How to save the planet

And how any country can do it

Do you know that famous equation? I’m sure you do. E=Mc². Before you stop reading let me tell you this won’t be a post with complex stuff. Just some basic rational thinking with the hope to make you as excited as I am about innovative energy solutions.

So, that equation.

It’s mind-blowing, actually. There’s so much that it implies. But let me take an angle that explains how it relates to saving the planet.

Energy equals mass times the square root of the speed of light.

In other words:

If you take a super small amount of material (mass), and you multiply it by a ridiculously high number (speed of light) , which gets multiplied by that exact number to become a number beyond human comprehension. The result of that calculation is the absurd amount of energy that mass holds.

To put things into perspective: The amount of mass converted to energy during the explosion at Hiroshima was just about 0,7 gram.

We are at war

We are in a war for energy over anything else. You can see it in the actual wars that are fought. Many of them are simply fought to secure nature’s scarce assets, like oil.

But what if I told you that climate change, and for that matter any issue we experience as a human race, can be solved, simply by energy. Some examples:

• We can desalinate water to become drinkable water, but desalination is extremely energy consumptive and doesn’t pay off. If we’d have unlimited energy, we could desalinate water all around the world to supply drinkable water for everybody. Hell, we could rehydrate complete dried-out lakes with desalinated water.
• We could wash the air and extract greenhouse gasses. We can do it already but it is simply not energy efficient.
• We can even bring plastics back to their oily form through depolymerization, removing the necessity to extract more of nature’s reserves and actually start exploring a whole new way of recycling the waste we’ve produced thus far
• Waste-filled lands and countries can be turned into goldmines, reversing economical refugee effects and reducing power conflicts
• With unlimited energy, nobody would burn fossil fuels to warm their homes. Home temperatures can easily be kept stable (in hot as well as cold weather) by air conditioners. Every home could be heated, and transitioning to this would be a breeze and a no-brainer when you are able to supply energy for (nearly) free

From that perspective, it makes a lot of sense to invest in solving energy demand by revolutionising the way we obtain it. And not by copying what we are familiar with. When we are able to supply an unlimited amount of energy for nearly free to the common man, a revolution is bound to happen.

This comes with great risk as well.

Unlimited energy would turn our world upside down. Like I’ve written in my post “why we innovate”, once we’ve solved that problem, more problems will arise.

For example, diamonds are super expensive because nature exerted massive amounts of pressure (read: energy) onto a piece of carbon which changed or rearranged its molecular structure. With unlimited energy, the currency of this transformed material will fall rapidly. And this is just a super silly example.

Not to mention the balance of power on earth. When chances are equal for everybody, there’s no leverage to suppress other countries that much apart from religion or belief. But with no existential stick to slap your people with, it will be harder to mobilise forces to go to war.

Hydrogen makes sense

Just kidding. It doesn’t. At least not for the common man. Hydrogen has to be kept under pressure, has no scent, is highly explosive and requires a completely new infrastructure for storage and transportation.

It’s key to understand that when we consider hydrogen engines as a valid alternative to combustion engines. Because if there’s one thing that you can monetise well it’s a proprietary distribution network of something you can’t produce or store well at home. This makes it interesting as an alternative for the monopoly of the current oil giants. Moving and storing hydrogen is a risky operation, and the only reason hydrogen makes sense, is because it makes people more reliant on energy suppliers.

The funny thing is that there is already a super good alternative. Direct energy transfer to forward motion in electrical cars with batteries. The network to transfer the energy is our light net. It’s been there for ages and won’t go away any time soon. Every house is equipped with it. There is no risk of explosions, nor is there any unwanted or risky side effect to transfer the energy. And I don’t know if you’ve seen Tesla’s latest battery inventions? Electrical cars and their constantly evolving battery packs are evolving rapidly to outperform conventional cars with combustion engines. There is no need to doubt range, charging times, the cost of the car or impact on nature’s scarce resources anymore.

The irony with hydrogen is: to produce it, you have to pump massive amounts of energy into water to split it into oxygen and hydrogen. It’s an extra step, where you lose energy, with unwanted side effects in distribution and usage.

Hydrogen does make sense however when it comes to the industry, for furnaces to heat steel for example, you need higher temperatures than what heaters running directly on energy can supply. Burning chemicals is instant and way hotter than any energy powered heater could possibly generate. But again, that’s for industry, not the common man.

We can do this because we already are

Use your divine google skills to self-research these terms:

• Tokamak
• Stellarator
• Wendelstein 7-x
• or other projects like positron fusion annihilation laser harnessing antimatter for annihilation.

The first three examples are projects that intend to do nuclear fusion on earth (not to be misinterpreted with fission, which is done in nuclear power plants). Basically heating up (moving atoms) so hard that they start colliding with each other so hard, that the atoms smash into each other and that bizarre amount of energy that holds an atom together can’t refuse anymore, forming a heavier atom. But its total mass is slightly lighter than the combined mass of the two atoms we had before. The difference in mass interchanged into the energy (E) we were talking about earlier. This brings us back to where we started our story with. A little bit of mass (M) was converted to a lot of (E) in the equation E=Mc².

Fun fact, did you know that only 1/64th of the sun is in fusion at its core? Only at the core of a star gravity is high enough to create enough heat and friction to do fusion.

And did you know that stars are the birthplaces of new, heavier atoms that formed every element we know of today? We are quite literally ‘stardust’.

This means that we are close to harnessing the energy of the stars, right here on earth. How cool is that?!

Just imagine and fantasise the implications of being the first country that manages to create these vast amounts of energy, just by innovating the way we obtain it.

It would be a small investment,
to change the world for the better,
forever.

Sorry I lied

It’s not the planet that needs saving. It’s the human race that needs saving. Life will find a way with or without humans. So this war on energy is ours to win. Not for the sake of nature. For the sake of life as we love it.