After one semester of school I have already come to the conclusion that I really dislike the Virginia Tech College of Engineering or at least the Department of Engineering Education (though I am still set on being an engineer myself). I am sick of the focus on sustainability (yes I did just say that), the arrogance expressed in our textbook and the attitude of half the freshmen that I meet who think that all the world's problems will be solved by strapping solar panels to the blades of a windmill. I am exaggerating a lot but I have heard the phrase renewable/sustainable energy so much that you might just think it's really going to fix all the worlds problems. Well I have some sad news for the Department of Engineering Education; sustainable energy won't fix the world's problems, but neither will Jesus nor Superman; politics won't help nor will free public education (sorry if I'm saying something you don't like, but it's my blog and I can be as ridiculous as I want). With that said I would like to propose the preposterous idea that I do have the solution to all the worlds problems. Yes I am being a little full of myself but I'm entirely in earnest; and it's pretty simple (and certainly a lot easier than Jesus' commandment to love one another). All that needs to happen is for everyone to get a little more comfortable with their neighbors.
The problem that I have spotted, the one that everyone else missed is that individually we have too much space and as a race, on a planet of limited size, we have far too little. This modest proposal asks that everyone just get a little closer together. It asks for the reduction of the suburbs and the elimination of the exurbs (large McMansions that have been intentionally built in the middle of nowhere) and just to put as many people as possible in large cities. Why do something so counter intuitive? It's pretty easy to predict that when you put a lot of people together you will get a lot more robberies and muggings, the crime and violence you always find in cities. Well the first thing to think about is that with a lot more people living in one place you will certainly have a lot more police, but that is not a solution to the problem. Something to think about is that people in general would not like to live in an area with lots of crime and violence and most of the people left the city to avoid those problems. However if they do stay, the people the city will try to make their lives better, which is something people routinely do and I would hope that if they tried long enough they would eventually start to succeed. I think most of the people in the world would like the streets to be safer so they weren't afraid to leave their homes. Most would like to have good grocery stores and restaurants. If people want these things bad enough someone is going to oblige and clean up the streets, open up restaurants and other stores if only to make money off of their desire for something better.
Now that I have cleared that general concern I want to address some specific concerns.
Cities are wonderful places, if they have jobs. But the wonderful thing about having everyone in one place is that all the jobs can be in one place too. Imagine that every day, people in Town A get in their cars and drive on the free way to work in Town B 10 miles away and at the same time everyone in Town B gets into their cars to drive to work in Town A. Well doesn't this sound like every day driving to work? A river of taillights flows out in front of you on one side of the road while cars on the other side of the road drive in the exact opposite direction to where you just came from to work. Wouldn't it be great if all the people could work in their own town? Can you imagine how much gas and frustration that would save? Except the people in Town A were only qualified for jobs in Town B and the people in Town B could only find work in Town A. However if you put everyone in City C and all the jobs are there then no one has to travel for a job because it's right next to them. So, are you happy outraged environmentalists and frustrated white collar businessmen? I just saved you all 20 miles of travel every day and if the city has good public transportation then you will only need a car for family vacation and camping trips so, everyone can have an SUV without worrying about gas money.
Now there are a lot of hungry people in the world, or so I was often reminded at the dinner table when I refused to eat. How does this idea help them? Well since the whole world population is now concentrated into small areas there are now lots of places to grow good food that can be shipped to the nearest city and with all of the heat in the city it becomes a perfect greenhouse to grow foods inside large buildings as well. With so much food it becomes dirt cheap and the basic foods would be barely worth selling at all. Also with a sudden abundance of good farmland there is no reason to keep burning down the rainforests at all because that land is not needed. Nature preserves can be kept as an escape from the city and now it would be a lot more wild because there would be no people anywhere. Poor starving kid in Africa satisfied; check! Naturalists and people who chain themselves to trees satisfied; check!
Now for the cherry on top of my social planning sundae; war and disease, the two worst killers of civilizations. Disease is certainly handled much better in cities with hospitals and modern medicine than out in rural areas but what of war? One of my heroes Nikola Tesla was an inventor more prolific than the famed Wizard of Menlo Park, Thomas Edison. He invented our current system of AC power, he was the inventor of radio (which was NOT invented by Marconi!) and he invented the science of robotics. Tesla believed that with his robotics the world could engineer away war. He envisioned remote controlled planes and mechanical men to fight wars in our place. He wanted war just to become a big game until it just faded away as a novelty like every other game we have played. We have robotic planes now, electronically guided missiles and machines of war that should keep our soldiers away from the bullets flying across the battlefield but war continues, our soldiers still die and the people who lack these machines to put distance between them and the bullets die as well. War is not going to be engineered away. But if you put all the people closer maybe they won't fight each other as much. It's a pretty common idea that if you allow people to get to know each other they will fight less and less. Tesla thought that his invention of the radio would help people communicate better and reduce conflict. Alberto Santos Dumont thought that if he invented a personal plane the world would seem like a smaller place where people could get to know each other. The problem with both of these ideas is that people don't have to live with each other in either case. They still can go home at night and they still have another country to which they have sworn allegiance. People in the same city may not get along that well but they still call the same place home which is a lot to have in common. Also they can't really blow each other up, especially if the military is all on the same side.
War; Poof! Gone!
Any questions?
Well then, I am done being silly for a bit. I don't really know if this would work at all and I have hardly worked out all the details but I was just making a very long example. I just said that you couldn't engineer away war and earlier that sustainable energy couldn't fix the world's problems. In the same context you can't engineer away hunger or poverty, you can't fix deforestation with technology and you can't make people happier by making a bigger car to drive to work in. You really have to think outside of engineering to solve the problems of the world. But this plan wouldn't work without engineers, it couldn't be built, it couldn't be organized efficiently, it couldn't be designed without them. I'm still set on being an engineer though and I don't want to relegate my profession to just enabling the dreams of others. Engineers and inventors have always had the big ideas that made the world a better place and I would like to be in that position someday.
For New Years Eve I was partying with my parents at the house of a NASA engineer, Chris Burke and at the end of the night he was talking to me about how to go about being the best engineer that I could. He told me simply that I had to think outside the box, the engineering box. He started talking about perpetual motion machines and their physical impossibility but the abundance of people attempting to make them. We both knew that thermodynamics prevented them because they violated conservation of energy.** All that means is that it is useless to try to make them at all. But he suggested to me that instead of thinking they were impossible and giving up, to try and think outside of the box to use the energy that is everywhere in the world to make the illusion of one. To make a machine that seemingly could go forever and even make energy out of nothing but really just converting the energy around it. This is what engineering really is. We are not just physicists determining what is possible and impossible, and instead engineers think beyond the rules to make something interesting happen. In essence it is our job to think creatively and not keep our minds trapped in what we have learned.
This is the kind of engineering and inventing that I want to do with my life, the kind that has nothing to do with my drawing or programming skills and nothing to do with the physics and math I have learned. Those are tools which should only help us think outside the box and not define the walls that hold us in.
Ta ta for now!
*The quote in the title is from the Assassin in the movie Serenity.
**A simple explanation of the three laws of thermodynamics. 1) You can never get more energy out of a machine than you put in. You can only break even. 2) You can only break even at absolute zero. 3) You can never reach absolute zero.
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