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term. You are mining top soil. Understand that we are not only using up our fossil fuels, we are using up our top soil, so therefore you have got to stop, you have got to stop plowing. The only way to do that is have food that grows without weeding, without breaking the soil. You have to just push these things in the ground and then you eat them. That's where we ultimately have to get to in another generation because, otherwise, there wouldn't be farmland left.
Do you think global warming is a problem?
Penzias: I don't know if global warming is real or not. I think the jury could still be out, but we dare not take the risk. Even if the odds are 90 percent, you can't take the risk.
It was like Ronald Reagan and the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). I talked to Andrei Sakharov (father of Russia's hydrogen bomb projects) once when he came to the United States. I said it was immoral for him to risk the planet because the Russians would change the rules of the game and start a war. He said the Russians wouldn't, that they'd quit. There was a 5 percent chance they wouldn't quit. By keeping SDI, he said we were betting on something which had a 5 percent chance of working. So don't worry about whether it (global warming) is right or not. We can't afford to bet.
What about solar?
Penzias: We have the two solar companies: Konarka and HelioVolt.
Konarka is saying that what we really have to do is get the cost (of solar cells) way down using reel-to-reel technology. You make these photoactive materials the way that Kodak makes color film. In fact, much of its manufacturing expertise comes from ex-Polaroid people.
Say you have a big box store in some shopping center that has got a lot of surface area on the roof, which is nothing but tar. Instead of replacing the next time with tar, you could just put this nice plastic sheet on top of it that makes it waterproof--and, at the same time, you pay your electricity bill that way.
Is the technology evolved well enough where it commercially might be viable in a few years? Some of the studies show that thin-film solar cells only convert about 2 to 3 percent of sunlight into electricity.
Penzias: I think in a few years. The efficiency is now lower than silicon, but there is no fundamental reason why it can't be a lot higher. I mean, we can go outside and look at an oak tree. An oak tree is doing many times better than silicon. Can you get all the way to photosynthesis? I doubt it, but somewhere in between.
You know you often look at things which no one could believe. I remember when I first saw a picture of an Ampex video recorder. It was 18 inches wide, 14 inches high, weighed several hundred pounds and needed to be bolted into one of these rack panels which people don't even remember anymore. This thing was $15,000.
I went to work that day and I said, "I have seen this thing and, you know what, I believe, after color television, the next consumer appliance is going to be these video tape recorders."
What was the reaction?
Penzias: My coworkers said, "You are crazy. It's just too much money." I said no, I think this thing could come down to $2,000 or $3,000 and they said "Bullshit. They'll never get down to $2,000 or $3,000." Right. Now we are getting them for $30 today.
These were brilliant engineers, going through the prime of their professional lives. They never thought we could get it for $3,000. I was thinking that I was crazy to say $3,000, and $300 isn't even right.
How about the first PC? When you first saw those, did you have the same sort of prediction?
Penzias: No. Somebody put a PC in my office. It came in four cartons. It had a DOS operating manual, which was about 3 inches thick, and a UNIX operating manual that was about 8 inches thick. I was given about a foot of books to read for this thing. So I said, "I'm going to donate this to somebody else." I just gave it away.
What do you think of nanotechnology? A lot of people see it as a way to keep Moore's Law chugging along.
Penzias: Yes and no. It's not an extension of Moore's Law. It's much more like Engel's law. He made a statement I think that said "qualitative differences come from quantitative differences." If you drop a nickel on the floor or you drop the nickel on your way out, that's a quantitative difference in your life. If you drop enough nickels that you go from rich to poor, it's a qualitative difference.
The world changes if you make something very big or very small. For example, Hannibal crossed the Alps to attack Rome from the North, right? Why did the elephants cross the Alps? You can't make an elephant do anything it doesn't want to. It's too big.
No choice?
Penzias: What do you mean by no choice? Who is constraining them?
They want to get where it's warmer?
Penzias: No, when we go up, it's cold, it was warm back there in the valley. At some point they're going to stop, they're going to turn around if they're cold. But they didn't. Why? Because they didn't care. You can't chill an elephant because they (have very little) skin per pound. Elephants just don't care about temperature. They don't need overcoats because they are so little skinned.
Now go the other way. When you make something small, all of a sudden it's no longer about bulk properties but about the surface. So the question is then, what is your understanding of the surface? In many cases, just making something small gives you a lot of problems. Things that you normally worry about--like gravity--no longer work. Somebody has to characterize the property and then exploit the ones you want. That's very hard to do, but that's what people are doing.
I wonder if I could touch on your work on the Big Bang. People are always fascinated by the story, particularly because you weren't looking for it.
Penzias: The story, okay, very simply. What I wanted to do with this horn antenna was understand what the radiation from the Milky Way was like. When we measured the intensity, we found much more intensity than could possibly be coming from the Milky Way. Therefore we had radiation which didn't have a local cause. It was a factor of 10 or 20 more than could possibly be accounted for.
We knew it couldn't come from the agglomeration of all the other galaxies either. So we excluded our galaxy, all the other galaxies, and essentially everything else we knew in the universe. At that point, that was when we had the results. We tried to see the radiation in the Milky Way and we found the radiation way beyond the Milky Way. That's the story.
Did people doubt it when you first came out with the theory?
Penzias: Oh yeah. We were skeptical. Somebody would come up with an explanation; we would look and it and say, "Well this can't be." The first explanation (that the radiation was a remnant of the Big Bang)--and there were actually a couple of others--turned out to be the right one.
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agriculture doesn't work, b) wind and tidal energy don't work, c)
nuclear power plants are good for the environment, and should
use up pristine arctic water... the list goes on. How depressing.
If this uninformed gibberish is the best there is on offer,
humanity surely doesn't deserve to survive for another 100
years.
He also isn't against wind energy... He's pro-nuclear power which isn't suprising. Nuclear power might be getting a bad rap because of some incidents but overall it's better & less damaging than coal power (do you have any idea how many thousands of coal miners die every year in the world?).
I also think it's important that "popular" ideas such as whether organic food is desirable, or the feelings against nuclear power be questioned regularly. In the end what he proposes extreme, but he is talking about changes to society over the course of several generations. Imagine how radical anyone talking about the shift to urbanization would have seemed in the 1820's!
agriculture - it is better for topsoil preservation than regular
methods:
"Organic farming enhances soil fertility and biodiversity,
according to findings from a 21-year field trial initiated by the
Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) in Switzerland."
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.ota.com/organic/benefits/soil.html" target="_newWindow">http://www.ota.com/organic/benefits/soil.html</a>
"Soil erosion is an ongoing concern for agriculturists, for without
topsoil cultivation is extremely difficult. The earth's topsoil is
eroding about seven times more quickly than it can be built up.
This is mainly due to inappropriate cropping, especially where
organic matter is low. Studies have shown that organic methods
do not lose as much topsoil as conventional practices. Organic
farmers use crop covers or crop residues to hold down the soil.
Alternating strips of forages and other crops prevents erosion.
Overgrazing of pastures is avoided. Organic farmers use contour
farmingplanting slopes with soil-holding crops or trees across
the incline. They do not use highly soluble pesticides and
fertilisers, which break down soil structure."
I believe that the Dr. Penzias is saying that loss of topsoil is significant and that organic methods are not a long term solution to that problem because they still involve plowing. He is not saying that the methods are not better. He is saying that they do not address a critical portion of the problem.
Thank you CNET.
www.windwavesandsun.com
research before making sweeping statements and easily writing
off emerging technologies.
Isn't it obvious to anybody taking an interest in
the environment that we are going to leave a toxic and
overheated wasteland for future generations, unless we
drastically reformulate our priorities? How
can an economy based on the consumption of natural resources
lead to anything but global destruction?
Humanity needs to learn to act in harmony with the natural
world - this is not an option, but a practical necessity.
The solutions to our environmental problems are readily
available, and this since the times of Nikola Tesla. But we need
to look for and nurture those alternatives. And we need to
make a fundamental choice: Do we want to survive as a species
in a world worth living in, or do we want to continue on the path
of making "big bucks" with outdated and discredited
technologies?
"Organic farming doesn't work"??? Strange that, since it did
work very well for the last 20.000 years. Our forefathers were
raised on nothing but organics.
Also, coming back to wave energy, have a look at this:
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.epri.com/targethigh.asp?" target="_newWindow">http://www.epri.com/targethigh.asp?</a>
program=270686&value=05T084.0&objid=297380
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.oceanpd.com/Resource/default.html" target="_newWindow">http://www.oceanpd.com/Resource/default.html</a>
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.oceanpd.com/docs/Camcal.pdf" target="_newWindow">http://www.oceanpd.com/docs/Camcal.pdf</a>
Anyways he does research that's his job. Don't get fooled by a bunch of computer generated pretty pictures and overblown promises. Especially interesting is their assertion that 30MW powers 20K homes... Even their promises are funny, all you need to power Edinburgh is 20 square kilometers of their products - excluding suburbs Edinburgh covers all of 60 square km. So it's a ratio of 3 to 1 for city size to power generation facility. If only land and seas in Europe were free, then this will work out just fine.
Also if this technology was available since Tesla's time, then why hasn't it been implemented? Mostly because it's not ready is my guess. Society adopts good things in the long run, even in face of attempts to hinder progress (which are rare).