Here Comes the Sun
the earth is just the middleman
Energy and how we generate it has ALWAYS BEEN about our Sun. This is a worthwhile reminder to those that believe only fossil fuels can provide our future. The truth is the fossil fuels were CREATED by the Sun in a TERRIBLY INEFFICIENT process over hundreds to millions of years. None of the things we concentrated on burning the last 150 years would be here without it. Today I am hopeful and post about how just grabbing the perpetual gift of the Sun out of the air is the path to a wonderful future. I hope that some of you will stop fighting it.
The Inspiration
In a few recent posts, I wrote about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) mission that began last Christmas Eve. The JWST pushes the boundary of what human exploration can accomplish. Most importantly, the breakthroughs will lead to even more missions. I hope that our nation can always remain committed to the exploration of the unknown. I believe that the more we explore and learn about our place in the world, the more likely we will embrace how fortunate we are to live in this age and perhaps learn to value each other a bit more. I don’t have any more to say about that but it led to tonight’s post. Tonight the subject is Goldilocks.
The Setup
One of my recurring themes is how this is the most amazing time to be alive. It is also true that the United Nations estimates that 1/3 of all of the world’s resources used to date (250000 years) have been consumed in the last 30 years! We are in a race to not create problems and challenges faster than we can solve them! I think this statement is a helpful way for people to understand how much of an impact our modern lives have on the environment. It is easy to say “Our actions are nothing compared to a volcano” or something of that sort. The magnitude and recency of natural resource use illuminate the story with facts instead of feelings. Our technology, going forward will demand that we begin to see our place in the world through that new perspective. That is not meant as a negative outlook. I have faith that humanity will rise to the challenge and figure out a way for things to improve. The futurist Ray Kurzweil estimates that in the next 20-25 years our progress will supersede the last 20000 years combined. Such bold assertions sound absurd. It turns out that if we continue on our progress path of the last 75 years, we will meet this goal handily.
In a prior post titled “5 Nanometers”, I explained that the first transistor was developed in 1947. Today there are more transistors than all the leaves on all the trees of the world. Numbers so large are hard to fathom. I provided a number estimate for transistors and even the number I provided is outdated. A more impressive perspective to try and understand is that worldwide production of transistors each YEAR now exceeds ALL previous production COMBINED. The number is MORE THAN DOUBLING EVERY SINGLE YEAR.
It is foreseen by Mr. Kurzweil what he calls a technological singularity around 2045. Kurzweil is a “wild-eyed” optimist. He foresees that with good planning, this planet with almost a billion years left before the sun burns out is an incredible place from which we can make our mark on the universe. These sorts of estimates are difficult to evaluate. Examples of thinking and reasoning help us make judgments about the claims.
One of my favorite exponential growth examples is the Human Genome Project. The process of mapping the human genome formally began in 1990. By 1997, 1% of the human genome had been successfully mapped. Old-world thinking, akin to “how long will it take to dig this tunnel” might lead people to think at this rate it will take 700 years to finish the job since the first 1% took 7 years. Rubes and politicians warned of overspending and the unreliability of the science. The human genome was mapped to completion by 2003. The underlying technology had improved drastically in the intervening period. The people involved in the project BELIEVED that science would deliver these astronomical improvements and estimated the project would take 15 years. They finished 2 years early. The scientists had faith in their projections. This project was funded largely by the Department of Energy and the National Institute of Health. Don’t accept at face value that government-private partnerships do not work.
Burning things (like trees and sticks) for light and heat later led to our advanced society. All of this has happened in the last 8000 years. Coal and oil did not reach broad use until about 1880 («150 years). In narrow applications the Chinese civilization was transporting gas through bamboo piping but it would take centuries for the Europeans to “discover” it. Not unlike the printing press of Gutenberg (the Chinese were printing on porcelain type centuries prior). When carbon-laden stuff gets burned, heat rises and gets stuck in the atmosphere rather than remaining in the ground. Here is my point about ALL OF THIS. There is no need to make topics like climate change a political issue. I much prefer Ockham’s Razor (keep it simple). All of this advancement is due to a singular factor:
We live on a planet that is referred to as a “Goldilocks planet”. That means we are not too close and not too far away from our sun. The next big thing you need to prevent from just being scorched is an atmosphere and a magnetic field that blocks most of the light spectrum away from the planet. Those are WONDERFUL and BLESSED circumstances. There are not a lot more things required to make everything else work thanks to the sun.
The early stuff we burned (trees and plants) grew thanks to the sun and atmosphere trapping some water.
The next stuff we burn (coal, oil, and gas) all results because of the living things (thanks to the Sun) that eventually die and settle, get buried under pressure, and concentrate carbon for us. Don’t dwell on “good” energy / “bad” energy. The truth is it ALL RESULTS from the Sun. Take it directly and eliminate either one hundred (for trees) or a million-year middleman (for coal and oil). Using the sunlight directly with no middleman means you don’t muck up the atmosphere in the process.
The next big step for us was to dig this stuff up and burn it to build our modern lives. The consequence of all this burning was that all of the stuff that was buried is now distributing itself in our atmosphere.
Now, in this golden age of reason, we are FINALLY SMART ENOUGH to eliminate the million-year-old natural processes required for the oil and the coal and rather just grab some of the light that led to all of this in the first place from our sun. We have another one billion years to just grab what we need, FOR FREE, and not disrupt the atmosphere and climate that we need to remain stable for us to feed, clothe, and protect the eight-plus billion of us that are counting on us winning the race to “solve the problem” before it “interrupts what makes this planet “just right” for us (thanks Goldilocks).
A recent estimate concluded that “current technology solar panels” which improve just like transistors would require 51 billion panels to fulfill all of the needs of everyone on Earth. Boy, that sounds like a lot. Here’s some perspective — in 2017 we were making 30 trillion transistors per second. For those of you who work in a business that makes things, the number above must be sobering. Don’t be so intimidated by numbers like 51 billion. Instead of dwelling (or believing) when someone reports that solar power is not practical, please realize the sun is inexhaustible (at least for a billion years). A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's TOTAL ENERGY PRODUCTION. There is more than enough if we apply ourselves.
No one imagined that one transistor in 1947 could become 30 trillion per second by 2020. This is the reality of exponential growth in silicon wafer technology. Solar energy has been following a similar type of growth steadily for 30+ years. The naysayers have been claiming “it can’t keep improving” but our best model of transistors tells us it can and will. Here is a graph of solar production since the early 1990s. The numbers are NOT as important as the scale. The graph doesn’t show the increase from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 to 5 but rather 1 to 10 to 100 to 1000 to 10000. It is this sort of sci-fi growth that points to an inevitable future for this technology if pursued. Solar production has been doubling every two years FOR ALMOST FORTY YEARS. Solar is currently providing about 2.5% of power generation nominally. If the industry continues to innovate at the same rate it has for nearly forty years for eight more years, the possible capacity will be 40% of worldwide energy production (2.5 » 5.0 » 10.0 » 20.0 » 40). The naysayers of course just like to say “It can’t keep growing like that”. They do not know, but rather a bias. Our minds are not built to think exponentially. I cannot imagine, as a child when I listened to a pocket transistor radio (which had about ten transistors in it) I would have believed you if you said in forty years we would be making 30 trillion transistors per second (3750 per second for every man, woman, and child on Earth).
Storing the energy for when the sun was not shining was always viewed as a challenge. The development of batteries similar to those used in electric cars solves this problem. It is a brave new world. Although not on the chart, in 2020, about 80% of ALL NEW ENERGY capacity worldwide was renewable, and over 90% of that 80% was wind and solar. There is no controversy about these matters. Not unlike the tobacco companies, oil and gas interests will invest their money in advertising and lobbying to confuse and slow progress. They lack the path to lower prices, the easy oil and gas to get without consequence is already gone. The $2/barrel oil seeping out of the ground in the Middle East is gone. New oil extraction is offshore, in deep wells or injects chemicals to crack shale and rock. Where there is oil and shale there is also groundwater and only 3% of all the water on earth is not in the ocean. Injecting high-pressure chemicals into the shale between oil and groundwater seems to me a large gamble. It is no wonder that most funding for horizontal drilling is limited liability entities. In the case of a long-term problem, the investors get their money and the costs for remediation will be laid off on taxpayers. Privatizing the gain and socializing the loss is never a good long-term plan. It is past time to consider the risks to the water we cannot live without and at least require exploration to bond for the costs to remediate independent of bankruptcy reorganization.
Do not misunderstand that I am “anti-oil or anti-gas”. I merely believe that any material we extract and utilize should be responsible for the FULLY LOADED COST of its use. If each burned gallon generates a certain amount of material that collectively the whole world must live with the consequences of down the road, perhaps we should tax such use to reduce its tendency. Likewise, if a solar panel transfers some cost back to society in difficult-to-recycle materials or pollution, the fully loaded cost should be estimated and applied. In this way, we choose the very best option rather than transferring costs to the next generation for actions we know to be negative. These are not abstract ideas. In my early career, I worked on projects that always REQUIRED a performance bond. This is just another name for insurance. Imagine if someone drilled a bit of oil in the adjacent area to your property. Wouldn’t it seem reasonable that an INSURANCE PRODUCT akin to escrow (good enough for regular folks when they buy a home) was posted to deal with any future remediation and would survive bankruptcy? It seems then the driller would be incentivized to take ALL PRACTICAL MEASURES into account and taxpayers would not become the payer of last resort. I hope and believe for many generations to come, we will continue to use oil and eventually will return to its use primarily as a lubricant.
So how did I get to this topic and think about Goldilocks? One of the primary missions of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be to look closely at a VERY LARGE INVENTORY of planets that will be able to be viewed and evaluated. They fit the criteria that they are quite similar in their distance and temperature profiles to Earth and are therefore the best places to look for other life in our universe. My favorite thing I learned when I posted about JWST was that all of the scientists and technicians who labored for the mission know that the telescope will run out of fuel in about 5-10 years (because of the precision of the mission thus far, this number has been updated to closer to fifteen years). The telescope has 63 gallons of fuel for the life of the mission. While it is conjecture and no plan yet exists, there are planning stage concepts to refuel certain satellites out of reach of manned missions via robotics. Whether such a plan could apply to JWST is not important. A human who can hope to live 80 years lives in a WONDERFUL world when there is an optimistic outlook that in only 10 years, something they cannot even conceive yet will happen. That is a wonderful act of faith.
Here is a good bit of music from my youth. The accompanying video is soothing. It also feels like a tribute to all of the dreamers who have sacrificed and become the successors of every human being who looked up at the night sky.