Everyone knows water is a problem. Everyone knows smoking is a problem. Everyone knows cancer is a problem. Everyone knows fossil fuels are a problem. The true grand challenges facing humanity are not obvious today. Here are some different ideas for large cash prizes that might just change the world…
Prize 1: Food / Nourishment
The entire system of food has not substantially advanced since the evolution of agriculture and herding. Our inherited digestive preferences, our foods, and our consumption patterns hinder our cultural evolution, strain the resources of the planet, and limit our ability to explore space. It is time that the great minds of humanity take a careful study of sustenance, growth, and the correlating health effects, looking to invent highly effective and low impact means to nourish a hungry species. What about a prize that encourages the creation of a non-organic food product that can be created through a catalytic process with no polluting byproducts?
Prize 2: Power / Light
The concept of burning fossil fuels to move water to spin a turbine to move electrons over thousand of miles of wires to burn a filament to create light is literally preposterous. If you took a college class of great minds and challenged them on how to create a scalable system to light the world, the electron-filament solution would get an “F.” Then, why do we do it? We need prizes in energy that get people thinking outside the box. What about a prize that encourages the creation of a mass produced lighting system that operates with no polluting byproducts?
Prize 3: Materials / Housing
The fundamental materials available in our arsenal of constructive tools has dramatically increased in the last century, allowing human beings to build great structures, explore the depths of the oceans, reach the peaks of land, and touch the edge of space. Materials have a profound effect. Imagine a thin and flexible bio-suit that maintained your core temperature in operating temperature extremes of this planet, from the desert heats to the cold of the arctic. Imagine a flexible and inflatable material that could be molded, shaped, then turned harder than steel for construction, then decomposed when needed. Why are we not building our own houses? What about a prize that encourages the creation of a lightweight, flexible, and super strong construction material that can be decomposed when needed?
This sounds like the source for either three new ‘X-Prizes’, or something the legislature should fund.
To start things off it might even be better to talk about doing something, rather than just doing it.
Why just talk, you ask? Well I won’t go into the physics of energy, and how the measurement of applied work in joules, versus wattage loads demanded by reviews & impact studies.
Advertisors understand the difference, and make fortunes based upon better promotion of mousetraps, amongst a field of equal verminators, rather than inventing better mousetrap themselves.
What I can tell you is that cheap oil, and worldwide backing of heavy military-industrial complex development has left many great ideas in the dust of this last century.
Enterpreneurs spend fortunes vetting inventions worldwide, to ensure legal patents.
Smarter promoters (or even wiser yet Venture Capitolists) will instead seek out those dark horses, previously under-supported, or ’small’ inventions already out there, and find new ways to award attention on potentially deserving alternative technologies.
For far too long we have ignored many ideas outside of the mainstream. Critical changes in the paradym, caused by the current economic downturn (and the possibility of peak oil), should encourage us to reexamine some of those ideas which came out before their time.
“It is easier to save energy, than to create it.”Amory Lovins
Prize #1 has already been answered in an even better way. But it was overlooked by the X PRIZE in favor of a capacitor idea to charge iPods and cell phones more quickly. Why start from scratch, when green waste contains cellulose, which in turn is PURE glucose in stored form? All it takes is a cellulase, an enzyme to cleave the bonds that link the glucose together in chains. Video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KzOSuK67ic
all of the above?