Protecting Spaceship Earth: my mission at Project Elara

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The author is the present Head of Project Elara, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to working on peaceful, visionary technologies for making a better future.

What is hope?

To me, it is the daringness to dream, the faith to carry a vision through, and the belief that – somehow – you can build a better tomorrow.

From that hope, I started Project Elara: a nonprofit organization developing technology to bring the power of the Sun to Earth. Tens of thousands of kilometers above the Earth’s surface, sunlight is abundant year-round. Capturing that sunlight and beaming it down to Earth means 24-hour power to nearly every place on Earth. It means abundant, clean energy to keep homes warm at night, to keep emergency wards running in warzones, to make sure schoolchildren in remote regions aren’t left out in freezing winters.

But Project Elara is more than just technology: it is rooted in the fundamental belief that this technology should be freely available to every human being on Earth. This means publishing our research and sharing our results freely. This means transparent funding and refusing to profit off our work. And this means dedicating our work to the world: to release it as public domain, relinquishing any right we have over it.

To some, this may sound crazy. And over the past four years I’ve led Project Elara, I’ve experienced this reaction many times. But I believe that the mission is worth striving for, no matter the odds. I believe that by taking small, incremental steps, we can reach further than any commercially-funded venture ever could. That by being stewarded by our ideals, not by the whims of investors, we can outlast the fast-moving trends of our modern world and build something more permanent.

I put my hope in a future where the Sun’s energy belongs to everyone, to every human being on this planet. It is what drives us, when all seems bleak; it is what urges us to shoot for the moon, and end up at the stars. And, perhaps fittingly, in a language known to very few, the word “elara” means “hope”.

I keep with me one symbol that has stayed unchanged for the last four years. The Project Elara logo is a blue and green circle, the two colors of our beautiful planet — the only planet Earth in the entire Universe.