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There has been obvious concern with recent financial bubbles: the internet, private equity, housing, food, energy, the list goes on and on.  Indeed bubbles represent the communal manifestation of human thought processes.  As humans, we take a few data points and extrapolate them into the future, and create predictions predicated on these assumptions taken to their often illogical end.  This cognitive process probably arises from the need to avoid a sabre-toothed cat or to prepare shelter for the coming winter months.

But nature works on much more diffusive or mean-reverting processes.  After all vacuums get filled, temperatures equilibrate, and there are substantive effects that drive processes that are often occluded from our immediate view.  For example that sabre-toothed cat might arrive at the top of that hill everyday at sunset, because it’s being chased by a group of hunters from the village downstream, not because it’s hungry for you or me.

We are working on some cool technologies and products to help our world wean itself off of petroleum based energy (a carbonified form of solar energy).  This is a great space to be in: there is significant investor, customer, and political interest, it carries the banner of the environment, and seeks to provide new opportunities to billions of people around the world  But we need to remind ourselves that energy from our sun isn’t the only big deal in town.  We should not build energy into yet another bubble at the expense of other opportunities.   We need to think of our other precious natural resources: our water, land, our wind.  The ancient view of our world as earth, wind, water, and fire should serve to remind us that all these ‘forces’ work in concert, and we should nurture them even handedly.

The August 2008 issue of National Geographic reminds us that our soil needs care and constant attention.  We’ve become so far removed from the basic source of our food that the bulk of the population neglects the need to reinvest in our earth.  We are driven by our idealism, but we are assured by result.  Don’t get us wrong, there is serious opportunity here to make our world better for future generations, and to create powerful businesses serving this undertapped need.

Nature Magazine’s latest issue (Mar 20 2008)  has a special section on the water situation including a nice article about novel technologies to address potential crises.

But equally interesting is an article on a variation of the prisoner’s dilemma game, often taught in courses on game theory.  The results are fascinating to say the least.  The authors (Dreber et al.) seem to have found that in a social milieu which involves communication in one of three ways (cooperation, defection, and harsh punishment), the players that used the harsh punishment received no additional economic benefit.  Instead, the non-punishers tended to come out ahead on the scoreboard.  This seems to hvave potential significance regarding how teams function.  I wonder if this can be applied to sports teams?  Is the value of a Steve Nash or Chris Paul assist higher than anticipated?

Who doesn’t like clever thinking?  There are a bunch of ideas which, upon retrospective analysis, you kick yourself for not having thought of first.  Recently an osmosis based power generator has been commissioned in Norway by the utility company Statkraft.  Osmosis based power generation is essentially to flip the process of desalination via reverse osmosis (RO) membrane filtration.

In RO membrane desalination, salt water is pushed through a membrane which prevents the passage of salt.  On one side of the membrane you have clarified water and the other brinier water.  The system does not prefer this non-equilibrium state and accordingly the clear water and salt water want to mix back together (this is what is known as a difference in chemical potential on the two sides of the membrane and gives rise to what engineers call osmostic pressure).  Because water can flow back through the membrane to remix with the salt solution, energy in the form of pressure must be input to the system to prevent water from flowing back.

In osmotic energy generation, clean water is brought in through the membrane to the salty side.  Water easily flows through the membrane to mix with the salty side and generate work.  Simple right?  Clean, no emissions, and abundant salt water and …

Oh wait… clean, clarified, fresh water is already a challenge to obtain for billions on this earth.  You can’t get it everywhere.  And if sea level rise, low lying fresh water will become brackish.

The point is that you can’t get something for nothing.  This is the lesson that we took from grad schoool in Jeff Tester’s Introduction to Thermodynamics 10.40 class at MIT.  In real-world application, there is no such thing as a reversible process.  In RO desalination, we fight entropy using work.  In osmotic power generation we leverage entropy to create work.  It sounds like a perfect strategy if you can create one site to do both the forward and reverse operations (generate energy or clean water when one or the other is required) But between those two steps, we’ll always lose to real-world losses.