Ice on the Moon

As of this day in history, 27 March 2020, there are this morning 86,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. and over a thousand have died. The Mayor of Boston has stated what is needed is a “Consistent Approach.” When this is over in a couple years, and based on the history of the Spanish Flu it is going to take that long, we will look back and write about it. What is recorded is all that future generations will know. I am not optimistic about the coming months considering how fast the virus is spreading and the character of the American people. If over a million people die most of them will be those sick with some other condition and the elderly. But that will still leave several hundred thousand that cannot be classified as somehow “unlucky and useless.”

It is considered bad form to play the Nazi card but in my view that abomination was the great lesson of history. The Celts would agree with me. They ruled ancient Europe until the Romans exterminated them. In Neoliberalism we find the philosophy of the Nazis in regards to “useless eaters” and those “Lebensunwertes Leben” (unworthy of life) to be closely related. The calls for the population to go back to work regardless of the millions who may die is reminiscent of the gate at Auschwitz.

The Consistent Approach is that human life is sacred. It is above money. The Neoliberal view is, of course, the opposite. We can read the story of the New Deal framed in different ways but for me it is mostly about this idea that human life is more valuable than any system we invent for humans to use in their lives (like money). The way the story goes, again, in my view, is the “free market” collapsed in 1929. The communists and labor unions suddenly became quite powerful and went to FDR, who was a capitalist, and explained the situation to him. Unless he and his wealthy friends did not want to find themselves in the same situation the Russian aristocracy did only ten years earlier, he better make a deal. And that was the New Deal, which today is described as “imbedded liberalism.”

The New Deal used the ideas of Keynesian Economics, which stated the government must strictly regulate the economy. Not control, but regulate, and the two are, despite all conservative arguments to the contrary, different. Simply enforcing laws that keep free market speculators from corrupting the system and causing it to self-destruct is the first part. But there is also a second part, a parachute in case the market fails- also called social safety nets. It must be accepted that greed slowly but surely corrupts regulation and the second part is thus necessary. Unfortunately, what the New Deal did not address was human nature itself, and the sociopathic personalities who gravitate to obscene profit-seeking diligently chipped away at the New Deal for decade after decade. The benchmark usually cited for the end of the New Deal is the Reagan Revolution. The New Deal started to have effects around 1935 and from that year to 1980 when Reagan was elected made America became the greatest nation on Earth. And we helped the Russians destroy the Nazis also.

And here we are, 40 years after the greatest 40 years our nation had.

When wealth is redistributed by the state to the extent necessary to keep the system stable and safety nets are sufficient to deal with any recurring economic crisis, then the nation thrives. That essentially describes what made America great. It is Orwellian to describe Neoliberalism, the toxic ideology that is now actually destroying us, as the cure. When inequality corrodes the alloy of this structure, when stability and safety nets are gone, it then takes very little to restart the cycle of empire, that is, the rise and fall of empires. Ironically, COVID-19 was initially described as only a little problem. See how that works?

This blog is supposed to be about Human Space Flight. The last several entries have made little mention of it and I should explain the reason why. I actually stated it a couple times in previous entries: it has to do with the Survival Imperative. At this point in history the human race has immense resources at it’s disposal. We can accomplish what is necessary to safeguard the species by expanding into space. This may not always be true. If we do not at least make some progress toward directing those resources at space then we may be guaranteeing the extinction of humankind.

Here is the simple explanation to give to conservative acquaintances: You want people healthy enough to work and earn those billions for billionaires? They get medical care paid for by taxes paid by the corporations and billionaires. You want people with the skills and training to work and earn those billions for billionaires? They get education paid for by taxes paid by the corporations and billionaires. You want people not revolting and rioting against the government and the rich when the markets crash? They get unemployment insurance, social security, and job placement from their government- paid for by progressive taxation. This is called imbedded liberalism and was what the New Deal tried to accomplish. It is why those Scandinavian countries are the happiest and have the highest standard of living. We don’t have it because of Neoliberalism- unregulated obscene greed.

The rich want their healthy educated wage slaves with no strings attached and as disposable as paper cups. Unions that negotiate higher wages to pay for health care, education, and financial security, are traditionally attacked by all means legal and illegal. Neoliberals want it all for as close to free as millions in corruption and lobbying can get them. As a rule they invest in manipulation and deception as this generates more profit than fairness and transparency. Any taxes on them are considered a theft of the money their genius earned and they are entitled to it without supporting the government or people enabling that wealth. Neoliberalism is socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. Everything must generate profit or it is useless and needs to be eliminated. The rich are exalted and the poor punished.

Money is the god of their world. What is interesting to me is consumerism- the service economy now halted by a pandemic. What if people did not spend all that money on shoes and clothes and restuarants and cars and the junk they fill their houses (if they can afford a home) up with? How would those billionaires make their billions? Materialism was at one time considered an alternate lifestyle- food, shelter, and medicine were the primary budget items. Now we prey on each other. An ever-smaller predatory fraction of the population taking wealth from an ever larger mass of prey. It seems to me it is this upward flow of money, to the top and not trickling down, that is theft. Yet the Neoliberals have the Orwellian audacity to call “redistribution of wealth” to the poor from the rich as being criminal. Of course anyone exposing the ravenous sociopathic culture of the rich is immediately branded a communist and a traitor. Of course they are.

In a sense it is like that saying, “High School never ends.” The bullies would terrorize their victims and nobody would do anything about it. Not the teachers, not the students, not the victims. Perhaps it is a deeply buried instinct we obey, to submit to the dominant ones in the group. Perhaps it is sadism originating in that happiness when the hyenas ate someone else who you did not really like anyway. Unfortunately, the universe is an unpredictable place and for whatever reasons the victims sometimes have the last laugh. Even if everybody dies.

 

 

Evan Vucci/AP/Shutterstock

Trump Suggests States Need to Bribe Him With Praise to Get Federal Assistance for COVID-19
“But, you know, it’s a two-way street,” the president said of states desperate for equipment. “They have to treat us well, also.” By RYAN BORT

Shocked me…it really did send a chill up my spine. The President says emergency federal aid (needed to save lives) might depend on a state being “nicer to the White House.” And nobody takes it as anything but business as usual. Sociopaths don’t care about human life and at some point a nation has to collectively say NO to those who allow people to die.

Very Scary. The Neoliberal ruling class that believes they have all power and authority over us is about to get something they will never forget. I have to believe they are going to find out that it really is a two-way street. Just watch. I usually go back and revise and edit my blog entries whenever I get a chance to review them but I am going to leave this one alone and not touch it. It is Wednesday afternoon March 25, 2020 and we will see if enough other people now believe this has gone far enough.

We will see.

Image: Salon

It is possible that many in this country are now beginning to understand exactly what Neoliberalism is all about. Remarks continue to be made to the whole world by politicians and certain wealthy individuals that place money above human lives. They seem to accept this as a matter-of-fact and are unapologetic. Let’s be clear about exactly what is being put on the table: profit-seeking is actually going to kill people and our “leaders” are good with that. The 1 percent do not seem to understand that most of us are NOT good with that. We really are not good with that. It might be the propaganda that has been pushed for the last half a century about anything being “free” as communistic/atheistic/satanistic will keep the masses confused for awhile but…

Humans are afflicted with a psychological feature that, as I have often stated on this blog, may just end us. We deny, we lie, we make up stuff when we don’t like the reality we are living (or dying) in. It is in fact our greatest evolutionary adaption. We imagine the best possible future and then try to turn that lie we made up into the truth. It is amazing when you think about it and it is incredible how well it has worked for our species. However, most of the species that have existed on this planet are now extinct. That we somehow are totally convinced such an event cannot possibly happen to the human race is the reality we are living and dying in. And there is the problem: we have a useful life of around a half a century and then we, as individuals, die. We have no reason to care about the future of our species when each of us, in reality, has no future.

For the last couple millennia of history humans have based their societies on various mixes of the standard hierarchy of upper, middle, and lower class. Only recently have these classes come to be understood in economic terms- they meant something different before the modern world. The nobility, the clergy, and the peasantry have been the normal structure of civilization since before the pyramids were built. The nobility inherited power and the clergy kept the nobility in power while the peasantry were persuaded to support these two higher classes. Neoliberalism has made money the god of this world, and those with the money are the nobility. The clergy have been replaced by the media and academia. These powerful and wise ones keep the other 99 percent distracted and deceived by various myths and false narratives. And some small truths.

The French Revolution, at the very beginning of the industrial age, and the Russian Revolution, at the height of the industrial age, were the two benchmark events every person on Earth should be versed in. By dividing history into three parts- before the 1st revolution, between the two revolutions, and after the second revolution- it is possible to see exactly where we are right now. And we have to know where we are if we are going to find our way out of this mess without wandering into another dark age. The most accurate way to frame Neoliberalism is to show it between two examples, the first being the Roman Empire long before the 1st revolution, and the second being the Third Reich shortly after the 2nd revolution. Rome ran on slaves and Nazi Germany was about genocide instead of money, but they both are intimately associated with the worship of power in key ways. Neoliberalism mistakenly identifies money as true power.

https://theconversation.com/neoliberalism-has-tricked-us-into-believing-a-fairytale-about-where-money-comes-from-113783

The myth of Neoliberalism is that money is somehow a stand-alone instrument and exists by itself, as a “real property.” Money has actually always been a tool of the state and NOT a feature of private individual ownership. The state allows the individual to possess only a certain amount of power in the form of money. Why the code word for greed in Neoliberal jargon is “freedom” is found in a refutation of this state control. This money-as-ultimate-power handed over to the individual is of course an illusion. Rome survived in a world filled with violent warring super-tribes by making the power of the state a force to be worshiped. Fascism mesmerized the population of Germany into the same cult worship by playing on racism and fears of a Jewish super-tribe. Now we have a new cult.

Neoliberalism hypnotizes human beings into believing money itself is the magical supernatural force that is actually in control of the world. Instead of recognizing it as having been created by powerful states for political purposes it is bizarrely worshiped as being above humanity and the ultimate purpose of civilization. The reason money has become deified is the myth of scarcity. In the past various world events made it absolutely crystal clear to human beings what true scarcity was. Now that nuclear weapons, refrigeration, antibiotics, and modern technology have made scarcity itself relatively scarce (in the western world anyway) we have forgotten what war, famine, and pestilence are. This has allowed money to become all important when before it was food, clean water, medicine, and a safe place to live that was paramount. In times of crisis money would not buy anything. Now we believe money is all that matters. A sea change in human perception.

Gerard K. O’Neill saw poverty as the driver of all conflict and misery on Earth and believed unlimited energy and eventually unlimited Lebensraum in space would be the solution. The greed that drives consumerism in this world is now the true driver as it inexorably redistributes wealth from the many to the few. A smaller and smaller percentage of the wealthy prey on the larger and larger percentage of the poor until the inevitable crisis event push those who realize they are little better off than slaves to revolt. It is the cycle of empire where the citizen farmer is eventually driven from his land and his loved ones lose everything to a ravenous ruling class. It is the French and Russian revolutions played out ad infinitum.

Except…nothing is forever and in this modern world of almost 8 billion people we may not see the rise and fall of any more empires. We may see the end of our species. We now have a small number of individuals, several who are obvious sociopaths, controlling much of wealth of the planet. In the 19th century we had the robber barons of the gilded age and our country suffered from the sickness of unrestrained greed up until the crash of 1929. But there is actually nothing in history that compares to the incredible wealth being hoarded now.

https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-robber-barons-2012-3

While our present pandemic, if completely bungled by Trump, will kill at most a million or two, Climate Change is on track to kill billions. My daughter was asking me about why everyone is just going along with it and I told her most people are NOT “going along with it”; they just have zero power to do anything about it. I recall a few months ago a coworker was talking about Central American refugees not fixing their own countries and coming here and I had to explain it to him: if they do anything that is not putting money into the pocket of the local gang then someone with a gun will put a stop to it. This is essentially how empires have done it since Rome. Anywhere on Earth at any time in history the story is the same.

A place where some are worked half to death and live in squalor while a small number live in luxury will find people asking the question, “why do they do so little and have everything while my life is spent working to give them everything?” It will be explained to the person that everyone agrees the rich “own” everything so they get everything. And if it becomes unbearable the many will revolt and risk everything to make it bearable. This simple disagreement explains most of the history of the human race. .

 

 

 

 

Image: ObjectsInFilm

A decade after I was born the science fiction movie “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” depicted a race of horribly mutated humans living underground and worshiping a doomsday weapon designed to destroy the Earth. My parents were moviegoers and I dimly remember going to the theater as a boy to watch the film. As I write this most of the movie theaters in the United States are closed due to a global pandemic. What I find so interesting about the whole subject of nuclear weapons is the public is almost completely unaware that atomic bombs, used for propulsion, are presently the only practical way for humans to travel to other planets. Bomb propulsion is the only technology in sight that enables humans to expand into space. While we have no off-word independent colonies our species is at risk of extinction. Again, of interest, one of the ways our species could end is by way of an engineered pathogen. Very few really understand this.

I connect this seemingly latent failure of vision to deism in that essential invisibility of God to allow some illusion of free will. If God were not invisible then we would be little more than puppets and any coexistence with God could not be something new, something different than God, and our maker’s design would fail. Religious people do not accept this explanation. It makes religion itself nonsensical for one thing. In my view this concept makes for a perfectly fair world of perfect opportunity. It is in one sense a variation of the teacher student paradox:

https://digitalcommons.denison.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1025&context=episteme
“Eulathus wanted to become a lawyer, but, not being able to pay the required tuition, he made an arrangement according to which Protagoras would teach him but not receive payment until Eulathus won his first case. When Eulathus finished his course of study, he delayed going into practice. Tired of waiting for his money, Protagoras brought suit against his former pupil for the tuition money that was owed. …Eulathus decided to plead his own case in court. Protagoras presented his case in the form of a simple constructive dilemma, which at first, appeared to be a sound argument: if I win, he has to pay me – that is the decision of the court. If I lose, he has won his first case, and therefore has to pay me as that is the stipulation of the contract. I will either win or lose. Therefore, either way, he must pay me. Euathlus defended himself with a counter-dilemma that had the same strengths and/or weaknesses as the case put forth by his teacher: If I win, I do not have to pay – that is the decision of the court. If I lose, I will not yet have won my first case, and therefore, I will not have to pay as that is the stipulation of the contract.   I will either win or lose. Either way, I do not have to pay.”

Of course there is no free lunch. We all have to pay and there is no cheap.

The Christian way to view this is we are all broken on the Cross. The world is perfectly fair, God is perfectly just. Never believe that others get away with more or less.

Humankind seeks ultimate meaning and any ultimate meaning would necessarily be an intelligent, self-aware meaning. This ultimate Being would create humankind to be different than God and would necessarily have to be invisible and separate or be defeated. With the H-bomb humankind has created peace at the risk of extinction. Yet this same device we fear is also the only way to avoid the inevitable extinction event. Whether it is used to deflect an impact threat or create space colonies by moving immense masses of material. The problem resonates with evolution itself. For life to evolve and stay then less evolved forms must die out and disappear. This seems to defeat evolution which, whether certain people wish to admit it or not, does have a purpose. Survival.

We are trapped in stupid world and chasing illusions. Like a cat trying to catch a laser dot on a wall. We have that power of the sun, fusion bombs, which can lift masses in the millions of tons off the surface of the Moon and other bodies. Such activity can create artificial spinning hollow moons where a population in the tens of billions can be supported. Harnessing the power of our own sun and applying beam propulsion can accelerate these constructs toward other solar systems at a percentage of the speed of light. Centuries from now, upon arrival, these starships can use bombs to slow down.

While humans live useful lives not much past a half a century we have little hope of survival. Until we have an indefinite lifespan and are able to freeze humans without damage and revive them (we will probably freeze people first), we are bound for extinction. We have the bomb to thank for the over half a century of peace on Earth. We have the bomb to allow us to safeguard our species by enabling space travel and space habitat construction, as well as deflecting impact threats. We have the bomb and curse it as if it should not exist when it is our best chance of surviving. Much of humankind worships a God that by design cannot magically grant our wishes.

The minority who hold most of the wealth worship money which is actually destroying society with the classic cycle of corruption causing the rise and fall of empire. We might have more of a chance of lasting as a species if we worshiped the bomb.

 

Image: Atomic Heritage Foundation

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200316152211.htm

It has been said we are all “children of Rome” in the modern world as much of our society functions like that empire did. The Romans were Neo-Liberals in that latifundialization eventually destroyed the fabric of their society- much like it is in the process of destroying the social fabric of the entire modern world. Major accumulation of land, power, wealth, is presently being effected by way of “the market” which relies on speculation (what stock will rise and fall in value). Thus, it is much like a magical prophecy game where if you predict correctly you become a king. It is in one sense simply gambling.

Once a certain level of wealth is attained the marketplace becomes a game between major casino owners. Today we use modern technologies of many kinds in “wealth creation” schemes while the ancient world essentially and simply ran on slaves and the soldiers opposite those slaves. Chattel slavery realizes the Neo-Liberal dream of turning human beings into commodities. The best those in pursuit of absolute power can do in the modern world is a lesser form of wage slavery. The Spartacus of wage slavery for the last couple centuries in the west has been the labor union. Like Spartacus and other rebels, unions have repeatedly risen and then been “busted” by the monied elites over these last two centuries.

If humankind is to avoid a descent into a new dark age, and possible extinction, then a realization of modernity, a sea change in the way individuals think, must occur. And soon. The obstacle to this progressive goal is psychological in nature and directly involves a minority of the population. It is not so much the wealthy I am focusing on but the sociopathic subculture underlying the monied class. Sociopathy and the deceit exercised by this small percentage of the population is the driving force behind Neo-Liberalism. The closest humankind has recently come to a system that could survive the rise and fall of empire was the Imbedded Liberalism of the United States in the 20th century. Unfortunately that system, like ancient Spartacus, did not prevail.

Image: slashfilm.com

Space is the place where the human race is going to survive. If we stay on Earth we will eventually self-destruct. In my view the first step is that old liberal saw- education. I urge anyone reading this to research exactly what these two terms mean: Neoliberalism and Imbedded Liberalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_liberalism

The second step, after the masses have some truth revealed to them, is tax the rich at the old 91 percent rate and start rebuilding infrastructure and converting the Military Industrial Complex into a Space Industrial Complex. The third step is, after the basic technologies of space solar power and beam propulsion have been proven, is to decide, as a species, our path is to build artificial worlds and expand into the solar system and beyond.

 

Image: Smithsonian

Though I am not a fan of Bob Zubrin or going to Mars I have to admit a chapter in his book “The Case for Mars” changed my worldview. The Chinese burning their exploration fleet of giant sailing ships was, for me, a very important lesson- though many of these history lessons I believe are so important seem to not impress others so much.

https://www.businessinsider.com/china-zhenge-he-treasure-fleet-elite-free-trade-2017-2

The Business Insider article tries to make a connection with Trump  and infers that if China had gone Neo-liberal back in the 15th century it would rule the world now…which I think is complete garbage. I thought I would preemptively address that view because I am not talking about how great commerce and money is: I am going the other way.

For the last ten years the “NewSpace Mob” has been waging a marketing campaign that invariably portrays NASA as a corrupt wasteful organization that is keeping private industry from expanding humankind into the solar system. This is a purely Orwellian horror story the public knows very little about. The reality is NewSpace is the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration.

The effect of this Ayn-Rand-in-space Neo-liberal con may likely end up being much like the Chinese burning their Superships. Only a state-sponsored public works project on the scale of the Panama Canal or the Hoover Dam is going to enable independent off-world colonies. The media has been completely hijacked and even public forums where critical views are supposedly allowed are now closed to any criticism of the flagship company or the NewSpace ideology. I know this well because I have been banned from almost all of these forums and the few that occasionally allow me to comment have recently stopped doing so.

If anyone reading this needs proof they need only read recent articles from sites that are essentially SpaceX infomercials.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/nasa-spent-a-decade-and-nearly-1-billion-for-a-single-launch-tower/

Ars Technica has dozens of articles damning the Space Launch System https://arstechnica.com/search/?ie=UTF-8&q=SLS

There is a short list of popular space blogs and newsites of about a half dozen and ALL are in the business of damning NASA and promoting SpaceX. Some of them do this subtly and others are blatant, but they all are obviously promoting the NewSpace flagship company. Even a few that seemed neutral have recently joined the rest:

More SLS Overruns–This Time the Ground Segment

SLS: $17 Billion And Counting, with First Launch Still a Year Away

This has been going on for ten years and those who were in their early teens are now adults and completely programmed by these years of propaganda to readily agree that it would be best to dismantle the space agency and “hand it over to Musk.”

 

 

image CNN

https://www.ibtimes.com/nasa-warns-airburst-causing-asteroid-arriving-week-2940563

1. Whatever happens, whether you succeed or fail, people with high expectations always feel better. They usually attribute success to their superior ability and failure with “bad luck.”
2.  The pure act of anticipation makes us happy. We enjoy imagining the better days ahead. People with mild depression are actually more realistic than healthy individuals.
3.  Optimism changes reality because it acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Optimism leads to success and health. If we expect the future to be bright, stress and anxiety are reduced (and we perform better).

Experiments have shown if people believe they have a ten percent chance of getting cancer and then are told the true figure of thirty percent, when asked later they will say they have an eleven percent chance. This profound (and quite common) self-deception is the feature in human behavior that could lead to the end of our species. Most people can understand quite well the likelihood of divorce is forty percent and the likelihood of cancer is thirty but they refuse to believe those numbers apply to them.

The more optimistic you are the less likely your brain is to respond to negative information. Firefighter fatality investigations often contain statements such as “we did not think the fire was going to do that”, even though the facts indicated it would. We tolerate the optimism bias in our everyday life but when it influences decisions that affect the future of the human race we are in reality vastly increasing the likelihood of our extinction.

We do not believe any highly lethal pathogen will result in most of the human race dying but the COVID-19 virus is the perfect example of this optimism not necessarily being warranted. If the virus had both a high mortality and been highly contagious we could be looking at the collapse of global infrastructure and subsequent death by starvation, as well as disease, of most of the human race. We are also quite happy believing there is no dinosaur killer on a collision course with our planet but…it could happen tomorrow.

COVID-19 appears to have a mortality rate of 3 to 4 percent and the Chelyabinsk (70 feet in diameter) airburst injured around 1,600. The Ebola virus has a 90 percent mortality rate and the Chixculub impactor that killed the dinosaurs was between 7 (asteroid) and 50 (comet) miles in diameter. We believe that somehow these percentages that minimize the effect of events like pandemics and impacts on our existence will always be on our side. It is crazy to believe that.

When considering “deep time” (geologic time) and statistical probabilities, what we would see if a 100 percent lethal pathogen (such as a genetically engineered biological warfare agent) or a 100 mile diameter asteroid impactor were to render us extinct, is just a small spike in the infographic. Our optimism bias makes that graph invisible to us.

We have the ability, at this moment in history, to direct vast resources at threats to our species. Instead, we direct vast resources at marketing shoes and pet products and allow a tiny minority of sociopaths to amass unimaginable wealth. As I have stated many times; millennia in the future, aliens studying our dead civilization will shrug and conclude, “they were too stupid to survive.”

The optimism bias also applies to engineering and public works projects and it is accepted that cost over-runs are somehow inevitable. In reality a simply formula to correct for the optimism bias in these projects would bring most of them in under cost. The most interesting project to cite in this category is, in my view, the SLS.

Infographic: r/SpaceLaunchSystem

Thirty-two SLS launches might result in assembling a true spaceship, the first of many to come, that would be able to use nuclear devices to deflect any impact threat. By increasing the SLS launch cadence to 6-8 missions per year (by abandoning LEO and Mars and redirecting that funding) a cislunar infrastructure could be created that would ultimately result in independent off-world space colonies immune to terrestrial extinction level events. Then we would no longer be too stupid to survive.

 

 

 

Gateway No Longer Mandatory for 2024 Moon Landing

The Gateway never really made sense when the radiation environment makes any long duration missions impractical without a massive cosmic ray water shield. Eugene Parker explained this for the layman back in 2006 in a classic popular science article published in Scientific American: Shielding Space Travelers.

In combination with dosing is micro-gravity debilitation which also causes permanent damage and there can be no real progress in Human Space Flight until this issue is settled. Especially for young females, a near-sea-level-radiation one gravity environment is the prerequisite for multi-year missions. There is no way around it.

Dosing and debilitation is best addressed by way of three techniques. The first is a massive water shield, as detailed by Eugene Parker, and the obvious structure to contain this shield is a wet workshop, and better yet, a double envelope “Fat Workshop.” It follows that a tether system several thousand feet long to provide artificial gravity would use these workshops- which are already built to withstand max-Q launch forces. The third technique is to bring the water shielding up from the Moon using robot Landers. Bringing these thousands of tons of water up from the Moon requires 22 times less energy than bringing it up from Earth.

The Fat Workshop is going to need a Super Heavy Lift Vehicle in the 130 ton payload (or larger) range.

 

At this point in our likely short history, our only plan is greed. Spoiled rotten children bullying and lying to acquire more toys than their siblings. Greed has become our parent, our narcissistic enabler, our rai·son d’ê·tre. The agent of greed, money, is the god of this world. Speculation, or gambling, or the market, or whatever term is used, is the den of thieves that ultimately destroys any hope of progress. Why work when you can be lucky? It is stealing without breaking the law. It is the miracle of something from nothing. Put some money, a little bit of your god, into it- and you get more back from nowhere. It just magically goes into your pocket. The choice is to be a dumb worker or a clever thief. And this is what will end our species.

It may be that greed is the filter everyone is guessing at concerning the Fermi Paradox. Evolution will eventually generate intelligent life, but to evolve, a finite lifespan is required. A species of conscious beings require millions of experiments to come into existence and this requires those previous millions to pass into non-existence. The self-defeating feature in this scheme is that conscious species retain that same mechanism which caused those millions to leave the stage: death. Since self-aware beings cannot accept non-existence, the one cancels the other out in the larger picture. We don’t care about the future because we subconsciously know all we get is what we can acquire in our own short life.

Children seem to be the only moderator in this drama as they do lend meaning to it all. That some people do not care for children is evidence we are programmed to love our offspring. I don’t mind being designed to love my daughter and granddaughter- it is one of the few things in this life I am at peace with. Extending that drive to all children, and because of our intelligence, to all people, we have a force that drives civilization to conform and cooperate instead of self-destructing by predation and zero-sum competition.  Sadly, the cycle of empire, of greed corrupting and destroying mighty nations throughout history, leads anyone paying attention to the conclusion that as a species we will not survive this for much longer. We will not be able to change this cycle of destruction until we change our individual cycle of destruction. As long as humankind fails to effect an individual indefinite lifespan we are likely doomed as a species.

The original reason I became interested in space travel was due to this lifespan problem. The critical feature of traveling to other stars is time and if a person can be placed in suspended animation then that problem is solved. I believed a quarter century ago freezing people was a completely viable prospect. The technical challenges to lowering the temperature of microstructures without damage are simply not that difficult. If it becomes practical to freeze humans without damage and revive them decades or even centuries later then…everything changes. The single most important event in human history. I call this development “The Great Rescue.” Maybe I should call it “The Big Freeze.”

More to come…or maybe not.

The man who could have taken humankind to the farthest reaches of the solar system is gone. He was a personal hero of mine due to his work on Nuclear Pulse Propulsion and is the second named scientist in the Parker-Dyson-Spudis continuum.

I was never really a space enthusiast until 2003 when I read George Dyson’s Project Orion. The book profoundly changed my worldview. In 2006 I read the Scientific American article “Shielding Space Travelers” by Eugene Parker and this also shaped my view on space exploration in a fundamental way. The third most influential work I read was probably “Angle of Attack” by Mike Gray.

Of all the people in these books the most interesting was Freeman Dyson. One detail about his life that caught my attention was when, during World War 2, he advised the British to remove the gun turrets from their bombers to improve their performance and avoid being shot down. Those in charge did not accept the numbers Dyson gave them of course…and people died because of that close-mindedness. Dyson was “open” to the truth and did not let pre-existing bias distract him from the best solution. We need more of that if we are going to survive.