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The new year is upon us, and this makes us think about what lies ahead. Here are some thoughts on what I'd like to see in our future. I don't expect these things to come to fruition in 2006, but we could at least start out on the path that leads to a brighter tomorrow.

First, we should start a program to build solar power satellites. This would be a mammoth undertaking: solar power satellites would be miles across. The effort would require a major investment and a long-time commitment.

Tapping sunlight in space to deliver gigawatts of clean, uninterrupted electrical power to Earth will not only help to end the U.S. reliance on oil from the Middle East, it will slow down global warming from the greenhouse effect of burning fossil fuels and pumping the resulting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Moreover, in the wake of devastation caused by hurricanes or other disasters, powersats could deliver plenty of energy to portable receiving antennas set up quickly by emergency recovery teams.

We know how to make solarvoltaic cells and microwave transmitters. We have built a football-field-sized structure in orbit: the International Space Station. No new inventions are needed, only the guts to get the job done.

Secondly, we need to encourage stem cell research. Stem cells may be able to generate new tissue for our bodies when they are damaged by disease of injury. Grow a new heart when your original one starts to fail. Grow a new leg when an accident cripples you. Stem cells offer a way to virtual immortality.

The most useful stem cells come from fetuses. While there are religious and moral concerns about killing fetuses to harvest their stem cells, recent research has shown that viable fetal stem cells can be obtained without destroying the fetus. Moreover, it is possible to use adult stem cells, as well.

We should be pursuing this work as hard as we can, not hindering it. The end of terrible scourges such as Parkinson's disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's and cancer may well lie in stem cell therapies.

Next, push research on fusion power. Fusion is the energy source that powers the Sun and stars. If fusion can be made to work on Earth, we could get as much energy from an eight-ounce glass of water as a half-million barrels of oil yields! And that's leaving ninety-nine percent of the water untouched! Practical fusion power systems will be as big a step for the human race as the taming of fire was.

Physicists have been trying to make a workable fusion reactor for nearly half a century. The standard joke among them is that fusion power "is just over the horizon. And you know what the horizon is: an imaginary line that retreats as you approach it!"

Despite the joke, an international collaborative effort is working to build a break-even fusion facility, one that produces as much power as it needs fed into it. That milestone could make fusion power much closer to realization. We should be supporting it as much as possible.

On another front, we need to reform public education. The health of our democracy depends on the education of our children.

We need to make excellence a major goal in teaching at all levels, as President John F. Kennedy urged more than 40 years ago. Remove the barriers within the school systems that prevent knowledgeable persons from teaching because they are not graduates of teachers' colleges. Create task forces of the best teachers for duty in the worst, poorest schools. Enforce discipline in the schools with police or, if need be, National Guard troops.

Without discipline there can be no learning. And without learning, children cannot be capable citizens.

Finally, make term limits mandatory for all elected offices at all levels of government. Together with this, create a national public service draft in which each citizen puts in two years of mandatory public service at age 18 (or upon graduating high school) and two more years at age 50. Get rid of life-long professional politicians and put the citizens to work inside government at all levels.

Our form of democracy was not designed to be operated by professional politicians, men and women who have never spent a moment of their careers outside of politics. We need citizens in government, both in the elected positions and in the bureaucracies. We need to do our duty to our nation, our states, and our local communities.

• On another note, a reader asked recently if science can explain the origin of matter in the universe. Actually, modern cosmology can and does explain the origin of matter. Read Dennis Overbye's "Lonely Hearts of the Universe" (HarperCollins, 1991) or "Companion to the Cosmos" by John Gribbin (Little, Brown, 1996). Both are written for the general audience, and both are very readable and entertaining. In a nutshell, matter evolved out of energy, the energy released in the cosmic Big Bang that started the universe some 12 to 15 billion years ago.

Where did the energy of the Big Bang come from? That's a little trickier, and current explanations have not satisfied everyone (including me).

But that's the way science works. No scientist pretends that we know everything; researchers are still seeking new knowledge. One thing reputable scientists do not do is to throw up their hands in defeat and say that the universe is so complex that we'll never be able to understand it.

To paraphrase Tennyson in his poem "Ulysses," the task of scientists is "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield (to ignorance)."Happy new year!

Naples resident Ben Bova is the author of more than 100 books, including the novel "Powersat," a high-tech thriller about the first solar power satellite. Dr. Bova's Web site is www.benbova.net.