Welcome to Thursday Things! This week we beam down some sunshine, weigh in on whales, and look on the bright side.
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Some ancient people believed a sun goddess who made the sun rise each day. As if! Photo by Rampal Singh on Unsplash
Power out of space
One of our fixations1 here at Thursday Things is space-based solar power, sometimes called SPS for “solar power satellites”. With the latest solar eclipse behind us, let’s check in on how that’s going.
Space-based solar power may be one step closer to reality, thanks to this key test
One step closer to reality!
Since we often find ourselves taking two steps back from reality, this is good news.
A first-of-its-kind lab demonstration shows how solar power transmission from space could work.
The demonstration, carried out by U.K.-based startup Space Solar, tested a special beaming device that can wirelessly transmit power 360 degrees around. That would be important for a potential future space-based power station, as its position toward the sun and Earth would change over the course of each day due to our planet's rotation.
The demonstrator is a key component of the CASSIOPeiA space-based solar power plant concept that is being developed by Space Solar. The company envisions that CASSIOPeiA could be in space within a decade, providing gigawatts of clean energy much more efficiently than solar plants on Earth.
As we’ve noted before, while terrestrial solar power has many benefits, it also has limitations, like not working at night, or under heavy cloud cover. There is also the problem of getting the electricity produced from your array of solar panels out in the desert somewhere to where people actually need it.
SpCASSIOPeiA would be placed in geostationary orbit, a path about 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) above Earth in which the orbital velocity of a satellite matches the speed of Earth’s rotation. As a result, a spacecraft at this altitude appears suspended above a fixed region on Earth. ace-based solar overcomes those obstacles.
The recently tested component will ensure that the giant satellite has a constant view of both Earth and the sun in order to provide clean energy 24/7, unlike solar plants on Earth, which only work during daytime and get affected by bad weather.
That’s what I just said. The sun is always shining in space!
A single CASSIOPeiA plant could power more than a million homes, researchers estimate. Solar power plants in space, although difficult to build, would produce energy 13 times more efficiently compared to those on Earth, as their view of the sun is not obscured by atmospheric gases.
Shine on, solar power from space. Shine on.
How bright is the future?
Checking in on solar satellites also reinforces that we have far more cause for optimism about humanity’s future than for despair. Despite the various wars and other crises we see in the news each day, on the whole our prospects for a better, brighter future are quite good.
I say this with full awareness that some may scoff and I fully respect your right to be utterly wrong in your doom and gloom pessimism. But you are wrong, because we’ve seen it all before, as this piece by Robert Tracinski reminds us:
What Big Thing Are We Getting Wrong About the Future?
I recently tracked down a copy of a fascinating old book, “Our World in Space,” by Isaac Asimov with illustrations by Robert McCall. Published in 1974, five years after the moon landing, it wonderfully captures a moment of exuberant excitement about the achievements of space exploration. But in one section, it also captures the way the people of an era can be blind to their own big errors.
Asimov’s blind spot was the 1970s obsession with overpopulation, the idea that if then-current population trends continued, the world would soon have more people than it could support. Billions would starve! Famine! War! We’re all going to die!
Back then the world’s population was around 4 billion people. What horrors would await when the population doubled to 8 billion? All the best and brightest, all the smartest people, including Asimov, said we were doomed:
Yet at the time Asimov wrote his gloomy words, he would have been solidly in the middle of the elite consensus. It’s clear he thinks others would regard him as irresponsible for not mentioning so important and well established a fact.
Yet here in 2024, the global population has passed 8 billion. And while we certainly have our problems, billions dying of starvation or fighting over the last Soylent Green wafer isn’t one of them. If anything, we might need to worry about depopulation.
So what went wrong?
Or, more accurately, what went right?
The “experts” of the 1970s prescribed draconian solutions like mass sterilization (which only China took them up on at a large scale) and centralized planning to dole out the Earth’s scarce and dwindling resources to the teeming masses.2
What the experts overlooked is the human factor — human ingenuity, human imagination, human adaptability, the human capacity to solve problems.
They also fell into the “if present trends continue” trap. Yes, you can show mathematically that if things go on exactly as they are now indefinitely terrible things will happen. The population will reach 10 trillion people! Where will be put them all?
But present trends almost never continue in a straight line, because conditions change. Technology advances. People, at both the individual and societal level, respond to changing condition and change their own behavior and decisions.
(I’m sure in the 1800s there was some Poindexter whale oil analyst predicting that if present conditions continued we’d run out of whale oil and there would be no way to light our lanterns. But we didn’t run out of whale oil. A better lighting solution was found long before that happened. The whales were saved!3)
The experts of yore missed that Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution were about to happen and massively increase global food production. Mass starvation avoided!
I would venture to suggest that 1970s experts — along with the journalists who parroted and hyped their views, and those in government, business, and elsewhere who tried to implement their solutions — also fell prey to the error of groupthink.
If all the smart people say the sky is falling, there is great social pressure to also say the sky is falling and to not ask questions — because questioning the consensus would indicate you’re not one of the smart people. Since all smart people — and all the “experts” — agree that the sky is falling. It’s on TV! It must be true!
Just a typical day in the future. Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash
Fortunately, here in the more enlightened 21st century, we have smarter and more clear-thinking experts who are not subject to groupthink, blind spots, or hyping bonkers solutions to supposed crises that are going to kill us all.
Ha! Just kidding
Back to Tracinski:
This started me thinking: What big thing are we getting wrong about the world, and the future, today? What idea is so universally accepted that we don’t realize all the things that are wrong with it?
There are undoubtedly several such ideas. (I will even acknowledge—purely in theory, mind you—that I might be wrong about something.) But I can propose one idea that enjoys much the same status as the “population bomb” in Asimov’s time—and which is wrong for many of the same reasons.
Spoiler alert: It’s the present day climate panic. We won’t go into all that, but the parallels with the overpopulation panic are noteworthy.
This leads me to the final parallel. Back in Asimov’s day, it was considered incredibly embarrassing for an educated and intellectual type, particularly someone dedicated to science, to doubt catastrophic predictions about overpopulation. Didn’t the math make it inevitable? Skeptics like Julian Simon were either vilified or ignored, and they often still don’t get much credit today, long after they were proven right. The other lesson we should learn from the overpopulation debacle is the importance of doubt and dissent, of probing the blind spots of our own era.
True. We should always be asking questions — especially about our own assumptions.
Sure, maybe the world is in such a crisis that we should go with the central planning and eating bugs in the dark, without pants.
And maybe we should massively cut back on our use of fossil fuels to generate energy even if the hypothesis that greenhouse gases are driving a catastrophic change in the global climate is wrong.
Right? Never mind the CO2, burning coal and oil produces massive air pollution leading to smog, asthma, and child labor chimney sweeps. There are good reasons to develop alternative energy sources that are relatively clean, reliable, and — much as I hate this overused word — sustainable.
If only human ingenuity was up to the task. If only there was some way to, oh, I don’t know, grab some of that almost infinite solar energy blasting out from the sun and beam it down to earth to power our homes and cities.
If only.
Thank you for reading!
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Other fixations include lasers, dog mayors, lost cities, and airships. That is not a comprehensive list.
Somehow with these “experts” the answer is always more centralized planning under the direction of the experts, no matter what the supposed crisis is. Funny how that works.
Kerosene! The whale-safe way to see!
This is an oversimplification for comedic effect. The “whale oil myth” is a whole fascinating topic in itself:
The whale oil myth surfaces again
One of the oil industry’s greatest historical myths is that petroleum arrived in 1861, just in time to light up the night and, as a bonus, save the whales from the whalers.
Even at the time it was something of a joke, as we see in this cartoon of whales celebrating the discovery of petroleum.
That brings us to the Whale Oil Myth. That’s the idea that petroleum oil, and the free market, saved the whales. Whales had come under a serious threat of extinction by 1860. And petroleum oil did fuel most lamps in the latter 19th century. So what really happened?
The cost of whale oil had risen as we killed off whales. It had always been too costly for most ordinary users. And only the wealthy could afford it by the end of the Civil War. We lit most lamps with far cheaper oils — oils derived from coal, as well as from plants and land animals. We lit lamps with turpentine, lard, or alcohol. Then camphine became popular during the Civil War. That much-used witch's brew was a mixture of camphor oil and a turpentine derivative.
The point is, we were never going to run out of whales.