Lannie, cool thought-provoking story, thanks for posting.
Personally I think we went a little wrong about the time Nikola Tesla was defunded, but I might be biased as an Engineer.
Since studying the energy problem and realising the technical definitions of, differences, and effects of free vs extracted energy, especially on Money, I now have a pretty dim view of the past 120 years or so. This is coupled with my own experience throughout industry, always being an ideas person, coming up with, and recognising, and crediting great solutions to things done by others, as well as me, we've been rewarded by our ideas being mostly crushed by the steam roller of the profit machine. The number of good ideas I've seen lost or wasted due to this is far more than I can remember, it is in the thousands, and that is just me, I am sure many other bright engineers in different areas will remember many other thousands than me, and between us all, what we've actually witnessed is only the tip of the iceberg, there is an infinity of things that can be imagined.
The truth is that if humanity got to exercise true democracy, and was allowed to decide for itself what it really wanted, and if that wasn't then oriented around just "More money", then we would have a very different, much better world now, it seems to me.
I bet no-one would have voted for two world wars, two pandemics, nuclear weapons, and now global climate disaster, if our view was unclouded by profit.
On the last part, we should realise that the climate disater unfolding is a hyperobject, all attempts to estimate its worst effects, and timecales will miss the truth, and an effect which still seems to be taking many traditional experts by surprise and disbelief, is that it is also intimately tied in with economy, in a way that it can't be disconnected. For thousands of years, that didn't matter much, but it does now, money, and capital is being mathematically devalued by nature, by the necessary injection of raw energy, in a way that the only way to save any value in money, is to sacrifice the value of capital, before both are completely devalued in any case.
There is an economic tipping point in each geograohical area corresponding to each currency, beyond which it will probably be too late to do this.
Countries demonstrating already how to fail include Cuba (A place I love very much), and more recently, Sri Lanka.
I won't harp on the details of what needs to be done, you've heard it often enough, suffice to say "Kardashev Money".
Of course what is being offered to Sri Lanka by the IMF is exactly the wrong thing, yet more money-as-debt, which has to tie them into yet more energy by extraction, which is obviously impossible, just more pain on the road to oblivion.
Cuba wouldn't accept IMF help anyway, even if it was offered, as they at least understand the slavery caused by debt.
They have accepted gifts of solar farms in the past though, from China, which they could have grown by the money-fuel tree technique, had they known how to do technically, they would have been now completely energy secure, and actually very prosperous, if they had done.
As it is they probably handled the solar farms as projects with an expected lifetime, and an expected capital return, after which the farm would be scrap.
That is how most profit driven companies view pretty much all existing solar farms, and as such they are not realising the physical benefits of the energy coming for free.
By treating it as if it wasn't for free, and thus placing it unnecessarily on a limited life death sentence, they kill the solar capacity without realising the value they could have had by monetising the energy.
See how it all fits together? Yet this is only a small part of the story, there are what I can't help describing as anything other than "god-signs" all over the solution, everywhere we look, if we know what to look for.
We really do seem to be at the biblical end of days, but it isn't necessarily a dead end, if we take the way out before hitting the wall in the dead-end.
Just demand the free money, and we will do the rest as communities, as needed, it seems to me.