Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: existential risks

I recently posted this on the only two other sites that will allow me to express my opinions;

I see the problem as one of self similarity; trying to go cheap being the downfall of all these schemes to work around human physiology.

When I first became interested in space travel several years ago I would comment on a couple blogs and find myself constantly arguing with private space proponents- and saying over and over again, “there is no cheap.” I was finally excommunicated from that bunch and banned from posting. They would start calling me an idiot and other insults and when I tried to return the favor the moderator would block my replies. The person who runs those two sites works for a firm promoting space tourism- go figure.

The problem is that while the aerospace industry made some money off the space program as an outgrowth of the military industrial complex, it soon became clear that spaceships are hard money- they have to work. The example of this is the outrage over the Apollo 1 fire and subsequent oversight of contractors- a practice which disappeared after Apollo and resulted in the Space Shuttle being such a poor design. A portion of the shuttle development money reportedly went under the table into the B-1 bomber program; how much we will never know. Swing wings are not easy to build which is why you do not see it anymore; cuts into profits.

The easy money of cold war toys has since defeated any move by industry to take up the cause of space exploration. No easy money in spaceships. People who want something for nothing rarely end up with anything worth anything. Trying to find cheap ways around furnishing explorers with the physcial conditions human beings evolved in is going to fail. On the other hand if we start with a baseline of one gravity and Earth level radiation we are bound to succeed.

The engineering solutions to this baseline requirement are as I have already detailed; a tether for gravity and a massive moonwater shield with bomb propulsion. That is EXACTLY how to do it and I do not see any one else offering anything else that will work- just waffling and spewing about R&D.
We have been doing R&D for over half a century. It is a reason to go that is supposedly lacking.

When that crater in Mexico was discovered in 1980 the cold war was reaching it’s crescendo and the massive extinction it caused was overshadowed by the threat of nuclear weapons. Impact defense is still the only path to all that DOD money for a Moon base.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121231180632.htm

Excerpt: “Galactic cosmic radiation poses a significant threat to future astronauts,” said M. Kerry O’Banion, M.D., Ph.D., a professor in the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy and the senior author of the study. “The possibility that radiation exposure in space may give rise to health problems such as cancer has long been recognized. However, this study shows for the first time that exposure to radiation levels equivalent to a mission to Mars could produce cognitive problems and speed up changes in the brain that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease.”

It appears when Eugene Parker wrote “Shielding Space Travelers” in 2006 he was right- and all the private space sycophants claiming radiation mitigation is trivial are wrong.

Only a massive water shield a minimum of 14 feet thick and massing 400 tons for a small capsule can shield human beings in deep space on long duration missions. And since a small capsule will not have sufficient space to keep a crew psychologically healthy on a multi-year journey it is likely such a shield will massive over a thousand tons.

This mass may seem to make Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO) impractical but in fact it is not an obstacle but an enabler. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion using bombs to push a spaceship to the outer solar sytem becomes more efficient the larger the ship and this amount of water is useful in a closed loop life support system.

Lighting off bombs in the Earth’s magnetosphere is not acceptable and this points to the Moon as the obvious place to launch nuclear missions and also to acquire the water for radiation shielding. The Space Launch System (SLS) is the human-rated Heavy Lift Vehicle (HLV) with a powerful escape system that can safely transport the required fissionables to the Moon.

2013 may be the year of the comet and the year of the spaceship if the two goals of protecting the planet from impacts and establishing off world colonies are finally recognized as vital to the survival of humankind.

A happy new year to the human race from it’s most important member; me. Since self-worship seems to be the theme of the new American ideal I had better get right with me.

With my government going over the fiscal cliff it would appear that the damned soul of Ayn Rand is exerting demonic influence on the political system through worship of the individual. The tea party has the Republicans terrified of losing their jobs. Being just like me, those individuals consider themselves the most important person on the planet- so I cannot fault them.

As Ayn Rand believed, “I will not die, it’s the world that will end”, so who cares about the collective future of the human race? Towards the end of 2013 the heavens may remind us the universe does not really care about creatures who believe themselves all important. The choice may soon be seen clearly in the light of the comet’s tail; the glorification of the individual and the certain extinction of our race, or the acceptance of a collective goal and our continued existence.

Ayn Rand made her choice but most of us have time to choose more wisely. I pray for billions, tens and hundreds of billions of dollars- for a Moonbase.

I am not one of the Earth is overpopulated crowd. We could have a high quality of life for every man, woman and child on this planet if we did not, as a species, spend most of our resources pandering to moral weakness and cravings for profit. The myth of scarcity is a smokescreen to obscure the reality of greed and ignorance. Which is why people like Gerard K. O’Neill sought to improve the human condition with space colonies.

We need to go into space to first safeguard the Earth from impacts and the human race from extinction, and along with these missions to spread life into the universe through colonization. None of those three things has anything to do with getting filthy rich or intimidating other nations with our firepower so we can steal their resources. Which is why it has not happened.

Happy New Year with hopes for a more enlightened public.

Happy new year to my Wife, my Daughter, my Father, and to those who give a damn about next year even if they will not be there.

http://news.yahoo.com/nowhere-japans-growing-plutonium-stockpile-064038796.html

A half century after being developed, nuclear pulse propulsion remains the only practical system of interplanetary travel. What is required to launch a bomb propelled mission to the outer solar system? Well, first you need.…..bombs.

There is no shortage of bomb material on planet Earth. The problem is lack of a vehicle that can get this material to the nearest place a nuclear mission can be launched; the Moon. For over a quarter of a century a launch vehicle capable of sending significant payloads (and people) to the Moon has been lacking. The Space Transportation System, aka the space shuttle, was a dead end as far as exploration due to the lack of funding for a Sidemount cargo version.

Now we wait on the SLS.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121228100748.htm

Only this human rated Heavy Lift Vehicle (HLV) with a powerful escape tower will be suitable for transporting survivable packaged fissionables to the Moon. It is not only the fissionables that are required; hundreds of tons of water from lunar ice deposits are necessary to fill the radiation shield for any such Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO).

Eventually lunar resources can be used to actually construct atomic spaceships and also the thorium reactors necessary to power colonies in the outer system. It is the establishment of a beam propulsion infrastructure that will finally open up the solar system to large scale development. This will require a massive infrastructure on the Moon. Such a base will serve as insurance against an extinction level event wiping out our species. As such it deserves a full measure of DOD funding. Like that trillion dollars that is going to be spent on the F-35 stealth fighter over the next half century.

Only monthly Heavy Lift Vehicle launches of payloads to the Moon can be considered as a beginning to a true space program- where Apollo left off. There is no cheap and there is no flexible path.

Please, Dear CERN:

Stop for just two weeks ahead of schedule and the whole planet will applaud.

Everyone is vaguely aware that there exists a 4 years old new result that totally upsets the properties of black holes – the little monsters that CERN is attempting to produce every day.

CERN’s sensors cannot detect them by design, but the first slow enough specimen to stay inside earth will shrink the latter to 2 cm in a few years’ time. No specialist on the planet contradicts my Telemach theorem, published in the African Journal of Mathematics.

The media know that CERN refuses to update its official safety report and its safety page for 4 years – because the named danger would have had to be mentioned for once. Acting while keeping silent is the strategy chosen by Director Rolf Heuer.

Today I am not criticizing him – he no doubt acts in subjective good faith. But I herewith publicly ask him for a Christmas present to the world: JUST TWO WEEKS!!!

Thank you very much.

I want to start a project of better visualization of the problems we face. We ask children to visualize in school but we all could use it. In the common economic discussions trillion dollar budgets and a million dollars are discussed interchangeability shows lack of visualization. The West is heading for currency collapse but austerity measures in Greece just add to unemployment not debt reduction, why is this so hard to visualize?

One clear way to shore up the US economy is to end foreign bases and end the embargo of Cuba. Boycotts hurt both sides, the Cuban economy is smaller so it hurts them more. The US economy is shaky so at some point embargo’s may be the straw that makes us fall apart.

Bumblebees spread beehive syndrome, and all flee the hive after a bee sips from the genetic insecticide in the corn syrup in a discarded soda can. Corn that got cross-pollinated by the wind. How would organically labeling food ingredients help the situation? Only corn from the Southern Hemisphere could be truly labeled, not genetically modified. In the past laboratories blew up, on occasions when an experiment went wrong. The earth not just the mountain section of France and Switzerland is the laboratory when it comes to Large Hadron Collider research.

I want to start a project of mass visualization, but before I post any depressing thoughts, I think I must enclose a little excerpt on the good news in the last election. The Republicans lost much of their base as many Orthodox Jews voted Democrat and Cuban-Americans stopped listening to their hysterical leaders, booting two out of office. Suddenly around the country most Council for a Liveable World candidates won. Suddenly far fewer Americans believe that pot or gay marriage will destroy our country. It is for a moment at least suddenly easier to try to solve out collective problems.

Now that I got that paragraph out of the way, I want to go on with my project of visualizing the world around us.

The following link is about visualizing large sums of money and finance in general,

http://usdebt.kleptocracy.us/

Even many professional economists and physicists envisioned far more as a child then their everyday efforts to skillfully ticker with known formulas a little. Visualizing is considered something for kids to do; something only high pressure salesman ask others to do. A very few individuals continue visualizations all their life, such as Albert Einstein.

We live in a universe with the very small and very large, tiny gamma rays can pass through almost any object so the space between the planets circling the sun must be comparable with the space between atoms circling a molecule. And their must be space as between the stars sub-atomically, if gamma rays can pass trough without bumping directly into some resistance. Gravity increases four times as it gets closer, like swinging a heavy ball around ones head puling it harder toward oneself and it goes faster. Space junk before it hits the atmosphere ends up circling at the speed of about three times a day. If the earth had no atmosphere and was solid with nothing lighter than lead, space junk would circle several times faster before hitting the shrunken earth. The Echo Satellite which I liked to look for at night, much slower, the moon once a month around the earth, the earth once every 365 days around the sun with less pull. If the earth shrunk to a black hole, space junk would spin around until reaching the speed of light and go no faster so instead quickly fall toward the black hole that was the earth.

We consider this kind of visualizing something for smart children, but if this is true then Einstein never grew up.

Enclosed are some links for visualizing quantity,

Google the following and click on quick view, GOOGLE THIS PPT FILE,

http://www.hstwohioregions.org/sitefiles/The%20MegaPenny%20Project.ppt

The ancients had a similar illustration concerning a chessboard. A story of a king impressed by his astrologers predictions offered to give his servant any reward of whatever he wanted and got asked for a seemingly humbly request a grain of wheat (or other versions say a grain of rice) doubled for each square on a chess board and if 16 grains equal a penny, what takes the place of rice and wheat grains in our world, a cubic mound, one quintillion pennies, would be comparable with a cube as high as Mt Everest (scrawl the above link for a fire on quadrillion).

Time visualizing,

http://www.costellospaceart.com/html/time_and_the_speed_of_light.html

Visualizing scale

https://richerramblings.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/visualising-scale/

When it comes to visualizing the four dimensions, the old stand by is Flatland,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland

Where in a two dimensional world certain members appear to have magic by using the third, jumping over barriers appearing to others to be passing right through walls. Actually it is more like us in this corner of the universes living on a frozen lake as amoeba-like oily intelligent blobs that slither around the surface of the frozen lake with little understanding of height. In other words the fourth and fifth or more dimensions are all around us but we don’t notice. If this isn’t true it would mean that dimension is the wrong concept when applying it to time.

There are no sites links that I could find on the dangers and hopes of genetic engineering. However insecticide was genetically implanted on corn for animal feed back in 1991. I see no sense of terror that it might invade the Southern Hemisphere or hear of anyone manually importing Southern Hemisphere bumblebees to our national parks. Now there is fear that the man-make insect terminator genes might spread to rice, wheat and any other plant not helped by insects,

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0040035

There are fantasist genetic experiments cross-breading goats with spiders to create thread stronger than steel, wide goats might live longer if their hair was resistant to being torn apart by wolfs. Creatures with hard to digest inbreed thread or glass-like bits near their muscles and bones from whatever man-made source would crowd out animals who were easier to digest. Labeling foods for genetically modified products is actually of small comfort.

Some dangerous experiments should be done despite the danger. There was suggestions even 45 years ago on lubricating the fault lines to only have small earthquakes from then on. If things went wrong and their was a huge one instead there would be no Japan disaster or any other huge earthquake in today’s world. I don’t know what is equally dangerous and necessary when it comes to food production. Of course none of this is safe.

Physicians like Otto Rossler has extreme trouble visualizing Hawkins Radiation. But those who skillfully push formulas around find it extremely handy and convincing. Hawkins radiation is one of the main reasons Large Haddon Collider research is considered safe despite the fears among some, of an out of control black hole. Another reason is that there are immense forces in the universe, the idea that puny little humans can make major change is very, very unlikely. However, what if dark matter was really small black holes which make up most of the universe.

Puny humans adding one more hole would be a small change in the universe. If the moon collapsed into a black hole it would disappear from the sky. During what was once a eclipse of the moon would instead appear very weird, as light from the stars near by bent to a great degree.

But what if physicists made a mistake that there is a minimum size that a micro black hole could shrink without becoming unstable. If this is miscalculation is true then there would be ever shrinking holes. They could be in the middle of many celestial objects including our earth. When a light wave or something else passes over it, it might result in a little hole like a bullet hole, possible making the wave shift ever so slightly toward the red. On the other hand I could wrong because why wouldn’t it make the wave narrower more toward violet. If it was in temperature close to absolute zero the object baring down on the mini-micro hole might stick to it instead of making a hole when passing through such as in the helium cooling coil of the Large Hadron Collider. I hope the cooling coals or horizontal not vertical preventing an updraft that might keep the hole growing for a short while as gravity pulls it to the center of the earth. Tremendous cold right next to intense heat may not occur without human help.

Now back to the fourth and more dimensions and if time is a dimension time travel all around us like with creatures living on the surface of a frozen lake, that have a dim concept of height.

In the collider experiment some particles are synch together like a flock of geese or a chorus line all appearing moving and disappearing together,

http://sciencestage.com/r/particles-flock-strange-synchronization-behavior-large-hadron-collider

http://allenlrolandsweblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/hadron-collider-reveals-universal-urge.html

Maybe we don’t actually see a moment but several moment segments at the same time so quantum physics is like a little time machine, when something reaches the speed of light it moves over in time if it moves faster we see evidence of more of a wave gamma ray extremely hot and fast moving away from us in time if cooler we detect infrared heat waves that we get to observe a wide section. If you take a one tenth second timed picture of a water wave you would see a fuzzy line where the wave moved during the filming but a far faster wave in an iron bar would be closer to a picture of an ink line. All the waves could move endlessly in time but we note only perhaps a billionth of a second, longer as time speeds up for the object moving away from us so we see a slightly wider than perhaps a billionth of a second and thus more of the wave segment of a wave that if we could see all the time segments would extend endlessly in time not the line segment we see but and endlessly wide sweep.

So the object behind a light wave is perhaps there or not there depending on which time segment it is actually in.

At one point astronomy consisted of a series of epicycles as new information was obtained a new epicycle was added,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysterium_Cosmographicum

With Hawkins radiation and dark matter instead of just invisible ordinary matter with the same proprieties as visible matter we are going through a somewhat similar constantly tinkering with a theory instead of looking for a new one

The problem is the entire earth is a laboratory ready to come apart if something goes wrong. Safety first or else sooner or later one mistake will be the last .

Note: The below is exclusively about the United States of America, yet the theme is international.

Each time an extreme weather event takes place humanity is reminded again that basic preparation for an off-grid experience did not take place across large swaths of an affected population. Ironically, it does not begin to take place, publicly and en masse, after the event.

Saving humanity will have a lot to do with teaching a kid to build a fire, in the near term. More esoteric “preservers” and “shields” have their place, but “Scout” knowledge can produce immediate quantitative and qualitative improvements in humanity’s survival capabilities, fast.

After weather-induced disasters, our tendency is toward construction of physical things – better towers, more resilient dams, improved architecture. Seldom do we do anything to improve ourselves. Thousands remain helpless and dependent in the face of the Hurricane “Sandy” aftermath.

We have the resources in abundance to mobilize a citizenry education program. Many veterans have expert-level qualifications in survival training, for example, and with Internet and iPads their knowledge could be disseminated to every public school auditorium and town hall equipped with electricity at nominal cost, while also providing the instructors with competitive compensation.

To practice and train in the practical skills of preparedness, schools, towns, cities and parks could coordinate to deliver on- and off-site programs all citizens could reasonably take part in over a specified period of time. The goal should be to ensure within a specific time frame every citizen is aware of and able to employ a holistic set of preparedness actions in the event of an emergency. It’s a simple, clear and achievable objective.

It is what we do or fail to do as a society and as individuals to prepare for and learn from risk events that makes them more or less harmful now and in the future. The “existential risk” of extreme weather events, or extreme geological events, or terror events or financial avalanche, or their compounding, barring total annihilation, is the systemic and chronic damage which mutilates the fabric of society over time, making us weaker each time we face a new emergency, and also more prone to creating a new emergency or failing to prepare adequately for the next.

A citizen-wide preparedness program for unplanned emergency off-grid events could be designed for fun, building of comradery and orientation of adults and children toward a grounded, active, positive engagement with a highly variable world, thus doing much to off-set the negative impacts of an increasingly disaster prone environment and also much to build a more internally cohesive society. The literal ROA for investment in citizen preparedness should be exponential if the programming is organized with care, especially when including and evaluating the investment into human capital as an asset class. The very act of addressing how we handle disaster will diminish the potential for disaster itself.

A more self-sufficient and stable citizenry would help to increase public wealth and decrease public debt by limiting or eliminating the public expenditures made after an emergency (through the Federal Emergency Management Agency or through deployment of the military for example). Insurance claims of many types would decrease, new markets for sustainable goods and services would emerge, and dependence for survival upon non-sustainable resources like fossil fuels and coal-powered electricity would be tempered, all with increasing measure and positive impact over time.

A logical step for such a program would be for a public official of rank to announce it as a national priority. This could set a helpful tone of willingness, support or mandate. Local councils and agencies could also come together in confederation and create the same effect. Organizations disposed to the dispensation of preparedness skill sets could also use this time to create momentum.

Becoming competent in the ability to intelligently face adverse conditions is the most important skill required in society today. Until the time when all or a majority of people are able to act with sustained rationality and functionality in an unfamiliar situation or emergency, systems will continue to decay or collapse faster than ability to repair damage or survive impact peaceably.

It was on a long-haul flight many months ago that I recalled a visit to the National Air and Space Museum [1] to a fellow passenger whom I struck up conversation with. Asking if I could recommend somewhere to visit in Washington DC, I recounted how I had spent an entire day amazing at the collection of historic aircraft and spacecraft on my only visit to that city fifteen years or so previous as a young adult — and as always a kid at heart.

Seeing the sheer scale of the F-1 engine for the Saturn 5 rocket first hand, stepping inside an Apollo command module identical to those used during the Apollo program, not to mention seeing full life-size replicas of the Lunar Roving Vehicle, an Apollo Lunar Module and for some reason what seemed most surreal to me… the Viking 1 Lander. This was enchantment.

However, for all the amazement that such a museum can provide, it is also a saddening reminder that what once was the forefront of human ambition and endeavor has now been largely resigned to history. NASA budgets are cut annually [2] whilst military expenditure takes ever more precedence. A planned six percent budget decrease in 2013 is the equivalent savings to three hours of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Instead of reaching to explore outer-space we are encouraged to get excited about the equivalent billions [3] invested on science exploring the subatomic inner-space world. Meanwhile, we tend to forget that the ambitions of space exploration are not just to satisfy some wide-eyed childhood yearning to explore, but the serious and sobering prospect of needing to ensure that we as a species can eventually colonize to other worlds and ensure we are not counting down the days to our extinction on an ever-more-precarious planetary solitude.

In the face of such indifference, such concepts of lifeboats have become marginalized to what is perceived to be a realm solely for loons and dreamers, or ‘space cadets’ as we used to call them back in the days of school. The trillion dollar question really is what it takes to redirect all that military investment into science & exploration instead. It is down to credibility. Governments shy away from investing public funds when there is a lack of credibility.

It was an easy sell to the public to invest in the military after the tragic events of 9/11 and terrorist threats which were presented largely by propaganda/disinformation to the public as an existential risk to the free world. The purse strings opened and an unforgivable amount of expenditure was invested on the military in the subsequent years. Let us hope that it does not take unprecedented natural disasters [4] to awaken the world to the fact that it is nature which poses much greater existential risks to the survival of our society in the long-term.

[1] http://airandspace.si.edu/
[2] http://www.care2.com/causes/2013-nasa-budget-gutted.html
[3] http://www.ibtimes.com/forbes-finding-higgs-boson-cost-1325-billion-721503
[4] http://rt.com/news/paint-asteroid-earth-nasa-767/