timeline overview
31 Jan 2006- President Bush asks the world for help in State of Union address - how do we free USA from addiction to petroleum economy and make ethanol (or other green energy) a competitively priced gasoline within 5 years?
Oct 2005: 21 Business leaders publish Gathering storm report - its 2 recommendations to the president free us from addiction to petroleum addiction, and invest in education of those who connect maths, engineering and innovation. One of the report'c co-chairs mentions the buzz phrase DEATH OF DISTANCE 5 times of Charlie Rose PBS interview 1 2
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11463.html
http://www.nap.edu/execsumm_pdf/11463.pdf
December 1984 : Death of Distance is coined as main slogan of the 1984 future history co-authored by The Economist's Deputy Editor Norman Macrae 1 2 3 4 5 , and his son Chris Macrae. Death of Distance network maps and dialogue circles have been open spaced ever since. In particular, our 1984 script for energy is reproduced below and helps to explain why hundreds of club of city and village blog correspondents are collaboratively linked in to the most exciting innovations of green energy we can find
page 145-146 of our 1984 book
Sunlight is the fuel which sustains life on earth. The process by which plants extract energy from sunlight, using that energy to build up complex compounds from simper ones and thereby storing the energy which animals, including humans, use to grow and move and see and think is the life-process itself. We (human beings) have always exploited that life-process, but in the past we have only been able to do so by using living plants as our agents. We learned to cultivate them, develop them by selective breeding, and since the 1980s to meddle with their genes, but we have not yet learned to substitute something of our own making for the living plant. We have not found or made a more efficient substitute for chlorophyll itself outside the naturally-occurring factory which is the living cell.
Until we design our own systems which can deploy the energy of sunlight as efficiently as humble algae does, we humans have no real biotechnology of our own. We have many kinds of solar cells which can extract energy from the sunlight and store is as electricity or heat, but such devices are very crude indeed beside the technical sophistication and versatility of living plants.
We are making a determined effort to capture and use a greater fraction of the solar energy which falls upon the face of the earth every day. We are trying to make plants flourish in paces where at present they can only eke out the most precarious of existence. The ideal situation, however, would be one in which we did not need to work so hard to adapt existing plants to more hostile conditions. If we had our own artificial systems of photosynthesis we might exploit the desert sun ourselves, without using other organisms as intermediaries. Our ultimate ambition must be to make artificial photosynthetic systems more efficient than those which have evolved alongside side us throughout the history of life on earth. Then and only then will we be able to claim that we are technologically self-sufficient. In 2024, this looks as if it might be one of our children's tasks.
Oct 2005: 21 Business leaders publish Gathering storm report - its 2 recommendations to the president free us from addiction to petroleum addiction, and invest in education of those who connect maths, engineering and innovation. One of the report'c co-chairs mentions the buzz phrase DEATH OF DISTANCE 5 times of Charlie Rose PBS interview 1 2
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11463.html
http://www.nap.edu/execsumm_pdf/11463.pdf
December 1984 : Death of Distance is coined as main slogan of the 1984 future history co-authored by The Economist's Deputy Editor Norman Macrae 1 2 3 4 5 , and his son Chris Macrae. Death of Distance network maps and dialogue circles have been open spaced ever since. In particular, our 1984 script for energy is reproduced below and helps to explain why hundreds of club of city and village blog correspondents are collaboratively linked in to the most exciting innovations of green energy we can find
page 145-146 of our 1984 book
Sunlight is the fuel which sustains life on earth. The process by which plants extract energy from sunlight, using that energy to build up complex compounds from simper ones and thereby storing the energy which animals, including humans, use to grow and move and see and think is the life-process itself. We (human beings) have always exploited that life-process, but in the past we have only been able to do so by using living plants as our agents. We learned to cultivate them, develop them by selective breeding, and since the 1980s to meddle with their genes, but we have not yet learned to substitute something of our own making for the living plant. We have not found or made a more efficient substitute for chlorophyll itself outside the naturally-occurring factory which is the living cell.
Until we design our own systems which can deploy the energy of sunlight as efficiently as humble algae does, we humans have no real biotechnology of our own. We have many kinds of solar cells which can extract energy from the sunlight and store is as electricity or heat, but such devices are very crude indeed beside the technical sophistication and versatility of living plants.
We are making a determined effort to capture and use a greater fraction of the solar energy which falls upon the face of the earth every day. We are trying to make plants flourish in paces where at present they can only eke out the most precarious of existence. The ideal situation, however, would be one in which we did not need to work so hard to adapt existing plants to more hostile conditions. If we had our own artificial systems of photosynthesis we might exploit the desert sun ourselves, without using other organisms as intermediaries. Our ultimate ambition must be to make artificial photosynthetic systems more efficient than those which have evolved alongside side us throughout the history of life on earth. Then and only then will we be able to claim that we are technologically self-sufficient. In 2024, this looks as if it might be one of our children's tasks.
posted by ... at 11:30 AM
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