Space Ports - Supply Chains and 3-D Printing Discussion

Many scientists working at NASA had always considered the space shuttle more of a space truck. In a way that's true, it had a giant cargo bay and that is what it was used for. Was that really a waste? Perhaps not, because if we are to have lunar colonies and Martian colonies then we are going to need a rather robust supply chain, and we are going to need space trucks which can go back and forth. The space shuttle is a decent design, and although it may not be the final design of the space truck, we sure learned a lot in the process.

Don't think for one minute that that knowledge and technology or those areas of science will go to waste, you'd be mistaken. In the future there will be spaceports with a space distribution system. We will also be in the age of 3-D printing. However many of the molecules which will be assimilated at perhaps the nano-scale for many of the things that they make off world may not be available on those planets, or we will not have the mining operations necessary to dig up those materials there. They will have to be brought from somewhere else. Perhaps in giant hoppers on space cargo vessels, and they will be a very valuable commodity.

There was an interesting article in the Economist March 12, 2012 titled; "Ports in the Storm - Building Euro-Zone Competitiveness - Portugal needs to privatize its ports to reap the full benefits of its location. The latest in our series on reforming Europe's economics," and accompanying this piece was a map of all the sea routes which show Portugal's obvious strategic location as a hub port. I couldn't agree more, and it also noted the volume of trade coming through their three main ports.

Now then consider a future with people living on the Moon in human colonies. We will need distribution hubs. Perhaps orbiting warehouses, and places where the gravity dwell is much less than that of Earth to save on the efficiency moving products to and from. We may have satellite warehouses at Lagrange points as well. We may also have hospitals, space hotels, and Earth defense systems there in case we have to take out an NEO Near Earth Object such as an asteroid on its way to hit our planet or Moon. Yes, if we have colonies on the Moon we must also protect them from incoming objects at high rates of speed.

Have you ever noticed all the craters up there? Then you see what I mean. What I'm saying is we will need a superior supply chain, and it will exist in the future in a new era of 3-D printing. We will not be taking everything fully manufactured from Earth, much of the manufacturing will be done there on site, using materials, molecules, and alloys perhaps put together at the molecular level, and 3-D printed from there. Please consider all this and think on it.

Cultural Awareness and the Decelerating Development

Cultural awareness can be divided into two groups. The first group is the asymmetric individual cultural awareness. It is grown through the experiences, learned abilities and -knowledge in relativity with the membrane culture the individual has lived in. This also includes the base culture of an individual, the family culture, which influences in psychological development the most.

The second group is the mass awareness of the individuals a part of the host culture, combined into a larger whole from the features mentioned above.

So, how can we understand how the cultural development can be decelerated? We can approach this from the content of awareness in a mass. And then, by understanding the collective time produced by the combined individuals. The collective time of a population of 10 000 000 individuals can be for example be formulated to be 16 hours of waking hours * 10 000 000. This leads to the total of 160 000 000 hours/day. If all of these individuals are active members of society, then what they can in a mass accomplish would take for one individual 18 264 years to accomplish. That is, if all of the individuals would spend their time productively for the whole 16 hours/day.

The deceleration takes place in how the content of the awareness in a mass is divided. Their skill set, and knowledge, downsized with focusing the time available for a day to unconstructive actions and knowledge.

In order for the culture to avoid various decelerating variables, mentioned in this paper and in the vaster variety not mentioned, the responsibility does not fall as much for the education system as it does to the individual. Such ideals as the mastery of knowledge and such icons as polymaths do not appear to be as important for the mainstream culture now as it did in the time of renaissance. What we have in fact experienced is a decadence and deterioration of the highest ideals of humanity.

The time and development of the individual's awareness in existence is consumed by mass media, commercialism, values, and gaming. They are in the value of knowledge and time spent as a mortal irrelevant at best. This corruption and psychological pollution of commercialism decelerates the development of a culture. It slows it down and produces awareness that has no relevance to the real world. The icons of renaissance have been replaced by less than mediocre celebrities. And worse, the lives have been focused into a spending spree of dissipating ideals until the next season of fashion and trends of commercialism appear.

Yet Another Think Tank Strategy for Stopping a Hurricane, Perhaps a Tornado Too?

Over the years, our think tank has come up with many strategies to stop or kill a hurricane. It's a lot more difficult than you might imagine, as it's a lot easier to prevent one from forming then to stop one which has been fully formed and has gained significant momentum. Okay so let's talk about this for second shall we?

Back in 1962 the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory came up with a concept to cut holes in the clouds, it was a rather interesting technique they used. Today, we have the ABL Airborne Laser 747 project being tested by Air Force Research Lab which could be used for essentially the same thing - only way more potent. Is it possible to use airborne lasers to cut holes in hurricanes?

The biggest problem is that hurricanes are constantly moving around, so you can't actually cut a hole in its side. But perhaps you could take three or four lasers lifting their angle vertically, and then back down again causing a jagged graph like effect disrupting the eye wall. If you could do that it would allow the trade winds access to the low pressure area in the center, and disrupt the eye wall while it was going through its reforming process. It could work.

Indeed, perhaps we should try just to see what happens. Perhaps we could do it through a simulator using a supercomputer CADCAM program which predicts the weather. We have the processing capability, and we do know a thing or two about hurricanes, we fully mapped several of the now. With this technology we could do a simulation and see if it would work.

Now then, could we use it to also knock down a tornado? What if we took an ABL on a C-130 platform following those areas where there were converging fronts and all of the necessary elements and components for tornado formation, and then flew around until we found a tornado and chopped it into pieces or caused it to separate, which would lift it up off the ground where it wouldn't do any huge amount of damage.

Drilling holes or slicing a tornado in half could really disrupt its structure thus, it should fall apart on its own, although it is massively powerful and creates its own airflows, it is inherently unstable and it only takes a little bit to disrupt it especially a small size funnel cloud. Indeed, I propose we practice on water spouts during the next Hurricane which brushes the shoreline causing such mini-tornados off shore. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.

Flying Cars, Airspace, Autonomous AI, and Traffic Schemes Considered

Not long ago I was talking to a fellow private pilot and he also happened to be a former airline pilot about the prospects of flying cars in our future. One of the biggest challenges will be that if there is an accident, that would be considered a midair collision, and it's not as if you can just pull over the vehicles and exchange insurance information. When two aircraft hit generally they come crashing down. Okay so, how might we prevent all of this?

Well, consider if you will all the autonomous work that Google is doing with the self-driving cars. If you'll recall DARPA had the grand challenges motivating automotive high-tech folks to get together with computer science engineers to build the first autonomous cars - now we have them, and Google has received a license from Nevada to drive their robotic car around all by itself. There will be issues with flying cars if we allow people to control them because they will be going every which way and there will be lots of crashes as these vehicles or personal flying craft proliferate.

A smart concept would be to have each one of these cars talking to centralized control, in a very similar way as an air traffic controller in controlled airspace, but the only difference would be there wouldn't be in human involved at all, just a centralized computer system. When you wanted to go somewhere, you would put in the coordinates get to where you wanted to go and then tell the car you are ready, and it would contact the computerized system which would then give authorization for it to take off and go on the approved route.

Chances are the approved route may not be direct due to privacy issues, for instance folks that live in gated communities or high-rise buildings wouldn't want flying cars zooming overhead or alongside violating their privacy. Also if there was ever an emergency or your autonomous car might crash, we wouldn't want it to crash over a school, or an open assembly of people such as the Stadium, or a large event in the park. Surely you can see that.

The computer system would realize and already know the safest routes, and the location of all other personal flying craft and aircraft in the area, as that would prevent midair collisions. Your flying automobile would also be communicating with all other flying personal craft, to prevent midair collisions in case something happened with the main system. That's pretty much about the only way it could work and still be safe. Please consider all this and think on it.

A Hollow Earth Beneath Our Feet

Whispers and myths of a hollow earth have been with us for a very long time, the earliest references come from ancient people's legends about how and where the human race was born, the Inuit people of Greenland and Northern Canada tell stories of a great land far to the north, where it never gets dark, this place has a mild climate and large lakes that never freeze, where strange animals move in herds, and where birds of many colors fly overhead. A Welsh story writer from the 12th century named Walter Mapes wrote about a prehistoric king of Albion (Britain) named Herla. When King Herla became lost from his soldiers in a great forest he was approached by a dwarf king who took Herla through a tunnel which opened in a sandstone cliff, down into the earth where time ran differently to the world above. Of course both of these accounts can easily be written of as fanciful tales but what has been written about the hollow earth subject in more recent times?

Athanasius Kircher was a German scientific researcher and expert linguist, he lived from 1601 to 1680 and was adept in twelve european and oriental languages, he tried to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics before the Rosetta stone was discovered in 1799, but unfortunately failed to translate them. He also deeply studied and wrote about China, the tower of Babel, mathematics, cosmology, magnetism and medicine, but the reason he's making an appearance in this article is for his book titled the subterranean world in which he writes about the Earths tides being influenced by a subterranean ocean and vast underground caverns. Athanasius was so interested in the idea of a hollow earth that he once paid a guide to take him up mount Vesuvius and lower him into the volcano's crater, which was dangerously close to erupting, so that he could study it from inside.

Next we have the astronomer and physicist Edmond Halley, who was born on the 8th of november 1656 and is famous for working out the orbit of (his) Halley's comet. He was also deeply intrigued with the hollow earth legends and first suggested his hollow earth theory in 1692, he theorised that the outer shell was roughly 500 miles thick and that there were two inner shells, each shell including our surface has an ozone layer and the spectacular lights of the aurora borealis were the inner ozone seeping through the north and south poles. For Halley his theory also explained why magnetic compass readings went haywire in certain areas, his thinking being that the inner shells gravity was throwing them off.

Now we get to the more interesting and weirder first hand account of admiral Richard E. Byrd. Byrd was a naval officer and his primary duties involved exploring the north and south poles by air. The official accounts of his polar adventures are relatively mundane but from his own personal diary comes an amazing account in which he claims to have flew into a great opening at the north pole where his aeroplane was intercepted by "advanced flying machines" which escorted him to a great city. After being allowed to rest Byrd was interviewed by the senior residents of this city, and during the interview he was told that they were greatly concerned about the work our scientists were carrying out with harnessing the power of the atom, specifically bomb development. Of course admiral Byrd's story has been condemned as false by official sources but of course any government trying to keep such a thing quiet for the psychological benefit of their populace or work force would seek to discredit a witness's testimony such as admiral Richard E. Byrd's who referred to the Arctic as "the land of everlasting mystery".