Somehow We Forgot: Energy is Free

In 2011 Justin Hall-Tipping opened his famous Ted Talk with the words, "Why can't we solve these problems?" Remember him?

I was 25 years old at the time of his talk. I had recently opened my own small car dealership and was waiting in my tiny office for my dealers license to be approved. I showed up to work each morning hoping that someone I had delivered flyers to about my exceptional car detailing service would ring my phone and tell me they wanted me to spend 3 hours detailing their vehicle with the promise of maybe 30 bucks that I could take home when the job was done. I had a lot of time on my hands to try to network a car dealership, that wasn't really a car dealership because it had no license, and a detail bay that would get popular enough to support my family just as the license did get approved, as well as the line of credit from the auction and the lure of "easier money" would distract my attention. But, I suppose that's a story for another article.

The point is that between cleaning client cars and becoming exhausted from trying to develop my brand, I had a lot of time to watch videos on the internet. Years earlier, working as a building manager, I had already perfected the art of transferring videos or written text to MP3's that I could listen to while pushing a vacuum or cleaning windows. I had discovered that my poor scholarship was the result mainly of me not being able to understand a large portion of the information with which I was presented in school via text. The moment I discovered audio learning in 2007, it was like a man, having subsisted off grass his entire life, suddenly being presented a bowl of well cooked rice. Can you imagine what that bowl of rice would taste like?

So for me, in 2007, the books I read did not have to make it onto the New York Times best sellers list in order for me to find them delicious. I had discovered something. I had discovered that I could learn from listening. Text to speech or videos transposed into audio of any topic at all became like a waterfall of information for me. I could, all of a sudden, unscrew my cranial plug, pop a funnel in the form of ear phones into my head, and collect as much information as I wanted. Almost as if information in audio form was the transmission fluid necessary to lubricate the gears of my mind. Without it, yeah my brain would function, but with a lot of friction. A lot of, "hey what was that noise" or "didn't I just read this sentence?" or "God you're stupid. Look how long this is taking you to read one page."

Tangent time:

Can you remember silent reading in elementary school? Some kids looked forward to silent reading and now that I think of it, man... if it was called "silent learning" and I could have listened to an audio book, I probably would have too. I know that some of my classmates got lost in fantasies of dragons or space ships, chocolate factory tours or time travel. But me? I just sat there feeling stupid. I would try to read but eventually I would just pause on a page and allow my eyes to un-focus. I would wait until the kid next to me turned his page, count to 15 and then turn mine.

I remember two very impactful English teachers I had growing up. One who discouraged me from reading and writing and one who helped me discover that, although I'm probably dyslexic, writing for me could be an intensely helpful avenue to collect and organize my thoughts, build confidence and alleviate anxiety each time I engaged in it.

The first teacher caught me when she asked to see my book report. I had gone to the library and found a book, a HUGE book, a fiction about great white sharks. I can't remember the name of it now. It was close to 900 pages. But the important thing about this book (to me) was that it came with a collection of audio cassettes, narrated by the author. I devoured that book and wrote a book report that gave me an A+! But how could this kid who had never written an A+ book report in the past suddenly have this kind of shift in academic performance?

She asked me to bring in the book and talk to her after school. I handed her the thick hard cover book feeling proud that I could prove her wrong. She picked it up and said, "This is quite heavy. You read ALL of this book yourself?"

She had tapped into one of my deepest points of embarrassment. As a 12 year old boy, I really didn't know how to read that well. She didn't need to accuse me of anything. I spilled the beans. I told her about the audio tapes and accepted the assignment of "actually reading" another book and preparing a new report. Inside I knew this just meant I would accept an F because I knew the replacement report would be some more chicken scratch I made up 15 minutes before the assignment was due by reading the first few paragraphs of the beginning, middle and end of a small book with big words, plus the synopsis on the back.

THAT teacher made me believe I had no business in English. Luckily, she was not my only English teacher.

In Grade seven, two years later, another teacher held back three A+ creative writing pieces. She held them back after passing out the rest because she said she wanted to single them out. She said, "each of the authors of these pieces have a fantastic future in writing." She never said our names, but I and two of my classmates were the only ones without our assignments back from grading out on our desks. So now the game was to pin the story to the author.

Mrs. Brum read my story last. I remember it was a Halloween story written as a comedy -and it killed. I remember having tears in my eyes because I was laughing so hard along with my classmates. It was a lucky coincidence because my tears represented two kinds of emotion and I could hide the fact that Mrs. Brum had touched my heart. I remember the looks on the faces of my classmates as they turned to realize she was reading my story. Skeptical, "his older brother wrote this for him" looks turned into, "I never knew you had something like this in you."

My only regret is that I didn't tell that first teacher that she was wrong about me. I did love reading and writing and I was going to be great at it. I believe that in many cases, ideas can triumph because of a single word of encouragement, as can dreams be sent to their graves, still locked away in the hearts of those who dared to dream them because of a single episode of disgrace.

Back on track:

By 2011 I was 4 years into the understanding that, had I wanted to learn something, I could, and so I did. I read an average of three books a week from 2007 - 2012. Motivational books, history books, academic journals and opinion pieces. I transposed PDF papers into a text to speech software and listened to the piece as it was downloaded into my mind at 1.5 or 3 times speed. I would get lost in learning and a good book would mean that my work would become more detailed. I would go the extra mile on cleaning the stairwell if it meant another chapter could be consumed.

Now, when I wanted to learn something, I knew how to do it and the most interesting part is that I learned that I love to learn. In all my years of school, I had never discovered that. I often think about how well credentialed I'd be at this point had I discovered audio learning while still a student. Today, I don't have anything to hang on my wall with a stamp and a signature to show the level of my intellect. I suppose you'll have to take my word for it. I subscribe to Zig Ziglars notion that, "You can finish school. You can even make it easy. You NEVER finish your education - and it is seldom easy."

What does all of this have to do with Justin Hall-Tipping? Well... graphene nanotubes of course.

What!?

Just go with me on this for a second. Depending on how you ask the question, a graphene nanotube is between 140% - 580% more conductive than copper. It is 200 times stronger than steel. It can be stretched like rubber 25% of its length and maintain a density harder than a diamond. Here's where I learned that.

Some researchers have found that graphene "...(violates the) law of thermal conduction (Fourier’s law) in the micrometer scale." Here's where I learned that.

Stick the tip of a graphene tube in a pot of boiling water at sea level at one end of the room. Follow that tube to the other end of the room. It will be cool to the touch the entire trip. On the other end where the tube opens, you'll get 100 degrees C and you could boil a second pot of water if you wish.

Put simply, it is strong enough, if twined into a string (made macro), then twined into a thread, then twined into a cable, to theoretically go 200 times further than the same size cable of steel. And the place I think we ought to send a cable like that is straight down.

Que Elon Musk's Boring Company.

The thickness of the Earth crust is a fairly steady 5kms under the ocean floor. Under the continents it averages out about 30kms. Here's where I learned that.

To date the Russians maintain the record for the deepest hole ever dug. When their drill got stuck in a rock in 1989 they abandoned their drilling project near near Murmansk at just over 12 kilometers straight down. Here's where I learned that.

Moho, or Mohorovičić discontinuity is a layer of the Earth that is just between the Earths crust and the mantle. You know what the mantle is. Its super hot rocks. So hot they are in a liquid state. When they are still in the Earth they are called "magma." When it spues out of the Earth in volcanos we call it "lava." THE FLOOR IS LAVA!

Moving on.

Drill down to the Moho and you got a balmy 200 - 400 degrees C, year round 24 hours a day for the next ca-jillion years or so. I got that here (minus the ca-jillion years).

So if you have a 35 km graphene cable attached to a boring robot (no pun intended) on land, or a 7 km graphene cable on the same robot at the bottom of the ocean, you can have STEAM at the top end of that cable, anywhere in the world. Pressurized steam can turn a turbine and power an electrical generator. We'd just have to keep that turbine fueled with water. GREAT NEWS: we live on a blue planet.

Hold on. Wouldn't there be some by-products to this kind of electrical generation?

Glad you asked. Yes. If we used sea water (which we have a lot of) the byproducts would be salt (NaCl) and fresh, drinkable, water.

Now is the time for you to go back up. Not from the Moho, but to the top of this article where I mentioned Mr. Justin Hall-Tipping. Play his Ted Talk. Watch all of it but most importantly watch the part starting at 10:47:00. For me, I am touched every time I replay this video to hear him plead at the end, "We can do better than this. We should do better than this."

Somehow, in our modern culture, we've forgotten that energy is free. We forgot that the Earth provides us with a bounty of water, fresh yes, but also she has given us the knowledge and understanding to desalinate that water that makes up 80% of our planet. Using graphene we can devise a way to make that fresh drinking water in such abundance that no one needs to go without, ever again. In doing so, we can generate enough electricity to power the world, orders of magnitude, over.

I am a fan of trying to explain to people that our problems are all connected. There are upstream solutions to things like food and water insecurity that would have the side effects of powering the worlds factories, computers and cars.

In my personal history, one of my teachers sent me away with the impression that I had nothing to contribute to the world of creative writing because I, in her mind, refused to read. She was dead wrong. I did have something to contribute. I just needed to come at the problem from a different angle. We spend nearly $8.6 billion dollars every single year trying to solve world hunger. If it was a money problem, that ought to have afforded us a solution by now.

Another teacher of mine told the class on my behalf that I had a bright future in writing. While I've been unable to make it a career, I have made it a companion. I almost believed that I hated reading because of a single word of discouragement. That teacher saw me and my abilities through a lens that she couldn't remove. The other teacher didn't see my unwillingness to read at all. She saw my writing. Both teachers wanted to impassion my love for English. One just went about it the wrong way. Can you imagine the surprise that would result in that first teacher had she been able to learn that her best English student was the one who couldn't read.

You are more than the false criticisms you've received too. Don't forget that. Perhaps if that's something that you can remember, we'll be one person closer to remembering that energy and thus life on this Earth is free.

Don't forget: The best things in life are free.