Here’s a fun game: Wherever you are right now, take a look around and count the number of man-made objects that you could have created yourself. I’m looking at the area around my desk and feeling like quite a caveman. Would I have even the slightest idea how my iMac works, let alone how it’s made? No. And that’s probably to be expected, but when you get right down to it, I wouldn’t even know how to make the Post-It note stuck to the front of said iMac. If someone put me in front of a tree, put a gun to my head, and demanded that I explain how to make that tree into a Post-It note, I’d have to say “First, you cut down the tree, then you—woahhhhhh haaaa!” and I’d spin around and kick the gun out of his hand and rabbit-punch his solar plexus, then grab the gun and say “What’s up now? What’s up now?” Then I’d tie him to the tree and put a Post-It note on him that said “Never underestimate a Navy SEAL.” But I still wouldn’t know how to make paper.
    I got thinking about my ignorance of the physical world the other day when I read about New Hampshire crazy inventor-guy Dean Kamen’s new work on the Stirling engine. The Stirling engine, as near as I can tell, is like the Flux Capacitor from Back to the Future II (that’s the one that ran on garbage instead of the previous model’s plutonium or clocktower lightning-derived energy sources). If Kamen gets this thing to work, not only will he have a swell motor for his dorky scooters, but he’ll also make the power grid obsolete, drastically cut our dependence on foreign oil and make enough money to buy himself a second island, such as Australia. Whereas I will continue to ponder with furrowed brow questions like why “underpants” is a funny word but “underwear” is not.
    I decided to do my part for humanity by sitting down and thinking up some good inventions. The first thing I came up with was caffeinated orange juice, which seemed like such a good idea that someone must have thought of it already. I looked on the Internet and there have indeed been a few caffeinated orange juices. They all flopped. Fine, everyone, go drink your coffee and praise Dean Kamen for his portable kidney dialysis machines and robotic wheelchairs and I’ll just go stand in the Dumb Inventor Corner.
    OK, I’m over it. Inventors need to be resilient. My next idea is a self-propelled spare tire. Whenever I start telling people about it, and their response is inevitably “What?” I guess not everyone can envision a world where if your car broke down on the interstate you’d just bolt on a self-propelled spare tire to get you to the next exit. That’s fine. People made fun of Ben Franklin when he said he wanted to electrocute them, and look at Texas now.
    Another product I thought of is not so much an invention as a marketing angle: extreme toothpaste. Everyone wants to be adventurous, with their sport utility vehicles and their kayaking off waterfalls and such, and why should those people use a tame toothpaste? Do you think someone who’s summitted K2 on RollerBlades and parachuted into an erupting volcano uses Mentadent? Please. This market segment demands new Disaster Toothpaste. Go ahead, have a brush with Disaster.
    While Disaster will make me loads of money, it won’t be as important as my last idea, which involves saving the planet from utter ruin. As you may have heard, greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels have caused global warming, which is melting the icecaps, and pretty soon realtors are going to be hawking waterfront condos in Denver. Meanwhile, we’re sucking millions of barrels of oil out of the ground every day. Here’s my plan: If an offshore rig can pump oil out of the seabed, then why can’t you throw that sucker into reverse and pump the melted icecap water back into the well once the oil’s gone? Maybe you wouldn’t even have to pump it. Maybe you could just cut a big hole in the bottom of the Arctic Sea and put a drain over it, and check it once in a while to make sure there are no whales clogging it or anything. Oil out, water in, disaster averted.
    But I think I’m still going to patent my floating beach house, just in case. *