Managing the running of an economy off of energy from its environment takes massive amounts of data. In fact, it takes tera-bytes of remote sensing data about the Earth that can only be taken from space. This requirement is not widely appreciated by the non-space community.
The data needed to run a sustainable Earth is not exactly the same as the date now being taken to do science. We need to review exactly what data will be needed.
For example, to run a combined wind and solar national power system, we need to know the available power at each of the many distributed generation sites. We also need to know weather and temperature data for all the even more widely distributed usage sites to estimate the load.
To even build an environmentally powered plant, we will need very good projections of the amount of power available to that plant over its entire live time, at least 75 years. This requires very good climate prediction in a time of climate change. Both of these tasks can only be done with copious amounts of data taken from space.
There are a number of possible educational tasks here. They include: determine the types of space data needed, but not exactly available at present, and evaluating local sites for power potential using existing space data.
Such studies will highlight the enormous alternative resources that America has to offer.
Contact me if you have an idea for a specific project in this area.
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