Muscle Car

The following line of thought started with my observation of how efficient the human body is at converting food into energy. A marathon runner can eat a pork chop and run 26 miles. Your car can’t do that.

Then I thought about how scientists created a heart out of human cells grown in a lab. It’s a muscle that actually works. So how much of a leap is it to imagine vehicles powered by lab-grown muscles, with artificial digestion systems, powered by your leftovers from dinner? All it would take is a small electrical stimulation to make the muscle contract in time to pedal a generator attached to a motor.

We probably wouldn’t want to use human cells to create those muscle cars. Other creatures have more efficient muscles. Maybe a huge muscle made from an ant’s leg would be good. Those tiny bastards can lift many times their own weight. I want my car powered by giant ant muscles.

The great thing about a muscle car is that the more you use it, the stronger it gets from the exercise. The downside is that you’d have to keep the muscle warm enough so it didn’t freeze, and not so hot it died. But I think science could figure that out. Maybe the muscle would be part ant and part polar bear.

The artificial digestion system would be optimized for whatever food you have in your area. If you modeled it after a cow’s guts, it could run on anything from lawn clippings to licorice. You could stop at McDonalds and order a Big Mac for yourself and a milkshake for your car.

This feels somewhat inevitable to me.

Comments

[Christopher Glen]

Inevitable? I hope not – lol. It definitely brings a new meaning to "Horsepower" though. I don’t think my "Mustang" would last long if I kept bringing it to McDonalds.

[Joy Forever]

Here's something along these lines...

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/03/080317-muscles-video-ap.html

[Vinod]

Funny but misinformed. Fuel combustion engines are way more efficient. The only advantage Scott's machine has is it uses food for energy. But like others have pointed out those things used to be called horse carriages.

[leonardtambunan]

Horses put their shit on the road.
This one have no shit, right Scott ?

[peter]

It sounds ridiculous now...but so did flying machines 150 years ago!
Good Luck with it! My only worry would be the junk food diet!

[TJ]

hey Scott,

Get a job!! you give me creeps...thank God u r not one of the Policy-Makers in department of renewable energy sources!

[Luca Masters]

My car is a lot heavier than I am and is designed to be most efficient at higher speeds than a marathon runner can sustain. Heck, higher speeds than a sprinter can reach.

Except I have no car.

[David Cheung]

Why stop at cars? we should be thinking about flying vehicles! like dragonfly or something

[Paul Hosler]

Scott it's already been done!!! Check this out...
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w316/pahosler/mexsuv.jpg

[zume]

...its called a "horse."

[Leo Greenwolf]

So your car would be alive.

Animal right activists are not going to like this!

[John]

Hmmm... If you could engineer it to run on managers you'd have plenty of hot air readily available for the airbags and it would have an environmentally friendly, inexhaustible supply of fuel.

[n]

eeeeks

[Tyro]

Ant muscle?

Every time its about to rain, all the cars start driving around like crazy.

[Oz]

Technically, the DeLorean from Back to the Future was always powered by gasoline. The plutonium reactor (and later the Mr. Fusion) was only used to power the time-travel machinery in the back.

[exiledsurveyor]

Maybe we also need to create an organism that eats plastic and turns it into oil, or eats water, CO and CO2 and produces natural gas?

Trash into power

I wouldn't mind a house I could move from place to place too while you're at it.

[aaron]

'we used to call these cars "horses"'

brilliant.

[Jimbo]

Uh... you think the human digestive/circulatory/muscular system is more efficient than an internal combustion engine? *Seriously*?

A diesel VW Golf can drink a quart of cooking oil and haul several thousand pounds ten miles. A human runner... well, we're not going to get into the details of what he'll do if you pour a quart of cooking oil in him, but it definitely doesn't involve a few hundred KWh of work.

[V]

...and if you feed your car beans, be ready for a take off!

[aahhrrgg]

Sounds like intelligent design to me. And just as crazy.

[Andrew]

The runner in your story doesn’t get much faster than 10mph, and doesn't carry more than 5Kg of stuff. Design a 100Kg car (fully loaded) and drive it at fast walking pace and you would have a pretty impressive set of results.

[Mark]

we used to call these cars "horses"

[just_human]

Cows are only meant to eat grass. They get sick when you feed them anything else. I think you're mistaking them for goats.

[Jack @ The Tech Teapot]

Wouldn't the cars crap everywhere?

[Michal Malkowski]

Hey, but the interior won't be as crappy as in BS: Galactica, right?
Altought it'd still beats that cheap chevy plactic...

[PoweredByPork]

While I think the idea is genius, I foresee some complications:

1. The "stronger" the car becomes, the smaller its muffler gets.

2. Imagine coming out of the garage to discover the car's hood is sagging over its front bumper. the TV in the garage is on. It sense you come in and says, "dude...get me another beer so I don't have to miss any of the game."

3. Regular maintenance would include doses of Advil and waxing with Aspercreme.

4. You'll often find your car parked in the playground, picking on the Mini Coopers and Hyundais.

[golfwidow]

Just in general, I'd like to see someone genetically alter a kid or a pet with gauges so I could know whether they need feeding or diaper (filter) changes or medical attention. I might not be so inclined to avoid having either in my life, were that the case.

[Billy Arvia]

Scott,

After seeing the comment by Bertram, it never ceases to amaze me that, no matter how ridiculous the posting, someone will give a serious answer.

http://triplebee.squarespace.com/

[Besides, ants can lift a multiple of their own weight not because of better muscles, but because of small size: with linear change of size, muscle cross section changes by the power of two, but body weight changes by the power of three. An ant of double the size has 4 times the muscle strength but 8 times the weight.

[Ozz]

Each time someone replies it's a horse, a poor kitten dies. Seriously, how many times do you fools need to mention it. Be creative, afterall this blog is supposed to attract geniuses.

[BobUK]

Even cooler if there was an implant that allowed you to control your biovehicle by thought alone.

Just be careful what you wish for when you're driving...

[Jeremy Hunt]

Well, our cars require substantial amounts of upkeep, and their 'food' (gas) is increasingly expensive.

Organic technology would be great. I think cars could be 'grown', given their own DNA and told how to produce a hard outer shell, muscle/propulsion systems, and so forth.

Good call. I'd like to order 2 of those please.

JH

[Timhogs]

It's a late night in the western desert. A car shows up at a convenience store without its driver. The town sheriff shows up to investigate, but the only clue is the driver's metal watch on the floorboards.

And as the scene fades out, a burping noise...

[Tom]

to kick up the efficiency a bit, make the car a hydrolic/muscle hybrid where the muscle twicthes at it's most efficient rate putting potential energy into a hydrolic accumulator that can power the wheels at any time and also recharge from regenerative breaking.

[Skyler]

The heat required to generate a few hundred horse power would burn any biological muscles.

[Bertram]

This exists. Its called "horse and carriage".

Besides, ants can lift a multiple of their own weight not because of better muscles, but because of small size: with linear change of size, muscle cross section changes by the power of two, but body weight changes by the power of three. An ant of double the size has 4 times the muscle strength but 8 times the weight.

[Doug]

Uh, we already have that. Its called a "horse".

[Gametheory]

I think someone invented a way of transforming food into kinetic energy, and it is in use since the middle ages. It is called horse (Ba da ba da bum!).
But I gotta admit riding a gigant ant looks much cooler than a horse. Imagine John Wayne riding one of those.

[matt]

maybe, instead of driving to maccy d's you could build a car that feeds on grass or other plant matter and just grazes while it's not in use so that it can feed its engine.
I say this because that car of yours sounds like a horse on wheels.
So teach a horse to pedal-power your car. A man can run at up to 20mph, and cycle in excess of 100mph. A horse can run at up to 50mph, the rest is maths.
You need to invent either a horse-powered car, or genetically modify the horse to have wheels and ample luggage space.

[Paul Hosler]

How about a cockroach car; go any where, eat anything, very fast, and nearly indestructible. Serious gross factor though!

[Oli]

This is actually quite a good idea, what would happen if your car got cramp on the motorway though?

[Fafnir]

Sci-fi got there first, I'm afraid! Machines that could refill their energy reserves the same way we do - or better, by metabolising things we couldn't eat, like sunlight or garbage - would solve a lot of our problems. It's a looong way out of our reach as yet, though.

Also, to everyone worried about the "output" - if we get to the stage where this sort of thing is a possibility, we could probably get to the stage where the output is odorless. It doesn't happen with humans because we've evolved to metabolise all the energy from our food, not produce nice-smelling dumps, but in a handmade organism it should be possible to sacrifice a little energy gain to remove the methane and stuff.

[Nathan]

would the car need a set of lungs? How would the car cope when mixed in traffic with normal cars, breathing in all those fumes? Would it get lung cancer? Could you be fined for treating your car inhumanely? If you had an accident and totalled your car would you have a funeral?

[Cornholio]

I see only one problem. How would you know when it needs fuel?
It needs some kind of brain to decide on it's own that it has to refuel.
Of course I don't need to tell you that they invented horses already.
I think they are already as efficient as possible in transforming matter into energy. Especially if you put a carriage behind them.

[AJ]

this is the sort of thing we need if we could convince someone to put money into this this sort of project then it would make the technology to clone individual organs fro transplants so much easier you might even be able to keep a spare liver in your car and vent out all the alcohol after a night drinking so you were safe to drive.
the problem we would have would be if the car breaks down apart from the obvious smell and how to gauge fuel (maybe give you car some speed if you need to get somewhere in a hurry)

go the the auto shop i need 2 new tires and a lung for my car

also of there was a crash you could well end up with no one being able to tell what bits are you n what is the car what a mess

[RUBBA]

You wouldn't need small electrical stimulation to make the muscle work. Why consume electricity. A certain muscle just needs a select picture to expand and run a motor (or contract and stop).

[Bob]

I think we had one of these... we called it a 'Horse'.

[mike]

They do this already in parts of the third world. I think it's called a "rickshaw".

[Mohrorless]

What's next? Steroids for your "Muscle" car?

[Dave]

As with all muscles, they will become atrophied if not used regularily.

- Dave

[Anfauglir]

Possibly my naughty mind, but I read Rodger's "...problems of hot rodding the car..." and got totally the wrong mental picture! You know it could happen though: a warm, organic exhaust pipe....

In some ways it does seem inevitable, but we would have to overcome the issues about what "life" actually is. Would a car that ingests, excretes, and moves, be counted as "alive" or not?

[Kevin]

And what about the poop the comes from the car? The streets would be covered in carshit. It was hypothesized in the late 19th century that the biggest problem cities would be having would be to get rid of all the poo left by the horses which pulled the trams. They didn't find a solution then, because the electric models started appearing, but if your idea hits the market, those guys were visionaries...

[vlad_tsepes]

For a muscle car try a car powered by wanking. All you need is a lab grown penis, a lab grown arm and a supply of old girly mags, or maybe if you're cheap, some of those lingerie catalogs. Everyone is always throwing them out. Recycle and generate power to drive your car.

I leave it to you to convert the work to usable energy - a Stirling engine perhaps or just a crank shaft hitched to the forearm.

I get get 32 miles to the Victoria's Secret catalog.

[Ferran]

HORSE, it's called a horse, four legs, lots of muscles (including his/her own "love muscles") and the digestive system and all...

[Derek Seklecki]

A curse on you, Scott Adams! I'm currently working on a science fiction novel series, and you have hit upon all the technology I will be using in my universe. I call it organotech. It extends not just to cars, but everything -- houses grown from coral, train cars that move through giant esophagi via peristalsis, bed-linens made from warm living skin, lighting from bioluminescence, computers made from human nervous systems. They say as soon as one guy gets an idea in this world, 5 others get it at the same time. It's just a matter of who acts on it first. I hereby declare that this time I thought of it before you did!

[gordon_goosemonster]

Still hooked on Battle Star then?

[Colin Hill]

these vehicles already exist.

they are called horses

[Car Doc]

Might want to add some form of lungs to your car. Muscles don't work very well without a constant flow of oxygen.

[Sabine Dinis Blochberger]

The "artificial digestion system" already exists in a way, we already know how to "convert" bio matter into methane gas with the help of bacterias. And cars can run on gas.

The problem with the muscle analogy is that nothing in nature has wheels, it's all about legs. Although just yesterday I saw a program about robotics on TV, and how a guy was building artificial muscles (air pressure and woven metal tube).

So what, a robot horse? Besides the artificial intelligence, the modern car sounds like it already ;)

[Bjorn R]

You wrote;
"A marathon runner can eat a pork chop and run 26 miles. Your car can’t do that."

My car can't do that, but according to http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/mostEfficient.shtml:

"The PAC-Car II set a new world record in fuel efficient driving during the Shell Eco-marathon in Ladoux (France) on June 26, 2005. Running on hydrogen, the PAC-Car II achieved the equivalent of 5,385 km per liter of gasoline (12,666 MPG!)"

I am not sure how to convert pork chops to gasoline or hydrogen (methane, maybe), but I suspect that the PAC-Car II is much more fuel efficient than a marathon runner or even a bicyclist.

[Patrick]

I worry that this car would pass a lot of gas, especially if you fed it beans, and this would contribute to global warming.

Of course you could also light its farts, claim carbon credits for that, and use it to heat the car.

[Instinctive Traveller]

Scott... do you think you've over looked muscle fatigue? That would be enough to give your car the cramps or a muscle pull. So what would your car doctor prescribe other than a good weeks rest? I wouldn't want that for my car. Oh no!

[Aslak]

Don't you think there were good reasons we replaced the horse with the car all those years ago? You honestly want to go back?

[Johno]

What would really suck is dealing with your car having a virus. You're on your way home from work and it starts sneezing.

On the plus side of the ledger, though, it's easy to get more of them. I predict people starting car stud farms.

Just picture it:

A farmer takes a 10 ton truck and crosses it with a hatchback, the result being a large ute[1].

And remember people, responsible drivers have their car neutered.

[1] Ute is what we, the Australians who invented the thing, call the car referred to by Australianally challenged people as "pickups." We came up with the idea, so we'll call it what we like. :)

[Chris Arnott]

You eemed to have forgotten disease in thinking about your car. What are you going to do when you've got a really big trip ahead of you and you car's got a cold?
Even worse. How expensive will it be when your car gets cancer?

[Vikram J]

Hi Scott,

This kind of car was designed 4000 yrs back....
It was called bullock cart...:)

[mann]

On a completely unrelated subject,I thought you might enjoy this site. These people give awards for the funniest deaths, deaths which subsequently improve the remaining gene pool. Hence the name 'Darwin' awards.
http://www.darwinawards.com/

[Michal Malkowski]

AND it would be thief-proof, every vehicle would have different DNA.

"The downside is that you’d have to keep the muscle warm enough so it didn’t freeze, and not so hot it died"

That part cpuld be invented in F1, where they have to do just that with some parts of bolid.

[Bill Leather]

This has nothing to do with today's post, but Scott Meyer is getting better and better. Since you recommended him, I've been visiting his site and the man is a genius. I have to thank you for the heads up. Mention him again in your daily and see if it can boost him over the top.

Bill

[Bill Leather]

This has nothing to do with today's post, but Scott Meyer is getting better and better. Since you recommended him, I've been visiting his site and the man is a genius. I have to thank you for the heads up. Mention him again in your daily and see if it can boost him over the top.

Bill

[MaxDZ8]

It would be pretty weird but I once read that hi-perf machines must be built up from organic stuff (sci-fi, you know).

[Surkit]

Have you been reading star wars? The Yuuzhan Vong only use organic technology, including spaceships and armor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuuzhan_Vong

[Timothy F]

Going by the amount of fat and lazy people floating or if you will waddling around these days, I hardly think someone who cant look after there own well being enough to be able to get out of the drive through and walk to the counter of there local fast food joint. Will have the adequite skills to keep there car running at any useful operating level. I can just see it now traffic backed up for miles and when you finally progress your way to overtaking the slow sunday driver all you can hear is heavy wheezing, while your air vents are over powered by the smell of sweaty arm pits.
The amount spent on chafe cream alone for the poor creature would outweigh the savings of petrol.

[SAR]

Don't we have this already, isn't it called a "horse?"

[josh]

yeah, ummm, horse. i'm not the first to say it, but horses solve the energy crisis

[Bronau]

Why not give it a rudimentary brain? Like a good horse, the car could drive you home when required.

[Bronau]

Why not give it a rudimentary brain? Like a good horse, the car could drive you home when required.

[Petruchio]

Ah! You've just invented the horse. So it goes.

[lol]

We have these. They're called horses. We don't use them anymore because cars are apparently more efficient.

I get what you mean though. It's an interesting idea. ^^

[Dan Quixote]

Dude! First time I've seen the posters funnier than the post, and the post was good in itself. Nice job guys.

[Shivam]

Nothing to do with above post but thot this might interest you...
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/7_to_13_mins_enough_for_best_sex/articleshow/2841145.cms

would love to read a blog from you on this... :)

[Rabbit]

It sounds like something out of the Terminator movies. If those muscles were attached to a metal skeleton and controlled by a computer those would be true cyborg vehicles. Break out the lazer guns, we are going to have cyborg car wars. What if your car became self aware and did not want to take you where you wanted to go and held you hostage? Or maybe it could be a Transformers sort of thing... Your car can morph into many different things.

[Douglas Karr]

You think we've got too much crap in the air now... just wait!

[friskybeaver]

Wow. That's just too dumb to argue with.

[Mongo]

Scott you are probably right and I look forward to riding my first muscle car. But there will be more exciting developments before then: If they can grow an ear on a mouse's back now, how long will it be until we see rats with 10 inch wangers growing on their backs? Planeloads of rich American men will flock to Mexico to have their custom appendages sown on.

[Josh]

Wow. That's so backwards I don't know where to begin. For the sake of arguement, I'll take round numbers. A marathoner needs about 100 kcal/mile. Today's average sedan can get 30 mpg highway, and may weigh in a 2,500 lbs curb weight.
You should think about your definition of efficiency. First, the inputs versus outputs- A 2500 lb car going 30 miles on 1 gallon of gas (125,000 Btu) and a 175 lb marathoner going 30 miles on 3000 calories (11,900 Btu). So, your car runs at 50 Btu/lb and the marathoner at 68 Btu/lb. If you scaled your marathoner up to the size of a car, he'd be consuming 41 gallons of gas equivalent. And since oil or carb is not as dense of a fuel, it'd be lugging around even more weight than that. And that's not even taking air resistance into account (which would require more energy expense)
or how you expect to deliver that sort of energy intensity to muscle fiber in that short of a time (think sprinters).
Ant muscle systems run on hydrolics, and also do not scale with their size. Take a more appropriate example of a great cat or dog. They have, per pound muscle fiber, more power output than humans, and it's scalable... but keep in mind the elephant, and how much muscle it needs versus how much is used for how much work output.
Stick to drawing comics, monkey boy.

[Kevin Kunreuther]

I am so not gonna get a car that is organic, alive and runs on leftovers. What if I'm in the middle of nowhere and the damn thing gets hungry and starts digesying me? Pure Stephen King evil!!!!

[Steve]

Is it just me, or is Scott trying a series of ever-increasingly bizarre posts to see exactly how many dancing moist monkey robots he can get to go along with any particularly crazy and infeasible idea?

Also, the online game "Kingdom of Loathing" already beat you to it by having an item called the "bitchin' meatcar."

Plus, what ever would they do over at "Pimp My Ride?" Give your car steroids? :D

[Luke]

Actually combustion engines are more efficient than the human body. The difference is that the marathon runner only has to move himself. A car is a lot heavier.

Heck, I'll even back up my claims. Human body efficiency is about 300 miles per gallon.

http://www.eating2.com/index.asp?ID=2

That seems pretty good; a Prius gets something like 35-50 mpg. But consider that a marathon runner weighs maybe 170 pounds, and the Prius weighs 2890 pounds.

So the runner is 9x more efficient, but the Prius is 17x heavier. It doesn't seem like powering cars with pork chops will be possible.

Sorry!

[Paul]

The reasons ants can lift so much is because they are so much smaller than us. Something to do with scale, I'll let you look it up for yourself.

[Jaime Bakulic]

maybe we'd have talking, eating, pooping cars. They'd have clothing, opinions, sex... before you know it a supercharged dodge viper will be ruling the world.

[matt]

You know whwat? Damn car will fart, produce methane and cause more global warming than the CO2 producing model.

[Avi Bernshaw]

I like the idea Scott, but you're not the first person to have it, sorry... In fact, that idea, and several other GELF appliances were part of the Red Dwarf series of novels by Rob Grant and Douglas Naylor (seriously, if you haven't read it yet, do... the humour is the sort of thing you'd get a kick from if your own writing is anything to go by).

Also, ants work on a system of hydraulics, not muscle...

[Rosalind Warren]

This post is deeply weird and that's saying a lot for this blog.

[horse]

Er, wouldn't that be a horse?

[OceanBP]

Don't forget that a car typically weighs over 3000 pounds. That runner that can run 26 miles on a pork chop weighs about 5% of that. So to be fair, the car could be allowed 20 pork chops, plus an additional one for the weight of the driver.

Assume the car gets 26 mpg, so it uses 1 gallon of gasoline to go that 26 miles. So how many pork chops equal one gallon of gas, more or less than 26? That's a better comparison. How much fuel does it take to raise the portion of a pig needed for 26 pork chops? You'd have to include the food used to raise the pig, energy used to process and transport the pig, etc. Which is more efficent becomes much less clear.

[MiaMiaPantsonFia]

I know you're full of bull, and that most people who finally spew out a good idea, go through one hundred bad ones first, but this is the most ridiculously stupid idea I have ever heard from you.

[KD]

I don't know where to begin on this one.

1. Mammal muscles are intentionally inefficient... it allows us to get more power out of them.

2. An ant's strength wouldn't scale upwards very well. They are strong, but that strength wouldn't translate nor would it be the only thing.

[Darren J]

I love the idea! -And in regards to the post complaining about hot-rodding the car, just imagine the progress that would be created in the steroid market? (If you thought it was hard to tell the difference between baseball fans and NASCAR fans before,...) There would be all kinds of different quazi-legal horse steroids (or ant steroids) that would soon be available to customize your car, and make it as big and powerful as you wanted. But would the rumbling of the muffler be replaced with the rumbling of the, ...digestive system? -I would not want to be standing behind an old jalopy when it back-fires!

[Tim]

One litre of gasoline/petrol contains around 30 million kilojoules of energy, enough to propel a car approximately 10 kilometres or to power a human for 10 to 15 years.

A loaf of bread, which costs around the same as a litre of petrol, contains around 6000 kilojoules, or enough to power a human for around one day.

Therefore, you would require around 5000 loaves of bread, or equivalent house hold scraps, to propoel your car 10 kilometres. Herein lies one inherant problem with replacing petrol with biofuels.

It would be more efficient to power humans on petrol and stop wasting all that time and resources with agriculture.

Therefore what the world really needs is an enzyme that allows the human body to digest petrol. If it was sufficiently efficent we would just run or ride everywhere and no longer require cars.

[D. Mented]

First, they have to find a way for any heart to supply blood efficiently while running 30 to 80 miles an hour for several hours at a stretch.
Then I'll get one installed in my own body and forget the car.
Rita Mae, of course, will be in line ahead of me. We'll have races.
D. Mented

[Chen]

That's the creepiest thing I've ever heard you say.

[Stui]

That's hilarious. I'm just picturing lifting the bonnet and passing the milkshake in for the little cyborg dude who's been pedalling frantically to get you around. Sort of like an inboard rickshaw.
Giddyup Bill.

[BAM]

If you want to see what your muscle car would look like check out this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEfXmWGj7CA

[Scott (Not Adams)]

When they talked about giant ant muscles in my geometry text book in 6th grade, they said that the cross sectional area, and therefore strength, grows as a power of 2 as you increase size, but the volume, and therefore mass, grows as a power of 3. So the muscle gets too heavy to lift itself past a certain size.

[Dallas]

This is very Red Dwarf, we wouldnt want to end up with polymorphs

why stop at cars? we could make couches like this too which would massage your shoulders when you were stressed

Would it then be considered a perversion to sit on your couch/in your car naked?

[MrWizard020]

Wouldnt work. Cars are already like 35% effecient at processing gas into work. Muscles aren't that effecient to begin with (think of all the energy you use to do things that dont involve work, like just breathing). Also, not everything scales proportionally. There is a reason you never see insects the size of cars. Weight scales geometrically with size, not proportionally.

[Derek]

I also forgot to mention that muscles also need oxygen, requiring a blood system and a type of lungs, they need to be protected from harmful bacteria, requiring an immune system and skin, an ability to sense changes in the metabolic rates, requiring a central nervous system...

Essentially your idea would only be possible when we can bio-engineer every body part we want and make it work as a whole while having it hook up to mechanical parts. I still find the concept very interesting, but this should highlight how many years we are away from developing it. It would surprise me to see this available before 50 years from now.

[zippy]

It's called a horse.

[Luke]

I'll take the Barry Bonds model please. Then it could shit out of it's huge asterisk.

[Derek]

Interesting idea. Almost every one of your sentences has a logical or factual error in it, but interesting idea nonetheless. Just for the heck of it, I'm going to run through your errors 1 by 1.

A pork chop does not have enough slow release carbs to power a marathon runner for 26 miles.

A car and a marathon runner weigh massively different amounts, meaning that one needs a lot more energy for the same distance than the other.

Ant muscles aren't that much more efficient, it is just easier to have relative strength for small scale things (for example, if you double every dimension of an iron girder, it will be twice as strong, but weigh eight times as much, making it relatively weaker, and if you made it 100 times bigger in every dimension it would probably bend and break under its own weight). If you don't believe me on this find a structural engineer. In the case of animal muscles, it's hard to imagine one that could generate enough horsepower to move a rolling vehicle uphill without pulling it the old-fashioned way.

Polar bear muscles can freeze too. Constant stimulus, a lot of fat, and a good coat keeps them above freezing, not any special properties of the muscles themselves.

Making a muscle that works is a lot less complicated than making a digestive system, especially one that can run a muscle how you want it to.

Still, despite all these flaws, it's an interesting concept, and if it's possible, scientists will definitely look into it soon enough!

[Sean Walsh]

Imagine giving the car anabolic steroids?

[d1lb3rt$uxx@$$$$]

just wanted to point out that there's a videogame series called QUAKE that has an alien race called "The Strog" that's based on this idea....

organic organs and machine/computer stuff together...

[ppm]

Bad example!
Can a marathon runner drink a gallon of gas and transport 5 people over 25 miles? Weight-wise, gas costs less than a tenth of pork chops.
'Natural' is not always 'optimized'.

[Tad Annoyed]

Now I KNOW you're on the weed...

[SlowMovingTarget]

We could call it a "horse" or maybe, a "camel".

[Don]

If I work quickly, I can trademark all the good names and sell them back to the car companies at a huge profit. So far I've got....
Ford Pecsplorer
Checker Abs
Nissan Gluteus Maximus
Got any others?

[El diablo]

Ants muscles aren't any stronger than humans. The thing is that muscle strength is proportional to corss sectional area, whereas weight is proportional to volume. So if something was double its size in every dimension, it would be 4 times as strong but 8 times as heavy - and therefore it would be relatively half as strong as its smaller version. Thats why fleas can jump 2000 times their body length and elephants can't jump at all.

[rna]

Wouldn't that change the emissions standard? what if your car produced gas, what would the impact be on the ozone?

would the car have eyes? could you grow one that would park itself?

Do the cars have sexes? what if you were "parking" with a girl, could you promise the car wouldn't be jealous?

could you mate the cars for "hybrids"?

forget the fact that this is a highly improbable concept... too many strange things could happen.

[bigmeow]

We used to have organicaly-powered vehicles; they were called HORSES. They were very high-maintenace and required a barn to meet their specialized needs. They were weather-sensitive, disease-prone, and are always consuming energy, whether they are idling or not. Any genetically engineered vehicle would probably face the same deficiencies a horse had.

[Joey Holmes]

wouldn't it get kina exspensive. You would need a new car and then you would have to buy food and think about how fast a human can go through food, 3 meals a day, basically 3 fillups. And wat if your cars gets to hot or cold, then would you need a new car or would you just pay for new muscles
all that aside good concept

[kate]

honestly, i am truly sorry Scott, but i had to say it. This post looks like a highschool transcript of me and my mates talking shit, at 3am, after drinking for several hours, followed by a couple of bongs (c'mon it was highschool)....

Its the kind of theory that seems so incredibly f#cking brilliant at that point in time that you marvel at your own genius and have to write it down so you will remember tomorrow. When tomorrow comes if the writing is even legible, you can guarantee nothing good came out of it, except maybe a great theme for a Simpsons episode...

Please Scott... seek help... :)

[mr tom]

You know how people worry about the machines taking over?

The only thing worse than that is making the machines dependent on organic nourishment, if you catch my drift...

[Memming]

Awesome idea. But rather than a single giant ant leg, it would be better to use many of the small sized ones. It is easier to produce, robust to damages, and so on.

[Graham Dodgson]

you've invented the horse

[Steve]

I think car engines are more efficient than animals. You feed it a gallon of gas and it can push a two ton car around for 25 miles at 60 miles per hour. How many pork chops will you need to eat to perform that feat?

[Jshope]

LOL

A transport vehicle that consumes a readily renewable resource. The waste product is a perfect fertilizer, to be used to grow the renewable consumables. Strong muscles, with an added boost capability, when required. Able to cover nearly any terrain. It is soft on the outside, and drive the chicks crazy. It is possible to personalize, to recognize the owner or those designated 'friendly' by the owner.

Hmmm, sounds like a Horse.

[Nathan]

I think it would probably be easier to genetically engineer a super-horse (with wings!) That could eat and digest any organic material (the neighbor's rose bush anyone?) And produce no poop.

Easier still, Scott, would be to stick with your bicycle, which is muscle powered (yours) and is already more efficient than any other vehicle we've invented so far.

Although if you want to be lazy, then what you want is a rickshaw pulled by a guy on a bicycle.

[Rickie]

Sounds gross, but oddly intriguing..

[Mike Meyer]

Just to throw some logic into the equation (although your proposal is funny).....

You said - "A marathon runner can eat a pork chop and run 26 miles. Your car can’t do that."

Yes, but the typical human body doesn't weigh 4,000 lbs (unless, of course, you are from Boston). I guess a fair comparison would be......A car can move 4,000 lbs a distance of 25 miles on a single gallon of gasoline. A human body (or ant body or polar bear body) can't do that.

[Drone74B]

What if you feed it the wrong thing and it farts all the time?

[thirdman]

Umm... Scott... It's called a "horse".

[Nato]

Maybe your initial observation is invalid? check out this article:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2195538.ece

Anyway, cheers for the food for though...

[Greg]

Awesome... But wouldn't it be easier to buy a horse?
Sure they crap a lot but if you built a car that worked off of artificial muscles and scrap food you'd also have to deal with 'crap' that the muscle couldn't process into energy.

It's a nice idea if it wasn't full of shit.

[partgypsy]

They already have something like this.
They are called "horses"

Seriously if something like this could be designed, they would all have "heated leather seats" comphy!

[mtj]

I suppose the "gas" tank inlet would have dual purposes .....

[David]

I did some quick research (note: read as very quick) to decide if I want to buy one of your early model muscle cars. Here’s what I found.

A Big Mac has 485 calories of energy and a gallon of gasoline contains about 31,000 calories of energy.
Therefore 1 gallon of gasoline equals about 64 Big Macs worth of energy

At 138 lbs I burn about 540 calories by jogging six miles in one hour (hat tip to online fitness calculators) It would therefore take slightly more than 1 Big Mac’s worth of energy to get me six miles in one hour.

My car weighs just over 3000lbs and its fuel efficiency rating is 23miles per gallon (highway or non stop at roughly 55miles/hour) It would therefore take my car’s engine 8093 calories or about 17 Big Macs to travel those six miles in about 3minutes 20 seconds.

Now if I weighed 3000lbs like my car it would take 5877 calories or about 12 Big Macs to run those 6 miles in one hour. (Hat tip again to online calculators that let me assume I weigh 3000lbs).

So on the surface my muscle car will be better (12 Big Macs for the muscle car vs. 17 Big Macs for my V6). But wait…

Unfortunately I can’t find an online fitness calculator that will let me assume I run at 55 miles/hour. So this is where my analysis ends. What a productive use of 20 minutes of my time it was. But Hell, if someone designs a muscle car I’ll buy one Scott.

[Michael]

New record Scott - fewest posts ever. Just stunned silence... and where did I ever get the thought that you were a veggie?
Keep 'em coming!

[Will Von Wizzlepig]

what creeps me out are the food processors made from internal organs, which eat the ingredients and poop out a fully cooked meal.

or worse yet, the genetically modified dog, which eats dog poop, and poops dog food- you just need to pair him up with a regular dog, and they're a self-contained system.

just remember which one isn't allowed to lick your face.

[Kevin]

My car weighs 3000 pounds, and would cover that 26 miles in about 30 minutes. It could also keep going as long as it had fuel, with a few minutes here and there for maintenance, for at least 50,000 miles

A marathoner weights about 160 pounds (5% of the weight of my car) and covers that 26 miles in about 2 hours, at best. That's a total of about 1% as much work being done when you consider weight and time. So the car should consume about 100 pork chops to be equally as efficient as the runner, and we are not even considering longevity here.

I am not an expert on energy content of food vs. gasoline, but it seems to me 100 pork chops is a lot more fuel than one gallon of gas. And let's not forget all the stored energy from previous meals the marathoner uses during the run, and all the food that was eaten for the marathoner to get and stay in shape. I can put my car in storage for a year, and not use a bit of fuel in order to keep it operating at high efficiency. We cannot yet do that with long distance runners (:

[ComidaDos]

Eventually cars will take mass and convert it completely into energy.

[Ax]

The reason we switched from horses to cars seem to be related to reliability and up-time. I wonder if it would be easier to augment a horse to gain the beneficial attributes of the automobile, rather than the other way around.

[moriarty]

Civilian vars would be herbivores. Police vehicles would be carnivores, derived from Cheetahs, Sharks, etc.

Lawyers would have scavenger derived vehicles.

[Armando Esteban]

Last post i said "not funny".

NOW:
"I want my car powered by giant ant muscles."

JAJAJJAJAJAJJAJAJ REALLY FUNNY lol

[Tony]

You'd have to feed the car quite a alot of hamburgers. A gallon of gas has 31,000 calories (so sayeth Google). So a car that gets say, average 20 miles to the gallon in the city would need 1,550 calories to go a mile, which would be about three quarter pounders with cheese, or roughly 676 hamburgers for a full tank of gas (12 gallon equiv).

I ate a lot of tofu and ran a Marathon. I don't think a porkchop would work for me.

[Ceri]

Mmmm ... your body is about 25% efficient (look it up in any physiology textbook) in its use of food energy. Your car engine is between about 25% and 40% efficient (lower for gasoline, higher for diesel).
So you're not talking about efficiency, you're talking about non-petrochemical fuels. Why would this be more efficient or effective than using technology to create biofuels (ie providing a more energy-intensive fuel [in Joules/kg], like diesel, rather than sponge cake, or whatever). That doesn't mean I think that the current (disastrous, pointless) corn/ethanol biofuels are worth pursuing, but in the future other biofuels may be. Directly powering cars from biomass doesn't make sense, though, because of its poor energy/weight ratio, and the large volume of waste produced (which you end up hauling around in the car).

... or perhaps your post was intended as 'philotainment', and I should just ignore it?

[Tom M.]

I've read that there's nothing particularly unusual about the ant's muscle, or even it's musculo-skeletal arrangement (which explains why a chimpanzee is stronger than a similarly-weighted person), but rather in the scale of all their organs to their environment. In other words, if we were the size of ants we would be corresponsdingly as strong as they are.

[Scottupnorth]

Ant car......brings new meaning to the name Volkswagon Bug

Ba dum ch

[Larry H]

Would injecting your engine with steroids be illegal too? Great excuse for athletes, "I grabbed the wrong syringe".

How about some coffee for the car to give it that zip on the way to work.

And a new excuse, my engine caught a nasty virus.

[Warren F]

You're a bit late on that invention. It exists, and is known as a "horse".

[Robert]

I'd hate to see the exhaust.

[Joe]

Thinking of the scene from Fight-Club where Edward Norton says to some guy "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard".

[rbp]

"I want my car powered by giant ant muscles."

You'd lose your way at every crossroad.

[Josh]

So you envision a future where cars will be measured in ant power? That would be awesome.

[Anarchy In Your Head]

If you used the digestive system of a dung beetle, you could have a perpetual motion machine! Think about it... OK, I know that's not really scientific, but it's funny.

[vanwall]

Sorry to be picky but as an engineer you should know that the ant is not so relatively strong because of its muscles. The weight of an object increases with the cube of the linear dimension (i.e. with the volume) while the strength only increases with the square (the cross-sectional area of the muscle). If you double an ants dimensions it would be 4 times as strong but 8 times as heavy. Do this often enough and the ant would collapse under its own weight.

[Jason]

Insect muscles don't scale very far up.

[SJA]

You know in parades you see those guys with the shovels and buckets following horses.... Car droppings could be a problem unless we use Car diapers and then there is the problem of who is going to change the car diaper today... Stop taking the the little orange barrel shaped pills....

[Fergus]

One tiny mistake in your post: ants' muscles aren't actually any stronger than humans'. The laws of physics says that if you scaled down a human to the size of an ant, he'd be able to lift the same amount as the ant.
But aside from that, great post (as always).
By the way, what happened to Basic Instructions?

[Parker]

Hmm... there may be a couple scientific problems with your car.

For starters, gasoline is more energy-dense than fat (which is pretty energy dense as far as food goes). When you fill up your car now, you put, say 100 lbs of gasoline in it. Can you imagine putting more than 100 lbs of food in your car every week?

But lets assume your muscle-driven car is more efficient than a gasoline engine. Enough so that it's feasible for a person to "fill their tank" without a forklift. You've still got a problem-- the energy required to grow, process, and transport the food to your house is pretty high. Meat wouldn't be an option-- you'd be better off powering your car with whatever you were going to feed the animals than lose the energy in conversion to meat. You're essentially limited to fast-growing crops if you're going to mass-produce this stuff, which is pretty much where the ethanol industry is now. And they're barely breaking even (depending on which study you read) from an energy standpoint. Of course, you'd hope methods would improve over time, but this seems pretty far fetched, even for you.

Instead of trying to power an entire car, what about a small machine that sits in the corner of your kitchen? It's got a "stomach" and a "muscle"-driven generator. Your scraps, which are just wasted calories in the trash, are digested and power the generator, feeding electricity back onto the grid, lowering your bill. And every once in a while, you empty the compost bin in your yard/garden.

[Mycroft]

My argument against this is the same as my argument against ethanol fuels.

Among other considerations, I don't want to compete with machines for food.

[Miguel]

That's just a joke, right?
Do I really have to tell you that our engines are much more efficient than our muscles? (Think about the mass being moved, and the speeds thus attained.)

And ant muscles wouldn't scale the way you imagine. In fact, they can only lift so much weight because of their very small size - it's all about the Square-Cube Law (check out Wikipedia) - double an ant's size and it's weight will be multiplied by 8, while it's strength would only increase fourfold.

So I do hope that you're only joking (and it wasn't even a funny joke, BTW) - and not publicly embarrassing yourself.

[GLK]

Many years ago Cycle World magazine ran a story by Peter Egan whereupon Egan and a friend went on a long journey. Peter rode a small-engined Honda Motorcycle and his friend (an accomplished bicyclist) pedaled a lightweight racing bicycle. It turned out that the bicyclist consumed quite a bit more dollars worth of food-energy than the motorcycle consumed in gasoline-energy. True, gas was cheaper back then and the motorcycle wasn't very fast, but it was an interesting study in mechanical vs. human efficiency that drove home the point that human energy is not particularly cost-effective.

[Wizard Tim]

In Elbonia we already have such cars.
We call them "horses".

[ulf]

Looks to me as if you re-invent the horse...

[Chris]

Tangentially, this reminds me of a thought I had a while back. Dunno if anyone else has thought about this, but being the vegetarian you are, Scott, you may have thought of it yourself.

With respect to cells/tissue grown in a lab, why not grow meat the same way? I mean for human consumption. After all, if they can grow organs safe enough to place inside a human being, they could certainly swing something safe enough for your average Joe Burger-Slob to eat, yes?

One of the biggest objections to eating meat is that, well, animals have to die for us to have our steak/porkchops/drumsticks/etc. This would obviate that entirely. Just do a wee muscle biopsy on Bossy and Babe (we could even make sure they've got full anesthesia), then off to the lab/factory we go.

Some of the obvious downsides to this are that there will still be people protesting about this, finding SOMEthing morally objectionable about it. But remember, "no animals were killed in the making of this prime rib."

I think the biggest stumbling block at this point in our civilization at-large is that people are generally creeped out by bio-organic engineering/technology such as this. Call it "playing God" or "tinkering with Nature." Call it what you will, it is almost certainly a natural evolution (Yes, I just used the E-word!) in our technological development.

Being myself a self-described "apologetic carnivore," I can tell you that I'd feel a lot better about eating meat knowing that a living, potentially thinking, feeling creature didn't die so I could enjoy some tasty, grilled goodness.

Discuss?

[Sam Davis]

Taking this one step further: electric turbines made, via nanotechnology, of muscle-like tissue, designed to run on landfill waste.

Not impossible, nanoscientists would probably say, and not that far in the future.

And, as Eric Drexler pointed out nearly 20 years ago now in "Engines of Creation," nanotechnology ultimately has the potential to end material scarity altogether. How? By building assemblors that are pre-programmed to re-arrange the atoms of any material into any other material.

So, if you have a 10 pound pile of dirt, you can pour some liquid assemblors on it and get 10 pounds of white chicken breast - without, of course, having to slaughter real chickens. The possibilities are endless and petroleum-producing nations fear the day when it becomes possible.

[taylor]

Yeah, but the problem is of speed to produce energy. Sure, a body is more efficient, but it's slowly producing that energy compared to an engine burning gasoline. It's the old principal of you can have it fast or cheap, but not both.

[Pender]

I like the way you think, but a human can only go 25 mph tops on a bicycle.

If you used, say, cheetah muscles, I think you might have a problem using that to move a three thousand pound car.

Yes, we do have the power to play with nature, but you have to admit that we REALLY suck at it. (See africanized honey bees for example)

[larry]

Since i'm a brutha in south central LA, then mine needs to run on KFC!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Michael Casey]

And what happens if your car gets a taste for blood? I don't want my car smacking its hood whenever I'm in front of its headlights.

We'd have to fight back by eating the cars. Drive-thrus would be equipped with big contraptions that would be a cross between a car wash and a slaughterhouse. You'd order at the box like usual, tell your car you're going to go wash your hands, and wait as it unwittingly drives to its doom. Presto, fresh carburgers.

[Ivarelf]

You fail at both physics and biology. A 2000 lb car moving at 60 mph takes a little more engery than 170 lb person running at 4 mph.

Also, isn't your idea basically the same as going back to horse/buggy transportation?

[Ibid]

As long as we're engineering a car I want it to be able to grow it's own carapace so it can heal if someone keys it.

[Arby]

Let’s go a step further and give our bionic car a brain, with emotions, attitude and personality. Hell, we may even want to marry it if we fall in love. Then of course, there is the inevitable divorce and custody of the mini cars and child support along with an ex mother-in-law (she probably looks like and old wrecked Buick) to cope with. Stop me before I go on……

[Bob]

I think they call that a "Horse".

[Scott from Canada]

You've gone mad, and I love it. Somebody get the man an Igor!

[jamester]

Actually, since the car won't have taste sensitivity, it should just run on our poo, shouldn't it? That would also eliminate (yes, intended) waste tx problems in their current form...

[jC from Tn]

What would you do if your car gets a cramp. I think it would be unpleasant having to do a deep tissue massage on a bicep-hemi or hamstring transmission. I would guess it would happen alot in the cold. Maybe there would be a market for vehicle massuesses that you could get to make garage calls.

[Josh]

Scott, you've got your physics bad wrong on this one, both about the ant being stronger and about humans being so efficient. The ant's seeming herculean strength comes from its small size. Rigid body strength (like bones) increases at the square of the length, where mass increases at the cube of the length. This is why things the size of the moon or bigger have to be round, and why very small things, like insects, can have such a spindly structure and still be very strong.

And the human muscle efficiency thing.... No. First, the human is about 1/20th the weight of a car, which can go about (for sake of argument) 26 miles/gallon. Second, the food we eat has a huge amount of energy in it, which is why we can do something like make ethanol from corn. Third, a marathoner is not getting all his energy from a pork chop, but also the accumulated fat and sugars in his body from preparing for the marathon. There is no human who could run a marathon after every meal. I'd love someone who actually has these numbers at hand to describe human efficiency in an empirical way, and post it here.

[Bloodboiler]

I for one welcome our new car slave life forms. Cars would born in factories and get conditioned according to the future owners specifications, much like people in 'The Brave New World'. Eventually your car would get old and literally die, but then you could then feed its corpse to your next car.

[Mike]

I feel compelled to point out, ant muscle cells would be totally wrong for such a solution. The reason why ants can lift so much more than their own body weight has a lot to do with the physics of very small things. Merely scaling up the body proportions of an insect would quickly lead to an insect unable to stand up, let alone lift anything.

The other tradeoff is one of power generation. Sure, a marathon runner can move for a long time with relatively little fuel, but doesn't exactly do so quickly. when compared to the world of wheeled transport. While I'd love to be able to toss a dollar's worth of pasta into my car and get 30 miles out of it, I'm not sure I'd be willing to do so if my maximum speed was just over 10mph.

Considering the time I spend on maintenance