Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  In his analogy, the electrons are your coffee, and the water that contains those electrons are the grounds—you want to get your electrons to pass through into the semiconductor, but prevent water from coming in and corroding everything. The filter is designed to filter electrons out of water and keep the semiconductor nice and dry.

  Ten years ago, scientists like Sharp would have had to mix and test new materials for their filters or light absorbers over months, exposing them to different levels of heat and corrosives to see how well they worked. JCAP scientists have retrofitted an ink jet printer to synthesize and print out tiny dots of metal mixed up from different amounts or types of elements. The result is a long, scrolling paper like what you’d get out of an old dot-matrix printer. Except each dot on it is a novel material that can be tested in parallel. Up to one million of these new materials can be produced in a single day.

  Consider that this high-throughput synthesis of materials is being used in many other labs too. Though JCAP will eventually settle on a particular stack of materials for its light absorbers and catalysts, it will have created millions of other materials with novel properties in the process. It plans to make information about all those materials available for free online. Other scientists working on different problems in materials synthesis can consult JCAP’s database.

  This is a classic example of how taking on a big scientific project can lead to other forms of innovation on the way to a long-term goal. JCAP scientists want to generate solar fuel from carbon dioxide and water. Along the way, however, they’ll make it possible for engineers in many other fields to discover new materials that could lead to what we saw in the biomimetic city: spray-on, high-performance windows, foam roads, sophisticated 3-D printers, superdurable environmental sensors, and extremely efficient water recycling systems.

  It will also lead to actual solar fuel generators, another reason this futuristic city looks a lot like San Francisco today. Unlike current solar energy, which is intermittent and terrifically difficult to store, solar fuel can be packaged up in drums just like oil and gasoline.

  We’d fill our gas tanks with solar fuel and use pipes to bring it into the city from the nearby generator fields. We’d retrofit a lot of our current infrastructure to work with this new, carbon-neutral fuel. The fact that we won’t have to reinvent the way we deal with fuel could help us transform our cities sustainably, and slowly. Instead of tearing cities down, we’ll recycle them and patch them up with new materials. Our cities will evolve to be more like biological organisms that are self-restoring.

  On the road to developing efficient solar fuel generators, we could create cities whose technologies behave like components in an environmental system. As Sharp put it to me, “It’s not a future that looks totally different, but the subtle differences are important. The result is very realistic.”

  Life in the Ruins: What Would Make This Scenario Possible?

  Unlike the biomimetic city, the Mound city is actually biological. Everything from its water filtration systems to its solar energy production is done using biological organisms. Its structures aren’t “smart” like iPhones—they are smart because they are teeming with bacterial colonies that respond dynamically to the environment. This city is the result of advances in synthetic biology that allowed engineers to use the photosynthetic process in cyanobacteria to convert water and light into hydrogen fuel.

  Modeled on St. Louis, the Mound city looks dramatically different from cities of today—though, as our narrator explained, its architecture does resemble the styles favored by the Meso-American peoples who built Cahokia on the eastern side of the Mississippi River in the 600s CE. Historians believe that one reason Cahokia may have been abandoned in the 1200s is that the centuries-old city became polluted with waste and ruined by unsustainable agricultural practices. (There’s evidence that the locals diverted rivers multiple times for irrigation.) Many of the problems that plagued people of that era are also issues for St. Louis’s inhabitants today. The coal industry won’t last forever, and droughts in the Midwest wreak havoc on the food supply.

  That’s why physicist Himadri Pakrasi has created an interdisciplinary initiative at Washington University in St. Louis called the International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES). The cornerstone of the initiative is a series of projects devoted to alternative energy, with Pakrasi focusing on genetically modified cyanobacteria.

  A few years ago, Pakrasi made headlines when his lab created a strain of cyano that could produce far more hydrogen than average. If we could capture and use that hydrogen, he speculated, we’d have the beginnings of a new kind of sustainable fuel. Instead of drawing carbon from stores deep beneath the earth, this cyano would draw carbon that’s already free-floating in the environment as part of its natural life cycle. This is the very definition of a carbon-neutral fuel.

  When I visited Pakrasi in St. Louis to talk about how he imagined I-CARES would change the future, he suggested that one day his city would draw its energy from both algae and ultra-high-efficiency solar cells. His colleague Richard Axelbaum, an environmental engineer, gave me a tour of a model power plant facility at the university that the group thinks could represent a transitional phase between coal energy and algae energy. The plant is designed for “clean coal” burning, a process where the harmful by-products of coal burning are reduced and, in some cases, recycled. Carbon is siphoned off during combustion and fed to huge tanks of algae that will ultimately produce fuel. Tailings, instead of being stored in toxic ponds, are used in the production of asphalt.

  This kind of energy plant, where coal burning feeds into the production of biofuel, is a reminder that we can’t change over from one kind of energy production to another overnight. We have to move through transitional stages while corporations and the public adjust to the new carbon economy. To transition to the Mound city, however, we need more than hybrid fuel production facilities. The public must become accustomed to the idea that their city will run on genetically modified organisms.

  Sustainable fuel from cyano could be the GMO that sets off a synthetic biology gold rush. After a generation grows up using GMOs for fuel, GMO panic might seem like an antiquated superstition. Today, we are already seeing the development of “smart” materials in labs—including bacteria-based, self-healing cement—but many people fear the idea of building with biology. It’s possible that Pakrasi’s strain of cyano, or something similar, could convert that fear into familiarity.

  The result might be a place like the Mound city, where people use modified cyano for everything from air filtration to fuel. They also build with smart, self-healing materials, treating microorganisms the way we treat microprocessors today. Their Mounds are covered in vines and grasses that are an integral part of the city infrastructure.

  However, Mound city isn’t just the consequence of scientific advancement. If science were all that mattered for building a city, we could have a Mound city in fifty years. Cities are fundamentally social and economic structures. We’d need a social transformation that allowed for things like carbon taxes.

  People living in the Mound city would also have dramatically different expectations about how they would live. Our narrator’s home is in a densely populated building where her neighbors’ cyano affects the functioning of hers—much the way a plumbing problem in one apartment can become a leak in another. She also doesn’t own a car, nor does she expect to live in a place that is clean in the way most urbanites today would want. Dirt and plants are everywhere. And energy comes where you can get it. Most of the time, she powers up her computer by walking on a treadmill made with viruses that convert kinetic energy into electricity. For city dwellers of today, this might sound like a dirty, crowded, difficult existence.

  To modern eyes, the Mound city would look like a ruin, with crumbling, scarred buildings that have been overrun with plants. But to people of the future, it would represent the apex of technology. Or rather, biology. Instead of building against
the environment, Mound citizens would be building with the environment. They’d be using Earth’s greatest source of energy: solar. It would be hard to know where the city stopped and the natural world began. It wouldn’t be the sterile, orderly future of Star Trek that many of us were promised. It would just be Earth.

  The biomimetic city and the Mound city are both imaginative products of a long-term scientific search for new kinds of solar energy. They remind us that every great innovation spawns more inventions than we intended.

  As we move forward, new technologies and new social ideas may make the future as strange to us as a new city is to visitors from out of town. But if we choose our scientific projects wisely, we can harbor a rational hope that there will be friendly tour guides in centuries to come, willing to show our descendants around.

  file404/Shutterstock, Inc.

  FORUM DISCUSSION—Urban Sustainability

  Vandana Singh, James Cambias, and other Hieroglyph community members debate sustainable cities, community gardens, and the “zoopolis” at hieroglyph.asu.edu/solar-city.

  A HOTEL IN ANTARCTICA

  Geoffrey A. Landis

  © 2013, Nina Miller / ASU

  MAYBE IT STARTED THE day his laser company failed, the day his best friend, Saladin, drove off into the sunrise on his motor scooter, taking along the girl that Izak Cerny had always planned would be his girlfriend, and he stood on the curb waiting for lawyers and police cars to take everything he’d worked for, watching the sun rise, wondering what to do next.

  Zak had stayed at a hotel that night. His credit cards were no good, but the banks hadn’t yet flagged them for fraud. The hotel bill would just add a few more meaningless numbers to an epic bankruptcy. In a few days he would be thirty years old.

  He’d never thought much about hotels before then. But—with his company imploded, and his thoughts circling in meaningless spirals—it was the only thing he could latch on to. He needed to think about something else or go crazy. And so he studied the hotel, Mistry Majestic Long Island, in obsessive detail. How would it be different if it were on the moon? On Mars? In orbit? He decided that yes, it might work. It just might work.

  “I’m an entrepreneur,” he said. “I can do it.” It was midafternoon on a weekday. He was alone in a hotel room three grades fancier than anything he could have afforded, and he was talking to himself. He walked past the queen-sized bed, threw open the sliding glass doors, stepped through to the tiny balcony, and shouted to the ocean, “I can do this.”

  Or maybe it had all started long before that, the summer after his sophomore year at MIT. They had planted a seed, and Zak had carried it with him all those years.

  That all-night session in the lounge outside their dorm rooms, they had been too young to legally drink, but with the help of some French grad students who didn’t think much of American rules about alcohol, a small group of them were splitting a cooler full of Narragansett. Zak was expounding on how to colonize Mars, something he worked out in great detail, from the air-handling and regeneration system all the way to the sewage system. Saladin, always the voice of cynicism, pointed out at every opportunity “you don’t know that,” and “that’s never been tested,” and “what if it breaks down, and you need a spare part you don’t have?” Eventually, Saladin made an argument. “Look, Zak. Seriously. Mars is way more hostile than you can imagine. It’s colder than Antarctica, has less air than the top of Mount Everest, is drier than the Mojave, and is harder to get to than the bottom of the Marianas Trench. You say people are going to live there; it’s our destiny? Fine. So we need room that bad, how come we don’t have condos in Antarctica? Why no cities on the bottom of the Pacific? Why isn’t the Gobi Desert populated? Those are vastly easier places to live than Mars. Yet nobody lives there.”

  “People live in the Gobi Desert.”

  “Maybe one person in a hundred square miles. You know how freaking big the Gobi is? It’s empty.”

  “People live in Antarctica, too.”

  “Yeah, right—science stations. I mean, people who really live there, not just scientists on a glorified camping trip. You think humanity needs room? There’s a whole continent we’re not using.

  “You think you can build a colony on Mars? Prove it. Build a hotel on Mount Everest. Or Antarctica; a hotel in Antarctica. That’s a thousand times easier, but it’s still damn hard. A hotel in Antarctica, that will show me you’ve got a clue, Zak. Call it an existence proof.”

  “Don’t be silly. Who in the world would you get to stay in a hotel in Antarctica?”

  He looked around the room for support, but to his surprise, a handful of the sophomores were nodding. One, a kid whose name Zak had long ago forgotten, said, “Me. I’d go.” Another kid said, “Sure. Awesome skiing. Make it a ski lodge.” “Penguins,” another kid said, at the same time a fourth one said, “Set up tours to see the aurora.”

  “See,” Saladin said. “There you go. Extreme tourism, that’s the ticket. You got a market. Make me a hotel.”

  “Drunken sophomores?” Zak said. “That’s a market?”

  “Build it and they will come.”

  Some twelve years later, Izak Cerny slid a sheet of hotel stationery from the fake mahogany desk of a hotel room he couldn’t afford. Underneath the letterhead “Hotel Mistry,” he wrote: “A hotel in Antarctica 1. Because it’s really cool. 2. Because it’s never been done. 3. Because it’s expanding humanity into a new frontier. 4. As a step toward Mars. 5. To make money. 6. Because it’s really cool, also penguins.” Then he wrote “people will want this.” He circled that twice and wrote in the margin, “!!emphasize this point!!”

  The desk drawer held a privately printed autobiography of Gajadhar Mistry, founder of the hotel chain. An identical volume was in every room of the hotel: promotional reading for a million bored businesspeople who had already finished the Wall Street Journal. The motto of the founder was in boldface across the cover: “What others call obstacles, I call stepping-stones!”

  Zak mined the book for relevant details, and then swiveled over to his laptop. He already had eight windows open, with searches on the geography and ecology of Antarctica. He opened a new browser window and typed in “Gajadhar Mistry.” He would try Google first and then check LinkedIn. He knew a lot of people. Somewhere in his network of friends and connections and friends of friends, there was someone who could put him in touch with Gajadhar Mistry.

  GAJADHAR MISTRY HAD BLOW-DRIED silver-gray hair that made him look like the uncle character in a Bollywood thriller. But other than that, he still had the body of a much younger man, muscles showing that he regularly worked out with his personal fitness trainer. He wore a T-shirt and jeans. When you’re a billionaire who owns top-end hotels in twenty countries, apparently you don’t care what anybody thinks of how you dress.

  “My friends tell me that I should talk with you,” Mistry said. “So, tell me. Why should I talk with you?”

  “I want to tell you about an idea—”

  “Yes, yes.” Mistry waved his hands. “You want to build a space colony. I read the package you put together. It’s crazy.”

  Zak interrupted. “It’s not a crazy idea. The space colony is just an example. It’s about a self-sustaining biosphere to live in a hostile environment. Antarctica—”

  Mistry raised a hand. “I have no problem with crazy ideas. The fact that your ideas are crazy is not a downside for me, Mr. Cerny—” He broke off. “Mr. Cerny, that’s formal, and I am not a formal kind of guy. May I call you Izak?”

  “Just Zak.”

  “Zak. Excellent. Please call me Jerry. Now, Zak. Your ideas are crazy. Antarctica! Space hotels! Crazy indeed. But I like crazy ideas. I will let you convince me. And maybe your idea is not so completely crazy at all.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Let me tell you,” Mistry said. “I have made a small fortune building luxury hotels catering to the extreme tourism market. My first hotel was for the jungle-trekking tourists, in Chiang Mai. You already kne
w that? Ah, you’ve read my book. Excellent, I see you do your homework. Tourists love elephants.” He waved his hand at the wall of the office. It was covered with photos taken at his various hotels, half of them featuring wild animals, with tourists on elephants in two of them. “The hotel in Chiang Mai was built on the backs of elephants—not literally, of course. Everybody loves elephants. Wonderful beasts. Penguins, now—I expect that some people would pay something to frolic with penguins, yes. And skiing, of course. Especially when it is summer in Japan and America.

  “Now. Space colonies I have no interest in. But Antarctica? Crazy, but maybe crazy in a good way. Crazy the way I like.”

  Mistry leaned back in his chair and folded his hands together, fingertips to fingertips. “But my question is, why should I talk to you? You already gave me your idea.”

  Zak started to object, but Mistry raised his hand for silence again. “Yes, you gave it to me. Ideas can’t be copyrighted. Once you sent me your package—thank you, and you have no ownership. I read your résumé. You have a physics degree from MIT, very impressive, you worked for several small technology businesses. Then you broke away to form your own company, which I see failed and went bankrupt in a most spectacular fashion. Now, maybe I like your idea. A hotel in Antarctica. I like the audacity. I’m charmed by your idea.”

  He leaned forward and placed his elbows on the desk. “But I don’t see that you know anything about building hotels. Why do I want you?”

  Zak looked him in the eye. Mistry held his gaze and waited. “You don’t know me,” Zak said. “You don’t know this about me.” He enunciated each word separately, as if it were its own sentence. “I. Will. Make. This. Happen.”