived in kennels being artificially stimulated in a way which caused their tails to wag constantly. Even moreso, the creators of this industrialized tail wagging energy generating facility, obsessing over efficency and output, might have devised some neurochemical which was administered to these dogs that created more frenzied wagging of tails, to the extent that these dogs would no longer be wagging their tails in excitement.
This whole thought process took place over the span of a few minutes, and at this point I reminded myself that I had taken a break from my work in an attempt to relax.
Realizing this, I said my dogs name louder and in a higher pitch than previously, and expressed verbally the gratitude that I felt for not living in a world where energy is powered by the wagging of his tail.
Dogs are awesome, and they never fail to amaze me at how excited they get when they see you for the first time in a short while. If you're reading this, and have a dog (or any pet for that matter), go ahead and give then a few belly rubs or pats on the head, to show some appreciation for them.
After all, who else will literally almost pee themselves in excitement when seeing you walk in the door for the first time in a few hours? Dogs, of course!
This was a fun break from my daily work grind. It may seem like a strange blog entry, but I find rambling off the random thoughts that enter my mind during the day helps me focus better on my work when i return to it.
As always, thanks for reading!