Had yet another experience today where someone else — several steps ahead of me — fleshed out a concept I’d fully intended to accelerate my energy and effort toward. While I’m absolutely delighted that the concept might become a reality (and will undoubtedly participate), it has also made me, again, stop and think about performing even MORE due diligence on my ideas and checking the collective unconscious (and consciousness!) more closely before moving forward.

Sigmund Freud postulated a collective unconscious. In the Wikipedia article referenced above, “The collective unconscious refers to that part of a person’s unconscious which is common to all human beings. It contains archetypes, which are forms or symbols that are manifested by all people in all cultures. They are said to exist prior to experience, and are in this sense instinctual.” So you can be assured that there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of others that see the same things you see. The acceleration and exponential increase in ideas proliferating is staggering as more and more of us connect via the internet.

The internet, in my view, is most importantly enabling a collective consciousness. Over-n-over again I’m finding like minded individuals that are seeing the same things I’m seeing or sensing changes and shifts in economics, spirituality, and raised levels of consciousness. I gravitate to these people and somehow we’ve been finding one another. What I’m most interested in is finding ways to collectively harness and focus our respective energy, achieve and accomplish much, while each of us continues to do what we need to in order to economically survive and thrive.

What’s most interesting (from a 40,000 foot perspective)…

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Now that global warming and the simultaneous spike in the cost of gasoline have finally slapped people in the face and gotten their attention, there seems to be a sudden interest in any-and-all methods to significantly reduce both carbon emissions and energy use.

This is a good thing but most don’t realize yet that there isn’t a magic bullet and we need to attack global warming and energy consumption on several fronts: a little hybrid engine and ethanol use here; a smidgen of wind power generation there; incandescent lightbulb replacement up front and pretty soon we’ve made a big dent in both consumption and emissions.

I’ve been watching one area pretty closely: LED and other lighting technology. Quite some time ago my bride and I changed all of the incandescent bulbs in our house with compact fluorescents which — while still a disposable issue since they contain trace amounts of mercury — only use about 25% of the energy it takes to power that 139 year old invention of Thomas Edison: the incandescent light bulb.

LED’s have come a long way and are found in flashlights, as automotive and signage illumination, and soon residential lighting. Worldwide about 20% of energy consumption is for lighting and LED’s could cut that in half. “We’re on the brink of a new lighting revolution,” says Jerry Simmons, head of the solid-state lighting programme at America’s Sandia National Laboratory, quoted in this article (in fact one of the best I’ve read yet) in The Economist.

How’s THIS for a comparison?:

LEDs have become popular because they have numerous advantages over conventional light bulbs. For one thing, they last much longer: they can endure up to a decade of non-stop use compared with a few months or less for incandescent bulbs. They also take up much less space (a typical LED is about the size of the rubber on the end of a pencil), are shock resistant and, perhaps most important of all, are extremely energy-efficient.

An incandescent bulb, made of a wire filament encased in glass, emits only 5% of the energy it consumes as light; the rest is wasted as heat. Fluorescent lights, which consist of tubes filled with mercury vapour, are roughly four times more efficient. LEDs, however, contain no mercury and already rival fluorescents in efficiency. Upfront costs make them too expensive for most general lighting applications, but experts expect that to change over the next five years as prices come down and efficiencies go up.

I’ve been on the hunt for some time for LED’s that output the same relative lumens (a measurement of light output) of an incandescent lightbulb (a typical 60 watt bulb outputs 800 lumens). I’ve seen many clusters-of-LED’s bulbs that put out more than that, but they’re in spot bulbs that point a narrow beam of light. The ambient lighting output of a typical incandescent or compact flourescent bulb isn’t available for sale…yet…but I’m keeping an eye peeled!

I should note that my other eye is scanning for someone in government — or interested in governing and being elected to office — to take a leadership energy and have a national energy policy that clearly articulates specific actions each of us can take to reduce our energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Dr. Simmons had this to say about incandescent bulbs — which are, in actuality, vacuum tubes like those in the first computers and televisions — at the end of the article, “Ultimately, incandescent light bulbs will end up in a museum, just like vacuum tubes did for electronics.”

Growing up in Minnesota, I couldn’t help but be fully aware of this emerging dominant player in the computer business: Control Data Corporation (CDC). Led by visionary CEO William Norris, it was arguably one of the first technology corporations to be socially conscious with an eye (and investment) toward empowerment and the curing of many social ills.

Examining the demise of CDC as a force in the computer industry seemed to point to one thing: Norris took his eye off the ball since it was looking everywhere but the business. The link to the Wikipedia article about Norris above says it best, “They (the Board who were pushing for Norris’ removal as CEO in the 1980′s) were particularly harsh in blaming his social programs for their problems, although any connection is difficult, if not impossible, to find.“

That said, articles about him upon his death this past August focused on his accomplishments and atypical and material positive impact he made in the world (good biography here). However, I know dozens and dozens of people that had illustrious careers at CDC and talk about the lack of focus again-n-again as the key reason the company perished. Yes this is anecdotal (though I’ve heard too many stories to ignore), but for people that worked for CDC for many years this was key in their minds. CDC spawned numerous social programs, spun out many companies (including one I worked for, Authorware, which became part of Macromedia and now Adobe) and did much good. They could’ve done much more had CDC survived.

Is Google leadership taking their eye off the ball like CDC’s Bill Norris did?

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