Antarctic Heat Collector 1973 (Page 2)

A few dozen mirrors began playing beams of sunlight on a police car that had been dogging the rear end of the demonstration. The officers were caught by surprise. The driver managed to back the car down the street, but not before his partner, panicked by the glare and the rapidly rising temperature, had jumped out and run. More and more mirrors were out in the crowd now. The crowd glinted like a bank of crystals.

It couldn’t reach the police car which had found protection behind a drive-up liquor store. The man with the van now stood on top of it. An old bread delivery van. “Let’s burn it up. Yeh — this.” His voice is hoarse and breaking. A few mirrors flit across the van and the man on top. More focus on the tin side. The man climbs off. People are pulling the last mirrors from inside the van as others begin to focus on it. There are 800 mirrors out in the street.

The crowd is silent. The blob of brilliant light on the side of the truck is fringed with trembling squares of light flitting in and out of target. You can hardly hear a noise. Then the sheet metal side of the van [oil cans as the metal swells]. A few more moments and smoke appears — the crowd has results. That was at 11:00 AM; by dark there have been 100 fires.

No one on foot has been burned — too hard to follow a man on foot. Rows of smoking cars — the ashes of a flag at City Hall.

It’s the office buildings — the windows above the street — the crowd focuses through one window after another — the curtains go fast.

The police appear with arc welders masks. They fire on the demonstrators. The demonstrators disperse, but the light keeps coming. More mirrors appear on the street — funny shaped mirrors, mirrors with ornamental frames, tiny pocket mirrors in the hands of children.

Smoke is seen from another part of town.

Television crews arrive. The footage in the evening news across the nation is over exposed. An occasional clear image and then the picture goes white and overexposed.

The mirror crowds are completely silent — moving everywhere on foot. A secretary at City Hall: “They just looked so funny — a whole crowd of them standing just as still as could be holding on to those mirrors and then pretty soon the store across the street was burning.”

“When they started coming our way they just glinted and shined like a drawer full of diamonds — when they steadied down again we got out of there fast because they were burning up Capt. Garcia’s office downstairs.”

“Get those damned kids with the mirrors off the street.”

“But officers, I’m just usin’ this mirror ‘cause I’m combin’ my hair, no law against combin’ your hair is there?”

Dozens of youths in the street combing their hair peering into gigantic foot square mirrors.

SECOND SUN

Recently the government gave AD Little a grant of $200,000 to study and evaluate the plan of Peter Glaser to orbit a large satellite which would collect solar energy away from the inconsistencies of the earth’s atmosphere and the inconvenience of nighttime, and would beam the energy back to earth as microwaves.

Certainly it is an ambitious scheme that would require much ingenuity and dedication to succeed. I wonder if the attention given to this plan and now even the money spent on studying it is not very definite evidence that our society has gone crazy. Of course, it’s true that if you examine the uses made of modern technology you hardly need further evidence that things are screwy.

What is this really about? Are we that short of energy? Why not burn wood? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to build collectors on the ground and accept a little cloudiness and the occurrence of nighttime?

I don’t think these projects have anything to do with energy shortages. There seem to be projects which could be the realization of immense dreams.

Once they are spoken about they begin to collect enormous armies bent upon seeing them occur — here a member of the army contributes enthusiasm, here an arm, here a skillful tongue, here a prodigious ability with mathematics. Once they are going they produce a profound effect on those involved. It is as if the entire world were transformed into a gigantic darkened movie theatre where thousands have conspired together to remove the day to day world — with its logic, its pleasures, and pains, etc. (cars parked on the street, dirty socks, cumulus clouds, shrubs with dead branches, birds) and instead, project in front of all of them the Big Dream. And it must be good stuff for it answers all problems.

THE DREAM

Why not build a second sun that can beam its energy right through the clouds — and at night too. Why not build a sun that you own? Think of it.

Why settle for a sun that goes out at night and is interrupted by clouds? Why be dependent on a sun with an uncertain past? Who owns that thing anyway?

Why not build one yourself and know how and why it works? Never mind that it only relays the other sun’s energy. Why not have a sun that you can control from a console like a stereo set or TV set? Why not have a sun that is your friend? That you can turn off and on. Why not make a sun that would burn up other people if they were bad — you could decide if they were bad and your sun, controlled by your console, could take care of the rest. Why go backwards in work with solar energy so that you end up like an old farmer farming the sky worrying about the weather. Why not transform the sun itself into a commodity, like a big tank of propane?

Books:

Atmospheres — Richard M. Goody, James C.G. Walker — Prentice-Hall, Inc.
This is an excellent book that discusses the climates and atmospheres of other planets.
Sun, Earth, Time and Man — Harrison — Rand McNally, 1960
Solar Radiation — edited by N. Robinson — Elsevier Publishing Company

NEXT ISSUE: Day Chahroudi’s “Biosphere”

13 April 1973 — The Tribal Messenger — Page 13

Source: Steve Baer, Antarctic Heat Collector, 1973. Text extracted by OCR from scanned document.
PDF: 1973-01-01-antarctic-heat-collector-2.pdf