Ground control to Major Tom.

In a week that Mercury went into retrograde (we think), our thoughts turn skywards. What’s up there waiting for us, in every sense? This week, our regular launch into the EcoSalon archives takes a celestial flavor as we look at space – the key to so many of our earthly problems.

Space Is How We Fix Our Own Planet. Remember the incredible image of Earth-rise, described by photographer Galen Rowell as “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken”? That’s a gift the space program has bestowed upon us – ecological self-awareness. We know how fragile our world is because we can see it, bright and alive against the backdrop of the most profound emptiness we know. The help to our planet is technological, too: For example, you may have heard of a little invention developed for spacecraft called solar panels.

Space: Why Bother?

The more fuel efficient flying machine Aurora researchers envision (illustration, above) would be designed to cruise at mach 0.72 instead of the industry standard of mach 0.8. It would not have to use composite materials (which are lighter weight and used in the newly tested Boeing 787 Dreamliner) but it could use conventional aluminum and manufacturing technology, while still saving substantial amounts of fuel.

25% of costs for a typical airliner are spent on fuel, studies show. So the environmental benefits should deliver economic benefits, too.

Can the same efficiencies apply to space travel and space ships? As an industry, commercial space travel is too nascent to “go green,” Parrish says. But it is starting with a very ecological-minded entrepreneur, Richard Branson, along with pioneering spacecraft designer Burt Rutan.Branson famously supported and financed the development of alternative, renewable energy and signed the Clinton Global Initiative in 2006.

EcoMeme: The Future Of Flight, Fuel Efficient?

There are around 900 satellites up there, busily keeping the world connected. They’re immersed in a sea of spacecraft fragments and garbage nicknamed space junk. There are parts of rockets, fragments of destroyed satellites (some of them very fresh indeed), gloves…even, would you believe, an astronaut’s tool bag that can occasionally be spotted whipping across the night sky (and here’s how it got up there). Around 18,000 pieces are larger than 10cm and can therefore be tracked and avoided. The rest? An estimated 580,000 further objects above 1cm in diameter. And all of these are hurtling round at orbital velocity, with enough kinetic energy to punch through spacecraft armor, destroy systems worth millions of dollars and endanger the lives of astronauts. It’s way beyond being a nuisance and makes a shocking picture.

The Sky’s The Limit: Space Gets Trashed

If there’s one way to feel how precious and fragile our tiny blue-green planet is, it’s to watch the stars wheel as the world turns on its axis. When I eventually settle down and have kids, I’ll be taking them for long trips away from the city lights, and encouraging them to squint through a telescope, and pointing them towards online astronomical resources such as the pupil-dilating beauty of the WorldWide Telescope project, and all the other forms of amateur astronomy that gave me such a sense of the wonder of Nature when I was a child.

Stars: Teaching Us About Living (And Lying)

The thing about the Geminids is that they’re unlike other meteor showers in that their “shooting stars” do not come from our passing through the tail of a comet, but rather from a “weird rocky object” called 3200 Phaethon. This smallish rock with an odd orbit is believed to have come from an impact event with asteroid called Pallas. In any event, there’s a ton of strange and unique features to this show, many of which remains a mystery to scientists. Its big deal though, is, well, its bigness.

Heads Up, The Geminids Are Coming

Whether you actually buy into planetary politics (we’re reserving judgment), the cosmos are a fun and convenient foil for a range of bad behavior and bum luck. Your astrocartography, on the other hand, is something that should be taken very, very seriously. That’s right, your astrocartography, a.k.a. locational astrology, meaning you are where you live. That’s what the experts say, anyway. And you, my dear Leo, could very well be living in the wrong ZIP code.

Pack your bags. Here’s where you should be living according to your star sign.

The 20 Best And Worst Cities For Your Astrological Sign

Images: paul (dex), Aurora, Buglugs, ForestGladesiWanderer, DrRawheaD and Apple Wood Manor.

The post From the Vault: The Sky Is Not the Limit appeared first on EcoSalon.

The modern world needs to shut up.

Every weekday I walk to work along one of my city’s streets, and I’ve given up trying to listen to my mp3 player. I mouth frustrated obscenities at the roaring cars and replay scenes from I Am Legend in my head. I wish they would just stop. Yet it’s this wearisome racket that could help meet our future energy demands.

Question – what is noise? Energy, in the form of waves of pressure? No, that’s sound. Defining noise requires that damning, planet-ruining word “useless.” Unwanted, irritating and seemingly unavoidable, as a by-product of everything mechanical we are beholden to. We make the skies roar, the ground tremble, and we drown out the rhythms of the natural world until the biophony (of which we are a part) is in total confusion. It’s the human race’s noisy, angsty teenage years, and we’re turning it up to 11.

How can we fix this? “Stop at source” seems logical, but we live in a world so attuned to noise that electric car manufacturers are forced to add artificial engine sounds for safety reasons. So what do we do instead? We hide from it, soundproofing ourselves into happy ignorance or diverting it so it’s somebody else’s problem. Fingers in ears, lalalalala.

Luckily, there are signs it’s just a phase we’re going through.

The next generation of acoustic engineers are working hard to turn this acoustic nuisance into a power source. Enter the SONEA, a 7kg box you stick on your noisiest outside wall. Every single decibel of vibrating air smacking into it will generate 30 Watts of power (or so the designers claim) – just enough to keep the average CFL burning.  But just think what an array of them will do. An array facing the main runway at Heathrow Airport, or slung under a bridge on North America’s busiest highway. Even if the technology falls short right now, the potential is staggering.

But we’re not done. Why not help solve the fuel crisis as well? As New Scientist reports, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered a way to turn noise into an electrical charge that can break up water into oxygen and hydrogen. At 18% efficiency it’s a step up from existing piezoelectric (pressure-generated electric) technology – and it creates hydrogen fuel from water, or “a free lunch” in the words of the team’s lead researcher.

Just how far away are we from sound-harvesting architecture? Concept designs are already tweeting their way across the Internet, such as the Urban Transducer skyscraper with its frequency-tuning panels that hunt down the noisiest Hertz. Are we seeing the start of a whole new form of alternative energy gathering? Imagine a production line of energy collectors, with acoustic technology transforming the eco-friendly whump-whump of a wind turbine into even more juice.

It all sounds good from where I’m standing – with my fingers in my ears.

Images: nrbelex and Yanko Design.

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