coming crisis: February 2007 Archives

I saw the film The Astronaut Farmer yesterday -- wonderful, and wonderfully geeky film: see it when it opens next week. It’s about a Texas rancher, played by Billy Bob Thornton, who’s building a rocket in his barn, which isn’t so farfetched: he was an aerospace engineer and astronaut-in-training before he was a rancher, so he knows what he’s doing. And the film me thinking about the Virgin Earth initiative I wrote about yesterday -- I’d posted that just before I ran into the movie, so I guess it was fresh in my mind.

It occurred to me that it is perhaps just as likely that an individual could win the Virgin Earth prize, for coming up with the technology to scrub greenhouse gases from the Earth’s atmosphere. There’s a long American tradition of technological breakthroughs or new products coming from garage scientists -- see: Apple Computer, for one. And we’re certainly NOT seeing innovative thinking coming out of corporate or governmental arenas. As reported on Monday:

Now this is exciting. This is forward-thinking. Al Gore and Richard Branson have teamed up to announce a prize of $25 million for whoever comes up with a viable way to scrub CO2 and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. At the initiative’s Web site, Virgin Earth, they liken the contest to the one the British government sponsored in the 18th century to solve the longitude problem, which drove innovation in timekeeping and navigation, and by extension, trade and travel. It’s probably not too much of a stretch to say that solving the longitude changed the world in the 18th century in the same way that kicking global warming in the butt will do in the 21st.