Assuming that time and money were not obstacles...

The ask-a-scienceblogger question for this week was submitted by a
reader, Jake Bryan, who comments on Science Blogs as "chezjake."

"Assuming that time and money were not obstacles,
what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would
you most like to explore? Why?

It did not take long for me to come up with an answer to this.
 What I would most like to see researched intensively would
be: alternative energy sources.  Continue reading below the
fold...

The reasons?  First, I had to pick something outside of my own
discipline.  Second, it seems that such a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity should be directed toward something that would: benefit
everyone, have an enduring benefit, and which would solve several
problems at once.  



Here, I am assuming that the research would be successful.
 With unlimited resources, it is hard to imagine failure.
 



Adequate development of alternative energy sources would be of benefit
to my primary mission in life, which is to improve the health and
well-being of people.  It would do this by reducing pollution.
 It would reduce the potential for regional and global
conflict (world peace, anyone?).  It would have significant
economic benefits.  It would elevate everyone's standard of
living.  And finally, just to make this mesh with the goals of
persons across the political spectrum, it would improve national
security by making our country more resilient in the face of terrorism
and natural disasters.  Having massively decentralized, and
redundant, sources of power, would make it much less likely that a
terrorist attack, or a natural disaster, would cause widespread power
outages.  



What I envision is a system that generates and delivers energy using a
wide variety of sources and methods.  This would create new
industries.  Another social benefit is that such a system
would be very difficult for any central entity to control.
 This would make Enron-type criminal ventures much more
difficult to employ.  In short, it would make it more
difficult for any one small group to have an inordinate amount of
political or economic power over anyone else.