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If Tesla were alive today would the world be different?

Hmm, I think the AC power distribution infrastructure we ended up with is a lot less frightening than what Tesla proposed.
I agree. And that's even without bringing the likely increased cancer risk of broadcast power transmission into the equation. (I'll not have any of that wireless charging crap in my home.)
 
I agree. And that's even without bringing the likely increased cancer risk of broadcast power transmission into the equation. (I'll not have any of that wireless charging crap in my home.)

Risk, not proven though....

Do mobile phones give you cancer? No one's proved that yet.
 
Tesla was a very peculiar kind of genius. He was able to visualize technology in his head almost like a virtual reality simulator such that when he actually built it, it didn't require much in the way of trial and error. This was the complete opposite of Edison who just kept throwing crap against the wall until something stuck.

While he has been sort of unfairly deified and given credit for things he doesn't deserve, there's really no question that Tesla was a savant of some kind and his brain's wiring was abnormal.

https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/articles/miracle-mind-nikola-tesla

These days probably a big deal would be made of him being anti-social and labels like autism and OCD would be slapped on him, but his way of harnessing his gifts made the world a better place. That's quite a legacy. Who cares if he was an asexual loner who fed birds?

Another aspect about him is he was blogging before blogging was a thing. He wanted to convey his thoughts to the world. he just did it in writing.

Tesla was ahead of his time because, similar to Malthus, he saw how the trajectory of humanity would eventually bang up against limits to growth. This was something his peers rarely thought about because it was still the early days of the industrial revolution. But Tesla was worried enough about this issue that he wrote an extended essay on it called

The Problem of Increasing Human Energy

If you read that essay you'll see how it touches upon all of the problem we're now experiencing. Limits to fossil fuels, soil productivity, etc... You'll see him express high praise for hydro and wind power and a yearning for solar panels before they were invented. His cold-coal battery is closest to hydrogen fuel cells in the sense that he wanted to find a way to go straight to electricity without actually burning anything. He understood the notion of thermodynamic waste and that fossil fuels were ultimately a finite resource at a time when most were consumed with irrational exuberance.

So if he were still around he would be absolutely trying to solve climate-change and get us off of fossil fuels.
 
Tesla was a very peculiar kind of genius. He was able to visualize technology in his head almost like a virtual reality simulator such that when he actually built it, it didn't require much in the way of trial and error. This was the complete opposite of Edison who just kept throwing crap against the wall until something stuck.

While he has been sort of unfairly deified and given credit for things he doesn't deserve, there's really no question that Tesla was a savant of some kind and his brain's wiring was abnormal.

https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/articles/miracle-mind-nikola-tesla

These days probably a big deal would be made of him being anti-social and labels like autism and OCD would be slapped on him, but his way of harnessing his gifts made the world a better place. That's quite a legacy. Who cares if he was an asexual loner who fed birds?

Another aspect about him is he was blogging before blogging was a thing. He wanted to convey his thoughts to the world. he just did it in writing.

Tesla was ahead of his time because, similar to Malthus, he saw how the trajectory of humanity would eventually bang up against limits to growth. This was something his peers rarely thought about because it was still the early days of the industrial revolution. But Tesla was worried enough about this issue that he wrote an extended essay on it called

The Problem of Increasing Human Energy

If you read that essay you'll see how it touches upon all of the problem we're now experiencing. Limits to fossil fuels, soil productivity, etc... You'll see him express high praise for hydro and wind power and a yearning for solar panels before they were invented. His cold-coal battery is closest to hydrogen fuel cells in the sense that he wanted to find a way to go straight to electricity without actually burning anything. He understood the notion of thermodynamic waste and that fossil fuels were ultimately a finite resource at a time when most were consumed with irrational exuberance.

So if he were still around he would be absolutely trying to solve climate-change and get us off of fossil fuels.


Imagine a collaboration of Tesla and Elon Musk both working together
 
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