Articles

Nature's Sweet Refineries

by Roger Richards

It is supplied with raw material by airborne tankers. These tankers are also equipped with a defensive weapon to protect their refinery. They will literally self-destruct to protect it. It takes 30,000 tankers to supply this refinery's needs. The tankers travel over 75,000 miles, enough to travel three times around the world, to bring the raw materials needed for the refinery's annual production. The tanker's life-span I, therefore, is only about 2 months.

These tankers are unique in that they not only transport the raw material for high-energy liquid production, but they also locate its source, pump it onboard, store it in a special internal tank, and refine it as they fly back to the refinery.

When the tankers arrive at the raw material production site they have a specifically designed propulsion system that allows them to hover over the source. Then, using a special on-board pipeline and pumping mechanism, they load the raw materials.

A special on-board optical sensory device guides them back to the factory. It does this by training a few of its 8,500 lenses on the sun, each from a different angle. The information is input to the tanker's on-board computer system, which then enables the tanker to find its way back home safely, every time.

The tanker's own fuel comes from its on-board tank/refinery, but only a very small amount. It gets about 4 million miles to the gallon at cruising speed, slightly worse at full speed. As compared to a 747, on a scaled up ratio, its cruising speed is around 330,000 miles per hour! The on-board refinery begins the "cracking" process, which converts the raw materials to refined, high energy liquid in flight. This refinery secretes 7 specific chemicals in just the right amounts to do the job. Its on-board computer directs all these, of course. Next, it flies to the refinery.

As you may know, energy sources are very valuable in this world, so each refinery must have its own security and defense system. These power-plants are occasionally attacked, sometimes successfully, but never easily. Upon its approach to the refinery, fighters carefully examine the tanker. It uses an airborne chemical to identify itself, which is instantly recognized by the fighters, as they have specifically designed chemical receptors to check it out.

Upon passing through the air defense system, the tanker enters the refinery, which is air conditioned, and kept at 35 degrees C (94 degrees F). If the temperature should go up even one degree, the tankers are sent out on a different assignment--that of water retrieval. Water is then brought back to the refinery and spread over a vast network of thin walled cells, similar to what you find in a car's radiator. Many tankers hover over the cells and use their propulsion devices to blast air over them. The water evaporates and cools the refinery's interior.

Their designer programmed this information into the onboard computer of each tanker. Should the plant temperature fall below 14 degrees C (57 degrees F), then the 30,000 tankers skillfully park themselves very close to each other, forming a sphere in which their internal heat is shared and captured. Thus energy is conserved.

To store the high-energy liquid, the tankers pump it from their internal tanks and transfer it to specially designed worker-machines that transfer it back and forth until any water in it has evaporated. These workers have small internal factories that are very similar to petrochemical plants. The factories produce a complex, carbon-based plastic containing a specifically formulated mixture of esters, cerotic acid and hydrocarbons.

The workers have previously coated the cells mentioned above for cooling, with this plastic. The high-energy liquid is then stored inside the cell and capped off with the same complex plastic.

As you can probably imagine, such a refinery is very valuable to its owners an they are willing to give their lives to defend it. Should an energy-pirate attack, the tankers have been programmed to dive-bomb the intruder. It is a suicide attack, but when each tanker hits the intruder it leaves a very sharp, specially designed poison dispersal device. The device contains an extremely complex mechanism, which causes it to pull its way into the invader.

It has barbs to prevent easy removal, and a poison, which is slowly ejected into the pirate. For some pirates, one poison dispersal device is enough to cause their retreat, but others require hundreds or thousands, and if they don't leave they could be destroyed. Unfortunately, when the tanker leaves its device, part of its mechanism of life-support is sacrificed, causing its destruction. Each tanker is designed to automatically act to repel intruders, without hesitation.

As you may have gathered by now, the high energy refining plant is actually a beehive, the tankers are honeybees, and the worker machines are worker bees. The raw material is nectar, the high energy liquid is honey, and the complex plastic is beeswax.

The honeybee's onboard computer is its brain, its refinery is its glandular system, its propulsion system is its wings, its tracking devices are its eyes, its weapon is its stinger, and its identifying device is the chemical it gives off to be recognized. The worker bee's petrochemical plant is a set of glands in its abdomen. The pumping devices are of course real, but miniature. The air conditioning and liquid energy storage systems are the combs in the beehive.

These are all complex and high tech in design. If just one small detail, such as the cooling system or the 7 chemicals for refining the nectar, were to be even a little off, the bees would die out. However, their great designer, God, saw to it that they would get it right every time. Too bad human designers couldn't do the same, there would be a lot less accidents and lawsuits!