Why no ponies?  Everyone should have a pony, shouldn't they?

#7 is somewhat addressed with the OLPC (one laptop per child) program already underway. 1 million of these "$100" (really $130) laptops are already on order and will be shipped soon.

As for #11, you should read "Why Things Bite Back" by Edward Tenner, if you have not already done so. To me it's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" for technology.

All items are possible, not all are the ideal solution, but the last is impossible.

A basic problem is that the listed goals are mostly not well-defined. For example, "A way to connect everyone in the world to the Internet within a decade" is not defined as to whether it is engineering or politics. One asumes politics is the intended meaning, because the "way" to connect is to connect.

Better-defined goals are often well-addressed by prizes. Here's a list I would promote:

1) A better battery or super-capacitor. With pretty good ones available now, this would defined by hard numbers such as capacity, shelf life, and purchase cost.

2) Photovoltaic systems with 50% efficiency. With current designs at 21%, proposed new systems at 40%, and theoretical work suggesting 60%, 50% is a realizable goal.

3) A cheap and environmentally low-impact way to orbit. Set a goal of $/Kg, maybe 100$.

Other issues are already addressed, or follow from the above. Mr. Hundt's #1 is too vague but my #1 and #2 would lead to inexpensive local desalination systems. Unfortunately, the only way to "cause" water to flow uphill is to pump it, so my #1 and #2 would address that.

The same two items would make it easier to set up wireless internet connections. They depend mainly on power, and even more than the ongoing cost of buying grid electricity is the cost of building the grid. Places that lack one need not wait, if they have their own power.

The cheap way to orbit, my #3, solves both #6 and #12, and a host of other issues, from the need for increased communications to the need for off-planet resources and industry.

The battery is much more important than most people realize. Try this thought experiment: Assume a zero-cost battery of arbitrary capacity. Once one has this, sunshine or wind anywhere, anytime, can be banked and the energy delivered to where it is needed. This would allow an increase in available non-fossil energy to grow by a factor of several hundred. (The Earth receives, as sun, roughly 1,000 times the energy usage of the population.)

Wind generators are already nearly maximally efficient, but photovoltaics have a long way to go, although they're already worth buying if one has the $$. Both are much enhanced in usefulness by the battery.

Many improvements are waiting in the wings for economic incentives. WOWEnergy, Inc., has secondary and tertiary boiler/turbine systems that can increase efficiency of heat-generating processes, like coal-fired power plants and manufacture, by roughly a factor of two. Put another way, while the Electric Power research Institute thinks we need another 64 gigawatts of nuclear power, we can (conservatively) capture over 200 gigawatts going up the chimney now. The problem is that while a factory sees improved bottom line, the coal power plant has to sell power for less, and who would choose to do that? Incentives need to be arranged.

200 gigawatts is roughly 200 nuclear installations. We waste huge amounts of power. We don't need to stop industry or give up our air conditioning and heating, we need to stop throwing away money. We can turn down our thermostats, but instead of freezing, insulate the house.

There was a similar column this week by John Tierney, marveling at the thought of how such moneys, perhaps from government, would free the market to exercise its brilliance and solve everything, or at least global warming. It was nice to hear a rabid libertarian like Tierney accept that markets don't find solutions to everything on their own, without some outside force rejiggering the stakes. However, it fell into the other traps one would expect from market fundamentalist theology.

In particular, it had infinite faith in what entrepreneurs would do to solve problems, whether they're the kind of problems, such as a delivery of goods and services that efficently combines the goals of some consumer's saving money and some producer's making a buck, that markets can do. This model obviously has not led to efficient or equitable solutions in many areas, such as schools and health care.

Moreover, it had a way of looking to technical fixes for political problems. Should consumers have to drive less, use more mass transportation, or choose more fuel-efficient cars? Or can we simply suck the carbon out of the sky and provide an unspecified infinite energy source for all? Not dealing with the first, the real political dilemmas, has a way of taking the second, an open question, for reality: science fiction for fact.

I fear that Reed's list has the same effect. I realize he's not so much pushing a warped agenda like Tierney, so much as entertaining himself, but we can do more. We have to. This is not a top 10 list for late night TV. This is life.

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

I can offer negative comments on almost all of those "wishes", but I think I will limit myself to just one for now - No.6. I can't see a value in working to make habitable a world that is mega billions of dollars away. Far better to make habitable a world that is just across the ocean. Antarctica is a very large continent, and making it habitable for humans is almost a trivial exercise compared to doing the same for Mars. But, we have made no effort whatever towards that goal. In our own country we have vast areas of land with virtually no human being within miles. Making those areas habitable truly is a trivial exercise compared to doing the same for Mars, and the scenery isn't that much different.

Now, a few positive comments! No. 12 is potentially the most important "wish" in the list, and requires only some really great engineering. So, lets commit as a nation to doing it. The battery goals can best be addressed thru basic research, and a federal agency, similar to the old NACA is the way to do it.

Hoppy in Sacramento

The PRIZE concept is usually a bad idea.

The idea of technical progress by prize got real popular after DARPA's big success with robot cars en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge. For a few Million $$ DARPA got maybe $50M effort.

For this to work you need essentially free labor, because nobody gets paid until after they are done, and most don't get paid then. It works for incremental innovation, because the goals need to be very well-defined. Like, all of the elements of the robot cars were already invented. The prizes suggested above mostly require radical innovation, and that won't come from a prize competition.

where indeed? my point exactly. The glory of the prize system is that anyone can post anything they like and anybody can try to win the prize. It's a very different matter to use the government to subsidize R & D or to trust markets to produce invention. Those two actions might be wise, but the whimsical and yet possibly creative effect of the prize system combines nicely with an Internetted society, where any number can collaborate to try to win prizes. Hard for me to see why buying lotto tix or playing the church raffle is the only way prizes ought to be able to be sought. And yes, far-out ideas especially deserve prize awards.

I assume costs drop for PV due to volume and competition. But even now, cost per watt is a squishy concept for a system that has no operating costs. Amortization cost is significant, and already achieving usefulness.

Banking power in the grid is wasteful, because of large losses in transmission. And we are seeing the limits of grid banking already, with wind systems finding no customers during off-peak times.

As to batteries and similar storage systems, they both allow low-loss transport of energy and make certain apps like electric cars feasible. There is a lot of room for improvement. Consider flow batteries--these are cousins to fuel cells, and are just beginning to be installed, for example on King Island, Tasmania.

Here's an example of the value of batteries to solar or wind. Much of the planet is inhospitable for living but has resources (Prudhoe Bay). If we lack land area for solar or good wind, we can simply set up where those are, like the ocean for solar, and polar regions for wind. Then the power is banked in a flow battery. The charged chemicals are shipped by boat and delivered to markets with much less loss than over wires, and it would be crazy to run wires across the ocean, anyway. 

Fusion is messy, although not as much so as fission. Whether using plasma or inertial-confinement ignition (laser) the reactor vessel and working fluid (likely liquid sodium) would become irradiated and unusable after a shorter time than for fission reactors. It will always be a very tricky technological achievement, like nuclear weapons. Its best use will be for off-planet rocket propulsion. (Not a pleasant thing to have for ground launch.)

By contrast, solar is perhaps a little tricky to manufacture efficiently, but a no-brainer to use. Batteries, ditto.

. . . fresh water from melting ice on the Arctic and Antarctic landmasses to go not into the salt water oceans but instead into fresh water lakes or aquifers in more temperate zones. (Think of a refilled Caspian Sea or replenished underground reservoir in the Dakotas.)

Haven't we seen this floated here before? To persist in this ridiculous notion is evidence of systematic flaws, at the most basic level, in understanding the limits of what can physically be accomplished.

How would this water be collected, and how would it be transported? Water weighs 62 pounds per cubic foot; a ton of water occupies 32 cubic feet, or a cube with meter-long edges. You are talking about moving uncounted cubic miles of water for thousands of miles and then lifting it up hundreds, or thousands of feet. A cubic mile of water weighs over 9 trillion pounds, or about 4.5 billion tons. How many thousand 900,000-ton tankers would this take? Where are these ships? Who will build the hundreds of gigantic pumps required, or the miles of huge pipelines? You are talking about something that would probably be larger than all engineering projects in human history, combined, and that might require more energy than humans have used to date.

Not to mention the global warming effect of such a project . . . .

Which is why Vote By Mail is such a great alternative to the good-ole-days of standing in line at a ballot machine.

~~~~~~~~~~~
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

Come visit PROJECT: Lucidity.

Long while back, my mom, a doctor from Beijing visiting Salt Lake City, and I visited southeastern Utah to see Moab, Arches, etc., etc.  As we drove, Grace -- the doctor -- marveled at the empty space.  She said, "You could put an entire city there! and another one there!"  The deserted desert puzzled her.  My mom explained about the scarcity of water to support cities.  Grace nodded, but I suspect that she found the  whole idea a bit far-fetched.

Still, at least the air is breathable. :)

As an Oregonian, I'm quite proud of our Vote By Mail system. After many years of service, I have yet to see a single article or new report of tampering, fraud, or coersion. We also have some of the highest voter turnout in the nation, even during mid-terms and yearly ballot initiatives.

The security of the VBM was very well thought out, and I cannot think of a single problem with it.

As far as voting for school boards, sewer bonds, etc, we already do that. Ballots are written by district, and are encoded for proper tabulation, even if I return my Washington County ballot in Multnomah County.

~~~~~~~~~~~
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

Come visit PROJECT: Lucidity.

Batteries are expensive, and although there is great room for improvement they always will be expensive. Just think about the job a battery has to do and you can see why. Batteries are ONLY used for isolated systems not connected to a grid. Banking power in the grid may be wasteful, as you say, (about 7% loss in the US http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission) but it is cheaper by far than any alternative.

As an example, you mention King Island. King Island has a population of 1500 and it is not connected to an electricity grid. So it is in fact an isolated system.

Flow batteries in development for wind farms are mainly for power leveling, not long term storage. Wind power flickers on a minute to hourly time scale, and it is difficult for the grid to respond (to turn other power plants on and off) on such short timescales. Flow batteries can average out the flicker.

I had a similar experience. Long while back I drove a Japanese tourist from the Grand Canyon to Phoenix. She marveled, not so much at the empty space, but at the empty space with top-notch roads across it.

Exactly, the problems with VBM have already been solved in Oregon on the small scale. It requires no retooling, just scaling. It is the simplest and most practical solution, because everything to make it happen is already in place.

As for tabulation, the IRS has centers all around the country. The same thing would happen here. Your ballot goes to the location preprinted on it, where it is scanned and the results totalled and returned to the state and local ECs for reporting. If there are questions about an election or the need for a recount, all the ballots are in a central, secure, non-partisan location. They can be retrieved and recounted and, if need be, recounted by hand by trained professionals.

It's so ridiculously obvious how this solution can fix the current system that I wonder why some form of it hasn't already been adopted nationally. The answer is obvious. Politicians of all stripes are not very interested in an election system that can't be rigged or stolen.

You're right, although I guess we could use nukes to dig out holes for brand new lakes in solid rock, not connected to aquifers or any other drainage.

How can he say these things without being embarrassed?

But Hoppy,
#6 is the most easily achievable. Give Fox the exclusive rights to a Mars reality show, say Mars Survivor, and it will happen in no time flat...

You look up into the night sky and Mars seems to twinkle a bit more than usual. Curious, you find that long unused telescope and look more closely. There, trailing behind Mars in the sky is a banner, maybe a million miles long, reflecting sunlight to say....

"New Season Starts This Thursday!"

"Of course they will let them see the light of day - they can make money doing it. That's why somebody like GE is making world-class moves in wind power."

**************************

It's the same thing with #1. GE already has de-salination plants (you've probably already seen their "Fishing" commercial).

It's part of GE's "ecomagination" change... realizing it's profitable to be green. The Energy division has their wind and cleaner coal generators; Transportation has their "green" locomotives; Security is going ROHS compliant; Industrial has the de-salination; etc.

~~~~~~~~~~~
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

Come visit PROJECT: Lucidity.

Tom:

I agree that PV will be a major source of clean power in the future; IMO we should be heavily financing research in this area.

Minor point, but I considered a job with a PV manufacturer recently and learned that the theoretical limit for conversion efficiency is about 28%, using the best single-crystal silicon technology known. There are other PV technologies that are less costly but also less efficient. Apparently the best result achieved so far is around 23% or so.

However, even the 18-20% that is currently achievable is not bad. I did a back-of-the envelope calculation last year on what kind of capacity could be purchased with $1 Trillion (based on estimates of the cost of the Iraq war) and came up with a figure that amounted to about 30% of the entire US Domestic (i.e home) Energy consumption in the year 2000. I used a figure of 12% efficiency and took the current cost of PV power. In other words, the calculation was extremely conservative.

To put this in plain English, for the money we'll end up spending on Iraq we could have bought enough solar cell capacity to satisfy about 1/3 of our home electricity needs.

-Dave Adams-

What about making habitats in deep mines where representatives of the gene pool (and in the breeding age) could reside on rotation?

A bold plan to reduce football injuries by 100%: strap the would-be players to armchairs.

I think you make a fair point El Campesino.  I hear of more and more corporations "going green".  I disagree with you on the pace of the change though.  The steps being taken are baby steps at best and only by a few.  There needs to be more urgency, and by allowing coprorations the chance for making a profit off the efforts is fine with me.  Maybe tax breaks, even though I am not a big fan of corporate subsidies, based on successful innovations which are put into practice.  I have no problem with carrots being offered after the fact as a motivator...

Even us space boosters (oops, unintentional pun) care about Earth. A consortium of astrounauts and cosmonauts called the Association of Space Explorers has offered a draft treaty for dealing with an asteroid that appears to threaten the planet. That particular danger will be handled, I am confident.

The collecting of data and identification of dangerous asteroid orbits is straightforward. The scarier scenario is something like comet Hyakutake, which came pretty much out of nowhere. When first spotted , it was only a few moths out. Its movement was noticeable enough to convince it was not headed straight at us, but it came a bit close. When I photographed it the tail covered half the sky, and that was at 10,000,000 miles distance.

The problem is the short lead time, precluding most deflection techniques. Movies made much of this worry in "Deep Impact" and the goofier one, "Armageddon". But it's a non-trivial worry, and even if the odds favor us, the result of losing the bet is not acceptable.  

Keep some nukes on the shelf.

.> 2. The invention of a secure, five 9's
> reliable, one person = one vote, and
> recountable voting system that could be
> conducted on-line so that polling places
> can be an artifact of the past.

I earn my living in part developing secure, reliable on-line systems. My advice, and the advice of just about every Net professional who is asked this question is: make Election Day a mandatory paid national holiday with only grocery stores, drugstores, gas stations, and hospitals allowed to operate and those entities required to half-schedule their workers. DON'T try to replace the current system of each county choosing their own system, as there is security in diversity, but DO prohibit voting system vendors from killing off Open Source(tm) competitors through political maneuvering.

Trying to build a complex system to solve a very simple problem just results in very complex and unexpected failure modes. In England they vote with pencils and Xs and it seems to work pretty well for a nation of 60 million.

sPh

Let's see..

#1 could be tricky.

#2 is not desirable imho. We could already have completely secure elections except for this proviso that you want people to be able to vote over the Internet. Adding that clause will open the system up for abuse. For election reform ideas, having a paper trail for each vote is simply not compatible with the idea of letting people vote electronically from home. IMHO, the former is more important than the latter.

#3 a "national wireless broadband system" doesn't require any technical innovation. It just requires money. I'm not sure it's worth it. And it certainly would cost more than $25M to put in place. How about if we just restricted its coverage to urban areas? Or it could grow through the same path that cellular coverage did: cities first, and then highways and then coverage would increase.

#4 is easy. #5 is very hard. Wind and tidal power can provide lots of energy for countries with less need. The long-term problem isn't this kind of small-scale feature, but what do we do about modernization in China, India, and Indonesia?

As for #6: I don't see how that would be economically viable. Mars is much further from the Sun and much colder than Earth. We could have enclosed bio-dome type settlements there but they wouldn't be economically feasible.

If we wanted to do something much better for NASA to do, we could get them to set up nuclear power plants on the Moon.

#7 is pretty much done. Cell phones are cheap and within 10 years they'll all have Internet capability.

#8 is very ambitious. Personally I favor the approach of simply doing a better job in education as opposed to the "no child left behind" approach.

#9 is ill-considered. Putting the cart before the horse I would say. If we want to help Africa, I would suggest starting with condoms and not savings accounts. Fight AIDS and malaria.

#10 seems incongruous on this list

#11 is more important, but I would still put it behind stopping malaria and AIDS.

#12 - we already have ways to dispose of nuclear waste. The only questions are cost. Of course if you go with the Moon idea, then you can worry a bit less about the need to keep radioactivity contained.

#13 How about Lake Woebegone?

#14 That just comes down to who has the cash, doesn't it? I bet #10 will be the easiest to fund, as the commercial implications are immediate and it would affect an industry that has plenty of money to spend. It also doesn't need "prize" financing.

The first chapter of each one of my network engineering book is titled "What Problem are you Trying to Solve?" What is the unique problem solved by electronic voting?

Oh, quick results make the media happy, and I supposed they've conditioned the electorate to expect them. Nevertheless, Canada and Britain get by nicely with totally manual voting. If more speed is desired, they get more ballot counters, a way to involve more people in the process.

Now, I can speak of all sorts of ways to make electronic voting software more tested, and indeed, open source is one of them. Nevertheless, one very basic challenge is going to be to have trusted credentials for voters, without invoking the specter of national ID cards. Centralized public key infrastructure or PGP-style rings of trust still have the problem of requiring a more formal credential than a voter card or driver's license. Intuitively, I sense that biometrics would not be acceptable, but perhaps I am wrong there.

Zero-knowledge proofs and the like are so esoteric as to be dead on political arrival.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Dang, typo becomes permanent record. Where was Raymond Burr when I needed him?

Hoist by mine own petard.