Here is the relevant extract of the idea from Dyson's Utopia that I see happening sooner rather than later:
That's exactly what I had in mind. There are three items I cover in the new book. First, I didn't know Teledesic was going up, but I knew something like it was always within 10 years anyway. The second is solar energy, which is wonderfully world distributed. It's only a question of a factor of two to five between the cost of solar energy and the cost of oil. In the long run, oil will get more expensive and solar energy will take over. The third item is biotech, which is essential for using solar energy in crop plants designed to do all the industrial processes.
So you're not talking about solar electricity.
That's also part of the deal, but the more important thing is that you'll be able to make your gasoline locally. People will live in the villages and commute to work in the towns, and they'll produce gasoline on the local farms.
This is from biomass that you refine right there?
You don't even have to refine it. The plants produce it.
Isn't this a more complicated process?
True, we don't have the biotech yet. For that I'm talking maybe 50 years - when we really understand how DNA functions. However, there's no reason plants should be limited to 1 percent energy efficiency. We know photovoltaics can reach 10 percent quite easily. Plants are stuck at 1 percent because they use a particularly elegant process involving chlorophyll. But it's wasteful; it involves a long chain of chemical reactions. It's a historical relic that plants got stuck with. If you could design a plant from scratch, you'd probably use silicon films instead of chlorophyll to collect sunlight. Silicon is abundant, and you've simply got to have a plant that will process soil and extract silicon the same way that plants now process carbon dioxide into carbon.
By the way, this was from 1998, and the interviewer was none other than Stewart Brand latent of the Long Now.
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