Traditional ‘light water reactors’ work by allowing an unstable isotope to cascade down to a stable isotope and collecting the energy in heated water which turns a turbine. Breeder reactors are similar, except they include a design change that allows them to utilise a mix of the rare isotope and the common isotopes. Furthermore, all “waste” is simply re-purified and dumped back into the reactor. A variation known as the Burner reactor was actually designed to consume these final, troublesome elements. These reactors were first envisioned in the 1960s, but the abundance of nuclear material made their further development unnecessary. As a result, many of the reactors we use today are the older, waste-producing models. This leads to another problem; what to do with all of this nuclear waste we have?

The drawbacks. They often lead to the NIMBY mentality that plagues so many essential concepts of society. We’ve seen the headlines about Japanese nuclear reactors collapsing and threatening the hemisphere with their toxic nature. When authorities were unable to get close enough to fix the problem; a downright modern Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. But hey, let’s face some facts. That station was the old light water variety, it was forty years old, it was hit by a 9.1 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami, with the tsunami being the ultimate reason for failure. The backup generators for the cooling stations were fried in the wave. There is nothing in any of these catastrophes that couldn’t have been avoided, and often the technology existed at the time.

I think it’s about time we started connecting some dots. Breeder reactors could use the very pure forms of Uranium, like an appropriately processed core of a nuclear warhead, to get the fire started and then consume all of the waste we have stored up. We both demilitarise our stockpiles and clean up the Earth at the same time.

And the best part, as published in Journal of American Physics in 1983, there is enough Uranium on Earth to power our planet for the next five billion years using Breeder reactors. No more paying for electricity, just the maintenance fees. The energy for processing could come from the reactor itself. No more coal mining, or natural gas fracking, or oil spewing into our landscapes, or excess carbon given off to our atmosphere.

There has even been much progress in what is called ‘cogeneration’ plants. Where the heat coming off of the nuclear reactors is then used to desalinate ocean water, producing drinking water and salt. This is important in areas where drinking water supplies are limited, such as the Middle East and major coastal cities.

Soon, car manufacturers will have improved electric car designs that make it an upgrade from classical gasoline cars. The benchmarks have been set in both energy output and total storage for batteries, and intense research can often brute force some amazing results. When every car is plugged into the houses that are themselves on a grid powered by nuclear power, then gasoline would instantly become unnecessary.

All of this technology exists today, all it would take is someone with enough conviction and authority to recreate America’s energy market. No more nuclear weapons, no more coal, oil, natural gas, gasoline, no more nuclear waste, renewable sources of drinking water, and assured energy independence for all of humanity in perpetuity.

One of my favourite anecdotes on the triumphs of humanity over disease, is the eradication of smallpox. Here is a disease that goes back thousands of years, afflicting even the ancient Pharaohs, and has survived by continuously afflicting humanity. The disease had no non-human reservoirs, and therein laid its demise. Dr. Edward Jenner proved in 1796 that a related virus that affects cows could be used to prepare the body for an infection from smallpox. From the Latin word for cow, ‘vacca’, he derived the word ‘vaccine’. Almost two centuries later in 1976, we celebrated the end of an infection of humanity that had claimed about 400 million lives alone in the 20th century.

I feel the story is important, not because of its accomplishment, but for what it represented in terms of technical skill. The coordinated production, shipment, and administration of a preventative cure to everyone on the planet in a timely enough fashion to actually destroy an extremely virulent and tiny form of life. Philosophers across the ages have described the factors that end life; death, war, famine, and disease. This is the triumph over disease.

Remember in the cartoons when the heroes would get into a small submarine and shrink down to enter a friend’s body and fight off the diseases? We’re there already. A few years ago, surgeons started using tools that patients swallow and the operator can control remotely, reducing the need for cutting into the body for tissue samples. Presumably the tiny scalpels retract before it lets itself out the back. Every year the robots get smaller and the technology gets more developed and better at what they do. Maybe one day, we all will have a small robot living inside of us, detecting diseases, administering cures, fixing tears and holes, and more, all automatically. At night, it would sneak up to your mouth and clean the backs of your teeth for you, floss in all the places you missed.

How about something I feel we could easily accomplish in the modern era? Proper nutrition is the cornerstone of anyone’s health, and always has been since antiquity. Well, extensive research has yielded the detailed dietary needs of the human body as it grows. Why don’t we create a place on the internet where we could not only access all of this data, but also share meal ideas; a Wikipedia mixed with a Facebook of foods. In the process, we participate in a massive cultural exchange, find our own path towards a healthy diet, and create a timeline and a resource for the future. Who knows what such a massive amount of information could yield long term as well? Smarter crop planning as we understand our collective diets, a fuller understanding of the relationship between diet and different illnesses, and coming a step closer towards wiping out another pillar of evil; famine.

In my wildest dreams, I’d imagine that we would achieve immortality through genetics. Our DNA is extremely long and complicated, but could be thought of as a binary sequence. Instead of ones and zeroes, we have four base pairs. The order of these pairs was assembled randomly and saw much of its expansion during the wild west of Earth’s history; when everything was single-celled and dog ate dog to survive. Sometimes there would be a Jonah and the whale type story, and the smaller bacteria would survive within the larger one indefinitely; this is what led to the mitochondria and the importance of mitochondrial DNA. Once we made the jump to multicellular organisms, we were just re-scrambling all of our genetic noise until a more useful pattern came out.

Now imagine we could re-order that DNA. Now that we understand how DNA translates into proteins, we can restructure our genetic code to make sure that everything is where it should be, spell-check it for spelling mistakes that would leak to heart disease later in life, or Alzheimer’s. Maybe make sure we grow up with thick bones that don’t break and grow to be seven feet tall? Imagine if we changed what used to be the dark corner of the evolutionary locker room floor into a well ordered library of genetic sequences that would most efficiently use the nutrients we take in. Would we live to the very limit of our existence? What would that even be?

It’s only a string of neat inventions and innovations away!

What if we don’t yet have a tool like what we need? Let’s say we want to be able to run at 100 miles per hour? Well, then some great innovator comes along and invents a new tool that often changes the world; the printing press, the cotton gin, the automobile, the airplane, the internet. Sometimes the inventions can be harmless, and sometimes the inventions can be harmful. The technology we develop is made to serve a purpose, and we often need to lay down the law concerning their safe use. Certain ages to drive, certain permits to own a gun. These laws are one of the main reasons for government.

Alright, full disclosure; I’m a politics junkie! So when I see things on the news like local law enforcement is developing something called Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) that allows them to look right into homes and identify illegal operations without a warrant, I think ‘Oh look! They have a new tool to get around that pesky Fourth Amendment.’ The Bill of Rights were written by the minority of Founding Fathers who thought the Federal Government would become too powerful and the people wouldn’t be able to guarantee their own rights anymore. A selection includes the right to free speech (1), right to weapons of self defense (2), right to privacy (4), right to a legal defense (6) and a trial (7), and not to be tortured (8).

So now, the premise of it all: Given the Bill of Rights, would our government find a way around it with new technology or methods the Founding Fathers hadn’t predicted?

Let’s start with the good. Americans joined the world recently in rejoicing the shelving of the SOPA/PIPA legislation. Printed word is often restrained by decency, and television and radio have the FCC for a bridle. But the internet is still a place where one can go and say crude and lewd things to all their friends and no one will rain punishment down on you. Free speech exists nowhere else in the world other than on the internet, and even that is a right we must constantly assert it seems. George Carlin would be smiling if he knew what just happened.

On to the bad. Our rights to privacy have become up for interpretation. There are machines that scan, sniff, poke, prod, irradiate, and who knows what it does to our bags while we can’t see them. And all of this is just at the airport! We are entitled to privacy in all of our actions as long as we aren’t harming anyone in the process. The justification that we could be just about to harm someone and therefore aren’t entitled to privacy is the very suspicion we were supposed to be protected from.

What about the ugly? Two words: Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Three words. Two places on the planet where it is well documented that the United States locked people up, threw away the keys, and often tortured them continuously until they heard exactly what they wanted to. Some will say that it’s for self-defense, and that none of the victims were Joe American. Well, Obama just signed the National Defense Appropriations Act, which funded the military for one year and introduced a law allowing the lock-up of Americans forever under suspicion of ‘terrorism’.

Technology is always a march forward, and the path is chosen by the needs of those in need. The technology that allows us to eliminate guerrillas in the mountains of Afghanistan could be used for the most efficient search and rescue operations imaginable, or it could just as easily be used to peep into the homes and digital conversations of every American. We need to be aware that a lot of money is spent making the next generation of iPad, and a lot is spent on the auspices of ‘National Defense’. Hundreds of quotes from our most beloved historical figures exist, but here is one from one of our most respected military leaders,

“No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation.” –General Douglas MacArthur

For those who might not be familiar with anything other than Windows or OS X, the word Linux is practically an umbrella term for any of the flavors of operating systems that use the Linux code and licensing terms, that descended from the GNU project. The project, started at MIT in 1983, declared its goals to be the creation of a free body of software that would allow users to get along without any proprietary software. The source code is constantly being improved by a community of devoted programmers, and sometimes even collaboratively with major companies.

What does this mean practically? It’s a free operating system in a world where nothing is ever free. Compare that to Windows 7 Ultimate at $320, or an OS X Lion upgrade at $30 So hey! I figured I would give this software suite a fair shake.

In the past I had unsuccessfully attempted to install a copy of Ubuntu, the flagship Linux version on my rig; a computer that had been assembled from parts. But once I booted for the first time, I found the experience something only an active software programmer could enjoy. I retreated from the brand at that point. Until my friend told me about Linux Mint.

This new version styles itself as a version of Linux that is completely intuitive and ready out of the box. I downloaded a free copy of the appropriate version of their latest, Mint 12, and installed it alongside my prior OS, Windows 7 Ultimate. The new operating system was heavily customisable, beautifully polished, and frightfully unstable. The GNOME 2 graphical user interface (GUI) was designed for a desktop computer, but they overlay it with the GNOME 3 engine, which is designed for use with mobile devices like tablets. The combination was something I had never experienced with Windows, but I bet the new Windows 8 would have a similar feel. However, my encounter with the 45 day old operating system was not to last. I ended up re-installing Mint 12 five times as I struggled to get all of my previous software onto the new system, and many of the drivers for my hardware wasn’t yet supported.

Eventually, the 60 GB solid state I had been running both OS’s from crashed and would refuse to allow my computer to boot. I couldn’t even get to the BIOS to figure out exactly what was wrong. At this point, my solid state is beside me on my desk, weighting down a stack of papers from the fan’s interference. This was probably unrelated to my Linux Mint woes, but just to be safe I decided to go with a slightly older version of Mint that wasn’t so cutting edge.

Linux Mint 11 sports only the GNOME 2 interface, but what it lacks in polish, it provides in every other way. After the initial installation and update, the user is free to do anything they did on their old operating system with the collection of software that comes pre-installed or provided in their massive catalogue of community written free-ware. And if you absolutely need to use that Windows program you used to have, the developers have provided a special program called Wine that allows you to run Windows programs on a Linux OS.

Since my original hard drive crashed, I am now exclusively using Linux Mint 11 and have no regrets making the switch. Other than the 60 GB solid state that went floppy on me.