Re: Solar powered lasers in space

On 23 Sep, 20:05, Willie.Moo...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

New York is where all the action is taking place.

Precisely my point.

That is basically
why people are there. In point of fact you could get rid of New York
wiithout a fantastic amount of space engineering.

You will always have places like New York. Given human sympathies we
may always have a New York! even if its an historic recreation
between Wall Street and Park Avenue! lol.


This can also be done by developing terrestrial technology.

When you can fly ballistically at 1 gee to any point on Earth in 20
minutes or less (thrusting outward during the middle of the flight to
maintain altitude against centripetal force) - the Earth has in fact
become a global village. There is a strong psychological connection
between the time it takes to get somewhere and what you consider your
hometown. Wherever you can go in 40 minutes or less, you consider
your neighborhood. If it takes longer than 40 minutes, then it
becomes a bother. Longer than 2 hours and its a different place
entirely. So in the days of horse drawn carriages it took 4 hours to
go 10 miles. I live in Columbus Ohio. Within 5 miles of 'downtown'
which used to be Columbus proper, there is Clintonville, and 5 miles
beyond that Worthington. This was the day when average speed of
transit in a horse drawn carriage was 2.5 miles per hour. Today
average speed of transit by velocipede, automotive preambulator,
motorized carriage (which locals call simply 'car') - is 50 mph. So,
the same 5 miles that took 2 hours before - can be traversed in 6
minutes. The separate towns and villages surrounding Columbus, have
merged into a great metropolis, and these villages have become post
office boxes known as sub-urban areas - or 'suburbs' to the larger
city. In fact in two hour you can span over 100 miles - allowing the
City of Columbus to spread across Franklin county forming a single
integrated community. At automotive speeds the Cities of Cleveland
and Cincinatti, Wheeling and Indianapolis, are the nearby towns
today. In an age with high speed subsonic personal VTOL bizjets
capable of 500 mph - the Cities of New York, Chicago, St Louis, and so
forth, will absorb these towns.. and in an era of 50,000 mph VTOL
cruisers - just discussed - the entire Earth will psychologically
become one city - and the orbiting colonies and factories will be the
suburbs, and the moon will be a small nearby town...

Actually ballistic flight may not be the best solution. The solution
may well be to have evacuated tunnels and electromagnetic
acceleration.

One small
point. You are now inplicitly postulating VN machines. If all the work
is done by robots the colony is VN. I personally beieve O'Neill is
only credible in a Von Neumann context.

At some point we will have VN machines. Probably sooner rather than
later. The early work of Johnny von Neumann was so successful and
suggestive of immediate progress, I wonder if this isn't being
supressed along with some of his other stuff related to secret codes.

I don't think so. There are a great many conspiracies but this is not
one of them. I do not think there is any conspiracy in fundamental
science/mathematics. I think that the VN machine has not been built
because in the time of Von Neumann computers just weren't powerful
enough. A similar situation held with regard to language.

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/sci.physics.research/browse_frm/thread/4ec2ce2ba587ed58?hl=en

When we are considering assembling flat packs we are in the situation
of "We can build it if we want to and if we have the imagination". As
far as codes are concerned we already know a lot. We know about the
RSA code the beauty of which is that you can establish it without ever
having to transmit anything in plain text. We know too that with any
generating function we have a code, but we need RSA to set our
generating function up.


How long should we wait. Go now for energy - quite right. VN is at the
end of the road, it has to be.

But we can do a lot in space in the interim. Beam energy from the sun
to provide Earth's energy and provide advanced transportation
technology (light-wing VTOL super-ballistic transport in every
garage) Survey all the small bodies in the solar system. Use the
laser capacity near the sun to capture the richest of these to bring
into MEO. Use the same factories and launchers to put remotely
controlled robots that are shot into space to operate by remote
control within MEO - hire the 1.6 billion unemployed in the world, and
pay them with output from the factory,sell the excess, and keep the
profit.

I don't think it has to be ballistic.


Ditto on terrestrial possibilities.

But that's not needed! There are 3.4 billion men and 3.4 billion
women within 1/7 light second of one another. Its a total waste of
energy to build sexual analogues of them when you can go meet them in
person! Better to spend money to make food production and
distribution more efficient.




Somewhere there is a compromise that suits the majority of
people.

This is only by necessity of our limited technology involving
primitive forms of communication, transportation and production.

I am not so sure. The question I am asking is why do business
executives keep travelling to meetings which are completely
unecessary, even with present day technology.

You can meet people in New York easier than you can meet them
elsewhere. OK perhaps not New York, but you do need a settlement.

Because of our primitive forms of communication. I mean, Bill Deming
demonstrated the importance of gathering quality data during the 1940s
and integrated into production systems that made weapons and so forth
- to solve quality problems with weapons. The Japanese adopted these
techniques across their industry - and the resulting improvements in
quality, volume, and cost allowed them to make very sophisticated
products (automobiles, consumer electronics) very competitively with
established manufacturers, by the 1960s they were making inroads in
the US and Europe, and around the world, by the 1980s, US and other
manufacturers began adopting some of the techniques, it wasn't until
2000 that most manufacturers were ISO 9000 compliant - and this is but
ONE detail where science has impacted manufacturing. There a whole
host of findings that are gathering dust, vonNeumann didn't just
postulate and do work on SR machines, he built prototypes! and its
been a dead letter.

Not completely (see above) Von Neumann lived in the era of valves and
it was hard to execute his devices. The thing I feel now is that we
have computers of fantastic power, in comparison. Somehow though we
have lost a certain amount of vision.

Norbert Weiner, Ken Arrow, Wassily Leonteiff,
have huge bodies of work - just to name a few - with Buckminster
Fuller acting as cheerleader. But all these folks worked in the
1950s. With the exception of Eric Drexler, I haven't seen any follow
up on any of this. And these fols suggest small steps to improve the
efficiency and quality and cost of our productive systems across the
board using cybernetics and advanced math.. haha.. but folks haven't
adopted it. Or have been slow to adopt it. I will say retailers have
adopted retail automation - this is something I had a small part in.
But this is just the smallest drop in a rather large bucket that if we
tapped into it, we could transform life on Earth today without VN
machines - by understanding adopting and adding to the bodies of work
that lie dormant in our collective abilities.


We are basically designed for a hunter gatherer existence. Tis is
perfectly true. Hunter/gatherer bands were (probably) round about
50-100. With that number of people objectives are fairly well agreed.

Correct. One interesting possibility in the near future, if everyone
has access to ballistic transport and the internet, folks can organize
along lines that are most productive and complementary - rather than
geographically.

You don't need ballistic transport - all you need is a decent system
of telepresence. This is achievable in the very near term.

These are all arguments which will be raised by the skeptics. I don't
think there will be any skepticism about energy. I don't think
colonization will be a stated goal for a long time.

Well you disagree with what Werner vonBraun said in The New Horizons
study done for the US in secret following World War 2. VonBraun said
we could have begun colonization of the moon in 1948 and urged the US
to take the leadership position. The work was classified for a number
of years, and his advice ignored until Sputnik.

Fact is, we could start to colonize the inner planets and the moon and
cislunar space today if we had the will to do it.

Yes I do. Werner v Braun - like v Neumann in some respects had a
vision that could not be realized at the time. You cannot consider
space colonies without a drastic reduction in cost. This reduction of
cost is so many orders of magnitude below current costs that a lot a
technology has to be developed first. We can have a power station as
an objective, we can have a VN maschine. Colonies, they will be
objectives when the costs are right.



If you can get onto a downward spiral of costs then things will indeed
happen quickly.

Yes. This is achieved by choosing a valid metric of measurement -
continually reviewing it - and then investing in improving it. We
cannot expect progress in any endeavour until all of these steps are
carried out. Once they are we can expect exponential improvements in
cost in very short times.

But colonies will still not be an objective.

Consider that between 1948 and 1968 we went from the V2 to Saturn V
moonrocket. If our goals were directed a little more rationally, and
LBJ hadn't cut back on nuclear propulsion systems, we could easily
have had some of Philip Bono's NOVA rocket, a Saturn with a nuclear
upper stage, or even Kraft Erikhe's nuclear cruiser to colonize
mars.

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/heliosa.htm

Apart from the nuclear dimension, they were basically larger versions
of the chemical rocket. The nuclear cruise cancellation stems from a
distrust of neclear power. The beauty of a laser is that you can have
what amounts to a Nerva engine in the lower atmosphere without the
risk of nuclear accident.


Basically if you take an outsized Atlas type rocket, that burns
hydrogen and oxygen, put a nuclear thermal sustainer on it, and two
lox/hydrogen engines on the outside, you have a dandy 1 stage rocket
that can take off from Earth, the LOX tanks and sustainers form liquid
boosters that fall off and glide back to the launch center.

The hydrogen fueled sustainer operating at 1,200 sec Isp - blasts the
payload into a Mars trajectory - with sufficient propellant to execute
a soft landing on Mars after an aerobrake entry.

I though the Nerva was round about 950 I may be wrong. I am assuming
just over 1,000 for LH + carbon particles.

Refueling on Mars from local water found there - and decomposed using
a space power version of the nuclear thermal core (built around the
nuclear core of aircraft carriers and nuclear sub power plants being
built at that time) - the vehicle is refueled and takes off from mars
without the boosters (because mars is 1/3 gravity) - and flies back
to Earth, aerobraking here to re-enter and then land - to be fully
reused.

This mars cruiser was designed and could have been built at the same
time the SR-71 was designed and built - 1957. WE CHOSE NOT TO. Using
the same nuclear technology that gave us the nuclear jet cruise
missile (secret) the nuclear sub, the nuclear powered aircraft carrier
and the nuclear airplane.

It would have been very expensive. I doubt seriously whether it could
have been done ast that time.

In terms of politics I think that one significant
factor may well be "What is the smallest quantum of money which will
start the ball rolling.. You can get significant amounts of solar
energy with a fairly large collection area fairly simply. To have a
cheap space launch based on lasers requires another stage.

Well, I've designed very low cost solar panels. And I've incorporated
them into solar synfuel process to create tremendous value. Once
that value is realized, additional facilities will be built.
Additional profits will be earned. And there will exist many large
central solar collector sites that can be improved by simple space
laser. So, I can see things moving rather easily from where I am
today, to where things can be tomorrow.

This is indeed one of the attractions. The smallest quantum of money
will buy you a 1km collection circle. If you can concentrate to 1m
from GEO you need an aperture of 40*1.22m or about 60m diameter. You
need at least 60m to think in terms of a specific impulse of 1,000.
Probably won't cost that much. You will need quite a lot of
experimentation. Would be a far better goal than "back to the Moon".


N Korea is a rogue, but is not rich. I will agree some of the Middle
Eastern rogues are rich.

Is the average Libyan rich? the average Iraqi? the average Iranian?
I don't think so. They have oil and that's it. By not trading with
them that oil is placed in storage - and the remaining oil is
overdeveloped to take up the slack. When the produced oil runs out,
the oil in storage can be brought on line - and overdeveloped as
well. This is a way of producing an extended period of stable prices
for the US. The US can afford to pay high prices moreso than any
other nation. This policy creates an extended period of stable
moderately high price oil that is very beneficial to the US.

I am not at all sure.


I would like references to this. The problem I have always had with
linking US foeign policy to oil is that spending money on defense is
simply not a cost effective way of obtaining oil.

We obtain the oil by buying it always. Taking it off the market and
putting it on the market adjusts supplies, which given the demand,
adjusts the price. It takes very little or no money at all to say -
hey, we're not going to trade with these guys - and don't you trade
with them either. How much did it cost to find out that Libya was a
rogue state? Nothing.

It takes a lot of money to attack someone. Iraq is a major contributor
to the budget deficit.

look at figure 2 in this report

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/feature_articles/2004/wo...

Look at the exponential increase through 1970... that's greater than
5% growth btw. It was this strong global economic growth since the
1950s that led to so many rosy scenarios about a wonderful future!
haha.. anyway (sigh) continue that 7% annual growth rate forward -
on top of 1973 - and you'll see you'll reach the peak that is coming
now in 2026 - by 1986 -

Without the oil crisis we would already be in secondary production.
And what moderate that output? Why did we meander along the
horizontal and not have strong growth for 30 years? Because SUPPLY
was removed from the market.

Far better to spend
your money on nuclear power (peaceful), terrestrial solar power, more
exploration if not space lasers.

Agreed. If you don't step on the toes of special interests who have
invested heavily in acquiring control of reserves. They want to make
sure that the reserves are fully used, and of course get as much
profit as possible from those reserves. This was the view of the
business community in 1950s. Soon science would make nuclear power
too cheap to meter and the age of oil would be gone. This was
derailed at that time. Very similar to the tension between the
electric light and gas lamp in the 1880s. But instead of the new
technology winning out. The old technology won out. Then, in 1964
LBJ aske Brookhaven National Labs to conduct a study to resolve the
looming energy shortages. We KNEW that by 1970 the US would be
entering secondary oil production. BNL came back with a plan. Direct
thermochemical decomposition of water into hydrogen and use the
hydrogen directly or in synfuels by upgrading low grade carbons. LBJ
got bogged down in Vietnam, did not run for re-election and his Great
Society program along with this little piece, was scrapped by Nixon.
The shortages came, the economy went in the dumper, the US went off
the gold standard, OPEC flexed its muscle. There was increased unrest
in the Middle East. The US stop trading with half the reserves and
got everyone else to stop trading too. This created a period of no
growth - but a period where US was in charge of everything. No major
money was spent. People wanted the growth back, an wanted things like
they were in 1960s. Carter came to office - a nuclear engineer -
promising to do something about energy. Before he could turn around
TMI happened and he was urged to drop all references to nuclear power
in his plan. The US spent more money on energy research than in going
to the moon and never produced one damn thing that challenged big
oil. This despite all the expert opinion and all the studies done up
to that time. NONE of the programs that were suggested by the nuclear
industry were adopted. Nothing nuclear came out of the research.
Which brings us to our present situation. Now the hard stop - or real
end of oil on a global scale - will happen in 2026 - and the DOE has
rediscovered the 1964 BNL study and proposed a GEN 4 nuclear program
which is basically that program - to start in 2030. Why 2030? That's
when oil prices will start to falter due to economic depression. The
oil companies have successfully executed their end game - at great
cost to everyone else. .

Capitalism is a flexible system that will produce at a price. The
basic reason why the US is in Iraq is sheer goddam stupidity. Nothing
else. No oil, capitalist oilmen would go nuclear, even solar, even put
lasers into space. They would NEVER have gone into Iraq.

I got very cross when Fred McCall said I should listen to the people
who knew what they were talking about. Clearly they don't.

Did we use up all the stones before we ended the stone age? no. Did
we burn all the trees before we switched to coal? no. Did we burn
all the coal before we switched to oil? no. Did we burn all the oil
before we switched to space power or nuclear power? yes.

I don't think we will. I think once off the ground space will have a
momentum of its own. There is lack of technology and lack of
imagination.
One quite interesting point. Obsidian knives are used in operations at
the present time. They are in actual fact sharper than metal knives!
This is very much in the nature of a BTW.

Its not a matter of technology. Its a matter of politics and lack of
true concerned leadership.

Clearly this long term policy was planned - there are even papers
available from US state department and others. Plainly it was a way
to moderate the supply of oil in a way the benefitted the US relative
to all other players in the market. Obviously this is our primary
motivation. Just compare our attitudes of WMD in Iraq and need to
invade Iran because of a nuclear power program versus our continuing
lack of interest in Pakistani nuclear weapons - which already exist,
and the nuclear program of North Korea (which was of no real interest
until the North shot off a rocket capable of reaching US homeland)

The one reason for attacking Iran is failure in Iraq.

You are looking at the tactical situation we face today and ignoring
the strategic discussion I am trying to have with you.

You cannot advance strategically without tactical victories. There is
one basic point about oil companies that you should never forget. They
HAVE made a considerable investment in alternative technologies. The
strategic aims of a company are to diversify into areas of future
growth. In fact if you want money you should look at people like
Shell.

Shell is dedicated to making money, it is not dedicated to oil. It
looks at the technological and political scene in deciding where to
invest and what to research. There is also quite a lot a kudos in an
oil company diversifying.

Oil, like other companies have to present themselves as being
attractive to young people. Image is vital to them. Any oil company
executive, believe me, would far sooner be in space, or in a
terrestrial desert rather than Iraq.

The fact is that
when the US withdraws Iran will take over the country, either in terms
of a more of less client state (which I think they would prefer) or as
an organic part of a united Persia.

So what? Iran was trying to take over the country when Saddam ran
it? Syria won't sit still and neither will Saudi Arabia. Turkey and
the Kurds will have a say too. So what? That oil means nothing if
we switch to another source. And that only matters to the oil
companies. That's all I'm saying.

Saddam was there stopping them.

Pick up a book on the Ottoman Empire and read it. You might also want
to read the first chapter of THE COMING WAR WITH JAPAN by Merideth and
Lebar I think. Great stuff. Talks about what the US has done to
maintain its strategic position in the world, and suggests what it
might do in the future. Which is not to put the US down. If the US
weren't number one - someone else would be, and things would likely be
far worse than they are.

I think it is possible to envisage a collection of states having a
common policy. I see what you mean. The immediate alternative to a US
world is a Sino Russian world. Al Qaeda has tried to make certain that
the US is defeated. The irony is that they got entangled with a far
more ruthless enemy than the US. The Shiites/Iranians responded to
terror, not with security measures as the US would have done, but with
ethnic cleansing and extermination.

But at some point, the US has to have an end game. At some point the
entire Earth will be politically integrated and peaceful. JFK wanted
to start down that path in 1960. Switch to nuclear power from oil.
Switch from a nuclear competition of the cold war to a space race.
Use our intelligence community to inspire peace and cooperation rather
than seek advantage in pointless competition. JFK lost. Nixon/
Eisenhower won. The economic collapse of the United States in 1975 -
including our failure in Vietnam is the result.

It will have to be.

BTW - The current plans for Iran include "letting the anthill sort
itself out at the end of the strikes". Quite clearly nothing to the US
liking will emerge. There is even the possibility of an intervention
by a third country. Possibly Putin under the unberella of the Central
Asian Federation.

Yes. The chinese are already building an oil pipeline into the
region. This is bad for the US, but not bad for the oil companies
that supply the US. China will have access to low cost energy. The
US will have access to low cost chinese labor. The US will pay more
to the oil companies for the reserves they DO control (they just
signed some deals with Libya) - and they'll get top dollar for those
by the time the US does what it should have done 45 years ago.

The Sino Russian world. Of course a pipeline will enable the Straights
of Hormuz to be closed, while still preserving Iranian exports.


History is what actually happenned, not what might have happenned.

That's a ludicrously stupid statement. History isn't just what's
written in the press releases of the White House. Its what's written
in the secret documents, private agreements, and actions of otehrs as
well.

True. What I wa saying is that you can't say if this or that had
happenned history would be different.

Knowing WHY history happened the way it did is important - and to
understand that, you need to look at the strategic thinking that
informed those decisions and what opportunities they had at that
time. Why don't we do all we can to stop heroin production in
Afghanistan? No one has an answer for that. Why doesn't anyone in
the news media Fox or CNN ask this question? No one has an answer for
that either.

One
thing that someone looking into America from the outside, I am in fact
British, finds hard to appreciate is the fact that America wins large
numbers of Nobel prizes, but has repeated intelligence failures in the
area of public policy. The official CIA report on 9/11 shows almost
criminal negligence - not to mention of course the initial error of
supporting OBL in the first place (that is when he was fighting Soviet
forces).

Agreed. And what's more, Americans for a New Century met in DC in
2000 and concluded that they needed a Pearl Harbor type event to
galvanize public opinion behind their goals of US dominance through
direct military intervention. Also, the folks that were responsible
for the FIRST attack on the WTC were largely apprehended, but some got
away. And those that did were being tracked and monitored by the
FBI. But, when they came back into the US, the US lost track of
them. No explanation. And those guys were on the flights that
crashed into the WTC.

Meanwhile, rather than address these serious questions, you have crazy
folks marginalizing this whole avenue of discussion by saying bombs
were put in the WTC by US intelligence community and so forth.

Bombs in the WTC is very easy to disprove. No debris (except for
engines) was left because aircraft are made out of aluminium which
melts at a low temperature. I sometimes wonder whether the bombs in
the WTC was a story put out by the CIA to cover up the questions that
really should have been asked.

Conspiracy theories do however show a lack of trust in the government.
On whether the Apollo Moon landings really took place, Buzz Aldrin has
said that he believes there should be freedom of speech but people
should be aware of the impression they are giving young people.

My thoughts are different. Dictatorship arises when democracy fails to
answer the problems of a society.

Dictatorships arises for the same reason religions arise and for the
same reason any form of government arises - people have an irrational
relationship to their own power and irrationally give power to father
figures. This has been discussed at length by Freud and Miller.

Islamic society contains one major
contradiction.

Just one? haha.. All religions have multiple contradictions stemming
from poor child rearing. Emotional needs that are not addressed in
childhood, continue buried in the concious of the adult. Sort of like
a mental club foot arising from poorly fitted shoes. So they have a
mental limp! Its easy for bullies to push them over. Same here. The
forms of government that humans adopt have far more similarities than
differences. Those similarities stem not from any rational cybernetic
need - but from irrational emotional needs. Those needs are not
present in properly raise children, or adults who have successfully
completed a valid course of therapy. Those sane individuals are by
far a very minute minority in the population.

Islam sees the spiritual and secular rulers to be one
and the same.

If God exists then every individual is created by God and has a
capacity for direct personal revelation and direct contact with their
creator. According to those who have had such revelantions such
contact is natural and a source of great joy and great wisdom and
peace that surpasses understanding.

If that were true you would not need religious leaders. Ayatollahs
tell you what God's will is. You don't discover it for yourself.

Religions exist to extract temporal power from people by removing the
individual from his or her natural connection with the divine and
substituting a connection with the religious institution. This is the
worst form of blasphemy. Religions are successful at this with people
who as children suffered certain types of mental and physical abuse as
outlined by Miller and others. Religions also promote rules related
to free sexual expression and child rearing that promote the very
abuse that makes it easy for them to retain their power through the
generations. Religions also align themselves with other temporal
powers to maintain their power and control as well.

The Islamic religion is not unique. It shares many features with all
other powerful religions in the world.

Islam is more prone that most. Christ, the Buddha, Lao Tse etc. were
religious leaders/philosophers. Mohammad was a tribal leader who led
his tribe into war.

Islam also shares one feature with Protestantism and that is that
secular prosperity and religion go hand in hand. Nasser was a secular
ruler who did not say his prayers properly and was defeated. We say
our prayers properly have got the faith to suicide bomb - and we are
being defeated too.


Hearts and minds have not been won in the Iraq war either.

They could have up to about 2 days after the statues were pulled
down. But asking the man who lost New Orleans to plan for the post
invasion strategy is asking a bit much. But like I said, this oil is
going to China, and Libyan oil is going to the US, and by 2026 - the
oil companies will have played their end game.

All oil eventually ends up in Rotterdam. Sellers have to sell it,
buyers have to buy it. This is so whatever the political color.

This last
paragraph is a little bit contradictory. The military has tries to win
hearts and minds, but has failed.

The military must rely on their commander and chief to create a
strategy with the expertise he can draw on, central intelligence,
state, others who advise the White House - to come up with a workable
strategy. To throw it on the field commanders or generals even, and
then say they failed is to do them a disservice.

He can call on lots of people. America does wil Nobel Prizes.

It's knowledge is clearly
incomplete, its control of the sources of information incomplete.

Yes. What is reported on CNN is self-consistent. But is incomplete.
Fact is, there is a lot more opportunity for action than you recount
here. Fact is,these were ignored. Fact is, Bush had no idea how to
handle post invasion.. Fact is he had no idea because he gave it no
thought - had he given it some thought and authorized action on it -
he would have had a workable plan. But that didn't happen. Fact is,
the President is responsible for this failure and he has not stood up
and taken full responsibility for it.

I ask the question again. How come America can win Nobel Prizes but
can't get a strategy for Iraq right.

You know my perennial hobbyhorse AI. Now in the future television
programs are going to be sent to us via the Internet. Google is going
to control our hearts and minds.

This proceeds from the false assumption that people are merely robots
that respond to inputs. Fact is, we have the capacity to create our
own ideas and follow through on them - stemming from deep seated
desires.

Now Google is in fact international.
I have talked about Radio Reloj (which in fact is the name of a radio
station in Cuba) in the context of SETI. Sync pulses can be obseved
tens of parsecs away.

You are making non-sequitor statements.. this makes no sense in the
context of what we were discussing.

We are made by our experience and sources of knowledge. Television is
one of the major sources of knowledge we have. If an AI system is
creating our experience it seems clear that it would have enormous
power.

Quite clearly the demise of Radio Reloj will have a lot to say about
how we perceive the word. We have to be certain that AI provides a
neutral picture. So far Google seems to be doing.

You are not making any sense at all. I thought you meant AI =
Artificial Intelligence. I know what Google is. I don't no what
Radio Reloj is. But if you think that by listening to a media source
you can change life experience in any tangible way you are mistaken.

No, television has been a major part of our culture since it was
invented. Our views are formed by the sources of information we have -
And it won't just be television, it will also influence the way we are
educated.

I think we should distinguish between religion and belief in God.

I think you need to distinguish between belief in something and the
direct experience of that thing.

Religious leaders cannot therefore have had any direct experience.

Science is neutral about belief in God as such.

Science is a greek word for knowledge. The scientific method arose
around the 13th century when a group of priests had an argument over
the meaning of the Word of God as passed down to them through Text.
They hit on the idea that God create nature and if there was a
reliable way to read Nature, then we could understand God that way,
without worrying about the truth or untruth of this or that word. To
distinguish this form of knowledge, derived directly from the natural
world, these folks called the results of their method after the Greek
word for knowledge, Science - and the method the Scientific Method.

From that time to this Science has accumulated in its power and its

capacity in human affairs. Religions based on interpretations of
ancient texts have not. No system of government has accumulated power
except by abrogating to itself the results of Science. An approach to
examining the human mind has only been developed in the last century
by Freud. In the past decade a few brain chemistry researchers and
therapists have suggested using DMT in a controlled setting to bring
about religious insights to people who seek them and have prepared
themselves for them.

As far as orgainized
religion is concerned the difficulty I have with it is the intolerance
it shows.

Any temporal power must explain its shortcomings to the faithful.
Since religious organizations exist only to perpetuate their temporal
power, they create stories that explain their shortcomings in a way
that expands their power. This leads naturally to stories where they
and the faithful are blameless, while others who are not part of the
faithful are to blame for any and all shortcomings.

Islam is unashamedly temporal. The others are in differing degrees.

There are a lot of religions saying contradictory things.

Because things are said to take advantage of the irrational feelings
people have and need not be logical or consistent - the only
requirement is that the faithful are filled with shame remorse and
self-loathing, and at the same time hope for the future, by
surrendering themselves to the authorities and through promises to
come to understand and adhere more closely to authorities in the
future.

Now, this is distinctly different than surrender to God, or to the joy
and hope within that sees shame remorse and self hatred as a form of
madness.

Surrender to God (Islam) or surrender to his self appointed
spokespersons.
They can't all be right.

None of them are,

Either one of them is right or they are all
wrong.

They are all mad. Various individuals certainly had a direct
revelation of the divine at some time in the past. And some of them
were able to organize followers and some sort of institution to pass
on the wisdom of the individual. Those institutions responding to the
pressures that temporal power exerts, chose temporal power over the
divine message. In fact, the message was edited and reformed many
times to meet the needs of this or that dictator. Look at what
Constantine did to the Gnostics! It happens in all religions. So, I
feel quite confident in saying they are all mad. When you have
churches urging young men to go to war in the US, or when you have
mosques recruiting young women to blow themselves up in crowded places
- is one very different from another? no. they're all mad and have
sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

Organized religion claims to have a red phone - dial "A" for
Allah. He does not seem to have taught them how to live in peace.

Peace can only come about by loving yourself and honoring the voice
within and knowing that nothing at all can threaten what is and that
what is is perfect. Religions seek to undermine this 'oceanic
feeling' and create generation after generation of people that die
bitter and frustrated.

Agreed

A genuine religious experience?

It doesn't take much. Given that God created you and is still in
contact with you. But religions would have you think its the most
difficult thing. Or make you feel guilty if you think you had one.
Or demonize you if you stuck to your guns. Otherwise, they'd lose all
authority relatively quickly.

Possibly, but organized religion is
not about religious experience.

Interesting that you say that. That's the problem.

On the personal level. People are drawn to religions because they are
seeking something that is missing in their lives. Maybe they suffered
a loss of a loved one. Maybe a financial reversal. Maybe they're
battling alcohol or drug addiction. Maybe they're doing well in every
part of their life, but feel empty anyway. They are seeking a
connection with the divine. they are seeking a religious experience.
And the religion is telling them they have the answer. they know the
way. they know the truth. And people surrender to the religion and
adopt its precepts and they're stuck since the religion doesn't offer
the experience they seek - merely exploits their need for it.

On the theoretical level. Religions have a book, writings of holy men
and women. These people are holy because they have been transformed
by their religious experience. These people started out quite
modestly. They had an insight an experience. They shared it. It got
recorded. And a religion began.

They have genuine insights mixed up with other things. I think in fact
Mohammad did have insights (he believed in more rights for women) not
all of which were shared with his followers. Being a war leader he had
to compromise.

It is about in groups and out groups.
I will kill you if you don't say your prayers as I say them.

It depends what sort of stresses exist within the religious
community. Certainly, if the religion feels threatened by the
faithful blaming them for their discontents, they crack down on the
faithful and cast blame on to the non-faithful. If the religion feels
powerful and discontent doesn't exist among the faithful, then the
religion can take responsibility for the good feeling and generally
they laugh at others misfortunes blaming their lack of faith for that.

Religious
experience on the other hand tends to be "Buddhist" in a very broad
sense, and spans the different traditions.

Buddha said talking about religious experiences is like a finger
pointing at the moon. If you have a dog, and you point at something,
the dog looks at your finger. Because dogs aren't that abstract in
their thinking. haha.. But a religious experience is not based on
words, or logic even. So, this is where the religions get into
trouble right at the outset. Words can only point at what is
important - what is important cannot be expressed in a word. So
they're only approximations to the truth. They're never the whole
truth. But there are Christian retreats designed to invoke a direct
connection through Christ. There are Muslim activities directed toward
having a direct revelation. These are highly controlled and anyone
not following the party line can quickly get into trouble. For
example, there was a Muslim leader who organized the destruction of a
Buddhist icon in Afghanistan about 10 years ago. They got together
and prayed and then went about destroying one of the largest buddah's
in existence. As he clambered to the top of the statue and started
breaking it apart with a sledge hammer - he had a revelation. He
realized that a thousand years ago he was a Buddhist who invaded this
region and erected this statue. That was what he thought. He stood
up and looked around and started telling people to stop. They thought
him mad but out of respect stopped. He went to the Mullah and
explained what had happened. He sent him to a mental hospital and
extracted a recanting from him using modern medical techniques of
torture. As it stands, the guy went bonkers and his story is of no
account. But that's only the history the way it was written by those
there. The reality is that the guy had a direct revelation - which he
believed to be very personally powerful to him and answered questions
for him that he personally had asked.

And it was an experience that did not exclude other experience.


This may be true. I think though in a very real sense the type of
framework provided by Organized Religion may in fact stop one thinking
in this sort of way.

Religions exist to perpetuate the power of the religions. If thinking
a certain way undermines a religion then the religion is against it.
If thinking a certain way empowers the religion then the religion is
for it.

The Pilgrim Fathers did not go because they were
awaestruck with America. They went because James I wanted rid of them.

That's right. But don't underestimate that. In today's world James I
would have no place to send them, and so would be forced to a final
solution of some sort.

And he would be scared of giving them a VN machine.

Yes indeed, but I want governments to be elected that attempt to
better the lot of Mankind. This is one factor that will influence me
in my decision of who to vote for.

But Ken Arrow showed in 1950 that voting doesn't work the way we think
it does, so its all a sham. His data has been used to increase the
power of the specialists at great cost to the public. So your vote is
meaningless.

It is when we do not fully understand the issues.

It is also possible that AI will influence the course of government.
Asimov talked about the laws of robotics.

This was just a part of a sci-fi story. It was only later that folks
wondered about it. As a practical matter it has yet to have any
impact on human affairs - except as an idea.

With the rise of digital
feeds Isaac Asimov immediately springs to mind.

But there are no Asimov laws in any software or hardware around
today. So, its weird to hear you speak as if Asimov's 3 laws actually
exist in some real sense. haha.. People talk about Santa Claus, but
they seldom talk as if Santa actually exists. Same here. The idea
exists certainly. The thing itself does not.

Content should be
provided and indexed impartially.

Should be? How?

Asimov I believe would have wanted
his robots to combat antsemitism.

Are you the person who said history is what really happened? Just
checking. haha.. Asimov was a science fiction writer and a popular
writer of science - a science journalist. He had a background in
biology. Wasn't very good at math. He never built any robots.
Robots of the type he imagined in his stories never existed and may
never exist. So his robots were incapable of doing anything being
ideas in Asimov's head. Asimov knew this, so I doubt Asimov wanted
them to do anything except be interesting characters in a story that
would sell.

As far as anti-semitism is concerne, Asimov was a Jewish emigre to the
United States -

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

and the worlds he imagined for his robots did not involve anti-
semitism at all. Although his robots did have a sort of predilection
toward isolating humans from one another when they outnumbered humans
creating some interesting outcomes - IN FICTION!!!


No I was commenting on the logic of his 3 laws, not rewriting history.
I am saying that we must work to insure nothing like that ever
happens again. Producing a just world is very much a part of what AI
should be about. This is what I am saying.
Today we do not feel as much threatened by other nations as by
individuals who want to kill us and are often not too worried if they
kill themselves too.

I thought you said you were British? hmm.. Look, people surrender
power to those they think can help them accomplish what they feel
needs accomplished but cannot do it themselves. The modern nation-
state has exploited this process to maintain control over its people
using all the knowledge at its command.

We should be attempting to go to a supranational world. We should and
I think must ensure that technology in general and AI in particular is
used to this end. I want to see technology srerving humanity not the
current status quo.

All nations do this. In a world where the Soviet Union collapsed and
was no longer a credible threat, the US neede another enemy. So, we
turned a blind eye and let the second attack on the WTC happen.

But terrorism isn't new. We've had suicidal terrorists since Thomas
Rainsborough! (1647) haha.. and the powers that be have used them,
or any enemy they could impress the public with to raise taxes and
exercise ever more power over their subjects.

The thing is, we need to change the paradigm under which we operate if
we want to change our condition - and this takes a change in the way
we raise our kids and the way we deal with our emotions in adulthood.

Agreed. AI is I believe capable of changing the paradym.

Nation states have a monoply of force. I believe that a world without
nations would be an ideal to strive for.

No one has power over you unless you give it to them. The more people
that take their power back for themselves the weaker nations and
religions become. In the end, they will collapse as people find a
better way for themselves.

How will they find a better way? Information is needed.
Quite clearly it is also an
idea that no one wants.

People who do not own their own power feel naked and threatened by the
idea of there being no nations and religions. People who own their
own power - are not beholden to anyone, and the nations will fall of
their own accord once a tipping point is reached.

Looking at the situation from Britain we have
the EU. Now governments, including Gordon Brown want to bring about a
common European sovereignity. Quite laudable you might say.

Depends on the details. None of this gets us past Arrows
impossibility theorem. So, its really quite mad to try to do anything
within a system that doesn't work.

Governments have negotiated an EU treaty which the voters are throwing
out. Gordon Brown is not going to face a referendum here, he will get
the treaty ratified by Parliament. Governments are persuing what might
be termed rational policies as far as they can. They are definitely in
advance of their populations.

Nonsense.

The British people are Eurosceptic and would vote the treaty out. It
is not a big deal but a treaty is better than no treaty.

I think you misundrstand, conflict is part of the game.

There is no game. Conflict beetween Shiites and Sunnis stem from the
need for each to project blame outside their own circle to solidify
control over their faithful. This is madness - and leads to madness -
and has nothing at all to do with the insights that the religion was
orignally set up to spread and honor.

The Sunnis and
Shiites each cose an outcome which led to 4 million refugees.

Its all madness - and its not a rational choice - and it cannot be
sustained.

The Sunnis and Shiites have a matrix of reults, this is the essense of
a game. If they cooperate there is one outcome. If they don't there is
another. The Sunnis/AlQaeda blew upthe mosque at Karbala. I don't
think they knew what the outcome would be for them.



It is true that mutual cooperation will provide the highest score but
they contive not to.

Let us look at the outcome of a staghunt. The Tigres and Euphates are
powerful rivers. In the time of the old Babylonian kings 3 crops a
year were produced. That is before oil comes into consideration.
Nobody would have had to have left their homes there would be electric
power 24/7 and the country would be on the road to prosperity.
However ...... How basically do you get people to look after their own
interests.

By empowering them as children and teaching them to trust their own
inner voice.

I thnilk there are other things too,

It is how you say your prayers - not resources.

No, in times when there is plenty, in times when things are going
well, the religions take responsibility for that, and point to anyone
not doing well as an examplar of what happens to unbelievers. They
could care less about how non believers pray.

In times of scarcity, in times when things are going badly, the
religions project blame to the non-believers, particularly if they are
doing better than them, and seek to destroy them - in their
destruction will the faithful win their release. This is true in the
modern age, as it was true in the time of the Inquisition. It was the
failure of Spain as a world power that led directly to the Spanish
Inquisition.

False - The Inquisition stated when the Christian Spanish were
fighting the Moors. 1492 in American history is the data of Columbus
sailing. In fact it was also the date of the capture of Granada the
last Moor stronghold in Spain. The Inquisition existed thoughout that
period.

So, it is resources squandered in the hands of the irrational that
lead to religious conflicts.

There is enough in
Iraq for everyone there and for everyone to come home.

No there isn't. Not when the nation is isolated from world trade by
US edict. These tendencies toward conflict are then exploited to keep
everyone focused on local events and not project power outside the
region. Read the first chapter of TE COMING WAR WITH JAPAN and then
we can talk.


Did he now. He, more even than Lyndon Johnston, was the architect of
Vietnam.

Nonsense.

Robert McNamara said that Kennedy was strongly considering pulling out
of Vietnam after the 1964 election. In the film "The Fog of War", not
only does McNamara say this, but a tape recording of Lyndon Johnson
confirms that Kennedy was planning to withdraw from Vietnam, a
position Johnson states he disapproved of. Additional evidence is
Kennedy's National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) #263 on October
11, 1963 that gave the order for withdrawal of 1,000 military
personnel by the end of 1963. He did get involved and overthrew the
Diem government. But Kennedy was generally moving in a less hawkish
direction in the Cold War since his acclaimed speech about World Peace
at American University the previous June 10, 1963.

After Kennedy's assassination, new President Lyndon B. Johnson
immediately reversed Kennedy's order to withdraw 1,000 military
personnel by the end of 1963 with his own NSAM #273 on November 26,
1963.

Nations of Earth
would compete with one another in developing resources and capacities
off world in the frontier of interplanetary space - much as Europe
developed sea faring capcities and avoided conflict for hundreds of
years - while engaging in powerful competition across the world. This
was his vision - that the US would be the first among all nations to
develop the opportunities and resources of interplanetary space for
the betterment of mankind.

He was shot in November 1963 and in December 1963 Lyndon Johnson and
Robert McNamara cut back on the nuclear propulsion programs of the
US, the scope and range of post- apollo landing, and spent more money
on Vietnam. In the end the US spent $20 billion on moonships with 5
dead, $200 billion on Vietnam, with 50,000 dead, and $2,000 billion on
ICBMs, with potential 5,000,000,000 dead.

The irony is that I am not asking for people to be unselfish.

Cooperation does not require one to be unselfish.

In
fact in some ways I am asking them to be more selfish.

Selfishness depending on context can be good or bad for society.

Spoken by a true bweiever the games theory. You can be selfish and
hunt the stag.

Transaction analysis - yes.


Yes and religion (org) also gives a double standard sexual morality. I
suggested sending those Iraqii girls from Damascus nightclubs into
space. This very much stems from the words on the Statue of Liberty.
They have said thier prayers the wrong way, they have been booted out
- and to cap it all they are now moral outcasts. This is organized
religion for you.

This would echo James I solution for the Pilgrims.
I don't somehow think James I would have let his pilgrims loose with
VN machines. I think King James would have wrestled with how to
control them.

- Ian Parker


.

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