Obama Gets Starry Eyed for Space Solar Power

Many of you have probably seen the Obama transition team’s white paper on Space Solar Power. While I agree that SSP could be an important source of energy over the long term, our R&D investments would be much more useful addressing the problems of the next few decades as opposed to the next few centuries. By the team’s own admission, the barriers to entry are:

1) Achieve cheap & reliable access to space
2) Apply high-volume mass-production assembly-line techniques to spacecraft construction
3) Reduce the technical risk with basic research and technology demonstrations
4) Adopt proven government approaches to incentivize private industry investment, development and operation

Not what I would call trivial hurdles. Additionally, it is unclear how a large export market for electricity would function if the U.S were to become “the world’s largest exporter of energy for the 21st and 22nd Centuries, and beyond.”

So, in short, SSP could, and will likely be, an important energy in the (far) future, but we have more immediate concerns.

Change the World… with Your Computer

Millions of personal computers sit idly on desks and in homes worldwide. As they wait, every hour hundreds of people contract and die from infectious diseases. While computer owners run their screen savers, millions die from hunger, or environmental disasters devastate whole communities. What if each of the worlds estimated 1 billion computers could be linked to focus on humanity’s most pressing issues?

To help make this vision a reality, PunditPolitics.com has become a partner of World Community Grid, joining the IBM Corporation and a group of nearly 400 companies, associations, foundations, nonprofits, government agencies and academic institutions. PunditPolitics.com is encouraging members of the community to contribute their idle PC time to assist humanitarian research by joining World Community Grid at http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ and becoming a member of the PunditPolitics.com team.

World Community Grid uses grid technology to establish a permanent, flexible infrastructure that provides researchers with a readily available pool of computational power that can be used to solve problems plaguing humanity. Grid technology joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that far exceeds the power of a few supercomputers. Importantly, World Community Grid is easy and safe to use.

To join, individuals should go to http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ and simply download and install a free, small software program on their computers. When idle, your computers request data from World Community Grid’s server. Computers then perform computations using this data, send the results back to the server and prompt it for a new piece of work.

Today, hundreds of thousand of volunteers around the globe are donating some of the time when their computers are on but not in use, and World Community Grid is harnessing this power to help advance promising humanitarian research projects. Results on critical health issues have already been achieved, demonstrating World Community Grid’s potential to make significant inroads on a great range of future projects that can benefit the world.

You can start making a difference today. Please go to http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ and become a member, and then join the PunditPolitics.com team!