Friday, March 13, 2009

Dwapara Yuga: Solar power thru metallic balloons

What the title says.

The current oil crisis and housing market crash has concentrated many investors and engineers in silicon valley to the problem (including Ananda India).

2 comments:

nina said...

Thank you Psychegram! The future will look like this, I got that 'sure thing' feeling while reading about it. They will have to make them able to withstand stronger winds however. The places where they will be most successful initially are climates with year-round sunlight, ie; hurricane prone.
With a few of these balloons every 150 miles and a Kamen Slingshot or three, a city could survive. For the suburban communities, its ideal, for a less than 150 person group, it will be imperative. How much could it cost? Obviously, it will put the utilities out of business. And therein lies the biggest problem advancing new, innovative technologies. Patents tangled up for years and utility lobbyists Monsanto-style tying up the technology using all the trickery historically in use. But the idea will catch on anyway since clever people will make them themselves. Now if the inventors could just leap out of any profit mindset and settle down with Creative Commons Attribution licensing, no-derivative works, non-commercial, this idea could take hold NOW. Commercial use would naturally follow, provided the patent office cleans up its Bush mess backlog, which it could easily do under an Obama jobs program. But will it?

psychegram said...

Ditching the profit motive is a hugely important aspect. So long as people are in the mindset of making and doing things only if they can guarantee a direct reward, their creative energy will stay locked within a system that has ultimately been built specifically so that the vast majority of the benefits will accrue, ultimately, to a very few hands. 'As above, so below' you might say, in economies as in the cosmos.

If instead the dominant mode is one of the gift, well then, it would be just as you say. Means would be found to (for instance) make these collectors in peoples' backyards rather than seeking to build a factory to turn them out en masse. Iterate the same principle, across the range of economic and artistic activity, and we would all find ourselves in a world in which anything and everything we could possibly need was freely given to us ... and thus no reason not to seek those ways in which to give back to the world in the most perfect ways we can.

Few can see that world, now. It can be there if we want it to, oh yes and a small fortunate few of us do want it, so very much ... and we try to live in it, as best we can. We're still a very, very long way from the formality of materialization but in the meantime the Kingdom of God is within, as they say, and more of ourself is finding that to be the case every day. As the collapse proceeds, however, out of that rough sketch will arise spontaneously forming social networks held together by those of us who can feel the light and....

Flowers will blossom in the ruins.