Nature-like power industry

Abstract

An overview of the works, describing the current state of the technosphere energy and presenting forecasts of its further development, is provided in the article. Based on the works of ecologists, the contradiction between the organization principles and the directions of the evolution vector of the modern technosphere and its energy with the Earth biosphere is shown. Since the transformation scale of matter and energy by the technosphere is currently commensurate with the volumes of planetary flows, the confrontation between artificial and natural habitats can lead to the destruction of the latter and to a global ecological catastrophe. In order to avoid such a negative scenario, scientists propose to “learn from Nature”, that is, to rebuild the technosphere according to the naturalness principles, just as the biosphere is organized. This process can be called greening, as a result of which a nature-like ecotechnosphere will probably be built. It will harmoniously coexist and develop (co-evolving) together with the biosphere. The main task of creating an ecotechnosphere is the formation of a nature-like energy supply system for humanity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, V.I. Vernadsky began to consider this topic in the work “Autotrophy of humanity”. In this article, the authors propose a configuration of the power industry of the future ecotechnosphere, which is based on the already well–known theoretical and experimental developments carried out by scientists in the direction of nature imitation - biomimetics. This term includes equipment and technologies that reproduce natural processes of obtaining and converting energy, such as low-potential renewable energy sources, bioelectricity generation, controlled photosynthesis, glucose power industry, artificial muscle fiber.