Frankly, oil sucks and coal and natural gas aren’t much better; all three involving burning hydrocarbons, releasing pollutants into the air and water and, in the case of coal, ripping off the tops of mountains in West Virginia and dumping everything but the coal into rivers. I remember one story from The New York Times about a family in coal country where the water was so full of industrial solvents and other chemicals that they get burned if it touches their skin.

Fossil fuels just aren’t the future, especially compared to more viable options. Wind power is popular (and could do really well on this campus during the winter), but it just doesn’t generate enough energy to be worthwhile. Wave power is nice if you live on the coast and hydroelectric is nice if you have a river to dam and don’t mind wiping out entire towns.

Then there’s nuclear. It doesn’t produce any climate change emissions, it’s not dependent on a capricious planet for input and while uranium is technically a non-renewable resource, there’s enough of it that it won’t matter for tens of thousands of years.

However, there’s just one teensy-weenie problem with nuclear power: The waste it produces stays dangerous for so long that part of the Yucca Mountain project included linguists paid to theorize how human language might change over the next several thousand years in order to making warning signs.

There is a source of energy available to us right now that remains virtually untapped. It’s been around for billions of years and will be around for billions more. Yes: the Sun. Right now there are two major problems with solar power: One is that you need a lot of land area and two, even if you have a perfectly cloudless day, you can only collect power for 12 hours and those 12 hours have various peak collection rates because the amount of energy a panel gets is related to its angle with the Sun and the Sun’s angle with the Earth.

Thankfully, there’s a better way of realizing the Sun’s bounty here on Earth. Instead of putting the solar panels on the ground, covering up Arizona, put them in space and beam the power to receivers on the ground.

As some scientists have been known to say, it’s an elegant solution. But is it practical? Yes. Space-based solar power has been researched since the 1950s and all of the technology to do it already exists: microwave lasers, orbital launch vehicles capable of taking satellites to geostationary orbit, solar panels and so on. Research has also been done on the effects of transmitting power from space to the ground and if the laser is wide enough it won’t warm the atmosphere anymore than sunlight or fry birds passing through. The receiver on the ground would have to be large, but it could be integrated into the environment instead of covering it.

The satellites would have to be in geostationary orbit – an orbit where the satellite’s position relative to a spot on Earth is fixed – and therefore would be able to continuously collect energy and beam it down.

There are no technological challenges here; the big problem is the cost of putting these things in such a high orbit. Today, space launches cost several thousand dollars per kilogram of payload. The reasons are varied, but generally related to maintenance and fuel costs: A four gigawatt system is currently estimated to cost around $11 billion to launch.

But even this apparent setback has hidden benefits: A company putting solar power stations in orbit could start with smaller ones in low Earth orbit to start generating revenue quickly and invest in the research and development of better, cheaper launch systems, like laser propulsion, where radiation pressure (the same thing that makes solar sails work) from a ground-based laser is amplified with mirrors. The launch company could even have a satellite in orbit dedicated to producing power for the lasers. Science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein once said that once a spaceship is in orbit “You’re halfway to anywhere” because a spacecraft can use as much acceleration getting into orbit as it can going anywhere and that opens up the possibility of all sorts of industry in space.

The main one would probably be asteroid mining. There are plenty pretty close by (in astronomical terms) and one nickel-iron asteroid could bring in billions of dollars worth of valuable metals. It would be like another industrial revolution.

Some entities are already looking to invest in space-based solar power. A company called Solaren has a deal with a California utility to buy 200 megawatts of solar power beginning in 2016, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency wants a prototype in orbit by 2030 and Astrium, a subsidiary of the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company has plans for a prototype.

If Twitter can get billions of dollars in venture capital without any revenue plan at all, then space-based solar power and its derivative benefits – industry potentially worth trillions, being good to the environment, lowering the costs of everything and creating a world where our grandchildren will be under the impression that Al Gore was the leader of some kind of cult – should have investors lining up.

Matthew M. Robare is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].