Re: Art, where's the buzz on nanotech saving America today?

Straydog wrote:

<snip>

I've already made, many times, the statement that if we took all the billions spent on CTR, and spent it on solar cells, then we'd probably have several percent of our nation's electricity supply converted to renewable energy by now.


One word: politics.


And, I'd qualify that as fadism (or, any and all progress; any and all high-tech-sexy solutions to any problem) is the one and only way to go.

Some thirty years ago, when the rumours were in circulation that we were going to run out of oil by the end of the last century, all sorts of power generation concepts were proposed as alternatives ranging from PV and wind to biofuels, though there were several which were rather far-fetched. The orbiting PV plants that were discussed earlier in the thread were among them.

Governments were only too eager to make funding for such ideas freely available. This lasted until the early '80s when we were swimming in cheap oil. The projects were shelved and the funding disappeared.

Next idea....
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