What We Think We Know
thoughts on being barefoot and bottling the sun
Did you know that scientists, engineers, energy developers, and big tech are trying to bottle the sun…with a big magnet?
This is what was circling my mind this morning while on a hike. I kept telling myself it was Saturday. A day off. But three weeks deep in an edit and my brain had not yet caught up with my body in the woods.
Which is to say: I needed to take a walk.
Then my husband removed his shoes on the trail. He is a known shoe hater.
Then my four-year-old, who thought it was novel and cool to be like dad.
Then the two-year-old, who seemed instantly more calm, grounded in a way I did not know to envy.
I said: Well. Now I have to take mine off or I’m the fully clothed nerd on the nude beach.
I removed them with resentment, and immediately it subsided.
The coolness of the earth. The wet leaves. The soft moss. The sharp sticks. The slick rocks. The squish of yesterday’s rain.
My whole body slowed to the age of the oaks. I did not care how far we went. We walked peacefully and gently and quietly - and it was wonderful.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking.
But as I get older, I realize I care less and less what you’re thinking. Not out of cruelty; out of something closer to clarity.
Public opinion changes. One day everyone hates AI, the next it’s in every sentence at dinner party - well I asked ChatGPT - and I feel like the last one standing on the ground. Literally.
After our walk, I saw a neighbor take in her No Data Center sign. I joked she’d bring out All Hail AI next. She didn’t. But it would be the ultimate signal of how quickly we move and how little we hold.
I have been filming for almost a year about energy.
Fuel agnostic, we call it. All forms. None labeled good or bad. It’s about the people. And the people are all types. All of them.
But being deep in this topic makes you prickly. You realize how little everyone knows about the thing they use every day - let’s be honest, abuse every day - and how ungrateful they are for it.
So a film about the people who provide seems very on-brand for me. A person who has tried to say, always, in the nicest and most creative way:
You are arrogant. You think you know. But you have no clue. And I am going to show you something you think you understand through the lives of people who DO know, because they are on the ground.
Pride is ugly. I don’t like it in other people or in myself.
Pride keeps our shoes on when the rest of the family goes barefoot because we’re thinking what will a passerby think?
Pride is ultimately useless and life-sucking.
And yet…
The people in the energy sector have a pride that is different. Not the life-sucking kind. The motivating kind. The kind that comes from being asked, constantly, by people who know very little, and act like they know everything.
So back to my original question…did you know that scientists, engineers, energy developers, and big tech are trying to bottle the sun…with a big magnet?
A magnetic bottle, they call it - holding superheated plasma in place, keeping it from touching the walls, so that hydrogen atoms can find each other, fuse into helium, and release something massive and clean.
That is what fusion power is (sorta). That is the promise - near-infinite energy, not hinged on natural resources, not borrowed from the earth we are already asking too much of.
Some say it will never happen.
Others present flashy materials: Yes. In fact. It will. See here this snazzy PowerPoint.
I am not smart enough to know who is right. But I pause.
The sun is unlike any other star. Its power would destroy us entirely if the atmosphere - and all the other complicated things of physics - were to change.
And yet here we are, trying to bottle a star.
So I pause.
Is it pride that makes us think we can hold the sun in a magnetic fist?
Or is it pride to say we can’t?
Today, I took my shoes off in the woods, and immediately my pride subsided.
The squish of yesterday’s rain beneath my feet was a reminder: we did not make the rain fall, and we cannot make the sun shine.