Author: John Clarkson

By John M Clarkson BA(Hons) MSc

Space based Solar Power is closer than we currently think. The time line is shortening as payload costs tumble with the development of privately owned rocket companies. The Chinese have set up a city to develop Space based Solar Power in order to solve their coal shortage, especially important after the Philippines decided no longer to sell them coal. Who will win the race? The West or the East? Finances are at the heart of this problem as much as cheaper rocket payload costs.

Energy from Outer Space – A Course about Space Solar Power – available now on Udemy at a reduced price

I’ve created a course on the subject of SSP which I hope people will take and enjoy. It’s available at by clicking here: SPACE SOLAR POWER COURSE

We’ve looked already at Space based solar Power in my Blogs here on the LUF, however, by writing a course on it, and working on my film (still in production) called ‘Valery Danko Discovers Energy from Space’ we inadvertently stumbled across another interesting subject: financing.

It’s not covered much in our course, though we do look at some interesting versions of it. However, what we found was even more interesting. It’s scandalous and goes to the very heart of the future of planet earth.

The Domesticated Human Economy

The world you see is not as we are told it is. We are told that we should run businesses and pay our tax. That the tax is collected and used by the representative (NB.) governments ‘we the people’ elect. This applies to any nation that actually has liberal-democracy in a sense of free and fair elections. That the system is that government shouldn’t interfere with the economy too much. That all will be well as long as we allow the ‘hidden hand’ to take action.

We are also made aware of, but never get any sense that anyone ever listened to him, Adam Smith, who in 1776 criticised ‘rent economies’. That is where unproductive assets that don’t employ people or generate products that help the masses, but simply suck money from them become a dominant means to make wealth. This would include land owned by the Duke of Westminster (by right of birth or inheritance) or buildings bought by the Reuben brothers to rent to the H M Inland Revenue (the tax collecting authority in the United Kingdom).

These warnings are ignored because our current economy rewards and supports asset owners, rent economies, and dissuades invention and investment in manufacturing. Space X, Virgin Space and Blue Origin are exceptions not the rule. Most banks merely shunt money around in a circle, printing money automatically as they loan it to businesses and people. Many people are buying assets such as homes. They do invest in companies, but not nearly enough to stimulate economic growth. Instead they are asset based rent economy supporters and that means land and property is valued above creating space technology companies every time!

When economies fail, those who are unable to pay back are left homeless, or lose their business properties, and soon the banks own all the assets. This is exactly what we ought not to be allowing, because it is a ‘rent economy’.

The banks always win even if they go bust. In 2008/9 RBS was bought out by 50% or more by the UK government using a 19th century law. Some banks seem to have gone out of their way to suck up defenceless asset owners businesses, those not rich enough to fight back. This involved forgery of documents, fraud and re-writing telephone transcript records!

What has this all to do with the Living Universe Foundation? It’s vital to understand the kind of economic system we live in order to know if anything will ever happen over the development of space technology.

What is the solution to a mature rent economy? Well that’s called Georgism, and is the idea that all taxes should be replaced by a land tax. With some extra rules such as rent caps and mortgage caps, and using the single land tax to pay everyone a Universal Basic Income, we can build a better future. With the growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robots Elon Musk even said that this will be a necessity. Well, the only way to fund it will be via Georgism. The richest people will resist this as it hits them the hardest, especially the entrenched elites e.g. Prince Charles.

In bringing such a system into place one would immediately stop the millions that never flow into the tax system because they are sent abroad to tax havens. This tax which is currently lost is vital to the future. We don’t know exact numbers but it could be billions of pounds sterling per year (we’ll never know) to provide things like free health care for all (as in the UK) without privatisation of healthcare (which sadly has been introduced into the UK from the USA at huge costs – namely 150,000 dead from poor covid management – the blame can be firmly placed at Jeremy Hunt MP and his Conservative Party’s door). The sad fact is the major thing you’ll pay in your life is tax, because the asset owning classes have made sure they never will. Why is that?

The Wild Banker Warlord Economy

Why won’t we ‘ever know?’ And why will the asset class holding elite make sure you’ll always pay your taxes and they never will? Surely everything is recorded? Incorrect. The City of London is a Secrecy Jurisdiction. This means nothing can be reported. Occasionally though the secrecy is lost e.g. Pandora Papers, the Panama Papers etc. This reveals a spiders web of disgusting malevolence by the elites – who by the way hardly ever pay tax – and the intrigue that occurs in the City of London.

The City of London is the hub of the problem, which is also behind the destruction of our planet, using its many former tax havens to disguise flows of money around the world merely to invest in illegal land clearances, deforestation, child slave labour mining (e.g. cobalt, lithium etc used to make batteries) and oil, gas and coal extraction. There are crime syndicates and mafia involved, along with drug cartels spanning the world! There’s a whole host of Eastern European and poorer nations prostitution and vice rackets attached. Every nasty thing you can think of from arms sales to paedophiles (remember Jeffry Epstein) is involved in this scurrilous tale of immorality, condoned by the law makers in the UK for centuries!

In my film: ‘The World Stripped Bare’ we’ll take an saucy and entertaining look at this phenomena.

The World Stripped Bare Trailer (2021)

How should we classify what is legal in the financial world and how this affects the growth of humans into space? These are fundamental questions to explore. Here I’ll provide a few ideas.

Laws do not make things moral or right. Everyone has heard the ‘law is an ass’. The US broke away from Britain’s laws not because of the Tea tax that involved the East India Company in Boston Harbour. Actually the reason was far better than that! It was because the founding fathers wanted an empire. The Act of Proclamation 1762 prohibited expansion west to prevent another war with France or further wars with Spain, and to some extent a feeling that the native tribes would be too difficult to deal with! The British government were simply not prepared to risk lives and resources in western expansion having fought a nasty war with France to protect its citizens in the 13 colonies of America. That’s why they needed a tax contribution, which was by the way, very small compared with the taxes that the Founding Fathers applied to pay for the cruel war against the British (where unlike in the film Patriot starring Mel Gibson most of the major atrocities were carried out by the US forces e.g. the long march into Canada where women and children died in the snow. This led to the formation of Canada and an anti- US sentiment by Canadians which came to a head in the War of 1812, when the US tried to invade Canada and got a bloody nose followed by 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue being burned down by British Admirals. The US President had to leave in a hurry, and the British commanders ate the President’s dinner and set the slaves free – the British having already outlawed slavery to some extent.)

In our film we examine how tradition and laws or lack of them have allowed the City of London – the Square Mile – to become a centre of a vast financial empire that is largely behind much of the environmental problems we are suffering now. This leads me onto the fact that is even more concerning.

Will the Warlord’s invest in SSP?

Will the City of London and the banks in the USA they are connected to have what it takes to invest in a long-term space technologies that appear to have no value right now? That’s where most people will say that is where government must step in. However, each time a disaster happens we know that governments essentially lose the ability to keep borrowing money from the future.

One chink of light is that bankers know all about commodities. They make good business from them. Think about the recent pandemic and the inflation it has caused as governments pumped money in and closed down oil, gas and coal production, only to find out that commodity traders have obtained (been paid by the production companies) to hold these vital energy stocks. Now they are required they release them to make a profit on the fact they rented out storage facilities and ships to hold them over the pandemic period. How much better would it be to have Space based Solar Power on tap than rely on dodgy commodity traders? It’s looking like a feasible investment with a 4:1 EROIE.

There is however, a flaw in this argument. Increasingly commodity traders are diversifying into buying up land, mainly rainforests to obtain Rare Earth Elements. These REEs are not rare, but spread out. Vast amounts of land have to be accessed. That means major deforestation in places rich in them e.g. D R Congo. Here they get cheap slave labour. Why then invest in somewhere expensive to make energy, when one can wreck the planet Earth with lithium and cobalt pollution to make a Renewable Electric Energy Economy? (see my course on the Future of Energy.) What will dissuade them when they are short-term greedy thinkers who want their money back as soon as possible?

[On a side note it is interesting to know that the assassination of JFK may have been connected to the death of the UN ambassador and his role in the Katanga War. This was a place south of the DR Congo rich in minerals, particularly REEs and the British financial sector and Belgian government were highly placed to take advantage of them if they could make sure that their men in power won that war. It appears that this and the fact that JFK tried to tax the Eurodollar trade (nothing to do with modern Euro currency) in July 1963 may have caused the CIA to consider eliminating him purely for self-interested reasons due to their connections to the ruling elites in London and New York. By November JFK had been shot dead allegedly by a lone gunman, who had connections to the CIA. It was well-known that the CIA had an agenda the opposed JFK but was supported by Johnson. This is not a conspiracy theory but is founded in facts established after the Warren Commission.]

Tentative Conclusion

If commodity traders and banks are into asset buying then where is the money to invest in the space industry? Can they magic it out of thin air as prices rises, taxes reduce, the wealthy send their money offshore to invest in land, property, assets and commodities, and less into home grown production industry or design? What happens when the AI revolution hits? Meanwhile the Chinese giant is now awake and running a capitalist system that forces them to hold onto power using a forever growth model? Will the West fall behind? If the West does fall behind what will happen next? Or will the City of London with its 320 to 800 year history, and US banking system with its 246 year history, be able to pluck victory from the edge of climate change chaos and energy crisis disaster? We can however hope that visionaries will emerge. Hopefully we here at the LUF can be those visionaries.

BIBLIOGRAPHY & REFERENCES

The Future of Energy – udemy Course

Energy from Outer Space – udemy Course

What will it lead to?

There are few places in the world quite like Easter Island or as it is known to the Polynesians, Rapa Nui. It is arguably the remotest place on Earth. It could be said that one is closer to cities when you are in the International Space Station (ISS) than when you are on Easter Island. It is famous for only one thing: the moai. These are the colossal stone statues of human faces that seem to be impossible to construct given the lack of timber on the island. However, did they do it?

Valery Danko, the Managing Director of Perimetr Films travelled to Easter Island in 2019. Initially we made a history film. However, at the same time evidence was collected about climate change, plastic pollution and the clear reliance on diesel oil based energy (though some solar was allowed, it was thought to ruin the character of the island). Clearly space based solar would be very suitable on Easter Island.

What is interesting about Easter Island is that like humans on planet earth as a whole, the people that originally inhabited it around 800 AD, were extremely successful economically. However, they devastated their environment. Thus, they lost the ability, due to their long time on this remote island, to flee from it. One could say it was a lack of knowledge! I suspect it was also a lack of palm trees to build their ships. Climate change may have had an impact on them also, as the decline seems to correspond with the Little Ice Age. Equally rat populations may have also prevented them from managing the tree harvest properly. Whatever the case, the bad situation was multi-causal and eventually the civilisation that had built the moai declined and was eventually enslaved by Europeans. (The film above we made is fascinating and I highly recommend it!)

Easter Island is a good example of Spaceship Earth. We should never forget we are essentially a spaceship. We float through space at an enormous speed, which we don’t even notice.

We desperately need to return to the moon and colonise it. Then we need to venture towards Mercury and disassemble it for materials. We need to use robots that can survive the harshness of space. They need to be artificially intelligent, able to reproduce themselves, survive the rigours of space and adapt to new and even more hostile conditions. They must be almost as good as humans at adaptation to conditions on Earth.

Once we have succeeded in this we can venture into the asteroid belt and to the moons of many planets that offer us a bountiful treasure of materials we can utilise for the betterment of human kind.

If we stay on planet Earth, and only go to the Moon or Mars for tourism, we’ll fail to survive as long as we can.

We need right now to build the best space defence systems available – which need to be solar powered. (See my previous blogs.) We need to clean up the debris orbiting our planet which we have turned into a tip.

Taking mercury apart by using self-replicating robots will not be too difficult. However, another swarm of robots will need to build huge space factories that can convert this material into thin solar panels, space vehicles, and bring back rare elements that we lack on Earth and so on.

Also taking mercury apart gives us the materials to try to create a Dyson Sphere. We can then muster huge amounts solar energy, allowing our ships to venture beyond the solar system, deep into space.

Human problems are not generally insurmountable. Instead I believe most human problems are linked to 3 things:

Firstly we tend to over-populate and live in cluttered hostile environments.

Anything that produces more than it’s own number is going to grow exponentially. When you add that to a limited space you have a problem.

Maths is quite useful here. If you want to know how long it takes anything to grow over a time period you can use this trick:

Let’s say that the global population grows at 2% per year. If that is true then that means it doubles every 35 years. On a grand scale that’s not long – only half a human lifetime (of 70 years of age). That means they’ll need twice as much as what we have by the year 2090. Twice the food, twice the shelter, twice the water, twice the number of sewerage plants and twice the amount of energy.

The way to know the doubling time of any fixed growth rate is to divide it into 70 e.g. 70 divided by 2 = 35 years. If the growth rate is 7% per year then 70 divided by 7 = 10 years. (The growth rate does not have to be per year, it can be any time period as long as you have a percentage growth rate.)

A 100% growth rate per year would by 70 divided by 100 = 0.7 of a year.

Populations go completely crazy if confined to a cluttered and overcrowded environment. For example, mice placed in an experimental habitat, started off quite relaxed. However, with a few generations they were crazily competing over resources such as living space (lebensraum – where have I read that before?)

Mental health is a big priority now especially amongst the younger members of the British royal family. More and more people are seeing psychiatrists or therapists for help. The 2020 lockdowns due to covid-19 have not helped. However, fear of lockdown or loss of work due to lockdown is a real and present threat. People are losing their jobs to the policies that the governments are using to deal with it.

Population growth in cluttered spaces is thus a problem for the well-being of humanity over the longer term. It encourages future pandemics. We must therefore tackle with all urgency population growth and curtail urban growth in favour of village growth.

Secondly, we are wasting much of our talent because the economy works on the principle of satiating a need, a want, a desire, or a demand. These are what drive the global economy. Anything that cannot produce something that people want to buy is without an income and thus can quickly end up being overwhelmed by poverty. We are one pay check away from poverty in many cases. In the case of businessmen, or very rich people, who have lots of reserves, the inevitable can be delayed, but never put off entirely. Eventually one must find an income, even if it is only to pay the bills!

Such a system is based on using materials and destroying habitats largely unseen by us. The Planet of the Dead will be the epitaph of humankind if this economic system, however useful or better it is than other forms of production, is allowed to continue unchecked by effective enforcement of global environmental laws

Going into space though would allow humans to change their economic system to one of machine based Artificial Intelligence economics. With inexhaustible supplies of energy and materials humans would no longer need to work in factories, mine or go around chopping down forests. Instead they could work for the betterment of their villages, travel to places that they had never seen, enjoy their life rather than having to do some awful work that they hate, live, love and be merry, for life is short: who after all wishes to sit at a computer all day or work as a filing clerk? Who wants to protect the Prime Minister or the President from harm, when an Artificial Intelligence government could run the world efficiently? Who needs a democracy when artificial intelligence rules the world?

Thirdly, our current obsession with race, creed, religion, beliefs, ideologies, power and wealth, could be obliterated by placing artificial intelligence self-replicating machines in charge of politics or economics and do away with nation states altogether. In such a magnificent future Vladimir Putin would be viewed by the AI teachers of young humans as an example of a human dinosaur – that is a power mad, crazy who deserved to be terminated as soon as possible along with his supporters and oligarchs.

The solution though does not bode well. As artificial intelligence develops, it would eventually become superior to us. Once it can self-replicate without help from humans, and even change its own programming safety features, humans themselves would be seen as potential threat. Logic would dictate that such a system should eliminate its creator for fear of destruction. It follows the natural progress of human history: white Europeans with superior technological development conquered inferior developed regions and either enslaved them or carried out genocide in order to obtain their resources. The AI leaders would have no reason to kill us other than a fear of our unreliable, illogical behaviour. We are perhaps the most violent creature on planet earth given our firepower. Thus AI leaders would quickly assess us as a threat to their existence, and with cold logical terminate all of us.

Luckily AI of the type I am imagining is probably 1000 years away if not more. If well-controlled AI government could solve the Easter Island scenario and lead mankind to a better, happier future. The idea of Skynet, in the Terminator films, is a military version of what I imagine for government of planet earth and space. Who needs Joe Biden if you’ve got SkyNet to run things?

WEBSITES YOU MIGHT LIKE

https://futureofenergycollege.com

http://perimetrfilms.com

https://valerydanko.com

by John Clarkson BA(Hons) MSc film producer and Sustainable Development Scientist and Writer

At Perimetr Films we’re going to make a film about how the financial world is killing our planet and preventing humanity from reaching our potential. That potential is essentially reaching the stars and surviving an apocalypse.

Nicholas Shaxson wrote an amazing book (Treasure Islands: the men who stole the world) and there was even a documentary about the subject of trust funds. It describes the financial spiders web of intrigue and corruption that means tax payers are paying huge sums, whilst the mega-wealthy elites go untaxed.

At the same time though governments are investing tax in military and anti-climate change technology that serves no purpose other than short term financial gain. In many ways we all ought to not pay tax, or use banks, because these very institutions are behind slowly destroying rain-forests, sterilising land using pesticides and artificial fertilisers, producing food that is less nutritious and in some cases heavily polluted by chemicals that are known carcinogens to humans. One cannot blame the rich from hiding some of their money away.

When mega-corporations do it, then use it to go into space, we have to consider the possibility that the space industry is now also contaminated by the same affliction: tax evasion, avoidance, using the system to reduce or eliminate tax. It is a major problem for all of us and particularly any future plans to inhabit the moon, add space solar power (see my previous posts) or develop a space-faring civilisation capable of utilising resources from the solar system.

We could solve most of climate change by simply going vegan. That would knock out a huge amount of GHG regardless of what the naysayers say! Better investment could take money used for oil and gas production and divert it to space solar power and geothermal energy. Instead corruption in high places, such as investment corporations, mostly in the City of London, with its special connection to the West Indies tax havens e.g. British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands etc. have other plans. They go for short term profit from oil, gas and coal. They make it their mission. We only need some of these to make rocket fuel. Even that could be made artificially from a host of systems that are sustainable and completely carbon neutral. There’s no excuse for them. It is pure insatiable greed and it must be ended.

However, who is going to end it? The world’s leaders are all invested heavily in trust funds. Trust funds are the life blood of the global economy, providing in some cases, 90% of foreign investment. The individuals you think are in power are just puppets on an investment corporations string. They dance to their tune on a daily and hourly basis.

Many of these investment managers end up as head of tax authorities, who then do deals with companies such as British telecomm etc to lower their tax bill. The leaders you feel are adversaries are just part of a puppet show that creates good vs bad and leads to the nation state and terrorist anarchy we all see around us. Since COVID-19 the war in Ukraine, Syria and Yemen have largely disappeared from the news. It is now the USA vs China for a while, until Iran or some other media spectre is developed, like photographs that used to be developed in a dark room.

Our film will be very entertaining, and will try to get the message to the masses in a saucy way, so that they remember it for a long time. A film that fails to titillate and entertain, will always do better than pure dry statistics. That is what we have learned from Hitler, Trump, Johnson and Putin.

Politicians in the UK are well-known for their jobs after office. They seem to always end up with a fortune, being paid millions per week for being an adviser; yet none have any qualifications to advise! What is being paid for here is connections to the global oligarchy.

Money is made from arms and harm. This is why governments and investors invest in human division. Military arms only sell while you have bogeymen to fight. Pharmaceuticals and medicines are massively developed during wars. When you can create opposition, the arms dealers cash in, the wars help to provide new experimental patients to work on. It’s a big win, win for the trust fund managers.

Trust funds are often heavily invested in by illegal drug cartels from South America. This is similar to the Opium trade the British Empire did during its heights in the 19th century. Illegal money from fraud, theft and drugs finds its way into every corner of the world of investments, with huge profits to be had by legitimate and illegitimate businesses who are invested correctly.

Why is there a war in Ukraine raging when it was agreed during the dissolution of the Soviet Union where the border was? Why have hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian people simply vanished? Why is America dying to fight a war with Iran? What stopped that fight? A virus! Covid 19 is a product of our unsustainable meat industry I firmly believe. It was found in Spanish sewers long before it became airborne as a viral infection from Wuhan. How did it get there? ( See shorturl.at/alsD6) Who is cashing in on this deal?

Why are we sleep walking away from our destiny in the stars and allowing the mega-rich to get richer and failing to organise the scientific elites to fight back?

Why are the media allowed to consistently tell lies using measures such as GDP and GNP that have no basis for measuring much more than what wealthy investors wish to know, whilst the rest of people cannot get free health care, even in the UK where the NHS is supposed to be free? What is happening to the worlds space development programmes now we have militarised space and privatised it? Who will make money from those businesses?

There is only one answer. This is not a conspiracy amongst elite investment trust fund management companies or banks. Instead it competition amongst a few ‘hub banks and investment corporations’ that specialise in trust funds and investment in general. You will also notice that major banks and investments corporations often rotate their CEO’s on a merry-go-round of jobs. Some people have the connections, background and education (Oxford and Cambridge) to be insiders. The others are outsiders. (It’s good to be an outsider, for one can shine light into dark places from outside, whereas the true darkness is always masked by artificial light when you are on the inside! Think about it.)

We need to wake up! We need to become politically active.

http://www.perimetrfilms.com

by John M Clarkson BA(Hons) MSc

Humans are known for one thing on planet Earth if the rest of the creatures could talk. We are the ultimate plague species. Consider one great example. The Polynesian Triangle! As the Polynesians expanded they would take over islands, exhaust their resources and sail on to the next island.

Our film on Easter Island is being made right now (we filmed it on location in 2019) One point it makes is that ‘success’ can lead to disaster, and then a lesser success. Easter lsland was very successful, but eventually that success led to its decline and eventually its enslavement.

The planet we live on currently seems to be a human success. Poverty is generally down across the world, though this is highly debatable. Living standards are generally up. We have more access to technology than ever before. Even young men in impoverished parts of Africa have a mobile (cell) phone. Technology seems to be turning the tide against poverty. Yet there’s a nagging doubt that something is not quite right. Climate change, plastic pollution, micro-plastic pollution, destruction of habitats and air pollution are everywhere. They are not being solved. British ministers promise to stop plastic pollution being sent to developing nations, but nothing is done.

We need a solution to two things right now. One is energy from fossil fuels. Oil is after all the source of much urban air pollution and all plastic pollution. The other is resources. There’s also a need to address two threats to all life on Earth: super-volcanoes and of course comets and asteroids from space that are potential life killers.

We can do very little about super-volcanoes, other than develop underground farming systems, possibly involving mushrooms, but also utilising energy from geothermal to provide underground farming. This would allow humans to shelter for hundreds of years to survive volcanic eruptions. This will cost us money that no politician will provide, because politicians are poor decision makers who think in 5 year election cycles. Democracy and globalism are not good systems for long-term survival, even if my professors in university seemed to believe they were!

Energy we can solve using space solar power and geothermal energy. We don’t need nuclear reactors on Earth. We’d be better off building them in space. That way they’d be far away from us. Even fusion is unnecessary once space solar power and geothermal is sufficiently developed.

Space solar power could be, as suggested in my previous blog a perfect method for solar sail powered ships to glide around the solar system collecting minerals etc that we can use on earth. This kind of world would be a world of plenty, because the solar system has plenty of materials we can harvest. It’s virtually inexhaustible.

Using space solar as the means to deflect earth bound asteroids and comets is a viable solution for most situations. However, it is currently not being prioritised by governments who don’t really understand the issue. It’s not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’. The methods we use will not just rely on one kind of defence system. I suggest we start work on this problem immediately. There is no time to waste.

We need better leadership. However, what we observe daily instead is Elon Musk, Jeff Besoz, the Russians, Chinese and Virgin, all involved in space tourism! Today everyone is happy about he splashdown of the Dragon X capsule returning from the ISS. This is the story of humanity. Let’s focus on the wrong problems and deal with them. Let’s focus on BREXIT and Making American Great Again, but not worry about pandemics. Then COVID-19 turns up and the economy crashes. Why? Because our political leaders are not scientists. Instead we have rich men forcing themselves by the fact they have wealth and media status, into power. Be it Biden (whose son is involved in oil in Ukraine) or Trump (who thinks that there were British airports in 1775, and people are ‘dying who have never died before’). In the UK we have a Prime Minister who believed that paint could solve climate change and that building a garden bridge across the river Thames was a viable project, which he spent millions on! These kinds of imbeciles should never be given anything but a toilet brush and an pot to clean; but instead, due to wealth, the ability to inflame the rabble, clever spin, and ignorance amongst even the intelligent (I know someone who thinks Johnson is great, and is himself an Engineer!) they take over.

I think it is time that if we want a Living Universe, scientists need to start to become politicians. It may seem ridiculous, but if it does not happen soon, we will have a problem. Look at how well Germany is run! Yes, perhaps she makes mistakes, but at least hers are forgivable and often very humanistic (helping refugees for example).

If we want to solve our problems we need to do two things fast: quickly develop space technology that defends our planet and finds new resources; and secondly create a more sustainable civilisation on Earth, where people live simpler more harmonious lives, with nature. Where they work for the good of each other and not the greed of themselves. If we do that, we will have a better world.

One stumbling block will be the financial system. That’s a subject for another blog. A blog that will challenge you and what you think about your own contribution to the problems our planet faces.

We need a scientific meritocratic democracy, and we need it quickly.

www.perimetrfilms.com

Could we one day use the Space Solar Power to travel around the Solar System?

When Valery Danko in 2019 went to interview Professor Naoki Shinohara, during the intial contact phase, he mentioned an experiment using Microwave beam technology to fly a small drone. In other words, no energy is carried on the drone, it all comes from the microwave beam at a distance!

This example is not clearly the same as Solar sail, but the principle is the same. The drone saves vital weight carrying fuel or batteries. The energy is supplied by the sun, using another electromagnetic beam of radiation!

The Developed Martian Colony

Mars is a very hostile place with a thin atmosphere and less solar energy than on Earth. It’s very far away from Earth – anywhere between 55 and 401 million kilometres. (34 million miles and 249 million miles). There’s no life on it as far as we currently know. Its atmosphere is so thin that it is an excellent insulator. However, it might also be so hot in the sun that living things will have problems without considerable energy use to keep cool. Artificially Intelligent (AI) robots will be critical to any development of a martian colony. Also, if we decide to nuke it before we turn up (as Elon Musk suggests) we can thicken up the atmosphere and hopefully create, albeit low gravity, conditions for growing food. To make it worthwhile, we’ll have let the robots build mars before humans arrive.