Orlando Weekly columnist Billy Manes – who I generally like and even supported for Mayor of Orlando – disappointed me with his story on gasification, A Convenient Truth.
The story comes on the heels of recent revelations that – to the gleeful delight of neocons everywhere – the production of the electric motors used in the Toyota Prius is so energy intensive, that it effectively negates whatever carbon/energy savings its use provides.
The two stories are related in that they both point to unhealthy attitudes towards new technologies.
Somewhere in the past forty years, we as Americans became intolerant of the trial and error aspects of technological development (read: pathetic cry-babies). Were Thomas Edison alive today, he would be regarded as total loser for failing to produce a working light bulb the first 300 times he tried.
Don’t believe me? Let’s turn back 40 years to 1967, and the Apollo One mission.
During a routine training exercise, a wire shorted out beneath Gus Grissom’s seat, starting a fire that quickly spread through the capsule, killing Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. Initially, their deaths were blamed on a design flaw in the capsule door that prevented the astronauts from opening it from the inside and escaping.
Soon after, though, the Apollo program astronauts and staff realized that the entire system was fraught with design flaws: The short itself was due to inappropriate wiring. The fire spread because the seat fillings and covers were flammable. There was no fire extinguisher system on board. The list went on and on.
In 1967, they did what exactly what they should have done: They figured it out, fixed it and continued forward.
If that accident happened in 2007, the entire Apollo mission would be shelved; there would be special reports, live updates, congressional hearings, local human interest stories, Matt Lauer interviews and photo-ops a-plenty; Orlando Sentinel columnist Mike Thomas would write a series of columns on what a waste of time and money the space program is – oh wait, he did that already.
The point is that we would never make it to the moon, today.
Gasification and hybrid engines are examples of those bold, world-transforming ideas that Americans used to be famous for: It takes something we produce in excess and turns into something we don’t have enough of. So it doesn’t work perfectly the first few tries? If we learn from each experience and make each subsequent instance more successful, isn’t that better than doing nothing while we wait for the perfect solution to come along?
Let’s stop catering to the small minds that can only see obstacles, and get back to being the big idea people.
