Solar powered smart roadways that charge your electric vehicle as you drive on it. It’s all coming together, we have all the required technology we just need a financially backed entity that values altruism over profit. It’s not impossible just nigh improbable

Research funded by the army, this has a good chance that it will pop up for civilian use eventually.

So in theory they use nickel molecules to act as a conduit since it has good conductivity, so they have to tweak the composition to make it work, maybe layer it like synthetic materials like G10 and micarta?

Or maybe just 1/1000th of a yearly US military budget line item? US infrastructure needs a significant revamp.

You’re absolutely right, I avoided the topic because federal budgets never please everyone but you nailed how easy it could be.

I’d say bioengineered bacteria fed along sheets of plastic would be a good way to create large swaths of cheap, conductive surfaces for buildings and roads. We need something useful to do with all the plastic we can’t recycle.

Oh yes, that would be a lovely repurpose for plastic, I'm not sure if we have bred bacteria for this purpose but I think they have already engineered worms to eat plastic, so the bottleneck so far is a issue of scale and cost it seems.

I'd love to see this for roads but I don't think it would stand for the stress involving vehicles, maybe something for more like electronics and maybe military stuff? Both industries love to shave weight off stuff, while still being able to do their jobs with reasonable durability..

The US military budget is about $800bn, and I’m pretty sure that you don’t really believe that much can be done in terms of infrastructure for 1/1000th of that, never mind a single line item.

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> Research funded by the army

You mean by the taxpayers

The army doesn't fund shit.

Correct I was being facetious. It would require more money than the specific example I gave.