Big Capital for Big Innovation

I find the concept of a sustainable city like Masdar intriguing, but it certainly isn’t a fresh idea. It reminds me of many of the displays at the World’s Fairs of old. A project of such scope brings up many questions of urban planning, waste and energy management, and adopting new technologies to make it all plausible. There is new technology on display, but mostly there are an array of old technologies that haven’t received the kind of research and funding that could have brought them to maturity years ago. I think that would be the crowning achievement of Masdar. As the article said, the gulf has more sunshine than oil, and if it were possible to capture even a fraction more than is being done already, it would revolutionize habitability and energy security in the region. That is the kind of social innovation that leads to major progress.

These kinds of experiments take the kind of capital accumulation and the concentration of resources and manpower that only governments can manage. There has been a focus throughout the course on start-ups and social entrepreneurship, but let’s not forget that many of the private corporations that pioneer new social and technological ventures had their beginnings winning government contracts to commercialize high-technology. A classic example would be the aerospace industry: research and experimentation through government initiatives made commercial flight, space flight, and now commercial space flight possible. Think of how that has revolutionized the world. We even commercialized things like teflon for non-stick pans from the materials science research done for shuttles reentering the atmosphere.

Masdar isn’t NASA, but it is a step in the right direction for coalescing different technologies and methods of thinking to expand our range of habitable land. The gulf states know that oil won’t last forever, and it makes sense to diversify their interests and capabilities while they can still afford to do so. I remember a picture shown to us near the beginning of the semester that displayed the rapidly decreasing cost of solar power. If the trend continues, Masdar may not look so much like the Jetsons in even 10 years. And that brings me to my final thoughts for this post: with the way that technology is so rapidly advancing, who knows where we will be in 10 years. It’s a dizzying thought, especially considering now how archaic life seemed just ten years ago. Maybe what we’ve been discussing will be old news.


Source:
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-05/city-light?page=0%2C0