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You don't. Not unless you try anyway.

The first thing you'll feel is emptiness.

Much like switching on a recorder and trying to find the words to say.

Or the moment people freeze when they are told the camera is rolling.

Begin by writing all the jumbled thoughts and expressions that spring to mind. Expect a mess.

Forget about it for a few hours. Come back later and see if there are parts which make sense.

If it doesn't, give it another shot. Keep going. There is no other way. Unless those words appear on the page, they'll remain trapped in your mind.

That's the strange thing about writing. It doesn't get easier but you learn to persist.

Before it can become extraordinary, it must go from being terrible to being ordinary.

There are some who have the gift.

Even then, unless they've chipped away, struggled and overcome frustrations that last for years, it doesn't get better.

Words are your masters to begin with and you cannot command them unless you earn their grudging respect.

There's a constant tug of war going on - and you won't win all the time.

But when you get it right, you'll know.

There are no fuel stations in space

We've seen the soul-stirring shots of spacecraft lifting off from launch pads.

That's fine to get beyond the earth's atmosphere.

But how would they keep going?

That's the problem space scientists solved in the 1950s

And it was also the beginning of solar power finding the ideal conditions for growth.

There were huge arguments between scientists who wanted to rely on chemical batteries.

Dr. Hanz Zeigler showed that silicon solar panels would be the best solution

At the time, in the 50s, solar power was unbelievably expensive

$300 per watt.

There was no application on earth that could have justified the cost.

In space, however, it was the best way to ensure long galactic voyages.

Use the sun to generate power - the ultimate refueling station.

In sixty years, the cost of generating solar power has dropped dramatically.

It's now the cheapest source of electricity on earth.

Comparable to computing power increasing exponentially while the price plunges every year.

Where will you see a similar transformation?

In agriculture. The second largest exporter of food in the world is the Netherlands.

And the food grows in skyscrapers, not on land. In a sustainable environment.

Change happens slowly, then suddenly.

What came first, reading or writing?

It's like the eternal chicken and egg question.

Unresolved and riddled with contradictions.

Until we learned to write, there would be no readers.

And unless there were readers, why would anyone write?

An article in the Smithsonian makes a confusing point.

That the art of writing was not invented by the educated 

The alphabet, apparently, sprang from hieroglyphs, the pictorial depictions of language which were the precursor to a written language.

The miners, immigrant labour brought in to build the temples of Egypt, were not well-versed or didn't have the ability to understand the hieroglyphs.

So they created their own simpler forms and scrawled them on miniature versions of the Sphinx to offer their own prayers to the Gods.

Discovered thousands of years later, they point to the origins of language from these simple forms that came to represent sounds and words.

The question is this.

At the time, would literacy have meant anything at all?

If reading and writing was largely unknown, so was the concept of schools. At least that is the assumption.

So, to say that writing was created by the uneducated is a bit like saying - 'before we were alive, we didn't exist'

Incomprehensible, isn't it?

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