INDUSTRY There is, already, an utterly reliable, maintenance-free, nuclear reactor that consumes its own wastes-the sun. suggest there may be solutions is a "Western" viewpoint, very different from the fatalism much of humankind still lives by. But it is the material results of that Western viewpoint which most of humankind is striving to achieve. I find myself trying hard, as a human being first and a scientist second, to find solutions. For years I have been exploring practical ways to preserve or even improve the environment while at the same time making available to the people of the developing nations the material resources they so desperately want. THE LINK BETWEEN E ERGY AND INDUSTRIALIZATION The central problem of industrial growth is energy. Building more energy-efficient systems, especially transportation systems, is a way we can reduce energy needs. Much of my current efforts focus on the design of a practical transport system which can be faster than the Concorde, is virtually free of noise and enviromental impact, and is more than five times as frugal in its use of energy than an efficient car, train, or airplane: vehicles traveling at or near surface level in a vacuum, supported and driven by magnetic forces and guided by computers. Despite such examples, reducing energy use overall is not an option, because producing most foods, goods, and services depends on energy. The least-developed industrial nations use only a hundredth as much energy as the most developed- but they suffer a living standard a hundred times lower in consequence. We could not reduce energy use without condemning the majority of the world's population to unending poverty. Maintaining the present rate of energy growth in developing nations will require generating more than five times today's energy production 50 years from now. It is so difficult and challenging to do that in an environmentally benign way that we must begin by throwing out most of the ideas we have heard so far. We are concerned enough with the rise of carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect that our desire, as environmentalists, is to phase out the use of fossil fuels. That can be done, even for road transportation, if electricity can be made cheaply enough. Fuels like methane, propane, and butane can be synthesized using recycled carbon dioxide to put energy into portable form. But how do we generate energy cheaply, reliably, without significant environmental impact, and without danger? uclear power is not very cheap, and would require operating 63,000 nuclear reactors worldwide by the middle of the next century. Reactors concentrate energy to an extreme degree, which is why there have been fatal reactor accidents in the real world of fallible, error-prone people. Solar power received at ground level cannot be converted to energy in the amounts needed without paving much of the world with solar cells. That would further raise the Earth's temperature by increasing the heat the ground absorbs. Obtaining power from the temperature difference between surface and deep ocean waters in the tropical oceans would change the global climate profoundly by altering the heat balance at the ocean's surface. Fusion power appears still far from realization, and would not be free of radioactivity. When conventional ideas are exhausted and no solution has been found, it is often wise to examine whether we have, unknowingly, bound our own thinking by convention. In this case we have, because all of the usual answers concerning generating energy are bound by our unspoken limitation to the surface of the Earth. I like to illustrate that tradition-bound thinking by posing the six-match puzzle. Put six matches on a table, do not break any, and use .them to make four equal ttiangles. People who attempt the puzzle usually push the matches about the table for awhile and then give up. The solution is simple: make an equal-sided triangle of three matches, and hold a new match at each point of the triangle with the other ends of those last TRILOGY JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1992
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