Photonic solutions for solar bioenergy

我们正面临能源匮乏的危险。化石燃料只能再维持几十年，而核电站的建设速度也不足以满足预计的短缺。如果没有替代能源，油价的上涨将被勉强接受，直到石油枯竭。富有的石油/天然气公司将控制一个能源匮乏的世界，在这个世界里，我们的后代将遭受全球变暖的长期影响，包括干旱、饥荒、疾病和洪水——许多主要沿海城市和亚洲大部分地区的损失。为了避免这种情况，我们必须紧急关注可再生能源，如太阳能，它是如此丰富，超过我们的需求一万倍。因此，更好的收集、储存和使用方法可能会产生很大的影响。所有生物都依赖阳光。我们是由光合生物开始的食物链的一部分。即使是我们赖以为生的石油，也是在过去的6000万年里慢慢地利用阳光制造出来的，但大多数容易开采的石油在短短100年里就燃烧殆尽，释放出大量的二氧化碳。种植植物作为食物可以有效地收获太阳能，科学家们最近找到了种植作物和微生物作为燃料的方法。但是生物燃料?遇到了严重的问题；没有足够的土地来同时生产食物和燃料，因为只有大约0.1%的阳光能量最终用于生产生物燃料或食物。新的光子材料使我们有机会？并改变其成分，使其对将其转化为食物或燃料的生物更有用。通过将物理学家制造的新型光子材料与生物学家开发的生物燃料技术相结合，我们可以减少对土地的需求，这样我们所有的能源和食物需求都可以通过阳光来满足。

We are at risk of energy poverty. Fossil fuels will last only a few more decades and nuclear power stations cannot be built quickly enough to meet the predicted shortfall. Without alternative energy, rising prices will be grudgingly accepted until the oil is exhausted. Wealthy oil/gas companies will control an energy-starved world in which our descendants suffer the long-term effects of global warming, including drought, famine, disease and flood-loss of many major coastal cities and large parts of Asia. To avoid this we must focus urgently on renewable energy like sunlight, which is so abundant that it exceeds our requirements 10,000 times. Therefore, better ways of collecting, storing and using it could make a big difference. All living things rely on sunlight. We are part of a food chain that starts with photosynthetic organisms. Even the oil that we rely on for energy was slowly made using sunlight over the last 60 million years, but most of the oil that can be reached easily has been burnt in just 100 years with massive CO2 release. Growing plants for food effectively harvests solar energy and scientists have recently found ways to cultivate crops and microbes for fuels. But ?biofuels? have hit a serious problem; there is not enough land to produce both food and fuel because only about 0.1% of the energy in sunlight ends up in the biofuel or the food. New photonic materials give us the chance to ?process? sunlight and change its composition, so that it becomes more useful to the organisms that convert it to food or fuels. By combining new photonic materials made by physicists with the biofuel technologies developed by biologists, we could shrink the land requirement so that all our energy and food needs can be met by sunlight.