Refractory Electronics

I've had a couple of hare-brained ideas in my time. One was to build this really big solar paraboloid, like 40 feet across with the focal concentration power of a couple hundred thousand suns, and position it so that it would focus the sun just twice a year. Then, on say, spring and fall equinox, you would put a hot dog or something, in the focal point, and watch it vaporize and/or explode.

Another idea I had was to purchase a series of shredders and chippers and dust makers and take, say, an automobile, and reduce it to as fine a dust as I could. And then package it. A can of Rolls Royce tickle your fancy?

The problem with both these schemes is I lacked the capital to do it. Both of these schemes are competely feasible, they merely require monies.

A while ago a friend/acquaintance was going to work on an intelligent kiln. It would keep track of all sorts of stuff going on inside it. At the time, I said, well, what really want in order to that is a whole bunch of wireless sensors that report on all the little volumes inside the kiln, and so it would be really the intelligent object inside the kiln that guided how the kiln would fire it. But in order for that to happen, sophisticated electronic devices would have to be built that could take the heat. And as far as I knew at the time, no one was working on that.

And now I find out about plasmonic metamaterials, and the potential, should they take the technology in its logical course, for refractory electronic devices.  And actually, given the huge amount of waste hear we as a society produce, thermionic electronics make even more sense.

People are looking for carbon-neutral energy sources, when we could be using all that waste energy!

What do you think?