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Famously in the film when Spooner is riding on his motorbike with Dr Calvin, she asks him something like 'this doesn't run on gas does it? You do know gas explodes!'. Her obvious horror suggests that in 2035 humanity relies upon an alternate power supply than gas (or even fossil fuels). Is there any indication of what this is (I don't recall seeing any nuclear power plants or solar panels), or are we meant to simply guess what it would be?

SQB
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Often Right
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    I hope not a nuclear source. Seems kind of silly to complain about gas exploding when you're sitting on nuclear material... – jpmc26 Jul 18 '14 at 01:35
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    I don't think you were supposed to think about it at all. I think it was simply to compare future tech to something concrete that the viewers would know, and to provide some humor. – calccrypto Jul 18 '14 at 01:37
  • @calccrypto nevertheless in a society where basically electricity runs everything, it's still a fairly important question I think – Often Right Jul 18 '14 at 01:38
  • Well, the plot of the movie was about robot/human interaction, singularity, technophobia, and Converse All Stars. What do power supplies have to do with any of those things? How would mentioning the power supply contribute to the story, beyond the mentioned scene? – calccrypto Jul 18 '14 at 01:55
  • Between batteries and non-exploding power sources we have today (solar, hydroelectric, wind, maybe others I'm forgetting...) her incredulity may be a regular occurrence within our lifetimes... – Izkata Jul 18 '14 at 02:10
  • @Izkata are you saying batteries don't explode? the wording is slightly awkward. Also http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2093/would-a-large-quantity-of-gasoline-in-a-closed-container-explode-violently-when – calccrypto Jul 18 '14 at 02:40
  • @calccrypto Exploding batteries are due to catastrophic failure, gas engines run off of continuous controlled "explosions". A similar statement is sometimes made in sci-fi series where energy weapons are standard and a character is incredulous at modern reallife conventional weapons: "It's like trying to control an explosion!" – Izkata Jul 18 '14 at 02:41
  • @Izkata got ya. and controlled explosions were not what Dr. Calvin was talking about. Even if she did know about controlled explosions, the line was written for the average audience, who expect gas tanks to explode – calccrypto Jul 18 '14 at 02:44
  • @calccrypto Yeah, I don't see how you could make the phrase technically correct and still natural-sounding, so I'm guessing they figured that was a good enough intermediate phrase, but that they may still have had "controlled explosions" in mind – Izkata Jul 18 '14 at 02:46
  • @calccrypto the all-stars was an antique just like his CD player. Spooner liked antiques. – Bernard the Bear May 27 '18 at 12:08

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If the original Asimov source material is an acceptable basis for an answer, Earth received power from space-based solar power stations as described in the short story "Reason." The main characters in the story were Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan, who were young contemporaries of the Susan Calvin character featured in the movie. Each solar collector near the sun gathered incoming energy and converted it into a concentrated photon stream, probably microwaves. The photon streams were aimed at a receiving station on Earth and other destinations in the solar system as demand warranted.

Kyle Jones
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