This is important to do if we are to hasten the theoretical & technological development to leave Earth on a commercially feasible scale. I was surprised by what I found.

Below is the list. I’m sure it is not complete but it is a start. If you know of anyone who should be on this list, please let me know, and I will update this post.

Here are the ground rules for including a name.

1) They must have published their research in a journal accessible to the public (preferably in English as I’m monolingual and cannot verify the validity if it is not). This excludes anyone in secret projects or black projects (therefore Greenglow, Phantom & Skunk), or could not reach the level of research where peer review would consider the paper acceptable.

2) Excludes papers related to conventional technologies. This excludes sails, tethers, conventional fuels, ion propulsion and nuclear detonations.

3) Excludes the extension of conventional physics. For example, it is estimated that doing interstellar travel to Alpha Centauri, with conventional fuels would require a fuel cost of approximately 3.4x 2011 World GDP.

4) Exclude papers requiring ‘Millennium Theories’. Millennium Theories are theories that will require more than a 100 years to falsify. This eliminates research using exotic matter. For example, it is estimated that doing interstellar travel to Alpha Centauri, with antimatter would cost of approximately 43,000x 2011 World GDP.

5) Includes researchers attempting to solve anomalies or unexplained observations, today, but exclude those whose focus is not propulsion.

6) Includes researches in established organizations but excludes researchers involved in the test methodologies or the management of such programs.

7) It would be desirable if the publishing journal/conference was associated with a national organization such as AIP, AIAA, Elsevier or other similar organizations.

There are 16 countries! and 57 researchers. In a 2011 email to us, James Woodward had suggest that there are only about 35 of us seriously researching propulsion physics, on this planet. He came close, or I’m being generous. OK you can exclude Finland and India because I do not think these two countries have a concerted effort to develop a new propulsion technology.

Thanks to Ron Kita for pointing me to Takaaki Musha (Honda), Kimio Nishino (Toyota) and RC Gupta. I was surprised that Honda and Toyota, the car companies were interested in gravity modification.

Ron had also suggested Mike Gamble (supposedly of Boeing, and I did not attempt to either confirm or disprove his employement), and Brice Cassenti. I did not include Cassenti because his work was on Biefield Brown, which is an electric field effect.

Propulsion physics is about anything that is not related to gliding, rocketry, jets, electric motors, and internal combustion engines. I included South Korea because Tajmar is there now.

I excluded Mike Gamble, and here’s why. At SPESIF 2012 (which I had not attended) he announced that ‘Boeing has been using a “scissoring gyroscope” style of inertial propulsion for satellite maneuvering for years!’ and showed a picture (see http://www.integrityresearchinstitute.org/Enews/EnewsMar2012.htm).

I am very skeptical. I could not make out what the picture shows, and in my opinion a “scissoring gyroscope” type technology is too jerky to be used as a means of satellite propulsion.

Kumaran Sanmugathasan had suggested Mehran Keshe of Belgium, he does not satisfy the rules. Thanks Kumaran.

Gary Stephenson had suggested many, many names. Thanks Gary.  Gary had also suggested S.M. Godwin & V.V. Roschin of Russia, but I could not find enough information about them with respect to the rules, above, and have to exclude them.

Hope this blog posting will increase the number of serious researchers in the new field of propulsion physics, increase the funding, and raise the awareness of propulsion physics as opposed to astronomy or cosmology.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative

- From Integrationalism

In April of 2010 the Library of Congress announced that it will acquire all of the public tweets for future generations to review. It’s quite the ambitious effort from a technological standpoint, considering all of the data migration and storage as the micro-blogging social network grows. The initiative also has some uncovered ethical and democratic potential that are currently being overlooked.

Twitter as a platform is empowering the creators of the world to understand how their co-conspirers and consumers are affecting the discovery, development, and delivery of new goods & services to be brought to market. For instance, Marketing and other R&D departments across the globe at the enterprise scale are using social networks like Twitter to monitor and improve their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) processes. These aren’t rigid customer service initiatives, but also customer discovery initiatives. Social networking is giving new meaning to the idea that supply & demand are never ending sphere of interaction; further, confusing the philosophical ideal of who might our creators and consumers be.

This is important because ownership is allocated to creators of sorts, regardless of initial or latter impact.

At current, the world is enduring a series of spiking economic crisis, and as the engineers and economists try and root-cause to remedy our problems, the political conservatism that we all possess at some extent is making it difficult to justify spreading the wealth. Moral and Political arguments haven’t been working over the millennia or most recently. The books/rants/calls for gifting larger amounts to working-poor, nor distributing wealth at high rates to compensate the lesser valued have yielded a change in the gap between those with an immense value and those without. This crisis is not one of lost value, or population growth, or technological change. It is (and has always been) one of poorly allocated ownership. Those causes can be debated separately.

Ownership is paramount in distributing value to individuals and institutions, outside of charity. I don’t think it necessary to elaborate on how miniscule charity is in the known world. It’s legally defensible and mathematically quantifiable. One of the missions of the Library of Congress is to log intellectual property; further, so that it may (if necessary) be defended on the behalf of stakeholders. The initiative to capture tweets for the future generations should not only be technologically charged, but it should be economically charged to assign ownership to authors. This effort would assist greatly in identifying the degrees of separation between the various stakeholders in the discovery, development, and delivery of things.

(1) Discover Life Nearby:  This is the search for life in our solar system.

(2) Sniff It Out: Do the sort of spectral analysis that might detect atmospheric gases caused by biology.

(3) Eavesdrop On ET: Otherwise known as SETI, is the effort to detect radio signals or laser flashes from technically savvy extraterrestrials.

Neat, Shostak has set the frame work for further dscussions. Note that the (1) is the search for the existance of life based molecules. That (2) is the search for life forms, whether past or present. And (3) is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

He says that a priori all are equally likely to be successful. Lets think again.

With respect to (1) Discover Life Nearby, lets look at the record. Using the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit & Opportunity, as examples, Spirit which was 2.3m wide, covered 8.81 km over 581 sols (a Martian day that is approximately an Earth day), that is approximately 19 m² per day. Given that the surface of Mars is 144,798,500 km² it will take Spirit about 7.6 × 10¹² days or 208,340,844 centuries, to examine the total surface of Mars. That is, assuming randomness, and that life did exist on Mars in the past, the quick & dirty probability of finding life on Mars on any day with current technology is 1.3 × 10^-13. We have a better idea of Mars. It is mostly barren. However, not a clue about the Europa the moon of Jupiter, that is believed to have oceans beneath its ice.

With current projections it likely that NASA will have a satellite at Europa in the 2020–2030 time frame.

So, we can make 2 types of guesses. Assuming that life started on Europa some millions ago, then the probability (from a detection perspective) of finding life on Europa is good, close to 1. However, if Europa is a liquid version of Mars, then the probability is on the order of 1 × 10^-13.

Therefore, the time frame for discovery of extraterrestrial life by (1) Discover Life Nearby, is about 2025 assuming no budgets cuts or other re-prioritizations.

With respect to (2) Sniff It Out, scientists estimate that there are about 1 x 10¹⁰ Earth like planets in our Milky Way. Lets assume that the Goldilocks Zone is a necessity. Using Pluto as the outer extreme of planets in a Star Local system, and Mars and Venus as boundaries of our Goldilocks Zone, then the approximate probability of finding one of these Earth-like planets in the Goldilocks Zone is 2.89 × 10^-2. This reduces the number of Earth-like planets capable of supporting life to 289,340,102. Or the probability of finding life on at least one of these planets (assuming life is present) is at least 3.45 × 10^-9.

I would estimate that the time frame for detecting extraterrestrial life is between today, and 35 years from now to 2047.

It could be any day now as the Dutch using the Very Large Telescope in the Chilean Andes have detected carbon monoxide on a planet hugging the star Tau Bootis that is 51 light-years away. The other end of my estimate is 2047. This is because developing a technology like the James Webb telescope was 30 years in the making.

So (2) Sniff It Out, has a better chance of finding evidence of life than (1) Discover Life Nearby.

Now how about (3) Eavesdrop On ET? As the author of the 12-year study An Introduction to Gravity Modification, it is slim. Sorry, Tarter, Shostak and all of you at the SETI Institute. But wait, I haven’t finished.

Look at our civilization. In 1895 Guglielmo Marconi proved that long distance radio transmission was possible. In 117 years we have exponentially evolved our technological sophistication to what it is today, 2012.

As the author of the 12-year study An Introduction to Gravity Modification I have proposed (see page 195) the existence of subspace, where everything is probabilistic, and light speed is not a restriction. Therefore, if confirmed, there is the strong possibility that by 2025/2035 this planet will go radio silent, because all our transmissions will be through subspace.

That is, the window to observe a radio intelligent extraterrestrial civilization is about 100 to 150 years, then they go silent. 100–150 years is an immensely thin slice or duration compared to the distances of stars even within our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Or the probability of detecting extraterrestrial radio transmissions within our own galaxy is approximately 1.25 × 10^-6. It is actually a little better than this but I am using quick & dirty for this blog posting, and this will do.  This is much better than a posteriori 1 × 10^-13 for (1) Discover Life Nearby and  3.45 x 10^-9 for (2) Sniff It Out.

So SETI, keep eavesdropping, and we can expect confirmation of Extraterrestrial Life by 2047 latest.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative

Complex societies are heavily addicted to expensive, vulnerable and potentially hazardous infrastructure. We rely on a healthy environment for production of food and access to clean water. We depend on technological infrastructure for energy supplies and communications. We are deeply addicted to economic growth to support growing populations and consumption. If one of these pillars of modern society crumbles our existence will collapse like a house of cards.

The interdependencies and complexities of the system we call modern society has become so intertangled that finding a robust and simple solution to our problems has become close to impossible. Historically the cold war gave us the logic of a “balance of terror”. This logic, originally concerned with a balance of U.S. vs. Soviet military capacities, has lead to an increasingly expensive way of reducing risk and ever expanding bureaucracies to keep us “virtually safe”.

With the onset of a global economic recession, drastic climate change, deadly natural disasters, raging civil wars and diminishing natural resources we need a new logic. A set of moral laws for reducing risk and mitigating consequences applicable at a low cost from the bottom up of entire societies.

The concept of resilience is based on the idea that disasters are inevitable and a natural part of existence. Our best defense is preparedness and engineering systems that not only can withstand heavy strains but also absorb damage. The Institute for Resilient Infrastructure at the University of Leeds gives this definition of “Resilience”;

Resilience can also be explained in terms of durability. A durable material, component or system is one which can cope with all the known, predictable loads to which it will be subjected throughout its life. As well as physical loads – stresses and strains – we include environmental loads (e.g. temperature, weather), economic loads (e.g. the scarcity of resources or financial turmoil) and social loads (e.g. changes in legislation or of use, terrorist attack, changes in demography or society’s expectations and demands).

In the 1970s about 100 disasters were recorded worldwide every year. According to the International Disaster Database an average of 392 disasters were reported per year in the last decade. In 2011 we saw record greenhouse gas emissions, melting Arctic sea ice, extreme weather and the earthquake in Japan resulting in the world’s second worst nuclear disaster. Current systems for mitigation of risk are obviously not capable of handling the overwhelming challenges confronting us.

The price tag for disasters in 2011 reached a record high of $265 billion. Most of that cost ($210 billion) came from the tsunami in Japan, but flooding in Australia, tornadoes in the United States and earthquakes in New Zealand contributed substantially. The increasingly turbulent weather patterns wreaking havoc across the planet may only be the beginning of a period of drastic climate change.

In addition to climate change industrial society faces depleted natural resources, degradation of infrastructure and systemic limits to growth. The ongoing economic crisis is a symptom of a deeper structural failure. Governments are running out of options when solving a debt crisis with more debt is the last resort. We rely on short term solutions for long term problems.

We are facing a different type of threat originating from within the system itself, an endogenous and internal failure of our civilizational paradigm. Growing populations stress our dependency on non-renewable resources supported by potentially hazardous nuclear power. The case of the Fukushima nuclear accident illustrates that large population located on limited land is extremely vulnerable to unpredictable events like earthquakes or other catastrophic “wild cards”. From the perspective of risk analysis the state of Japan is a model of the entire planet.

To make the situation even more acute the horizon of Homo Sapiens is full of threats like global pandemics and emerging technologies that could permanently wipe us off the face of the earth. Nanotechnology, synthetic biology and geoengineering hold the promise of a quick fix but also have the potential to cause irreversible harm to the biosphere and human life.

Technology is without a doubt a part of a permanent solution for sustainable life on the planet. The bottom up approach to resilience is about awakening a culture that rewards autonomy and self-sufficiency. Resilience is more than durable engineering. Resilience has to become an obligatory way of thinking and eventually a way of life.

10 robust resilient strategies:
1. Sustain a culture that rewards autonomy and self-sufficiency.
2. Share practical solutions and stockpile resilient ideas instead of canned food.
3. Support intra-generational sharing of knowledge on how to live in accord with nature.
4. Develop alternative economic systems; use Bitcoins and barter when possible.
5. Refine high-tech solutions but favor low tech; HAM radios beat cell phones in emergencies.
6. Grow your own food; become an urban gardener or start a farm revival project.
7. Reduce energy consumption with geothermal energy, local water mills, wind mills and solar panels.
8. Use a condom; think eugenically — act passionately.
9. Keep a gun; if you are forced to pull it – know how to use it.
10. Stay alive for the sake of the next generation.

This article is co-published on Interesting Times Magazine.

Yet, many of us look skyward and are uninspired, believing that our time and resources best be kept grounded. Despite our human-centered ideologies, our self-assured prophecies, our religious and philosophical beliefs, no existential rationale seems apparent.

We as people welcome technology into our lives and use it constantly to communicate and function. Scientific discoveries pique the interest of every citizen in every country, and technological revolutions have always preceded social and political revolutions from the creation of the internet back to man’s first use of simple tools. Leaders of nations proclaim the importance of science and discovery to our welfare to be utmost.

But what we have seen done recently contradicts these proclamations: space programs are closed; science funding for schools always falls short; and we see no emphasis of the significance of science in our modern culture. Our governments call for the best but provide capital for only the satisfactory, if even. We no longer succumb to the allure of learning simply for the sake of knowing what we once did not know. We have stopped dreaming.

The exploration of space is as related to earthly affairs as any trek, perhaps even more so, because what we learn along the way directly affects the knowledge we apply to our politics, our religions, societies, and sciences. We learn about ourselves, our dreams, our fears. We learn about our strengths and our weaknesses as nations and as a species. In searching the void all around us we learn how to interact with each other and bridge differences between races, religions, genders, and ideologies. The societies of Earth need to emphasize the importance of discovery and innovation to the longevity of mankind, as well as the very human need for the pursuit of challenge.

We are and always have been an adaptable species capable of creating dreams and accomplishing them. We should seek to explore our new frontier and chase ideas yet to even be conceived. The exploration of space has lifted our human spirit, enlightened us, and has made lucid and close our fragility and responsibilities. Perhaps our inhibitions and worries, and our craving to overcome them fuels our explorative ambitions.

If we desire greater purpose then let us earn it; through hardship to the stars! The sky is no longer a limit, but a starting point. We can define our lives, and our existence, by how we accept and handle the unknown; our significance as humans set forth by our bravery and intelligence. Regardless of our qualms and fears, exploration of the unknown is an intrinsic passion of mankind. Why not remind ourselves of what has advanced us thus far?

As the astrophysicist and activist Carl Sagan said, “We were hunters and foragers. The frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the earth and the ocean and the sky.” Let us now explore the boundless, and go forth into the starry-night, fresh and inspired, ready to accept any challenge, just as those before us did, when they first set sail for the unknown.

Read the original post at bmseifert.com.