Has the World Finally Caught Up with Isaac Asimov's Vision?

I vividly remem­ber meet­ing Isaac Asi­mov when I was a teenager. My father had man­aged to get him as a speaker at the col­lege he was teach­ing, where as part of a Fes­ti­val on The Future, the Sci­ence Fic­tion writer was being asked to give a lec­ture on his advice for the future. Besides his impres­sive mutton-chop side­burns and lively demeanor, I also remem­ber what he spoke about.

One of the main points of his talk was that he found him­self greatly influ­enced by an early piece of Sci­ence Fic­tion him­self. It was a novel called “The Man Who Awoke”, writ­ten in 1933 by Lawrence Man­ning. Despite some silly dia­log and flat char­ac­ters, I actu­ally had read the book and really liked it. It was about a rich her­mit named Nor­man Win­ters, who found a way to put him­self into sus­pended ani­ma­tion in a sub­ter­ranean cham­ber he’d con­structed, for thou­sands of years at a time, mak­ing him a sort of one-way time trav­eler. When he first wakes up in the year 5000AD, all of the world’s fos­sil fuels have been used up, and the peo­ple alive at that point use alco­hol refined from wood pulp as a fuel, and referred to the past cen­turies as the Great Age of Waste. The book is a com­pendium of pop­u­lar Sci­ence Fic­tion plots: in later chap­ters, in the times that Win­ters awakes cen­turies later, the Earth is run by a tyran­ni­cal cen­tral com­puter (see any num­ber of Star Trek and other Sci-Fi series plots), then he tries to inter­vene with a city of sleep­ers who can pro­gram their own dreams (see The Matrix), he then finds a world dom­i­nated by anar­chists in enor­mous walk­ing robots who per­form Genetic Exper­i­ments, and finally, he reaches the age where Man dis­cov­ers Immor­tal­ity (and just in time for him, too).

It was that first episode, how­ever, that struck Asi­mov as down­right plau­si­ble; as we know very well today, there are only finite reserves of fos­sil fuels, and we now know that burn­ing them at the rate we’ve been doing for power and trans­porta­tion has led to cat­a­strophic cli­mate changes. After years of study and thought, Asi­mov (back in the 1970’s, when he gave this lec­ture) sug­gested a scheme where we launched satel­lites into geo­sta­tion­ary orbit, much the way weather satel­lites are today. These satel­lites, how­ever, would use arrays of solar cells to col­lect the sun’s energy and con­vert it into elec­tric­ity. To get that power back to the earth, Asi­mov sug­gested a microwave beam, that like a tower between the earth and the satel­lite, would never move, and allow us to con­tin­u­ously har­vest power, with­out any inter­rup­tions of clouds or storms.

Much of Asimov’s pro­posal was dis­missed in the 1970’s, mostly because it was too expen­sive, par­tic­u­larly when you fac­tored in all of the rock­ets that you would need to launch and man­power you’d need to sup­port in space to build such a struc­ture. A lot of peo­ple were still in denial that mankind would ever really run out of oil, despite the Energy Cri­sis of 1973 being a clear warn­ing shot off the US’s bow.

Today, with Manning’s 1933 prophecy com­ing true, and the even more seri­ous prob­lem of global warm­ing from the Green­house Effect, Asimov’s pro­posal is start­ing to look far more attrac­tive. In fact, if you fac­tor in the sav­ings we get by using robots to build the solar arrays (another Asi­mov cre­ation, but oddly enough, he never dis­cussed using them to help build his orbital con­struc­tions), improve­ments in pho­to­voltaic effi­ciency, newer, lighter mate­ri­als, and the idea starts to gain credibility.

I found that last bit out in an arti­cle on the web site for New Sci­en­tist, where the US Pen­ta­gon has sug­gested Space-Based Solar Power Facil­i­ties as a poten­tial solu­tion to our energy problems:

A report released yes­ter­day by the National Secu­rity Space Office (NSSO) rec­om­mends that the US gov­ern­ment spon­sor projects to demon­strate solar-power-generating satel­lites and pro­vide finan­cial incen­tives for fur­ther pri­vate devel­op­ment of the technology.

Space-based solar power would use kilometer-sized solar panel arrays to gather sun­light in orbit. It would then beam power down to Earth in the form of microwaves or a laser, which would be col­lected in anten­nas on the ground and then con­verted to elec­tric­ity. Unlike solar pan­els based on the ground, solar power satel­lites placed in geo­sta­tion­ary orbit above the Earth could oper­ate at night and dur­ing cloudy conditions.

“We think we can be a cat­a­lyst to make this tech­nol­ogy advance,” said US Marine Corps lieu­tenant colonel Paul Damp­housse of the NSSO at a press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day in Wash­ing­ton, DC, US.

The NSSO report rec­om­mends that the US gov­ern­ment spend $10 bil­lion over the next 10 years to build a test satel­lite capa­ble of beam­ing 10 megawatts of elec­tric power down to Earth.

My favourite part of the arti­cle comes right at the end:

…the NSSO and its sup­port­ers say that no fun­da­men­tal sci­en­tific break­throughs are nec­es­sary to pro­ceed with the idea and that space-based solar power will be prac­ti­cal in the next few decades.

“There are no tech­nol­ogy hur­dles that are show stop­pers right now,” said Damphousse.

So, noth­ing new to invent, and we could have much of the prob­lems of the end of cheap oil and Green­house gas buildup fixed within, say, 15 years. That might just save the human race from extinc­tion (even if we do lose the Polar Bear).

I am aware of the dan­gers of a fixed and con­tin­u­ous microwave beam, and we have no idea what it would do the atmos­phere. I cer­tainly wouldn’t want to be a bird (or plane) that wan­dered too close to the beam itself. Nev­er­the­less, I can’t help think­ing that if we’d only lis­tened to Asi­mov, when I met him back in the 1970s, we’d be in much bet­ter shape now, but maybe it’s not too late to heed his advice 30 years later.