World Wide Jigsaw

I think that people can solve all of our problems, if we could just work together. In fact, I think that solutions of many of our problems already exist in pieces scattered here and there all over the world. For example, all over the planet the Sun is shining on thousands of miles of roads and highways, and this energy is wasted, doing nothing useful for humanity or the Earth. Somewhere on one of those roads there might be a company or a person with a way of producing a translucent substance, both cheap enough and tough enough to be used to surface roads. Some other company on a different street has a way of making cheap solar cells, but they are not tough enough to surface roads with. Obviously, if we combine the two products we could make all the thousands of miles of highway all across America into a network of solar cells, replacing a bunch of polluting power plants. 

One problem with this idea, among many, is that the people with the translucent substance and the people with the cheap solar cells probably don’t live on the same street. They are unlikely to even be in the same country. Luckily, the Internet is connecting people. Some day soon a creative teenage girl doing a school project in Louisiana might do web searches on ‘plastics’, ‘highway construction costs’, and ‘experimental solar panels’ and discover that:

- The median cost of constructing a lane mile of highway in America is $1,600,000, and in Louisiana it is $2,015,000. (Source: Washington State Department of Transportation, Highway Construction Cost Comparison Survey, April 2002 Final report).

- STMicroelectronics, a French-Italian semiconductor maker, is making solar cells using organic materials such as plastics. Cheaper than traditional solar cells, these produce electricity for half the cost of burning fossil fuels with no pollution. 

With this knowledge, and knowledge of a clear substance that would work as a road surface, she could work out how to revolutionise both the roads and power grid of Louisiana, reducing the cost of electricity while creating less pollution. She could easily turn her school project into a proposal then search the Internet for whom to send her proposal too. Eventually these new roads might spread across America, and across the whole world.  

The world could be changed, not by a million dollar government research project or a massive conference of important people. Just by a single teenager with the initiative to put the answer together, and the Internet to link her to the people with the pieces.