Solar Dollars
Jonathon Keats
Project Overview:
Money originated with the sun. Long before the development of banking, and even before the evolution of the human species, photosynthetic organisms worked out systems to amass, save, and spend solar energy. For many plants, energy earned by collecting sunlight gets banked as sugars, which may be invested in personal growth or spent onsex.
Our economic systems, which emerged with agriculture, merely emulate what we've observed in nature. However, we don't do it as well as the average rhododendron. We expend an enormous amount of energy working for money that has almost no energy value.2
Humans can do much better by learning from the origin of money. We can reengineer currency not only to store energy more efficiently, but also to continuously generate new energy from sunlight.
The concept is simple: Embedded with flexible solar cells, solar dollars and pounds will become more valuable just by lying around. Thin-film photovoltaic materials will charge a paper-based supercapacitor, which will work as a rechargeable battery. Each note will also include a self-resonant coil to allow for wireless energy transfer from the supercapacitor to household appliances or the grid. Plus, the money will feature a matrix of light-emitting quantum dots to display current value, indicated in watts.
Solar Dollars Presentation
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