I was standing by the elevator in my apartment building the
other day. In a brief moment I put my hand in my pocket, and almost smacked
myself forgot your car keys. As that
moment passed I smiled to myself. The elevator had arrived. I reach the parking
lot and my car flicks its lights on and off and honks once gently. I get in and
push the pedal down, it moves. Like an obedient bot. No vrooming, no flashy
nonsense. See I am in 2082 and I am 57 years old. My Pop used to drive a
gasoline car. He always forgot his keys, and I would fetch them for him.
He would always say one thing, “We live in a weird time son.
I never get it”, he said, “Why do we still use keys? You encrypt your phone
with passcodes, your mails and messages with encryption keys, why are we still
using keys like cave men?” Bless his heart. Pop was always ahead of his times.
He was a humble professor. He taught Biology and Advanced Mathematics at the
local university.
Today I walk into the parking lot, my mobile device
identifies my car’s location, starts it, honks its horn to help me locate. I
reach my car, the door opens, I get in, I drive. There is an encryption key
that pairs me and my car through my mobile device. I wish my Pop was alive to
see this. We have electric cars now. Gone are the gas guzzling, burping
belching station wagons and sedans. We recently took our kids to the museum to
see what those gas cars looked like. I told my kids, “My pop used to drive one
of those”, I said pointing at a cheap hatchback by Hyundai. The kids were repulsed
by the noise; the smoke coming out almost choked them. The streets are all very
quiet now. I live on one of the busiest streets in the city. Yet I can hear my
TV at the minimum volume.
How did this happen? Some wise guys, my Pop was one of
those, thought why do we focus on two equally inefficient power sources –
Gasoline and Electricity. Why not route all the power through one source and
try to improve that efficiency as much as possible? Facing stiff opposition
from the money crazed powerful Oil Moguls, undaunted they carried on with their
research. First task was to simulate everything on a computer. Before even
thinking of going ahead with the plan. Which is where my pop came in. He was
one of the brainiest Math professors around town. And he literally spoke to
computers, fluently! He would coax, cajole sometimes force the machines to do
what computation he wanted. It’s no harder than learning German, he would say.
So on the research team went building simulations, coming up
with estimates of cost, overall system efficiency etc. to justify the massive
paradigm shift that eventually occurred. Today all the worlds power systems are
consolidated. All of human kind’s energy goes into trying to make things more
efficient at the electricity production and distribution. It’s just better that
way! Think about it. You burn coal, you produce tons of CO2, you dump it in the
atmosphere, you cry foul over the Petroleum industry. The petroleum industry
distils crude, produces combustible hydrocarbons, we in turn burn the
hydrocarbons in our cars, dump it in the atmosphere, and the petroleum
companies blame thermal power plants for global warming. It’s just easier this
way! It’s logical. Have all the energy sources producing electricity some way
or the other. Let the end user be faced with just one energy- electricity! Then
at the back-end deal, with efficiency of burning Gasoline to turn the turbine.
Just one universal turbine, unlike hundreds of thousands of types of cars! Get
what I mean? And at the other end, focus your efforts on minimizing
distribution losses. In 2030 our scaled energy losses in distribution were 60%;
thermal power plant efficiency was 23%; Gasoline and Diesel average engine
efficiency was a measly 18%.
Today all Oil distilled products route to power plants,
where our efficiency has bumped up to 35% ! Just two percent shy of the
theoretical maximum of 37%! Today due to superconductor research, distribution
losses have plummeted down to 7% ! It is really an end-to-end optimization!
My Pop worked as a supply chain consultant before going back
to research. He worked largely in systems and networks – Systems biology for
his masters’ project, Supply chain networks in his first job, neural networks
in his PhD. Later on he attributed his visionary research with his teammates to
this exposure to different disciplines. He would always quote one of his
Biomedical Engineering professors, “Science is a continuum”
It indeed is.
