I can write about my own viewpoint

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A blog is there in case someone else is interested; few blogs take the time of others to read. So writing a blog entry is mostly for one's own fulfillment urges, most likely.

So, I can write about my own viewpoint.

What people ought to be doing now, per my evaluation, is utterly different from what they are actually doing. The difference between the two scenarios ought to be useful for something.

So, first, my belief of what people ought to be doing now, and how I help in that process:

I have spent much of my life focused on how civilization can expand healthily into nearby space, expanding the wonderful diverse earthlife to vivify the lifeless space beyond the oceans and land surface of this one planet, wonderful as it is.

We have grown populous enough to expand beyond the surface. We seem to have the scientific and technological knowledge and technological skills . We have used rocketry to use robotic spacecraft to explore the solar system, and have put people on the Moon for brief times, and in orbiting containers in orbit around the earth for lengthly periods, so we have been there, seen the strengths and weaknesses.

We have utilized the energy stored in fossil fuels hundreds of millions of years ago, a one-shot deal, our one energy chance to reach to where plenty of endless power washes through space from our star, the Sun. The inherent inefficiencies of rocket access to earth orbit provide measures of energy cost/benefit for the access process, and it is extremely limiting; rocketry as we know it has given us a tiny taste of space, and that is about all it is good for, but it has done the job.

I have been in love with technology's potentials in action even since before I have been in love with womankind. Both seem full of potential for fun and wholesome adventure for me, for civilization; and also have the responsibility for progressing civilization on, best possible ways.

Yet once something sort of works, people seem to stop there, engrossed in its workings. Transportation gadgetry fits this pattern too. From cars to bicycles to rockets, the busyness of reproducing something that works and people will buy and use, essentially halts progress beyond there; the cashing in on the idea, becomes the focus, seen as the endgame.

Rocketry is such a pattern. We have been stuck there too long. The aerospace corporate business people have found their place in the business, life is good, don't rock the boat, we have found the good life so don't you dare try to change anything. The whole purpose gets forgotten, just as forgotten is what propelled the aerospace business corporations into existence in the first place. Strange, how this happens.

Building railroads across the vast deserts and wastelands to reach lands of plenty, and to bring life to the wastelands, was in contrast to the wagon trains, pony express and horse-drawn stagecoaches that made their way across the same distance, their inherent low capacity and extreme effort expended for a small amount of transportation, controlled civilization's access to the greater area beyond where it was at the time. Rail transportation of a wide variety tends to be much more efficient than other modes, for routes of heavy repeated travel.

And so the "Space Elevator" anchored tether, earth rotation counterweight supported structure, would provide a rail to space, a structure to hang onto for support instead of expend energy just to hover above the planet while reaching another step higher.

Another kind of structure also is possible, reaching from the earth surface to high earth orbit, which does not use earth's rotation to centrifugally swing a counterweight around to support the structure, like the anchored tether would use.

Instead, encircling the planet, it would rotationally develop its own outward centrifugal force within itself, in opposition to the force of the planet's gravity.

Taking the form of a ring around the planet, from the earth surface somewhere on the equator, its loop around the planet extending to high earth orbit far above the opposite side of the planet. If that high place is also the balance point where the orbital velocity is identical to the earth's angular velocity, materials brought up the structure would stay put at the top, in the orbit known as GEO, Geostationary Earth Orbit, or the Clarke Belt, located some 22,3000 miles above the earth's equator, all around the planet. That is where our weather satellites and communications satellites now reside already, for example, like flowerpots put where vast abundant farmlands could be.

This ring around the planet structure from ground to space would be supported by the centrifugal force of continuous streams of mass sliding speedily around on the inside of the ring structure, their outward centrifugal force set to just a little more than that necessary to exactly balance the force of gravity on the structure's mass in which they slide, along with the weight of the payload-carrying vehicles continually going up and down the structure between the Earth's surface and the Clarke Belt construction site.

So I have been figuring out what principles and materials and construction techniques and utilization methods and the facilities in space they could enable become possible, much of my life, a primary focus of my existence. Something I could do while also living life's existence, paying bills, doing jobs other's would pay me to do. A hobby, of sorts, yet one that seemed to me to be needed for civilization to be able to rouse out of its well-fed slumber, to get up and go for the next round.

I have struggled to put the concepts "out there", assuming humanity would eventually notice them and excitedly see them as a treasure map to new wonders far beyond their daily grubbing lives now, and away they would go on the adventure of spreading civilization up into the Clarke Belt, a high place also from which to easily reach out to the rest of the Solar System, such as our Moon, Mars, and moons of other planets, to bring life where there was none before.

But this did not happen. Nobody seemed even to notice.

So I gritted my teeth more, put my shoulder again to the load, writing and preparing technical papers for printing in space conference proceedings, and traveled to distant places like Princeton and Albuquerque and Houston, dressed up in fancy suit, showed slides and PowerPoint presentations, the concepts in hard copy and on my websites on the internet. Extreme stress for me, standing up there talking to audiences of people whose identity was largely based on their lifelong high academic and corporate achievements, seeing me as an unwelcome intruder who was a college dropout and mere technician, daring to pretend he had something new for them, something they did not already know. Cat and mouse game.

Did people catch on to the concepts and the tremendous potentials for civilization, healthy escape from the path civilization is now on? Nope. They did not seem to notice even yet. Seemed too busy squabbling amongst each other, to set that pettiness aside once again so as to join together to take in new goodies for all.

What is that force that blocks their vision? Why do they prefer to squabble and play games of misinformation, ego-valued ways? Did we not get out of the hunter-gather mode of total predator on the natural world, and become the symbiotic win-win presence of agriculture and industry on the earth, working together to produce resources instead of be mere top predator?

So I wrote the concepts up in the form of Science Fiction, and put it on my websites, to broaden the imagination of people, and show the craggy paths from where we are now, a bit exaggerated for emphasis, leading to the space civilization. But magazine would not accept my sci-fi stories for publication. Eventually I realized that even my own hunger for science fiction adventures reading, there is a problem. The "science" in science fiction has primary purpose to provide an imaginary backdrop where people can temporarily step out of their ongoing reality, to play out their urges while not bound by the real world context with its unwritten heavy rules and expansion-stifling status quo. The science and technology of the stories was mere soil to trod while people played their ego games, free for the moment from the stifling crunch of the real world life situation of the readers. Since my science fiction novels such as "the Ark of 1984's Future" and "Building Up" interlaced people's drama with things that we could actually be doing right now, that perhaps was terrifying to those sci-fi afficionados that put cowboy rowdiness into space suited trodding on other planets instead of western prairie, but in actuality the same old ego games playing out as the feature stimulus. As if "What! Actually do it? How frightening! Things are just fine like they are, don't rock the real world boat! Get away from here with your ideas, we have got everything under control, a controlling grip on the world, it is our game to be won by defeating the enemy, so we get the goodies!" Experiencing the wild sci-fi adventures and ego games played out there, no matter how rowdy, one can then close the book (or turn the movie off the TV) get up out of the comfy chair, walk out of the adventure and back into the well known life we know so well how to play. If people built the systems I described and lived in them, there would be no way to close the book to escape. Responsibility would be reality. People do like to be more in control than that, and right now they are in control; don't change anything, please.

So. It seems I made a mistake about what people want. And that is possibly why they block me from getting what I want, in my loves of sci-tech potentials and womankind's liveliness interactivity with me, thus I remain semi-hermit man in a desolate land, considered a disruptive influence instead of a blessing enabling their much better future.

James E. D. Cline 20070509