OTEC, Powering Civilization from Our Sun, and Questions About Human Consciousness

For me, part of the joy of business travel that involves long car rides is the opportunity to listen to amazing radio broadcasts that I otherwise would have missed. Last week found me renting a car in Lancaster, PA (home of my client OTECorporation), and driving it south to Leesburg, VA, where I stayed with one of my best friends from college and his charming wife the evening before a meeting in nearby Washington DC.  En route, I was lucky enough to catch a program that examined the question: Who are we, fundamentally? Incorporeal souls? Ongoing chains of chemical reactions that somehow enable us to form a coherent story about ourselves?

For a second, ponder what happens in our dreams and ask yourself what it means vis-à-vis the question at hand. Start by comparing your experiences in your dreams with those in your local movie theater.

When you go to a movie, you’re taken on a ride that was constructed from its opening scene to its closing credits by the filmmaker. At various points in that period of two hours or so, you will laugh, or cry, or envy, or hate—and you won’t know what will happen next, as the adventure was scripted by someone else. Depending on the whim—and skill—of the person who took you on that ride, you’ll be transported to an experience that you may find somehow gratifying–maybe entertaining, maybe emotionally engaging, in which case you may recommend the movie to others, or you may conclude that it was a waste of time, in which case you’ll wish you had stayed home.

But now consider what happens in your dreams. Here, just as in your experiences with movies, you laugh, cry, envy and hate—and, again, you really have no idea what will come next. Yet there is one important difference: in the case of your dreams, you are both the filmmaker and the audience. Please take a second and let that sink in. You–whoever “you” are–take on two entirely distinct roles in your dreams–and then you wake up again and your world is again presented to you from the outside in.

Here’s my personal bet, for what in may be worth. Humankind is right around the corner from an economically feasible way to power its civilization from its local star; this is a claim I’ve made many hundreds of times, and hope to pull off in a big way in my next book on renewable energy. And we may be somewhat close to uncovering the underlying theory that explains the origin of, and basic composition of, the universe. But I’m afraid we’re a million miles away from understanding human consciousness.