I have decided to devote this column to doing only good.
I shall start by solving the energy crisis. Now, crisis is a terrible description and shortage is worse. The terms of this debate have been set by the oil industry, whose worldview was formed when atoms were solid. Oil industry executives still see cars as the solution to the global threat emanating from horses (who, scientists once predicted, would bury the world's cities under 20ft of manure by 1950). But how can you have a shortage of energy in a universe made out of nothing but energy? On a planet half of which is bathed in high-energy radiation at all times? A planet with a core of solid, crystalline iron, which rotates in a boiling slurry of molten rock so energetic it can burst through the earth's skin to consume cities? A planet with a moon that hauls entire oceans, whales and all, several meters up in the air, twice daily? Earth's air pours forth raw electricity, in billion-volt bolts, at a global rate of 100 times a second. Absurd excesses of energy lash us from every direction, it's a miracle we're not all dead. Shortage? The crisis is one of overproduction.
Yet people are faffing about attempting to run cars on soya oil. Stop it! It's embarrassing! Where is your pride in technological advance? Way back in the 1970s, spacecraft already used fuel cells and solar panels and elegant gravitational slingshots around distant planets and yet we, in the 21st century, are still trying to move forward by essentially lighting our own farts.
What is this obsession with the internal combustion engine, anyway? German engineers can perfect it all they want, they're still setting off explosions in a tin can, in order to rotate a stick, so that mechanical gears can turn a wheel, with a 15 per cent energy efficiency. It's Victorian. And nuclear power is no advance. Nuclear power plants are just used to boil water. They are giant kettles. We cracked the atom and we used it to make tea.
Why aren't we having more fun with this? Look, if we can't find a way to generate power from an iron sphere which is the size of the moon and as hot as the sun rotating in a magnetic field beneath our feet, then we deserve to sit in the dark until the fission reactor that floods us in energy rises the next morning.
For the love of God, our planet is flying through the sun's magnetic field at a shocking speed. While spinning. It's just a huge dynamo, waiting for someone to tap it. All you have to do is run 100,000-km wires out of the earth's magnetic field and into the sun's field. What? How? Make the wires out of stuff that's already up there. Use old nuclear warheads to blast a few iron asteroids into geosynchronous orbit around earth. Voilá! Tiny, fixed moons of solid ore. A little factory builds a big factory from the asteroid's material and off you go. Finally, gently lower one end to earth, at the equator, using space-elevator physics, and connect it to a global grid. Do I have to do everything for you?
It's an ideal way for America and China to rebalance their accounts with each other, while building something more productive than machines for spin-drying lettuce. America needs to replace its dilapidated 1950s electricity infrastructure, and China needs to generate electricity for a billion people without cooking the world. Not only would a global dynamo generate no greenhouse gases but the heat from the dynamo would be radiated into space. (Besides, in the next few years, America and China will need something exciting to do together that isn't a war.)
You also end up with the bonus of a space elevator, which lowers the cost of getting stuff into orbit a hundredfold, so only the first wire is really expensive. And the wires would look great at night: big glowing lines stretching off into the darkness. Especially if you hung ultrathin sheets of glittery solar panel off them too, doubling the energy return. Nature was fun while it lasted, but humans now own the planet. We might as well decorate it.
Sure, converting some of the earth's orbital and rotational energy into electricity would eventually slow the planet down, lengthening the day and the year, but we'll enjoy the lie-in. And we could declare the extra days holidays. No, no, your thanks are unnecessary. Just name December 32nd after me. (And before the protesters get started—tidal friction is already slowing the earth's rotation. Go picket the moon).
Much of the research has been done: many of the satellites passing over your head already use electricity and a kilometre-long wire dangling into the earth's magnetic field to raise and lower their orbit.
And one of the nicest things about this plan is, unlike burning all the oil, it's reversible.If we later found a cleaner, cheaper, more fun way to generate energy, we could push electricity back up the wires. Resistance would become assistance: instead of slowing us down, the sun's magnetic field would speed the earth up and haul us into our old orbit, as if it had never happened.
Well, that's the energy crisis solved. Next month, I shall bring about world peace.
