SpiralTruth

The world’s in a very strange place right now. On one hand, it feels like it might fall apart at any moment. Worldwide economic collapse, global warming, the always turbulent Middle East. On the other hand, everything seems possible. We’re starting to program DNA, we can engage in worldwide collaboration on any subject, and the U.S. has elected a smart President who believes in science. Wow. Maybe that’s why I ended up musing about alternative energy today. I was thinking about lightning. We’ve known for a long time that a single lightning strike could provide amazing amounts of electricity if we could only harness it. The main problem is that all the electricity is delivered at once. We could never charge a battery fast enough to store it. Meanwhile, hydrogen is a promising fuel source. You can get it from water and you get water as the exhaust when you burn it. The main problem with hydrogen is that you have to use so much energy to separate it from water via any of the known methods (electrolysis being one of them). Well then, wouldn’t it be possible to set up a system that uses a lightning strike to help convert a bunch of water into hydrogen, effectively using the gas as a very volatile quick-charge battery? You’d have to keep the hydrogen from exploding, of course. And there might be something about a lightning strike that makes it fundamentally unsuitable for the task. I’m much more passionate about art than I am about traditional science, and I have to confess that I have no desire to try and build a proof of concept. I did, however, find the idea intriguing enough to whip out the google-fu and see if anyone else had asked a similar question. Turns out, a lot of people had. Some of them are even trying to make a working prototype. Check out these links: 1. Aspiring Lightning Wrangler Todd Livingstone 2. Check out the conversation over the article http://www.inhabitat.com/2007/10/15/power-your-home-with-lightening/ where Steve in T.O. mentions the idea of lightning electrolysis. 3. User triden asked about it in a physicsforums.com forum in 2007. There were no replies. Another thread on physicsforums.com ends up discussing the electrolysis idea. 4. Discussion on a whynot.net post also turns to electrolysis. Another interesting idea mentioned in this thread is that of using radio frequencies to help capture only part of the energy. At this point, I stopped being interested in whether lightning-electrolysis could work and turned to what I thought was a bigger issue – and one that could be solved with today’s technology and some good legislation. Take a look at all those links again. Look how random the discussion is. Some replies give other ideas. Some debate aspects of the main idea or the alternate ideas. There’s no way of organizing the issues people bring up and saying whether or not someone has solved each of them or proven one or more unsolvable. In addition, there’s no real motivation for any of these people to go past the high level discussion phase. At this phase, the idea’s still very exciting, feasible or not. No incentive is needed for most people to post and debate. Any further investigation would require increasing amounts of time and equipment. Plus, we know that whoever is able to solve the last few problems quickly enough and on a large enough scale will own a technology that could generate heaps of wealth. We know it would benefit the rest of us too, but the idea of helping out in even the smallest way and only getting the societal trickle-down benefits while a few people are raking in the money is kind of hard to stomach. What we need now is a centralized platform for the communication of new ideas that would also appropriately compensate contributors. There’s no shortage of good ideas out there. But judging from my own hording of the ideas that fall into my areas of expertise (in case I find the means to act upon them and thus make scads of money), I’m betting that some of the best ideas have never been communicated. The current economic climate even encourages this sort of mentality. After all, one of those pipe dreams could save you from the uncertainty of whether or not you’ll have a job next month. It feels almost foolhardy to just give something like that away. And that sort of me centered thinking is what’s killing us. Yet if I felt assured that by mentioning an idea, I could secure my rights to take a share of the profit (no matter how small) if that idea starts making money, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I realize I’m essentially talking about patents here. That’s the system we still use to encourage and compensate invention. The problem is that it’s ridiculously inefficient, possibly generating more lawyers than innovation. When I think of patents, I think of patent trolls and of companies stifling progress for years because they own exclusive rights to an idea that others could expand upon. Patents are more about excluding others than disseminating ideas. What we really want is a patent system that is more like the stock exchange. And we need to add to it what we’ve learned from Web 2.0 ventures. This thing would be like Cambrian House on steroids. Assuming we could effectively manage duplicate ideas (determining who came up with a particular idea first and what actually qualifies as a discrete idea), we would have to figure out how to fairly assign shares to contributors. Add a reasonable threshold of profit that would need to be reached before someone commercializing these ideas would be required to start paying the “shareholders” (idea shareholders, that is), and you have a system that accomplishes the goals of the patent system in a much more efficient manner. Lowering the barrier for participation encourages good ideas from people who don’t consider themselves inventors or who don’t have the means (or desire) to act on those ideas. This is exactly what the world needs right now. But to really work, the new system would need legislative backing and a publicly owned infrastructure. There’s no reason that private companies couldn’t provide their own interfaces. What’s important is that the data is centralized and non-revocable. If you look at the current model of Facebook Connect, you’ll understand why private is a bad idea. Facebook Connect allows other social networking platforms to add an existing social graph (Facebook’s) into their application. Facebook sells this idea by saying it allows a user to control his or her information from one place (Facebook), but they neglect to point out how dependent this makes everyone on Facebook. If they turn evil (assuming they’re “good” now) or go out of business, or crash like Wall Street, they’re going to take all these other dependent applications with them. Government funding and control of certain areas is good when privatization restricts freedom of movement. The other reason why we can’t solve this problem completely in the private sector, via companies like Cambrian House, is that they’re only acting as a tape and bubble gum solution. They still have to work with the old patent system. And as long as they have to do that, they cannot effectively replace it. There would need to be legal measures in place to say that something registered online will trump a patent that is completed later in order to push people to not waste time hedging their bets and to build trust in the new system. If anything you did with Patents 2.0 could be negated by some asshole who watched the idea form and then decided he had the time and money to file a v1.0 Patent for it, then you’re not going to get fast adoption of Patents 2.0. As long as v2.0 is given priority over v1.0, the systems could run in parallel for a time. But this needs government involvement. Old laws need to be modified. New ones need to be made. I hope someone in the Obama administration is thinking about this. I can’t think of a better way of spending money to stimulate the economy than to fix systems that encourage innovation, making them fairer, more inclusive, and easier to use. The long term benefits of government spending to stimulate an ailing economy may be debatable, but surely spending time and money in order to free and fairly compensate 21st century ingenuity can be considered money well spent no matter where you sit on the economic ideology spectrum.