Transcriber: Amir Bagheri Reviewer: Esra Çakmak
Good day, everyone.
I’m Rohit Sajan pursuing UG Mechatronics.
I would like to begin my talk with a small question.
What do you think is the most costly stuff in the universe?
Most of the answers would be like gold, diamond or whatever
the individual thinks that it is important to him or her.
In the same way, in my point of view,
energy is the most costly stuff in the universe.
The reason why I choose energy is
because every creature in this world goes about its daily activities
just to find some energy, which is nothing but food.
But men distinguished himself from all other creatures,
and went one step forward in search of energy,
and wherever he extended his vision towards energy,
it led to a gradual but massive destruction.
To make this evident,
we can consider the previously mentioned food as an example.
Men’s agricultural habits led to
the emission of greenhouse gases like methane into the environment.
It also emits CO2 whenever the agricultural wastes are burned.
And in search of new agricultural lands,
we are destroying our precious forests if we consider
the world's major CO2 emitters,
which are nothing but the power plants and vehicles.
Their main purpose is to generate energy.
So if we can find a source that is renewable, efficient
and doesn't emit any greenhouse gas into the environment,
then most of our problems and climatic changes will be easily solved.
Although there are some cleaner sources already available,
they all have certain drawbacks.
For example, the wind energy power plant requires wind flow with certain velocity,
and solar power plants require daily maintenance of solar panels.
They both require a lot of initial investment
since a lot of materials like silicon
and steel are required to install solar panels and windmills, respectively.
They also take up a lot of area.
To be precise, the world’s largest thermal power plant,
which is the Vindhyachal power plant,
consumes around 33 acres of land to produce 5.8 gigawatts of power.
Whereas the world’s largest solar power plant, which is the Bhadla Solar Park,
produces around two point two five gigawatts of power but takes up
a ginormous fourteen thousand acres of land.
So what could be the best possible solution to this problem?
It is to explore the unexplored.
One such unexplored source of energy inspired me a lot,
and I believe that it has the potential to meet all our energy needs
without causing any harm to the environment.
In 1929, a famous researcher named Edwin Hubble carried out research and measured
the redshifts caused by distant galaxies,
as well as measured the distance between us and that particular galaxy
based on its luminous intensity.
While he was doing so,
he found that the extent of redshift was increasing linearly with their distance.
This led him to conclude that the universe is expanding
at a constant rate.
This was believed to be true until 1998,
after which two research teams,
namely the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High Z Supernova Search Team,
carried out research in 1998 and 1999, respectively.
They plan to observe a type large supernovae,
find its redshift and distance to determine how far
the universe has expanded since the supernova had happened.
The result was astounding.
The gap between us and that supernovae was farther than it should have been.
Further investigations help them to conclude that Hubble's theory was true
until the universe age was five to six million years old.
After that, some sort of energy came into existence and held the galaxies
and stars to overcome the gravitational force of attraction
and expand at a much faster rate.
So now, instead of expanding at a constant rate,
the universe is accelerating by that energy.
Since that energy didn't absorb, emit or reflect light,
they named it dark energy.
It is also observed that dark energy occupies sixty eight percentage
of the universe energy density.
The rest 27 percentage is occupied by dark matter and just five percentage by
the baryonic matter, which is a matter which we can optically observe.
So how can this dark energy could help us solve our environmental problems?
But before it could help us make wonders, we should overcome a small obstacle.
We thought green technologies.
It is very hard to detect the presence of this energy,
and hence we know very much little about this dark energy.
Since its discovery, we have just made few assumptions
that could best define dark energy.
One, it might be some sort of energy fluid that fills out
the entire universe.
Number two, it might be the cosmological constant mentioned by Einstein
in one of his equations that defines the static universe theory.
Three, there might be some error in Einstein’s law of gravitations,
which could be corrected by including
a field of force that represents this dark energy.
Four, it might be the energy created by virtual particles,
which are the particles that appear and disappear in space constantly.
Apart from these assumptions, we never knew much about the dark energy.
It can also be considered as an infinite source of energy,
since it occupies evenly the entire universe.
Without stopping here,
dark energy could help us to reach a new age of spaceflight,
and the research to find this dark energy is booming
among the cosmological research societies.
So if scientists in near future can identify what dark energy exactly is
and construct an equation that could best define dark energy,
as well as find a device that could harness energy from the source,
then we will be able to meet all our energy needs without causing
a single scratch to the environment.
In the end, I would like to conclude by extending
the responsibility of finding this dark energy
to the cosmological research societies,
and I wish that I could also contribute to it if I had
the option opportunity in future.