Hydrogen is weighing heavily on my mind this morning.
Not that hydrogen, itself, is “heavy”. In fact, quite the opposite. According to what I learned in my high school chemistry class, hydrogen weighs less than anything else.
But it also explodes. That’s the “heavy” part.
Additionally, hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, making up about 70% of all known matter. (Note: this is “known matter”. I will discuss “unknown matter” in a future Daily Post column, but it will be a relatively short essay.)
The chances that humankind could run out of hydrogen — by doing something foolish — is very slight. (We often do foolish things, but there’s really a lot of hydrogen out there.)
We could possibly run out of trees, for example, or fossil fuels, or other things. (I ran out of coffee, a few days ago.) But we will not run out of hydrogen, unless we try something really stupid.
In fact, you can make hydrogen out of water, by running an electric charge through the water. With, like, a 9 volt battery. (You will also need salt, but salt is cheap. I get mine at Walmart.)
So, some people are telling us we could use hydrogen to fuel our cars.
Which leads us to Guangzhou, China. A Chinese auto company called GAC Group is developing an internal combustion engine that burns hydrogen instead of gasoline.
This concerns me, because, back when I was a kid, I heard about the Hindenburg disaster.
My mom and dad had a record album titled ‘Led Zeppelin’, and the cover art portrayed the Hindenburg zeppelin catching fire. (I guess it was actually my mom’s record, because she got it in the divorce settlement. Along with other things.)
As a kid, I didn’t understand the artwork on the album cover, so my dad sat down with me and told me about the Hindenburg — how it was basically a balloon full of lighter-than-air hydrogen that carried passengers (and crew) back and forth from Europe to America, in luxurious and spacious accommodations.
And how the disaster, in 1937, pretty much put an end to zeppelins, as passenger transportation. (But not as rock ‘n roll groups.)
My point in bringing up this unfortunate story about the Hindenburg, is that hydrogen is dangerous. Just because something is the most common known element in the universe doesn’t mean we should be messing around with it.
They tell me, for instance, that the sun consists almost entirely of hydrogen. Think about that. You can get sunburned from 93 million miles away.
And don’t get me started on hydrogen bombs, because we will likely be here all day.
The engineers at GAC auto company probably know what they’re doing, building a hydrogen-powered internal combustion engine, and I’m perfectly fine with people in China driving those kinds of cars, if they want to.
But I know how these things go. It starts in China, and then it infects everyone over here in America.
It would be just my luck if, someday, a rock ‘n roll group puts out an album, featuring a picture of my hydrogen-powered car, exploding.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.