Light and Weather in Microsoft Flight Simulator

Fans of flight simulators often talk about how “immersive” a sim is. It’s about how much the sim experience makes you feel like you’re flying a real airplane. Visuals are obviously a key component, and VR can take this to a higher level in terms of feeling truly surrounded by a 3D environment made up of the structures of your aircraft as well as all the natural and human-built objects in the simulated world around you. Sound is also very important, as are physical controls like yokes and rudder pedals (controlling an airplane with a keyboard is definitely an immersion killer). Realistic ATC (Air Traffic Control) communications are important especially for airliners and military flight sims.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 addresses all these components, but to me, lighting and weather are the pieces that really pull it all together. Things we take for granted in real life like shadows, reflections, transparency, refraction, and color shifts are all well-simulated in MSFS. Making things look real also requires careful attention to materials and to how light interacts with them, including their colors and how shiny or rough they appear to be, which also affects color.

MSFS uses techniques called PBR (physically based rendering) to pull this off. Notice how the yellow features in this Stearman paint scheme (above) are reflected and distorted in the shiny blue fabric panels of the wings. The colors are shifted by these reflections as well as by shadows and by the angle from the sun at which you are viewing the surface. PBR techniques are also used to make buildings, runways, and other surface objects appear more realistic, often in combination with photogrammetry. 

Photogrammetry uses photographic imagery for measurement purposes, and in MSFS, this real-world data allows many cities to appear nearly photorealistic. Based on the resolution of the captured data, objects as small as signs on buildings may be readable, depending on your position and altitude. Technologies such as radar and lidar can also be used to accurately measure the height of terrain, and such data is often available to simulation modelers. Although MSFS recreates the entire surface of the Earth, the level of available detail varies by location, with many major cities covered by detailed photogrammetry (like New York City, shown in a VR stereo pair below), while many others depend on AI-based “autogeneration” of 3D objects including buildings, mountains, trees, etc. 

The appearance of objects in a simulation naturally depends on light sources, and MSFS incorporates multiple light sources starting with the sun and the moon (both accurately positioned based on the location, date, and time of day). I believe starlight is also modeled. Human-made light sources include streetlights, vehicle lights, light from building interiors, airport lighting, etc., and what amazes me is  when light sources interact with surface properties (reflecting or scattering) as well as with atmospheric properties like clouds, mist, rain, and snow. The resulting scenes can be uncannily realistic.

Speaking of rain and snow, weather is the other big piece of “immersiveness” I wanted to briefly discuss here. It’s a critical subject in real life aviation and in the sim. Microsoft and Asobo and their partners have placed huge emphasis on making weather look and feel right, and the system they developed is incredibly detailed, flexible, and easy to control.

Not only can you adjust any location's time and weather to your choosing - from clear skies to heavy clouds, to snow and storms – with “Live Weather,” you can even set it to match real conditions taking place in that part of the world. But if you don’t like the time of day, the wind, the height of the clouds, the height of the waves, or the depth of the snow cover, you can change any of that without even stopping your flight, using the interface shown above. 

Rather than drone on and on about this, allow me to recommend two brief developer videos that clearly explain how they managed to make the weather so real, it can get scary at times. Fortunately I can switch to clear skies anytime and (usually) not hit the mountain that was behind that cloud!

Feature Discovery Series, Episode 2: Weather 

Partnership Series: Meteoblue - Weather Forecast System

Great Book: Kindred Beings

I recently read Dr. Sheri Speede's wonderful book Kindred Beings (subtitled "What Seventy-Three Chimpanzees Taught Me About Life, Love, and Connection"). What an amazing book! What an amazing woman! It is no exaggeration to say that this book clearly shows that chimpanzees are people too, just a different kind of people. They are close to humans in much more than DNA. The picture above shows a group of chimps grieving and paying their respects to their dead friend Dorothy at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center, which Sheri Speede founded in Cameroon. While I understand that poor humans in Africa have difficult lives and that some may rely upon “bush meat” to have protein in their diets, it is horrible, bordering on genocide and cannibalism, that these chimp/people are losing even more of their home habitats, are often abused and hunted for food, and are being driven to extinction. There are an estimated 150,000 chimpanzees remaining in Africa. The population has declined by half since 1960.

Nature is not especially kind or fair. It is often quite cruel. To a good approximation, every species watches out only for itself, through the actions of individuals who struggle to eat, to reproduce, to survive. Millions of species have become extinct and more become extinct every year. This was happening long before humans became the dominant species on this planet, with the power to transform habitats en masse, but we have certainly accelerated the process in recent years. Many humans have an interest in life beyond the earth. Is there life elsewhere in the universe? Perhaps even intelligent life? These are great questions, and I am quite interested in this subject myself. But look -- there is highly intelligent life here, and not just we humans. We have especially close cousins in the chimpanzees and other social apes. I wish we could find a way to co-exist with them.

This is just such a moving book. Here is the next to last paragraph:

Chimpanzees engage life fully, in the moment. They wear their emotions for all to see, or hear. Even an adult chimpanzee might cry like a baby if he is being rejected, or throw loud and dramatic tantrums over a perceived injustice. A few minutes later, with the proper recognition or comfort, he can be the picture of contentment. The quality of their friendships and family relationships to a large extent determines the quality of their lives. Watching the social vignettes of chimpanzees through the years has taught me to recognize my own pretenses. We are such similar apes. But they bring a primal pureness and immediacy to their expressions of intimacy, which I have come to cherish in my friendships with them. From knowing chimpanzees I have learned to live more honestly and vulnerably.

For more information about efforts to save chimpanzees in Africa, read this great book, or check out the IDA Africa (In Defense of Animals) website.


I have recently started to keep a journal using an app called Day One that runs on the iPhone. I adapted the above post from an entry in that journal. While I know I have no obligation to write this blog with any particular frequency, I sometimes feel bad that I don't do so more often, especially now that my apparent need to write for myself is being met by journaling. I've been writing this blog since 2005, and I hope that some of what I have written is useful or interesting for others. There are a lot of words here! It is still interesting to me to look back at some of what I have written here, even if I don't write here as much these days. I will probably write more blog posts from time to time, but with no particular goal for frequency.  In a cliche that I'm not supposed to use: it is what it is.

Plain or Peanut?

I watched a very interesting short video from Worldviews Network today, "A Global Water Story." I learned a lot about fresh water and how it's in increasing demand around the world, even as climate change makes dry areas drier and wet areas wetter and ancient underground aquifers sink rapidly. To set the scene, the video uses a clever analogy to show how little of our planet's water is fresh water. 

Imagine that all the water in the world is represented by a one gallon (3.8 liter) pitcher. All of this would be salt water except for three shot glasses of fresh water (a shot glass holds about 1.5 fl. oz. or 44 ml). The contents of two of the three shot glasses would be frozen polar ice. Of the fresh liquid water in the third glass, most of it would be underground. The drinkable amount available on the Earth's surface would be the volume of a single M&M candy (a volume of about 0.64 cm^3 or 0.64 ml):

Happy Earth Day!

Before it slips away and becomes belated as so many occasions seem to do, here's wishing everyone a very happy Earth Day!

The picture above is a screen shot from the Orbiter space flight simulator, which I keep wanting to return to playing with, but never seem to have time. This is a nice, big-picture graphic, but as a celebration of the Earth, it pales in comparison to the daily stream of fascinating Earth images beamed down from the International Space Station by its commander, Col. Chris Hadfield. Just amazing stuff. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook (or on Tumblr) if you really want to get to know the face of this wonderful planet! He also does great science demonstrations (thanks to Astropixie for this tip).

Awesome (Truly!) Video

Overview by the Planetary Collective. See also this website.

The Dog Stars

How will the world end? Or at least humanity's part of it? War? Resource depletion? Pandemic? Asteroid? Of course I don't know. I hope we can learn to take better care of this world, and of one another, so we can  carry on here for a very long time. I also hope we can develop space settlements similar to what is described in the novel 2312 that I read recently. It would be nice to have an off-site backup for humanity. SpaceX and Curiosity* notwithstanding, that's probably going to take a while.

Meanwhile a lot of authors are thinking and writing about the end of the world in one form or another. I have read a fair amount of post-apocalyptic fiction in my time. Not sure why. I like a good story, and I'm curious about how things might turn out if things go bad for a lot more of us than is the case now. In the last two days, I read what may the best post-apocalyptic novel ever (for me anyway). The Dog Stars takes place in an unspecified but very near future, about 9 years after an especially vicious flu pandemic has wiped out over 99% of the human population. It seems totally plausible.

The narrator, Hig, lives at a small airport in Colorado. His only neighbor is a heavily armed survivalist, and together they manage to survive the occasional attacks by bands of desperate survivors looking for food and whatever else they can find. They are armed and prepared and they do not negotiate with these people. Hig flies patrols of their "perimeter" in his 1956 Cessna to spot trouble early, while Bangley handles the "ground war." Hig's best friend is his dog Jasper, and with his wife and everyone else he knew dead in the pandemic, his bond with Jasper is an important part of why he is still around. There are some other survivors who live a few miles away, a small group of Mennonites who are infected with "the blood," a wasting disease that is thought to be highly contagious (it somehow became common among survivors of the flu pandemic). Hig lands his plane on their farm sometimes and helps them out in various ways, without direct contact for fear of infection. He is a kind and caring person who is also an excellent hunter, able to take down a deer or a marauding human when the need arises.

That sets up the story, and I won't give away any more of the plot details, because it's a great story with vivid characters and a lot of interesting twists (no zombies, no monsters, no space or sciencey stuff, though there is a hint at one point that the virus that wiped us out was engineered in a lab - in California - but no one knows for sure). There's also a fair amount of "flying lore" built into the story which appealed to my pilot side. But the real appeal is Peter Heller's use of language. Heller is a poet who has written a lot of non-fiction. This is his first novel. The writing style simulates to some extent Hig's stream of consciousness, and at first you may be bothered by the lack of quotation marks and other "navigation aids." And also the incomplete sentences and even fragments. But. It seemed natural to me after a dozen or so pages.

The real beauty is in how he observes and connects things. He loves the woods, the mountains, the birds, the streams, the sky, everything in nature. And his dog. And his airplane. And his late wife. And poetry. And fishing. Somehow all of these things connect to create a personality that seems vividly real. Hig builds an inner world out of these parts, and you can see why it is worth fighting to go on as one of the few people left alive on earth. But what if one more thing is taken away?

I will say that this is the most uplifting post-apocalyptic novel I have ever read. Not a feel-good story exactly. But a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit and to the beauty of the world, in spite of almost anything. Post-apocalyptic fiction for people who don't like post-apocalyptic fiction. Maybe.


* This week the Mars Society sent members an email talking about the relatively low cosmic radiation levels that Curiosity has measured in its first first few days on the surface of Mars, saying that this level (about the same as astronauts experience in low Earth orbit) bodes well for human exploration of the Red Planet.

Orbital Resonance and 2084 (Save Us, Elon!)

I recently re-read Orbital Resonance by John Barnes, one of my favorite SF writers. This book is part of Barnes' "Kaleidoscope Century" series about which I have written before. Written in the early 1990's, the series imagines an alternate near-future in which a series of disasters have devastated Earth in the early twenty-first century (names such as Tailored Rice Blast, mutAIDS, the Eurowar, and the Great Die-Off suggest the scale of Earth's troubles). Space flight has advanced sufficiently to allow construction of some off-planet "lifeboats" including several space colonies formed from captured asteroids and an embryonic terraforming project on Mars. These space activities can only include a tiny fraction of Earth's population, but they provide hope that humanity can survive even if Earth does not. And of course they have their own troubles.

Orbital Resonance takes place aboard The Flying Dutchman, a huge space colony built and operated by NihonAmerica Corporation which is on a special "resonant" orbit that cycles between Earth and Mars, transporting cargo and colonists. The ship is largely self-sufficient and houses a permanent population of 7,200, most of whom have been born on the ship and are under 20 years old. Melpomene Murray is the narrator. Thirteen "ground years" old, she is one of these young ship-born members who know of life on Earth only from videos and from the stories of the parents. Space-ship engineering is quite important and advanced, but social engineering is equally important. While most adults manage to adjust to life in this confined, disciplined, variable-gravity environment, the kids have grown up on the ship, and their schooling and socialization have been tailored to help them cope and eventually take over from the adults here.  They are the future. But has the social engineering been successful? That's the story of this book.

Of course psychology is still not an exact science, and when a new boy from Earth joins Mel's class, the social balance is disturbed in various ways. Despite their impressive skills and knowledge, these are after all still adolescents, with all the hormonal and other issues that implies. Mel doesn't consider herself to be special (that's part of the team-oriented socialization process), but it turns out that she and a few of the other kids are special, with fewer of the social/developmental controls that have been placed on most of the kids. The adults are grooming them for leadership positions. But the kids don't especially like the ways they have been manipulated. I'll leave the rest for you find out if you choose to read it (as I have done three times now).

Of course I love "space stuff" and there is plenty of it here, but the book is not primarily about space, nor is it primarily about Earth's disasters, though these form the essential backdrop for why this ship and its three sister-ships exist. I read another book recently that is explicitly concerned with Earth disasters, a $1.99 "Kindle Short" called 2084: An Oral History of the Great Warming by James Powell. There's really very little about space or any other advanced technologies in this book. Its premise is that we do more or less nothing about human contributions to climate change (i.e., the path we are on now), and that due to various plausible feedback loops and uncertainties in the climate models, we end up with a 6° C (10.8° F) average temperature rise and a one meter (3.3 feet) average sea level rise by 2050. A variety of bad things ensue, many of them indirect side effects of climate change. They are told as "remembered anecdotes" by eyewitnesses to events that took place over many years.

There are obvious ones like the loss of many of the world's low coastal cities (most of Florida's coastal cities as well as most of the Netherlands are lost, not to mention most of Bangladesh). Loss of water supplies devastates the US Southwest, sub-Saharan Africa, and many other areas and leads to wars over water supplies, including a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. There are so many mega-storms that they are no longer named, but numbered by year, like 2048-9, and a huge storm in 2042 inundates and destroys major parts of New York City. Most of the US mid-west becomes too warm and dry to grow wheat, while Canada's climate makes it the new breadbasket - and leads to invasion and war with the United States! This sounds implausible, but consider that problems with water, food, and immigration (huge numbers of climate refugees heading for Europe, USA, and other areas) have led to the rise of Fascist governments in many countries, including the USA. There's more - a total of 18 anecdotes in this brief, fictional "oral history."

It's not the greatest writing (e.g., I was annoyed by the abundance of "local color" foreign expressions that the author inserted in most anecdotes, apparently to remind you that this was not an American "speaking"), but it is very thought-provoking. It is something of a worst-case, because although we can't be sure that technology will save us, surely some of the developments of today will help, with bio-engineered fuels and solar desalinization, for example. I'm not assuming space colonies (though I certainly favor an off-planet insurance policy for mankind), but lower cost access to space combined with robotic tech could probably lead to practical solar power satellites that would greatly help the energy supply - I'm thinking SpaceX Falcon 9 Heavy. Yes, Elon Musk will save us! I know he can do it.

The Carbon Bathtub

I saw a cool little article and graphic in National Geographic that's very helpful in understanding the dynamic nature of the level of CO2 in our atmosphere. In the analogy of filling a bathtub which has a slow drain, it is very easy to see that even if you turn down the faucet (i.e., reduce the production of CO2), the level in the atmosphere can continue to rise (as long as the in-flow rate exceeds the out-flow rate).

Fall Day in New England

Wachusett Reservoir, October 25, 2009.

Getting Hyper(spectral)

As an optical engineer, I have a professional interest in all sorts of optical systems. I currently don't do optical design on a regular basis myself, but sometimes I have to dig into some particular aspect of optical design to develop a presentation or prepare for a customer visit. It is such a circumstance that is leading me to dig a bit into hyperspectral imaging systems. These are cool optical systems that also connect nicely with my interest in space exploration. The picture above is the spectrometer part of a sample system I've been playing with today (designed by a colleague for demonstration purposes).

Spectrometers are pretty well known in astronomy and other technical fields (e.g., chemistry). A spectrometer uses a prism, or more commonly a diffraction grating, to spread incoming light into its component wavelengths (corresponding to colors for visible light). Spectra can be collected from the sun, from stars, from flames, light bulbs, etc. and when properly captured, recorded, and analyzed, they can reveal information about materials present in the light source (and possibly also of a medium in between the source and the instrument, e.g., the Earth's atmosphere, which selectively passes or absorbs certain wavelengths emitted by the sun). Spectrometers can also look at reflected or scattered light, and if the properties of the source are known, changes in the spectrum recorded from the reflected light can provide information on what chemical substances must have been present in the object that reflected or scattered the light.

Imaging spectrometers also do this, but they do it in a way that captures both an image of the source ("spatial data") and spectral data from specific parts of the image. So instead of recording a spectrum of the whole scene or object (which would have to be some sort of average of everything in the scene), an imaging spectrometer records a separate "rainbow" for each pixel in the image.
If you scale this up to where you are collecting such pixel-by-pixel spectra for many narrow wavelength bands across a wide range of wavelengths (maybe ultraviolet to infrared), you are now in the hyperspectral imaging domain, and this is especially exciting for remote sensing of the Earth and other planets. Instruments of this type are carried on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (CRISM) and on various Earth remote sensing satellites (and aircraft) to help map the locations and types of minerals and also vegetation (at least on Earth). The amount of data that is collected can be huge if you have high spatial resolution (many megapixels) and high spectral resolution (many wavelength channels). This data can be depicted visually as a "datacube," as in the AVIRIS example at left (the 224 contiguous wavelength bands form the "depth" of this cube). This article is a good brief overview of hyperspectral imaging for remote sensing.

SSP at Change.gov

One of the great things about the Obama transition is that the public is invited to participate, to have "a seat at the table," as they put it on the change.gov web site. They have invited proposals from outside groups (37 pages of links so far) with the provision that all documents submitted will become public (they are PDF files on the web site). You can read them and then join in the discussion through forums associated with these proposals. Open government!

I just learned about a proposal on space solar power (SSP) that is under discussion there. I read the brief proposal and browsed many of the comments. Although there are some off-the-wall comments as in any public forum, the discussion is impressively multi-level and well informed. I rated a number of comments (thumbs up or down) and added a general comment to one of the most informative posts. If you care about this issue, you should go read, vote, and comment.

Of course there is no guarantee that SSP will be pursued by the Obama administration. It's one of hundreds of proposals. But the fact that these discussions are happening is in itself such a hopeful sign. This combined with the impressive cabinet and other appointments that have been announced shows that change is indeed coming. We will soon have leaders in Washington who don't have their heads in the sand! Or wherever the current administration's heads have been.

P.S. It's not very clear on change.gov, but the forums are run by IntenseDebate.com, and to register for the forums, you need to set up a free account there, even if you have registered at change.gov for other things (as I had done).

Cool (Earth) Solar

Now this is some cool solar technology. How do you make concentrating solar collectors cheap? Make them out of plastic sheeting and blow them up to the right shape like balloons! That's the basic idea from CoolEarth Solar. The inflatable collectors can be cheap enough to replace every two years, and they are so light, that the structure for mounting them and tracking the sun can also be light and fairly simple. As they say in this PDF presentation, "solar farming" should be taken more literally - make the individual parts cheap and scalable, like growing wheat in a big field, as opposed to growing it in a greenhouse.

Concentrating sunlight onto photovoltaic cells means you need a lot fewer cells. This approach combines clever use of optics and mechanics, with cheap, ubiquitous materials (plastic sheeting, air, a tiny amount of aluminum to coat the reflecting surface). Here's the basic environmental impact (from the notes in the PDF presentation, slide 4):

Our approach is to suspend concentrators on support and control cables stretched between poles. The ground under the concentrators is shaded only by about 10% and remains free for other uses like farming or ranching. Suspending the concentrators also preserves habitat. It is also inexpensive: telephone companies, ranchers, and farmers have already figured out how to set posts cheaply across vast spaces.

Cool indeed.

Solar Power Satellites

The basic idea of solar power satellites (SPS) has been around since 1968, but with high and rising energy costs and with improvements in solar photovoltaic technology, the idea seems to be getting more attention now. There was an opinion piece in the New York Times last week that outlined the basic ideas of SPS, noting that the required technologies all exist now, and that with lighter and higher efficiency solar cells, the mass of an SPS could be much less than the monster systems envisioned in the seventies. The ISS could be used for testing some SPS technologies in space (even though it is in low Earth orbit and therefore doesn't stay over one point on Earth as a real SPS would presumably do from GEO). There are other promising developments:

• An October 2007 report to the National Security Space Office called "Space-Based Solar Power As an Opportunity for Strategic Security" (available here). Strange maybe, but at least DoD is an interested party with money!
  
  
• Japan has been testing SPS technology including power-beaming and plans to have an SPS in space by 2030 (JAXA concept picture shown).
  
  
• A new organization called SSAFE (Space Solar Alliance for Energy Future) was announced last fall by NSS. SSAFE is a coalition of 13 research and space advocacy groups advocating investments in space-based solar power. NSS also has an extensive on-line library of books and other materials on space based solar power.

A recent article in Air & Space Magazine also talks about the issues of space-based solar power. While there is great promise, and progress is being made, there are also many problems, including public perception of the safety of beaming power to Earth with microwaves (really not a major issue) and the fact that ground-based energy technologies are also developing faster now, reducing possible energy cost advantages of space-based solar. But in the long run, placing arrays of efficient solar cells in a place where the sun always shines is too good an idea to waste!

The Ship that Sailed the Moon

Somewhat like 2008, 1973 was a pretty crappy year. Nixon was president. We were still in Vietnam. Arab-Israeli War. OPEC oil embargo. Gas lines (gas went from 38 cents a gallon in May 1973 to 55 cents in June 1974, oil quadrupled to $12 a barrel in 1974). Recession. Apollo was over.

I was still in college but spending most of my time with music - listening, writing, singing, recording. That was cool except for being dirt poor and having to take a full time job in a psych hospital to live (and eventually finish my physics degree when I finally realized that I wasn't the next Elton John or James Taylor).

That May one of my favorite albums by one of my favorite writer/artists was released, There Goes Rhymin' Simon by Paul Simon. Al Gore said in a speech the other day that we need to move within ten years to 100% renewable energy sources for our electricity. I think he's right - we need to try anyway, really try. As many have done recently, he cited the Apollo timetable from JFK's speech to Apollo 11's landing as evidence that when it's really important, we can do amazing things, even though we are far from perfect, and we all have lives to go on with. I think we can do amazing things too, and for some reason it reminded me of a song from that 1973 album.

American Tune

Many's the time I've been mistaken
And many times confused
Yes, and often felt forsaken
And certainly misused
But I'm all right, I'm all right
I'm just weary to my bones
Still, you don’t expect to be
Bright and bon vivant
So far away from home, so far away from home

And I don't know a soul who's not been battered
I don't have a friend who feels at ease
I don't know a dream that's not been shattered
or driven to its knees
But it's all right, it's all right
For we've lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road
we're traveling on
I wonder what went wrong
I can't help it, I wonder what went wrong

And I dreamed I was dying
And I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly
And I dreamed I was flying
And high up above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty
Sailing away to sea
And I dreamed I was flying

For we come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the ages most uncertain hours
and sing an American tune
Oh and it's all right, it's all right
You can't be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow's going to be another working day
And I'm trying to get some rest
That's all I'm trying to get some rest

Words and music by Paul Simon (c) 1972

Personal Best: 63 mpg

Driving the Prius to work this morning, I was not paying too much attention to optimizing the mileage, but everything seemed to work out, and on my 20 mile (32 km) drive, I got 63 mpg (3.7 liters per 100 km for those of you in the metric world, i.e., every country but the US!). My previous best was about 58 mpg. This little trip cost me about $1.30 for 0.32 gallons of gas (at $4.09 a gallon).

When I first got the car in June 2007, I was getting around 45 mpg on my benchmark route, but over time it has tended to be 48-52 mpg depending on conditions. It's a mix of suburban streets, secondary roads, highways, and interstates, and on the interstates, I tend to drive around 73 mph which is not ideal for the Prius hybrid system. Today the traffic was flowing a bit slower on the I290 and I495, around 65-69 mph, and with cruise control (and no A/C) this really helped to ration the gas.

I really do like the Prius!

A 30 Year Energy Snooze

Back in 1978, I worked for a while as an optical analyst at Itek Optical Systems. Most of Itek's business involved military reconnaissance optics - top secret stuff (they started out working on the optics for the Corona program, the original US spy satellite). But I was working on less-secret optical analysis software and simulations.

One interesting project was for NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory). It was a solar concentrator project, simulating and analyzing large solar concentrators made from meter-size low-precision fiberglass panels (think boat hull fabrication). A bunch of these reflective panels would be mounted on an umbrella-like frame to approximate a parabolic reflector. I was studying how bad you could make and mount these things and still get useful solar concentration. It turned out they could be pretty bad. But so was Itek's business, so I changed jobs and moved to Pasadena, California (to work with other optical software).

This was a small part of the burst of enthusiasm for alternative energy back then, triggered by the 1973 "oil shock" (I had no car until 1977, so I never had to wait in gas lines). Jimmy Carter even put solar panels on the White House, but Ronald Reagan quickly took them off, and most of the alternative energy money dried up. We basically hit the energy snooze button for about 30 years...

Now $4 gas has set off the alarm clock again, and there's a lot of interest in alternative energy. While it's bad news for business as usual and for lots of people who have to figure out how to put gas in their SUV's and still pay the rest of their bills, the good news is there are lots of ideas being explored, and there is energy all around us if we can just figure out how to harness it effectively. We have solar, wind, tides, geothermal, algae, and many more possibilities. I picked up the July issue of Popular Science which has the theme "the future of the environment." It features an article on a possible future "eco-tropilis" (a green city that even has its own vertical farms) as well as "audacious ideas to save the planet" (from solar power satellites to turning pig pee into plastic). Of course it's not all smooth sailing - they talk about the pitfalls and perils too. It's quite a thought-provoking issue.

If you don't want to buy the magazine (save a tree?), PopSci.com has most of this material on line, some of it in Flash-driven interactive form. There's even a game. Cool stuff.

NASA and Climate Change

Dr. James Hansen is well known as the NASA scientist who told Congress in 1988 that global warming was already here. This is often considered to be the point at which "global warming" started to receive more attention in the press and to become better known to the public. This week Dr. Hansen was back in Washington, telling Congress 20 years later that the Earth has "long passed" the dangerous level of greenhouse gases and that we need to take drastic action to lower these levels and avoid more serious consequences (still possible, he believes, if we act quickly).

There are still some climate change skeptics, but in the past 20 years, we have collected a lot more data and have seen a growing number of problems that can be linked to climate change. Much of the data on the changes the Earth is experiencing have come from satellites operated by NASA and other space agencies, and these satellites are continuing to add to our knowledge and to allow us to see the "big picture" as polar ice caps, clouds, the level of the sea, and other things are changing. You can explore the evidence on a new NASA/JPL web site, Global Climate Change. It's a nicely designed site with excellent graphics and a wide range of interactive features.

Saved by the Sun

Saved by the Sun is about the possibilities of solar power. This episode of Nova aired on PBS at least a few weeks ago (actually first aired in October 2007!), but I didn't get a chance to see it on TV. Fortunately PBS has it available in six on-line episodes streaming in several formats here. I especially liked the segment on what is happening in Germany, where photovoltaics are heavily subsidized, with the price for electricity sold back to the grid guaranteed for 20 years. We could move more quickly on alternative energy sources like solar in the US if we had more sensible energy policies that were not dedicated to maintaining our destructive addition to oil.

Energy Ostriches

Whether it is projection or speculation, there have been discussions in the news that oil could reach $200 a barrel and gasoline could reach $10 a gallon in the not-too-distant future under some scenarios. It's presently around $120 and $3.60 or so (above $4 in some regions - $3.79 would be $1 per liter). Of course gasoline prices have been higher than this in Europe and other regions for quite a while, but the current prices and projections like these have many Americans up in arms (and make me glad I bought a Prius, which is back to giving me ~50 miles/gallon now that my snow tires are off).

There is also discussion of a summer moratorium on the $0.184/gallon Federal excise tax. McCain and Clinton have endorsed this, though it's a ridiculous band-aid or PR stunt that encourages gas consumption and probably won't even lower consumer prices. This is what passes for "energy policy" in this country.

As Thomas Friedman points out in this op-ed piece, the US really doesn't have an energy policy. It is astonishing that Congress has failed to extend tax credits for alternative energy research and production (mainly solar and wind). The oil and gas industry continue to get their credits, but it is the still-embryonic solar and wind industries that really need this help to attract investment and help them to grow to the point where they can operate without subsidies. Fortunately other countries such as Germany and Spain are subsidizing alternative energy R&D and starting to build industries in these fields.

It's pretty clear that the Bush administration is as brain-dead on energy as it is on most issues, but it's worrisome that none of the three presidential candidates seems to be paying much attention to this beyond McCain and Clinton supporting the crazy summer gas tax holiday.

Options in the Big, Bright Solar System

In a NYT op-ed piece titled "Running Out of Planet to Exploit," Paul Krugman wonders whether this time, with oil at $117 a barrel and Australia in its tenth year of drought, we might really be facing massive food and energy shortages that will hurt lots of people and trigger all sorts of bad side effects. It's a big world, but it's feeling noticeably finite, isn't it?

But as I and many others have written before, the sun is an immense source of energy, and the Moon and near-Earth asteroids hold immense stores of various materials. Not that we can use these next year or even in ten years, but if we can develop better access to space, we will have more options.

And speaking of more options, acclaimed physicist Stephen Hawking gave a speech on the occasion of NASA's fiftieth anniversary, calling for much greater investment in space development, leading to colonies on the Moon and Mars. He argues that the world should devote about 10 times as much as NASA's current budget to space development, around 0.25% of the world's financial resources - a lot of money but a tiny fraction of our available resources, and a true investment in the future. Not that this will be easy or quick, but it would represent a real insurance policy for humankind, and we can certainly afford to do this while still working to keep things under control here. He supports NASA's plans to return people to the Moon by 2020 and to get humans to Mars soon after that - first steps in permanent settlement.

Hawking has spoken before about his concern that natural or human-made disasters could wipe out life on Earth (or at least human life). He's not the only one worried about this, but I'm afraid things will have to get a lot worse before many people will start to take seriously the need for a backup plan for humanity. I hope we will act before things get really, really bad as in John Barnes' alternate near-future SF "Kaleidescope Century" series, but I'm only vaguely optimistic that we will. I like those books, but I wouldn't want to live there.