At the end of the day, market, media, jourmalism and economics revolve round the conversations most survival to our species, as well as smaller things like keeping up with the Jones’ . So what do you all think are the 5 most vital worldwide conversations of 2006, and which ones are not happening either among enough people or with simple enough info?

Clean energy for 22 years as launched by the then deputy editor of The Economist and all entrepreneurial circles he helped to plant 30 years ago. Below the conversation started for 1984. Is the world debating this enough-if not, why not

Let's see if Britons, The Commonwealth and anyone else who wants to linkin can clarify the 5 conversations that should most concern the human race of 2006. Following on from Queen Elisabeth's Christmas speech, our species may never have experienced a year with such vital conversational foci

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YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE written 1984

Sunlight is the fuel which sustains life on earth. The process by which plants extract energy from sunlight, using that energy to build up complex compounds from simper ones and thereby storing the energy which animals, including humans, use to grow and move and see and think is the life-process itself. We (human beings) have always exploited that life-process, but in the past we have only been able to do so by using living plants as our agents. We learned to cultivate them, develop them by selective breeding, and since the 1980s to meddle with their genes, but we have not yet learned to substitute something of our own making for the living plant. We have not found or made a more efficient substitute for chlorophyll itself outside the naturally-occurring factory which is the living cell.

Until we design our own systems which can deploy the energy of sunlight as efficiently as humble algae does, we humans have no real biotechnology of our own. We have many kinds of solar cells which can extract energy from the sunlight and store is as electricity or heat, but such devices are very crude indeed beside the technical sophistication and versatility of living plants.

We are making a determined effort to capture and use a greater fraction of the solar energy which falls upon the face of the earth every day. We are trying to make plants flourish in paces where at present they can only eke out the most precarious of existence. The ideal situation, however, would be one in which we did not need to work so hard to adapt existing plants to more hostile conditions. If we had our own artificial systems of photosynthesis we might exploit the desert sun ourselves, without using other organisms as intermediaries. Our ultimate ambition must be to make artificial photosynthetic systems more efficient than those which have evolved alongside side us throughout the history of life on earth. Then and only then will we be able to claim that we are technologically self-sufficient. In 2024, this looks as if it might be one of our children's tasks.

Given this picture the 64 trillion dollar energy question and even more than that if we value sustainability of life is what can we best compound around the sun's energy exponentials in 2006. Next major public meeting on this in London looks like March2006- please do tell us at wcbn007@easynet.co.uk if you have other open meetings elsewhere to linkin on this agenda. posted by ..., 1:43 AM  permalink