Take a Cool Guess—The Fun Quiz on Renewable Energy and Environmental Sustainability. Today’s Topic: You Can Predict the Future of the Energy Industry

Question: Who said the following, and when did he/she say it?

When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole.

We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.

Answer: Can be found at Clean Energy Answers.

Relevance: Predicting the future of energy is far easier than we think; in fact, it’s more-or-less set in stone, given the cost curves of renewable energy and storage. When we look at the ever-accelerating rate of improvement in technology, coupled with the fact that we receive 6000 times more power from the sun that all humankind is using, we realize that it’s only a matter of a short period of time until we become what physicist Michio Kaku calls a “Type 1 Civilization,” i.e., one that gets its energy from its nearest star.

When we look at the plummeting prices associated with solar and wind, the incredible advancements being made in storage, the investments being made into power transmission, and the electrification of transportation,  we can see this all coming together in fairly short order–whether or not we actually care about human health and our environment.  But fortunately, a great number of us actually do care about such matters, as evidenced by the 194 countries that have signed onto the Paris Accord, the coming ban on internal combustion engine-powered vehicles in Europe, the net-zero energy building standards in California, and dozens of other easily observed phenomena.

You can predict the future.  Clean energy is happening, and there’s no turning back.