American ingenuity has raged this past century like Genghis Khan through technological obstacles.
What was science fiction just a few decades ago can now be held in the palm of a hand or on the point of a pinhead. While perhaps the greatest jump for humanity took place at 3:17 p.m. Eastern Time on July 20, 1969, when the Apollo 11 lunar module, the Eagle, landed on the moon, the next one may be around the corner.
“Nothing can astonish an American,” Jules Verne wrote prophetically in “From the Earth to the Moon” in 1865. “In America, everything is easy, everything is simple; and as for mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before come up… One thing with them (Yankees) is neither said nor done.”
Also, entrepreneurs in this country have reaped success after success. Dirty iPad Notes.
IT’S OKAY. How about finding a way to make clean energy the dominant form of electricity production?
It can’t be too soon.
A study led by West Virginia University researcher Dr. Michael Hendryx found cancer rates twice as high in a community exposed to mountaintop mining compared to an unexposed city, he said. Jeff Biggers, journalist and author, in an article for the Huffington Post. The study links the open pit mining method to an additional 60,000 cases of cancer.
And the carbon output and air pollution from burning fossil fuels seems poised to unleash a climate disaster that will baffle even the most jaded naysayers.
So we need a plan. Blogger Michael Graham Richard, like me, focused on the space race of the 1960s, in which the United States crushed the efforts of the USSR, to find a role model.
“Just like the 1960s, we’ll need an inspiring vision to unite our efforts, we’ll need to take existing technologies and quickly take them to the next level, as well as invent new ones,” Richard writes in a post on TreeHugger. .com. “But the most important thing is that we will need focus to keep doing the hard work and sacrifices until we reach our goals.”
Verne wrote his novel on space travel before any real work on the practical mathematics of such trajectories was formulated. However, his rough calculations and ideas proved to be remarkably accurate.
I use the book in this analogy mainly because I just read the passage above and was impressed, even proud. Hell yeah, that’s the spirit, I thought. Mind you, this is my fifth Verne book after reading “A Journey to the Center of the Earth” and “The Mysterious Island,” and I’m starting to think like a long-dead translated French author.
Verne’s hero in the novel is Impey Barbicane, an industrialist marginalized by the end of the Civil War. Barbicane’s comments at the beginning of the book made me realize that he was reading something akin to anti-war satire.
“My brave colleagues, too long and a paralyzing peace has plunged the members of the Gun-Club into deplorable inactivity,” says Barbicane.
Let’s apply that to current geopolitics. Perhaps stopping all wars, official and unofficial, will give the nation’s military industrial complex the incentive to seek, like the members of the fictional Barbicane Gun Club, alternatives like clean energy.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in his famous 1961 speech that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or not, by the military-industrial complex.”
But he also said his “total influence, economic, political, even spiritual, is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government.” That power, harnessed for clean energy profits, could change the world.
Meanwhile, smaller companies are doing quite well on their own.
Michael Kanellos of GreentechMedia.com reports that First Solar has developed a cadmium telluride solar cell that yields a record efficiency of 17.3 percent. The progress surpasses the old record of 16.7 percent set by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory a decade ago.
And Timon Singh of Inhabitat.com reports that startup Semprius has unveiled a solar cell about the size of half the head of a pin, which when combined with powerful but inexpensive lenses can concentrate sunlight more than 11,000 times and convert it in electricity.
Other advances and cost reductions are occurring throughout the solar industry, bringing us closer to the day when solar power will compete head-to-head, without subsidies, with fossil fuels.
For now, we wait. And I will be discovering how the protagonist Barbicane reaches the moon.