Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for August 09, 2012

“…the profit motive is not always the best!”πBut when it is regulated by effective, honest government of the people, by the people, and for the people, it can be.πTwo athletes competing against each other (they may even be friends, even brothers who love each other) when the race is regulated by fair rules and regulated by honest officials, then the profit motive — to win the gold — can produce the best product: the fastest 200 meters ever. Or marathon. πAppropriate regulation of corporations (no campaign donations, no writing of legislation, no “insider trading” — just honest, fixed-rate mortgages to folks with good credit rating, and good jobs who can make the payments. πAmong Universities, say Stanford against Harvard: which who produces “the best, the brightest and the most honest” get the best jobs. As long as there are rules, regulations and controls (even to the point of drone camcorders on every student’s test paper, if that’s what it takes to eradicate cheating), then might produce high quality students.πYou’re probably too young to remember the idealistic scientists and engineers who back home in WWII, invented better and more lethal tanks, faster plains, bugger stronger carriers, such as the ENTERPRISE. The atomic works at Oak Ridge, TN; Los Alamos, NM; and Hanford, WA helped to defeat Japan and save a million U.S. servicemen’s lives.πHealthy competition drove these efforts to improve and make something better and better — enough to overcome our enemies.πI’m not saying we should start another war. I’m saying that when war is necessary, thrust on us, declared against us, then we should go all out to win.πLikewise with the space race to the moon. We have both cooperation and competition among scientists and engineers: scientist competing against scientist and engineer against engineer. But in order to do that we had to have the universities producing “the best and the brightest” to feed into the whole NASA system. πA third example: President Eisenhower and the Interstate system we enjoy today was built largely with both competition and cooperation working as long as it is properly regulated against corruption, inefficiency, etc. on the job. πThere’s plenty of work to do on, for instance, our infrastructure. We need a “Manhattan Project:” to redo pipes, bridges, electrical distribution, canals, etc. in an environmental friendly way.πWe need new sources of power such as SOLARES which launches thousands or tens of thousands of mylar mirrors that unfurl after launch and reflect ordinary sunlight to photovoltaic receptor clusters on earth in a circle as large as a city that could pump out much more energy than the US uses today from all “dirty” sources, such as coal-fired plants, oil-fired plants, and natural gas-fired plants. And there could be a limitless supply of SOLARES “cities” ringing the globe. This is the proposal of scientist Ken Billman when he worked for the NASA installation at Mountain View, California.πAnd not only electricity could be produced. When you have enough cheap power, such as SOLARES would provide, you and use it, for instance to "crack water molecules H2O apart into pure water and pure hydrogen. Then, an engine burning this cleanest of clean fuel: hydrogen and oxygen, slams back together again producing purest water, but with that water an enormous release of pure energy that can power any car as well as gasoline. What comes out the exhaust pipe? Pure water and only pure water.πSOLARES construction would require scientists, engineers, astronauts, and all the requisite support personnel.πHow I wish President Obama could catch the SOLARES vision. SOLARES would not contribute to global warming because it would emit no CO2 (carbon dioxide) or any other global warming gasses. πUnder these scenarios and many others, such as the Mars project, can make our future look brighter than ever before.πDylan Thomas Pi