Doctor Recommended
100% All Natural

If you enjoy reading technological predictions of the future, then you will like the interview between Compute! magazine and space-science popularizer, Gerard O’Neill (who I mentioned in passing recently).

To his dismay, space colonization never reached the level that he had hoped for, nor for that matter, did Wernher von Braun’s.

See O’Neill discuss The Colonization of Space in Physics Today, circa 1974 — as well as an interview of him by NASA.

A month ago I mentioned the pie-in-the-sky project of placing solar panels on the moon and beaming the energy back to Earth.

While that alternative has been collecting dust on the drawing board, Solar Power Satellites - its cousin - may once again see the day of light.

In a nutshell, the SPS is just a large array of solar panels launched into geosynchronous orbit. So, think of them as conventional solar-powered communication satellites without the communications equipment. Or in other words, using the technology of today, to stitch together a kilometer+ sized array of solar cells.

Once the energy is collected, it could be beamed back to a terrestrial recevier through the use of microwaves — and at a high rate of efficiency (very little loss due to atmospheric disturbances, weather, etc.).

The links above discuss some of the monetary costs of launching such a system into orbit, and they are still quite steep. Of course, that could all change if relatively light-weight materials (e.g. nano-based cells) are developed, which shed the payload costs.

Or, as mentioned in “Shooting yourself into space with a cannon,” you could switch to an entirely different approach to launching objects into space, mass drivers. No doubt, you are familiar with these devices, such as rail guns, through their depiction in Hollywood films like Eraser.

For more on the practical uses of SPS and mass drivers see: Gerard O’Neill and the L5 Society.

In 1900, about 2 percent of the college-age population enrolled in higher education. That number is around 65 percent today. And of the nation’s 15.5 million college students, about 44 percent attend community college.

According to the Census Bureau, as of 2004, 28 percent of those age 25 or older reported they had attained at least a bachelor’s degree.

And based on survey results analyzed by The Council of Graduate Schools, 643 institutions enrolled more than 1.5 million graduate students in the fall of 2005.

So, the next time you hear someone use nerd as a pejorative, embrace your heritage and be offended — because holding a college degree nowadays is almost like owning a car: everyone’s got one. Thus, for comparative marketing purposes, you are most certainly not a nerd.

For more on degree inflation, see also: Overselling Higher Education