Rob Schofield | Pessimism and defeatism will not fix what ails our fragile planet

At the conclusion of director Ridley Scott’s 2015 science fiction film and cable TV staple, ­The Martian, astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon), having been rescued from months of solo isolation on the red planet through a combination of remarkable luck, pluck and some Hollywood scientific liberties, shares the central lesson he’s learned from his harrowing experience with a group of eager new space program recruits:

“At some point, everything’s gonna’ go south on you…everything’s going to go south and you’re going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem… and you solve the next one… and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home. All right, questions?”

At which point, of course, every student in the room raises their hand in a rousing sign of “can do” energy and optimism.

Would that such forward-looking enthusiasm was more prevalent on the 2024 U.S. political and cultural scene – an environment in which so many conservatives deny hard truths about the future and seek to magically recreate the 1950’s, while many progressives contemplate the decades ahead and merely sigh in resignation.

Damon’s speech came to mind recently when I happened upon an article in the journal Aviation Week & Space Technology entitled “Electrifying Ambition” about the encouraging efforts of a Dutch startup company called Elysian that’s working to build a large, battery-powered airliner.

For years now, aerospace designers have been tilting at the myriad thorny challenges associated with dramatically reducing airliner carbon emissions: Is the answer battery power? Hydrogen power? “Green” jet fuel?

While each of the possibilities has shown potential, the chief roadblock that’s arisen thus far has been scale. In other words, building a very small plane to fly on various sustainable fuel sources (or a combination thereof) is doable, but building one that can carry lots of people long distances – not to mention constructing a whole new infrastructure for fueling aircraft — is quite another matter.

Interestingly, however, the Aviation Week report explained that the Elysian engineers have made a rather extraordinary finding.

Whereas most designers had long sought to tackle the issue by building new power and fueling systems to attach to smaller existing aircraft, the Dutch researchers did some outside-the-box thinking — they did some math.

Making use of traditional aviation equations involving things like weight fractions and lift-to-drag ratios, they determined that they could overcome several roadblocks by designing a new plane from scratch that would weigh as much as a mid-20th century jetliner.

Indeed, with the right aircraft design (the Elysian engineers envision a craft with eight turboprops spread across a very long wingspan), their calculations show that it’s possible to build a rather heavy, battery-powered aircraft that can carry 90 passengers as far as 500 miles with battery technology that’s expected to be available in the relatively near term. What’s more, the report notes that the plane’s “grid energy consumption per passenger kilometer” could be as much as 80% lower than a traditional airliner of comparable size and weight.

While far from a panacea for all of the challenges that confront commercial aviation and its impact on climate change, such an aircraft could prove extremely useful for numerous commuter routes around the world and make an important contribution toward reducing global carbon emissions.

And this fact serves to illustrate a vitally important point that should be much more obvious and loudly trumpeted in 2024 in a nation that has so long prided itself on innovation and progress – namely that the road to a healthier and more sustainable future starts with a single first step (or perhaps more accurately, thousands of single first steps) in the right direction.

Yes, the challenges are immense, daunting, and will involve expense and sacrifice. We cannot, for example, avoid further environmental degradation. Rising seas and desertification will inevitably consume currently inhabited land in the decades ahead and fuel even more mass human migration. And paying more – at least in the near term – for things like energy, food, insurance, housing, and infrastructure is a virtual certainty.

But surely, energetically tackling these problems and challenges is better than surrendering to the pessimism we hear from both the right (“Change costs too much. Our best option is to put up more walls, drill, baby drill, and turn up the A-C.”) and the left (“Selfish humans are hopeless; it’s time to prepare for an inevitable societal spiral.”).

Scott’s film may suffer from some gaps when it comes to our best understandings of physics and space travel, but astronaut Watney’s speech was and is on the mark. We do have to begin. We do have to do the math.

And as the engineers at one small company in the Netherlands and thousands of public and private sector innovators like them across the globe are demonstrating every day, there are a lot of people out there doing those things, and they deserve our attention and support.