Solar system colonization – needs and opportunities, “working globally” becomes “working solar system wide”
With LEDs going to lower and lower energies, moving electrons is probably less expensive than digging holes and trying to concentrate the rather thin light on Mars.
I was gathering what groups and resources are needed to send small nuclear packages to Mars to provide the energy needed. The old dream of atomic energy was to have it safe, clean and universally accessible. There is plenty of oxygen on Mars and the moon as oxides lying everywhere. With plenty of energy, your melt it, separate it electrolytically and have metals of various sorts as byproducts. Molten glasses are useful in their own right. My direction is something I have tried to do all my life – what I call “intermediate nuclear materials” and now call “atomic fuels”. These use bond strengths in the kiloElectronVolt range. Not the under 20 electron volt “chemical fuels”, or the over 1 million electronvolt per bond “nuclear fuels”, but intermediate between the two. All the “nuclear engineering” can be treated as magnetic bonding between particles. If you bring two magnetic dipoles together, such as two protons, two neutron, a proton and neutron, two electrons, an electron and positron, a proton and antiproton — all of these have stable states. The particle antiparticles can bind into permanent stable configurations. It is a balance between the very powerful magnetic forces holding it together, the electrical forces holding it together, and then stored rotational and vibrational energy to keep it stable.
Such particle antiparticle pairs have no external charge, no external magnetic field and so are invisible to electromagnetic waves. They are literally invisible (not interacting with visible light) and only very specific frequencies and timed electromagnetic pulses. But they have mass. They form a superfluid gas that I think is responsible for the properties of the gravitational potential, and the potential that supports both electromagnetic and gravitational waves. I got into gravimeters because I wanted to measure the speed of gravity. That was almost 20 years ago now. I calibrated the global network of superconducting gravimeters using the sun moon tidal signal and determined that the speed of gravity and light are identical. In Aug 2017 that merger of neutron stars generated both electromagnetic and gravitational signals that arrived at exactly the same time at earth. That showed that the speed of light and gravity are not just close, but identical. The only way that can happen is if they share the same underlying potential field. So stable particle antiparticle pairs is my favorite candidate for dark matter. The neutron star model guys have superconducting protons in their models and that is because the protons with their positive charges and permanent magnetic dipoles can bind into neutral pairs. No one will just take my word for it, so I have to wait another few decades for people to try it, and will use their own ideas first.
An “atomic fuel” I have been working in since before I started high school. My dad worked for NASA at Cape Canaveral (now Kennedy). I saw those noisy, inefficient rockets going up often. I was happy we were going to the moon, but saddened every time I saw the clumsy way they were doing it. With an atomic fuel, the energy density can be a thousand times what you store in chemical bonds. So that 300 foot tall fuel tank for those huge rockets shrinks down to a few inches. The fuel unit goes inside the vehicle, not the vehicle on top of a giant fuel tank.
We need atomic fuels for transportation in the solar system. My goal is 0.1 speed of light travel in the solar system. That shrinks the solar system down to weeks not years. There are groups working seriously on faster than light vehicles, and they need full particle antiparticle fuels. The “atomic fuels” can be made from regular atoms. The “particle-antiparticle pair fuels” might be naturally occurring and plentiful, but not in a useful form.
There are groups working seriously on faster than light communication. It takes light about 1300 seconds (21 minutes) to get from earth to mars today. But that can be done in about 5 microseconds with a gravitational signal. Finding that gravity and light share the same potential opens up all kinds of new possibilities.
I treat every group on the Internet the same, and want to give them the best tools the human species can provide. When people are living in space, on Mars, exploring near the sun or mining the asteroid belt (they need specialized tools and fields) – I want them to have every bit of knowledge and capability of the entire human species. Not just a few people who can be paid to spend decades working on small pieces. I have looked at almost every group using the Internet, and many that can be considered “groups working on the same problem or opportunity, but not working together”. Just that, getting people so they can work together globally or solar system wide – will make a difference. Not forcing every person to sit for decades memorizing a few facts from books, but letting them use and see anything that humans can produce or that is in the universe. A global memory – to be efficient – needs to have its interface as an extension of the people and systems that use it. I call them “intelligent algorithms” – caring, thoughtful, careful, complete and always working.
It is going to take an Earth economy that is measured not in hundreds of trillions of dollars a year, but in billions of trillions to support that kind of solar system activity. We might limits things on Earth, but it takes fantastically greater energy and effort to work in the solar system.
Molten glass that can be spun into fibers, or formed into sheets, molded, 3D printed — can be a universal material for Mars and the moon. If energy is sparse, then we don’t use glass on earth. But there that could be the best sealant, barrier, protection. I think that once you extract the oxygen, the resulting naturally occurring mixtures of metals that remain are likely to be used raw at the beginning. and then refined and improved as the economies expand.
It is going to take an Earth economy that is measured not in hundreds of trillions of dollars a year, but in billions of trillions to support that kind of solar system activity. We might limit things on Earth, but it takes fantastically greater energy and effort to work in the solar system.
For some odd reason, I was just looking at the report for a group effort sometimes in the next few years. It is announcing some new advance, and it is digitally signed by the tens of millions of people who all contributed to it. And, because it was done on a lossless, fully auditable, permanent global Internet memory – every single thing that each person contributed was there for anyone to see.
In a science fiction book I wrote a few years ago, one of the main characters is the first intelligent algorithm, the first truly independent machine based intelligence. Let me not spoil it, if you ever read it, but he likes to give people abilities and memories in instants that they otherwise have to spend decades memorizing or learning, and then humans forget and they die.
When I met Joe Weber at the University of Maryland at College Park he was under a cloud because he thought the signals he picked up could be gravitational signals. So he told me what he hoped to do, but encouraged me to read and follow what his student, Robert Forward had done. So that is why I have working on combining gravitation and electromagnetism for the last 43 years. Robert worked in industry and helped found gravitational wave detection. I would credit him as laying the foundations for “gravitational engineering” – detection, communication, field generation. Robert wrote a series of science fiction novels and they were rich in details about how he though gravity worked, how it does work. Not particularly great literature perhaps, but though provoking and entertaining.
This last one is someone I respect, who worked quietly on important things. In his book “from X-rays to quarks” I have a letter from him from 1981 when I was writing about gravitational energy density and particle antiparticle pairs. He got his Nobel prize for the antiproton. He did not know me from Adam, but took time to answer my questions about positronium spectrum. He was working on new atomic elements and new phenomena. There are hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people working on things like that now – they are just all not working together.
All the “papers” on the earth need to be converted into living tools with living equation, with living data and data streams – tied to living group of all the people working on a topic. To me, Wikipedia is a dead thing – because the equations are not living equations in standard forms that can be combined, compared, used, tested and improved as a whole. The data is not data, and ALL of it can only be used by humans reading it, matching with things they already know, and then tediously and often never using it. That applies to all books, all papers. PDF is still paper – it requires a human reader. HTML is paper, it requires a human reader.
Do you know why “covid” research is so slow? Why “global climate change” is so slow? Why it takes decades for people to memorize subjects that are already out of date? Because it is all on paper, or the equivalent. The test is to look at something and determine if it needs a human reader to make it work. That includes a lot of internet processes where a human is behind the scenes making it work.
My brother, Clif, and I have a favorite joke. We just have to say “green curtain” and we can laugh. In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy meets the Wizard for the first time as he is trying to hide behind a green curtain as he scurries around manipulating the levers and controls to make it look like there is some giant intelligence working. So we say “green curtain” when we know that some software is not intelligent, it just has an active community supporting it, and often paid ones at that.
Now a paper book that gets made into a movie is a kind of living representation of that book. If it is something like the Wizard of Oz, then it has people and places and things everyone is familiar with, even when that includes witches and flying monkeys, magic and tornadoes that take people new places.
But I have a book that I have read and loved for many decades called “CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics”. I haven’t quite checked every fact on every page, but I have made a good effort. But it requires reading by human eye, matching what is on the pages against a human memory, resolving many many things that are not written in the book, and working things out else where in calculators, programs and on paper – the equations, models, reference data, datasets and instruments that are embedded in that paper book.
I review hundreds of very complex papers every week. Sometimes more. I remember much of it, so my reading speed, regardless of the topic is fast and comprehensive. But I have watched myself carefully as I read those tens of thousands of papers and it is always the same — me reading paper, me identifying and mapping out the entities, equations, data, constants, units and dimension, remembering how all the instruments and sensors and models and programs and tools all work. But all of that is in the computer somewhere, and the whole of everyone’s laborious recreation of things from text and image descriptions of things written on “paper” – could be done by using “hover” in a better kind of browser. See something you don’t know? Hover it, and there is infinite depth of what ever you might want to know. See something in the hover that you are interested in – hover that – and never have to leave your base context.
I am pretty sure I have covered that several times in the videos I have made. But like what I am writing here, there are so many facets to everything, even if I have one person to try to share with, there are lots of things I have seen and done that are hard to put in English works on paper.
How does this relate to “solar system colonization”? We need to expand the global economy a hundred fold, just to get started. We need all those countries who have trained their many people in STEMC and quantitative methods to learn how to work in global communities. It is already happening, covid kicked up the pace. But the selfishness, the narrow purposes, the greed and petty jealousies that seem endemic is all human organizations generally tears down whatever any other groups tries to do. It is not a positive and supportive world, but every group for themselves. My group, my country, my area, my whatever.
Do you remember the one thing that stuck out most in the early Star Trek shows? It was the multiracial nature of the crew, and that the whole Earth was working as a whole. Looking back there were a lot of habits that carried over, that probably not needed, but people working together was a large part of it.
I like those movies where people pull together and save the world. But after spending 23 years every day studing what people are doing in the world that shows up on the Internet – the most common and horrible thing is there are always tens of millions of copies of things, hundreds of thousands of repetitions of things, hundreds of millions of people — all memorizing and recreating from scratch things that have been known a long time. I think of a topic (today I was working on “hyperspectral” “unmixing” and those tens of thousands of groups and individuals don’t seem to know they could be working on the topic, everything tracked and recorded – and the best practices available to all.
Maybe just getting the “paper” methods off the Internet might help.
I think that “solar system colonization”, “atomic fuels”, “global climate change”, “domesticating viruses”, “real time brain mapping”, “collaborative model of stars and suns”, “living 3D model of the earths interior, oceans, atmosphere and fields” would be good global communities. I have been finding many like that.
It took me many months of full time effort to find the roots of the problem with the slow response to “covid”, and then I could not do anything about it. Because the problems are two-fold. First is the massive duplication. That is easy to fix, but tedious.Just find all the places that covid is mentioned, index it, find who is responsible, gather the pieces, gather the people, make it one topic, not tens of billions. And the other is more striking – everything is being done on paper.
We went through tens of centuries learning to write things down on stone and paper. And most of the human species has not learned to make things and let them learn and operate on their own. I was complaining that Wikipedia only talks about things, and does not let you use it. There are words and picture “about” things, but why not the things and tools themselves. Talk about equations but no tools to use them. Talk about programs, talk about phenomena. Talk about everything and nothing real, none of the associated communities that make them fun and worthwhile.
