Motivational Competitions

It causes siblings to try to best their brothers and sisters, it causes classes and schools to forget social heirarchy for a bit and come together to defeat their rival teams, and it was the catalyst that spurred on many brilliant minds and philanthropists to make privatized space travel a reality.

X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis kicked off the PopTech conference here with a lofty goal on Thursday: "Our mission is to bring about radical breakthroughs," he said in his opening-day address.

But I wonder if the public's imagination can be captivated by the final frontier on Earth as it was by Burt Rutan's Spaceship 1's triumph. Space travel and colonization are fascinating, but there is so much that is yet to be discovered on Earth that we could be focusing on in the mean time. Alternative energy sources, undiscovered life forms, and how the many different systems of the Earth work together are just some of the stuff we could better understand if there was more interest, funding, and research put into the marine sciences.

The article mentions the discovery of a deep-sea microbe that eats methane and farts out elemental hydrogen. Now, if only we could capture cow burps, have the bacteria convert them, and use the hydrogen to power our cars, we could reduce bovine greenhouse gas emissions and tap into a previously unimagined source of energy! Dude, that prize is so mine!