Tokamaks and Moringas
A few weeks back I mentioned in writing some electromagnets being built in France that were twice the power of a Saturn Five's rocket thrust. Indoors. With an on/off switch. This prompted readers' questions of "what the hell?!" Ever heard of a tokamak? In essence, it is a star in a bottle. The visionary physicists out to solve long term the energy needs of the planet have a project going in the south of France to make a fusion nuclear reactor. All reactors today split atoms, fission, to generate power; and in the process generate nightmarish trash, radioactive by-products that will be toxic to humans and all living things for hundreds of thousands of years. And then there is the toxicity of uranium mining and processing, the preparation of the fuel.
A fusion reactor will basically run on seawater and generate massive amounts of power with no waste products. The challenge being faced is how to contain the hellfire of a star's guts inside a building. The solution is an electromagnetic torus, a tokamak, a doughnut shaped force field of pulsing energy constraining the forces capable of incinerating any material in existence--metals, vaporized; ten foot solid diamond walls, utter toast, instantly. But this power plant is being built, partly the construction project of a forty nation consortium, partly an improbable science experiment. Humans. We can do this.
Meanwhile, in Saharan Africa facing the droughts of climate change, researchers are planting Moringas. It's a tree sourced from India that is fast growing and nearly impossible to kill. "Extremely drought tolerant" is the applicable descriptor here. Its leaves can be eaten raw, cooked, or ground into baby formula. They contain four times the calcium of milk, four times the Vitamin A of carrots, seven times the Vitamin C of oranges, three times the potassium of bananas and 150% the protein of soybeans. Their seeds can be pressed into an olive oil-like unsaturated fat or crushed into a powder that can purify water, the electrolytes in the powder attract impurities and precipitate them out of the fluid. The Moringa is the leading edge of food research to feed all of us and especially those where sweet rainfall is scarce.
So there we go. Farmers and physicists. Saving the world.
Likely none of these folks will read these paragraphs but the strength of their efforts has to reverberate. We can all focus wherever we can to dance forward. Little steps can preface big leaps. You have to love the fact the Wright brothers were bike mechanics first.
And of course Beauty with a capital B. There is a piece of my work hanging on the dining room wall of the director of the Hubble Space Telescope. This makes me happy and hopeful. Science and art. We got this...
