Bright Ideas - Producing Energy

There are a lot of experimental ways to produce energy using natural energy sources - wind, water, the sun, whatever. And I've come up with a brilliant new way of harnessing energy. What's the most efficient creator of energy you can think of? What's always moving, always creating, and always producing energy? Humans, of course! I'm no scientist, but don't we all create kinetic energy just by moving? So, my brilliant idea is this: we need to find a way to harness the kinetic energy that humans produce, and use to to power things. The most obvious example is in exercise. Someone should invent a bike that creates power when the wheel rotates, for example. Or a treadmill that you set the pace for that turns and creates energy whenever you run. Do I have any idea how this would work? No! But I know we're producing energy when we exercise that we aren't harnessing, and that could remedied in an efficient manner. Someone get on that.

I was talking to my friend and colleague Emily Knott about this idea, and she pointed out a rather amusing irony that I thought I'd share. 200 years ago, people didn't really have this concept of exercise. They got exercise because they worked hard with manuel labor every day of their lives. Now, we have machines to do that labor, but we need power for those machines. It's fairly amusing that my solution is to work to produce power to power machines so that we don't have to work. She makes a good point, but I figure it's easier to modify a stationary bike than change the quirks of society.