Up to now, we’ve looked at problems like global warming and thought “we have to fight it”.
This is exactly how we acted for most of the history of the human race. I propose to act in a different way, and that difference can be summed up with one word: aikido. In aikido, one does not “fight” the opponent, but instead one seeks to merge one’s energy with the opponent and bring a successful conclusion to what started as a dispute. The best conclusion, of course, is to end up with the opponent agreeing with you, and both of you going in the same direction, hopefully as friends.
The same thing can be done with global warming; let me give you an example.
It has been said that when the ice in the Arctic melts, we lose more reflective surface, and therefore absorb more heat. Why not use that heat? It is, after all, energy, and with enough energy, we can even transform the world. We have already, and not in such a small way, by burning fossil fuels. And we certainly have built enormous works, such as the interstate highway system.
I propose to build enough new solar thermal energy plants so that an area easily the size of the Arctic will be covered. These plants do not rely on expensive photovoltaics, but on inexpensive heat–concentrating mirror arrays that can turn the sun’s heat energy into electricity. As we speak, the Ivanpah solar plant is slated to begin generating power now. It generates 377 MW, enough power for more than 140,000 homes. I propose thousands of these plants in the desert, covering an area bigger than the Arctic and taking the heat to make electricity.
This amount of energy is almost inconceivable. Nuclear power originally spoke of energy “too cheap to meter”; these plants would not be cheap, but they would have no spent nuclear fuel to dispose of; they would actually use the heat and convert it into energy, and we could, with that amount of energy, really do some things that we wanted to do for a long time. We could, for instance, build large enough magnetic rail guns that we could colonize space much more cheaply than with cumbersome rockets, a 12th century technology that we somehow haven’t managed to surpass. Yet.
As for space debris, think of them as resources; what they are is material that is already in space, so that we don’t have to spend huge amounts of money to put it up there. It’s time to collect it and use it to build other things… In space. Why allow it’s orbit to decay and waste all that energy and material by having it fall back to earth? much better to collect it where it is and use it there. This is an example of aikido instead of “fighting”.
It’s time to stop “fighting” our problems, and instead find ways to take advantage of them.