This article Powering the Planet With Solar Energy on the production of solar fuel was part of our assignment over break for my chemistry class. I thought I’d share it with you guys as a more hopeful look at the future of our planet. The conclusion of the article is especially thought provoking.
“We have an even grander vision. Some time in the future we will be able to put three components of our atmosphere — carbon dioxide, nitrogen and oxygen — along with sea water into solar reactors to make not only fuels, electricity and pure water, but polymers, food and almost everything else we need. We have been taking from nature since the beginning of time, consuming the oil, gas and coal given to us by thousands of millions of years of photosynthesis. This is the century in human history when we will start paying back with the capital generated through fundamental research in chemistry.”
What do you think of this idea of humans as producers as opposed to consumers? This seems to go against our natural niche in nature and as a result violates some major biological principles. Do you think people will be open to the idea of scientific production of polymers that can be used to food? Is this idea any different than GMOs?
I’m not sure I agree that this would really transform us into producers, at least if you are referring to food production. Humans already indirectly use solar energy to produce food, a.k.a agriculture! How would this be different, except that instead of the solar energy going towards growing crops in a field, it would go towards making food in a machine? Still, I think it’s a really fascinating idea that would probably solve a lot of the issues involved with agriculture like the need for land, environmental degradation, use of fossil fuels to power tractors and make fertilizers, manual labor involved, and so forth. I can see such an invention as this solar reactor having downsides too though. Would everyone have access to one? Would most people have to continue relying on agriculture while others profited from the new technology? Still, it sounds like it might be a really efficient alternative to our current system of food production.
And as for producing things other than food, well then it definitely does look like “the answer to our problems”! Can you imagine being able to make enough energy and water for the whole world from sunlight, a renewable source?!
The idea of humans potentially taking on the role of producers in the near future is very interesting and is the train of thought our society needs to follow. It will be difficult to tell if the public will except these solutions to fuel and food issues, as even GMO’s haven’t been entirely embraced yet. This relates to the idea of manipulating nature for human benefit, although in the case of this article the production of polymers won’t exploit the environment; it would be a way around the exploitation that we have gotten used to.
The article is certainly optimistic about the future of solar energy, although there will definitely have to be a period of trial and error. This is sort of Scott Page’s idea in action–a good example of what can be done when issues are approached with new points of view.
this is a wonderful article and, for me, it places a greater emphasis on Page’s Diversity/Difference work because what we see is how essential it is that we all reach beyond the obvious — outside the box — to gather knowledge, build ideas, ask the relevant questions that deal with challenging problems. Not least of these problems is this notion, in the article Cooper provides,of humans being producers. Quite literally, then, this is a revision of Emerson’s vision that Nature — a human construction — is our “library,” our lexicon. Gray says, “Long ago, nature figured out how to use abundant metallic elements in combination with proteins to activate small molecules. However, the organic frameworks of these biological molecules are readily degraded by oxidative and other chemical processes, greatly limiting their lifetimes. Nature copes with limited lifetimes — a living system can rebuild the key components it needs — but we must find other ways to deal with the problem. ”
Here’s our age-old argument (and challenge): how do we include scientists, social scientists, humanists AND NATURE in the conversation about “limitations.” All of life, as artists have pointed out through time, is about limitations. Goethe, for instance, the great German Romantic poet, said that “Art exists in limitations.” When you write an essay, your asked to write in a limited space, looking at a limited screen; when a painter paints, it’s the canvas; a movie script should not exceed 120 pages — and so on. Our entire life is about limitations — the semester is over even before you realize, by Thanksgiving, say. What we do with these limitations is key: will you look at these as disabling limitations or enabling limitations. Or to use the tennis metaphor: would you play tennis without a net?