A ripping yarn and some crazy new energy ideas.

In WWII when British boffin Barnes Wallis suggested to the top brass of the British military that the best option for destroying some major dams in Germany was to drop a number of bombs that would bounce on the reservoirs — each bomb essentially skipping along the surface of the water until it hit the wall of the dam — he was looked at with incredulity.

You know what? The idea worked. The bombs bounced and the dams were destroyed. (See the movie The Dam Busters if you want to see a fuller version of this ripping yarn).

Today there are similar bright minds at work suggesting equally incredible ideas about alternative energy solutions in the war to tackle global warming and increase energy supply. According to an August  MSNBC  feature, some of the wild and crazy ideas include the following:

A solar panel array in earth orbit that can beam down energy from its 24-7 solar-powered system. Crazy, right? Well, Pacific Gas and Electric has signed up to buy 200 MW of electricity from Solaren Corp., which plans to sell power from orbiting solar panels beginning in mid-2016.

A submerged grid of flexible cylindrical rods to translate the river currents or slow moving ocean currents into electric power by converting the natural mechanical energy into electricity. No way? The University of Michigan is working on it.

Artificial trees. Structures made of proprietary absorbent materials that mimic real trees in their ability to remove carbon dioxide from the air. The trapped carbon dioxide is then sold to soda makers for carbonation. Come on. Well, Global Research Technologies of Tucson envisions it working.

The book SuperFreakonomics suggests an even wilder idea: Several miles of garden hose attached to a helium balloon pumping sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere in order to lower earth’s temperature and reduce global warming. Now that is a nutty idea and has brought howls of derision from climate scientists and others. But some take it seriously, including Intellectual Ventures (a firm set up by former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold) which came up with the idea, and University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner, who put it in their book SuperFreakonomics. (The model is based on reproducing the effects of Mt. Pinatubo’s massive volcanic eruption in 1991, which pushed so much sulfuric ash into the stratosphere that it cooled the earth temperatures by about one degree Fahrenheit for two years, or so.)

Crazy talk, right? But one generation’s crazy can be the next generation’s operating system. This writer has experienced first-hand a media/digital revolution that has transformed how we communicate and he remembers a world before PCs, VCRs, DVDs, the Internet, the World Wide Web, the BlackBerry, and iPods. Many of the electronic tools for communication we take for granted are recent inventions, most of which started out as wild ideas.

Barnes Wallis knew that Necessity is a mother, but so is consumer demand, and both will determine whether orbiting solar panels, a submerged self-generating power grid, artificial trees, or a garden hose in the sky, will make the transition from crazy idea to mundane reality, and become a ripping yarn.

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Photo by Jeremy Levine, used under a Creative Commons license.