Posted to the main list working to make space solar power a real option for electricity generation, followed by the larger challenge of human potential (what I planned most to do in retirement):
1. SPS and the swamp ============================================
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Making SPS "real" (the target of supplying at least 10% of world electricity at a generation cost no more than 10 cents per kwh) is a VERY daunting challenge, with no guarantees of success. But it is SO important, I am glad that some of us keep discussing strategies and options and collaborations to TRY to get there. It is good that some of us are very flexible in HOW to get there, because goals as hard as this cannot be achieved without flexibility. It reminds me of the old saying "No battle plan survives the first few minutes.."
And no army or commander survives long without a certain degree of situational awareness. ANY real success with SPS does require some awareness of the disposition and nature of what some call "the swamp," epitomized in my mind by the very specific lobby groups working for the oil industry I alluded to last time and by folks who are both committed to NASA development of expendable rockets by the least qualified possible workforce (ala Ares or SLS) AND to the elimination of any possible competition to that in launch services. A certain kind of bipartisan corruption in Washington (similar to the depiction of lobbyists in Atlas Shrugged) is the REAL swamp, and I often wish Trump fully understood that so that he could better resist or even shrink it. He hasn't seen how it really works at ground level across the main relevant government agencies, but ... as the old radio show said..
"the specter knows," and so do the janitors like me (especially after having worked for Specter). His recent attacks on federal workers actually make the swamp worse, by making it easier for external puppetmasters to give binding orders to them.
Here is one example of the evillest swamp at work, actually important to SPS:
What does it have to do with SPS? Well, it turns out that Republican Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, was the number one force for sanity on energy policy in Congress for many years, deeply respected by his colleagues, and powerful enough in the committee system. (And yes, he was important to me personally, as I worked closely at times with his two key energy staffers).
Among other things, Bartlett was the chief spokesman for "peak oil" in Congress, the belief that national security demands greater diversity and flexibility in transportation fuel, and that it would be VERY risky to expect the US to meet its own oil demands forever.
His colleagues respected him, but certain well-heeled forces (the same ones who got rid of my old boss before my eyes) felt very strongly that that kind of national security effort and peak oil stuff was TABOO. And they simply got rid of him.
What now? What can we do to keep the country from being liquidated, despite the unavoidable reality of those forces more firmly in place now than they were back then?
You folks never had the experience of a certain type of Middle East oil guy (not the good Prince Mohammed type) come in to a US government agency and give them new orders to stop funding technologies which might create competition to orthodox oil and gas (which does not include methanol) and refocus research to ensure their dominance forever, with Lamar Smith's buddy standing next to him to reinforce the message. (Guess why I retired... along with half the other R&D leaders.) Nor the even worse experiences I have heard of from folks in other agencies we worked with.
Ah, if only we had managed to get Exxon a stake in low-cost advanced launch services. But sounding like Roscoe Bartlett on peak oil is not the way to warm their hearts, to put it mildly.
Years ago, there was a small group called the "Propulsion Group" with chief economists of oil guys and auto guys with the legally required government presence. If THOSE guys were still like what I saw (in the year when I was the gov ernment presence), America really would become great again (and Exxon would sell a lot more methanol). But the great guy who set it up is 95 years old now, and a different breed has taken over power in so many industries.
One key ever-present challenge is how to STRENGTHEN connections with Boeing, while AVOIDING the worst of the swamp monsters (if possible by simply avoiding their turf except with a real pass from their real bosses).
Best of luck...
#2. Reply to a friend committed to human potential ================================
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Good morning, ...!
Since the basic goal here is extremely important, and I owe you very special respect, I owe you some background information before we go further. ..
Immediately after the Nepal conference, I was ready put in multiple levels of energy and time into the goal of broadening education all over the world to
better fulfill the core goal: developing the skills and strengths of ALL people in the three great continents of body, brain and soul, including the skills to connect the three and accelerate harmonious integration of all three.
By now, I know enough about brains to know in some depth why effectiveness demands that we take the time to remember a larger goal again and again, and come back to "replan" our strategy.
if I were in China, I would perhaps write that last sentence in very big characters and post them as a (citeable) banner in many places.
And so, I am glad you are still on target there.
I remember saying to a friend that I met two or three people in India from whom I might actually learn something BEYOND what we learn on the normal high level we have here in places like the old NSF and local interactions with the best people I have access to around DC. ....
And so, we had a brief flurry of discussions .. which seemed promising, but simply ended. ..
I wanted to forward to you all of that discussion (and check to see how much you were included), but yesterday I could not find the most important part of the discussion. Maybe today it will reappear, maybe not. I do remember my greatest worry: how to make sure that new efforts are truly cosmopolitan and oriented towards skills, with an absolute minimum of indoctrination and factionalism. I am ever mindful of the way in which good intentions have led to bad results at times (not just in education but in other areas!) (Those last two sentences also may merit a big banner.)
As an example, I think of billionnaires in the Middle East, whose great donations to education ended up producing doctrinal madressas and more secular schools producing students who can get no jobs; both have led to decay of political systems, of stability, of culture; and of the soul itself in large parts of the world. Even in the US, "Christian madressas" are a major part of the negative developments of recent years, undermining the great work of Thomas Jefferson who, for all his limitations, was a great positive force for spiritual progress in the West. I am not a devotee of Thomas Jefferson, but I am deeply appalled at how the world seems to appreciate less and less how positive he was; we cannot fdo better unless we appreciate some of the key accomplishments of the past.
Even in the effort to avoid decay into indoctrination, it is hard to avoid the basic fact that integrated growth of body, brain and soul tends to require belief in just these specific basics -- growth, body, brain, soul and integration. (In ancient China, perhaps I would call these the Five Great Seeds of Life.) It is a kind of necessary common denominator in this effort. To demand more (other than a few basics of constructive behavior) would be very risky, and a "slippery slope."
But discussions on the sadhu list and elsewhere have made it very vivid to me how deeply committed many people are AGAINST one or more of the Five great Seeds. Interacting with those people reminded me of two experiences from the Nepal trip -- a simple connection to the main mosque of Doha in Qatar, and the connection I made in the presence of you and Joan in Kathmandu. All these represent a kind of breaking of a serious spiritual dam. (There were two other dam breakings I experienced in Nepal, one more challenging than what you saw and one less. I did not talk about the more challenging one to anyone, and no one in our group witnessed it. If Vadaran's swami could intuit what THAT was, I will be very deeply impressed. It had a Buddhist flavor.)
By "dam breaking", I mean a kind of connection which involves a difficult level of energy to cope with, which demands very careful patience and self-control... a good thing which can become very bad if pushed too hard, too far, too fast, too crudely. Whenever I think of "dam breaking" experiences, I remember Annie Besant's little book on thought forms, which my wife Luda and I saw on Ghandhi's shelves in Mumbai. (We still have the photograph she took, which I posted on the web.) She talks about not pushing open the eyes of the mind TOO hard and fast (e.g. with drugs) but encouraging a natural and sustainable development. What she taught really is one important resource for strengthening the soul ... as a guide to us above all, not as a doctrine to teach
(except as one of many choices in certain advanced classes, not our K-8 starting point!).
The discussions on the sadhu list began to remind me of that experience in Nepal, as the deep energy of people opposed to one or more of the Five Great Seeds became risky.
I decided I am not yet ready to cope with that. I do not want to look up here and see what I saw there (what you drew my mundane eyes to in fact).
Yet in my own way, just this week, I am facing up to the core issue in what you sent me: HOW to justify the reality and importance of soul JUST ENOUGH to motivate, energize and anchor Five Seeds education? Without excess doctrine?
When I signed off of the sadhu list last week, I shifted my attention on the Consciousness front to a much smaller discussion of a few people interested in scientific journal publication but still serious about soul. I hesitate to name their names now, because of certain rules. (There are levels and levels of privacy rights and of IP.) I have been doing the same with quantum physics for some time. It is like people who feel confused, overwhelmed, who do not want to risk doing something negative because of that confusion, who withdraw FOR A LIMITED TIME to core areas they know especially well. I was very happy that the topics of Carl Jung and of archetypes came up in a serious and deep way. Neuroscience is a major part of that thread.
Again and again in my life, in more and more areas, the theme of "one step at a time" keeps coming up. Each channel of communication, mundane and spiritual, has a kind of channel capacity, both quantitative and qualitative. I often get in trouble by saying too much too soon when people are not ready, even when it seems to me that I am speaking of things which are ridiculously elementary.
There are dams which do need to be broken, but VERY carefully, and without unnecessary red herrings.
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I should mention two more small things before closing this, and addressing some deadlines here.
First, I was stunned just a few years ago when my wife took me on a car tour of the US, and she showed me the museum of West Point, the main military academy of the US. It seems that Thomas Jefferson played a key role in planning that college. To this day they revere and talk about his goals for the college -- to develop the strengths and skills of body, brain and soul! Exactly! he was there first! It was a very successful college, though it did not FULLY attain what can be done with the three continents. In their big poster on what they do for soul, they basically listed just two activities: (1) football; and (2) affirmative action (sensitivity to minorities and gender).
Second, last week I went back to the street where I worked for a year, in an office building of the US Senate, to attend a meeting organized by the Friends Committee on National Legislation (Quakers) on bipartisan action on climate change. At that meeting, I met the man who actually managed Friends Community School (FCS) after we created it, after the first school head had left. I was glad to hear that he continued to work hard to push hard the basic theme of strengthening body, brain and soul. I do not think they do football for the soul -- but they DO regularly do group meditation and the course in conflict resolution (an important kind of sensitivity training), among other things, and strive to do more. It is not easy HOW to do full justice to the Five Great Seeds, and we need to have a plan to LEARN MORE with time rather than expect to know the best way to begin. By the way, he is now more active in climate, and I was delighted that he understands how climate threatens human extinction better than anyone else I have met in my travels (except perhaps an oceanographer who just gave up and retired to a beach).
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But now I have a few more practical duties I must catch up on ...
Best regards,
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