The why affects the what and how and who of it all

Just mildly pondering the thought that the “why” people do a something, affects how they do it and also the kind of results obtained, especially the lateral effects of what was done.
And also figuring out the “why” someone does something, is a bit of guessing game. It all gets quite into the “people stuff is complicated” zone. Yet it all may not be useless to contemplate all the time.

This trend of thought seems to have been triggered by the news articles about the expected launch of a lunar rover by the Chinese. Connecting human civilization with lunar resources has long been more than a casual interest in me, and I have written a lot about it during the past forty years or so. However, the responses I have gotten range from apathy to “we don’t know you” to outright hostility and undercutting. So the thought now is that it is the “why” of doing something that makes the difference.

And the “why” can be quite complex, including being variable with the situation and even self-contradictory at times.

The current articles on the Chinese launch to the Moon, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25178299 , point out that the Moon is a potential source for elements needed by industry and in short supply here on Earth, and the lunar environment be a site for man’s works including gathering solar energy to help supply civilization’s enormous need for energy.

Now, these things have been known for at least the forty years I have been making suggestions as to how to efficiently access and utilize lunar resources. Yet we here in the US, whom I have addressed over these decades, have ignored my efforts, or worse. Now the article says the Chinese are going after lunar resources, with their fledgling industrial skills. Yet America still is doing the ignoring thing re lunar resources, despite our early efforts half a century ago. It is the “why” of it that is perhaps the difference.

This blog post could get to be really long and maybe even lose the original path by doing so. I will just point to a couple of my online-avaiable writings:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/32802637/1972MooncableDocumentRev2C.pdf and in a different mode
http://www.amazon.com/Torus-City-Shields-Returning-Home/dp/144212489X/ and the
http://www.facebook.com/groups/185118771625919/ “Moon Space Escalator” group. All of these writings describe not only why the need but also offer efficient new ways to achieve them. Results: the big silent treatment. Consistently. I point out my efforts as an example of the “why” of doing something, strongly can affect the “what” that is done, which can even include giving the “big silent treatment” as what is done.

There is no change: the Moon is still there not that far away, the resources are known to be there, the resource needs of civilization’s thriving, continue as before. Yet the Chinese head for the Moon while America … does not head for the Moon.

So I now suggest that exploring the differences will provide a lot of answers to the differences in the “why” of doing it. I could get long is my conjectures about it right now, but there is only so much effort needed just to maybe get a little info into a responsible brain out there, somehow surviving amongst the suffocating “big silent treatment” blanket here in America.

Repeating, this is to urge exploration of the thought that the “why” of doing something can have major effects on the “how ” and “what” of doing it – and maybe there is a lot of the “who’ involved, too.

Jim Cline

Anything you can do I can do better

There is a lively song from the musical "Oklahoma" that goes "Anything you can do, I can do better!" In the musical it is just an opening for a young man and woman to show each others' stuff, as they grow from puberty into adulthood's interests.

Yet now in my quest to discover "what people really do do," it seems that the phrase "anything you can do, I can do better" is a major thing among people's interactions, explaining lots of behavior.

I noticed that a long time ago, watching many of my friends.

Yet it did not seem to be anything I could find in my own self. I occasionally hypothesized about the phenomenon, to myself. It might explain lots about what I observed in the world of people.

I tentatively concluded that, to the "normal" person, lacking an inner measuring stick, that it was a way of evaluating their own performance, by measuring against what their neighbor was doing.

It thus explained the urge to run foot races, race cars, even the generally bloodless mock battles of team sports.

That means of evaluating performance thus was not tied to actual achievement capability. It only required one be better-than the other person, to show OK-ness. It was not tied to the successful doing of what it took for the group, the species, to survive and thrive. It therefore could easily miss the boat and never know it.

I now am beginning to suspect that this is what is responsible for America to be unraveling in recent times.

The self-correcting feedback loop is tied to the wrong parameter.

And it also explains the strange response I got back starting 23 years ago when I publicly proposed my KESTS to GEO concept to save civilization. The aerospace studs merely saw me as attempting to show them up.

And thus they responded, instead of welcoming me and my concepts to the endeavor of extending civilization into space in the near future, to instead of looking big and impressive and totally concerned with the future of mankind - the distant future, that is - letting the present times coast along continuing to give them the cushy prestigious life, obscuring what I had proposed.

So it was an "anything that Jim Cline could do, we important aerospace folks can appear to do better" kind of response attitude. Merely a rivalry game, that was their duck soup; something they could win with one hand tied behind their back and blindfolded, how great they were. That seems to explain a lot. It also means I really misjudged them. No helpers, they.

But it is not that they are bad people. It is merely their knee-jerk way of relating.

My stance on coal and environment at this point

There needs to be a balance between protecting our environment and maintaining our energy supply; along with heavily cutting back on dependence on offshore oil and its one-way flow of huge amounts of our money. Coal is our local hydrocarbon energy source burned in the air, but it creates much CO2 and toxic contaminants in air and soil; it needs to be expanded some as clean as feasible while speedily building up wind turbine energy sources and solar panel energy sources. Would also be very wise to carefully examine and begin to implement the "KESTS to GEO" hoop-type electrically powered space transportation system between equatorial ground terminals and GEO so as to quickly and economically start building the long-proposed multi-gigawatt Satellite Solar Power Stations in Geostationary Earth Orbit to beam down plentiful clean electrical energy 24/7 to supply America's power needs and become an energy exporter to the rest of the world, too, the same way. Petrochemicals need to be saved and used only for materials manufacturing for the future's needs, not to be burned for energy production anymore now than absolutely necessary. See http://www.scribd.com/doc/14090674/Carousel-f and http://www.scribd.com/doc/14090616/SpacecraftElectricalLiftUpAroundEarthToGEO for example descriptions of the "KESTS to GEO" project concept, which have references to published technical papers; concept does not use rockets thus not of interest to present day aerospace businesses, so the country is the potential creator of the project, much as was for Apollo project; but this time a space race against time so as to provide abundant clean cheap electrical power derived from the 24/7 solar power in orbit, while also sharply conserving the world ecosystem. KESTS to GEO also paves the way for a new way to clean up our industrial toxic materials by conversion back into their constituent materials in solar powered mass-spectrometer facilities in GEO, all enabled by ultra-low-cost transportation to GEO by the KESTS space escalator carousel structure. Meanwhile, maximum effort to build the wind power and solar panel power along with some increase in coal power with intent to phase it out as soon as possible.