The Solar Window Of Opportunity: Joe Jordan at TEDxSantaCruz

hi everybody thanks for being here it's a beautiful day I just checked the Sun is just now coming out through the clouds and the fog here in Santa Cruz which is very appropriate for this picture right here I don't know if you can see it too well but I'm sure you're all familiar with this common pattern you see how those sun rays are all kind of fanning out like spokes of a wheel in the classic sunburst pattern now I'm sure you've seen that but would you believe me if I were to tell you that all those sun rays are actually parallel to each other may not look like it they're sort of fanning out like spokes wheel right but they are parallel to each other consider a couple of railroad tracks that appear to converge to a vanishing point on the horizon it's the same deal it's the perspective of parallel lines keep in mind that these sun rays are coming towards you they're coming at you out of the third dimension pretty interesting hey think about it well anyway now I've got a big kind of heavy question for you today are we going to make it as a species on this on the earth for much longer might be kind of a cliffhanger seems like we're sort of heading into a perfect storm right now but in the SETI research community SETI search for extraterrestrial intelligence the question arises okay where are they how come we haven't been hearing from anybody else out there got to do the barefoot thing myself too that's how I teach you so well some people will tell you well it's just because we don't yet have sophisticated enough technology or extensive enough sky covered yet to have been picking up signals but others say well you know intelligent civilizations with powerful technologies are really pretty rare out there in the cosmos or they just don't last very long they inevitably blow themselves up or pollute themselves out of existence or run out of resources or succumb to plagues or some damn thing nervous laughter for our future now we do know of ancient civilizations on this planet that flourished for a while and then vanished but now think about it global collapse could that be our fate alright now look in the really long run in the cosmic perspective there is one thing that's certain and it's not pretty starting in about a billion years the Sun is going to go red giant swallowing the planets Mercury and Venus and vaporizing our oceans well ouch you know I never thought I'd hear myself say this but could that be a case of too much solar energy and serious global warming by the way but hey that's a billion years from now not a million but a thousand million oh what a relief okay so what we are going to have to concentrate on getting through these next tens and hundreds of years and how we're going to do that nobody's figured it all out but there is one great truth really good news that you can count on any truly advanced civilization of intelligent life here on earth will have as its key signature that it runs on the Sun why is it such good news energy is the way we do it today is the largest and most polluting industry in the world but the Sun is by far the dominant source of energy on the planet completely dwarfing the sum total of everything we will ever get from oil coal natural gas and uranium combined you never hear this it's the best-kept secret in the world but here it is take a look at that big cube there that's the annual total solar energy input to the earth and you see that little tiny cube down on the lower right that's the annual total energy usage by all of civilization those other sort of largest dark boxes those aren't the annual energy supplies from the fossil and fissile fuels those are the total remaining reserves left in the ground so hey this picture is kind of like manna from heaven and especially if you're interested in really lots of really great new jobs where people can make a good living helping make a difference for a better world there's good news here and lots of it now let me show you a picture one of my favorite sky phenomena can't tell how well you can see it from out there shows up okay here but can you see well we were looking away from the sunset toward the east in the evening so first of all what's that white thing there when the moon is full it's always more or less opposite the Sun but you notice the contrast between this dark zone narrow dark zone down here and this much larger brighter zone above now you may have all seen this probably many times and maybe you thought that dark stuff was smog or something but you actually see it best on the cleanest clearest days I'm going to give you one more hint about what that is this whole pattern is rising in the east as the sun's going down behind us in the West it's the shadow of the earth on the atmosphere the air actually acts as kind of a projection screen for the shadow of the horizon behind you being cast out onto the sky ahead of you and now do you also notice a kind of a little pinkish orange horizontally oriented fringe along the boundary line there that's the last direct rays of the Setting Sun hitting the atmosphere it's called the alpenglow you don't have to be in the Alps to see it though you can see it here or anyplace else and this whole picture well actually I got to tell you before I finally get to the point here when I was a kid there are these two soap operas on afternoon TV one of them was called as the world turns and the other one was called the edge of night some of you may remember that well folks this is the edge of night as the world turns what you know at our latitude on the earth we're rolling about 800 miles an hour towards that day/night boundary so this picture kind of symbolizes the night and day contrast between the way we've been doing energy in the world you know analogous to that shadows on there and the way we have to start doing energy and can do it from now on if we're going to make it the way we do energy now is literally harnessing the powers of darkness oil coal gas uranium these things we have to dig up from underground largely in places where we've now largely made ourselves unwelcome making a huge mess everywhere we do it and every time we use the stuff meanwhile the Sun yet shines on the great majority of this scene representing that this vast resource whose enormous potential we've barely begun to tap yet the Sun and all of the renewable energy sources derive from or related to the Sun the winds which are caused by the Sun the waves which are caused by the wind green plants which grow under the light of the Sun falling waters which were raised into the sky by the heat of the Sun as well as ocean thermal power where we can utilize the temperature differences between the Sun warm surface layers and the cold depths and then there's lunar tidal power and geothermal earth power together these provide in less than one hour enough energy for all of humanity for a whole year and humanity's energy usage at present is really very wasteful so hey if we move towards more smarter more efficient infrastructure and towards wiser more community-oriented energy habits and that's a shout-out to the transitions movement we'll have a much more manageable problem all of these especially the big one the Sun are clean limitless homegrown and democratically distributed it doesn't get much better than that together these hold the keys to eliminating or at least greatly reducing what in my book are the top problems that humanity still needs to grow up and deal with poverty and war while promoting the health of the entire biosphere and revitalizing our global economy with a multi trillion-dollar revolution to the future where at last we can have widespread reasonable decent levels of wealth worldwide ok so what's the problem why aren't we there yet or at least well on our way the main reason is we haven't even been really trying yet you want to see a picture of how we've been spending our resources for energy over the past generations there you go that tall bar is the money we've been throwing at the dinosaur energy technologies of the smokestacks and radioactivity economy the little short bar is what we've been investing in our future ok so folks we've got to turn the tables on this picture and do the research and development the basic research like we used to to get the costs of solar and the other renewables down and then the political work to bring up the costs to where they should be of the cheap and dirty stuff what's been lacking is education of ourselves and our leaders so people know what's even possible and we can get the political will together to take on this enormous lee difficult radical wholesale sea change and spending on the right things for a change for anything we decide is good important work worth paying people to do we can and must spend which will increase the spending power the people doing the work and enrich economic activity overall it gets the job done while getting the jobs going now just so you know how real this potential and promise of renewable energy is guess what country in the world has deployed half of the world's solar electric arrays a technology that was invented here in the United States by the way I'll give you a hint it's a cloudy small country in northern Europe with a solar resource about like that of Alaska Germany has done this with intelligent wise vision and leadership translated into public policy ok well now just a couple more pictures of favorite sky phenomena as kind of visual metaphors and then it's time to go eat some stored solar energy ie lunch time this is a picture taken by one of my colleagues here at Cabrillo College Rick Nolte Gnaeus of one of the wonders of the world a total eclipse of the Sun and by the way I can't wait the next one that crosses our entire country is only six years away 2017 you know when you're in the middle of the round shadow of the moon on the earth you get this 360 degree sunset glow all the way around the horizon it's amazing and here's there's this amazing coincidence that the Sun is 4 the moon is 400 times closer than the Sun but also 400 times smaller than the Sun what's that mean it means it just exactly fits in front of the Sun enables you to see all these marvelous phenomena and that's a coincidence that's probably not duplicated many other places in the galaxy so you know what I tell people if aliens are coming here maybe it's to see our eclipses now these these are these bright magenta prominences here around the edges those are huge plasma eruptions bigger than the earth now you know we actually already have all the nuclear energy we need in that gigantic wireless fusion plant in the sky and the way we harvest solar energy at present for electricity is using the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust silicon the stuff of rocks second only to oxygen from all the water in the oceans but this picture kind of shows you where we are and what we're up against we're in the dark with a real fight on our hands our democracy is in danger of being turned into a racket by powers that be that are blocking our main path to sustainability so we have to move them aside take back today and let there be light sky power to the people now we're not quite done yet let me just leave you with that fabled atmospheric phenomenon of the green flash where the top edge of the Sun momentarily turns emerald green just as its meeting the horizon either at sunset or actually even better at sunrise Robert Frost had a line in one of his poems nature's first green is gold we truly are at the dawn of a whole new Golden Age of green cresting on the onder horizon on the very cusp of one of humanity's greatest projects ever the solarization of the world let's help create that wave and then surf it keep an eye on the sky sky power to the people thank you so much for anything you do out there

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 55,392

Keywords: USA, tedx, Energy, Solar, SETI, tedx talk, ted talks, ted x, ted, English, TEDxSantaCruz, climate change, warming, Joe Jordan, Sky-power, green, ted talk, Power, TEDx, tedx talks

Id: R1y2wll2Ve8

Length: 13min 19sec (799 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 31 2011