bonus.

Hmm. As is, this stands to do quite a bit of good. It's looking like they're not expecting a full outfit to do much more than power an iPod, which means all it will do is save power on gadgets that everyone's using, anyway. Good thing.

Paradoxically, for the moment, I'd say we're rooting for this not to become much more efficient, at least for the everyday consumer. Once it does, it's likely to lead to the manufacture of millions of portable gadgets that no one would have cared enough to mess with otherwise. After all, even if the money and time savings are negligible, who isn't going to want a Blackberry when you have the coolness factor of keeping it charged just by typing on it? Or some lame wristwatch that measures your pulse, body temperature, location by GPS, and gives directions to the nearest bagel shop even when you're lost in the Congo?

From a non-environmental perspective, this does apparently have some very cool potential applications in medicine. And if the tech does get as efficient as I was just hoping it doesn't, I expect it could be damn useful for things like space suits--and space exploration, in the very long term, is one of the best things we can possibly do for the environment.

So...
Powering current gadgets: good.
Leading to creation of new gadgets: bad.
Other nifty applications: most likely good.
Bedsheets that make hot eco guy/chicks want to roll around under the covers: definitely good.

I give it a tentative thumbs up.

Also: if that hint about space exploration being a superlatively terrific boon for the environment were on a student essay I was grading, I would underline it, and snarkily annotate it with "Explain."  Meaning, it sounds brilliant, promising and fascinating, but you have not done quite enough to let me know what is going on in your mind.

As for the nearest bagel shop to a position in the Congo (and yes, I entirely agree, all sorts of curious interests and appetites must occur to explorers lost in the Congo): Johannesburg?  Eilat?

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Now, it really gets interesting when you get into the question of what exactly you're using those sheets to power...

On bagels: I'd say you nailed it on the head with Eilat. I was going to suggest Jeruselem, on about the same reasoning I expect you were using, but a quick check of a world map reveals that you're right, Eilat would be closer. I am forced to bow to your superior geographical knowledge.

On space exploration:  As many of us have been saying for years--and I feel I should give a nod to Wolverine here, as this point is a pet argument of his--the human population is already larger than the planet can comfortably sustain, and will only get larger. Honestly, I don't think our survival instincts will ever let it stabilize; there's very little evolutionary advantage in knowing when to take a species-wide cold shower.

And unfortunately, while many of us continue to blast away on the overpopulation horn, none of us can actually offer a viable solution for it. Yes, I'm pro-choice in large part because I'm anti-overpopulation (as well as the obvious personal freedom factor, of course). Yes, I think free birth control and should be provided to the economically disadvantaged. Yes, I think HMO's should be required to pay for sterilization operations, which many of them won't. No, I don't think any of this will actually solve an impending population crisis.

Now, I'm not saying the planet will actually become unlivable when there are too many humans. Humans have an astounding capacity for surviving even when it defies logic. They may end up synthesizing food from dirt and CO2 out of the air just to avoid wasting space on the middle man that is a crop plant, but the species will in all likelihood endure.

What truly worries me is that before it's over--and I'm talking many centuries from now--we'll wipe out everything else on this planet. First it will be in the name of farmland, and eventually, it could come down the simple geometry of fitting hundreds of billions of domeciles on this relatively small planet. And while every possible labor of environmental stewardship helps to delay this nightmare scenario, that won't by itself be enough to completely avert it.

What will? Space travel.

We need a place to expand to. If we're going to save all the flora and fauna that we all cherish so much, we're eventually going to need somewhere else to stick all the humans. So, a century or two from now, I'd like to see expeditions scouring the outer reaches of our solar system to mine for metals and water ice to hydrate and house the fast-growing subterranean Mars colony. In the background, I'd like to see a two-hundred year automated program working to modify the atmosphere of Venus until it ceases to be a gigantic terrestrial oven and becomes a world that could sustain life as we know it. I'd like to see hundreds of probes flying to the thousands of roughly Earth-like planets that will most likely be discovered between now and then, working to discover exactly which ones have the potential to house the coming generations. And if, wonder of wonders, one of these planets is discovered to have life of its own--imagine, an entire ecosystem completely different from everything we've ever known--I'd like to see that planet left in peace, trod only by explorers and scientists, guarded and observed as a hallmark of the fact that we aren't alone in the Universe. I'd like to see that, and I think it will only happen if by the time we make that discovery, we've already found two or three other planets we deem suitable for colonization.

But more than anything, I'd like to see all this happen while there's still rainforest in Brazil. I'd like to know that a thousand years from now, there will still be polar bears roaming the Arctic. I'd like to know that there will still be creatures that you and I haven't even imagined swimming in the deep ocean. But all that can only happen if we have someplace else to send future generations of humans.

And that starts with seeming trivialities like better space suits.

Crowding leads to more aggression and fighting over resources.

Jefferson was right, living in the country promotes sanity and city life promotes mental illness and perverseness (specifically myopia - a loss of view of the big view and the realities of the connectedness of things - how many city dwellers now could survive without a supermarket nearby?)

Your "rights" exist only so far as they do not fringe upon my "rights". I feel I have a right to live in a natural environment that is not crowded and polluted.

The "right to breed" no longer exist in the present world.
Babies should be sterilized at birth. Eggs and sperm could be harvested later if judged appropriate.

Tax policies in industrialized nations could be used to control birth rates.

We have a cerebral cortex that allows us to overide the reptilean part of the brain of instincts ...... but you have to use it.

I think the fact that some do not is itself an argument for a type of eugenics in today's world.

The developed countries cannot sustain the overflow from 3rd world countries where apparently they only work, sleep and screw and think having babies proves you're a monkey (sorry, I meant "man").

The 1917 influenza virus that had a 50% kill rate was recently harvested from frozen corpses in Alaska by the US govt and has been recreated.
You really don't think they did this for research purposes do you?

The rich will not hesitate to "thin-out" the species when the numbers become a threat to them.

Or nature herself will probably "kick-back" with its own "leveler" in the form of some superbug.

Its too bad that the human race has failed its evolutionary tests for rationality ..... we will eventually be eliminated and perhaps in a few hundred million years a rational species will evolve.
     

"We Have Found the Enemy and It Is Us" ... Pogo

Terraforming has been bounced around for a while in sci-fi.  And in the Solar System, Venus looks like a fine place to start -- I think Carl Sagan's idea was to seed the atmosphere with CO2-eating bacteria.

Terraforming is indeed an ethical issue, but not urgent just yet.  Whether one may buy advertising rights on the inner face of the Moon would seem to be more pressing.

That would be kind of neat, actually: "Drink Coca Cola," flashing on and off in all the languages of the world ...

Also in sci-fi, I think there is a rather cheery situation in a novel by Arthur Clarke, that the Earth has been environmentally restored, with lots of forests and wilderness, as a result of off-world colonization.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

The notion that off-world colonization, if it were to become at all even possible, would somehow lead to the redemption of our home planet's biodiversity and environmental balance may indeed be a cheery concept but one that does not bear an iota of scrutiny. Note that the worst industrial devastations of Europe took place AFTER the "New World" colonization of the Americas, Africa, East Asia and Australasia were well under way.

But a little light relief is fun, no?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.