Smegma Huffs Gas to Make Electricity. No, You can't Charge Your Phone by Farting on Cheese Dick. Yet.

Sometimes I wonder if we are increasingly being led ever deeper into crude hedonistic fantasies of deranged psychopaths wielding malevolent AI, like a fevered dream of some Soma-addled pseudapostle. Sometimes I feel like pinching myself to see if this is REALLY happening. I have before read about H2 being a potential source of electrical power, but Earth doesn't have much free hydrogen, so it's not much use here, at least not for anything substantial. We have a lot of hydrogen, but it's pretty firmly trapped in water.

On planets with more free hydrogen, like Jupiter or Saturn, NASA could run robots, and a lot more, with it.

When I watched Anton's video on Odysee about making electricity from hydrogen enzymatically, I learned the organism from whom we learned this trick was Mycobacterium smegmatis, and yes, it's the cause of smegma.

Checking Wikipedia (to make sure I wasn't hallucinating) I learned smegma was discovered in 1884.

"Mycobacterium smegmatis...was first reported in November 1884 by Lustgarten, who found a bacillus with the staining appearance of tubercle bacilli in syphilitic chancres. Subsequent to this, Alvarez and Tavel found organisms similar to that described by Lustgarten also in normal genital secretions (smegma). This organism was later named M. smegmatis."

Must...Not...Make...Lustgarten...smegma...joke...

[A quick shot of cheap scotch enables me to regain my self control. Where was I?]

Now, I've much considered the prospect of exporting terrestrial life into space. I've lamented that we really can't completely sterilize spacecraft, and things like waterbears (and other extremophiles) are quite capable of surviving the vacuum of space and lethal doses of radiation, perhaps for aeons, and could potentially contaminate extraterrestrial environments. I'm pretty sure we've left waterbears on Mars that might someday snap out of stasis and start crawling around on their eight little legs, cuter than ever. I console myself with the fact that no place we've gone yet seems to harbor indigenous life, so the worst we've done by exporting tough terrestrial critters is transform barren wastes into new habitat for sacred life.

Wherever we go, we'll take life with us.

IMG source - BigThink.com

IMG source - eejournal.com - Scientists revive tardigrade after 30 years>

But I never thought about scraping smegma out of syphilitic chancres and spreading it on purpose, like I was Johns Hopkins in Guatemala.

[Aarrgh! Quick, another shot.]

When I was a kid I thought it was funny to be in a band called 'Smegma and the Four Skins'. No, we weren't very good. We were just as juvenile as you'd expect. But, that immature eleven year old mini-me I yet nurture inside is, frankly, goggling agape at the almost infinite potential for NASA and other space transport entities to avail that crude Middle School gag. The prurient possibilities are endless, and Anton didn't even try.

[Aaaaah! A desperate chug.]

I feel a strange trembling in the farce...er, force, as the raw power of crude pubescent humor stirs, as if an ancient and terrible god in some unknown Lovecraftian dimension has itself been invigorated, like a vampire that has awaited fresh blood in a crypt for millennia, wizened and shriveled, is suddenly bathed in it by a firefight between mortals above, unaware of the evil they've awoken.

[Half the bottle is gone now. I can hardly type, but you, dear reader, should be safe from my puerile jests.]

Intrigued, I wondered about the copious hydrogen on Earth. Are there ways to free it from water, to make it available to smegma to give us power? Searching, I found some possibilities. Molecular Catalysis in “Green” Hydrogen Production from May, 2022 suggests that the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) could make hydrogen available. So, smegma supplied HER gas...

[Nooooo! Must...Resist...]

It occurs to me that if the wires were hooked up differently, and we showered less, the concept of using humans as batteries in the matrix might actually work.

[Gaaah! The scotch is all gone, now.]

Suddenly it makes sense that people abducted by aliens ubiquitously report being anally probed. Their alien technology is more advanced than ours. We only just learned about the power of smegma.

"Take me to your peter"

[Nooooo!...