Rocket plane's inspirations

Having finally dug out and scanned in some pages for an aquaintance who had asked for them, the design book about a German designed WWII-era rocket plane (that could skip along the upper atmosphere to glide all the way around the globe to back home's landing, dropping its load somewhere along the way) which so fortituiously fell into my possession back at a space conference a decade or two ago, has stirred up some thoughts I normally set aside.

In looking more into that book, written in 1944 and translated into English in 1952, so many years ago, I discovered that the authors were intellectually briliant in their Rocketplane bomber analysis, design and mission planning; yet also glibly described its use to flatten cities of 1 million or more anywhere in the world, so they had no sense of the suffering of people their machine would cause if used for the described purpose.

That WWII Germany mode was to conquer by destruction of other nations, the "end justified the means", and such motivation could have let the Rocketplane be created, but only for use to conquer others via bombardment destruction of other's big cities.

Pondering what could cause such gross callousness in such otherwise brilliant people: in 1944 when the book was written, Germany probably was frequently experiencing being bombed by American warcraft, causing destruction of some of their factories and cities. Thus it was merely "tit for tat" stuff to them, probably; it was the way people did things then.

"War Fever" affects people's attitudes a lot. When the war was going on 1941-1945, I was 5-9 years old and thus had formative years while a similar "War Fever" existed in the environs around me. Battle seemed an attention-getting game played early.

But people did not create atomic energy for the purpose of generating electric power and nuclear medicine; it was done to make and use atomic bombs on other people. Rocket technology fast advancement was not created (though, like nuclear energy, the originators had the peaceful uses as purpose they envisioned, but the actual authorities making it happen physically were war-driven people) for exploration of the Moon and other planets with eye to accessing resources and living room up there, but instead as machines to hurl bombs at the neighbors of this planet, done in a "War Fever" mentality.

Must humanity be driven so? War does not always bring progress even primitivly. For example, humanity could have put big efforts to access space so as to provide abundant clean electric power worldwide, recycle the worst toxic wastes of industry, and build orbiting cities easily and cheaply reached, the adequate concepts for space elevators and space escalators have been described in the technical literature since 2000, but man chose instead to spend even far more heavily than the space efforts would have cost, on bashing the neighbor countries, for reasons rather muddled at that.

Something important can be derived from this, but what? The money America has spent on warfare in the past 5 years could have built the space elevators and space escalators needed to have built the solar electric powerplants in space to power the world cleanly and prevent global warming, and all the rest; yet the authorities chose to go the opposite way. Perhaps it was because that war was what they knew how to do, but space was risky ond out of their field of expertise; and they had to make a showing.

There is a part of the human mind that focuses attention on strife against others. Some people seem to live in this mentality as a starting point of their daily life. Others only take it on when frazzled enough to do so. Some have invested a lot of effort to fence off that part in themselves as a "no man's zone."

Much of religious teachings describe ways to respond that are different from instinctive strife's bashing activities. Yet some people of many religions focus on the small parts of old religious texts which describe heavy strife in terrible circumstances, and didn't see the other ways life could go instead, given people's will to do so.

I think it has to do with the individual's "Temperament" type. For buddies, like seeks like; and the ones who focus on accomplishment at the physical action level, often drift toward the violent part of old texts and to "glorious" warfare as solutions to problems, joining the others who are of similar Temperament and focus. But that Temperament is also the kind so very needed to get things done on the physical level, including for peaceful constructivism.

Since today is engrossed in this kind of stuff deeply again, it might be worthwhile to re-explore ways for balance among individual's Temperaments and nation's neighborliness, that puts humanity to good use. Surely we are worth that.