Re: The Moon

From: william mook (william.mook_at_mokindustries.com)
Date: 10/10/04 

Date: 10 Oct 2004 06:39:25 -0700

"wally" <wallyg@citysyd.com.au> wrote in message news:<416504d8$1@dnews.tpgi.com.au>...
> "Alan Erskine" <alanerskine1@yahoo.com.au> wrote in > We can get people to
> the Moon in five years,
> > not the fifteen GWB proposes.
> > Give NASA a real challenge
>
>
> yeah, stop world poverity, wars///

Space travel can end world poverty and stop wars. That's the whole
point.

Rising population levels and limited resources mean a rise in poverty.
 Tension over resource shortages lead inevitably to conflict.

Space faring technology gives humanity the capacity to tap into
resources off-world and bring those resources to bear on the problems
of poverty. Easing resource limits reduce economic tensions that lead
to war.

While NASA is not particularly well suited to this task, NASA can play
an important role in space travel development. Just as NACA played a
role in the development of air travel.

This would require a change of focus at the agency - and increased
funding.
 
The discussion below expands on some of the statements above.

First we must understand the cause of systemic poverty and wars.
Systemic poverty is quite different than poverty due to psychological
failings related to earning a living. Systemic poverty affects whole
populations and is caused by resource shortages.

So,

1) Limited strategic resources can cause nations to engage in power
struggles over those resources which can lead to war.

http://www.ppu.org.uk/war/future_wars.html

2) The way children are raised in the modern world affords them scant
respect. This creates a fascination with wealth, power and death and
leads to a propensity to support actions that lead to war in a
significant minority of adults raised this way.

http://www.noogenesis.com/malama/abuse/miller.html

3) Voting and markets are incapable of doing what people routinely
expect of them. No method of counting can be used to accurately
measure the will of a population of individuals.

http://www2.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/arrow.htm

SOLUTIONS

Solar power at a cost that displaces oil, coal and nuclear sources.
Even if produced by terrestrial collectors, solar power is energy
arriving on Earth from off-world. So, this is a space based resource-
the first and most ancient.

Solar power satellites - expanding on terrestrial solar power.

Capture of rich asteroids to supply strategic materials via remotely
controlled work force.

Supply situation;
http://www.wws.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/byteserv.prl/~ota/disk2/1985/8525/852504.PDF

Moving asteroids;
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/asteroid%20deflection

Remotely controlled workers;
http://asimo.honda.com/index.asp?bhcp=1

So, space technology can allow us to harvest critical energy and
materials in sufficient abundance and at a cost that provides for all
our material needs - even if our population should exceed 10 billion
people!

We can expand upon this concept to place all major industry in Earth
orbit, including farms and forests - to provide all the world's food
and fiber while simultaneously letting the world go back to nature.
People would then be capable of living at very high standards in a
vast global nature preserve - sustained by resources and processes
located in Earth orbit, fed by asteroids made into new moons.

All this is possible by the development of space faring technology.

How we organize our affairs effectively will take new discoveries -
which have little to do with space faring technology. However, any
coordination of global resources will require space based
communication and sensing technologies to work efficiently.

I have proposed my own solution to Arrow's Paradox. Namely, get rid
of scalars as the means to measure preference. Preferring instead,
vectors. Then, arrange the use of these vectors in a way that causes
rational social choices to emerge naturally from the interaction of
these vectors in an electronic market place.

done

Relevant Pages

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