I’M watching Star Wars Episode VII as I’m writing this. You all know what it’s about and I’m pretty sure a lot of you have seen the movie as well. But I won’t be talking about the saga and why it’s a Skywalker family saga.
Allow me, instead, to draw your attention to Starkiller Base. And no, not about its destructive power but on where it draws power to charge it’s “superweapon capable of destroying entire star systems.” It’s a massive feat of engineering and science. We all saw in the movie how it draws energy from a nearby sun to charge its weapon. It sucks up so much energy that it actually drains an entire sun to fully charge.
Looking beyond the fiction in the movie, don’t you think it’s pretty much the same as us, here on Earth, drawing energy from the sun to be able to power our homes and communities? If those living in a galaxy far, far away actually see the benefit of drawing energy from the sun (even though it was for bad intentions in the movie), shouldn’t we be also exerting all our energies to harvest that energy from our own sun? It’s already established that the sun can supply our energy needs many times over and there’d still be a surplus. So what’s the holdup? Your guess is as good as mine actually. There can be a number of reasons out there and, depending on who you talk to, one of those reasons or combinations of those reasons can be the culprit why solar energy adoption is slow.
Nevertheless, I still think that we all need to double time with our efforts to be able to fully utilize solar energy and also other forms of renewable energy sources.
Check out this great video from National Geographic Megastructures that features the “world’s largest single location solar power plant.”