Robert Heinlein

Believe it or not, I'm not the only person in the world who's had good ideas. And like me, many of these people have had ideas that never really caught on for one reason or another. Take, for example, one of my favorite authors, Robert Heinlein. He was a science fiction writer in the mid 20th century, and was counted along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clark as being one of the 3 great science fiction writers. Though his early work was strictly adventure oriented fiction, he became increasingly philosophical and political as his career progressed. He advanced ideas that were radically different on the political spectrum, ranging from government or military service as a requisite for citizenship, to the ideas in a book that was called "the unofficial bible of the hippie movement," to a book which called all governments, including republics, a threat to individual freedom. In his time, he was labeled a communist, a fascist, and everything in between.

Amidst all of this though, he had some startlingly brilliant technological ideas. Though some of his ideas were incredibly far-fetched (using psychic twins as an instantaneous interstellar communication method) most were highly practical and based in real physics (using gravity wells for slingshot propulsion). Some of his ideas have already been put to use, such as his personal spacewalk vehicles (NASA's MMU) while others would probably catch on quickly if they were developed (strike-anywhere cigarettes).

He addressed certain physical realities (which other authors ignored) and made them important plot points. For example, he never assumed faster-than-light travel or artificial gravity, so his interstellar transport involved colony ships that took multiple generations to reach a destination, corkscrewing all the while for centrifugal effect. In one story, so many generations pass that the occupants no longer know that they're on a ship, and a caste system has developed between people living in high gravity regions and low gravity regions. In another story, he uses the discrepancy between the gravities of the moon and earth as an economic factor, as it makes shipping goods from the moon back to earth a lot cheaper than vise versa, which is the cause of an eventual rebellion in the lunar colony.

One idea that has become more relevant recently with our quest for sustainability was his use of piezoelectrics. In at least one of his books, (forgive me, I don't remember which) he uses them extensively as an energy conservation method. Now for those of you who don't know, piezoelectric materials are ones that, when deformed or vibrated, give off an electric charge, and when a charge is applied to them, they deform or vibrate. The most common of these materials is quartz, and it's used in a wide range of technological applications, hence the terms "quartz radio" and "quartz watch." Anyways, certain of these materials (I believe) vibrate within the visible spectrum. He hypothesized that one could use these materials as artificial lighting in, say, an office building or spaceship. The advantage over current lighting options would be that you could put one set of radiative "lights" on the ceiling, and another set of regenerative panels on the floor. That way, a good chunk of the energy that was expended in lighting could be recovered as electricity. You could still provide just as much light as before, but any light that wasn't "used" could be "reused."

Now this obviously isn't the sort of technology that we have but aren't using, as even our current solar panel technology is fairly poor. But that being said, with a couple decades of intensive research, perhaps it could be done. I'm not going to pretend that I know even the first thing about materials science, but the logic behind it at least seems relatively sound. And if not piezoelectrics, maybe someday we could coat our floors with nanopolymer solar panels, and have them feast off our incandescent and fluorescent lights. Though certainly not cost effective at the moment, breakthroughs in solar technology might make this an eventual reality. In the places where we can't reduce, maybe we can reuse.