Space Vanguard

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 "...