Brene Brown studies human connection — our ability to empathize, belong, love. In a poignant, funny talk at TEDxHouston, she shares a deep insight from her research, one that sent her on a personal quest to know herself as well as to understand humanity. A talk to share.
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All posts by Bryan Morse
Piers Morgan interviews His Holiness the Dalai Lama for CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight originally broadcast on April 25, 2012. (www.dalailama.com)
Video courtesy of CNN
Phenomenon – The Lost Archives – The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla. Why did the US Governement, the CIA and The Patent Office try to cover up all the great work of Tesla ? Was he the greatest genius of all time? The modern world is not ready for Tesla’s secrets, which potentially would distroy the fundamental axis of the worlds corrupt systems… based on SLAVERY and FIAT CURRENCIES! Tesla’s ideas involving ‘free wireless energy for all’ and ‘zero point energy’ would at best create a world society that would have no use for ‘nuke power, coal power, oil, solar, wind, etc…’ Such a future without pollution and carbon based emissions would prevent the pyramid of wealth that has been created to further ENSLAVE THE IGNORANT MASSES! Humans would only require ORGANICALLY GROWN FOODS along with these technologies and could have prevented the horrid DNA damage already done to all earth species… Someday the technolgical door will open and the need for WAR MACHINES will be no longer… this is why we today praise the mass murdering ENSTIEN who is responsible for more human deaths then any other single person; instead of TESLA who singlehandly created the technologies that became the triumphs of this modern age like AC electric, 3 phase electric motor, radio, cell phones, inductance coils, to name a small fraction of his huge gift to all. Keep in mind that the gifts Tesla gave us have made us the ‘first world’ and still millions live without these advantages and are stuck in the third world.
By Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
updated 5/12/2012 12:13:38 AM ET
Website lays out detailed plans to make a Star Trek fan’s dream come true
In Star Trek lore, the first Starship Enterprise will be built by the year 2245. But today, an engineer has proposed — and outlined in meticulous detail — building a full-sized, ion-powered version of the Enterprise complete with 1G of gravity on board, and says it could be done with current technology, within 20 years.
“We have the technological reach to build the first generation of the spaceship known a
s the USS Enterprise — so let’s do it,” writes the curator of the Build The Enterprise website, who goes by the name of BTE Dan.
This “Gen1″ Enterprise could get to Mars in 90 days, to the moon in three, and “could h
op from planet to planet dropping off robotic probes of all sorts en masse — rovers, special-built planes and satellites,” BTE Dan says.
Complete with conceptual designs, ship specs, a funding schedule and almost every othe
r imaginable detail, the BTE website was launched just this week and covers almost every aspect of how the project could be done. This Enterprise would be built entirely in space, have a rotating gravity section inside of the saucer, and be similar in size with the same look as the USS Enterprise that we know from classic “Star Trek.”
“It ends up that this ship configuration is quite functional,” writes BTE Dan, even though his design moves a few parts around for better performance with today’s technology. This version of the Enterprise would be three things in one: a spaceship, a space station and a spaceport. A thousand people can be on board at once — either as crew members or as adventurous visitors.
While the ship will not travel at warp speed, with an ion propulsion engine powered by a 1.5GW nuclear reactor, it can travel at a constant acceleration so that the ship can easily get to key points of interest in our solar system. Three additional nuclear reactors would create all of the electricity needed for operation of the ship.
The saucer section would be a 0.3-mile-diameter (536-meter-diameter) rotating, magnetically suspended gravity wheel that would create 1G of gravity.
The first assignments for the Enterprise would have the ship serving as a space station and spaceport, but then go on to missions to the moon, Mars, Venus, various asteroids and even Europa, where the ship’s laser would be used not for combat but for cutting through the moon’s icy crust to enable a probe to descend to the ocean below.
Of course, like all spaceships today, the big “if” for such an effort would be getting Congress to provide NASA the funding to do a huge 20-year project. But BTE Dan has that all worked out, and between tax increases and spreading out budget cuts to areas like defense, health and human services, housing and urban development, education and energy, the cuts to areas of discretionary spending are not large, and the tax increases could be small.
“These changes to spending and taxes will not sink the republic,” says the website. “In fact, these will barely be noticed. It’s amazing that a program as fantastic as the building a fleet of USS Enterprise spaceships can be done with so little impact.”
BTE Dan adds that “the only obstacles to us doing it are the limitations we place on our collective imagination.” His proposal says that NASA could still receive funding for the science, astronomy and robotic missions it currently undertakes.
But he proposes not just one Enterprise-class ship, but multiple ships, one of which can be built every 33 years — once per generation — giving three new ships per century. “Each will be more advanced than the prior one. Older ships can be continually upgraded over several generations until they are eventually decommissioned.”
BTE Dan, who did not respond to emails, lists himself as a systems engineer and electrical engineer who has worked at a Fortune 500 company for the past 30 years.
The website includes a blog, a forum and a Q&A section, where BTE Dan answers the question, “What if someone can prove that building the Gen1 Enterprise is beyond our technological reach?”
Answer: “If someone can convince me that it is not technically possible (ignoring political and funding issues), then I will state on the BuildTheEnterprise site that I have been found to be wrong. In that case, building the first Enterprise will have to wait for, say, another half century. But I don’t think that anyone will be able to convince me it can’t be done. My position is that we can — and should — immediately start working on it.”
For the complete space nerd experience, check out Build The Enterprise.
What do you do when your country has gone to shit? Italy: Love It, or Leave It goes beyond the picture postcard version of Italy to show a once glorious country beset by corruption, greed, and trash. Partners in life and filmmaking, Luca Ragazzi and Gustav Hofer have grown disillusioned by their country’s economic and cultural decline. Before deciding whether to decamp to Berlin, the boys embark on a grand tour to rekindle their love for il bel paese. Crammed into their vintage Fiat 500, Luca and Gustav’s road trip takes them from Italian trash TV and Berlusconi’s geriatric fan girls, to Sicily’s unfinished monuments to government corruption and Napoli’s all too literal trash problem. After charming Vancouver audiences at the Queer Film Festival a few years ago with their award-winningSuddenly, Last Winter, Ragazzi and Hofer return with their endearing blend of the personal and the political. –JC
Hysterically funny man Ben Aaron shows us the new craze he has developed he calls… DANCE WALKING FITNESS
SpaceX plans to launch a historic demonstration mission to the International Space Station in early May, but the company’s ambitions extend far beyond low-Earth orbit.
If all goes according to plan, SpaceX’s unmanned Dragon capsule will blast into space in about two weeks, lifting off the pad at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station atop a Falcon 9 rocket. Once aloft, Dragon will berth with the orbiting lab — a first for a private spaceship — offload supplies and take some different items on for the trip back to Earth.
The mission — originally slated for April 30 but now likely pushed back to May 7, SpaceX officials announced Monday — is a test to see if the Falcon 9/Dragon combo are ready to start making contracted cargo runs to the station for NASA. A successful flight would be a big step forward for private spaceflight, and it would set SpaceX more firmly on a path toward its ultimate goal: helping save humanity from extinction.
“I think it’s important that humanity become amultiplanet species,” SpaceX founder and Chief ExecutiveOfficer Elon Musk said in an interview that aired on CBS’ “60 Minutes” last month. “I think most people would agree that a future where we are a spacefaring civilization is inspiring and exciting compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event. That’s really why I started SpaceX.”
A cargo craft
When NASA retired its venerable space shuttle fleet last July, the United States became completely dependent on Russian, European and Japanese spaceships to carry cargo and crew into space.
But the space agency isn’t content with this state of affairs. It’s encouraging the development of private American spaceships, in the hopes that they can transport both supplies and astronauts to the space station in the near future.
The California-based firm SpaceX — short for Space Exploration Technologies Corp. — is one of the companies that NASA is counting on. SpaceX, which Musk started in 2002, holds a $1.6 billion NASA contract to make 12 robotic supply runs to the space station using the Dragon capsule and the Falcon 9. (Another company, Orbital Sciences Corp., signed a $1.9 billion deal to fly eight cargo missions for NASA.)
The Dragon/Falcon 9 pair already has one space success under its belt. In December 2010, SpaceX became the first private company to send a spacecraft into orbit and retrieve it safe and sound; it fished Dragon out of the Pacific Ocean after the capsule made two loops around our planet.
If the upcoming demonstration flight goes well, the first of SpaceX’s 12 cargo missions could launch later this year, company officials have said. But even if it doesn’t go well, the firm has no plans to give up.
“There should be no doubt about our resolve,” Musk told reporters last week. “We will get to the space station, whether it’s on this mission or on a future one.”
SpaceX plans to launch Dragon two more times in 2012, he added, perhaps once in the summer and once toward the end of the year. Those missions could be bona fide cargo runs or further test flights, depending on how Dragon and the Falcon 9 on their scheduled May launch.
An astronaut taxi, too
Dragon is not just a cargo ship, however. SpaceX has always envisioned that it would carry astronauts someday, and the company’s engineers are working to make that happen
Last year, NASA gave SpaceX $75 million to support the development of a launch-abort system for Dragon, a key requirement for a crew-carrying craft. Over the past two years, the agency has also given money to three other private spaceship builders — Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada and Boeing — in the hopes that at least two different commercial spacecraft can start ferrying astronauts to and from the space station by 2017.
According to Musk, SpaceX should be able to meet that deadline.
“There’s a lot of variables between here and there,” Musk said. But in a “perfect world” timeline, he added, “it’s probably like three years — maybe a little less than three years.”
Shooting for Mars
SpaceX is not content just to carry astronauts back and forth to low-Earth orbit. Musk wants Dragon to send humans to much more far-flung destinations, such as Mars, to help us become a multiplanet species.
“Ultimately, the thing that is super-important in the grand scale of history is, are we on a path to becoming a multiplanet species or not?” Musk said at a conference last year. “If we’re not, well, that’s not a very bright future. We’ll simply be hanging out on Earth until some eventual calamity claims us.”
To help get us farther afield, SpaceX is developing a huge rocket called the Falcon Heavy, which it hopes to launch for the first time in the next year or two. The vehicle will boast 4 million pounds of thrust, making it twice as powerful as any rocket in existence — and about half as powerful as the Saturn 5 rockets that carried astronauts to the moon during NASA’s Apollo program, Musk said.
“So in principle, with two launches of Falcon Heavy and with some in-orbit docking, you could actually send people back to the surface of the moon, which is pretty exciting,” Musk told Space.com in an interview earlier this month.
But SpaceX is dreaming even bigger than the Falcon Heavy. Last autumn, Musk announced that the company hopes to develop a fully reusable rocket, which would dramatically reduce the cost of lofting humans and cargo into space.
A completely reusable spaceflight system — in contrast to the expendable rockets in widespread use today — is the key to opening up the final frontier, making the exploration and colonization of other worlds much more feasible, Musk has said.
“In order to revolutionize space, we absolutely must have a fully and rapidly reusable rocket,” he told Space.com. “This is basically the holy grail of rocket technology. A lot of people don’t think it’s possible, I should point out, which is why I call it the holy grail.”
Musk thinks it is possible, though he acknowledges the difficulty of the task.
“But if we’re able to do that, then the cost of space transport can drop by a factor of 100,” he said, then put the concept in terms that most people can appreciate firsthand. “Imagine if you had to buy a new car for every trip; you’d need two cars for a round-trip. You wouldn’t be taking cars very much.”
NASA dominated American human spaceflight for more than 50 years, but in the 21st century private spaceflight companies are building new space taxis to launch more people into orbit. Space.com looks at the major players in the commercial spaceflight race in our week-long series: The Private Space Taxi Race. This is Part 1 in that series.
The venture known as Planetary Resources eventually plans to go asteroid mining — but the first step in the billionaire-backed business plan is to launch an orbital fleet of “personal space telescopes” capable of looking out into the heavens or back down on Earth.
Right now, the idea of sending robotic drilling operations to near-Earth asteroids, extracting water for powering interplanetary spaceships — and, by the way, turning that into a profitable business — sounds like pure science fiction. But to quote Planetary Resources’ president and chief engineer, Chris Lewicki: “Everything is science fiction right up to the point that it’s science fact.”
Lewicki knows his way around an outer-space challenge. He’s been involved in managing NASA’s twin Mars rover missions as well as the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, which made the first on-the-spot observations of Red Planet water ice. Even by that scale, however, his new mission at Planetary Resources is special. It’s not just a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “Maybe once in a species, that kind of opportunity comes along,” he told me.
The venture, which was hinted at last week and is being formally unveiled Tuesday at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, is sufficiently down to Earth to attract funding from such A-list investors as Google CEO Larry Page, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, Texas billionaire Ross Perot Jr. and spacefaring software executive Charles Simonyi. Filmmaker James Cameron has signed on as a senior adviser.
Planetary Resources is the latest brainchild of Eric Anderson, whose company Space Adventures has helped millionaires and billionaires go on 10-day trips to the International Space Station; and Peter Diamandis, the motive force behind the multimillion-dollar X Prize program, the Rocket Racing League and the Zero G Corp.’s weightless-airplane tourist venture. Anderson and Diamandis serve as co-chairmen of the venture they co-founded.
Diamandis said Planetary Resources follows up on discussions that he and Anderson had starting about three years ago — and also follows up on a nearly lifelong ambition he’s had.
“As a teenager, when I was asked what I wanted to be, I’d say, ‘An asteroid miner,’” Diamandis told me.
Why mine asteroids?
Planetary Resources’ ultimate goal is to set up a commercial infrastructure for fueling trips far beyond Earth orbit, with Planetary Resources controlling the equivalent of oil wells, refineries and filling stations in outer space. That’s the long-term promise of near-Earth asteroids.
“A water-rich asteroid would greatly enhance the large-scale exploration of the solar system,” Anderson said in a news release. “Water has many uses in space. For instance, it would not only be used for hydration, but also would be broken down into oxygen and hydrogen, for breathable air and rocket propellant.”
But why go to all the trouble, when there’s so much water on Earth? “It costs on the order of $20,000 per kilogram to get a liter of water into orbit,” Diamandis explained. “If you’re able to buy it on orbit for one-hundredth of the cost, that would be transformative.”
Asteroids also could yield precious metals such as platinum, gold and rare-earth materials — treasures that are worth bringing back to Earth. Diamandis said a single asteroid in the range of 200 to 500 meters in diameter could contain more platinum-group metals than has ever been mined in the whole of human history.
“When the availability of these materials increases, the cost will reduce on everything, including defibrillators, hand-held devices, TV and computer monitors, catalysts; and with the abundance of these metals we’ll be able to use them in mass production, like in automotive fuel cells,” Diamandis said in the news release.
Humbler materials could be used for construction of deep-space facilities. “Even dirt is valuable as a radiation-shielding material,” said former NASA astronaut Tom Jones, who got his Ph.D. in planetary sciences by researching remote-sensing techniques for asteroids. Jones is now serving as an adviser to the Planetary Resources team.
First launch in two years?
Building a commercial empire in outer space may be the long-range plan, but the short-term plan is closer to home: The first step to mining an asteroid is figuring out what’s out there. To that end, Planetary Resources’ first hardware project is what’s known as the Arkyd-101 personal space telescope.
Lewicki hopes the personal space telescope will do for astronomy what the personal computer did for information technology. Planetary Resources plans to put the instrument into Earth orbit to survey the sky for potential targets — asteroids that come close enough to Earth often enough to make them reachable, and have a spectral signal that would make them good candidates for mining. The main target is C-type or carbonaceous asteroids, which are dark and not so easy to detect with existing instruments.
The Arkyd-101 telescope is designed to be launched on any of a variety of rockets, including the Russian Dnepr, the European Ariane, the Indian PSLV or the SpaceX Falcon, Lewicki said. It would have arcsecond resolution for astronomical observations, and if the camera were turned earthward, Lewicki said the resolution would be a “couple of meters per pixel,” which comes close to the standard for commercial Earth imaging.
The key factor is the cost: Lewicki noted that an imaging instrument like NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer would typically cost hundreds of millions of dollars. “We’re looking to go one to two orders of magnitude below that,” he said.
Diamandis said that price reduction would significantly widen the market for orbiting telescopes. “We’re in discussions with groups that might want to buy personal telescopes,” he told me.
Another part of the Planetary Resources’ early-phase business plan would be to strike a deal with NASA, under which the space agency would buy data about the spacecraft and astronomical observations. NASA may find such data useful for planning its own missions to near-Earth asteroids, culminating in manned flights in the 2020s. Similar data purchase deals were made a couple of years ago with several of the companies that are planning to put landers on the moon to win a share of the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize.
The New York Times quoted Anderson as saying the company was ”cash-flow positive already,” thanks in part to technology development contracts.
Diamandis said about 20 engineers have already been hired to work for Planetary Resources, with operations based in Bellevue, Wash., east of Seattle. The need to advertise for more employees was one of the reasons why the company’s principals decided it was time to go public with their plans, he said.
He and Lewicki are projecting the first launch of hardware in the 18- to 24-month time frame. Once the telescopes are up and running, the team will identify likely candidates for future missions. The top targets would be near-Earth asteroids that would be energetically easier to reach than landing on the moon. Getting to those asteroids would require the development of additional spacecraft for the Arkyd product line, such as an in-space propulsion vehicle and an experimental resource-extraction package.
“Three, four, five years out, depending on trajectory, is when we envision getting up close and personal with an asteroid,” Lewicki said.
Time for a reality check
Planetary Resources says space mining could “add trillions of dollars to the global GDP,” but such an estimate assumes that there’ll be a significant demand for the water, fuel and air produced in outer space. If NASA doesn’t send out deep-space transports, or goes with a space propulsion system that doesn’t require a periodic fill-up, that could reduce the projected demand for the materials that Planetary Resources aims to produce.
That doesn’t faze Lewicki, however. Even if NASA doesn’t turn into a buyer, “we’ve got a private interest in developing those resources,” he said.
There’s also a question about the part of the operation that would involve shipping platinum and other materials back to Earth. Platinum now costs more than $1,500 an ounce, but with current technology, the cost of launching a mining probe, extracting ore, processing the metal and returning it to Earth would almost certainly be more than that on a per-ounce basis.
“The question is, how does the economics come into this?” said Adam Bruckner, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington. “Can it ultimately be less expensive to find it on an asteroid than to find it on Earth? At some point in the future — and it’s debatable how far in the future — the two lines will cross.”
Anderson acknowledged in a video statement that Planetary Resources would be an unconventional, long-term venture: “On a scale of 20 to 30 years, I envision the resources from space contributing a significant amount to the GDP of the planet — truly creating a world where one plus one equals three.”
Bruckner noted that the idea of mining asteroids for water and other resources has been around for decades. Fourteen years ago, for example, a company called SpaceDev planned to take on a commercial deep-space mission to an asteroid. SpaceDev eventually abandoned the idea and turned its attention instead to the development of small satellites and hybrid rocket engines. In 2008, the company was acquired by Sierra Nevada Corp., which is currently receiving millions of dollars from NASA for spaceship development.
Bob Richards, co-founder and CEO of Moon Express Inc., one of the ventures competing for the Google Lunar X Prize, said he welcomed Planetary Resources’ efforts but insisted that the moon was a better target for resource extraction than any near-Earth asteroid. Just today, Moon Express announced that it sent NASA a mission plan that eventually could lead to mining missions on the moon.
“I looked at this myself,” Richards told me. “The energy argument doesn’t trump the fact that we’ve sampled the moon and we know what’s there. … But it’s a big universe. There are trillions of trillions of dollars in space resources, so there’s enough room for a lot of players.”
For The Next 7 Generations is a documentary that reveals the importance of Indigenous knowledge in our world today as shared by thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, wise elders, shamans and medicine women, from all four corners of the world. This film reveals timeless wisdom to help us make a difference in our every day lives in service of peace, of Mother Earth and healing in the world
This is the hardest time to live, but it is also the greatest honor to be alive now, and to be allowed to see this time. There is no other time like now. We should be thankful, for creation did not make weak spir
its to live during this time. The old ones say ‘this is the time when the strongest spirits will live through and those who are empty shells, those who have lost the connection will not survive.’ We have become masters of survival -we will survive- it is our prophecy to do so.”
“Humanity must shift from living “on” the earth, to living with her.”
- Tiokasin Ghosthorse
One important thing in common: The knowing that we are now in a long-prophesied time of critical importance for humankind, in which a return to an actively spiritual ways of life is essential if we are to survive.
-Navajo elder Harriet Goodluck
Of all the roads I’ve travelled one true path remains
I could see it through the drifting snow; I could find it in the rain.
I can hear my people calling like a wind across the sand
When I walk this Reservation Road I am back on sacred land
The sound of the drum, an eagle’s wing
To my people these are sacred things
Visions of old, hope for the new
All that we ask for is a prayer for the truth
All we need is the truth
When I walk down by the river and I hear my Father’s call
As brothers we must live together, there is one sky above us all
If we forgive our betrayers, then the healing can begin
And the scars from our nation’s past can finally start to mend.
The sound of the drum, an eagle’s wing…
—Bill Miller
