The celebration of the 50th anniversary of the laser this year reminds us of the pervasiveness of optical technologies and their impact on Society in numerous positive ways. For instance, advances in lasers and optical fibers have revolutionized information technology and telecommunications, creating a global network that has led to the internet and changed the world’s economy. Likewise, optics had a dramatic impact on medicine, health care, and the life sciences in areas like advanced imaging techniques or DNA sequencing, to cite just a few. While these great discoveries enabled by optics marked the last decades of the 20th century, the century ahead poses new challenges to sustain our civilization’s continuing advancement. Foremost among these challenges is the need to develop new clean sources of energy while preventing or reversing the degradation of the environment. Optics is likely to play a key role in dealing with this challenge. Among renewable energy sources, solar energy shows great potential as the sun provides the earth with more energy in an hour than is consumed by the world’s population in a year. While solar thermal and photovoltaic technologies are quite mature, their scale remains small with a total energy market share of less than one percent. Hence, making solar energy more efficient and more economical compared to oil, natural gas and coal, remains a challenge that is driving new research and innovations worldwide. Several new approaches are being explored to capture, convert, and store the optical power from the sun. For instance, the thermophotovoltaic approach has the potential to yield to power conversion efficiencies that exceed the maximum theoretical value for single p-n junction cells. Another source of energy includes nuclear fusion, the artificial re-creation by man of the sun’s power. While fusion has already been demonstrated on a small scale, it remains a grand challenge to make it economical. Hence, several approaches to fusion are being studied including inertial confinement fusion (ICF) at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) where 192 high power laser beams are focused onto a tiny spherical target filled with deuterium and tritium.