Space Vanguard

"Another Mensan and I are working to bring in a credit union that will be for people who are interested in science fiction/fantasy and/or space exploration, which I think might relate to your SIG's space perspective. Would you or any of your SIG members be interested in helping us bring this in? Also, would you like me to post this on your SIG's blog? Thanks very much for considering this, Pat Crepeau, Mensan" catalyst.pat@gmail.com I endorse this in concept, credit unions save consumers a lot of money. I do not know Pay and I caution everyone to be careful with their deposits wherever. The financial turmoil that I predicted seems to be playing out now. Pat, best of luck.

I have been thinking abstractly about how like-minded people in a community could band together to assist each other and to advance the cause of private space exploration. This is a concept only, and I want to hear your ideas. A religious organization seems like a very flexible structure to promote new ideas. Here is what I personally would like in benefits from joining a church: a very short positive sermon about God, followed by a free Sunday lunch with one pint of beer or cup of wine and a folk music sing-along with dancing and socializing, and free all-week country club benefits including tennis, basketball, volleyball, and swimming. For additional individual donations the different church rooms could be rented out for members' weddings, funerals, and concerts. You would probably have to expect a $500 donation per person per year for the church to be able to provide these benefits. Then I thought about blood donation as a fundraiser. The church could provide a blood banking ser

The Sun usually has a cyclical increase in solar flares about every eleven years. It has been slowly ramping up lately and now it is getting very violent. David Sereda says that the worst flares start with a long filliment hanging out of a sunspot and when it collapses back into the sunspot it creates a large hydra-flare eruption of a charged plasma wave that hits the Earth about 3 to 4 days later. These plasma waves spin up the Earth's magma core and the timing is linked so they probably caused the large recent earthquakes in Chile, Haiti and in Alaska. It is probably also firing off the new undersea volcanoes around the world. Get ready for some major Earth Changes.

The Japanese government has made a committment to developing a robotic moon base at the lunar south pole by 2020. I think that is a noble goal but I doubt that robots can learn to pick up dropped tools, fix crossthreaded bolts, and solve other complex tasks by then. The amateur experimental scientists around the world are advancing the robotic art by developing printing machines that can lay down layer upon layer of sprayed on plastic until a whole 3 dimensional plastic part is created. But much more work needs to be done before robots can pick up these created plastic parts and assemble them into useful machines in outer space. And the fabrication of necessary metal parts is much more difficult than plastic. I think a good strategy for the Japanese would be to find a crater near the lunar south pole and place two tempered glass domes over it. Small meteorites might crack the first dome but the second one should be able to resist the remaining impact force and still contain the artifi

I am not a saint by any means but I have noticed a few common moral lapses in people that generally end up causing harm, revenge, and overall lost happiness and productivity.  For example, while you should not deliberately hurt someones feelings many times people will continuously ignore the truth and tell little white lies or omit some pertinent information to try and save another person’s feelings about trivial things that cause that person to act on incorrect information and ends up causing the small initial problem being blown up into a much bigger problem. Happy people are productive people. I think that people would be happier and society would be better off if people adopted this short new moral code of conduct: Be friendly to others but remain cautious and observant because other sentient beings are not always loyal to your friendship. You should not lie. It is usually better to remain silent than to lie. People should occasionally, gently give their friends constructive a

The economy is in rough shape right now and there is a cyclical trend going on. The price of precious metals has been artificially depressed by Central Banks leasing out their gold to banks and hedge funds. It creates a new temporary supply of gold for the banks to sell futures contracts on. The problem is that futures contracts buyers eventually want to take delivery on the gold that they have contracted for and then there won't be any to return to the Central Banks at the end of the leases. That is the artificial situation that has been dumped on us now. It is going to cause a five year super bubble in precious metals prices. Silver is the metal that has been depressed the most. As silver runs from $18/troy oz to maybe $80 the common stock of established silver mining companies will skyrocket even farther. They are already covering their production costs so any increase in silver prices will drop straight down to the bottom line as pure profit. Again, this is an temporary engine

It looks like Phobos (one of Mars' two moons) is 30% hollow and constructed with an engineered frame and covering. The penetrating radar from our satelites discovered a series of discreet internal bays, some with intact pressurized atmospheres. Most of the moon has been wrecked by meteorites and alternating tidal tugging from Mars itself. Much of this has been discovered and reported by Richard Hoagland and friends at the website: http://www.enterprisemission.com/Phobos2.html The spacing nations are assembling and will announce soon that they will form a joint mission to Phobos to try and retrieve the advanced technology left behind there by whoever built the craft. Since Phobos is small its gravity is insignificant and it doesn't require much rocket power to land and take off again from its surface. The whole mission should take less fuel than when we went to our Moon and back in the Apollo missions. Do they need any nonscientist handymen? I'm available...

In the US our electric power has normally been produced in large AC (alternating current) generating plants and distributed over the electrical grid to the residential and commercial users. With the improved power technologies like Bedini generators, fuel cells and solar cells becoming affordable for the home the power delivery system will probably change to a more decentralized network with homes having private power generators backed up by 96 DC (direct current) battery packs to store up extra energy, and maybe supplemented by the traditional AC grid during peak usage times. The advantage of our present AC electrical system is that the voltage can be stepped up very high by a transformer and then transmitted great distances with very little line loss from resistance. When the electricty gets to its final destination it is stepped back down by another transformer and carried around town. At your street it is stepped down again and carried into your house at a peak 240 volts AC. That

If some of you can't wait to try new living systems then I suggest that one way would be for some of you (I'm not interested) to collectively organize and buy up a couple of old destoyer ships, with the cannon removed. Then you could hitch them together with the tops of a couple of old drilling rig platforms across the bows and sterns creating a stable catamaran that could pierce through the occasional tall rogue wave. Looking for an income source to keep you going I thought about the resource of all of the plastic particles floating in the Pacific Ocean. The currents have concentrated them into a garbage pile circling some distance north of Hawaii. With filter nets you could bring this resource up on deck and feed it into a char reduction furnace to create some residual fuel oil to sell. At the same time you would being cleaning up the Earth and be living the independent life. A small test example of one is shown at: http://www.windward.org/notes/notes70/opalyn7002.htm When t

With the publication of the new SIG list we are starting to get some new members. Welcome all! Some people work for NASA and JPL so I expect they will keep us in line scientifically. I can't wait to hear your ideas, just comment on any of my posts and eventually I will transition to a webite where we can keep the ideas in separate folders for easy access. Remember to click "older posts" at the bottom to get to the earlier posts.

The measurement systems are tough to reform because they are so ingrained in our production systems. Ideally, we would start down at the nano scale and say that at absolute zero temperature and zero pressure the singular hydrogen atom has a diameter of one Dync. There are different isotopes in nature so a normal tank of mixed hydrogen isotopes at room temperature might show an average hydrogen atom diameter of 1.1 Dyncs (I'm just guessing). From there we could scale up to a standard gigadync size that we would use in our normal life scale measurements. Thus it would be easy to measure chemicals and infer roughly how their weights would add up in industrial combinations. I think that for the time being it will be easier to just stick with the Metric system for distance and mass measurements until we really start colonizing new planets and want to get pure and simple with our measurements. I suggest we change the Milli prefix (one thousandth) to Thili so we don't confuse it with

In a sense all governments compete with each other to retain their taxpaying citizens and residents. Taxpayers can usually relocate to more attractive countries or states if they perceive that the relative quality of life, opportunities, protections, and tax burden are better on the other side of the fence. So in the marketplace of governance systems we could pick an island and set up an idealized federal-only government with the rational goal of fostering the health and wealth of us, its citizens. In our era of fast communications there is no need for redundant state and local govermnents that churn the tax revenue around again and again and waste a lot of it. First I want to address the tax system. "Before all else there is the land." There is an old idea of a simple land value based tax system that was espoused long ago by Henry George, and I propose to make it even simpler. In the USA the government really owns all of the land. You may think you own your front yard "