Video about NASA.gov – draft sketch of some issues and ideas

Ben NASA Profile Video 1 Trying to summarize the methods and issues and goals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aARsXPWQnRo

This is a draft review of some NASA.gov pages. I am trying to formalize and simplify the recommendations for the whole Internet. NASA is so important to the human species right now. If this solar system colonization goes smoothly and well, then it changes the whole course of human development.

I see, because I look at the whole of human knowledge, much of which is hinted at or shown on the Internet – the fantastic potential for new things. Want so colonize the moon? – get people together on the Internet and fill in everything you find and can model or estimate. Want faster-than-light vehicles and communication? There are people working on it seriously. Will it come to anything soon? It might go faster if people got together and shared the work on models.

The “open” communities on the Internet are clumsy and slow. They still force all users to memorize long sequences of constantly changing instructions – to do the simplest things. Want to model the universe? There are people doing that – but they have not learned how to share what their tools.

My intuition, honed by hammering on these kinds of global problems for more than 50 years now, is that when the exascale groups, the 3D modeling and simulation groups, the symbolic modelers, the engineering toolkit groups, the online calculator groups, the Wikipedia article writers who use equations or data of any sort, the many groups writing software — when they really work alongside their user as partners and collaborators – they will start to see new ideas, new ways of looking at problems, that are much faster and easier.

It is simple? No. But I have learned something really important – “it is not hard (intrinsically impossible), just tedious”. You can do most anything you tackle if you put all the pieces where every one can see them, allow everyone a chance to try, actively look for bottlenecks (putting things on paper and forcing people to try to recreate from a few hints).

I wish I could just pour my life’s experiences into everyone’s memory – concise and immediately usable. But you can see in this video, I am still struggling. i get tired, and there is so much I don’t know. And there are so many needs, and even more potential and possibilities in a world with 7.8 Billion unique and creative individuals.

Richard Collins, Director, The Internet Foundation