ZEH communities are the leading edge of technologies that might someday create houses that produce as much energy as they consume.

They have created cutting-edge technologies

My colleagues and I are studying something called augmented reality (a field of computer research dealing with the combination of real-world and virtual reality)," said Christopher Dede, professor in learning technologies at Harvard University, "Alien Contact," for example, is an exercise developed for middle-school students who use hand-held devices that can determine their location.

Because so many of our modern technologies and services depend on oil, nations, corporations, and institutions that control the trade in oil exercise extraordinary power

The space dreamers end up benefiting all of us—not just because of the way they expand human knowledge, or because of the spin-off technologies they produce, but because the two types of dreams feed off each other.