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Chapter 21: Researching Councilman's Viewpoint

from B'wana Tregorre, the Councilman's viewpoint

Sleepily, B'wana Tregorre responded to the alert wake up alarm com. It advised him that as a senior council member, he has been requested to provide an opinion by midday; another attack on the KESTS spacerail link to the ground nearly succeeded, so has precipitated the need to quickly make a decision and act on it.

A refreshing stimulating splash and nutrition later, B'wana opened the integrated knowledge link and uneasily once again studied the ancient history leading up to the building of Clarke Belt Nation and the KESTS spacerail system that made it possible, the umbilical cord with Earthsurface. To get into the spirit of the events, he decorated his cubical with momentos from that past, his favorite was the one with the saying to the aspiring ecologist " When you are up to your waist in alligators, it is hard to remember you came to save the swamp". As appropriate now as back then 50 years ago, it was about those who struggle to save civilization and earthlife while having to get its denizens to be the very ones to build and survive happily in the result, when all those critters actually seem to want to do is to jostle around for a bigger hunk of whatever unfortunate was becoming the meal of the moment... often targeted were those who struggled to save the future of them all. The Confederacy of Clarke Belt Cities, all 1,500,000 of them ringing the planet in the Clarke belt synchronous orbit above earth's equator, would be voting on an extremely serious matter: the abandonment of their commitment to restore the Earth's surface ecosystem back to an enduring genetically diverse healthy balance, as part of the international decision to build the Clarke Belt Cities, even to development of the KESTS. Then, as now, there was the problem of coping with, then integrating with, those who thrived on aggressive powerful cunning to usurp the maximum for their ends... the alligators, sharks, of the human world. The Sovereign Nation of Earthsurface was the latest bunch of alligators, no more, no less.

The overall history spanned some 64 years for B'wana to research, starting where predesesor fragmentary concepts such as Loftstrom's "Launch Loop", Hyde's "Starbridge" and Smith's "Texas and Universe Railroad" were merged, purified, and built upon to become the foundation concept from which was built the place where he now lived, and the dynamic transportation structure which made it all possible. The brief initial description of the concept that became "KESTS to GEO Habitat Ring" was given to the public in 1988, in a brief file called "Energy/Transport System" in the GEnie Information Network's Space & Science Library. More files placed there for the public chronicled the development and expansion of the concept until 1996, when the concept was put up for the public on a website on the Earthlink.net, and there the concept continued to flesh out for all to see. A freely creative vision was published first in a slick magazine in 1989 titled "Treehouse Haven" in Meditation Magazine. An attempt to interest people in using the wet-launch process to build a research 200-1,000 person wheel-like research space habitat was published in 1995 by SSI, titled "Wet Launch of Prefab Habitat Modules", but that organization balked at publishing a full paper two years later on the KESTS to GEO, concept, a paper titled "Kinetic Energy Supported Electrically Powered Transportation Structures" which SSI failed to publish as part of the conference proceedings where the paper was presented. In 2000, a simplifed version of that paper was accepted and published finally, but by a more appropriate organization, the American Society of Civil Engineers' Aerospace Division, a paper called "Kinetically Strengthened Transportation Structures" finally entered the wider consciousness of hardcopy published peer reviewed technical papers. In the 50 years since 2002 when "Kinetically Supported Lifting Bridge to GEO" was published in ASCE's "Space 2002" conference proceedings, it took 8 years for the ecosystem to become so terminally toxic and resource-depleted that the population demanded the KESTS to GEO spacetrain elevator be created, 5 years to develop the technology and construct the seed KESTS to GEO, two years to expand the KESTS to a capacity of a million people a day and to build the Lunar robotic infrastructure for building the shell structures for space habitats at a high enough rate, then for 20 years the KESTS lifted a million people a day on the average with their household cherished possessions, and it has been 15 years since the pirates attacked during the final stages of the was-to-have-been-temporary total exodus from the ground.

In the late 1990's, when the possibility of restoring Mother Earth's ecosystem while greatly expanding human civilization became apparent, the odds against getting the KESTS to GEO project to actually happen seemed impossible. Essentially everyone saw the concept's proposal's result as a rip-off of their homelands, a forced exodus from the surface of their home world to go into concentration camps life inside cramped submarine-like machines in the sky; corporations saw no profit in their management time frame, and it would make their existing space transportation technologies mere history, sending their hopes for fame and fortune into ruin. The enormously powerful Real Estate manipulators, and crude oil suppliers alike, saw KESTS to GEO Habitat Ring as if it were an intolerable interference with their otherwise presumably unassailable wealth base and their continuing Good Life, as if an attempted assault on their power, and so they assaulted back in reaction as bullies have always done.

Those who would benefit by the concept, the people of the future and the species of the earth's balanced ecosystem to be, could not vote on its implementation. So the concept of a ring of habitats in GEO, connected by a massive transportation system bridging the ground and that ring of space cities, had to be developed out of sight of the reigning overseers of technology; yet by the end of the '90's, covert spy technology was so insidious and pervasive that the lone inventors could not invent anything without the monitors, burglars and industrial spies becoming aware of it even as it developed in the inventor's garage, so by the time the inventor could try to patent it, impressive engineering documents were in place to "prove " that some corporation had developed it first and had applied for patent days before, and the inventors gradually starved out due to failure to get reward for their creative work.

So now where could they find the many creative minds to do the vastly diverse design of a new transportation system, and of building self-sustaining cities in near space to make good life for 15 billion people? Engineering employees of corporations all were sworn to give over any invention of theirs done on or off the job to their employer as a precondition of employment, which intensely suppressed their native creativity, and had slowly but thoroughly killed off the "Yankee Ingenuity" base of America and much of the developed world. So, none of them could be used to create such a project.

Yet the technology needed to be a demonstrable real possibility, somehow, by the time civilization woke up to the fact that it had almost eaten itself out of house and home and had trashed out what remained, and there was clearly nothing but ruin laying before them. Sadly, the corporate managers knew the truth that it was much cheaper to suppress competitive technologies than to improve their own. And the researchers themselves learned early in their careers that one does not get so creative that one's work strays far beyond the boundaries of the job at hand and the established set of concepts, if one hopes to not be rejected by the staid peer review process.

B'wana continued to link empathetically and informatively with that past, through the integrated knowledge com link. Back in time and space with them virtually, he was with them, one of them, in essence.

Sure, they could fight over the scraps of what was left of the planet, but by then little would remain to sustain the winners, and the chains of long term ecosystem balance would have been long broken in many places by then. Before then, a way out had to be secretly created and presentable to a dazed and panic-stricken civilization which had lost the first utterly essential resource, and reality had to be faced. So how did the proverbial ecologist back then get the alligators to stand up and rebuild the swamp, instead of having the ecologist for lunch and letting tomorrow take care of itself? Recorded history did not have much to say about how the success happened despite the covert suppression of those who naively first publicly proclaimed the concept in the late 1980's, thinking an earth full of intelligent people would rally to the opportunity to save their heritage's future and their planet's sustainable ecosystem upon which life depended. Instead, those creative but naively optimistic few found a planet full of powerful, aggressive TV-addicted people committed to maintaining the status quo that supported their power, ignoring the impossibility of doing so for much longer; those powerful people merely believed that forcing population growth to zero would solve the problem. B'wana wondered if those authoritarian people also believed that if they ran their automobiles at a constant speed they would never run out of gas... sure, it would save gas, but eventually the tank would run dry anyway. They might even have believed that burying their garbage and toxic trash would make it not haunt the future.

Up here in a Clarke Belt City of 8,000 people, every bit of the substances of mechanical and living processes was integrated into recycling processes. Some inert waste material went outside to be added as radiation shielding mass to the non-rotating outer hull of each city. Many of the recycling technologies used up here would work down there on the surface, although many recycling processes depended upon the immediate wide availability of hard vacuum processing in a wide range of gravities ranging from zero to 1.1 g's, and the enormous focused energy resources of a sun that shone 24 hours a day, on the average seven times as much solar power than the solar influx on an equal area on the earth's surface. But still, there were a lot of technologies developed for Clark Belt Nation that could have helped the technologically generated trash accumulation down there, and delayed the inevitable ecosystem collapse for part of a generation longer, perhaps.

One of the original purposes of the KESTS was to have been used to cheaply bring up the toxic wastes which had accumulated on the earthsurface, up to the solar powered GEO Total Recycling Plants to be torched into plasma by concentrated sunlight, accelerated to a constant velocity then hurtling through an electromagnetic field the ionized stream of dissociated elements would be swept out through arcs dependent on mass-charge ratio, and the distributed chemical elements collected in buckets as a function of angle, and the noble gasses collected by their lack of response to the deflection. The originally intractably toxic materials, thusly returned back to their original pure elemental chemical states, were then ready for shipment back to the ground to be used for new manufacturing purposes. But no, the conflict with the pirates that had taken over the ground had prevented that original plan by their blockade. Access thus was limited to the area where the earth surface terminal tunneled through the Ecuadorian Andes, a hundred miles radius from there, no more. Although the earth ecosystem clearly was still overburdened by centuries of civilization's unrecyclable wastes, the earthsurface pirates clearly intended to sever the KESTS link to the earthsurface, and this morning had almost succeeded.

Focusing his thoughts back on the situation here and now, he had to postulate that there was a solution to this mess. The solution surely was in that original grand plan for KESTS, the Clarke Belt Habitat Ring of nations, and the planetary ecosystem which was to have been restored back to long term balance as a great planet-wide International Park long before this.

B'wana was not a Councilman for the Clarke Belt Orbital Habitat Ring by accident. An outstanding scholar, a generalist, specializing in the ongoing flow of history, and an additional degree in Decisionmaking. It was time to do his homework. How far back would he need to go? Back before the time when the bombships became suddenly more deadly, about 5 years ago. Before the takeover by the earth surface pirates just before the temporary evacuation of the planet had been completed, and they effectively stole an entire planet with its abandoned riches of civilization, including most of its military machinery.

Before the time when the people of the earth rose up against the powerful highrollers who still were engrossed with playing their power games, addressing public concerns by increasing recycling at a snail's pace with little regard to the destruction of the planetary ecosystem they were doing, and thus later forced the emergency development and construction of KESTS to GEO. Back before that, back to when the KESTS to GEO was first conceived and proposed.

The Teslaholomatrix had not existed back then, was only in imagination at that time, so the historians had used cartoon morphographics to recreate as best as could be determined what was the happenings of the previous eras. The genealogy of the KESTS was particularly difficult because the attempts by those aspiring to the wealth and power beyond anyone's earlier dreams were apparent to those who thrived by putting the squeeze on civilization, and they had gone to great lengths to erase the true history of the beginnings of KESTS to GEO, even psychic traces were messed with by those burglary experts. Yet B'wana felt that somewhere in those turns of events were the seeds of the difficulties which were now so threatening.

B'wana relaxed into the Teslaholomerger and noted the labels identifying these were simulations, not real witnessing of real-time events.

The KESTS to GEO concept did not have the blue blood lines of most formal academically proposed projects that eventually spawned physical realities. The concept both offered a possible way out for civilization's dilemma of resource depletion, accumulating toxic wastes, and rising demand for energy. Yet it also suggested changes in just about everything that was considered unshakable to civilization, and change is not easy for people... KESTS to GEO, in its most severe scenario (which actually came to be, due to the corrupt machinations that suppressed it in early times, thus bringing about severe crisis later) would even have just about everybody on the planet move to dwellings built in GEO, perhaps even permanently, yet nobody but the homeless would choose to lose their homes, farms, businesses. So it was not easily considered by people.

The workably integrated KESTS to GEO concept apparently was even created by someone not recognized by either corporate stature or academic achievements, he was a struggling technician who had dropped out of college. This seemed so implausible that years went by while academia stalled the publication of KESTS while they sought some "actual" originator who had impressive academic standing. Corporations laid groundwork with engineers documenting in their legal logs some work that could be related later to KESTS development, just in case it looked like a moneymaker, they would have a foot in the door. None of these things helped the struggling originator, who had to use most of his resources just for survival instead of for advancing the KESTS to GEO design. Furthermore the system which ought to have been helping him create the KESTSGEO, were busy attempting either to prove him incorrect or else suggest he stole the idea from some esteemed scholar or from some company he had worked for as a technician. So here were the roots of the current crisis problem, B'wana Tregorre hypothesized.

What was it that created the KESTS to GEO project in the first place, what were the struggles then and their solutions? The name of that originating technician had been effectively erased by the entrepreneurs who rushed to start industries capitalizing on KESTS technology. B'wana found it difficult to focus a train of thoughts on something that had no name. "Jedsee" was the best he could do for synthesizing a name from remaining records. Jedsee had been a highly academically competent person until sometime in the Freshman year of college as a Physics major, he became afflicted with a severe case of Tinnitus in both ears; and he was in despair that his girlfriend appeared to have abandoned him when he went to college; he was working his way through school as a coop student as an electronics technician at White Sands Missile Range working indirectly with his beloved rockets of the mid-1950's there, a dream come true for him. But he had Asperger's Syndrome, unknown to him at the time, and there were 12 men for every woman there at that college so it was overload and he dropped out of college to go look for a wife. Eventually married to a woman who demanded she be given his whole paycheck, he found himself needing to build a bridge across a canyon to the disintegrating mountain cabin home they bought; four years later his library studies and construction labor had created a car-carrying bridge of wood and steel cables 40 ft long, center span 26 feet long, a half ton pre-load on cables of all 8 cables, stretched by pairs of car bumper jacks. His studies of the nature of materials and of bridges throughout the ages combined with his love of space adventure, so he was one of those many who "reinvented" the anchored earth tether space elevator, then abandoned it when he found no material remotely strong enough. He then modified the concept for an anchored tether on the lunar surface, balanced across L1 toward the Earth, integrated manufacturing and siphon-like energy transfer system along the tether. But NASA could not pay for his efforts to do this work as a formal proposal, and his wife divorced him immediately because of that, plunging him into years of despair. Nonetheless, the seeds of the idea of very long thin structure transportation systems in space were sown in his mind. Fascinated by the 90 mile high concepts of Keith Lofstrom's "Launch Loop", a circulating outflung belt between pulleys reaching to the fringes of the atmosphere, and Rod Hyde's "Starbridge" vertical tower supported by electrodynamic drag of paramagnetic discs launched up an evacuated tube tower again to the fringes of space, he resisted his fear of public speaking to present testimony to the National Commission on Space in 1985, rewarded by much audience and panel interest, but nothing about it actually appeared in their resulting published report.

Puzzled as to why NASA was not pursuing Lofstrom's Launch Loop or Hyde's vertical dynamic tower concepts, Jedsee began to see flaws in those concepts, inadequacies. Neither the launch loop nor the vertical tower would put anything in space and have it stay there, it still needed a rocket motor to give it most of the energy to attain orbital velocity from the top of either of these dynamic structures. Earl Smith envisioned a track circulating between Texas and GEO, a stretchable iron belt, which everybody thought was a joke. But Jedsee took the workable portions of each of those concepts and assembled them into a new concept, filling in the mechanisms and principles to make it all work, integrating it all with anticipated useful applications to be the KESTS to GEO concept. He attempted to gain public interest and help on the project by writing files on the GEnie information network starting in 1988, then when the internet became publicly accessible he used an ISP free website to tell about KESTS to GEO and applications starting in 1996. He had foreseen a need to do early real development work on large scale artificial gravitied space habitats, called "Centristation" then finally in 1995 his first formal peer-review technical paper got published, called "Wet-Launch of Prefab Habitat Modules" which told more of building a research toroidal habitat in upper LEO, built on the ground and tested, then launched module by module by having each module serve as its own pair of cryogenic fuel tanks for their own launch, remotely guided to docking eventually into a full circle with hubs in LEO, before the first workmen arrived there. All in preparation for KESTS.

But two years later when he formally presented a paper on KESTS to GEO to the same esteemed academic aerospace organization, they essentially laughed him away, the Ivy Leaguers denigrated the timid college dropout who had dared.

Not until 2000 did Jedsee succeed in having a peer reviewed technical paper published describing the basic principles of KESTS, and of course it was by the Civil Engineers, not by the conventional rocket oriented people; it was of course farseeing big project Civil Engineers who approved of the concepts of building elevator bridges to space. Jedsee's Asperger's Syndrome was both a strength and weakness in all this, B'wana determined to get the advise of the KESTS technician AP about his opinion of what Jedsee was coping with in those situations, difficulties with people beyond the understanding of the normal average person. Back then it looked like KESTS would put every aerospace corporation out of business, so those corporations used their power to prepare to tie its inventions up in court until the aging Jedsee disappeared from the picture or passed away, then they were also ready to put the squeeze on the technology to reap whatever moneys they could out of it, as they always had done with technology, instead of developing Jedsee-envisioned conceptual design technologies to their finest forms.

The "Space 2000" ASCE conference paper "Kinetically Strengthened Transportation Structures" finally made it appearant that the idea was about to be seen as a way to get the sorely needed SSPS into GEO, shifting the world's energy reserve leverage away from the oil producing countries, which would otherwise have shifted world power to those mid-eastern countries within 3 or 4 decades.

But a year later, in 2001, some airplanes were hijacked and flown into buildings in a spectacular romp goading the U.S. into a fear-and-battle mentality, and the tough-policy incumbents then in office took the bait, diverting the potential funds that could have been used for building KESTS to GEO, forcing them to instead be squandered at tens of billions of dollars at a time for homeland security efforts, engaging the people's minds toward a great fray, the kind they had often become excited about in past decades; instead of engaging America's efforts in a great constructive project like the Apollo project had been in the 1960's. The perpetrators understood the American psychology perfectly, America took the 9/11 bait, and so the risk of KESTS being built, and thus able to provide the world with abundant clean cheap electrical power without dependence on foreign religio-politically controlled crude oil supplies, was averted.

Jedsee continued his efforts anyway, and in 2002 his 14 page paper "Kinetically Supported Bridge Vehicle Lift to GEO" was accepted and published in ASCE's "Space 2002 Robotics 2002" conference proceedings. Yet the paper went essentially unnoticed, the country was all warming up to the prospects of an immense war effort of a new kind, this was something the TV addicted developed world could handle, involving little change in their own lives, and gaining prospects of observing occasional news picturing violence to spice their day. Peek-and-punch, spy-and-fry games were much more acceptable to them than some outrageous enormous space construction project being urged by an almost unknown dropout. Vigorous spy and action by their military toward an enemy they could see, was much more acceptable than widespread whole-population action toward an almost invisible enemy that moved with the stealth of a python against civilization, the enemy which actualized as dwindling resources and the effects of toxic waste accumulating worldwide.

Jedsee had done his best to prepare the way for civilization to thrive while healing the Earth's ecosystem, a very nice gift for humanity. However, what he reaped was the combination of the project's electric motor being considered too big to be possible, he was considered delusional as to its potentials, knowledge of its existence was suppressed from public awareness by some, received animosity from a few status-quo supporters, and leading toward the potential animosity of a world full of people who didn't want their lives to be changed, as if the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" adage applied to the world situation. He couldn't stay employed to pay rent because he was blacklisted by the corporations; the entrepeneurs who wanted to claim the KESTS to GEO as if their own, for their fame and fortune, put goons in the apartments above wherever Jedsee lived, spread nasty rumors to each new neighborhood that Jedsee moved to in the struggle, blocked his feeble efforts to regain a normal mated relationship with woman, interfered with his communications, and the worst fears of an Asperger's-afflicted man ran rampant as he struggled to get his message to the world. Asperger's bafflement at the endless appearantly unprovoked abuse toward him by the alpha-male aspirants combined with his basic naivity eventually had taught him to watch out for unprovoked abuse by bullies of incredible diversity and situations, but his efforts to figure it all out and "watch out" merely appeared as paranoid, even to himself, yet was the best he could do in defense against what he perceived as unpredictable unprovoked harrassment from powerful irresponsible others, whose abusive actions appearantly were within acceptable behavorial parameter limits by the general public. Instead of appreciative support for his finely creative KESTS to GEO project efforts, he found he was ignored, disbelieved, disdained and given cold abuse as people's response in general, so his efforts failed to prosper any more than he did. He had toiled for much of a lifetime to provide them with a pathway map for robust survival of all, but his reward from them was that the status-quo people effectively tarred-and-feathered him as their appreciation for his space railway efforts. Time went by, little constructive activity got done, more species continued to go extinct and more rainforests were razed to soon become more wasteland. So, B'wana noted, here was another major contributor to the pattern of the current crisis: there was a lot of rot in the social interactions part of the foundation of the situation.

In fact, B'wana thought that it was surprising that KESTS ever got built at all, because of the enormous changes it threatened in everybody's lives, the lack of academic or corporate high standing of the concept's originator, and the suspicion and disdain he suffered from that, compounded by the Asperger's outcast nature in society anyway, and his lack of a woman most of his life, astonishing that anything was created at all.

With sudden insight, B'wana discovered a repeating pattern in this all. The originator of KESTS to GEO was afflicted with Asperger's Syndrome, which was characterized in many ways, including that Asperger's-afflicted boys often were abusively accosted by bullies, causing much bodily and emotional trauma to the baffled Asperger's. Bullies were aspirants to alpha-male status socially, something that Asperger's miss noticing entirely. Acknowledgment of the alpha-male's "superiority" is demanded of all peers by teach would-be alpha-male, and ignoring that is taken by the bully as if a challenge to fight for the title. And those earthsurface pirates, they were the extreme essence of the alpha-male syndrome, combined with high competence and intelligence, but lacked responsiblity to the grand picture of life.

That was it, he thought: the common destructive pattern was the combination of alpha-male compulsion with lack of acceptance of responsibility for the overall results of their actions. Just as it was in Jedsee's day, so it still is. So, he was now one step closer to the solution. His goal was to integrate everyone, including those pirates down below, and get back to work performing the fulfillment of the rest of the plan for restoring the earthsurface ecosystem back to long term viability.

Taking a break, B'wana noted ruefully that the captured bombpilot was very much a female, and quite an attractive one at that, and yet she was about as "alpha-male" and as irresponsible for the whole, as any male he could remember. Maybe it wasn't a male thing at all, it was some "alpha-hood" compulsion coupled with irresponsibility for their part of the whole. This "alpha-hood" being some kind of compulsion to feel it is important to have others believe one is more powerful than they are in some way. Probably it was a left-over from an ancient time when some bull discovered that instead of wooing the females to reproduce, it was much more energy effective to attack his brothers and elliminate them from the potential gene pool, thus magnifying the propagation of his own alpha-hood kind at the expense of the group.

Would it take a change in both the alpha-compulsion and the irresponsibility aspect, or just change of one, to make a path for the earthsurface pirates to become integrated into the Clarke Belt centered civilization, so as to get on with the cleanup of the ecosystem and restoration of its balance using solar system resources? Down there, the planet looked very big to its occupants and the planet could take care of itself, is a huge place where people only needed to figure out how to wrest resources away from their environment so they could live well. Up here in the Clarke Belt Habitat Ring, it was easy for each person to quickly understand that they as a whole were only as strong as their weakest link, that they were all in the same boat and so needed to pull together so that all might thrive and prosper. There was no excuse for harming another, that only made a weak link weaker, and so all suffered as a result. Making a weak link stronger was the only solution. Today's crisis showed that the pirates down on earthsurface were the weak link to the resumption of the kestsgeo plan of continuing on cleaning up and healing the Earth surface environment, and getting on with life. What capability did the Clarke Belt and KESTS system now have to provide such change to the pirates that had kidnapped the planet's surface resources 15 years ago?

B'wana realized that his train of thought never had considered dismantling the KESTS and abandoning the earthsurface ecosystem, or of exterminating the pirate people on the ground. And this seemed fitting, since the Clarke Belt Habitat Ring's purpose was not to replace the civilization on the ground, it was to be an expansion of it and to take the load of civilization off of the planetary ecosystem. Once the ecosystem was back up and running again, significant numbers of people would return to the ground, not just as tourists or park rangers, but many to live there once again, supported by the Clarke Belt access resource systems wherever materials were involved that were not produced or recyclable by nature.

The key was to find a way to make alpha-hood and irresponsibility for the whole, totally unrewarding to the pirates on the earthsurface, he decided. Up here, the Teslafield holoviewer system had made those qualities uninteresting and quite useless. Seems now it is the time to get it down there too. How to get it into the pirates' hands, considering their irresponsible alpha-compulsion violent states of mind?

Thus prepared for the initial meeting of the Council on this issue, B'wana Tregorre returned to complete his sleep before the meeting.

posted by Unknown @ 8:03 PM