thefloatingstone

Everyone always talks about flying cars this and flying cars that.

When the only futuristic gadget I want that doesn't exist yet when it SHOULD are those cup noodles from Cowboy bebop where you just pull the tag at the bottom of it and the noodles are instantly warmed.

where is the future I was promised?

eightyonekilograms

Ok, I feel like calculating this out.

There are many self-heating meal products already, including but not limited to MREs, which typically use an exothermic reaction of water and some period II metal, most often calcium or magnesium. But these take a few minutes to heat water to boiling, and the OP said they wanted instant. Can we do it?

The recommended amount of water for a bowl of Nissin Cup Noodles is 300 mL (source). I couldn't find a similar authoritative source for the Big Cup Noodles, which is what the gifs appear to be based on, but this says they have about 1.5 times the volume of the regular size, so let's assume they take 450 mL of water. We need to heat that from room temperature (37° C) to boiling (100° C), and do it "instantly". Let's say for purposes of "instantly" that we mean 5 seconds or less.

This is a fairly tall order. Water has a very high specific heat, meaning it takes a lot of energy to raise its temperature. Specifically, to heat 450 mL of water from 37° to 100° needs around 120 kJ. To do that in 5 seconds, you'd need 120 kJ / 5 s = 24 kilowatts, assuming perfect transfer of energy to the water.

24 kilowatts is a lot of power, even before you factor in that a lot of the energy from your source will be heating the cup, the air, the material itself. My electric car draws just over 9 kW when it's charging, and to do that safely it has an insulated cable with the diameter of a tennis ball, and a charger with a big mechanical relay in it which makes an audible clunk only when it detects a safe connection, because you don't want human body parts near 10 uncontrolled kilowatts.

OK, forget power for a minute and just focus on energy. We need 120 kJ, and those little calcium salts won't cut it. How about thermite? This paper says that garden-variety thermite (if you just mix loose aluminum and iron oxide powder) has an energy density of 0.7 kJ/cm^3, so we'd need about 170 ccs of thermite, or about half a beer can. That's clearly much more than the bottom of this little cup here. But you can make packed thermite, which has a much higher energy density - almost 5 kJ/cm^3, meaning we'd need only 24 ccs, which I think might fit with the gif we're seeing. The only problem (well, ok, there are actually a bunch more problems) being that packed thermite gets hot enough to melt steel.

I think we may be stuck making our noodles with an electric kettle or a slow-heating chemical reaction, OP. What you're asking for sounds pretty dangerous.

kontextmaschine

I suppose an interesting question is just how powerful a smartphone with how long a battery life could you make before it can double as a grenade?