Stairway to heaven

HighLift Systems

This is a credable and realistic project (with funding!) to build an elevator to orbit. Without undue interuption, this could be realised in about 10 to 15 years. What future are we building that our children will inhabit?

Last night I watched the NOVA special on the "battle of the X-planes. I was staggered by the massive, unpresidented and over-whelming effort that was involved in the creation of these two (2!!!!!!!!) flying machines. And just think, its only been 100 years since the first flying machine went up. Billions of dollars, thousands of geniuses and organizational effort that makes the manhatten project look like amatuer hour at the cub scouts. Yet in the end I was under-whelmed. The creation was not only temporal, but of no real value to humanity. It will feed none, it will heal none, it will enlighten none. It will kill and threaten which, even in the name of peace, is evil. The concept kind of reminds of the sign that hung over Auschwitz "Arbeit macht Frei" (work makes you free). Contradiction is never the sole evidenct of hypocracy. But to devote the best that humanity has to offer giving thier all in the most organized and comprehensive effort in history for the purpose of creating an 21st century weapon of death has to be the poster-child for the idea of complete contradiction-in-terms. We are capable of more than even "I"imagine (which is saying something...ask anyone who knows me. I'm the original "imagination commando"!)...

Nuclear Fusion doesn't work. The reason being that it is less than 100% efficent. It requires more energy than it produces. Society doesn't work. The reason being that it uses more human energy than it produces. At thier current level of advancement, computers require more work than they produce. Each action requires the explicit instruction of an individual to initiate it. Its like trying to get a child to do a household chore. A 10 minute job take 20 minutes of instruction, 20 minutes of supervised action, and the follow up corrections. (Any parent will have laughed, truth does that...).

The purpose of society is to facilitate the life of the individual. To allow the individual to meet the requirement of existance with less time/energy so as to free up more time/energy to devote to the growth and development of the self. It doesn't work. This is the motivational factor behind the pursute of wealth, the need to achieve that stated goal. The problem is that no amount of wealth is enought to create the conditions needed to facilitate that state. The other logical direction is to abandon society altogether. That seems to work, but we end up in the original situation. Thus we have capitalism (the rampant purute of wealth to facilitate the conditions necessary for self-development/evolution, justified by the idea that even if we have to supress many to achieve it we will, ultimately, benefit them with the achievement) and communism (The collective, organized, and directed abandonment of society in general as an attempt to avoid the negative consequences of the above).

Somewhere we are either missing the point, or just to stupid to figure out the obvious.

I remember being in the Philadelphia public library staring at an exploded view of the space shuttle. It was January 28, 1986 and I was killing time, staying warm and studing. I remember how I felt when I found out that at that very moment, the Shuttle Challanger had exploded. I would have never thought that 17 years later......{God....?: Why.....?!}