Let's Have a Clean-Sheet Constitution

Let’s have a clean-sheet constitution for colonies on a high frontier in space with a more tyrant-resistant balance of power based on individual rights (not group rights, not corporate rights), minimum cost, maximum transparency, and an assured, continuing process of frontier formation. For inspiration, I can provide some help:

Ayn Rand's philosophical and literary struggle was to solve the problem of how to defend against moochers and looters. Equality 7-2521 ran from them in Anthem. Howard Roark ignored them in The Fountainhead. In Atlas Shrugged, John Galt lead a strike that involved the creation of what amounts to a frontier. Rand seems to have thought that a frontier would be an essential part of any viable solution.

"Rather than quarrel about territory, the the poor, the needy, and oppressed of the earth, and those who want land, resort to the fertile plains of our western country, the second land of promise, and there dwell in peace, fulfilling the first and great commandment."

source: Letter to David Humphreys dated July 25, 1785.

territory, immigration, handouts, poor, welfare, farming, self-reliance

Governments (ours, theirs, it doesn't matter) are interested in continuity of government only. When government realizes that frontier formation does not serve this central interest, it backs off. Any progress made in space pioneering will have to come from commercial interests.

“Resistance to innovation is a part of the deep structure of politics. In that, it is like any other monopoly. It never goes out of business — despite flooding the market with defective and dangerous products, mistreating its customers, degrading the environment, cooking the books, and engaging in financial shenanigans that would have made Gordon Gekko pale to contemplate.”

Kevin Williamson  in The End Is Near and It’s Going To Be Awesome: How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.” 

― Alexis de Tocqueville

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.” 

― Alexis de Tocqueville

The United States should act to simultaneously reduce expenditures and enhance revenues as follows: It should abolish all entitlements and subsidies. It should limit regulatory authority to the prevention of actions aimed at obtaining advantage at the expense of others. It should modify the Constitution to require the Federal government to provide for frontier formation on a basis equal to the national defense. To that end, it should transfer $200b a year from defense to frontier formation with the goal of harvesting the material and energy wealth of the solar system.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.” William Shakespeare

Write it, publish it using one of the free publication-on-demand services, then sell it (the business model that new technology allows is to make money from small, even individual, sales, not publication). SpaceFarers wants to feature your creative work online at Alien Landscapes.

If you create it, find it, or just want to kick ideas around, go right ahead and let us know about it. Comment here.

The League of the Brick Moon

Selenite Embassy is coming to Valley of the Moon in Tucson, Arizona July 18. It should be fun; it should be a crazy-good time. There will be actors in character and in costume, food vendors, art vendors, appropriate technology vendors (agriculture to robotics to xenobiology), music, and a range of theatrical performances. If you want to come in costume, do it.

Some of the things you might expect to gain if you are a vendor or a sponsor:

• Exposure to an expected 300 visitors who make buying decisions for themselves, their families, and their friends,

• Inspiration from contact with Valley of the Moon’s professional explorers (children), who are quite apt to ask great questions,

• An opportunity to inspire interest in your passion, whether it’s a science, an art, or a technology,

• An opportunity to recruit new members for your organization,

• An opportunity to test-market ideas,

• A chance to remind people it’s Spaceweek, 

• Experiencing Valley of the Moon as an insider,

• Membership in The League of the Brick Moon,

• New business, 

• Immediate profits, and

• A tax break for any cash or in-kind support members might eventually offer Valley of the Moon.

The One-Minute Pitch

One of our most useful resources for finding vendors and sponsors is Startup Tucson, and one of the fun things about that is drink night at the Passé Cafe on 4th avenue, at Gio Taco on Congress, at The Screening Room, a different venue on the second Wednesday of each month. Organizers Justin Williams and Courtney Fey have created a way for Tucson entrepreneurs, including those running non-profits, to work with each other and potential investors. I often give a one-minute pitch during drink nights about Selenite Embassy that goes something like this: I’m Laurence Winn, President of SpaceFarers Corporation, and I’m here to talk to you about an outer space renaissance fair at Valley of the Moon, a space colony simulation here in Tucson offering previews of life support technologies from the companies inventing them, rides into space from the adventurers offering them, imaginative foods from the culinary artists creating them, and hosting bands of visitors from places unknown, strangers from elsewhere in time-space, and away teams from starships named and unnamed. There is no fee. There is no gate. Our business model is “karmic billing,” in which you donate what you believe we have earned by boosting your profits (or your spirits). And it’s a tax write-off. We’ll work with you. All that’s missing is your business with its interpretation in the context we’re bringing to Valley of the Moon July 18 as Selenite Embassy, Legler Station, North America, planet Earth, in a galaxy near you. And I have cards for anyone who wants one.

Persons of Interest

So far, I have talked to:

• Jodi Netzer, GoGoKarma, who is an event organizer and an entrepreneur of social games for doing good. I’m hoping to get her attention.

• Hugh Garvey, VP of Operations at Rigaku Technologies, who is in the process of building a business based on hand-held Raman spectroscopy for (molecular, nonmetallic) material identification. Though it sounds too technical for an entertainment event, I am hoping Hugh  will arrive with an exobiologist or asteroid prospector persona and give us an idea what we’re looking at when it comes to rocks, plants, etc.

• Brian Metzger, who owns Gio Taco and Poppy Kitchen, and is a potential food boss.

• Robert Muster, who sells car parts. What we have in common is rovers and a general interest in technology.

• Linda Leigh, Vermillion Wormery, who is a former biospherian with Jane Poynter and Taber MacCallum, and can show us how to process food waste for reuse in agriculture.

• Cathy Browning, who is a practitioner of Eastern health maintenance and chronic disease management methods. She says, “I'm looking forward to this exciting journey and will anticipate growth in myself and those around me.” She brings to the table a strong family  background in frontiersmanship and a medical technology that weighs nothing and requires no imports from Earth. Low up-mass; it’s what we’re looking for.

• Carole Leon at Paragon SDC, who has a Selenite Embassy prospectus and is considering it. She comes highly recommended from Grant Anderson, a linkedIn contact, who is now CEO, having replaced Taber and Jane as president and CEO, respectively. Both have moved on to World View Enterprises, which offers high-tech balloon rides into near space with low acceleration and space-colony-like accommodations for hours of Earth-gazing. From the description, I would say the experience is much like happy hour on a low-orbiting space hotel in terms of comfort and in affording a global perspective.

• World View Enterprises (Jane Poynter and Taber MacCallum) is “Pioneering a new frontier at the edge of space.” It’s a high-altitude research balloon flight to altitude around 100,000 feet, or 20 miles high. See the curvature of the Earth and the blackness of space. The Gondola holds six passengers and two crew. A parafoil returns the gondola after it descends to 50,000 feet. Plans to launch from Spaceport America (the Virgin Galactic spaceport) north of Las Cruces, NM. I’m talking to Jane, a LinkedIn contact. 

• Reid Silvern at The Galactic Center on Toole Ave. does what he calls “columiere,” a technology he invented that works with colored light to produce a kind of animation in static images. We found him at his laboratory/shop in the Warehouse District Downtown. Reid, a member of the Tucson chapter of the International Astronomical Art Association (IAAA), expressed delight when he learned of this opportunity  to demonstrate his art form using some of his space-themed original images (a good example of the fusion of science and art) at Selenite Embassy.

• Simon Kregar, who co-chairs the local International Astronautical Art Association (IAAA) chapter, says, “This looks like a wonderful opportunity to connect with the space enthusiast crowd.” The IAAA includes people from UA’s Planetary Sciences Institute, who are very much concerned with explaining science via art.

• Sean Herman, who has an association with Local Roots Aquaponics (with Stephane Herbert-Fort) is a maker of demonstration aquaponics kits for domestic and educational needs. He has responded to our invitation to join Selenite Embassy in July with an enthusiastic “Sounds fun! Please send me a reminder in late June.”

• Brad Brockman, who is helping me pursue an idea I am working on for music at Selenite Embassy. It’s the “Monsoon Carillon,” pentatonic wind chimes ringing pure, sustained tones from tubular bells arranged around a rotating or oscillating fan. Melodies emerge, shift, blend in pleasing counterpoint, and dissolve into the randomness of rain on glass. I have a Mezzo. I’ve run it with a fan at my home. Even when people don’t know what they are hearing, they acknowledge the “so peaceful” nature of the effect it produces. Anyway, I corresponded with the maker of the wind chimes in Austin, Texas, who directed me to a vendor in Tucson (Wild Birds Unlimited on Tanque Verde Boulevard). Brad may not be able to be there with his products, but I can bring my Mezzo, and if buyers bring him one of Selenite Embassy’s cards, he says they get a discount, and Valley of the Moon gets a donation.

Something More

In its grottos and caves and copses, Valley of the Moon already has a fair amount of shade, but I am looking for something more in the way of environmental control, like shade sails tensioned by guy wires, maybe staked over Pennyland (for our purposes, Dragon’s Gate Skylight). I’m also looking for an artificial tree with multiple, overlapping shade sail “leaves” and a system of ultrasonic foggers to supply transpiration cooling. It would need electrical conduits for power to the foggers and LED lamps. I see from my psychrometric chart that we should be able to reduce the temperature in the shade from 100°F to 87°F at a relative humidity of up to 60% using transpiration cooling, which could take the form of misters or foggers in the trees. We’re looking for something like 12 liters (about 3 gallons) per hour of water use under each sail. Geodesic domes with fabric panels, tripods with irregular triangular panels are options for providing shade, If we can engage with their vendors in time. If we could build a chimney out of shade sails for the misters, that would be visually dramatic as well as a source of enhanced cooling. Waste management, portable “relief stations, ” clothing and accessories for thermal management, all of the above I hope to have provided and represented by vendors looking for buyers. As I said, I’m looking for the lookers. If you have leads, please let me know. If you or your associates want to manage some contacts yourselves, bravo and carry on. Just try to keep me in the loop so I can pass it along.

Notes:

(1) The header graphic is from the Society of Illustrators in NYC (www.societyillustrators.org). The artist is Jeffrey Jones, oil painting commissioned by the Hayden Planetarium in New York in 1971. The original is in the collection of Robert K. Wiener.

(2) The text of The Brick Moon, Edward Everett Hale,

The Atlantic Monthly Volume 0024 Issue 141 (July 1869) is at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1633/pg1633.html. The physics is almost all completely wrong, but the story explores an important concept of frontier formation, the opportunity to build a world from scratch, and it foreshadows the utility of artificial satellites for navigation, not to mention a real moonshot on July 16, 1969.

Inspiring Image, Mystery Artist

I found the artwork I call “Frontier Montage” on my desk at Martin Marietta Aerospace one morning in 1980 or 1981. In those days, I ignored corporate propaganda, but I eventually framed it and hung it in my front hall at home. There it attracted favorable attention from visiting friends, one of whom remarked, “That really says it all, doesn’t it?” Black space in the background, Earth’s limb on the left, a Saturn V rises from its launch mount in the foreground. An Apollo spacecraft pursues a full Moon into the opposing upper corner. A space shuttle in orbit occupies the focal point (that’s the propaganda). A Wright flier traverses the blue band of sky between space and a green-wooded idyll, where a pioneer family, in a wagon, crosses the bottom of the canvas. It’s unsigned. I never figured out who made it or where it came from. Anyone have a clue?

Spaceship Mixup: Orion vs. Orion

Not so long ago, in a solar system really near you, the Supranational Authority was up to Hooda-knows-what. Let’s see if you can figure it out.

Some interesting nonsense that played out in three nearly sequential issues of Aviation Week & Space Technology recently involved confusion about a name, the designation of a current NASA project to build a spaceship of exploration called Orion and the name of a late 1950s/early 1960s program, also called Orion, to build a nuclear rocket with a payload on the scale of an aircraft carrier’s displacement, 100,000 tons vs. 100 tons for the proposed U.S. Space Launch System and 16 tons for the defunct Space Shuttle. Reader “A” in the letters column of June 30 offered an observation that, if the nuclear ship’s funding had survived the 1963 test ban treaty, it would have taken us “to Alpha Centauri and back twice by now.”

That’s a bit of poetic license, but it stirred the pedagogical instincts of a retired astronaut who replied based on the capabilities of the chemically-fueled spaceship, the other Orion (riding atop the Space Launch System), with its maximum velocity of 10 miles per second. His conclusion: it would take 55,800 years for the journey. We heard about it in the July 21 issue. Aviation Week went out of its way to emphasize the lecture with a halftone screen under the text and an actual algebraic equation and everything.

Finally, a reader from Hong Kong set the record straight in the July 28 edition with data from a 1968 Freeman Dyson article in Physics Today, pointing out the nuclear Orion’s 6,000 miles per second top speed. The article is available online at ow.ly/zt7jm.

In the middle ‘70s NASA made light of Gerry O’Neill’s space colonization ideas, citing the enormous mass that would have to be lifted into orbit. Of course, O’Neill had emphasized the need to obtain materials from the moon, not Earth. I have often thought that governments (and other devious types) intentionally introduce confusion about things they don’t want discussed. Now I think it again. Can you cite other instances of the same behavior?

New White Paper

A new white paper by SpaceFarers Corporation examines how to establish a spacefaring civilization without government intervention by turning space technology development into a popular form of entertainment linked to sustainable living on Earth. The current view of the future produces an emphasis on sacrifice and austerity. In the proposed ethic, the most fundamental freedom is the freedom to leave. Our research indicates that promoting this freedom through a specific form of entertainment will produce sustainability with prosperity on, and off, the earth. The customary way to leave a civilization as recently as 1900 was to head for a frontier, defined as an isolated region of resources without proprietors and with anonymity for new arrivals. The absence of frontiers is termed enclosure, manifesting as a constellation of symptoms in common with “isolated confined environment syndrome,” including depression, anxiety, and anger. This is a global phenomenon, a fatal cocktail of emotions requiring a frontier formation response. We maintain that the only accessible and fully functional frontier at this time is the solar system. The white paper postulates that (1) enclosure results in reproductive failure of the enclosed population, producing senescence followed by collapse and (2) no mitigation can happen on the required scale unless a large segment of society views space frontier formation as fun. The first premise has been tested and found to be arguably true in rodents. SpaceFarers is implementing, a test case for the second premise blending science, technology, craft, and performance art. We are looking for collaborators. The paper is posted online at the SpaceFarers web site, www.AlienLandscapes.biz/tospci.html.

Enclosure Sickness: Deadlier Than An Asteroid

Try a thought experiment.

Place 100 people behind walls. Provide plenty of food, water, sanitary services, comfortable living quarters and physical security against outside threats, but no challenge, and no ability to leave. Some individuals will feel a need to dominate others. It is inevitable with humans. Others will try to avoid domination.

Both types will attempt to satisfy their needs by social aggregation, forming crowds, perhaps at food courts, a natural place for humans to gather. Prey seek safety in numbers. Predators must be where their prey is. Every so often, an apparently normal male will attack a female, a juvenile, or an individual of lower status without preamble or provocation.

Most such will be beaten and expelled from the crowd, but, with nowhere to go, they will linger on the margins, cultivate their resentment, and fight among themselves. In darkness, they will prowl the tenements, seeking weak prey, especially the young. Their attacks will eventually saturate the defenses of the normal males, some of whom will abandon their posts and abdicate their responsibilities.

Families will dissolve. The young will be killed, sometimes by their stressed and distraught mothers, who will subsequently shrink to the most remote apartments they can find and abandon all normal reproductive activity. The weaker males who have given up will find solace in incessant grooming and will also abandon  family life.

Because external dangers have been minimized, and comfortable living conditions are maintained, death will be rare except among the young. Over a few generations, perhaps only three or four, the population’s age distribution will drift into senescence, consisting of many older individuals and only a few young ones. Extinction will follow in short order.

This experiment has never been performed in a controlled way with human beings, although history does record similar collapses that are said to have occurred for multiple and vague reasons (see Jared Diamond’s book Collapse). The trouble with human experiments is that complete enclosure and support of beings like ourselves over generations is not an acceptable option. It is considered cruel and unusual. There have been short-term experiments (see Jayne Poynter’s The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2). However, as we are not so picky about animals, experiments using small rodents have been performed with the results described above (see John B. Calhoun, “Population Density and Social Pathology”, Scientific American, February 1962, and Wray Herbert, “The (Real) Secret of NIMH”, Science News, August 7, 1982).

The difference between enclosure and population density is not trifling. All living things instinctively fear a cage. A crowd is generally not a problem unless one fears the worst, that the doors will be shut and barred. Although social psychologists typically ignore the difference, they should not.

No need for giant rocks from space on a collision course with Earth to wipe us out. We are already in the grip of enclosure, a global version of the more familiar isolated confined environment syndrome, and we are already taking damage.

To remain healthy, don’t hide from it. Think of it as temporary. Think of it as a problem for the rational mind. Think of it as a reason to engineer a breakout. Think of it as a litmus test, useful in identifying real sources of danger: Only one group will actively, even aggressively, resist the proposition of escape, and they are the predators.

Maybe It's the Birth of Something

I'm working on a paper for a space conference in June. The title I have in mind is, "Toward a Spacefaring Civilization: An Entertainment-based Approach to Creating a Consensus for Space Frontier Formation."

It describes a way to establish a spacefaring civilization without government intervention by turning space technology development into a popular form of entertainment linked to sustainable living on Earth. We start with the romance of the American West and its premise that the most fundamental freedom is the freedom to leave. Political philosophy does not today acknowledge this truth. Instead, the common wisdom insists that “someone”  impose beneficial change, ultimately in a zero-growth environment. That line of thought produces an emphasis on austerity. In the proposed ethic, SpaceFarers Corporation maintains that competition for population is good because individual departures will force change, as in commerce. Our research indicates that creating a market for the good behavior of Terran civilization will produce sustainability with prosperity on and off the earth. It requires that some of us leave so that the rest may know that they can. The customary way to leave a civilization as recently as 124 years ago was to head for a frontier, defined as an isolated region of “resources without proprietors” and anonymity for new arrivals. The absence of frontiers is termed enclosure, manifesting as a constellation of symptoms in common with “isolated confined environment syndrome,” including depression, anxiety, and anger. We hypothesize that nothing happens on the required scale unless a large segment of society views space frontier formation as fun. We propose, and are implementing, a test case involving what we hope will be a masterful blending of science, technology, craft, and performance art.

The test case has a steering group called "League of the Brick Moon" on Facebook and on LinkedIn. The group is public. Feel free to participate. Of course, you can also ask questions and offer criticism right here.

Maybe it's the birth of something.