"Kim Stanley Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

He read one paper, written as if by a Martian, that suggested if humanity cared to
share the planet with the other species, especially the mammals—and could they
really survive without them?—then they should restrict their population to something
like two billion, occupying only a networked fraction of the landscape. Leaving the
rest of the animals in possession of a larger networked fraction. It was a pretty
persuasive paper.



As another occupier of his thoughts (though now hunger was going to drive him out
into the world), he looked into theories of long-term strategic policy, thinking this
might give him some tools for thinking through these things. It was another area that
seemed on the face of it to be important, yet was under-studied as far as Frank
could tell. Most theorists in the field, he found, had agreed that the goal or method
of long-term strategic thinking ought to be “robustness,” which meant that you had
to find things to do that would almost certainly do some good, no matter which
particular future came to pass. Nice work if you could get it! Although some of the
theorists actually had developed rubrics to evaluate the robustness of proposed
policies. That could be useful. But when it came to generating the policies, things got
more vague.
Just do the obvious things, Vanderwal. Do the necessary.
Diane was already acting in the manner suggested by most long-term strategy theory,
because in any scenario conceivable, copious amounts of clean solar energy would
almost certainly be a good thing. It was, therefore, a robust plan.
So, solar power:

1) there were the photovoltaics, in which sunlight was transformed into alternating
current by way of photons stimulating piezoelectricity in silicon.
2) there were the Stirling engines, external heat engines that used mirror dishes
controlled by computers to reflect sunlight onto a hydrogen-filled closed element
that heated to 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit, driving pistons which generated the
electricity. The engine had been designed by a Scot named Stirling in 1816.

All solar technologies had efficiency rates measured as a percentage of the sunlight’s
photonic energy transferred successfully to alternating current electricity. They had
been getting some really good numbers from solar panels, up to twenty percent, but
this Stirling engine got thirty. Given the amount of photons raining down, that was
really good. That would add up fast.
Then he found a link to a site that explained that Southern California Edison had built
a Stirling system to power a five-hundred-megawatt plant; most
traditionally-powered plants were five hundred or a thousand megawatts, so this was
full size. That meant there was some practical experience with real-world,
commercial versions of this technology. Also some manufacturing ability, ready to
be deployed. All good news when contemplating the need for speed.
Banishing the thought (recurrent about every hour) that they should have been doing
this a long time ago, Frank called SCE and asked a long string of questions of the
CPM (the Cognizant Program Manager, a useful acronym that only NSF appeared to
use). This turned out to be a man who was more than happy to talk—who would
have talked all day, maybe all night. With difficulty Frank got him to stop. Lots of
enthusiasm for the Stirling system there.