Where Science Meets Fiction
Roads and buildings that produce power.
A person standing at a busy city intersection feels traffic in their feet. Not metaphorically – the pavement vibrates with each truck that passes. An articulated truck presses forty thousand kilograms into the road surface and moves on. The pavement flexes by fractions of a millimeter, springs back, and absorbs the exchange as heat. Nothing…
There are roughly 64 million kilometers of road on Earth. Most of them sit exposed to the sun for somewhere between four and eight hours every day, absorbing heat, expanding slightly, wearing down faster, and doing absolutely nothing productive with the radiation hitting them. A parking lot in Phoenix receives more solar energy per square…