After decades of environmental education, humans have become both more aware of the effects of their daily activities on their planet, and more hostile against organizations that fail to meet their social responsibility to the rest of mankind. As a result, “going green” has become a catch phrase amongst businesses, an ongoing, highly publicized trend that has companies competing to become the most environmentally friendly in the eyes and pockets of consumers. Money, resources, and intelligence are being funneled into these clean technology efforts. These new advancements are not only a trend, but a necessity for the continuation of humanity.
As I noted before, going green is an ongoing trend in business. For example, Ford is concentrating its efforts in manufacturing their EcoBoost engines, designed to improve fuel efficiency and reduce carbon dioxide emissions without sacrificing power, with the handy bonus of being manufactured in an economically struggling area. Designs have been crafted to install wind turbines into broken electrical towers, thereby turning the towers into wind energy powerhouses and providing an energy boost to a ready-made grid, as well as complementing newly built electrical towers. These designs also handily avoid the complaints that wind turbines mar the beauty of the scenery. It's not just obvious targets like cars that are being made environmentally healthy: products as mundane as media converters and LCD TVs have been "greened", substantially reducing the energy these products consume, thereby reducing their long term strain on energy supplies, the environment, and even the electricity bill.
The proliferation in solar technology is also proceeding at an impressive rate. Taiwan recently finished construction on a solar-powered stadium that generates all of its electricity from solar technology. The fifty-thousand seat arena is sheathed in 8,844 solar panels that fuels a system so powerful that it takes six minutes to power up the stadium’s entire lighting system, on top of powering thousands of lights and the two jumbo vision screens and feeding the majority of the local area's power needs. Israel, a nation forever vulnerable to military attack and energy supply disruption, is backing the efforts of a kibbutz to turn farmland into fields of solar panels, turning the desert into a power plant. A growing band of farmers in the south of France are putting up solar panels to supplement farm incomes as well as supply power to the area.
Just as solar technology is running the gamut from the massive corporate project to the entrepenuerial level, it is also receiving upgrades. Research is progressing on a way to manufacture solar cells as easily and cheaply as printing presses produce paper money. With each passing year, new cells are created that are ever more efficient, with companies pressing onward to create better cells. Even nanotechnology has been applied to produce more advanced, sophisticated, and efficient solar cells.
And those efforts are simply the ones focused on improving existing technology. Billions of gallons of gasoline are being targeted for replacement not only with ethanol from food crops, but with biofuels made from plants specifically for that purpose. Hydrogen gas pure enough to power a fuel cell has been created through combining enzymes with non-food cellulose like woodchips. Artificial photosynthesis is being explored, with some seeking to emulate the full process while others seek to stop at the step that releases hyrdrogen. There are plans to experiment with powering data centers with methane gas from landfills, and there is even a fantastic design to create what is called a traveling-wave nuclear reactor that would turn non-fissile material into the fuel it needs, permitting a reactor to run for centuries without needing fresh fuel.
That isn't to say that everything going on in the world of green technology is wonderful. In the same way that there was a real estate bubble that burst in the United States, Ireland, Britain, Spain, and elsewhere in the world, there is currently a biofuel bubble that is already nearing the bursting point. There are billions in cash invested into dozens of biofuel ventures, from start-ups funded by venture capitalists to energy company sponsored research efforts. The biofuel industry will be completely unable to meet the government mandates for biofuel consumption for decades, especially as meeting those standards would require only building hundreds of fuel factories, each with price tags at half a billion dollars, andeach surrounded by literal thousands of hectares of prime farmland, thereby reducing food-growing capacity.
Biofuel is a logistical nightmare, unsustainable by economies of scale or simple competitiveness. The billions being thrown into it is waste, as alternatives to both cheap oil and biofuels exist, the prime example being direct conversion into bioelectricity, which is more efficient and yield more energy than both. There's also the problem of opportunity cost; green jobs, or jobs derived from green technology, cost two and a half times more than jobs derived from cheap fuel like oil. With the billions of dollars the United States government is spending on green jobs, less jobs will result, a rather brutal indiction in a time of global unemployment.
However, despite the obvious drawbacks, there is plenty to support about green tech. We live on a planet of limited resources and limited viability. Green technology expands the uses of our resources, reduces the damage to our planet, and allows to sustain more people. Not only that, this green techonology increases the viability and reduces the cost of space colonies and space exploration. Green technology encourages us to think long term. In three generations of searching, we have yet to find another world like ours. Perhaps in the future we’ll find such a world, but for now, we have this one chance, one world, one home, and we must take care of it.
Sources
The Biofuel Bubble
Which Is Better—Biofuels or Bioelectricity?
Ford To Build Cleaner Engine At Ohio Plant
Allied Telesis Upgrades its Media Converters to Ship with Energy Star-Compliant Power Supplies
JVC LCD TVs Beat New Energy Star Standards
Wind Turbine Towers Win Metropolis Next Generation Prize!
Green Jobs, Ole: Is the Spanish Clean-Energy Push a Cautionary Tale?
Hydrogen Fuel From Woodchips And Other Non-food Sources
Next-Gen Green Data Centers: Powered by Methane?
Storing solar energy by turning over a new leaf
Taiwan’s Solar Stadium is 100% Powered by the Sun
Biggest Solar Deal Ever Announced — We’re Talking Gigawatts
A Solar Dream from Israeli Kibbutzim
French farmer is new sun king
New technology enables solar cells to be printed like money
TR10: Traveling-Wave Reactor
Sanyo hits world record for solar cell efficiency
Nanotechnology Researchers Make Solar Energy Advance
Friday, May 29, 2009
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
The Sacredness of History
History is the past, those things that have come before. Even as you read this, the words you saw before have become a part of history. The preservation of past events for future generations has been an obsession of mankind for as long as we have been able to walk upright. Oral traditions transmitted messages and testimony from one generation to the next, millennia before the creation of the written word. Admittedly, the use of oral transmission is filled with flaws, as history becomes legend, legend becomes myth, and things become forgotten, but the essence of the story is conveyed to its intended audience.
This means that, ultimately, history is the record of everything we as a people have done, and all the lessons we have learned. History is essentially the greatest story told by humanity, never ending and continuous so long as there is a single person who still lives, and never forgotten so long as a single book remains. The past defines the present and creates the future, so it is important not to forget. Without history, there is neither an identity in the present nor a future to create.
As the past is preserved through the hands of historians, this means that how the story is told is helplessly in the hands of humans. Obviously, this is a flawed process. The instinct of man is to make himself look good while making others appear much worse than they really are. While there are historians who seek the truth, there are others who seek to demolish heroes and conceal that which inconveniences them.
The most dangerous of the latter are the historical revisionists. First, I will add a qualification to this. Revision, in and of itself, is not necessarily bad. Revisiting facts when research has put them in a new context is no more evil than correcting a typo on a paper. Take, for example, the dig at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. Large, clearly sculpted stones have been found here, covered in intricate carvings. What makes the find unique is the fact that the artifacts are 13,000 years old, almost three times the age of the Egyptian pyramids. Not only does Gobekli Tepe predate “history,” it defies the common state at that time by being a farming community in a world of hunters and gatherers. This first settlement in beautiful and lush terrain was abandoned when man wore away the countryside, resulting in the present-day desert and probably setting the foundation for the legend of the Garden of Eden.
However, for every revision, there is an equal and opposite counter-revision. Take the controversy over the height of Napoleon, Emperor of France. He was a bogeyman to scare British children (and adults!) while he lived…while subject to endless propaganda that he was a tiny tyrant. Unfortunately, this minor slur stuck in popular culture, despite strong evidence that Napoleon was actually a respectable 1.7 meters, the average height for his time.
Revisionism is another beast entirely. Revisionism takes the evidence of the past and discards it in favor of a completely false assertion. Take, for example, the revolting attempted usurpations of the accepted truth to Cleopatra VII, who enchanted Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonious, and Charlotte, wife of George III of England. Black authors have attempted to claim that these women were either black or of black descent. In the case of Cleopatra, this patently false assertion is bludgeoned by blunt reality; as a Ptolemy of Egypt, Cleopatra belonged to an in-bred Macedonian royal family that had no trace of any Nubian blood. Charlotte, and by extension the British royal family, are claimed to be descended from the black mistress of a Portuguese king, a claim refuted by noted genealogists.
The most heinous revisionism, of course, goes into the category of Holocaust deniers. It honestly is not enough to say that this sort of thing should be accorded the status of a crime. The Holocaust is one of humanity’s best documented atrocities; the Nazi penchant toward paperwork and bureaucracy provided an incredible amount of firsthand genuine sources that are irrefutable by any standard historical research method. What makes it worse is that these denials do not come from dedicated analytical research, but rather, from political opportunists out to improve their standing amongst their audience or to grandstand on the global stage.
The goal of a historian is to preserve the past accurately for the future. Revisionists are not historians, because they seek to change the past for their present. There is no worse nightmare for a historian than for the truth to be buried under a cascade of revisionist lies, and no worse fate for a society than to believe falsehoods without a shred of collaborating evidence. After all, if an identity is built on a lie, it's as sound as a house built on sand.
This means that, ultimately, history is the record of everything we as a people have done, and all the lessons we have learned. History is essentially the greatest story told by humanity, never ending and continuous so long as there is a single person who still lives, and never forgotten so long as a single book remains. The past defines the present and creates the future, so it is important not to forget. Without history, there is neither an identity in the present nor a future to create.
As the past is preserved through the hands of historians, this means that how the story is told is helplessly in the hands of humans. Obviously, this is a flawed process. The instinct of man is to make himself look good while making others appear much worse than they really are. While there are historians who seek the truth, there are others who seek to demolish heroes and conceal that which inconveniences them.
The most dangerous of the latter are the historical revisionists. First, I will add a qualification to this. Revision, in and of itself, is not necessarily bad. Revisiting facts when research has put them in a new context is no more evil than correcting a typo on a paper. Take, for example, the dig at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. Large, clearly sculpted stones have been found here, covered in intricate carvings. What makes the find unique is the fact that the artifacts are 13,000 years old, almost three times the age of the Egyptian pyramids. Not only does Gobekli Tepe predate “history,” it defies the common state at that time by being a farming community in a world of hunters and gatherers. This first settlement in beautiful and lush terrain was abandoned when man wore away the countryside, resulting in the present-day desert and probably setting the foundation for the legend of the Garden of Eden.
However, for every revision, there is an equal and opposite counter-revision. Take the controversy over the height of Napoleon, Emperor of France. He was a bogeyman to scare British children (and adults!) while he lived…while subject to endless propaganda that he was a tiny tyrant. Unfortunately, this minor slur stuck in popular culture, despite strong evidence that Napoleon was actually a respectable 1.7 meters, the average height for his time.
Revisionism is another beast entirely. Revisionism takes the evidence of the past and discards it in favor of a completely false assertion. Take, for example, the revolting attempted usurpations of the accepted truth to Cleopatra VII, who enchanted Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonious, and Charlotte, wife of George III of England. Black authors have attempted to claim that these women were either black or of black descent. In the case of Cleopatra, this patently false assertion is bludgeoned by blunt reality; as a Ptolemy of Egypt, Cleopatra belonged to an in-bred Macedonian royal family that had no trace of any Nubian blood. Charlotte, and by extension the British royal family, are claimed to be descended from the black mistress of a Portuguese king, a claim refuted by noted genealogists.
The most heinous revisionism, of course, goes into the category of Holocaust deniers. It honestly is not enough to say that this sort of thing should be accorded the status of a crime. The Holocaust is one of humanity’s best documented atrocities; the Nazi penchant toward paperwork and bureaucracy provided an incredible amount of firsthand genuine sources that are irrefutable by any standard historical research method. What makes it worse is that these denials do not come from dedicated analytical research, but rather, from political opportunists out to improve their standing amongst their audience or to grandstand on the global stage.
The goal of a historian is to preserve the past accurately for the future. Revisionists are not historians, because they seek to change the past for their present. There is no worse nightmare for a historian than for the truth to be buried under a cascade of revisionist lies, and no worse fate for a society than to believe falsehoods without a shred of collaborating evidence. After all, if an identity is built on a lie, it's as sound as a house built on sand.
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