===================================================================================
This file from Adra, http://www.mhada.info.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Return to Adra's Top topics list.
Many months ago I wrote the following:
I don't know if, at my age, I'm going to do any more talks. However, talk structure offers a nice organizing principle for subject matter on a topic, and I'm going to continue to use it. Clicking on a blue title will take you to my talk materials; if the title isn't blue then I haven't put it together yet. Here are some of my recent talk ideas.
Now in 2009 October, I find my outlook changing. I've started developing my Topics materials. The first two entries here, 'Where Is Your Head' and 'Settlement Workshop' are two parts of one topic by myself about settlements Out There. I intend them to be done in the order seen here, and no farther apart in time than one day and the next. You can think of these two as 'Ready,' and 'Go.'
A brief reading of any news about space illustrates the totally Terra-centered point of view of those who write the news. They all think here on Terra is the practical center of all reality. "...Go to Mars, and return home." Etc etc.
We can reasonably expect that those who read that news -- even ourselves -- experience echoes of it in our own heads. We learn without being taught, to think in like ways. This workshop is an exercise to loosen up where you assume your head is. It is made in three parts:
Part One. You are probably a fish. You live in the primeval ocean. By calendar measure the time is about 440 million years ago, before animal life moved up onto dry land. (The plants got there first.)
Part Two. You are a Weller human. You live on the surface of Terra, at the bottom of its gravity well. By calendar measure the time is the early 2000s, i.e., about now.
Part Three. You are a Belter human. You live in an asteroid community beyond Mars orbit. By calendar measure the time is the early 2100s. (Optimistically assuming a lot of stuff.)
For each one of these options, we will briefly review the character of life there. Then we will look ahead to potentials and obstacles to life in the environment next farther out. I.e., in Part One, we ask if the possible return after great change to live on dry land, outweighs the difficulties and risks of it.
The best way to learn about living off-Terra is simply, prepare yourself, then go do it. Oops, the knowhow and the industrial base that we built in the Apollo years were then discarded and destroyed, and it gets worse: the people who did that (those still living) are past retirement age now. Well, there's always paper and the drafting board, good even today. And computers and cyberspace. You can use those resources right here on Terra, and that's what Adra is all about.
The thesis that humans in space, after one or two generations there, will be psychologically and culturally like us, fails upon the least critical examination. In this talk, I review some elements relevant to doing business with a Martian business person -- with thoughts about some of the forces that make this person different.
About fifty years ago, America had an industrial base capable of building large space vehicles, and a good track record at the work. Today, the Russians are into their second thousand of launches and we are nowhere. This did not happen by accident.
A brief survey of a large topic: why settle space. Over past decades I've seen a variety of "reasons" for going out to space. These were often so abstract I could not connect any useful meaning to them at all. Are there, in fact, good reasons for people to settle in space? Rather than send out remote control machines, and robots? Just like games?
In my view, sending machines has certain short-range benefits; but in fact, the central reason for anyone to be working at space, is so that people can go there and live there. In my 'Tripod' talk I discuss three solid reality-based reasons why I believe space settlement now is an urgent national and social priority.
I believe my thesis that America is not a spacegoing society may be independently verified by anyone with a few minutes to spend, who goes to some popular place and looks at the people there. I believe this unfortunate truth, is new in American society. America is not a spacegoing society (but it used to be).