How Renewables Like Solar Power Are Set to Save the World

Our economy, and pretty much all economies, greatly rely on fossil fuels. What are fossil fuels? They're essentially ancient compounds in the ground, such as natural gas, coal, and petroleum that usually contain a significant amount of carbon. They're ideal for chemical reactions that create energy, and, like most good things in life, they aren't set to last.

It's no secret that coal and oil are going to be gone someday, and even before they're gone they cause quite an environmental toll to burn. Hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, may get natural gas out of the ground at unprecedented rates, but it also was the identified cause of the major midwestern US earthquake that occurred just earlier this month. Global warming is accelerating faster and faster as we burn harmful toxins and heat into the atmosphere, hurting the ozone layer. Nuclear reactors have caused some of the worst man-made environmental disasters of all time.

So what are the alternatives? Surely there is enough discussion about the harm of conventional energy that we can focus on the ways to move forward to help our society, economy, and environment. This is the first in a series of posts about how alternative energy is moving us forward. Let's start with solar power.

A Solar Panel / CC by Jimmy_Joe

Solar power is a broad term, but in the context of using alternative energy as an economic resource, it's usually referring to using solar panels to convert our sun's energy into electricity. Our sun's light is the source of all life on Earth, so it's not a huge stretch at all to imagine us utilizing all the energy that otherwise often goes wasted.

The big problem here is that it's really hard to capture the sun's energy efficiently. We can put panels, like the one pictured above, directly in sunlight, and it's really not a big problem. Where we run into issues is how much of those rays actually come out the other end into the power grid.

The great news, though, and what makes solar power incredibly exciting, is that scientists are making huge gains here! While the normal solar panel in the 1950s could harness about 4.5% of its captured sunray's energy (yikes!), and most solar panels in the past decade have hovered between 14-20%, innovator and entrepreneur Elon Musk said in a Mashable article last year that his company was going to introduce a rooftop panel that would harness a record-setting 22.04%.

What's particularly exciting about this is that while it sounds like a small gain, even a gain of 2% creates a huge amount more over the course of a year, especially on a huge scale. With all the gains that have been occurring so rapidly in the 21st century with regards to solar efficiency, it's been risky to buy and install a panel on your house with the knowledge that it will soon be outdated. Now that we're reaching the outer limits of what we previously thought possible, many industry experts speculate that critical mass is soon to be expected. Neighborhood solar will be a reality.

This would be a huge, crazy, nation-altering shift for the US. Having solar panels installed on rooftops would become just another piece of maintenance. It would add a new sector to our economy and create a gigantic surplus of energy out of nowhere, almost overnight. Many could even sell their surplus power back to the grid, creating a profit, and better energy prices for all. With the prospect of electric vehicles in our future, electric-generating homes seem like a pretty smart bet. It may not be long before our daily routines and lifestyle change significantly for the better.

How VoIP Closed the Gap of Personal Communication

When it comes to historical significance, most would contend that the peak of communications technology was the telegraph or the telephone. The telegraph was the very first machine that allowed us to think of information as instantly transferable. It no longer had to be tucked away elegantly in a parcel, strapped to the back of a horse. We could transform a thought into just a few fragments of energy and transfer it along phone lines.

While these paradigm shifts were of great importance, another huge shift happened over the past decade or so that it seems a lot of us didn't even notice. This is the rise of Voice over IP communication or VoIP. Ever heard of Skype? Then you know what I'm talking about.

Skype, and many of the identical services like it, provide a way to easily connect with and actually see the person you're talking to. Like the video phones in The Jetsons, they give you a window into the facial expressions and room of the other person, creating a face-to-face conversation over long distances. While conversations over just voice are fine and dandy and were clearly very important on a technological level, Skype allows for a recreation of local, immediate conversation. It's much more intimate.

This opens up a lot of possibilities! Long distance relationships are infinitely easier, whether you're a couple hours away or an entire hemisphere. Doing interviews with someone becomes easier as you can see their hand gestures as they explain an important concept or their facial expressions as they attempt to inflect a certain tone. Parents with newborn children can call up the grandparents, creating those early, important visual interactions with family members despite them being on the other side of the nation. So many social possibilities are entertained just by this simple technological shift.

These are the little things we so often forget about when we keep our heads strapped forward, always looking to the newest thing. Parts of our social lives have changed dramatically due to technology, but we barely give thought to it because it seems like such a natural change. Video calls fit so naturally into so many of our lives, we don't really have to stress the innovation. I think that's a mistake! It's just another example of progress as our world continues to turn.

Preventing Maternal Hemorrhage & Shock in the Developing World

One of the biggest problems facing the developing world, and one that faced the entire world for centuries until modern times, is the serious injury and death that can result from complications during pregnancy. According to the World Health Organization, postpartum hemorrhage in developing countries is the single largest cause of maternal morbidity & mortality, accounting for 25% of maternal deaths globally.

These statistics lead to a great need for a solution, or at least some attempt to decrease the chance of serious complications in places where hospital care for a mother is by no means available or guaranteed. This is why the development of the Non-pneumatic Anti-Shock Garment (NASG) is so groundbreaking and important.

Courtesy of the World Health Organization

What is the NASG? It's a garment that is wrapped around a new mother's legs and pelvis and applies pressure to decrease the chance of pooling blood, increasing circulation and decreasing bleeding. The technology was developed by NASA in the 1970s, and it essentially mimics the lower half of a wetsuit, which is normally used to keep your body evenly compressed to prevent sicknesses such as the bends.

Not only does this decrease in potential bleeding lead to a decreased chance of hemorrhage, it also leads to a decreased chance of shock, which is where the greatest chance for serious injury or mortality arise. While the garment is a low-cost deployment that is more of a stop-gap than a full solution, it's still a very important part of the puzzle when it comes to preventing a horrendous injury until the mother can get more proper medical attention.

At a price of about 50$ and the ability to use it about 40 times, its cost-effectiveness is undeniable. It's just one way technology is making the world a better place for women.

Artificial Intelligence and Its Potential to Revolutionize Healthcare

Back in the 1960s, Artificial Intelligence, also known as AI, was characterized by science fiction as a terrifying prospect. In the film "2001: A Space Odyssey," a monotone AI named HAL 9000 betrayed the main protagonist, locking him out of his own spaceship and preventing him from carrying out his orders. As the highest-grossing movie of 1968, "2001" set a tone in pop culture that is hard to overcome, that of the backstabbing, emotionally cold computer who has no respect for the value of human life.

What about today? Cinema is not known for its historical tendency to portray things accurately. It goes for the dramatic flair, the terrifying glamor. Today, artificial intelligence is just about as boring, but useful, as could be. Researchers at Indiana University discovered, just a few years ago, that if you take all the medical data that patients give their doctors, but instead gave it to an AI, the machine would spit back treatment paths that increase positive outcomes by over 40% while decreasing healthcare costs by over half. Half!

How is this possible? Computers are becoming far more intelligent every year, and these computers were doing something called 'simulation modeling.' This modeling is done by inputting patient info into a diagnosing, decision-making supercomputer that computes predictions and outcomes for every single path of medical treatment. As new information comes to light, new paths are considered. The AI is essentially programmed to 'think like a doctor.'

This sort of breakthrough would be guided by advances in voice recognition, which would allow patients to talk directly to a machine instead of a doctor in certain circumstances to allow for earlier diagnosis, and mathematical frameworks, which allow the programmers to deploy such discoveries at massive scales. In the rapidly-advancing future, the sky is the limit!

In the near-future, AI is going to define several significant developments in our daily lives, talking to our phones, replacing our doctors, and guiding us through our preferred entertainment. It's good to know that it's a technology that is not going to be used against us or used to surpass us, but instead one that will be used to intelligently help us and enhance our processes. It will improve things that much need improving, like healthcare, and make the world generally a better place. As always, that's something to look forward to.

How LifeStraws Save Countless Lives

Many years ago, back in the 2007-2008 school year, the policy debate topic was public health assistance in Sub-Saharan Africa. I was not yet in high school, as I would enter the next year, but I would hear about the topic regardless.

Some of the various proposed cases, also known as affirmatives, were legendary. Cheap robotic rats would walk over landmines and blow them up to prevent public injury and death. Gustave the man-eating crocodile would be neutralized by the United States government. Another silly one, at least at the time, were these LifeStraws.

LifeStraws were a revolutionary piece of tech at the time. Unveiled in 2005 but largely undeployed, they were little straws that you would put into a source of drinkable, yet most likely highly polluted or diseased, water and it would, on the fly, do the filtration for you. As long as you had access to a body of water you could drink from it without fear of contracting sickness or disease from a single straw for about a year.

As they were nowhere near ready to be a mainstream product at the time, it was an investment that would theoretically require a huge amount of capital, and even then it was not clear whether its availability would ever be widespread. Now, in 2016, the answer is a little more clear. LifeStraws are a huge success that is helping millions of people in developing countries and victims of natural disasters alike.

A LifeStraw / CC by Badri Seshadri

How does it work? Well, a Cosmos Magazine article gets into the nitty-gritty of it but essentially there's a big filter at the bottom of it that filters out the big stuff (think insects, dirt) followed by several more filters where the holes are constantly decreasing in size, getting rid of more bacteria in each step. There's finally an ultra-filtration filter where incredibly tiny holes - just microscopic - get rid of the smallest viruses. A piece of carbon at the top of the straw gives the water a normal palate and prevents it from tasting horrific. Voilà! You have clean water.

Technology like this is the kind of benchmark we'll judge our age by. Decades from now society will look back on the early 21st century and talk about the strides we made as we started to really lock down the importance of resource access and humanitarianism. Living in America, it's easy to forget that access to water is still a gigantic problem in the world, but here humanity is, making it better every year.

Hello world!

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HOPEFUL.PROGRESS.EXE 1.0 2016-09-07 Copyright (C) Jackson Hermann

Hello, reader! Welcome to my blog! Whether you're reading it because you're part of my group, because you know me, or because you just happened to stumble upon it, I appreciate your time and attention.

What is Hopeful Progress all about? Well, it's about technology. We constantly hear about technology being used to solve economic problems or day-to-day annoyances, but what about when a breakthrough means a real improvement for people’s lives? This blog covers the optimistic worldview that technology is constantly making our lives, and subsequently the world, better.

What does that mean in simpler terms? That this blog is going to talk about how technology is making the world a better place. :)

Now why should I be the one to talk to you about this? What qualifies me to tell you about the technology of the world? I've been passionate about tech ever since I first logged into dial-up when I was 4 years old. As a millennial, I didn't have to adapt older ways of thinking and doing to new technology, but rather was privileged to grow up in the midst of the Information Age.

This passion has shown all through my life, from uploading YouTube videos all the way back in middle school to hosting my own tech news podcast. My outlook is that tech enriches our lives, and I hope that after reading a few posts, you'll think that too!

Anyways, that's enough about me. This blog will be updating pretty regularly and soon we'll be progressing as normal. Hopefully.

(C) Jackson Hermann