SIXTY years ago, Sean Connery first introduced himself as Bond, James Bond. The 007 franchise has seen a lot of changes over the intervening decades, but a constant theme, alongside the cocktails and quips, is science and technology. From lasers to space shuttles, the Bond films have showcased some of the latest technological advances. Where might the next instalment take us, scientifically speaking?
The world of Bond has been reinvented many times over the years. A View to a Kill is a reworking of Goldfinger, with Max Zorin trying to increase the value of his microchips instead of his gold. A lethal, highly contagious pathogen is deployed in the form of the 鈥渧irus omega鈥� in On Her Majesty鈥檚 Secret Service and as nanobots in No Time to Die. With the world in the middle of a global energy crisis, perhaps it is time to reinvent The Man With the Golden Gun.
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This 1974 Roger Moore film was released during the oil crisis of the 1970s and features a renewable energy that has fallen into the hands of Scaramanga. The device converts energy from the sun into electrical energy. Solar cells had been developed in the 1950s and used to power satellites in the 1960s, but in 1973 they were still eye-wateringly expensive.
In the film, Scaramanga stored the solar energy in a huge facility. There are pipes and dials and acres of steel, even liquid helium ponds for henchmen to fall into, but no sign of the most practical way to store energy: batteries. How it all works is never explained, perhaps because the problem of storing solar energy is a real one. Batteries today are much smaller than the film鈥檚 extravagant set, but they are still bulky, expensive and slow to charge.
Say some clever scientists figured out how to make a low-cost, lightweight, high-capacity battery that charged in a few minutes. Electric cars would become much more practical. Solar farms could store their energy on site and release it onto the grid to meet spikes in demand. It would revolutionise renewable energy. But what if that tech fell into the hands of a sinister organisation, such as Bond鈥檚 enemy SPECTRE? How much would governments be willing to pay to use it? And how much would oil and gas producers be willing to pay to suppress it?
Batteries have come a long way since 1800, when Alessandro Volta stacked up alternating discs of zinc, silver and brine-soaked pasteboard to demonstrate how dissimilar metals could be used to generate electricity. The choice of metals has changed over time and the design of the cells has been refined, but the basic principles still hold. Today鈥檚 batteries continue to use metals that release electrons and an electrolyte to move the charge so the current flows.
In the 20th century, metals such as lithium greatly improved battery efficiency, but their reactivity still causes safety issues. Other metals, like mercury and cadmium, have attractive electrical properties, but they are also toxic.
Liangbing Hu at the University of Maryland and his team could help solve the toxicity problem with a . A lithium-ion battery that can be charged in a few minutes, plus store more of that charge than current versions in a safe, usable form, has been demonstrated in the labs of . Donald Sadoway at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues have developed an that could be a lot cheaper than current lithium-based batteries.
These are major developments in the field of battery technology, but they are still years away from commercialisation. Looking further into the future, a quantum of energy solace might be found in quantum batteries. They are still only an idea in the real world, but maybe Bond鈥檚 world, with the scientific genius of Q Branch, could again show us the future.
Kathryn Harkup is an author. Her new book is聽Superspy Science (Bloomsbury)
