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Peter Glaser at MIT - 1999 MA Space Grant Consortium Public Lecture

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Peter Glaser at MIT - 1999 MA Space Grant Consortium Public Lecture MIT 150 | Peter Glaser at MIT - 1999 MA Space Grant Consortium Public Lecture [MUSIC PLAYING] YOUNG: --and fellowships. We have had, in the course of this lectureship, a very, very distinguished group of people, beginning with Bill Lenoir in 1990. And our last speaker in 1998 was Dr. John Logsdon from DC. This afternoon speaker is a friend of many of ours in this area, Dr. Peter Glaser, retired a few years ago as the vice president of Arthur D. Little, where for many years he founded and for many years ran the space research program at Arthur D. Little Dr. Glaser was born in Czechoslovakia. Was educated in England at Leeds College of Technology, as he was fortunate enough to escape from wartime Europe. Received his degree there in 1943, and enlisted in the Free Czech Army, which was part of the British Army and participated in the battle to liberate Europe. At one point in the progression through Europe and that battle, the Free Czech Army was transferred to the control of the US Army under General Patton, and went as far as Pilsen at the time of VE Day, at which point peace was declared, they were liberated, and Peter returned to his homeland of Czechoslovakia for a nervous period of three years, wondering what the Russians were going to do about it. His parents had returned from England to Czechoslovakia. He took advantage of that time to get a second degree in mechanical engineering from the Czech Technical University in Prague. And in 1948, when the Russians did take over the rule of Czechoslovakia with a very firm hand, he was fortunate enough to be able to get out on just about the last plane to the United States with his mother, where he was able to convert his knowledge of mechanical engineering and the $10 in a suitcase that he came to the US with to a job with a textile company doing mechanical engineering in New York. They thought highly enough of him that they encouraged him to go for an advanced degree, which he did, at Columbia University, getting a master's and eventually a PhD in mechanical engineering. The subject of his PhD thesis, which had to do with particulate matters in vacuum in 1955, turned out to be very key, a few years later, to the issue of trying to understand the lunar surface, which after all, was particulate matter in a vacuum. And Dr. Glaser was able to contribute a very important contribution to the success of the US Apollo program, and lunar landing program, and the soft landings that took place before it, by analyzing the data that was coming back from looking at the lunar surface optically, and concluding that, in fact, it was not a mile deep of light powder, as had been predicted by some who were doubters of the possibility of being able to land anything at all on the moon. And as many of you know, NASA, in a bold step, went ahead with the plans for soft landing and was able to succeed remarkably. He initiated and ran from 1955 on to his retirement in 1990 for the space program at Arthur D. Little. Arthur D. Little, over the course of that, put more experiments on the moon than anyone else. And what he is probably best known for most of us is the invention of the concept of space solar power. He is the author of a book, Solar Power Satellites, published by Wiley in 1997. And those of you who readT echnology Review may recall that his concept and his design was on the cover not too long ago. The issue of space solar power has once again, like a phoenix, arisen. And I think it's something that we will be wanting to pay a great deal of attention to. Without taking any more of his time, I'd like to introduce our distinguished speaker, Peter Glaser. [APPLAUSE] And I'd like you to wear a-- I'd like you to wear both-- GLASER: Sure. YOUNG: --[INAUDIBLE] for television. [INAUDIBLE]. This is for our [INAUDIBLE]. GLASER: Thank you very much, Professor Young. Ladies and gentlemen, students and visitors from the faculty, it is a great pleasure for me to address you on a topic which has occupied my interest for more than 30 years. I will try and, in my presentation, show you the slides, because they do a far better job than my speaking to you, to show you that the concept that I have proposed publicly for the first time in 1968 is indeed worthwhile studying. And I'm pleased to share with you that today, this is of major interest internationally, and is being taken seriously all over the world. I will show you slides which hopefully will illustrate some of the points that I would normally want to make, and have you get a feel that what some people call science fiction is actually the reality in your lives. So if I may-- AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] GLASER: I wanted to just start-- this is very short quote from Stephen Jay Gould, because we should not take for granted that the presence of humanity is guaranteed on planet Earth. And basically, my feeling has been for these many years that behind this is the capability to utilize appropriate energy sources, find effective uses for the energy, and at the top of my list is to safeguard the Earth's ecology in the broadest sense that it can be done. The point that I make here is that we are in a different world in the 21st century, because we have to increase the living standards of people. We have to stabilize population growth. We have to safeguard the ecology. And we have to avert the specter of future wars. And how easy it is to start a war, we are seeing right now. There are two aspects here that we have to bear in mind. First of all, global population, which is just about 6 billion. To put this into perspective, when I was in high school, there were 2 billion people on Earth. We expect, by the middle of the century, to be at around 9, and towards the end, perhaps 14. Now, as more and more people increase their living standards, they need to use energy, although we do the best we can to minimize the wrong way of using energy. And if you look at terawatts of energy, we are around 14 now. We would be around 27 by mid-century, and 42 at the end. These are unimaginable numbers based on what we now believe we have as energy sources. Totally unimaginable. This is a very simple example here. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] GLASER: Oh, yeah. Thank you. A very simple example. 5,800 million tons, 1950. 18,700, 1985. And we now project 28,600. And the most interesting aspect is that the developing countries will use half of the energy in the world. And I always find that people don't realize that there are only two countries which really are important in the next century. One is China, and the other is India-- purely on population. Now, the number of energy economists who try and predict, when will we get to this highest point-- now, some say we've already passed it. Some others say we will probably get it by 2010. And only a few say it will reach it by 2020. It is nearly immaterial when the actual point will be reached. We have learned how to live with an ever-increasing availability of energy. We have no idea what we will be doing as it is decreasing. And here's 2000-- it's this fairly rapid decrease that we have to worry about. There is nothing in sight that will allow us now to say, we will have the energy we need without destroying the ecology of the Earth. Let me just show you the problem we are facing. If we utilize oil, gas, nuclear, it has already upstream effect-- you know, coal mines, et cetera. We need water for electric power generation. And look, all the things that are happening in the air, in the water, on land. And if it's nuclear, we have the storage problem. So please keep that in mind, that those are the issues that the conventional-- and I put nuclear among them-- have to face. Now look at the CO2 emissions. In the CO2 emissions, coal is, of course, the greatest culprit. Oil. LNG. And only low ones are nuclear and solar power satellites. Now, those of you who have studied nuclear power realize that it is a clean source up to a point, because where the difficulty arises-- we generate plutonium in the process unless we have developed fast breeder reactors, but even then, we have some problems. Fusion is certainly a very interesting possibility at some time in the future. And I am a simple-minded engineer who says, I'm 100% for fusion. 100%. Because I can now use an existing fusion reactor, which we call the sun. [CHUCKLING] What happens with CO2? Well, I like this cartoon because it does indicate that we have a problem ahead of us. And this is a United Nations study which came up-- there's the results. What are the effects of sea level rise on people living in the Pacific? Now, you see the profound impact, and so on. There are about 300 million people affected by this.
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