“Wait a minute,” Julian said. “What do you do with tin cans today?”
“Actually, we use them very infrequently,” the other told him. “For instance, we prefer our food fresh. When we do use cans the metal is recycled. Mainly, we use plastic containers and the plastic too can be recycled.”
Julian said, “It seems to me that you can carry that recycling bit to an extreme. Suppose you go on a picnic way out in the boondocks somewhere and you take along a a dozen bottles or cans of beer. After you’re finished, do you have to carry them all the way back home to be thrown into the disposal chute and recycled?”
The doctor smiled. “Hardly. We have a special type of plastic for such use. In two or three days, exposure to either sun or rain will cause it to melt away into the ground. It is not harmful to soil.”
“Isn’t that waste?”
Leete nodded agreement. “Yes. But we are not fanatical. Also, it is not as though we were throwing away cans made of steel or aluminum. The plastic is made from wood and other things that grow and hence are replaceable.”
“You must use up a good many trees, if you manufacture as much plastic as all that.”
“There have been advances in forestry since your time, Julian. We now have trees that grow to maturity in one year. And, with nuclear fision and solar power, it is practical to desalinate ocean water and pump it into such areas as the Sahara and the Arabian and Gobi deserts. They are rapidly being reforestrated. We use wood and other agricultural products wherever we can, rather than metals and such irreplaceable natural resources. We husband such things for future generations. Such metals as we do utilize are recycled over and over again.”
The doctor paused. “Another example of waste in your time was your houses. In Europe today there are houses many hundreds of years old that are still lived in. Back at the time of the American Revolution, there were homes built that are still in existence. But in your day? A homeowner with a thirty-year mortgage could expect the house to have deteriorated before he finished paying for it. So bad was the workmanship and the materials that many had become hovels or shacks before ten years were up. Today, as in the long-ago past, we build houses that will last for centuries.”
“I suppose you’re right there,” Julian begrudged him. “We constructed millions of buildings each year and tore down almost an equal number—not just houses, but every other type of building as well.”
“Another great waste of your time,” Leete went one, “was power. You were going through your fossil fuels such as petroleum, coal, and natural gas as though there was an unlimited supply. For example, everyone who could afford it air-conditioned not only their homes, their offices, their stores and public buildings, but their cars as well.”
“You mean to tell me that you no longer use air-conditioning?”
“Sometimes, but not the to the extent you did. You see, most of us have come to believe that man’s body was designed for the temperatures nature provides. It did your health little good to go back and forth from the heat outside to air-conditioned interiors. How many colds and other respiratory diseases resulted from the practice, we’ll never know. You also drastically overheated your buildings in the winter months. Today, we still heat our houses, of course, but we are more inclined to wear heavier clothing, warm underwear and sweaters, rather than swelter in summer temperatures in December. Why, those who could afford it even heated their swimming pools. Can you imagine the amount of power that consumed?”
“That’s one of the things I meant to ask you about,” Julian said. “When I went into stasis, we were beginning to face a power shortage. How did you lick that? Though, from what you say, you now have unlimited power from nuclear fision.”
“It’s not as simple as all that,” Leete told him. “Unlimited power through nuclear fision could bring with it unlimited heat, which would be bound to get us into all sorts of trouble. So although we utilize it to some degree, we also call upon other sources, particularly renewable energy sources, so that we can live on the earth’s energy income, rather than its capital. We now utilize much more wind and water power—even the tides. We tap the heat of the interior of the planet. But most of all we are calling upon solar power, the vast energy pouring down on us from the sun. It produces some fifty thousand times as much energy as man’s current rate of consumption.”
Julian, as usual, was lost. He said, “You and Edith have mentioned solar power several times and although they were working on it even earlier than 1960, I never did quite understand it. You know, that was true about just almost everybody in my day. We accepted things but didn’t have the vaguest idea of how they worked. For instance, I don’t know what radio is, not really. It goes in here and it comes out there, but I haven’t the slightest idea of just what happens. I was an average citizen, with an average citizen’s knowledge of the gadgets we had; I haven’t the vaguest idea what makes a refrigerator cold. But back to solar power…1 think there were some two hundred houses completely, or at least mostly, powered by solar sources, even in my time.”
Leete nodded. “The solar battery was developed by the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1954. It’s been improved considerably since then. The early batteries were a flat sandwich of n-type and p-type semi-conductors. Sunlight striking the plate would knock some electrons out of place. The transfer was connected, as in the ordinary-type battery, in an electrical circuit. The freed electrons move toward the positive pole and holes move toward the negative pole, thus constituting a current. Those early solar batteries developed electric potentials of up to half a volt and up to nine watts of power from each square foot exposed to the sun. Not very much, perhaps, but its advantage was that it had no liquids, no corrosive chemicals, no moving parts. Electricity continued to be generated indefinitely, so long as the sun shined.”
“You’ve already lost me,” Julian said. “I’m afraid I’m no science student.”
“It is a bit technical,” the doctor agreed. “The amount of energy falling upon one acre of a sunny area of the earth is 9.4 million kilowatt-hours per year. Square mile upon square mile have been covered with solar batteries in places such as parts of the Sahara not suited for reforestation, in Death Valley, in the deserts of what was once Utah and other parts of the West. The Chinese have emplaced them in areas of the Gobi and the Russians in desert areas of Siberia. The Arabs have a source of power as great as that of their oil of the mid-twentieth century, in the broiling sun of the Arabian peninsula. In short, Julian, in solar power we have a source of energy that will undoubtedly last as long as the human race endures.”
“What’s wrong with nuclear atomic reactors? You have unlimited power from hydrogen taken from the oceans. They were the thing when I went into stasis.”
“Radioactive wastes are more carefully handled now, but there is still danger. The United States Atomic Energy Commission, the official custodian of the deadly byproducts of the nuclear age, took calculated risks which, looking backward, have horrified us. For instance, back in the early nineteen seventies more than a half million gallons of deadly radioactive liquid leaked from huge storage tanks at the A EC’s Hanford facility, near Richmond, Washington.
“No, we are leery about nuclear power and I have no doubt that they will phase it out as our power resources from solar energy continue to grow. Perhaps future generations will revive its use again, when science has learned more about handling it.”
Edith Leete put down her stylo, got up from the desk, and took a chair nearer to them. “I can’t concentrate with you two jabbering away,” she said. “I thought you were talking about waste under the old system. You hardly touched on some of the major ways there were to throw away valuable products.”