Somewhere in the vast and dusty recesses of the fabulous Bennion Archives, I’ve got a cache of old Science Digest magazines from the early ’80s. I subscribed for a time in middle school, or, more accurately, my parents subscribed me, first as a birthday gift, I believe, and then for a few more years because I was actually reading the things and — apparently — getting something from them. To be honest, what I was mostly getting was the foundation for a lot of future disappointment when all the crazy-cool stuff promised by the speculative articles failed to materialize. No high-speed underground maglev trains whisking us from LA to New York in an hour. No gigantic cargo blimps full of consumer goods gliding serenely through the skies on silent electric motors. No manned missions to the moons of Jupiter. You get the idea. The standard “where’s my jetpack?” sort of thing.

But not all of the magazine’s predictions turned out to be bull, and every so often deja vu will strike like a zap of static electricity as it occurs to me that I first read about some aspect of modern life years and years ago in the pages of SD. Cell phones and prepaid phone cards come to mind, as well as DNA sequencing and growing replacement body parts in laboratories. These ideas were only two steps removed from science fiction 25 years ago, but they’re now commonplace, or soon to become so in the case of lab-grown organs. The really big ideas, though, the ones requiring some kind of monumental engineering project… those were all just poppycock, right?

Well, maybe not. I read this morning that a California company called the Solaren Corporation wants to orbit giant solar-power collectors and beam the energy back to Earth in the form of radio waves. I immediately recognized the proposal as yet another concept I first learned of while sitting crosslegged on the floor of my old treehouse in the heat of a far-off summer day, listening to the old car radio my dad rigged up to run on AC and thumbing through the pages of the latest Science Digest. I remember thinking back then that it was a cool idea, and I still like the sound of it. No doubt it would be an immensely expensive and complex undertaking, and it probably won’t work for all sorts of reasons, but the basic idea itself is so elegant, so… obvious. It’s something from the happier Buck Rogers future I always thought I would be living in, instead of the considerably less ambitious and less hopeful future we actually got, and I hope this Solaren company actually attempts it.

Who knows, if this orbital power station thing works, maybe I’ll still get my maglev train someday as well…