Though anything you do to help may be insignificant, it is still very important that you do it -- (from a quote by Ghandi).

You Are Important. I look up in the sky at night, I see the twinkling of little stars. When compared to those stars, life for us seems short, like the brief flash of the shooting star against the dark night sky. Though life is short, we nevertheless leave our footprints in the universe. Passively, we perpetuate, keeping the human species from extinction, and continuing the traditions and cultures of our ancestors. Actively, we can add color to our culture by being an artist, novelist, philosopher ... or we can, like an Einstein or a Galileo, extend our knowledge of the physical world. Like it or not, those footprints we leave behind could be tiny or as big as the legendary "bigfoot pizza." Everyone of us is definitely doing something that effects the universe, whether it is contributing toward a new future for humanity or the illumination the face of a planet with the flash of nuclear destruction. -- A. To.

NSPRI Synthesis. You have probably heard the joke about energy these days -- "they don't make it anymore." It is a bad joke but illustrates the point pretty well -- we have to make the most of what we have. That is in part, what NSPRI is about. The facts regarding the present condition of world energy resources and the consequences of such will be well-documented in future issues of this newsletter. For the present, let it be sufficient to say that it is in our interest to explore alternative sources for the sake of our future standard of living -- NOW!

The potential of solar power has been examined from different angles in the past, but NSPRI is taking another approach by creating the framework for NSPRI volunteers to engage in short term research projects that will directly explore the use of solar energy, along with research into other indirectly-related areas. The idea is that connections can be made between some of these ideas, with the resulting syntheses to make otherwise unworkable ideas practicable. To borrow a bit from James Burke and his series "Connections," when one looks at our history, many of the developments that helped bring about the world as we know it were not simple inventions that one person or a small group of people invented out of nothing. More often, somebody took several ideas that happened to be lying around, putting them together in a different way and perhaps adding another piece or so, and coming up with a new piece of equipment, process, or other idea. As it stands now, research is being done in a number of different places and published in even more. There does not exist, to my knowledge, any organization for investigating these results as yet to see how they interrelate. One of the goals of NSPRI is to perhaps fill this gap. It isn't entirely unlikely that we may find out that there are other, better methods to meet our needs, or perhaps we will need a combination of different methods. But until we investigate the possibilities, particularly the less obvious ones, we won't know. -- Peter Spangler.

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