What is one way to make long airplane flights more exciting? Maybe if your plane was a little more stylish and was slowly saving the planet, flying across the country might be more thrilling. I'm talking about the Solar Impulse, the first plane of perpetual endurance that allows its passengers the possibility of endless flight while operating on sunlight.

Long flights back to campus, from any place in the world, often leave you with more than enough time to sit and think about the future. With spring break having come to a close, my flight back to school from California left me with time to reflect, and write this piece.

As I watched the Boeing 737 plane take off from my stop in Las Vegas, I saw the desert fall farther and farther away. It was only then could I truly see the entire expanse of the city and the desert. It was beautiful, hot, dry, and bustling with people. I thought: what if someday this is what all of our nation's cities looked like? Realistically, with our heavy dependence on fossil fuels, this is a very real possibility. Sustainable energy has already broken into many other markets of transportation already. The aircraft industry, however, has remained heavily reliant on fossil fuels, and a large cause of this is the lack of breakthrough technology that offers alternative energy solutions.

Luckily, two Swedish enthusiasts have dreamed and developed something that may change the industry forever. Businessman André Borschberg and aeronaut Bertrand Piccard are currently attempting the first Round-the-World Solar flight with the world's first single-seated solar aircraft. This amazing machine is made of carbon fiber and has a wingspan larger than that of a Boeing 747-8I. And with 17,000 solar cells built into its wings, the plane charges during the day and supplies enough energy to its four electric motors to fly at night. While still in its prototype and development phase, the Solar Impulse represents the type of engineering that could lead to a silent revolution, where commercial airplanes could eventually run on solar power instead of fossil fuels. To build on its success, the project is gaining mainstream support. It already had over 82,000 likes on Facebook and over 41,000 Twitter followers.

As you can see, the marketplace is changing, and it's exciting to witness and live through it. We are living in the renewable power generation. In more and more countries, generating power from local plants that can serve as renewable energy sources is becoming cheaper than buying power from the grid. The Solar Impulse Project is easy to become a part of, and its effects reach the entire globe. Each time that the Solar Impulse lands in another country, there are opportunities to reach out to governments, NGOs, universities and schools to spread Bertrand Piccard's and André Borschberg's message about clean technologies. The solar plane will be making stops in Hawaii, Phoenix, the Mid-United States, and New York in the upcoming months. This journey is much more than a feat of engineering funded by an enthusiastic billionaire. It is a testament to the ingenuity that we humans are capable of.

During your next flight, you may have the time to reflect on ideas like these. Within your lifetime, you may look up at the sky as see a plane similar to the Solar Impulse, and catch a glimpse into the future of greener technology.