January 26, 2000

Cheap hydrogen! Will it be invented in Pacifica?

There's a lot of hand wringing from various quarters about population increases in the future. I don't dismiss such concern cavalierly, but we should realize what the problem is. There's plenty of space in the United States, enough for a billion people to live comfortably and leave room for parks, open space and nature. Drive Highway 50 through Nevada if you don't believe that. The real shortage in Nevada and the rest of the U.S. is not space, but water, and not water, but energy. There's plenty of water in the ocean. I spent four years on a Pacifica committee that studied the feasibility of taking salt water out of the ocean and taking the salt out of the salt water. Desalination is not feasible, because energy is nowhere near cheap enough and fresh water from the Sierra is too cheap. Bottom line: If energy was cheap enough, we could pump desalted seawater all the way to the Nevada desert at low cost. The problem is there's no source of energy cheap enough, plentiful enough and non-polluting. In fact, even if fossil fuels were free we couldn't afford to use them for such a purpose. It would be extraordinarily foolish and shortsighted to waste any finite resource on such a frivolous endeavor.

Fossil fuels: petroleum, coal, natural gas, etc. can't ever be cheap enough. Additionally, of course, they're sources of greenhouse gases . We need an extraordinarily cheap and self-renewing energy source without the shortcomings of fossil fuels. The answer is hydrogen, taken from the ocean's water by a self-perpetuating process no one has yet discovered or imagined.

Though such a process is not likely to be invented in my lifetime, I take comfort in the fact that not one person, the year I was born, had imagined the personal computer, the transistor, or recombinant DNA. In 1939, when I was eight years old, The San Francisco International Exposition set out to tell Americans and the world about the future. They imagined many things, but they didn't have the nerve or the sheer will to imagine many things we take for granted. The 80 foot tall statue of Pacifica, the very symbol of our city, towered high over people, not one of whom realized that earth-girdling satellites would, in a few years, be passing constantly high above most of the children who weren't allowed to visit Sally Rand's Nude Ranch.

Is the potential inventor of cheap hydrogen currently taking a chemistry class at Oceana or Terra Nova? Perhaps she's a member of the Interact Club. Perhaps he's on the wrestling team. After all, the vastly more complicated world of the personal computer originated because of one extraordinarily gifted and imaginative Stanford professor. When I was going to college at San Jose State a few miles down the road, people thought silicon was something you used to make sand castles.

Parents reading this column should show it to their children, especially any who have shown signs of genius. Perhaps it will trigger a spark that will make the PC revolution look like a walk in the park.

Or perhaps it won't. Still, it's worth a try. Silicon Valley happened while I was obliviously earning a living 35 miles away without a clue. Encourage your kids. Can't hurt!

No one in 1939 imagined e-mail or websites, either. Some recent Reactor columns may be found at Paul Azevedo's website, http://www.thereactor.net/ Reach him by e-mail at Paul@thereactor.net.