Beam up enterprising imagination for new energy generation

News flash: Gas now costs too much.

It also generates too much carbon dioxide.

Coal spews too much CO2, too, and enough mercury to rile environmentalists.

Solar and wind power sound — and smell — swell. Too bad neither packs the power of fossil fuels (yet). Ethanol also sounded encouraging, until federal subsidies for it helped launch a global food-cost surge.

Nuclear power, though comparatively clean, still spooks lots of folks too ignorant or stubborn to distinguish Three Mile Island from Chernobyl, "The China Syndrome" and Hiroshima.

But at least a growing number of us are catching on to this dire reality: America's critical, long-time, economic asset of cheap oil is kaput.

Where do we go from here?

Why not "boldly go where no man has gone before"?

Dilithium crystals propel the Starship Enterprise at warp speeds. That's plenty powerful enough to propel us into a new energy age. According to a pal who knows way more about the original "Star Trek" series than any allegedly grown man should, those crystals yield awesome amounts of energy in "annihilation reactions" of matter and antimatter.

Far-fetched?

Seventy years ago, nuclear power was far-fetched. Two centuries ago, oil power was far-fetched.

Cynics will dismiss this call for an intergalactic dilithium-crystal search as illogical. They'll point out that dilithium crystals — like Capt. James Tiberius Kirk, Mr. Spock and Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy — aren't real.

Tell that to the loyal legions of "Trekkies," including my buddy, who has worn his Enterprise crew uniform shirt to work on Halloween. They still find a real source of inspiration (energy of a sort) in repeatedly watching the 79 episodes of "Star Trek" in its initial — and peak — 1966-69 NBC form (my friend's expertise verifies my view that subsequent movies and series fall light years short of that stellar standard).

Anyway, what really is, and really isn't, real? We're all prisoners of our own perceptions. And nearly all of mankind's leaps forward required what then seemed outlandish stretches of imagination.

As the relentlessly logical Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) concedes to Capt. Kirk (William Shatner): "Your illogical approach to chess does have its advantages on occasion."

Besides, if Americans were logical, we wouldn't still waste so much oil while buying so much of it from others and drilling so little of our own. If we were logical, we would invest more in the unknown's unlimited potential.

An enlightening, enduring example from 1967 (but not from "Star Trek"):

A group of inquisitive eighth-grade boys (names withheld to protect the guilty) found, on the grounds of St. Andrews Junior High, a vast reserve of mysterious, porous, greyish rocks. Quite by chance, they also found that those rocks, though odorless when left intact, emitted a revoltingly noxious smell of remarkable range and duration when broken into pieces (most human males of all ages like to break stuff).

By now most of you have deduced the purpose to which the lads put their potent "Eureka!" prize: Teachers whose classrooms were fouled by the resulting, vile stench had to order immediate evacuations. Thus, the youthful miscreants broke not just new scientific ground and what they aptly pegged as "stink rocks," but the monotony of their school-day routine.

Lesson: Never underestimate the latent might of discovery.

Back to "Star Trek": In "Mudd's Women," the sixth episode, con artist Harry Mudd enlists three beautiful females to scam miners on Ophiuchus VI out of dilithium crystals badly needed by the Enterprise. A testy exchange ensues between Capt. Kirk and Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott (the late James Doohan):

Scotty: "If only we had those crystals."

Kirk: "But we don't! I didn't get any! I should've found a way! Satisfied, Mr. Scott?"

No, Mr. Scott was not satisfied. Nor should he have been.

Nor should we be satisfied as the prices of gas and other necessities skyrocket while the values of our investment portfolios plummet.

Like Capt. Kirk, we "should've found a way" out of this utterly predictable mess long ago.

So please, somebody find some dilithium crystals — or at least some of that old-fashioned American inventive spirit — at warp speed.

Frank Wooten is associate editor of The Post and Courier. His e-mail is wooten@postandcourier.com.