Offering a way out of the mess

Offering a way out of the mess:

1. Mnufacturing machines operable remotely via the internet.
2. Raise everybody’s competancy.
3. Workstations made so that their function can be quickly changed, and daily on-the-job training for all employees.
4. Complete home education for everybody, primarily via internet.
5. Everybody works.
6. “Work from home” expanded hugely.
7. Every person to have access to their position in the “Big Picture”, and to have a vote in the way things go.

Expanding to some extent on these items:

1. Machines operable via internet. For example, a drill press that is operable from a home workstation, as if onsite doing its use. Not a robot standing there using a conventional drillpress, no; a drillpress designed and built to be operated via instructions on the internet while sending signals describing what it is doing, to the opeator via internet connection. And yes, once a particular use of the drill press to make a hole in a part, that is to be done repeatedly, can copy down the sequence made by the human operator, then repeat them therafter for however many parts are needed. Meanwhile, the distant human operator is doing new uses to makie new kinds of parts, best use of machine and of people. One such catagory of this would be in the making of the machines that are operable via the internet.

2. Raise everybody’s competancy. Thiis enables the whole system to perform ever better. This means everybody, including the CEO, the PhD, the sales clerk, the machine operator, the single mom at home, the homeless man on the street, too. Everybody, no one gets left out.

3. Workstations made so that their function can be quickly changed, and daily on-the-job training for all employees so as to be ever better at utilizing the alternate setups for their workstation. This was shown decades ago, as part of the “just-in-time” method of manufacturing.

4. Complete home education for everybody, primarily via internet and package shipment services where necessary. This, like the OJT, is part of the “raise everybody’s competancy” function.

5. Everybody works. Even if only minutes per day, or “digging holes and filling them up again” type exercise. This builds mental and physical muscles in familiarity with the world’s resources, thus available in time of need for real projects to fulfill needs.

6. “Work from home” expanded hugely, more than just “telecommuting” once a week to save gas. This not only cuts transportation commute enegy, but enables interruptions, spurts of progress, and location of personnel very flexibly, for human efficiency.

7. Every person to have access to their position in the “Big Picture”, and to have a vote in the way things go. Although i have only vague ideas as to how to generate and communicate the overmodel of the “big picture” at present, that it can be done, seems probably, given purpose.

J E D Cline 20050828

Horse, Peccary, and Path

Those who have walked past paths in some ways similar to the ones I walked, attempted to leave words of wisdom on the trail, that others might avoid the mistakes made by those earlier travelers. I saw those wisdoms: but I have a difficulty in learning in that I need a specific instance of something, then I can conceive the generalization of its principles. So, looking back at the lonely tracks I made through the vast desert to here and now, I recall two most wise of those messages the ancients left on the trail.

One is “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” And the second wisdom is “ Cast not your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet and turn to rend you.” Since my kind of thinking needs a specific example to comprehend the generalization, here are some of which I lived, repeatedly.

The horse one so clearly tells of my efforts to lead people to new capabilities for the struggles ahead, and even with years of great difficulty I only managed to get a few people to look at the potentially extremely useful concepts I had for them, yet they nearly always disdainfully acted out that they had no need for it and they were proving they were the heavies here, and whatever got done it was going to be their way, not mine. They couldn’’t see I offered it for their way, nor could they imagine the long trek through desolation we would have to make together. So the treks weren't made, and here we sit, the huge horse as pompous as ever.

Then the second one, about the swine, the peccary. I think I understand this one, and can even somewhat generalize it. “Peccary” seems a bit more dignified than “swine” (I don’t mean to be disrespectful) as well as indicates more of their incredible ferocity potential. The peccary (swine) look for corn or some grain to be cast before them, that is all they are interested in; they have no need of pearls which look just like more small pebbles to them, inedible, thus they see the pearls cast before them as trickery, worth only of attacking in response, how dare you do that.

So the too proud horse that wouldn’t prepare himself , and the indignant peccary that so disdained my hard-created valuables.

And that summarizes the state today. Do I have time, resources left? How can I get the horse to drink of vision worthy of gallup? How can I get the peccary to realize I have no corn to give them, but the pearls can be used to gain more grain than they can ever eat.

“How do I love thee, let me count the ways?” is another old saying: I have written many of those wisdoms on my webpages, and blogs such as this one: count the ways.

Jim Cline 20050828

Re-defined by each of many eyes

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Ah, does blunt reality be truly re-defined by each of many eyes that see?

From my perch, partly bought by heritage, partly by grim sweat and toil too near to be forgotten, how much of full reality can I see?

It is helpful to take a peek above the trenches of everyday life occasionally, as without a better vision to guide a way out, trench life will be endless. And yes, putting one’s head above the trench is risky. Yet, with even a glimpse of what lies possible in the greater world, one can then more wisely choose which direction to dig the new trenches, toward better opportunities.

The order within disorder, the part of chaos that intelligence usually seeks, that is the question.

It recalls the concept of “Signal to Noise Ratio” that is a measure of communication channel accuracy in electronics. In fact, there are many parallels between electronic’s SNR and chaos theory. One narrows one’s range of vision (= bandwidth) to more clearly see what one seeks; and pattern filters let pour through that which resembles the pattern.

If things seem clear and well defined, little disruption ongoing, then Cause clearly points at expectable Effects.

Yet if the noise, the disarray, is greater than the signal, the Effects more clearly select out the true Causes. That is, the Effects define the Causes; thus a pattern filter model to parallel that effect from within the chaos, could be useful to filter out subsequent probable effects from amongst current chaos content.

Yet also to contrast, when a nutrient is put into water and stirred, the intent is to increase the chaos, make it all the same everywhere.

One’s purpose becomes the filter and the signal amongst the noise is the order within the disorder.

Yet through too tight a filter, noise slips through while masquerading as the sought signal. Is it really there?

Ah, does blunt reality be truly re-defined by each of many eyes that see? From my perch, partly bought by heritage, partly by grim sweat and toil too near to be forgotten, how much of full reality can I see?

Saying it again, maybe more coherently:

Ah, does blunt reality truly be re-defined by each of many eyes that see? From my own perch, bought partly by heritage, and partly by grim sweat and toil too near to be forgotten, how much of full reality can I see?

If things seem clear and well defined, so that very little disruption is found ongoing, then Cause clearly points at expectable Effects, nice and neat, by the rules.

Yet if the noise, the disarray, is far greater than the signal, then the observable Effects can more clearly select out their true Causes. That is, when the disorder, the noise, is overwhelming the orderliness signal, then from the Effects one can more clearly define the Causes. The larger view of chaos does contain the signal, and as an optical lens focuses a widely distributed signal pattern into a smaller more intense easily identified picture image, so also can the orginating causes be identified from amongst the disarray noise. Thus a pattern filter model to parallel that effect from within the chaos, could be useful to filter out subsequent probable effects from amongst current chaos content.

If I look too intensely amongst that wide loud noise, if my filter is too narrow, the part of the noise that matches my narrow filter comes through masquerading as if the sought signal. Is it really there?

Ah, does blunt reality be truly re-defined by each of many eyes that see? From my perch, bought partly by heritage, partly by grim sweat and toil too near to be forgotten, how much of full reality can I see?

by JEDCline 200508235, 0731 hrs

Jim Cline 20050822

The old Prospector's goldmine

The old Prospector's goldmine

(a fiction writing)

Back in the days of the early settlement of the American West, precious metal mines were major sources of salable resources in the areas, and they had to be found first. Typically, a prospector would go out into the desert mountains and hike around, a burro carrying supplies for stay months at a time in lonely search among the hard and dangerous mountain rocks, looking for signs of worthwhile ores. When food and supplies ran out, he would come back to town and work awhile at cleaning stalls or building things, paid in food and supplies; then he would go off into the desert to search again.

And so this story begins with a prospector having finally found what appears to be an immensely promising gold mine site, but one from which he cannot usefully directly extract gold embedded in the ore, with which he could pay for things. And the path to there is very difficult; a passible trail must be built to get the equipment in to make the mine profitable. So the prospector spent more lonely years hacking at the mountainside, fighting off the rattlesnakes and mountain lions, to build a passable trail to the mine location for easy access by others. Then he proudly brought back sacks of ore samples to show the town's merchants. The prospector had done all that work so as to bring much prosperity to the whole town, and surely he would be appropriately appreciated and rewarded for making that new good living possible for all those people.

But what he finds in reality, is that after he gave the chunks of ore samples to the townspeople and merchants, some of whom he is sure can make adequate evaluation of the ore's potential, and provided maps of his laboriously built trailways to it, that instead of enthusiastic joy and helpfulness to him (who has grown old in the many years of struggle to provide this potential abundance to the townspeople) finds that the townspeople and merchants close themselves off from him. And they no longer give him quite enough paid work so he can buy food and supplies to survive.

As the town's businesspeople spend their evenings as usual together playing poker, at which they practiced the basic principles of their clever ways, they chatted around the table. The assay on the ore indicates that this will be the greatest gold mine ever. We all will become fabulously wealthy and powerful from the gold mine. But what of the old prospector? He stupidly gave us the map of his trailway to the mine's site and gave us samples of the ore to give to the assay office, not realizing that we now can stake the claim in our name. It is as if the old Prospector had shown his hand to the poker players, a move so incompetant as a player as to not earn anything other than sneering disdain. The businesspeople's suave high society elitist ways were not going to let the scraggly starving old prospector be accepted as one of them, how awful he looked and acted. After all, he clearly does not comprehend the worth of the claim to the mine. Their greatest guiding principles were "never give a sucker an even break" and "buy low and keep it away from those who need it, improve it as little as possible or none at all, then sell it high for as much as the desperate market will bear": proven principles that had already made them the winners, the wonderful elite.

And had they not already paid him to clean out their stalls and build their equipment over the years, so he could buy supplies for his prospecting? Thus they had surely hired him to find the goldmine and so he had already been paid, right? Anyway, it would cost a lot to develop the mine so as to have it start paying off. The Prospector was old and impoverished; they were younger and well fed and powerful; they would just sit on the discovery and its map, and wait out the passing of the old prospector. When he was gone, they would announce to the world about the fabulous new goldmine they had found. Easy money, this familiar game.

Meanwhile, to prevent others from finding out, they quietly spread the word that the old prospector was crazy, vile, given to fits of violence; especially dangerous to women and children; don't listen to him, he even claimed to have a goldmine; yet obviously he was scraggly and starving, so must surely be crazy and dangerous; the sooner he was gone or put away, the sooner everybody could feel safe and be happy again. So, help get rid of him.

They sat back smirking to themselves, cards in hand. Not needing voicing, each appreciated the vision of how each would spend their extra portion of the prospector's abandoned share. Character assassination was an old technique; even honorable, as was it not there in the Bible about sowing seeds of weeds and thorn bushes to grow in an enemy's crop fields? How dare that old man try to crash their party to steal a piece of their action. They would show that outsider just who were the great masters of the game. This would be fun, they smiled knowingly.

The card hand had been played out around the poker table, and the call went out again for their endless sport: "Deal!"

Building the concept in your mind from basics

Sometimes, the way something is said, can finally make it heard.

Most of us know of the extreme cost and difficulty of getting up to space, even just to LEO, which puts a severe limit on what we can do in space; yet, are there other ways?

The 6 billion dollar each Space Shuttle, with its 40 million dollar each launch costs, lifts its huge fuel tanks up on an impressive blast of fire and smoke, risking the lives of seven people on board, maybe to stay in LEO a couple of weeks doing good up there, then a fiery return to earth like a meteor to throw away their energy enough to finish with a glide home.

If someone says that our technology could soon (in a couple decades) be building huge solar-electric powerplants, spaceports, even huge rotating passively shielded cities like the Stanford Torus, and total recycling plants, lifting vast numbers of people up there to live and work in GEO, all done cheaply enough to make it economical ... the person saying that would be totally nuts, right?

I don’t think so, and let me tell you why. I agree it cannot be done with anything like the Space Shuttle, conventional rocketry; but the Space Shuttle has done its job as a powerful steppingstone to space, and done it well. It has shown that we can live and work in space, and is still proving that more.

But now picture, with me, a series of ideas, with the intent of finding a basic mechanism for an adequate way to access space.

Start with picturing a hoop, one that is rotating rapidly around its circumference, like a wheel rotates. That rapid rotation, spin, causes the hoop to have an outward stretch force, away from its center. (Perhaps also think of a lasso, a spinning circle of rope, as somewhat comparable.)

In your mind imagine this hoop is so big that it encircles the whole earth, and is placed above the earth’s equator, say at some Low Earth Orbit altitude, and its rotational spin were identical to the orbital velocity at that altitude. The outward spin rotational centrifugal force would cancel out the inward force of earth’s gravity on the mass of the material of which the hoop was made. In other words, all parts of the hoop would be in orbit, coasting along staying up there.

Now accelerate the hoop spin rate to twice the orbital velocity there. The outward centrifugal force could press upward with just enough force to support the stationary mass of another hoop, similar to itself but not rotating, the outer hoop being stationary relative to the earth. In other words, the mass of an orbiting object, restrained from rising to a higher orbit, when doubled in velocity, presses outward, upward relative to the center of the earth, against the restraining object, such that its force can support exactly its own mass equivalent of the restraining object.

So let’s make that restraining object be another hoop just above the spinning first hoop around the earth, and for now assume that they slide against each other with little or no friction. Let the mass of the two hoops be equal; the outer, upper, hoop is motionless relative to the earth below it, while the inner, lower, hoop is going twice orbital velocity at that altitude above the equator. The upward centrifugal force balances the downward gravitational force, it all stays in place.

The special thing to notice here is that the weight of a mass that is not rotating relative to the earth is being fully supported up there in space, without further expenditure of energy to keep it there.

What we are looking for here, is a way to get from ground to space; so let's pull one edge of the hoop pair down to connect with the earth at the equator, and fasten the upper, earth-motionless hoop to the ground there on the equator. Since the mass in the rapidly rotating lower, inner, hoop is now rising and falling as well as going around the planet, the shape of the hoop pair needs to be the shape of an ellipse, and the inner hoop needs to stretch or be segmented to accommodate the velocity changes due to continuous exchange of kinetic energy with potential energy of height above the planet all along its path. Let’s also use the earth-stationary hoop to form into a tube where it is within the earth’s atmosphere, so that the speeding inner hoop has a hard vacuum to travel in all along its way, no atmosphere to fight through.

So, now the earth-stationary hoop could be a roadway, something we could climb up from the ground at the equator, and reach space high above the opposite side of the earth. The inner rotating hoop then going a little bit faster so as to balance the force of gravity on our mass added as we climb the outer, earth-stationary hoop, of course. Are you beginning to get the picture?

To make this into a fully useful system for space access, Let’s add a few frills.

One frill is to make the sliding surface between the two hoops be of low-loss inductive magnetic levitation track nature. Very slippery track connecting the two hoops.

Another frill is to stretch the height of the upward part of the hoop pair until it reaches Geostationary Earth Orbit, so that an object brought up the hoop from the ground, and released there at GEO, will stay up there instead of falling back to the ground when released. No rocket needed to put it into orbit.

And a third frill, to put more maglev tracks along the outer surface of the stationary hoop’s surface, along which payload-carrying attached spacecraft slide along that hoop, all the way up from the equatorial ground to GEO.

Note that the pair of hoops form a kind of stator and armature of a synchronous electric motor. So add another frill such that the upward-moving portions of the inner high velocity hoop electrodynamically drags against parts of the spacecraft, thus exerting an upward lifting force on the spacecraft, to lift them up from the ground up to GEO; spin the inner hoop, the electric motor's armature, a bit faster so as to deliver the lift energy force lifting spacecraft with their payload from ground to space.

This is the main point of the structure, to lift spacecraft from the ground up into orbit, the spacecraft don't need to lift any fuel to get to space or having to lift the weight of rocket motors for the trip; and no energy has to be received beamed at the spacecraft, nor are there friction drives between the spacecraft and the structure, to climb up the structure to space. Just slippery maglev guideway tracks between the structure and the spacecraft, and magnetic brakes inductively coupled to the speedy rising parts of the inner hoop to lift the spacecraft with its payload, all the way up to GEO.

Another frill is that spacecraft descending the earth-stationary hoop, drags braking electrodynamically against it so as to gently return them to the ground. This drag has an outward component to its motion along the hoop, which is upward relative to the earth, adding lift energy to the hoop; thus this is reclaimed energy put back into the system as it descends, note.

To input energy into the system to make it go, put the armature-stator electromagnetic interface at the earth surface contact site, to speed up the rotating armature hoop to input the energy as kinetic energy of the armature mass stream.

So we now have outlined a system to electrically lift payload from ground to GEO, and to gently return the spacecraft back to ground while returning some of the energy to the system as it lowers. That is, a transportation system fulfilling our purpose we started with: a potentially highly efficient way to get from the ground into orbit.

What about the energy cost of this transportation, recalling the huge fuel tanks, the massive fire and smoke of lift and reentry of the space shuttle, lots of wasted energy going on there, but necessary for rocket transportation that way. So our hoop transportation structure would lift differently, but at what energy cost? The energy actually acquired by payload in the process of being lifted from earth’s equator up to GEO at orbital velocity there, is only 7.15 KWh per pound mass. If the cost of energy delivered to the hoop’s acceleration site is say, 10 cents per KWh as common nowadays, that is 71.5 cents per pound lifted to GEO. There will be losses in a real physical system of course, adding to the amount of energy consumed in the transportation process. The electrical power eventually could come from Satellite Solar Powerplants built in GEO, lifted up there through the use of this transportation system, which thereafter would specify the energy cost of payload lift.

So we now have outlined a transportation system which has a whole new set of characteristics and uses, as compared to rocket launch space access.

Rockets, including the Space Shuttle, have shown that we can live and work in space. Now let’s explore what we can do there in space, big time, with our new kind of transportation system that we have outlined here.

What could we do with extremely cheap, continuously operating, high capacity lift from the ground up to GEO? For starters, consider the aforementioned Satellite Solar Power Stations; high spaceports in GEO for rocket propelled vehicles to the Moon, Mars, asteroids and beyond; Stanford Torus type passively shielded cities there in GEO; and mass-spectrometer-like total recycling plants to convert our worst waste products back into pure elements for reuse in manufacturing, cheap transport of the trash up to GEO. for processing and return to the ground for new uses. And it would be all cleanly solar powered in GEO.

Are those things desirable changes for our future, and soon? Can we do it with an intelligent, very high integrity business system in all aspects, fully aimed at the best implementation for all mankind and our wonderful planetary ecosystem?

Does anybody at all want to go for this yet, besides me... or will it continue to be the big snub? Time and resources don’t wait; the sooner we get started, the sooner it can happen for us.

jedcline@kestsgeo.com www.kestsgeo.com

Ah, the comforting familiarity of life in the trenches

Seeking understanding this morning, my "Morning Pages" writing incomplete, it seems to me that in recent years the world has been getting even more fixated on targeted violence (also an example of "energy follows attention", as it is said), and I suppose that without large adequate near-future access to abundant space resources provided by KESTSGEO or even adequate numbers of tether-type space elevators, the world has little option but drastic population cutbacks, no doubt involving much tragedy along the way, dismal or dramatic. And group-leading bullies, as always, believe they will be winners in times of their favorite sport of severe conflict wherein they personally gain extra fame and fortune. Bullies' brains are genetically wired different from mine, their urge to assault individuals of their own species being a reproductively successful activity, perpetuating their bully-kind as done for eons. (A bully reading this, probably would not see this writing as a bit of wisdom's understanding, but instead as a feeble counter-offense effort, to be righteously squashed by the bully in response, again proving supremacy over someone out-of-place.) To get group support for bully's conflicts, preparing through a combo of widespread cunning vilification "spin" against the target (as well as implying the group-shared easy bounty of taking over the target's thusly-abandoned resources) typically works to get the support of a normally peaceable group. Situation-engineering. So, targeted violence against the rare ones like me (who the bullies see as someone trying to get the group to do something other than what the bully is having them do, thus seen as a challenge attempting to take power away from the bully), probably is not of much concern to the world, except to share as spectators in the thrill of conflict while the bully creates assault (of many kinds, from slow financial to fast fist) upon the target. Then the onlookers, having been briefly entertained by the spectacle of conflict, return to their mostly mindless daily routines, comforted that there is no change in the hierarchical position they have so laboriously attained. And otherwise, the morrow is of no concern to them: whatever will be there, abundant or sparse, they merely will continue to grab as much as they can. Thus, the potentially very abundant resource future prepared by KESTS to GEO ("Space Escalator Carousel" transportation technology) is not likely to be there for them... although it could have been. Ah, isn't the familiarity of "life in the trenches" comforting?