GRAND CHALLENGES
(water / food / pollution / health / energy)
"‘And what will they burn instead of coal?’
‘Water,’ replied Harding.
‘... Yes, but water decomposed into its primitive elements,’ replied Cyrus Harding, ‘and decomposed doubtless, by electricity, which will then have become a powerful and manageable force... Yes, my friends, I believe that water will one day be employed as a fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of light and heat, of an intensity of which coal is not capable. Some day the coal rooms of steamers and the tenders of locomotives will, instead of coal, be stored with these two condensed gases, which will burn in the furnaces with enormous calorific power. There is, therefore, nothing to fear...’"
- Jules Verne in The Mysterious Island, Hetzel, 1874 [285 ppmv CO2]
"... the supply of solar energy is both without limit and without cost, and will continue to stream down on earth after we exhaust our supplies of fossil fuels."
- Charles Fritts (1886) in Chapter 4: Fundamentals of Solar Cells. In Designing Indoor Solar Products: Photovoltaic Technologies for AES, Randall J. Wiley & Sons: Hoboken, NJ, 2005. [290 ppmv CO2]
"... if the quantity of carbonic acid [in the air] increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression. ...[The ice age succeeded a time where the global temperature was that predicted] if the carbonic acid [in the air] increased to 2.5 or 3 times its [1896] value."
- Prof. Svante Arrhenius (pp. 267 - 268) in “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground,” Philosophical Magazine, Series 5, 1896, 41(251), 237-276 by Svante Arrhenius [295 ppmv CO2]
"Some day some [person] will invent a way of concentrating and storing up sunshine to use instead of this old, absurd Prometheus scheme of fire... Sunshine is spread out thin and so is electricity... the trick [is], you see, to concentrate the juice and liberate it as you needed it... This scheme of combustion to get power makes me sick to think of - it is so wasteful... When we learn how to store electricity, we will cease being apes ourselves; until then we are tailless orangutans. You see, we should utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power... [Instead] we burn up wood and coal, as renters burn up the front fence for fuel. We live like squatters, not as if we owned the property. There must surely come a time when heat and power will be stored in unlimited quantities in every community, all gathered by natural forces."
- Thomas A. Edison (pg. 221) in “Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great,” 1910, vol. 1 by Elbert Hubbard [300 ppmv CO2]
"... for nature is not in a hurry and [humankind] is. And if in a distant future the supply of coal becomes completely exhausted, civilization will not be checked for that, for life and civilization will continue as long as the sun shines! If our black and nervous civilization, based on coal, shall be followed by a quieter civilization based on the utilization of solar energy, that will not be harmful to progress and to human happiness. ... So far, human civilization has made use almost exclusively of fossil solar energy. Would it not be advantageous to make better use of radiant energy?"
- Giacomo Ciamician (pg. 394) in “The Photochemistry of the Future,” Science, 1912, 36(926), 385-394 by Giacomo Ciamician [300 ppmv CO2]
"I believe we can look forward to the creation of an artificial system for photosynthesis which will mimic
the way in which the green plant takes two quanta to generate oxygen on one side and reducing power (either
hydrogen or reduced carbon dioxide) on the other side of the membrane... Such systems as have... been discussed thus accomplish both of the necessary requirements for a useful solar energy device, namely (i) the capture of the quantum and its conversion to some other energy form and (ii) the storage of that energy for indefinitely long periods with the possibility of its recovery at will in some convenient form."
- Melvin Calvin (pg. 374) in “Simulating Photosynthetic Quantum Conversion,” Accounts of Chemical Research, 1978, 11(10), 369-374 by Melvin Calvin [335 ppmv CO2]
"A long-standing challenge has been the development of a practical artificial photosynthetic system that can roughly mimic the biological one, not by duplicating the self-organization and reproduction of the biological system nor the aesthetic beauty of trees and plants, but rather by being able to use sunlight to drive a thermodynamically uphill reaction of an abundant materials to produce a fuel... For some purposes, however, it might be useful to use the H2 as a reactant to produce a different fuel, such as one that is liquid at the usual temperatures and pressures. Thus, we seek as a ‘Holy Grail’ a renewable energy source driven by solar energy that produces a clean and storable fuel."
- Allen J. Bard & Marye Anne Fox (pg. 141) in “Artificial Photosynthesis: Solar Splitting of Water to Hydrogen and Water,” Accounts of Chemical Research, 1995, 28(3), 141-145 by Allen J. Bard and Marye Anne Fox [360 ppmv CO2]
