Ground Floor: It was by accident rather than design that the man and I ended up watching a selection of Star Trek movies last weekend. I'm not a full-blown Trekkie, but I enjoy science fiction and used to watch the TV series, although I found the movies a bit tedious and self-indulgent. However, it was fun to look back at what was cutting-edge technology nearly 30 years ago and wonder where the obsession with pulsating coloured lights came from (and why nobody wore seat belts).
Digital wasn't really their thing either. Although plasma TV was still light years away, figuratively speaking, the first clamshell phone design was surely an Enterprise communicator (albeit a slightly clunky one), while Lt Uhura clearly used Bluetooth technology - even though the device in her ear must have been the most uncomfortable piece of equipment in the history of communications.
So perhaps some technological inventions had an airing on Star Trek, even if not in their ultimate design. But it's not the gadgets that should be of most interest to us, it's the fuel source.
In the series, the Enterprise was fuelled by dilithium crystals to ensure it zipped around the universe, boldly going where no one had before. Originally, the crystals were only found naturally (although not on earth), which meant the ship spent a lot of time looking for other planetary sources to mine. Later, the crystals were manufactured synthetically and the writers could think of other things for the explorers to do.
The search for dilithium crystals reflects the same concerns we face today. We are an energy dependent people and our world revolves around our need to constantly tap into a main source of fuel. Our economies continue to depend on fossil fuels and, more specifically, oil.
The price of oil has been an occasional feature in Ground Floor, mainly because I worry that eventually the pressures on prices will lead us into real inflationary problems.
This year, the price of crude oil has gone up by around 13 per cent, with Brent finally squeezing through the $70 (€57) per barrel level last week, thanks to hawkish US comments about military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. While you'd think that moving out of the winter heating season might help, we're now moving into the summer driving season, which won't.
President Bush, a defender of Americans' right to heat and drive as much as they like, has made a few gestures towards the country's oil dependence by suggesting that it is addicted to oil. But western leaders have done little to curb any addiction.
This is partly because our use of oil has become more efficient since the 1970s and because energy is a small proportion of our overall spending. And because we have trade agreements with oil producing nations. Low interest rates have made it easy to borrow to pay for consumer durables without having to cut back on spending elsewhere, so heating and petrol might be more expensive, but generally, we can afford to pay for it.
Consumer demand in western economies just isn't declining, nor is demand from India and China. So lower oil prices, at least not the $30-$40 price range that we once knew and loved, aren't going to happen soon.
Politicians the world over know that having all our eggs in one fuel basket is not the wisest choice, but it has worked for over half a century.
However, some entrepreneurs are beginning to take a serious interest in other fuel sources and when businessmen get involved in the game rather than politicians or environmentalists, you sense that, perhaps, a perception shift is starting to take place.
Last week, I mentioned that ethanol is big business in Brazil. Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, has invested heavily in companies which are developing bio-fuels, while venture capitalist Vinod Khosla (a co-founder of Sun Microsystems), is involved in fuel research and is backing ethanol as a petrol substitute.
According to the International Energy Agency, demand for fuels made from sugar and other crops like soya beans and corn will quadruple over the next 30 years. It might seem greener and more altruistic, but it's a money-making investment too. The Bloomberg world energy alternative sources index has gone up by 33 per cent this year. Shares in SolarWorld, which makes solar panels, are up 91 per cent. Suzlon, developer of the world's largest windpark, has seen its share price double since last October, and Ballard Power, a fuel cell maker, shows a 40 per cent rise in 2006.
Interestingly, the original Model T Ford was designed to run on ethanol, but it seems the oil companies had other ideas. The strongest always wins the day! It will be interesting to see if Gates or Khosla will change our way of thinking by promoting alternative energy sources - or whether we'll keep guzzling oil until we're forced to explore new worlds to see if dilithium exists and will help solve whatever energy crisis we've got into.
