Innovation doesn’t always mean “hi-tech”

CNN: Inventor turns cardboard boxes into eco-friendly oven

Inventor Jon Bohmer won the FT Climate Change Challenge with a solar oven made from cardboard, foil, and an acrylic cover. It only costs $5 and can boil water without flame or electricity.

“A lot of scientists are working on ways to send people to Mars. I was looking for something a little more grassroots, a little simpler,” Bohmer said Thursday.

Bohmer, a Norwegian-born entrepreneur based in Kenya, said he also had been looking at solutions “way too complex, for way too long.”

“This took me about a weekend, and it worked on the first try,” Bohmer said. “It’s mind-boggling how simple it is.”

I would say that it’s exactly this kind of thinking that we need to get to Mars and stay. After all, completing the mission while minimizing power and resource consumption is the name of the game. The simplest solution sometimes is the best.

We might even be able to use a scaled-up version of Bohmer’s solar oven on the Moon. An oven that requires neither power nor fuel would be mighty useful there. I’m not sure if there is enough light on Mars to be work, but that’s worth examining, too.

So, what other problems can we solve while minimizing our footprint?