Technologies That May Save Us
Here are my leading candidates
I’m a doomer. If you read me, you know that by now. Climate change is already here and civilization will topple in, I’d say, maybe ten to thirty years. Maybe sooner.
However, I love technology and I do think there is some hope that technological solutions will allow us to muddle through and stay this side of total collapse and doom.
Many technologies have been proposed as part of the solution, but I find most of them to be either unrealistic, unscalable, uneconomical, or too far out in the future to help. Here are some of the technologies that I believe may be practical and may save our collective ass.
Space solar power
Terrestrial solar photo-voltaic and solar “tower of power” thermal power generation are clearly solutions that are delivering today and that will continue to do so. But I think space solar is where the long term solution lies.
Solar power harvested in space and beamed via microwaves to where it is needed on the planet makes a lot of sense because it is continuous 24/7 power and thus removes the need for most grid-scale batteries and other grid storage solutions.
Several demonstration projects are already proving the viability of this space solar technology but currently the costs are too high. I believe that the costs can be driven down pretty quickly, though, for example with the SpaceX Starship lowering launch costs.
One company even plans to generate power with terrestrial wind and solar plants and beam it up to satellites, which beam it back down to where it is needed. This technique would allow giant solar arrays in the Sahara desert to power Los Angeles!
Space solar also does an end-run around the terribly complex and expensive need to upgrade the country and world power grids to move power around more efficiently. The grid must still be upgraded, but a lot of the long-haul links can happen through space.
Universal geothermal
Geothermal power is one of the cheapest and cleanest sources of energy (though not as clean as wind and solar).
The big problem with geothermal is that it can be deployed only in specific locations where the geology is favorable because the earth’s heat can be accessed fairly close to the surface.
However, at least one company is attempting to deploy super high powered lasers to punch deep geothermal holes into the earth pretty much anywhere. Holes much deeper than have every been drilled before.
They would like to drill holes near coal-fired power plants and simply convert them over to geothermal. After all, the plants already generate electricity from heat and are already hooked up to the grid.
I admit this technology, the hole-drilling by laser part, is still pretty pie-in-the-sky. But I have high hopes for it working out because it is such a sweet solution.
The high power lasers they are planning to use, by the way, have been developed for nuclear fusion power reactors. It would be great to get something actually useful from all the money that has been sunk into that dead-end technology.
Another company wants to use the same lasers to punch holes horizontally through the earth to create channels for buried power lines. Another great idea!
Small modular nukes
For my friend Jamie Fenton, I’ll throw in small modular nuclear fission reactors, also known as SMRs. I do believe they have a chance of making it.
Small and modular so they don’t require huge financing, mountains of red tape, and a decade to build and deploy.
New technologies that are inherently safe and that burn nuclear waste rather than generate it.
C’mon, industry, get us some demonstration reactors and prove this technology out!
Food from vats
But even if we have limitless energy, how are we going to manage to feed earth’s 8 billion, soon to be 10 billion, 12 billion hungry mouths?
We’ve overfished and overheated the oceans so badly, it is a dwindling food source.
We exhausted so much topsoil, and our totalitarian aggricultural practices create so much greenhouse gas, it’s a terrible dilemma.
The solution? No, not eating insects. It is food from vats! Vast vats of churning, frothing bacteria. Bacteria custom-tailored to mimic meats, fish, and plants in taste, consistency, and nutrition.
Impossible Burgers for everyone!
(Well, no, Impossible Burgers are plant-based, not grown in vats. But plant-based meat substitutes can be a stepping-stone to vat food.)
I like this food-from-vats technology because it is scalable. Great big vats brewing food wherever it is needed. And it depends on biotechnology, one of the fastest moving areas of scientific research.
It’s Soylent Green without the people.
I like the technology but I’m not sure I’ll like the food. Yum?
George Monbiot put this technology on my radar with this column in The Guardian: Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming — and save the planet. In this column, George does a good job of laying out the technology’s potential as well as mentioning possible negative side-effects.
It is currently too expensive of a technology to feed the world. But with the unlimited energy we get from the solutions previously mentioned, it should become cost-effective.
However, the Monbiot column is more than two years old already and we can see that the technology isn’t progressing quite as fast as he predicted. But it still seems like a winner to me. (Monbiot revisited the topic recently, here, but the two-year-old article is more detailed.)
This recent, rather long article in The Guardian on cultured meat comments:
Techno-optimists see a future of widely available “clean meat”, as ecologically and ethically superior to the original as solar power is to coal. Opponents see corporate-controlled lab meat that slots all too comfortably into a broken capitalist food system.
I also like this observation from the conclusion of the same article:
Most critical visions of cellular agriculture are dystopian: unaccountable corporate giants force-feeding a captive population with fake meat. Ironically, that describes the food system we already have.
Carbon capture and sequestration
Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) solutions pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it underground or use it to put the fizz in Coca-Cola.
I am very disappointed to see that even the experts are now predicting that CCS must be part of the long term climate change solution. It will be necessary because we will need to claw back a large amount of the CO2 we have already put up into the atmosphere. Not to mention the tons and tons more we will emit before we finally free ourselves of fossil fuels.
I am disappointed because none of the CCS solutions I have heard of so far are real. They work, but in such small amounts that it would take millions of CCS facilities to make a meaningful impact.
Essentially, the experts are admitting defeat in the CO2 battle.
However, I include CCS in my list of technologies that may just save the world because apparently we simply cannot save the world without it.
I hope that someone will make a breakthrough in CCS that can be substantially more efficient and/or substantially more scalable. Otherwise we will need to build those millions of CCS plants.
Maybe virtually unlimited, low-cost energy from space solar, universal geothermal, and small modular nuclear reactors is what is needed to make CCS real.
Once, when I was a kid at Disneyland, I wished real hard and Tinderbell’s life was saved. Will you join me in wishing for a CCS breakthrough? So billions of lives can be saved?
Doom!
Doom! Doom! I’m tell ya’, doom is coming!
But a lot of smart people are working on a lot of ingenious technologies that just might could save us.
I’m rooting for them!
— Lannie Rose, December 2022
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
