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Borrowing Fire from the Future
From hydrogen fuels and artificial suns to satellites harvesting sunlight in orbit, humanity is exploring extraordinary new ways to obtain energy. But beneath every technological promise lies an older question: can we learn to harness the universe’s abundance without ignoring the laws that govern it?
Singapore, Towards the End of the Century
Imagine Singapore towards the end of the twenty-first century. The skyline is still recognisable, though the buildings have changed. Autonomous ships glide through the port, factories make products we might struggle to imagine today, and vast computing systems process information at speeds that would have astonished earlier generations. The tropical heat remains, of course. Air-conditioning still hums, trains carry passengers across the island, and hospitals, factories and data centres run around the clock.
But perhaps something fundamental has changed. The electricity powering this city no longer comes predominantly from burning natural gas. Some might come from geothermal wells extending kilometres into Singapore’s granite. Some might arrive through international electricity…
