3 days Ago By Brandon Vigliarolo
obituary American flags throughout the United States are flying at half-mast to honor the life of Jimmy Carter, the 39th and longest-lived US president, who died Sunday, December 29, at the age of 100. Conflicts with Congress and international politics may have set Carter back, but he still managed to change the face of space and environmental technology. Carter famously had 32 solar panels installed on the roof of the White House, which were used to heat water.
Despite his prediction that the panels would still be atop the roof of the Presidential residence "supplying cheap, efficient energy" in the year 2000, successor Ronald Reagan had them torn off while redoing the roof in 1986. Carter had the last laugh there, though: President George W. Bush brought solar back, and Barack Obama added modern panels during his administration that are still in service.
Carter was also a life-long environmentalist, with his dream of a green future leading to the establishment of the Department of Energy as part of his mission to expand alternatives to fossil fuels. That same DoE now leads the charge on developing fusion technology that might represent the future of energy generation - if it can be scaled up , of course. Carter was also responsible for the creation of the superfund program that gave the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to designate heavily contaminated sites and earmark cash for their cleanup.
The former president made his mark in the space too, with noteworthy budget proposals giving NASA the cash needed to get the Space Shuttle program back on schedule after years of lagging development. Perhaps more impressive, Carter's words will be forever preserved on the golden records of the Voyager Spacecraft that are traversing interstellar space. "We cast this message into the cosmos," Carter's writing tells any extraterrestrials fortunate enough to bump into Voyagers 1 or 2 in the distant future.
"This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings." Beyond the more concrete changes that Carter contributed to the American technological landscape, the Consumer Technology Association also credited him laying the groundwork for innovations like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth through regulatory reforms. "[President Carter's] 1978 Executive Order set the precedent for directing federal agencies to periodically review their existing regulations and decide if they should be kept, changed, or done away with," CTA CEO Gary Shapiro said in a statement on Carter's death.
"The direct results of his 1978 Executive Order include innovations like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other 'permissionless access' products that now generate more than $95 billion a year in incremental sales value." Carter also pushed for regulatory reforms in the telecommunications industry, which have been credited with supporting the development of cellular technology and increasing options for American consumers. But perhaps the most interesting technological tidbit about Carter's presidency, or his campaign for the White House, to be more precise, was his embrace of the computer and email way back in 1976 - well before it was a household concept.
Carter reportedly used email "several times a day," according to one source, while his campaign aircraft, nicknamed "Peanut One" in reference to the former president's time as a peanut farmer, was the first such vehicle to be outfitted with a computer. That machine, Washington Post reporter David Broder wrote during the campaign, was "hooked in by elaborate circuitry to the schedule, media and organization staff in [Carter's] Atlanta headquarters" as well as to his running mate's aircraft, a New York Times information retrieval service and polling data. "But impressive as it is, the computer in the back takes second place to that housed up front, inside the head of Jimmy Carter," Broder wrote, calling the late president "the closest thing to a computer-driven candidate this technical age has yet produced.
" We've come a long way from the halcyon era of the late 1970s when email and an aircraft-mounted mainframe were state-of-the-art. We've also come a long way from the days when the US president was a science-loving, renewable energy-promoting former nuclear engineer , but that's a matter for another time. Make no mistake, Carter's policies continue to have an effect on the modern world.
Thanks to his contributions to the Voyager spacecraft, his words may also outlive us all and have visitors from other planets making a pit stop in rural Georgia before asking to be taken to whoever is in charge when they arrive. ®.
