Can’t find it for the life of me… Describing a web comic vs actually posting it always feels like a flop, but…
Aliens abduct a physicist, who doesn’t seem to give much of a damn about the abduction but is instead enthused to learn about the alien tech on board, so they give him a tour of the ship. They get to the power reactor and start dropping a bunch of sci-fi jumbo about “We harness dark matter to… (sci-fi Ruth Goldberg machine) …and finally, we use the heat it generates to boil water and crank a turbine!!”
*Physicist drops to his knees in despair and let’s out a dramatic ‘noooooo!’
Paraphrasing heavily due to having shit memory. I thought it was a SMBC comic, but… /shrug.
I swear we are going to be travelling to other planets and the biggest issue is going to be how do we stop water leaking into space from our steam turbines
“And then, the power generated is used to heat water and generate steam!”
“No…”
“That steam is used to turn a wheel!”
“No! NOOOOOOO!!!”
“Hey dude, calm down.”
-Actual exchange during first contact.
still waiting for someone to demonstrate a more efficient power transfer solution
You’re in luck. Supercritical CO2 turbines are a thing now, and they’re way more efficient because they don’t involve a phase change.
Got any sources on that? I would love to learn about some new tech in electricity generation.
One facility opened in China a couple weeks ago. I can’t find the article that I read from the other day but this should give you some info
