Everything loops back to steam in the end. Solid state thermoelectric devices have been around forever, and before that we had the idea of using thermal energy to augment magnetic fields and jump to kinetic energy without any intermediary conversion. All very low yield results, but we’ve tried it anyway.

Keep thinking about it, we need all the brains we can get, but don’t write it off as a novel idea that the other egg heads just haven’t gotten around to solving yet.