The Bali conference is actually the first step since its goals are threefold: to launch negotiations for a climate change deal for the post 2012 period, to set the agenda for these negotiations, and then to reach agreement on when these negotiations will have to be concluded.   While this process sounds ponderous and bureaucratic, that is to be expected given that it is governmental agencies that must make these determinations.  In this world of ever increasing rapidity of change, governments seem to be the part of society that moves most slowly and is now following their citizens rather than leading them. 

The length of this process will actually work to the benefit of those who feel, as I do, that immediate and drastic actions must be taken.  The data about global warming is coming in rapidly and it is alarming to those that study it.  The U.N Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, when they recently released their fourth and final report stated that even ...]]> Bali is a word that in 10-15 years I hope will represent and define the time when humanity made an essential shift in direction.  There are currently some 10,000 people attending the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Bali.  More than 180 countries are represented along with numerous attendees from non-governmental, intergovernmental groups and of course the media.  The general reason for the meeting is to start work on the replacement of the Kyoto accord to address the issue of greenhouse gas emissions which expires in 2012.

The Bali conference is actually the first step since its goals are threefold: to launch negotiations for a climate change deal for the post 2012 period, to set the agenda for these negotiations, and then to reach agreement on when these negotiations will have to be concluded.   While this process sounds ponderous and bureaucratic, that is to be expected given that it is governmental agencies that must make these determinations.  In this world of ever increasing rapidity of change, governments seem to be the part of society that moves most slowly and is now following their citizens rather than leading them. 

The length of this process will actually work to the benefit of those who feel, as I do, that immediate and drastic actions must be taken.  The data about global warming is coming in rapidly and it is alarming to those that study it.  The U.N Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, when they recently released their fourth and final report stated that even during the five years of their efforts the data coming in during the final year was pushing the upper limits of what they had initially predicted might happen when they first launched their study.  In other words, every day, data comes in that points to the need for greater curtailment of greenhouse emissions and sooner than initially thought necessary.

What needs to be pointed out is that the debate over percentage drop in total CO2 emissions and by what date is a relativistic discussion.  If all CO2 emissions were to cease tomorrow, the planet would still continue to warm up due to all that has already been belched into the atmosphere already.  This would continue for years after total cessation of emissions. Current emissions are down some 11% from 1990, and guess what?  The planet is continuing to show global warming. The ongoing conversation is about 10% to 40% drop from current levels by 2020.  A noble effort, but not a solution.  Slouching toward Bethlehem.

It appears that the majority of countries attending are in support of dramatic curtailment of greenhouse emissions.  The developing countries, who may be most affected by global warming and who have the least greenhouse emissions are of course the most adamant and committed to lowering these emissions as much as possible and as soon as possible.  The developed countries are being looked to for dramatic curtailment of emissions.  China, the second worst country after the U.S, in greenhouse emissions, and India are both resistant to going along with the developed countries as they believe that they should not be forced to restrict their exploding economies as they grow to match the developed economies.  The key to this part of the discussion will, I think, revolve around how much the developed countries will lead financial assistance to these two countries and the developing countries to help them retrofit their economies to meet stringent emission guidelines.

In the early days of the conference Australia announced its full support of the conference and its final decisions.  This left the U.S. as the only developed country not committed to do so.  As the greatest user of energy and the leading country when it comes to greenhouse emissions the U.S. should be providing leadership for one of the most important issues ever to face humanity.  Environmental leadership is non-existent in the Bush administration and it is shameful.  Once again, as I speak to people around the world I must differentiate myself as a citizen from the administration that purports to lead us.

The basic stance the U.S. government is taking is that why should we change our ways if China doesn’t? The government also still holds to that old, no longer relevant position that curbing greenhouse gases is bad for the economy.  If the U.S were to focus instead on creating new energy technologies — as silicon valley is doing — we could create untold wealth and leadership as a country. The stance that China is taking is why should we slow down our booming economy if the U.S. won’t do anything?  It reminds me of that common parental experience of telling a young child that just because another kid doesn’t do the right thing doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t do the right thing.

Bali is a turning point as is the issue of global warming.  This meeting will be looked at by future historians as a seminal event.  I will explore this from a more futurist point of view in the next column.   

John C. Mankins is the President of ARTEMIS Innovation Management Solutions LLC, a research and development management consulting start-up that solves tough innovation challenges for government, industry and not-for-profit clients, and Co-founder of Managed Energy Technologies LLC, a new energy technology start-up that aspires to transform solar energy solutions for terrestrial and space markets. He is internationally recognized as a successful leader in space systems and technology innovation, as a highly effective manager of large-scale technology R&D programs, and as an accomplished communicator. He is also one of the foremost authorities on the subject of space solar power (SSP). Mr. Mankins led NASA’s SSP “Fresh Look Study” in the mid-1990s, managed the SSP Exploratory Research & Technology (SERT) Program, and is the creator of several important SSP systems concepts, including the SunTower, the Solar Clipper, and others. He serves as the President of the Sunsat Energy ...]]> In this ninth installment of our on-going series of interviews with some of the leading thinkers and scientists on the subject of energy, we interview John C. Mankins.Facing and solving the multiple issues concerning energy is the single most pressing problem that we face as a species. There is a lot of media coverage about energy, alternative energy and global warming, but what has been missing is the knowledge and point of view of scientists, at least in the main stream media. If you have missed the first eight interviews, please scroll down the right side of the page and click on ‘Scientists — Interviews’.

John C. Mankins is the President of ARTEMIS Innovation Management Solutions LLC, a research and development management consulting start-up that solves tough innovation challenges for government, industry and not-for-profit clients, and Co-founder of Managed Energy Technologies LLC, a new energy technology start-up that aspires to transform solar energy solutions for terrestrial and space markets. He is internationally recognized as a successful leader in space systems and technology innovation, as a highly effective manager of large-scale technology R&D programs, and as an accomplished communicator. He is also one of the foremost authorities on the subject of space solar power (SSP). Mr. Mankins led NASA’s SSP “Fresh Look Study” in the mid-1990s, managed the SSP Exploratory Research & Technology (SERT) Program, and is the creator of several important SSP systems concepts, including the SunTower, the Solar Clipper, and others. He serves as the President of the Sunsat Energy Council (also known as the “Space Power Association”), a non-profit international group founded in 1978 by Dr. Peter Glaser, that promotes the potential of SSP for future application on Earth and in space. Mr. Mankins has authored numerous papers and articles on the topic of SSP and has testified before the U.S. Congress on the topic on several occasions.

Evolutionshift.com: John, you are regarded as one of the foremost authorities in Space Solar Power, also called Space Solar Energy. Briefly, what was your journey that led you to this position of recognition and expertise?

Mankins: I certainly had read about solar power satellites (SPS) for years, but I first looked seriously at the concept beginning in 1995. At that time, I was the Manager for Advanced Concepts Studies in NASA’s Office of Space Access and Technology, working for a great space visionary, Mr. Ivan Bekey. Ivan gave me the assignment to take a “fresh look” at space solar power to see whether new technologies that had emerged since the last major NASA design studies in the 1970s might have made possible systems concepts that were more technically and/or economically feasible than those of 20 years earlier. This assignment resulted in what became known as NASA’s “Fresh Look Study” of space solar power—and a enduring belief on my part that this promising concept deserved further consideration, and support.

Evolutionshift.com: In your presentation at the Foundation for the Future Energy conference your presentation pointed out the fact that the early work on SSP was done in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Has anything significant happened since then, and if not, why not?

Mankins: So much has happened in technology since the 1960s, it’s hard to name just a few topics. Here are some of the most important for space solar power, however. First, there have been enormous advances in solar power generation. Photovoltaic arrays have gone from less than 10% efficiency (turning 1/10th of the incoming sunlight into electricity), to more than 40% efficiency. And, solar array efficiencies are on their way to 50% efficiency or more. These advances all solar arrays to be reduced in size by as much as a factor of four or five—which would be tremendous for a large space solar power system. Another set of really important advances have occurred in solid state electronics. In the past 40 years, efficiencies, processing speeds, and operating temperatures have all increased radically. These improvements are also tremendously important for space solar power. Finally, everyone is aware of the tremendous advances in computing and robotics. Of course, this progress is wildly important for large space infrastructure concepts such as space solar power. Whereas in the 1970s, it appear that space solar power systems concepts would require 100s or 1000s of astronauts working in huge space factories to assemble them in space, now it is clear that these enormous systems-of-systems could be largely “self-assembling”, with the assistance of autonomous robotic “mid-wives”. All-in-all, space solar power is much, much more promising now than appeared to be true in the 190s and 1970s.

Evolutionshift.com: So SSP kind of fell through the cracks so to speak, right?

Mankins: Well, space solar power was a pretty good fit for NASA in the 1990s—when the Agency’s “Human Exploration and Development of Space” had as one of its goals the promotion and R&D that could enable new space industries such as space solar power. However, at the turn of the century, NASA’s goals were changed to focus more strictly on human space flight, space science and aeronautics. A wide range of small programs—such as the Centers for the Commercial Development of Space—were cancelled, as was NASA’s modest R&D investment in space solar power technology and studies. Of course, at the U.S. Department of Energy, the focus is on energy technology for terrestrial markets—including coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power, energy efficiency renewable (ground) energy technologies, etc.—and also a range of basic energy sciences research topics. There are modest DOE responsibilities for nuclear batteries (called Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators) for use in the outer solar system—but not for space energy in general, and certainly not for space solar power satellites. So, in a very real sense, after the studies in the 1990s were terminated, space solar power did “fall through the cracks”.

Evolutionshift.com: Clearly, the U.S. government needs to lead the way on this. Should a new department be created or can NASA and the DOE work together on this?

Mankins: The question is, how best for the U.S. government to take a leadership role in space solar power? That really depends on the policies worked out by the Administration and the Congress. NASA, DOE or any other Agency will not work on space solar power unless the Administration gives them the assignment to do so. Lots of organizations could take a hand in this; it is such an enormous challenge. During 2002-2004, NASA worked with the National Science Foundation on space solar power R&D—a partnership that was very successful. Also in the past, DOD organizations such as DARPA, the Office of Naval Research or the Air Force Research Laboratory have all played critical roles in national-scale innovations. On the government side, there probably must be a formal office somewhere—just where and how remains an open question. Ultimately, the individuals involved (and the charter of they receive) are more important that the details of the organization, or where it resides.

However, it probably should not be entirely a government responsibility. In the nearer term, companies should play key roles in innovation R&D—that’s what they’re best at doing. Then, when the time comes for larger scale technology demonstration on the ground or in space, it probably makes sense for these demos to be implemented through government, industry—and probably international—partnerships.

Evolutionshift.com: Sounds like what is needed is a massive effort similar to the Apollo Space project. Should this be a multi-national effort? Should the U.S. take the lead?

Mankins: I think that a better analogy for space solar power might be with a different example from the 1950s-1960s: the development of communications satellites. Success in this arena required both high levels of technological innovation, driven by economics, as well as organizational innovation (inside government, in industry and in partnerships of the two). Apollo was a tremendous success, but it was very single-minded—and gave no real attention to economics-driven innovation. Space solar power R&D MUST have these elements, or there’s no hope for the vision.

Concerning international efforts: the answer is a strong “YES”! The development of space solar power must be an international undertaking—and the U.S. should definitely play the leadership role in pulling together that effort.

Evolutionshift.com: Is all of the technology and science needed to make SSP a reality now available? If not, what remains to be developed?

Mankins: All of the basic science seems to be in hand. Unlike fusion energy R&D, not fundamental problems of science remain to be solved for space solar power to become feasible. However, there are definitely significant technical challenges remaining before economic feasibility can be established. Solving these challenges is more than just engineering—it requires real invention—but not basic research. A number of areas remain to be developed, including wireless power transmission, robotics, materials and structures, thermal management—and, of course, very low cost Earth to orbit transportation is critical.

Evolutionshift.com: How does the solar energy get sent down to earth? Can the existing power grid disseminate the energy or does a new storage and distribution infrastructure need to be built?

Mankins: Energy from a solar power satellite would be transmitted in a coherent beam of low-intensity radio or light energy. An individual receiver on the ground might receive anywhere from 200-400 megawatts of power, up to 2,000-4,000 megawatts of power. At the lower levels, this power could readily be absorbed into a local power grid with only modest changes. At the higher power levels, significant changes in the local power distribution system would be needed, of course.

Evolutionshift.com: It sounds like the burgeoning private, entrepreneurial space efforts springing up around the world might be a good partner for this effort. Do you agree? If so, would they act as private contractors to the governmental initiative?

Mankins: The players in the so-called “NewSpace” community might very well be excellent partners in the early R&D to enable space solar power. Rather than conceptualization of these firms as “contractors”, however, I think that the term “partners” makes a better model for how these relationships would work best.

Evolutionshift.com: If a well thought out, well funded program were to be launched in 2009, when could the first SSP satellite be in orbit and operational?

Mankins: If a thoughtful, adequately funding space solar power program were started in 2009, then it’s possible that a 100 megawatt pilot plant “demonstrator” could be operational in geostationary Earth orbit as early as 2017. (Of course, if that program got started in 2008, then the demonstrator could fly a year earlier!) Once a large-scale demonstrator has flown, then the pacing development for deploying commercial solar power satellites will be the highly affordable Earth-to-orbit transportation system, and whatever unique in-space infrastructures may be needed. Let’s say, perhaps another 5-8 years, depending on the technologies involved. All-told, it should be possible to fly an operational solar power satellite demonstrator by 2016-2017, and begin deploying commercial satellites by as early as 2020, or as late as 2025—depending on how various specific technology choices work out.

Evolutionshift.com: What percent of the global energy needs could that first satellite meet?

Mankins: By its’ nature, the first space solar power satellite demonstrator, even though large scale, would provide only a trivial fraction of the Earth’s energy. However, once commercial/operational satellites begin to be deployed, each of these might provide in total anywhere from 1,000 megawatts to 4,000 megawatts. That’s a lot of power. Unfortunately, the energy needs of the growing world population and economies are truly staggering in scope during the coming century. For example, by itself the country of India needs something like 500,000 megawatts of new electrical power generating capacity over the next 50 years.

Evolutionshift.com: How big do these satellites need to be? How many of them need to be in orbit to satisfy what percentage of global energy needs, projected out to 2100.

Mankins: Solar power satellites will be very, very large. Of course, all solar power systems are enormous. On the ground, it’s hard to see because the solar arrays are spread across thousands of rooftops. However, the overall systems is still of tremendous size. In the case of solar power satellites, if each satellite were to provide about 4,000 megawatts of power, then five of them would be needed to provide about 20 GW — which is approximately 2 percent of the U.S. demand for electricity. World demand for energy is currently about 4-times U.S. demand, but is growing fast! By 2100, huge new sources of renewable energy will be critical to our civilization, including hydroelectric (already in place), wind, ground solar, appropriate nuclear power—and space solar power.

Evolutionshift.com: It sounds to me as though SSP is the one form of alternative energy that can supply a significant percentage of the energy needs of the planet. So it sounds like the vision needs to be forged into a multi-national will and then receive the necessary funding. Is that correct? If so, care to comment on the probability of this starting up in the next 2-3 years?

Mankins: Actually, even if space solar power were fully developed, the global economy should have more than just one option: a prudent scenario would also involve a portfolio of current energy options—and a “quiver” full of new energy technologies ready to be deployed if, or when they are needed. Certainly, however, space solar is one of very few options to provide a substantial fraction of the truly vast amount of renewable energy that is needed to support human civilization.

Yes, the vision will require an international effort, with needed funding to be realized. Will that effort get started in the next 2 or 3 years? It certainly could: there is nothing technical or financial that prevents such a commitment.

Evolutionshift.com: Any final thoughts for my readers?

Mankin: The space solar power concept has been around for some 40 years at this point. The need for new, far-reaching energy options has never been more critical—and the economic feasibility of space solar power has never been closer to hand. A focused effort over a decade or so might very well bring this exciting renewable energy option into reality, just when we need it most.

Evolutionshift.com: Thank you so much.

Facing and solving the multiple issues concerning energy is the single most pressing problem that we face as a species. There is a lot of media coverage about energy, alternative energy and global warming, but what has been missing is the knowledge and point of view of scientists, at least in the main stream media. If you have missed the first seven interviews, please scroll down the right side of the page and click on ‘Scientists — Interviews’.

Dr. Thomas Valone is a physicist and licensed professional engineer with 30 years professional experience, is a patent examiner, research engineer, instrumentation designer and also an author, lecturer, and consultant on future energy developments. He is President and founder of Integrity Research Institute and formerly a community college teacher and a Research Director for Scott Aviation-ATO, Inc. He helped design the HullCom® for naval intraship communication, a 60 Hz gaussmeter without harmonic distortion, two bioelectric therapy devices, and a dental mercury vapor ionizer-precipitator. He is editor of Future Energy, Energetic Processes Vol. I & II, Turning the Corner: Energy Solutions for the 21st Century and a few conference proceedings, as well as author of Zero Point Energy: The Fuel of the Future, Practical Conversion of Zero-Point Energy, Homopolar Handbook, Electrogravitics Vol. 1 & II, Bioelectromagnetic Healing, Bush-Cheney Energy Study, Clinton Administration Energy Study and about 100 ...]]> In this eighth installment of our on-going series of interviews with some of the leading thinkers and scientists on the subject of energy, we interview Dr. Thomas Valone.

Facing and solving the multiple issues concerning energy is the single most pressing problem that we face as a species. There is a lot of media coverage about energy, alternative energy and global warming, but what has been missing is the knowledge and point of view of scientists, at least in the main stream media. If you have missed the first seven interviews, please scroll down the right side of the page and click on ‘Scientists — Interviews’.

Dr. Thomas Valone is a physicist and licensed professional engineer with 30 years professional experience, is a patent examiner, research engineer, instrumentation designer and also an author, lecturer, and consultant on future energy developments. He is President and founder of Integrity Research Institute and formerly a community college teacher and a Research Director for Scott Aviation-ATO, Inc. He helped design the HullCom® for naval intraship communication, a 60 Hz gaussmeter without harmonic distortion, two bioelectric therapy devices, and a dental mercury vapor ionizer-precipitator. He is editor of Future Energy, Energetic Processes Vol. I & II, Turning the Corner: Energy Solutions for the 21st Century and a few conference proceedings, as well as author of Zero Point Energy: The Fuel of the Future, Practical Conversion of Zero-Point Energy, Homopolar Handbook, Electrogravitics Vol. 1 & II, Bioelectromagnetic Healing, Bush-Cheney Energy Study, Clinton Administration Energy Study and about 100 published reports and articles. He has also served as an expert witness, an expert declaration writer for court cases and appeared on CNN, A&E, and the Discovery Channels, besides a few commercial energy videos. Currently, Dr. Valone is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the Bioelectromagnetics Society, the National Space Society and the Union of Concerned Scientists. He is also a Fellow of the World Innovation Foundation. His works have been published in German, French, Korean and English.

I met Tom at the Foundation for the Futures’ conference on the future of energy and was taken with his positive outlook and the fact that he has been a patent examiner.

Evolutionshift.com:  As a scientist and patent examiner you are in superlative company.  Any other similarities with Albert Einstein?  Seriously, how does your work with the government patent office compliment your scientific work and research?

VALONE: Any comments that I make in this regard do not reflect the views of the US Patent and Trademark Office and are only my personal viewpoints as a private citizen. Of course, when a recent biography of Einstein was aired on the PBS channel, I was happy to watch, being a physicist and patent examiner. However, I learned from the narrator that “Einstein was employed at a dead-end job at the Swiss Patent Office” before he was freed by publishing three seminal journal articles and receiving other job offers. The work at the US PTO often feels like a dead-end, repetitive job since it is piecemeal, production work with no job security. However, I have tried to follow in Einstein’s footsteps, who was born in the same month as I was, by taking General Relativity as a physics graduate student years ago, using it for analyzing non-inertial reference frames in my physics Master’s thesis on the homopolar generator, and recently by buying the book “How to Think Like an Einstein”, and also writing a PhD thesis on zero point energy performance of useful work from the quantum vacuum. This last work, which I hid in my drawer at the Patent Office just like Einstein did, has evolved into the popular book, Zero Point Energy: The Fuel of the Future, which presents practical suggestions for converting ZPE into electricity. That’s where the ability to search the scientific and patent literature comes in handy…finding science and engineering inventions in a particular field and thus doing ‘due diligence.’

Evolutionshift.com: You presentation at the Foundation for the Futures’ future of energy conference was one of the more urgent presentations about the need for alternative energy sources.  How urgent is the global energy situation?

VALONE: To answer the urgency question, we have to realize just one of the IPCC findings. That is, with every single degree of global temperature increase, there is a whole category on the average of increase in hurricane strength. We have already experienced this in our lifetime. A category 5 hurricane now will suck enough energy from the ocean to become a category 6, etc. The melting of the Antarctic and most importantly, the Greenland ice sheets is not only inevitable, according to a climate chart published by MIT’s Technology Review in July, 2006, but roughly equals the 80 meters of extraordinary sea level rise that is predicted by that calibrated chart. As fossil fuels continue to push carbon dioxide levels past the 400, 500 and the expected 700 ppm levels, we are entering new, uncharted territory on an earth that has not exceeded such levels in 400,000 years. We really need to introduce a completely clean and inexpensive source of energy for electricity, such as a zero point energy diode generator, in the next ten years to have any hope of revolutionizing the climate and energy usage.

Evolutionshift.com:   Do you believe in Peak Oil?  When will we be passing through it and when might the planet run out of oil?

VALONE: Peak Oil is not a matter of belief. It is a fact that Hubbert established to everyone’s satisfaction by predicting the United States’ peak of oil production twenty five years before it happened. His prediction for the world oil production has all the experts arguing about the give-or-take of only a couple of decades! That’s how close the tolerance is for Hubbert’s Peak. In other words, we are actually experiencing the maximum oil production that the world can sustain at the present time: about 72 million barrels of oil per day. This black, dead fossil liquid consumption by living human beings is on the same order of magnitude as the water flow over the American Falls in New York State, where I grew up. The only direction for this rate is downward. The U.A.E. presently is preparing for their Peak Oil by investing heavily in tourism resorts near Dubai and by building islands in the ocean with mansions on them. Technically, to answer the second question, the planet will never run out of oil. However, as Nikola Tesla pointed out, we won’t be able to continue burning it for fuel for the sake of our future generations.

Evolutionshift.com:  What are the best sources of alternative energy for the next 20 years?

VALONE: The best sources of alternative energy for the next 20 years depends upon what application is in mind. The top of the list has to include photovoltaic solar electricity. I recently wrote an article in the Integrity Research Institute’s Annual Report about a “Revolution in Solar Energy” which summarizes the latest discoveries. The ability to generate more than one electron from a photon of light, has now been demonstrated by Los Alamos labs. Alan Heeger , who won the 2000 Nobel Prize for his co-discovery of electrically conducting polymers, and his colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), have recently created process for multiple layers of plastic PV material with flexibility and high efficiency. The company Konarka based in Lowell, MA is the one to watch. Their polymer PV cells can even generate electricity with background room lighting. Another source of alternative energy that is on my “best” list is the permanent magnet motor, utilizing the ‘magnetic gradient.’ IRI has a spiral stator design that improves upon the old Kure Tekko Japanese patents of the 1970’s with several innovative magnetic pulsing techniques. We can foresee the day when a magnetic car will compete favorably with the electric car, since it will not need recharging. Geothermal energy is another ‘best’ and ubiquitous source of energy that has been highly recommended for municipalities and centralized power. Another favorite of mine is zero point energy, since I have performed a feasibility study and found that ‘zero bias’ diodes are manifesting the rectified electricity which we all desire for a generator. The quantum vacuum continually generates random non-thermal noise (called ‘zero point energy’) in solid state devices, causing tunneling and electron flow. It is time to start using this free energy source in a big way. The end product will have a construction, much like the tiny LEDs in our flat screen televisions, with millions of diodes all transducing zero point energy into electron current. For the application of medium to large industrial plants, I recommend the conversion of waste heat into electricity. The company, Primary Energy, headed by Tom Casten, has a wonderful offer they cannot refuse: allow him to build the electrical generation plant on site and they save about half on all future electricity bills. Other promising alternative energy sources include off-shore wind generators, tidal generators, and ocean current electrical generators. For the transportation sector, I advocate compressed air cars and plug-in electric cars, which are making their debut in every other country but the US. The US, as you might remember, is the country and GM is the company “Who Killed the Electric Car.” This debacle of purposely crushing every leased EV-1 electric car by GM is now recorded on DVD (by SONY Classic Pictures) for historical posterity. As Europe, Iceland, and other countries become energy independent and non-polluting, our EPA has yet to declare CO2 an environmental pollutant.              

Evolutionshift.com: How soon do you these sources significantly impacting the world’s use of fossil fuels?  What can be done to accelerate the timelines?

VALONE: As mentioned above, the US EPA is at fault, just as the California Air Quality Board was in 2002, for not standing up to the most problematic greenhouse gas and limiting its emission rate. Once legislation has been passed, the industrial sector has proven its ability to adapt, which will accelerate the timelines. As was the case in the 1970’s after the first Mid-East Oil Embargo, the US has the will power and the resourcefulness to put into practice the conservation mandates that are recommended by government. For example, conservation has not been advocated recently but back then it was and the US responded by almost a 50% savings in energy consumption. Today the Alliance to Save Energy here in DC is famous for “Energy Efficiency” forums, awards and programs. As Amory Lovins points out, it is easier and cheaper to save energy than to generate it. Therefore, to answer the question, in the short term, we can significantly impact this country’s use of fossil fuels, while the 5 to 10 year lag of development of zero-fuel devices takes place.

Evolutionshift.com:  What might be the sources of alternative energy longer term?  What do you see that is promising?

VALONE: As mentioned above, for the longer term, zero point energy devices will be developed and are foreseen by many experts to permanently solve the energy problem, also making practical space travel possible. Cold fusion devices will also become available, along with other exotic sources of energy, such as the pB-11 plasma focus fusion under development at the University of Illinois. Still, the biggest breakthrough for the future has to be the Konarka multi-layer polymer solar cell which is predicted to be inserted into almost everything, since it generates electricity from ambient room light.

Evolutionshift.com: Why is cold fusion so promising?  Hasn’t the scientific community at large ridiculed it?  Please explain to my readers why significant resources should be directed toward developing this type of energy?

VALONE: The International Conference on Cold Fusion is scheduled for Washington DC in 2008 for the first time and I look forward to participating in it. My nonprofit www.IntegrityResearchInstitute.org has sponsored one cold fusion seminar (LENREW-2000) and has consistently featured one “token” cold fusion speaker at both Conferences on Future Energy (COFE and COFE2). Suffice it to say, nature creates transmutation of elements at the cellular level, well documented in peer-reviewed journal articles, and reported by Dr. Ed Storms at COFE in 1999 and elsewhere. Cold fusion also achieves similar transmutation of elements through tabletop electrolysis, which is not so strange once we realize that nature does this consistently. It is so promising because the fact that transmutation means a nuclear reaction has to take place. Repeatable experiments of cheap, efficient heat production have been demonstrated in over a dozen government labs, which also indicates its promise. To answer the second question, we only have to thank the American Physical Society for creating enough obfuscation in 1989, mainly by Dr. Robert Park who for years fulfilled the role of public affairs director. He took it on himself to raise the skeptics flag and has waved it ever since. My removal from the Patent Office in 1999 was credited to him by the arbitrator who reinstated me. He acknowledged the bad publicity he created for my first COFE and the phone calls he made to the Commerce Department to discredit me, all for having one cold fusion speaker at COFE, which might have taken place at the State, Energy or Commerce Department. The ridicule mainly comes from a lack of understanding and, as my arbitrator pointed out, the fear that if successful, cold fusion will draw from the same limited pot of funding that hot fusion now enjoys. I know that once we become aware of the billion-dollar fusion boondoggle called “magnetic confinement” or the “tokamak,” which the DOE admits will not become commercially viable for electricity generation even by 2050 (always 30 years or more in the future), the urge to include plasma focus fusion, cold fusion, electrostatic confinement fusion, and even bubble fusion becomes much more defensible.

Evolutionshift.com:Are you optimistic that humanity can replace fossil fuels in time to avoid an environmental cataclysm?

VALONE: Every time there is an administration change in DC, I generate great optimism for energy policy change. I have given several slide shows for Congressional staffers and even advised Senator Kerry’s office when he was running for President. The question of avoiding the inevitable tidal wave from a number of likely causes (including the Canary Island landslide), the inevitable eruption of the Yellowstone caldera, or the unavoidable increased heat waves and stronger hurricanes due to global warming, as well as the inevitable sinking of most of Louisiana and Florida as the sea rises in the next century, all depend upon the next 20 years of preparation. If we as private scientists and entrepreneurs can break through the development and production barriers, while China manufacturing is still cheap and their currency has not been devalued, then the world will hopefully receive the cheap, inexpensive, one cubic foot box which I have repeatedly envisioned as the container powering the local home or business. Yes, I am optimistic, mainly from my belief in a benevolent Higher Power. However, some environmental changes are necessary, just like Katrina, to replace the impotent government agency leaders (e.g. FEMA) who often stop progress and instead, maintain inefficiency.

Evolutionshift.com: Any final thoughts or comments?

VALONE: Everyone can do his or her part to conserve energy and reduce their personal carbon dioxide emissions, including recycling their waste, installing passive solar in their homes and buying a hybrid, if they can afford to do so. Writing their Senator and Congressman to include green legislation like the 10% renewable portfolio for each state is vital. Right now, Europe has a 20% renewable portfolio for their energy production and the US lags behind, even though we are the biggest consumer (20 million barrels per day) of oil and the biggest polluter in the world. It is up to the US to change its ways if we believe the world can change for the better. Supporting and buying stock in Planktos, Inc., which has a wonderful plankton-feeding program for the ocean to sequester millions of tons of CO2, is also very important for the short term. The world’s temperature and sea level are being driven (thermally forced) by the present heat-trapping 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. Planetary wide modifications by the human race united for a common cause will solve this problem for the better.

Evolutionshift.com: Thank you Tom.

Facing and solving the multiple issues concerning energy is the single most pressing problem that we face as a species. There is a lot of media coverage about energy, alternative energy and global warming, but what has been missing is the knowledge and point of view of scientists, at least in the main stream media. If you have missed the first five interviews, please scroll down the right side of the page and click on Scientists – Interviews.

Perhaps the single greatest solution for eliminating the global dependency on fossil fuels is Space Solar Power. This has not received nearly the coverage it should in the ever growing discussion about global warming and alternative energy. This interview with Dr. Hsu is a great introduction to SSP, and from one of the greatest authorities on the subject. Please plan to set aside some time to read this entire interview and you will learn about what might well be the solution to the global energy crisis.

Dr. Feng Hsu is Senior Aerospace Engineer for NASA and a former research fellow of Nuclear Energy Dept. (now Energy Sciences Technology) at BNL (Brookhaven National Laboratory, http://www.BNL.gov). Dr. Hsu is a renowned world expert with decades of experiences in the field of Risk and Safety assessment and mission assurance management for complex engineering systems, such as ...]]> In this seventh installment of our on-going series of interviews with some of the leading thinkers and scientists on the subject of energy, we interview Dr. Feng Hsu.

Facing and solving the multiple issues concerning energy is the single most pressing problem that we face as a species. There is a lot of media coverage about energy, alternative energy and global warming, but what has been missing is the knowledge and point of view of scientists, at least in the main stream media. If you have missed the first five interviews, please scroll down the right side of the page and click on Scientists – Interviews.

Perhaps the single greatest solution for eliminating the global dependency on fossil fuels is Space Solar Power. This has not received nearly the coverage it should in the ever growing discussion about global warming and alternative energy. This interview with Dr. Hsu is a great introduction to SSP, and from one of the greatest authorities on the subject. Please plan to set aside some time to read this entire interview and you will learn about what might well be the solution to the global energy crisis.

Dr. Feng Hsu is Senior Aerospace Engineer for NASA and a former research fellow of Nuclear Energy Dept. (now Energy Sciences Technology) at BNL (Brookhaven National Laboratory, http://www.BNL.gov). Dr. Hsu is a renowned world expert with decades of experiences in the field of Risk and Safety assessment and mission assurance management for complex engineering systems, such as nuclear power plant systems, space launch vehicle systems, solid rocket booster & interplanetary exploration spacecrafts as well as air or ground traffic control systems for civil aviation. Hsu was a key member of the Columbia investigation team at JSC, and he is now a leading NASA expert working on risk management for frontier space missions at NASA GSFC. He has published over 100 articles and technical reports and has an extensive list of professional and academic honors, which include co-author of a recent paper bag by Apogee Books Beyond Earth  The Future of Humans in Space (http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Earth-Future-Humans-Apogee/dp/1894959418); Members of Technical Committees on IEEE SMC, IEEE Systems Engineering, PSAM9; Members of ANS, AIAA, SRA; Sr. Advisory to ATWG (Aerospace Technology Working Group, http://www.atwg.org/); Leadership Council — The SEDA Institute; Sr. Advisory Board of the Engineering Panel — the Life Boat Foundation (http://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.feng.hsu), and Advisory board member of the Space Development Steering Committee etc.

Dr. Hsu is regarded as one of the foremost authorities and advocates for Space Solar Power (SSP), and for Solar energy to replace fossil fuels in general. Solar Energy or SSP has not been widely discussed in the loud and growing conversation about global warming, yet it is starting to be viewed by many scientists as one of the most promising and feasible ways to completely replace dependence on fossil fuels. Please take the time to read Dr. Hsu’s thoughts on solar energy and SSP issues and you may well agree with me that it could be the single best chance we have for a global renewable energy future.

Evolutionshift: Dr. Hsu, thank you for taking the time to be interviewed for the readers of www.evolutionshift.com. Your title is Senior Aerospace Engineer and Risk Manager for NASA; what are your responsibilities and what does your job entail?

Hsu: Yes, I am a senior staff engineer, manager and leading expert on technical and technology risk assessment and management from NASA GSFC. My major responsibilities are leading the center effort on technical risk assessment and management to ensure safety and mission successes of various NASA projects and programs at Goddard. Prior to joining NASA, I have done many years of engineering research in the nuclear energy field at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Dept. of Nuclear Energy. As many of you might know that over the years of witnessing the human struggle on nuclear issues and the ever worsening energy crisis, my main interest now has been gradually shifted from nuclear energy to solar energy and its related technology issues, especially on terrestrial or space-based solar power (SBSP); a profound basic concept and gigantic engineering endeavor which may truly bringing us the ultimate energy solution for all of humanity. Before coming to NASA GSFC working on major space programs such as JWST, HST and CxP (Constellation Program) etc, I also spent many years on the Space Shuttle Program at Johnson Space Center in Houston, where I led the effort on risk modeling of the extremely complex Space Shuttle systems, and was part of the Columbia Accident Investigation team there at JSC. I believe that through advocating solar energy and SBSP, my passion, my energy and expertise can be dedicated effectively on help bringing about the economic viability; technological and commercial realisms to the current president’s vision for space exploration (VSE).

Evolutionshift: At the Foundation for the future energy conference your presentation was one of the few that took a look back at energy use throughout human history. Could you give a brief summary as to the stages we have passed through and how long they lasted?

Hsu: It is imperative for us to understand and always learn from the history of human civilizations, especially during crisis such as the one concerning energy and sustainability. In other words, there are no better lessons and more clear mirrors to foresee what lay ahead than looking at the foot tracks of our ancestors. To go quickly over the history of human energy consumptions and their related energy technology heritages, we can see that there have been fundamentally three eras of energy supply and consumptions in our human history. Not even a thousand years ago, throughout the long history of hundreds of thousand years of human presence on this planet, ever since the first fire was lit by mankind, our lives were based on wood-generated energy, basically based on the burning of firewood, tree branches and the remains of crops from agricultural harvests. Starting about 1600, we found coal and entered into the 2nd era of energy uses, namely the fossil-based energy supplies. Only a few hundred years later, about middle 1800 we incidentally discovered petroleum and commercialized the use of oil and gas, which brought about the entire modern industrial civilization of mankind. In the late days of first half of the 20th century, came the dawn of the Techno-era of energy use and production, as was propelled rapidly by the electricity generation of various technological energy forms, such as represented by hydro-power and the atomic energy generations. As the world demand of energy continues to soar, we’re now running into a profound energy crisis and other environmental crisis induced by our way of energy production, which is still predominately remained in the fossil-based 2nd era of human energy solutions.

As we can see since about year 2000 on, there is great uncertainty for the world energy supply, whether or not we engage in sustainable energy R&D, it’s up to us. The fossil fuel age on the scale of human history, if you plot the energy demand by year of human civilization on a terawatt scale, you will see a huge bump barely a hundred years ago. Before that, in the Stone Age, basically the cultivation of fire was the early human primitive creativity that led to the emergence of agriculture, cooking, tool-making, and all the early stages of human civilization. After about 150 years of burning fossil fuels, the Earth’s 3 billion years’ store of solar energy has been plundered. Therefore, in my view mankind must now embark the next era of energy supply and consumptions, namely to harnessing and rediscovering the mighty energy resource of our Sun, through extensive technology innovations. This era of taming solar energy through technology breakthroughs may well trigger the next giant leap of our civilization and elevating our species to transforming our combustion world economy into the forever sustainable Solar-electric world economy! I can never say enough of the paramount importance of solving humanity’s energy problems through learning from our ancestors  taming the nature forces of the Sun, much like mankind first harnessed the wild fire. We must allow common sense; logics and sound technologies drive our economy and drive the future of humanity. By the way, we should remember that even though the human discovery about fossil fuels could reach back before the start of recorded history, it did not became significant in our way of life until the dawn of the industrial revolution in the 19th century due to the lack of technology and engineering achievement. The Romans used flaming oil containers to destroy the Saracen fleet in 670. In the same century, the Japanese were digging wells to depth approaching 900 feet with picks and shovels in search of oil, and by 1100, the Chinese had reached depths of more than 3000 feet in searching of energy. This all happened centuries before the West had sunk its first commercial well in 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Now it’s time for mankind to heads up and starts digging into the sky, much like our ancestors dug into the surface of the earth long ago, but pursuing it with a fundamentally opposite and renewed yet brighter direction! We may not achieve what we would like to see (a solar-electric civilization) anytime soon, but we must start it now and staying on the right track — Harnessing the Sun!

Evolutionshift: The evidence of global warming you presented was alarming. Please comment on the urgency of the situation and the timelines we are looking at to turn things around, if in fact that can be done?

Hsu: The place I work for now is Goddard Space Flight Center, which is a primer NASA (or world) research center in the forefront for space and earth science research, and for monitoring and analyzing any cosmic or global climate changes. So, I do get the first hand scientific information and data relating to global warming issues, especially on the latest of ice cap melting dynamics or changes in both poles of our planet. Also, I always get a chance to discuss closely with some of my Goddard friends, who are world leading experts on the subject. I have no doubt that there is a clear trend of global temperature rise, and that the global warming is a pretty serious problem confronting all of humanity. Regardless of what may be the true or direct causes, whether it is due to human interferences or due to the cosmic cycling of our solar system dynamics, there are two basic facts which are crystal clear to all of us: (a) there have been overwhelming scientific evidence which showing clear and positive correlations between the level of CO2 concentrations in the earth’s atmosphere with respect to the historical fluctuations of global temperature changes; (b) Overwhelming majority of the world’s scientific community have consensus about the risks of a potential catastrophic global climate change if we humans will do nothing and continue to ignore this problem and continue the dumping of huge quantity of greenhouse gases into earth’s biosphere environment.

In my views as a risk assessment expert, or in the views from a probabilistic perspective, it is at least orders of magnitude more risky for humans to do nothing to curb our fossil-based energy addictions as compared to engaging in the fundamental shift of our energy supply landscape. This is because the risks of a catastrophic climate change can be potentially the extinction of human species, a risk consequence simply too high for us to do nothing about it. In my mind, it is absurd to hear some of the argument made by some of our politicians that humans should not worry about global warming because if we do restrict the burning of fossil energies, there will be economic consequences. Well, whoever makes such kind of argument is clearly ignorant of the concept of risk, uncertainty and risk mitigations. We are talking about options and choose between risks, as every human activities involving risk taking and we can not avoid risks but only to choose between them, making trade-offs and choose wisely. Therefore, there has to be a risk-based probabilistic thought process when comes to pick national or international policies in dealing with global warming or energy issues. As the measure of Risk is a product of Likelihood and Consequence, I believe the choice is crystal clear to most of us, when consequence or risk of a potential human extinction (due to catastrophic climate change) is to be compared with the potential consequence or risk of loss of jobs or slowing down the growth of economy (due to restriction of fossil-based energy consumptions). My view is that by making paradigm shift of the world’s energy supply through extensive R&D and technology innovations on renewable energy productions, we may well create countless new jobs and then end up triggering the next spectrum of economic development and industrial revolutions.

I will say that the acceleration and aggravation of a potential catastrophic global climate change is the number one risk issue of our current Combustion World Economy. I showed three pairs of pictures at the international energy conference back in April in Seattle where there were overwhelm evidence of glaciers disappearing at alarming rate (http://www.futurefoundation.org/programs/hum_wrk4.htm).

It is less important to assert any timelines of fixing or reversing the global warming trend, and so as the uncertainties of whether or not it can be done by any human interventions. It is up to the nature’s blessing depending on the magnitude of damages already done to the earth’s biospheres, and of course depends on the policies and effectiveness of the countermeasures we humans put in place as well. What is most imperative for all of us is whether we still continue the endless debate on the issue of global warming, or we would rather put our acts together and start to do something in a significant way! We have no other choices as it is a make or break it situation.

Evolutionshift: You are a firm believer that the solar energy in general is the best renewable energy source for the future. Please explain why you think it is the best source for humanity?

Hsu: There is now an energy crossroad facing mankind. My thought is that we have, basically, two directions to follow: either we look for energy based on cosmic-based, open, and unlimited original resources, which means everything comes from the stars, from the Sun, or we follow the direction on Earth-based, local and confined secondary energy resources. There is no secret that every single bit of energy on this planet comes from the Sun. We have a small window of opportunity that exists, in my view, from 2000 on for maybe the next couple of decades. Either we’re going to go down or we’re going to go up as a species largely depends upon how we approaching our energy solutions in a very basic and fundamental way.

There is no doubt in my mind that harnessing the Sun is the next giant leap for mankind. Harnessing the Sun is like our ancestors first harnessed the wild fire: an inevitable and logical leapfrog in the process of human evolution. I would like to quote from Dr. Bill Michael from the University of Chicago: “Use of fire illustrates that human evolution is a gradual process; modern humans did not emerge overnight in a ‘big bang’ of development, but rather slowly adapted from their primitive origins. The use of fire by humans throughout time to overcome environmental forces is a fundamental and defining aspect of human nature.

Before reaching the tipping point of the global sustainability, it is time for humans to tame the natural forces of the Sun and harness it for the well-being and survival of our species. The best place, of course, for a nuclear fusion reactor is about 149E6 km (149 x 106 km) away. It’s free of charge. The Sun’s energy only takes 8 minutes to arrive and leaves no radioactive waste, and it’s terrorist proof. Our Sun puts out about 3.8E11 TWh of energy per hour. Our planet receives about 174,000 terawatt each second. Every hour, Earth’s surface gets more solar power than humans use in the whole year.

Humans should learn to bypass the solar-to-fossil inefficiency. About 4.6 billion years ago, the Earth was just formed, and it was 3.5 billion years ago that there was the first sign of life. Not until 1.5 billion years ago was there multicell biology; real life started just about 500 million years ago. The dinosaur lived about 150 million years ago and went extinct. Human beings have lived maybe a few hundred thousand years. You can see that it took about 3.5 billion years and rare geologic events to sequester hydrocarbons and build up hydrogen in the atmosphere. If you do a little calculation, you will find that using direct solar energy is about 1,200,000,000,000 times more efficient than using the secondary solar energy – oil. Why not go direct to the Sun?

Evolutionshift: Please compare solar energy to the other forms of renewable energy currently be discussed. Pros and cons please?

Hsu: We must set priorities and choose wisely. The projected world energy use by fuel type is that in the next 30 years, we are going to have almost explosive increase in demand. In global energy consumption, mankind must revolutionize the world energy landscape. According to US DOE data (http://www.doe.gov) that the renewable energies include biomass, hydropower, geothermal, wind, solar, and others, all of those came up to about 6 percent of total energy production here in the US. However, on the fossil side, nonrenewable energies consist of about 94 percent. To recognize that solar energy is the best option for the future, we have to first set in priority of our energy requirements, and understand how should we evaluate and compare our energy options for major R&D activities for the future of mankind? This seems to be a major challenge for us. We need to define major criteria. It has to be quantifiable. In my view, it has to be affordable for all human beings at low cost. It has to be inexhaustible in terms of the livable planetary lifetime. It has to cause no harm to the environment, ecosystem, or human lives. And it must be easily available and accessible around the globe. It has to be in usable, flexible, and decentralized scalable energy forms, and there must be low risk of potential misuse for mass destruction. When we set key requirements, they have to be achievable. The energy option has to satisfy the need and goals of humanity. It has to help retain and improve human values and global collaborations. It must be highly achievable through demonstrated human creativity. It must help expand human presence and survival within our solar system. And it has to be consistent in elevating human culture, quality of life, and civilization. When you carefully compare and evaluate each available option of the renewable energy sources against these requirements and criteria, it is not hard to understand that the solar power in general will be the most viable sources of renewable energy for sustainable human development into the future.

Now if we are comparing some of the key energy options based on the major requirements and criteria as stated above, we can see that major nonrenewable energy sources, such as fossil fuels (oil/gas) will be depleted in another 40 to 60 years. Coal will be depleted in about 500 years. Some people estimate a thousand years, but that doesn’t really matter. Before you deplete all the coal, your global environment already has caused catastrophic change. The mining of nuclear fission material will deplete in about 50 years as well. All fossil fuels are harmful to Earth’s biosphere, and nuclear power has major issues with waste deposit, and the risks of proliferation and misuses are high. Nuclear, after all, had 40 years’ chance already, and it didn’t help the world solve the energy problem. Major renewable energy sources: hydro power — limited and unstable water resources; liquid biomass competes for land with food production. You have heard that in Mexico tortilla prices have gone up about 60 percent in two years. Hydrogen (fuel cell) has high risk for storage and transportation. Wind/geothermal/tidal is intermittent, unstable, and costly. Nuclear fusion has been brought up and studied by government funds for over half a century and it is unlikely to achieve anytime soon to curb the acute deterioration of our environment, and it has a high risk for harm. I believe that something that offers tremendous or explosive energy can be misused for ill-minded human destructive purposes. The US has been so busy and spent so much money trying to prevent just a handful of small nations from building their won nuclear reactors. Just imagine the risk scenario that if the know-how for making the A-bombs some 200 years down the road will be as easy as the terrorists in Iraq knowing how to make the IEDs nowadays? On the other hand, solar energy, basically as a general case it doesn’t matter if it is surface or space-based  is achievable, has no limit, and there’s no harm to human beings.

Evolutionshift:You are also a strong advocate of solar energy from space, and believing that Space Solar Power has great potential for the future. Please explain what it is, and why solar energy from space?

Hsu: Why solar energy from space? Good question David. One of the major challenges of terrestrial solar power is that, we have less than one percent of the world’s energy coming from solar power due to high photovoltaic (PV) cell costs and its inefficiency of converting the Sun light energy into electricity. Based on the existing solar technology and its PV materials, it would require a field of solar panels the size of the state of Vermont to power the whole US electricity needs. And to satisfy world consumption requires about one percent of the land that is used for agriculture worldwide unless there are breakthroughs made in conversion efficiency of PV cells and lower the cost of producing them and producing affordable batteries in a significant way.

There is roughly about 7 to 20 times less energy per square meter on Earth than in space, depending on the geological locations. One of the major concepts of energy from space is so called SSP, which stands for Space Solar Power. SSP as a space-based energy system concept isn’t a new idea at all. The concept has been systematically explored and studied since the middle 1970s. Actually, Nikola Tesla’s great dream was to find the means to broadcast electrical power without wires in between. Early in the first half of the 20th century, when Tesla, the pioneer of modern electromagnetism and inventor of wireless communication had addressed the American Institute of Electrical Engineers about his attempts to demonstrate long-distance wireless power transmission over the surface of the Earth. Tesla said, “Throughout space there is energy. If static, then our hopes are in vain; if kinetic — and this we know it is for certain — then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheel work of nature.” The SSP concept and much of its present form was originated in 1968, when Dr. Peter Glaser first brought out the idea of SSP as a source for continues power generation for the Earth’s future energy needs. Glaser’s basic idea was that satellites in geosynchronous orbit would collect energy from the Sun. The energy would be converted to radio waves and beamed to a receiving site on the ground. The ground antenna would then reconvert the radio waves to electricity for power consumption. In a typical SSP system, solar energy is collected in space by a satellite in a geostationary orbit. The solar energy is then converted to direct current by solar cells, and the direct current is in turn used to power microwave generators in the gigahertz frequency range. The generators feed a highly directive satellite-borne antenna, which beams the energy to the Earth. On the ground, a rectifying antenna (rectenna) converts the microwave energy from the satellite to direct current, which, after suitable processing, is fed to the terrestrial power grid. A typical SPS (Solar Power Satellite) unit  with a solar panel area of about 10 square km, a transmitting antenna of about 2 km in diameter, and a antenna about 4 km in diameter  may yield an electric power of about 1 GW (equivalent of a large scale nuclear power station). Two critical aspects that have motivated research into SPS systems are the lack of attenuation of the solar flux by the Earth’s atmosphere and the twenty-four-hour availability of the energy, except around midnight during the equinox periods.

Evolutionshift: Is SSP a viable energy option in terms of cost and technological possibility? What are the key challenges involved to develop SSP?

Hsu: Among the key technologies involved in the SSP are microwave generation and transmission techniques, wave propagation, antennas, and measurement and calibration techniques. These radio science issues cover a broad range of aspects involved in an SSP system, ranging from the technical aspects of microwave power generation and transmission to the effects on humans and the potential interference with communications, remote sensing, and radio-astronomy observations.

Is SSP a viable option? Well, in my opinion yes, it can be a viable energy option for base-load electricity generation to power the needs of our future. This is because SSP satisfies every key major criteria of a viable energy option except the cost based on current space launch and propulsion technology. We all know that cost (or space transportation cost) is a major issue for SSP. That is why to overcome the high launch cost; the development of autonomous robotic technology for on-orbit assembly of large solar structures along with the needed system safety and reliability assurance technologies for excessively large and complex orbital structures are among the major technical challenges for SSP. Nevertheless, there are no breakthrough technologies that need to be invented nor of any theoretical obstacles need to be overcome for a SSP project to be carried out.

Our society has seriously overlooked the great potentials of SSP as opposed to other energy concepts, and has owed a great deal for adequate funding in support of any SSP related R&Ds. The US government funded a total about 20 million dollars on SSP study back in the late 1970s in the height of the early oil crisis, and then practically abandoned this project with nearly zero dollars spent up to the present day. Above all, a government funded SSP demonstration project is absolutely long overdue. Mr. Ralph Nansen, a friend of mine, who was the former project manager of the Apollo program at Boeing and later managed the DOE-NASA funded SSP proof of concept study in the late 1970s, gave a great detail of the Boeing study effort in his excellent book SUN Power. I highly recommend the reading of Ralph’s book for those who interested on this topic. Also, Dr. Peter Glaser’s book is another superb reading on this topic as well. (http://www.spacefuture.com/cgi/glossary.cgi?gl=who&term=Peter%20Glaser;

http://www.tsgc.utexas.edu/tadp/1996/general/power/sun.html).

What I really like to point out here is that we can solve the cost issue and making SSP a commercially viable energy option through human creativity and innovations in both technological and economic fronts. Yes, the current launch cost is prohibitive to SSP however, besides continuing quest for low cost RLV (reusable launch vehicle) technologies, there are other revenues of utilizing ingénues commercial or business models to overcome the SSP cost issues. One such great model has been studied and is now being pursued rigorously by an American private aerospace entrepreneurial company, the SIG (Space Island Group) based in California. The SIG idea is to modify and utilizing the Space Shuttle heritages by turning the huge volumes of the external tank into commercial asset for the space-based research and orbital tourism industry. (http://www.spaceislandgroup.com). A huge demand in space tourism will certainly bring about the high launch rate, and it will in turn drive down the space transportation cost therefore help making SSP more viable. The key is for mankind to start pursuing energy in the right direction. Take for example, the case of the commercial aviation industry, who would thought that ordinary people could afford air travel just several decades after Wright brothers had succeeded in their first aircraft test fly?

On the other hand, we should pursue SSP through advocating solar energy as a fundamental energy strategy for the future of humanity. Unlike some of the views from our colleagues in the space community, I believe that we should not, nor need to restrict our vision on choosing between terrestrial solar and SSP. In fact, the dream of SSP can be realized much sooner through advocating the use of terrestrial solar energy and the pertinent R&Ds on a grand globe scale. This is because the advancement in major terrestrial solar technology, such as the nano-particle based ultra high efficiency and low weight, low cost PV cells along with the super capacity and low cost energy storages will also lead to affordable SSP development. Our ultimate goal is to taming the “very wheelworks of nature” and harnessing the Sun, so it’s not important as how we would achieve this goal, whether it’s via SSP or through terrestrial solar approaches. With the rapid advancement of nanotech based PV solar cell materials that is now reaching over 50% efficiency while can be cheaply produced (along with revolutionary battery technologies), it is totally possible that one day we don’t have to launch huge PV structures (SPS) into LEO to satisfy the base-load electricity consumptions for the entire planet, except of course for power supply in space environment. It’s extremely exciting to see in recent years, the kind of rapid advances and accomplishments made in the PV cells research filed, and an over 30% annual growth of the solar energy industry even without government policy support of such major nations like US and Russia. Imagine what will be our dependence on oil if every house in the future is to be built with cheap and highly efficient solar cell materials for the roofs and sidings, and every shaded parking lot in shopping malls and office buildings is to be built and equipped with solar powered charging plugs for electric cars?! (http://www.solardaily.com/reports/Solar_Cell_Power_Performance_Boosted_60_70_By_Nanoparticles_Used_In_Octillion_NanoPower_Window_999.html).

Evolutionshift: This sounds like a perfect undertaking for the emerging private, entrepreneurial space businesses springing up around the world. Could these entities help, or should this be solely the work of governments?

Hsu: Yes, I believe that the realistic hope of a commercially viable SSP system truly lies in the collaborative effort from the emerging private, entrepreneurial space businesses and venture capital investment within the world community, just like what you said. Quite frankly, I am very disappointed, yet pessimistic about the government involvement in this great human engineering and technological endeavor, especially on the part of the much needed support from the US government. I am also disappointed, even surprised to see there was no mention about energy and economic development from the current president’s Vision for Space Exploration (VSE). On the contrary, I am happy to see there are great visionaries in the world who do see the significance and inner connections of future energy prospect to the vision for space exploration. One such visionary is the recently retired president of India, Dr. Kalam Abdul. Dr. Abdul had the great vision and courage to speak publicly on the SSP prospect while addressing the Symposium on “The Future of Space Exploration” organized by Boston University lately. Kalam believes the space research is truly inter-disciplinary and has enabled true innovations at the intersection of multiple areas of science and engineering. More profoundly, the President said: “civilization will run out of fossil fuels in this Century. However, solar energy is clean and inexhaustible. However solar flux on earth is available for just 6-8 hours every day whereas incident radiation on space solar power station would be 24 hrs every day. What better vision can there be for the future of space exploration, than participating in a global mission for perennial supply of renewable energy from space?

Nevertheless, the government support on policies and financial resources for R&D and the related technology demonstrations are crucial to the success of such giant effort. As we all know that since the 1980s, any organized activity to study or develop SSP or solar power satellites (SPS) has been limited. There was no US government sponsored work until NASA initiated their A Fresh Look Studies in the mid 1990’s. Subsequently the Department of Energy abstained from any involvement. However, during this time the Japanese government and industry became interested in the concept. The Japanese updated the reference system design developed in the System Definition Studies in the late 1970’s, conducted some limited testing and proposed a low orbit 10 megawatt demonstration satellite. Their effort has been curtailed by their economic problems and by their lack of manned space capability. SSP Interest by other nations has persisted however, but only at low levels of activity.

The overwhelming initial cost of development and deployment has remained the primary obstacle. Number one on the list of cost barriers is again the cost of space transportation. Solar power satellites are only economically feasible if there is low cost space transportation. Therefore, in order for SSP to be successful, we need an organized consortium consisting of private businesses, venture capitalists from major international partners, along with government support of major industrial nations on R&D and technology demonstrations. We need this to bring down associated project and technology risks on safety, reliability and technology maturity. The Comsat model for the successful launching and commercialization of communications satellite industry should be a viable approach for SSP as well.

Evolutionshift: Sounds like we need a global Manhattan Project. Should the United States take the lead and other nations will join later, or should there be a multi-governmental organization put in place first. Can the US do this alone?

Hsu: Yes, a Manhattan Project like major effort led by the US with participations from broad international community is what needed to a successful creation, implementation and operations of a commercial scale SSP system. Please remember, an inherent feature of solar power satellites is their location in earth orbit outside the borders of any individual nation with their energy delivered back to the earth by way of certain form of WPT (wireless power transmission). The applications of WPT must be compatible with other uses of the radio frequency spectrum in the affected orbital space. The SPS infrastructure must also be launched and delivered into space. Therefore, it is vital for international and government involvement to coordinate global treaties and agreements, such as covering frequency assignments, satellite locations, space traffic control and many other features of space operations that are mandatory in order to prevent international confrontations.

I believe it is imperative for a multi-governmental organization or entity be put in place first for a major SSP project, and it will be extremely difficult, if not inconceivable, for the US or any single nation to do this alone at any useful or significant power scale due to the many political and technological reasons as stated. However, it is equally important that there must be a leading nation to provide the necessary leadership in such complex and interdependent international SSP effort. In a partnership of multiple governments and industries, it is vital that the leadership and responsibilities of the various project elements be clearly defined in order to prevent chaos. There should be some logical parameters to outline how this can be done. The key step is to establish a lead nation. The United States is the logical leader in this area because of the breadth of technology infrastructure and capability that already exists, as well as the magnitude of financial resources available in its industry and financial community.

In any case, space solar power is going to be a gigantic yet achievable human technology and engineering endeavor, based on heritages of human ingenuity. We can go to the Moon; we can achieve splitting atoms; we can also overcome the inefficacy problems of the solar-electric conversion, and we can achieve the goal for affordable access to space and hence making the SSP a cost competitive energy production for all of humanity. Key SSP component technologies will also enable human economic expansion and settlement into space, which is utterly important for the permanent survival of our species. To this end, such a vertical expansion of humanityinto our solar system in the new millennium can be every bit as important (if not far more critical) as the “horizontal expansionachieved by our ancestors since the 1400s. Indeed, SSP will provide an ideal platform for promoting human collaborations that will help reduce the global economy imbalances. It can be also a major steppingstone for humanity’s next giant leap for harnessing the Sun and transforming the combustion world economy into the solar-electric human civilization that is likely to transpire and elevating our species.

Evolutionshift: Is there anything else you would like to say to the readers of www.evolutionshift.com?

Hsu: Again, I can never say enough about the vital importance for mankind to start looking at the Sun for all answers to our ever increasing energy needs, and to solve our environmental or societal crisis! I call the harnessing of the Sunas the 3rd giant leap in the process of human evolution. The first giant leap was when human beings got down from the trees and started to use Fire, which brought tool-making, agriculture and ancient civilization. Then we invented machinery and discovered electricity, which allowed us the 2nd giant leap forward and brought up modern industrialization. Now we’re running into profound energy and environmental crisis. Mankind, from the primitive use of fire to the use of randomly discovered fossil fuels to the intelligent and creative use of sustainable energy sources, we must now embark the next giant leap of our civilization, that is to Harness the Sun, and therefore allowing transformation and elevation of a combustion civilization (built upon primitive and secondary energy sources) to the forever sustainable Solar-electric civilization (will build on inexhaustible and direct energy source from the stars)!

Can mankind achieve the third giant leap into the solar-electric civilization? My answer is positively YES! Humans have been capable of profound achievements as huge as the Manhattan and Apollo projects. We can certainly succeed in taming the mighty power of our star, whether it’s terrestrial solar or space-based solar energy, humans must achieve our next leap forward. Together we can make it happen — but not if we fail to educate and mobilize the politicians and decision-makers around the globe.

People always argue: Solar energy or SSP are too costly; we cannot do it. The real challenge for mankind for solar energy as well as SSP is really a Manhattan project for peace.The political system has been a key barrier for either SSP or any massive scale terrestrial solar energy installations to be developed by mankind largely due to fossil and nuclear energy establishments and due to our existing economic infrastructures. Mankind already got ourselves into the civilization based on non-sustainable energy sources; its not easy to change. However, in my view the key changes needed are much less technical or economic ones than that of the social and political ones. Indeed, it’s a policy issue, not quite a technology or economic issue. As in the case of space race or war, it’s easy and we can achieve nearly anything, but to do something gigantic for peace for all of humanity, it’s not so easy. It’s not in our human nature. But Dr. Robert Goddard liked to say: It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow. I would like to conclude this interview with what I said at the end of my talk in the Seattle energy conference: as intelligent creatures rooted in the cosmic origin, humanity was meant to survive and spread its presence all over the universe by milking the energy of the stars!

Evolutionshift: Thank you!

Hsu: Thank you David, for the interview opportunity.

Facing and solving the multiple issues concerning energy is the single most pressing problem that we face as a species. There is a lot of media coverage about energy, alternative energy and global warming, but what has been missing is the knowledge and point of view of scientists, at least in the main stream media. If you have missed the first five interviews, please scroll down the right side of the page and click on ‘Scientists — Interviews’.

For you readers who have enjoyed the past interviews with scientists I would like to quote some wonderful men from England who coined the phrase “Now for something completely different.” Howard Bloom is a renaissance man, or as some folks from his past might say ‘a different breed of cat’. Howard had been called “the Darwin, Einstein, Newton, and Freud of the 21st Century” by Britain’s Channel4 TV and “the next Stephen Hawking” by Gear Magazine.

A recent visiting scholar in the Graduate Psychology Department at New York University and a former Core Faculty Member at The Graduate Institute in two fields—Conscious Evolution and Organizational Leadership–Bloom is the author of three books: The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History (”mesmerizing”—The Washington Post) (http://www.amazon.com/Lucifer-Principle-Scientific-Expedition-History/dp/0871136643/ref=sr_1_1/002-7346841-0434402?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187141120&sr=1-1), Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century (”reassuring and sobering”—The ...]]> In this sixth installment of our on-going series of interviews with some of the leading thinkers and scientists on the subject of energy, we interview Howard Bloom.

Facing and solving the multiple issues concerning energy is the single most pressing problem that we face as a species. There is a lot of media coverage about energy, alternative energy and global warming, but what has been missing is the knowledge and point of view of scientists, at least in the main stream media. If you have missed the first five interviews, please scroll down the right side of the page and click on ‘Scientists — Interviews’.

For you readers who have enjoyed the past interviews with scientists I would like to quote some wonderful men from England who coined the phrase “Now for something completely different.” Howard Bloom is a renaissance man, or as some folks from his past might say ‘a different breed of cat’. Howard had been called “the Darwin, Einstein, Newton, and Freud of the 21st Century” by Britain’s Channel4 TV and “the next Stephen Hawking” by Gear Magazine.

A recent visiting scholar in the Graduate Psychology Department at New York University and a former Core Faculty Member at The Graduate Institute in two fields—Conscious Evolution and Organizational Leadership–Bloom is the author of three books: The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History (”mesmerizing”—The Washington Post) (http://www.amazon.com/Lucifer-Principle-Scientific-Expedition-History/dp/0871136643/ref=sr_1_1/002-7346841-0434402?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187141120&sr=1-1), Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century (”reassuring and sobering”—The New Yorker) (http://www.amazon.com/Global-Brain-Evolution-Mass-Century/dp/0471419192/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b/002-7346841-0434402?ie=UTF8&qid=1187141120&sr=1-1) and How I Accidentally Started The Sixties (“a monumental, epic, glorious literary achievement.” Timothy Leary). (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/B000S1KV3C/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_top/002-7346841-0434402?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books#customerReviews)

A still-in-progress fourth book, The Rise of the Cup and Saucer: A Radical Reperception of Western Civilization OR Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul In the Machine (http://www.howardbloom.net/reinventing_capitalism/) has been the subject of international conferences in New York, Amsterdam, and Malaysia.

Each puzzle piece of Bloom’s work fits into a 50-year-long project Bloom calls “The Grand Unified Theory of Everything In The Universe Including the Human Soul”.

For more information on Howard Bloom click on www.howardbloom.net

He has had a truly unique career path, so much so that I have asked him to relate it in detail.

Evolutionshift.com: Howard, thank you so much for this interview. When we met at the Foundation for the Futures’ conference on the future of energy, I was struck by the fact that you have a truly unique career path for a scientist. Please describe it for my readers and explain the trajectory as to why it all fits together

Bloom: At ten years old, I dove into microbiology and cosmology. At thirteen I changed direction. I realized I was an atheist, and that the great mystery was not a god in the sky, it was the gods inside of us, the personal and social passions that make history. So I jumped ship from standard academic science twice. In 1962, I dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, went looking for Zen Enlightenment and the Beatniks, and in the process helped found a new youth movement, the Hippies

In 1968 I jumped ship once again, turned down four graduate school fellowships in clinical psychology, and went on a Voyage of the Beagle, a deep dive into the underbelly of culture, the group-gut where myths and mass emotions are made. Like you, David, that meant sneaking into quite a few careers. I started a commercial art studio and made it on the cover of Art Direction Magazine. I became the editor of a national monthly magazine covering a form of music I didn’t know, rock and roll. The magazine was Circus. I used the tools of science and literature–anthropological field expeditions, correlational studies, and dissecting the anatomy of successful magazines in Germany and Franceto find out what made them tick. My goal was to give my publisher what he wanted, an increase in circulation. It turned out that the key was understanding—and loving–the heart and pulse of my audience, understanding and loving the core of an evolving subculture. I created a new formula for the magazine, and the circulation increase my publisher hoped for happened—a boost of 211%. Later I taught the formula to the publishers and editors of Creem Magazine and Hit Parader. The result, according to one of Rolling Stone’s founding editors, Chet Flippo, was that I created “a new magazine genre, the heavy metal magazine.” Then, after a few years of adventure in the corporate world—at Gulf & Western, ABC, and ICPR, the eleventh largest pr firm in the world at the time, I started my own PR company. It became the largest in the music industry, and was also heavily involved in film and politics. That gave me a chance to test what I’d learned, a chance to apply the tools of science to mass emotion, to popular music, and to music’s icons, a chance to try hypotheses out in the laboratory of the real world. The result—I helped strategize, build, guide, heal, or merely participate in the careers of Prince, Michael Jackson, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, Kiss, Queen, Aerosmith, AC/DC, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run DMC, and roughly a hundred others. I put together the first public-service advertising campaign for solar energy, created two educational campaigns for the Black community, founded a national anti-censorship group, Music In Action, and helped establish Farm Aid and Amnesty International’s American base.

It was an intense immersion in the mass mood shifts that make history. Then in 1988 I came down with an extremely serious case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, became too weak to speak, was trapped in my bedroom for fifteen years, and returned full time to science, writing what I hoped was original theory in subjects from theoretical physics to neurobiology and evolutionary biology. I took advantage of the Internet to organize three international scientific groups: The Group Selection Squad—a team of 40 evolutionary scientists working to undermine the evolutionary dogma of individual selection and to add what evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson calls “multi-level selection” to the evolutionary vocabulary. The second group was The International Paleopsychology Project, dedicated to “tracing the evolution of sociality, mentation, emotion, and perception from the first 10(-32) of the Big Bang to today.” And the third scientific group, the one that brought me back to future energy issues, was The Space Development Steering Committee, which includes: the second man on the moon, Buzz Aldrin; the sixth astronaut on the moon, Edgar Mitchell; the Chief of the Future Science and Technology Exploration Branch of the US Air Force, Peter Garretson; the National Science Foundation’s Program Director for Control, Networks & Computational Intelligence, Paul Werbos; the Chief Scientist at NASA’s Langley’s Research Center, Dennis Bushnell[note to readers, click here for an interview with Dennis]; NASA’s Senior Risk Analyst, Feng Hsu[note to readers: an upcoming interviewee here]; Boeing Phantom Works’ Ed McCullough; Air Force Research Laboratory veteran James Michael Snead, and the world’s leading expert on space solar power, 25-year NASA veteran John Mankins.

Evolutionshift.com: How far down the road are we regarding Global Warming. How urgent is the situation in your view?

Bloom: I’m a skeptic about global warming. With or without smokestacks, the big shifts of this globe’s weather kill. There have been 146 mass extinctions that we can count. And there were probably many more whose evidence we haven’t yet learned to detect. In some of this planet’s past climate shifts, the carbon dioxide level, the level of “greenhouse gas”, was 20 to 200 times what it is today. There were roughly 80 ice ages from 2.2 billion years ago until 12,000 years ago, when modern culture began. Twenty of those ice ages took place while we were evolving as human beings. In the last 120,000 years, there’ve been 20 global warmings in which temperature has shot up between 10 and 18 degrees in a decade. None of these catastrophes were caused by man. None were caused by industrial pollutants, automobile emissions, or human consumerist excess. The message? Forget about sacrificing to mother nature so she will make the earth a garden of Eden. Mother Nature, to quote a chapter title of one of my books, The Lucifer Principle, is a “bloody bitch”. She exults in creativity. And she exults in destruction and death. She has doomed neutrons to find proton partners in 10.6 minutes or disintegrate. She has given birth to stars and killed them. From that star death she has wrung 89 new forms of atoms, 89 new elements. Her ways of creation are not always nice. To me our fixation on apocalypse, our fixation on global warming, is a sign that we are slipping into a new dark age. Cultures that look up move up. Cultures that look down sink and die. The Global Warming fixation is our way of looking down, very far down indeed. We feel that we have sinned and must sacrifice, that we must atone. Our sin is the rape of the earth. Our atonement is the self-denial we call “conservation” and “sustainability”.

The fact is that the “rape of nature” and consumerist excess are the imperatives of a 3.85 billion-year experiment, the experiment of the Family of DNA, the experiment called life. Life’s challenge at every stage has been to rework nature, to defy her in her own name. Every colony of bacteria has had a simple job: kidnap as many inanimate molecules and electrons as you can and press-gang them into the family of DNA. Take carbon, oxygen, sulfur, whatever natural resources you can, and turn them into proteins, lipid envelopes and cells. Capture as much energy as you can to run societies. Our first ancestors were bacteria 3.5 billion years ago. Their societies were massive. A colony the size of your palm had seven trillion members, more than all the humans who have ever been. Those bacteria communicated chemically. They knit themselves into a collective intelligence. They spotted problems and opportunities. They did research and development. They reinvented their own genomes to turn formerly toxic stuff into food, fuel, and sustenance. They “raped” nature by sucking in wayward photons from the sun and using them to hook nitrogen, carbon, and hydrogen together in the fabric of life. But, like any materialistic consumerists, they farted out their refuse, a toxic gas. They used the atmosphere as their garbage dump. After more than a billion years of this pollution, they had poisoned the atmosphere entirely, filling it with a gas that killed. Then, according to biologist Lynn Margulis, there came a mass extinction. The survivors were those who learned to turn the poison into building material and energy. That poison’s name was oxygen. To us, the progeny of the survivors, oxygen is a vital resource. We don’t know it, but we are harvesters of what was once catastrophe.

In a planet of mass extinctions, the challenge of bacteria was to turn as much waste as they could find into biomass. To turn every bit of barrenness into riches and niches, new places to live, new delicacies and treats. Why turn every nook and cranny into biofuel? To survive the next climatic catastrophe. To outwit the inevitability of change. To ride out each disaster. To thrive despite apocalypse. So what is nature’s imperative to us? It’s to harness the forces of change. Those are the forces we are hiding from when we contemplate global warming. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is a fuel waiting to be made. Our real task is one that bacteria have undertaken many a time, to muster the ingenuity to invent a new carbon dioxide alchemy. To turn atmospheric carbon dioxide into food and fuel for more biomass, food and fuel to expand the enterprise of life.

Nature’s imperative to her first life forms—bacteria–was simple. Suck energy from wherever you can, even from granite two miles beneath our feet and from the poisons spewed by hot vents in the sea. Make everything you can a part of life’s economy. And that, David, is our imperative too. We are nature incarnate. In her name we must learn to wring energy from every storm and cyclone, every shift of climate, every poison and every toxic waste. We must build on what the global warming obsessives are creating–meteorological engineering. We must learn to turn the most impossible and catastrophic of things into biomass.

We became who we are today by challenging climate change beyond belief. As I mentioned, we evolved during 20 ice ages. We were born as the most pathetic creatures this planet has ever seen. We had no fangs, no ripping teeth. We had no claws. We had no fur with which to endure the shift from summer’s heat to winter’s cold. So we learned to reinvent ourselves. We made artificial fangs and claws from stone. We called them “tools”. We killed creatures and made clothing from their fur coats. We learned to use those coats and animal skin boots to endure even the glacial cold. We harnessed a catastrophe, fire. We invented fishhooks, calendars, sewing needles, and thread. We made our camps next to the very ice sheets that threatened our extinction and invented palaces made of mammoth tusks, mammoth ribs, and mammoth hides .

No matter how much we curb our gaseous carbon excretion, future planet-wide climate catastrophe is inevitable. It will not be a product of our sin. It will be a product of nature. And we must ready ourselves to outwit and harvest disaster… or we simply won’t survive.

Evolutionshift.com: At the conference you were one of the most vocal participants regarding the need for communication and creating a public awareness and forum around the issues of Global Warming, finding new sources of energy, conservation and generally getting humanity mobilized. Why, and what should be done?

Bloom: My real focus was on changing public opinion about the new forms of energy-harvesting. The press campaign for global warming has been incredibly successful. It began with the first Earth Day of 1970. Earth Day and organizations like Greenpeace did something very wise. They created one PR stunt after another. They inserted a new vocabulary, a new way of thinking into the public heart. They did it by reaching kindergarten teachers, first grade teachers, and high school teachers. Those teachers taught the eco- vocabulary and the mantra that the earth is fragile to kids at the age when we form the passions that steer us for the rest of our lives. Together, the eco-organizations, the Sierra Club and others—changed the way we feel and the way we think.

What I want is to spread a more hopeful set of concepts. Yes, it’s true. The climate of this planet could turn on us at any minute…with or without our industrial gases and our tailpipe emissions. Yes, it’s important to clean the atmosphere so we can breathe free. And, no, we don’t want our coastal cities to disappear beneath the seas. But the solution is invention and technology, just as it was for our Ice Age ancestors. The solution is ingenuity, the ingenuity that will allow our cities to float and to literally go with the flow. Our solution is to make our agriculture independent of temporary weather patterns like those that have favored vegetable and grain growing in America’s Midwest, in California, in Florida, in Argentina, and in Brazil.

Mother Nature’s weather patterns will eventually change and shift, gifting new locations. Remember, we are in the middle of a climatic anomaly, a momentary truce with Mother Nature’s fickle fancy, her taste for massive change. This anomaly has lasted 10,000 years. Eventually it will end and things will go back to normal. And Nature’s norm is the Jurassic’s “hothouse” warmth, a warmth that spread swamps and seas where many of our greatest cities are today. Nature’s norm is the two million years of Ice Age that gave birth to modern man, to your big brain and mine.

Are there practical technologies to make cities and farms portable? Am I wasting your time and energy with fantasies? We have floating, portable oil platforms that currently can host as many as 350 workers. We can build on that technology. We have at least one ship, a 43,000-ton vessel called The World, that’s a floating town filled with condominium apartments for the rich. With wireless, the inhabitants are connected to the world. And with helicopters, they can go to their home-bases on land whenever they please. In the world of agriculture, there are hydroponics and greenhouses, all of which can be erected wherever the climate of the year is most favorable. Investments in these technologies on a mass scale would be huge. But climate change, no matter how successfully we postpone it, is a simple, blunt inevitability.

Evolutionshift.com: Any innovative ideas on mobilizing the public around this urgent issue of energy given your grounding in popular culture?

Bloom: Right now, two groups I run—The Space Development Steering Committee and The Big Bang Tango Media Lab–are focused on television to re-excite the public about space. Space solar power is one of the energy options that can free us from our carbon spew. It may be valid to plan a television series on energy alternatives, too. The public yearns to be freed of oil and the wars that seem to be its price. And the public, despite its fixation on doom, still is excited by techno lust.

One TV series or show will accomplish little. To get people excited about new energy technologies, we need the kind of 30-year-long PR effort the eco-movement used to change the way that we perceive.

My own attempt at a contribution came a few weeks ago when I ran a seminar in Reperceiving Leadership for twelve of Malaysia’s top executives. Four were from the country’s electricity monopoly, TNB. And two were from Malaysia’s plantation industry. I encouraged the Malaysians to use their skills to raise massive quantities of algae and halophytes—salt water eating plants. Algae and halophytes, like all plants, breathe in carbon dioxide and turn it into biomass. And biomass can be used to make fuel or to generate electricity. One of the Thirteen Commandments of Reperceiving Leadership is “turning garbage into gold”—taking every poison and reperceiving it as a resource. Then it hit one of the TNB executives. Malaysia is spending hundreds of millions, she said, to eradicate an insidious weed, the water hyacinth. Why not run biomass-fueled power plants on hyacinths? If TNB and Malaysia’s top plantation companies, Mardec and Guthrie, follow up on this brainstorming session, we might see the first country to run itself on flower power.

Why hand out American technologies so freely? Because we in America are not using them. They are not even on our radar screens. Get Malaysia to use these new energy breakthroughs and we may be able to rouse America’s competitive spirit. We may be able to give our somnolent, fear-ridden culture a kick in the ass. The alternative is this. Malaysia and Korea, the two countries I visited on my Asian trip, are moving far ahead of the US, and they are doing it fast. They have the optimism and the future-orientation that our guilt-culture lacks. If America doesn’t begin to look up again, if it doesn’t see futures that are exciting over the horizon, then we will be the next Third World culture. In fact, flying in from Inchon airport to Atlanta I had the impression that I was reentering the third world. The Kuala Lumpur and Inchon airports are effortlessly efficient. Atlanta was a mass of lines that went on forever, baggage checks so primitive that the Homeland Defense folks simply tossed the bags they’d combed into a giant pile, a pile that included luggage going to Texas, Mississippi, and New York. Everyone I met in these lines had missed his or her connecting flight. The situation was so snarled that Delta had six counters just to rebook those who’d been kept from their flights by the endless security lines. This was NOT first-world thinking.

Evolutionshift.com: Do you believe in peak oil? When do you think the planet might run out of oil?

Bloom: To me, peak oil remains a hypothesis, a guess. There is a theory supported by my favorite biologist, Lynn Margulis, co-creator of the Gaia Hypothesis, that says everything we know about oil is wrong. Oil, says this theory, is not just a product of decaying plants and dinosaurs. It is a natural product of the earth itself. It is formed by geological processes. Yes, it’s a strange theory. But the fact is that astronomers have discovered carbon-based molecules all over the place in outer space. These carbon molecules are in hot interstellar gas clouds, cold interstellar gas clouds, comets, and on spicules of space ice. Of the 120 molecules found in space to date, 100 are biomolecules, they are carbon-based. So the notion that this planet will ooze oil forever is worth at least a second thought.

Evolutionshift.com: How important is conservation and finding more efficient ways to utilize existing sources of energy?

Bloom: We tend to find efficiencies even when we don’t look for them. When I was a kid, a stereo system swallowed huge amounts of energy. We measured the value of an amplifier by the amount of energy it ate, the number of watts it consumed. Today a stereo is an iPod nano that uses a fraction of that energy. This is the case even with that disturbing gas-guzzler, the automobile. The average automobile today is roughly half the size and weight of an American car from the late 1950s or 1960s. And the miles per gallon are twice as high. However Congress’ failure to mandate higher energy efficiency in automobiles in August, 2008, was deplorable. Congress’ techno-cowardice made me sick.

Evolutionshift.com: What do you think are the most promising alternative sources of energy short term?

Bloom: Biofuels. Cellulosic ethanol—alcohol made from the bark of trees, from woodchips, from saw grass, and from other “waste materials”. But the real jackpot is in the ultimate toxic waste—human shit. We produce excrement in massive quantities. And that excrement is already gathered in central points, waste treatment plants. Then there’s the pig shit polluting many a river in the midwest. This stuff is biomass, man. It’s fuel and energy waiting to be made. Remember the lesson from Reperceiving Leadership—turn garbage into gold.

I just asked one of my friends in the biomass energy industry yesterday if the energy-generation plants he’s perfecting can run on human shit. The answer was yes.

Evolutionshift.com: Long term?

Bloom: Space solar power—harvesting the nearly endless supply of photons from the sun, doing it where the concentration of photons is ten times what it is on earth, doing it where passing clouds and night-time can’t turn off the supply of light, then beaming solar energy back to earth. The beam is the problem. In current proposals, it’s microwave. I’ve been told over and over again by experts who know this technology better than anyone else on the planet, folks like John Mankins, a 25-year NASA veteran, the man who is THE source on space solar power, that the beam is as harmless as the wireless signal you tap for your laptop. Let’s hope the experts are right.

Evolutionshift.com: How important is the government in solving our energy crisis? Will they ever lead or must the people take the lead and force government into action?

Bloom: Under the Carter administration, from 1977 to 1981, we had a war for energy independence. It produced, among other things, the immense wind turbines that today populate wind farms on the tops of hills in places like California. But under Ronald Reagan, the government pulled out of alternative energy research. The result is that the wind turbines invented in America are now made in and imported from Scandinavia.

Alexander Hamilton knew that to invent a paradigm-changing technology, you need both industry AND government. The early presidents of America knew that, too. They subsidized continuous experimentation on the manufacture of firearms. Under government aegis and with government money America’s armament centers developed interchangeable parts and mass production. It took over 50 years of government investment. But by 1851, when the new system of firearms manufacture was demonstrated at London’s Crystal Palace in the Great Exposition, the Europeans were astonished by it. They called this brand new form of mass production “The American System”. Eventually Henry Ford would employ The American System to turn out a major paradigm-shifter, the automobile. But without a half a century of government investment and invention, Ford could not have mass produced the Model T.

In fact, without investment from both the British and American governments, we might never have had the Industrial Revolution.

Evolutionshift.com: If you could set the priorities for the world right now as it pertains to the entire complex issue of energy and our future, what would be the top three?

Bloom:

1. Peace—the most difficult of all things to achieve. We have learned to turn sand into silicon for cellphones and for computers that exponentially upgrade our abilities. But we haven’t learned to tame the beast of group violence. And we must.
2. Energy Independence for the United States, Asia, Africa, South America, and Europe.
3. The Perception Shifts that turn poisons into pleasures and excrement into energy.

Evolutionshift.com: Any final thoughts you might want to share with readers?

Bloom: Those who say that we have raped the planet and have come dangerously close to using and misusing all of Terra’s resources are dead wrong. We are using less than a quadrillionth of the resources of this planet. There are 1.097 sextillion cubic meters of rock, magma, and iron beneath our feet. (1,097,509,500,000,000,000,000) That’s a one-with-eighteen-zeroes-after-it stock of raw materials we haven’t yet learned to use. We haven’t yet learned to turn that sextillion-square-meter stockpile into fuel, food, or energy. We haven’t yet recruited it into the clan of biomass, into the family of DNA. This is a sin against the imperative of life, the imperative of evolution, and the imperative of nature herself.

Is the idea of bioforming a small fraction of this mass to make food, fuel, and energy absurd? Apparently Evolution and Mother Nature don’t think so. As I mentioned, there are bacteria two miles beneath your feet and mine, lithoautotrophs, turning solid granite into soup, salad, entrée, and desert. They’re doing it as you read this very word. If bacteria can do it, surely we creatures with brains can do it better. And thanks to the eco-movement, we can do it without poisoning the current crop of species populating this barely bioformed globe.

Remember, like endangered fish, owls, and flowers, we are nature incarnate. We are a tool nature has evolved to upgrade and change herself. And change is our mandate.

Evolutionshift.com: Howard, thank you very much!

Bloom: My pleasure, thank you!