It's so crazy that we've found like six different ways to use rocks to boil water. You'd think there'd just be two or three
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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It's going to be boiling water again... Isn't it?
I'm gonna need help identifying all of them. So far I have burn them, smush glowing ones together, and reflect radiation with them.
- Coal. Set it on fire, use fire to boil water
- Geothermal. Go down where the rocks are hot, use hot rocks to boil water.
- Nuclear. Magic rocks get hot all by themselves. Use them to boil water.
- Photovoltaics. Shape rocks into solar panels, use solar panels to power stove to boil water.
- Concentrated solar. Use mirrors to reflect sunlight onto salt (a rock). Boil water with hot salt.
- Put water in a glass tube. Use mercury (which comes from a rock) to draw a vacuum. Water boils at room temp under a vacuum.
- Lob a space rock at the planet. Space rock vaporizes everything in a 100 mile radius, including water.
I'm sure we can think of more
Dam. Stack rocks to block water, use leaking water to turn propeller.
Ohhh right that makes sense. I was only thinking of ways to use rocks to boil water to make electricity. So I missed geothermal and disregarded photovoltaics.
It's incredibly silly that even tho we advance the scale of power, with electricity, solar and even nuclear, all we use it is to boil water. We just can't seem to be able t build any a more advanced mechanism, it seems.
Hard to beat spinning a magnet to generate electricity, and it's hard to beat boiling water to spin a magnet
I think this may be due to the specific heat of water, no other substance matches it.
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Wind and photovoltaic have nothing to do with water
Mfw they use wind and photovoltaic energy to pump water to a high place so they can put it through a turbine later
I'd guess because its all heat energy in the end, so you need something that expands and compresses. The only alternative I suppose would be like sound waves, or mechanical energy, or whatever a battery does.
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I learned the other day there is a nuclear reactor in development that will use as primary coolant...molten lead.
Still use to boil water then, but pretty freaky still.
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There are a lot of options, but water works, is cheap as hell, and spills aren't much of an issue.
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Are we against boiling water only because it is old? Because if that is the only problem and we are ok with reliability and efficiency than i will take old
It's more that when you look at history and technological progress, and our (millenial's) own view on technological progress, the current stagnation and the permeation of said stagnation is a pain point. Every time we look at the news, it's something going fucking wrong, and never delivering on the promise of a better , brighter future.
We saw computers go from 100s of Mhz to 3 ghz ish and just get fucking stuck there. From 16 meg to 64 gigs, and now we can't buy any ram. We had touch interfaces being able to show you an arbitary interface and instead of innovation, we got swiping through stupid videos. We look through the history we didn't live through, and see that in the 20th century, we went through flight and rockets to the fucking moon and then nothing. We have a rocket going to the moon with people in it again for the first time since the 70s, and they aren't even doing anything new, just flying around. We expected there to be fucking bases on MARS by the time we got to the distant year of TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY SIX.
Even now, when we're coming to harvesting power from the sun, in a seemingly new way (focusing it with mirrors onto salt) it's just going to be the same shit, nothing new, no innovation. Just put the hot rock into water, and harvest it through steam power as if it's the fucking 1800s.
Also, it has a light relation to the evolution inevitably creating crabs once again meme of Carcinisation.
Great comment!
I'm optimistic in the space of biology and biotechnology though. People are doing actual SciFi shit right now. We've got CAR-T tech, CRISPR that's trivial to deploy, monoclonal antibodies, mRNA tech, microbiome science, DNA sequencing that is mind-blowingly good, large scale computational analysis and machine learning that's decoding the noise of our genomes, rapid detection of pathogens with a MALDI-TOF, to just name a few.
It's an insane time in biology right now, and it's the current frontier along with computer science/ML.
It's great that the field of biology (and medicine) are having new developments. I hope that the discoveries become more widespread though, because I do not want Peter Thiel to live forever while grandma has to die of a preventable disease at 75. I heard about Joe Rogan talking about "just treating covid with monoclonal antibodies" which feels indicative that some of this shit has already been made available to the rich, and fucking no one else.
Another way to look at it is comparing water to electricity itself. No one is complaining that going from the electric light bulb to vacuum tube logic gates to semiconducter logic gates to q-bit logic gates is just "using physics to direct electrons again".
Boiling water is just the layer 1 physical transport, all the cool stuff is happening at layers 2-7. The real mind blowing breakthrough would be if they finally did something to fix layer 8, but I ain't holding my breath.
semiconducter logic gates to q-bit logic gates is just “using physics to direct electrons again”.
I mean, even if they start getting quantum programming off the ground, no one is going to be able to afford the fucking computers. We can't even afford non quantum computers anymore.
Boiling water is just the layer 1 physical transport, all the cool stuff is happening at layers 2-7. The real mind blowing breakthrough would be if they finally did something to fix layer 8
I don't understand this layer stuff
Computer networking has the OSI model which I think is the analogy: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model
I had no idea there was a simple Wikipedia! I love these guys and am glad I'd donated when asked those times...
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Its more a commentary that most "new electricity source!!! Amazing!" Is a heat source thats boiling water to turbines which isnt a new method, its a new source of heat. So more a complaint about sensational headlines about electricity
Physicists just looove a hot shower
That's the reason why all electricity generation boils down to hot water.
Well molten salt batteries are a thing, I'm presuming this is to buffer the output of the solar and that the losses were deemed acceptable given the renewable nature of this.
Yeah, you can store the molten salt and its heat for when it's needed even at night. But it is used to drive a turbine hehe
Turbine go brr
if its just water boiling in a pot,can you just put a Turbine above the pot and use the steam to spin the Turbine?
Meh, it works.
They have (had?) these across the California border from Vegas. Bright as fuck, you could see them dozens of miles away when flying in on a plane, but couldn't look directly at them.
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I mean, is there a more efficient way to take raw energy and spin a turbine with it?
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What's the worst that could happen?
It would also be ideal for high-efficiency, high-temperature hydrogen production.
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