Scientific advancements surround us and are the byproduct of our development as a species. If we weren’t capable of observing and then learning, we would never have developed anything as complicated as science in the first place! Rudimentary concerns such as this aside, the state of the art as defined by scientists continues to evolve year after year. While there are many things that science has provided which people take for granted—say, cell phones, the Internet, or a microwave oven, other things still seem sufficiently advanced to merit a ‘Wow!’ from even the most jaded consumer.

Take for instance a solar tower. It is unlike its close cousin, the solar panel, of which nearly everyone has heard something after all the recent efforts of people from environmentalists to scientists to politicians to inform the public of the need to derive energy from lasting power sources. As oil runs out—there’s only so much of it in the Earths crust, and we burn a lot of barrels per day—we need something to use for power besides a limited resource. That, or we risk what happened at Easter Island after the last tree was chopped down—a very bleak future indeed.

A solar tower functions by focusing many (in the neighborhood of five thousand) mirrors onto a single point on a tower, which is filled with a liquid which then gets superheated. The hot fluid is then stored underground until is use is required. The steam from this hot liquid is then used to turn a generator, which in turn creates energy. People with online college degrees are sometimes solving very great problems of mankind. The energy problem as it stands today is very great indeed, with volatile, war-inclined powers controlling a large percentage of the Earth’s oil reserves. Technology such as a solar tower can create independence from these regimes.