This it what it looks like:

Top view:

Front view:

Back view:

Side view:

Perspective:

 

It’s 300 feet wide, 560 feet long, and 24 feet high at the highest, and it covers a horizontal area of 2 acres (8000 m²).

This is kind of a sketchy, dull, grey draft. In reality, the roof will be almost completely covered with solar panels. Along the front and the sides you could put rows of panoramic windows. And the tail can be painted in any color (e.g. red, if you want).

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Wouldn’t it be just great, Richard Branson, if you could replace the airplanes of your Virgin-fleet with some other type of vessel which can please your customers accordingly (or better), and which does not pollute? It’s technically feasible. I'm going to explain and show what it technically is about. But first, let’s look at it from a customer's point of view.

• This new type of transport vessel can take people (or cargo) from Britain to Brazil in 60 hours (2½ days), or from Bergen to Boston in 48 hours (2 days).
   
• Being on board feels like being on land. The vessel moves so steady that the passengers are undisturbed: They will experience no noticable accelerations or g-forces, no equivalents to air-sickness or sea-sickness, and no unpleasant changes in air pressure.
   
• While on board, passengers have plenty of room to romp on. This room can be divided, designed, and furnished to give the passengers just the kind of experience that you want them to have. Richard, you are so good at this, and there’s probably nothing that I can teach you in this respect. But just to give you an idea of the possibilities, let me mention some examples: The passenger space inside the craft can be built like a spa hotel, a city shopping mall, a sports hall or an office and conference facility. Apart from that, the passengers will of course have their own cabin, to where they can retreat to relax and rest.
  
  Does this appear to be like a cruise ship, do you think, Richard? That’s a funny coincidence. Just as I'm writing this blog, I get the news that you have announced to «shake things up» in the cruise industry, by starting your own cruise liner business, with your first cruise ship based in Miami, Florida. Well, this new concept of travel that I’m talking about, has the potential to disrupt both the airline business and the cruise business. So, you should be interested. (It’s not a cruise ship. As I stated in the first bullet point, it moves way faster than that. And it doesn’t pollute.)
   
• Passengers can bring their car, caravan or mobile home with them, just like on a ferry.
   
• All baggage is treated as hand-baggage. No checking in baggage prior to travel required.
   
• The craft is far less vulnerable to terrorist attacks and sabotage than an airplane. The vessel can not be used as a terrorist tool to attack external targets, like an airplane. The level of security required, is considered to be the same as in a city center or a public sports arena. Extensive security examinations (as currently, at airports) before boarding are therefore not required to the same extent.
   

So: From a customer’s point of view, the main difference with this concept, compared with an airline, is that the voyages can be so very much more comfortable, relaxing, eventful and pleasant. Though the time it takes to travel, is about twice or three times the time span of an equally long flight, it can be made quality time. And I trust that you, Mr. Richard Branson, can make it premium quality time to your customers.

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Yes, my claim is a bold one, Mr. Branson. Not as bold as your Virgin Earth Challenge, but nevertheless bold. I claim that I have conceived a plausible idea of how to construct a long-distance mass transportation craft capable of moving people and goods across the globe in a comfortable and efficient way, consuming less energy per mile per person or ton of cargo than today’s means of transport (including cargo ships), only slightly more time consuming than travelling by airplane.

This craft can run on solar energy, making it a zero-emission vehicle. I'm not talking about a PV-powered airplane, like the Solar Impulse. My suggestion is based on a different approach and is more of a disruptive innovation than that. But before I begin to explain the technical aspects, let’s consider the state of the art modern high speed long-distance means of transport on Earth (namely airplanes) and their advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages of travelling by airplane include:

1. For long journeys, it is the fastest way to get to a destination.
2. It requires minimal infrastructure (i.e. compared to the length of the journey): only an airport at the location of departure, and one at the destination. 

Disadvantages of travelling by airplane include:

1. In order to be economical, it requires a crowd of people to be crammed into a small, uncomfortable space.
    
2. Flights happen in the air. If the technical devices which keep the plane in the air (the wings, control systems or engines) fail, passengers will most likely die, and during the dramatic final minutes of their lives, they will know it.
    
3. Those of us who have a fear of flying, will spend more or less the entire flight, with their minds and thoughts focused on the topic explained in #2.
    
4. The infrastructures needed, the airports, are only to be found in a relatively limited number of locations. These locations often happen to be far away from the actual places of departure and destination. So for a journey from A to B, two extra journeys are needed: One from A to the departure airport, and one from the destination airport to B. Those two extra journeys and the transition between them and the journey in the air, tend to be very time-consuming, and for some people: stressful.
    
5. While the hours pass and you sit there, squeezed between your fellow passengers on your small seat, something insidiously harmful happens which you don’t sense, and which the flight attendants did not warn you about, during the pre-flight safety demonstration: Harmful radiation from the sun, unimpeded by air layers closer to the ground, penetrate the thin hull of the airplane, your skin and deep into your flesh, where it rages with the cells and their DNA. The gametes are particularly vulnerable. Frequent flights, especially long-distance flights at high altitudes, inhibit fertility, entail greater risk of birth defects for your future offsprings and increase your chance of getting cancer.
    
6. Flights pollute — a lot.

My idea removes all the above mentioned drawbacks of flights. It requires far less port infrastructure than airplanes. (It’s not a ship either.) It is a fairly quick way of getting from A to B. (The speed is superiorly higher than for road transport.) Although the craft does not move quite as fast as an airplane, it does so in a gentle manner. The passengers have plenty of space to roam and relax on. Thus, the concept can compete for customers, because the journey can be arranged to be so much more of a pleasant and eventful experience for the passengers.

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The solution is no pollution. 

Stop polluting is the way to avoid the looming climate catastrophe on planet Earth. It’s not in your power to do that on behalf of humanity, Mr. Richard Charles Nicholas Branson. You’re after all just one very tiny billionaire (i.e. compared to the real size of the earth).

But it is within your reach to stop polluting, yourself, or more precisely: to make your business operations stop polluting. So, now that I've reduced the Virgin Earth Challenge to its essentials, you see that it becomes a challenge to you, Branson. It’s still a bold challenge, but it’s yours: How can you transform your Virgin travel empire into one that does not contribute to killing the planet.

I’m not suggesting that you shut down your business. That’s not what you want. And it probably won’t make any difference, because someone else would just step in and fill that empty gap in the market. Pollution would persist, only that someone else, not you, would profit from it.

The business idea that has made your Virgin travel empire so successful, has been to provide pleasant long-distance travels to people while entertaining them during their journeys. That is not a bad business idea. Not at all. And it’s certainly not an evil business idea. It is not this brilliant customer care concept of yours that litters the atmosphere. The problem is all about the vehicles you have adopted for those transports, the fossil fuel powered tubes with wings (called airplanes).

So, the challenge to you, Richard Branson, is to replace those heavily polluting winged human transport tubes with some other kind of long-distance means of transport that can benefit the customers equally (or better), and which don't pollute.

And that, dear sir, is technically far less challenging than demonstrating a scalable and sustainable way of permanently removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, as your original Virgin Earth Challenge suggests.

I, that is we: me and my brain, believe we are on to something here, that might just do.

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The way I see it, there are (at best) three principal ways to stop increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere:

1. Pollution as usual (while waiting for a scientific miracle to come and rescue us all): We can continue to use the atmosphere as an open sewer for carbon dioxide, and then hoping that someone will invent a carbon-sucking machine to remove that polution from the atmosphere. Glory to you, Richard, for that you have tried to encourage this solution, through your Virgin Earth Challenge. But, it has not led to much yet, has it? For humanity, to comfort ourselves in hoping for such a breakthrough any soon  — with or without the encouraging power from the announcement of a billionaire's monetary prize — detached from what scientists currently know and recommend, meanwhile polluting as usual, is not a new excercise. We shall perhaps not dismiss this bet entirely. But as we are running out of time to save the planet from climate disaster, it becomes more and more clear that it is an hazardous one.
    
2. CCS: Geo scale carbon capture and storage, if achievable, could be a solution to the climate crisis, which would allow Big Oil and king Coal to go on with their business and live in peace and harmony with Mother Earth. Problem is: CCS is both expensive, energy-guzzling and technically difficult and risky. For airplanes, like those with red-painted engines and red tails with the Virgin-logo on it (just to mention an example), CCS indeed doesn’t seem like a viable option at all. (How would you capture the carbon emitted from the jet-engines, and where would you store it, when flying in the skies?)
    
3. Stop polluting: The simplest solution to the climate crisis, would be to not pollute in the first place. Of course, this will put the fossil exctractive industry of the world out of business.

Obviously, going for option #3 is the right and sensible thing to do. Bad news? Yes, for the fossil fuel extractivists. But ... It won't necessarily mean that you, Mr. Richard Branson, need to close down your Virgin travel empire.

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Dear sir Richard Branson!

Your Virgin Earth Challenge (http://www.virginearth.com/) is a bold one: A reward of $25 million to whoever can demonstrate a commercially viable way of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

Mother Earth pictured with Richard Branson (left) and Al Gore (right)

The answer to such a bold challenge, is a bold one too.

Me and my brain, we think we can contribute. So here we go: Our suggestion to answering your very big question «How to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere?» is, most humbly, that the question itself may be wrong, and that the most viable (and perhaps commercial) way to meet the challenge, is to slightly alter the question first. Let’s be pragmatic and start by making it a bit less ambitious on behalf of the climate (I'm sorry. But less ambitious, more realistic is better than no ambitions and no realism at all), and far more challenging for the fossil fuel dependent corporations of the world (Including yours — no offence!):

How can we ensure that the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will not increase?

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