Comicbook World #53: Flesh-eating Furniture?

Yeah, that's just what I need... household appliances powered by the flesh of those who offend me! Looks like the idea of creating machines that run on "biomass" is building steam...


In this bit of youTubery, we see a clock and a lamp, both of which are powered by luring and trapping flies, then converting their corpses into energy. The fine folks at Bristol Robotics say they were inspired by carnivorous plants, such as the Venus fly traps we used to see in cartoons as kids, and wanted to explore the possibilities of using similar methods to power machines. "8 dead flies makes it work for about 12 days," says co-designer Professor Chris Melhuish.
Anybody who knows me very well knows I think this is a bad idea... Now, don't get me wrong... I hate flies enough to buy a lamp, a clock... hell I'd drive a CAR powered by the systematic mass murder of those annoying filthy buzzing bastiches. I wouldn't lose sleep over multitasking the deaths of creatures we as humans work overtime to kill anyways (these same dudes have a table that kills mice, too), but the rush to feed meat to machines has potentially disastrous implications to it that I have addressed before (click here), and I still see it going bad on us on some Little Shop of Horrors type isht...

Why not create ways to power these things on waste instead? I mean, the flies get their food from poop, so why not cut out the middle man and create robots that are powered by sewage, or urine, or dust, or compost. Humans produce tons of crap (pun intended) that we don't want or need, so when are we gonna close the loop? Nature uses waste to fuel life, so why not imitate that, instead? I'm actually surprised this kind of technology isn't common already... remember that DeLorean that ran on trash from the Back To The Future trilogy? Yeah, we need our electric cars, and want our flying cars, but give me that urine powered, time-traveling jet-pack! That's an idea that's worth it's weight in liquid gold!
holla!
-samax.

2 comments:

  1. haha, that fly lamp, whoa. it seems kind of sick to me, actually. i know nobody likes flies but the idea of a machine that actually attracts them in order to kill them to keep itself running doesn't sit well with me. maybe if it was something other than a lamp, i don't know, something with more heft that you couldn't create otherwise. like a fly-powered car.

    i'm definitely pro-poop, though, i think that's the best way to go. total methane poop machines.

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  2. as much as I hate flies, I honestly couldn't see the technology stopping there, so I'll pass, before we are sacrificing un-rescued pound puppies to power the grid.

    I think poop-powered technology is an idea whose time has COME!

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