Space To Settle

Have you ever dreamed of living in a place that is not Earth?  Have you thought of how fun it would be in zero G?  Or of cultivating crop on the red planet?  These themes may smack of science fiction, but in a world that is mostly explored Earth is quickly becoming a non-frontier.  The human race has thrived exploring and expanding their abode into new territories.  After this sphere is conquered where is there left to go?  One place to go is up.  Some say the inner solar system is the next frontier.  To settle space is to keep the human race going.

People have explored since, well, since we wanted to know what's over the hill. We want to see, touch, smell and experience and place or environment.  The famed explorers went around the globe.  They searched for various things but most of all they just wanted to see for themselves these surreal landscapes.  We know their curiosities paid off when you consider the sights like the Pyramids, Lake Victoria, Teotihuacan, Chaco Canyon.  We have explored not only to find monuments natural and man-made but also to create trade, countries, and exploit the natural resources.  The central part of Africa was explored as late as the 1800s by Dr David Livingstone.  Because of his successful exploration trade route were established into the interior of Africa for the first time.  Exploration is in our makeup as human beings.  We have an insatiable need for new knowledge and exploration satisfies that curiosity.  Space offers much to explore.  From asteroids to moons of Saturn and Jupiter to Mars and even Venus, space is a great frontier.

Part of the challenge of exploration into new areas is the need to adapt to the area or the need to make devises to help us live in that area.  From our oldest ancestors, we have clothes.  Clothes warm us and protect us from things hitting or scratching our skin.  We have shelter.  Shelter keeps us from rainfall and snowfall.  We have heat.  We made heat with fire and now with sophisticated heat pumps.  We have air conditioning.  Air conditioning keeps us cool in our shelter for the warm summer months, or in some places year around.  Taking Dr Livingstone example again, part of his success was due to the medical knowledge of how to deal with diseases like malaria.  Today we have medicine and mosquito nets to keep us from such diseases.  Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest with the aid of oxygen breathers.  In Space Astronauts, Cosmonauts, and Taikonauts take not only oxygen but air pressure with them so they can stay alive.  Even the EVA suits (astronaut suits to conduct walks in space and on the moon) are more like a space ship with arms and legs than they are a suit.  Today one of the main problems to solve in space far away from Earth is that of radiation.  There is too much radiation in deep space (inside the solar system) to allow for humans to stay alive.  We have a need to develop technology that can deal with that problem if we want to go exploring or even settling.

The 1800's because of Dr Livingstone's exploration, Africa was part of the mindset of people in the western world.  The story of Tarzan was popular, and a myriad of movies, books, and songs were made about Africa.  It was viewed as an exciting, daring, and dangerous place full of potential riches.  At the same time of Dr Livingstone exploits, the abolitionist movement made some significant strides in ending slavery in the Western countries, which lead to the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln.  Explorers of the day had their hand in the abolitionist movement.  Today we have the exploration of science that excite some.  We also have Space exploration that excite much of the population.  The Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, became beloved characters to both the public and the human explorers at the rovers' controls.  Now we have a growing number of people talking and dreaming of going to Mars to settle.  The Mars Society is a non-government group that seeks exploration and settlement of Mars.  The red planet has become a major goal for many because its been identified as a place where the possibility of settlement with today's technology is potentially feasible.  OK, so its still a big challenge.  Other place to settle include the Moon, Asteroids, Venus and even deep space itself.  Finding out how we can live in such environments is a major job of the International Space Station (ISS).  One of the personal and social effects of low earth orbit has on Astronauts and Cosmonauts is the change in perspective they got by looking down at the Earth for the first time.  They see how thin the atmosphere is and how vulnerable everything they have known all their lives.  Virgin Galactic is going to send up paying passengers to suborbital space soon and many will get that first look of the Earth.  I predict that they will write about their experience and they will have a change in perspective.  Settlement in space can also change the perspective of the population at large, perhaps we will finally learn to treat our planet right.

conclusion
Keep the human race going is key to our survival.  Expanding to the stars is the way to go.  Settling in the inner Solar System is our next step.  It satisfies the human curiosity by going to Mars, Asteroids, and the like.  It challenges us technically by learning ways and making things to help us survive in harsher environments.  It also helps in the evolution of the human social behavior by challenging our perspective and making us change for the better.  Get ready, its coming sooner than you might think.

Freelance Writing for Examiner.com

Examiner.com is a news site that I never heard of until I searched for writing jobs locally.

In the search Examiner.com came up looking for specific freelance writers.  I checked out their site, and its a news site for local news.  The funny thing about it is that its actually nation wide.  But when you log on or go to their site, it will default to your local city.  You can also select other cities.

They hire freelance writers for who can write for their own communities.  The writers apparently get paid by readership.  So it may not be profitable at the beginning, but its seems to be a good way to get writing professionally.

O K I'll admit I have applied.  It was a simple 3 step process and at the end they said I would get a response in 2 weeks.  In the process you select what areas you want to write about from their selection.  Then you can add one and only one subject of your own.  Too bad I had a couple in mind.

You might ask what I wanted to write about.  Well I wanted to write about Space programs and Aerospace.  I love these subjects.  I have all my life.  If your asking why don't I just do that here on this blog, my answer would be because this blog is my way to freely be myself as an intuitive.  Writing about Space and Aerospace is a analytical exercise.

So you might want to check out Examiner.com for your local news and commentaries.  You never know who is reporting what.  It just might be your neighbor.

Disapointed about May 21st 2011?

I had a dream yesterday.  In the dream I got reports that people and two very popular idols committed suicide.  This dream startled me intensely.  The way I interpret this dream is that there is a real concern that people would want to commit suicide.  What about the two idols?  I won't name them but I interpret that as representing fans at large or the people at large.  In light of this disappointing prediction of end of the World or the Rapture for May 21st 2011, disappointment and depression leading to suicide is a real concern.  If you were affected, it's possible to reconstruct your life and continuing on and allowing yourself to be emotional and give yourself time can help.


You can reconstruct your life.  That may seem like a tall task right now.  At one point in my life I lost everything.  I only had the clothes on my back.  One step at a time I was able to get a job, rent a place and slowly reconstruct myself and my life.  During that time I thought a lot.  I had to put on hold everything I had believed and one by one test each idea and modify them if needed.  It was a hard thing to do, but I had no other real recourse.  I also started to make new friends.  People helped me here and there and I tried to help others as well.  Love for myself and for my fellow man became the most important thing for me.  There were fears but I had to put them aside and do what I felt I needed to do.  If I did it you can too.  It takes some thinking and some time and some research, but it can be done.  Try to find out details about the direction you feel you need to go before you go do it.


One of the first healing things to do is to let your emotions flow.  Allow yourself to feel anger and sadness.  Out of my own experience, being scammed and being robbed is the same feeling.  Tell yourself it's OK to cry.  Give yourself time and place to mourn.


One of the things that have been helpful for me in reconstructing my life was to take time for myself.  What I mean by that is to take time to rest and be entertained.  Some people consider entertainment as a way to kill time, but it can be a way to learn lessons from stories that writers try to convey.  Many Sci-fi stories are like Aesop fables in that they have morals to their stories.  Action stories can help take out frustrations as well as romantic or even erotic stories.  Moderate physical exercise is a good way to give yourself some time.  Taking some frustration out on a punching bag can help.  Taking a walk in a park can help restore some perspective in life.

Reconstructing your life, letting emotions flow, and giving yourself time can help you move on after a very big disappointment.  Deciding to move on is a courageous step that I applaud.  I don't recommend suicide over disappointment because this is a problem you can overcome.  Keep a good thought and consider this to be a new beginning.  To help you along I highly recommend Dr Orloff's book called Emotional Freedom.

All The Differences

There are a variety of mental disorders out there. I wish I knew the process medicine goes through to call anything negative.  I bet they don't think about it, they just giver it a negative name.  Consequently education looks at disorders as something to overcome rather than something to work with.  People look down on you if you have a disorder.  What if some of these disorders are more order than disorder?  What if we are just discovering new categories for humans?  Can we embrace such differences?

In an NPR article, the suggestion is made that there are more autistic children than anticipated.  The article mentions a South Korean study that looked at children on the broad spectrum of autism.  The study concludes that 1 out of 38 children have autism.  This means that there are more autistic people out there than we want to believe.  Can society come to acknowledge this?  Our society is stubbornly closed to the idea that people are different.  Science is increasingly showing us that individuals are more different and unique than we could imagine.

Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) is more and more common.  If you look at the Government definition of it, you may find something of a lack of logic.  It says that children who have ADHD behave out of the 'norm'.  If individuals are unique then behaving out of the norm should be normal.  It also states that these children's brains are different from other children.  If they are different then where is the negativity to call it a disorder, or to talk about a cure or cause as if it was a disease?  What is normal is a social concept.  The social concept in this case is out of date.  The 'normal' people work for corporations, they have wives and kids and a dog, they live in suburbia in houses made of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.  This concept of normal people came from the social and humanistic thinking that spawned in the 19th century.  That is a very long time ago.  Consequently our public school system and most of private school models for teaching and learning is based on such antiquated idealisms.  Though the science behind ADHD definition may be sound, their interpretation and application is obsolete.

Just how different is everybody?  Consider the tests from today's psychology, there are personality tests, there are learning styles tests, there are Briggs-Meyers tests, and many more.  Each of them depicting another difference or uniqueness we have from each other.  This flies in the face of the concept of 'normal'.  We are indeed individuals, but where does that leave the 'normal' people?  Back in the 1970's I heard a DJ (it might have been Charlie Tuna or Casey Kasem) make one of those science revelations they did over the radio.  This particular revelation stated that 70% of Americans had some kind of neurosis.  Neurosis was what we term today as a disorder.  That means that in the whole population that 3 in every 10 people could be called 'normal'.  That makes 'normal' much more rare than we care to think.  Thus 'normal' becomes not non-normal.

Education helps everyone with disorders to operate and cope in and with society.  Not all of them need medication, but all need education.  The problem today is that there is a lot of people not getting the educational help they could use.  The primary and secondary educational systems major of educating the vast majority of students one and only one way, in mass.  Then for the 'special' cases they make some recommendations or requirements for educators to help the student.  If it's true that there are more people that have disorders, then the educational system needs to be restructured to accommodate the needs of the students.  Such a restructuring could benefit society at large by providing students that are better equipped than they are today to function in society.  Many educational programs that come out new often say that there needs to be like 1 teacher for every 10 students for education to be effective.  What happens today, due to budget constraints and other reasons, is that there is often 1 teacher for every 20 to 30 students.  This is a failure for education because students do not get the minimum individualized attention they need to learn skills they can use.

I think its time to reconsider, and upgrade our educational and societal philosophies to match what we've been seeing for the last 50 years.  People are vastly different than anyone cares to accept.  To manage people with disorders, society needs to provide them with tools to help be independent and productive citizens.  If we don't change, people with disorders will do what they have resorted to, street smarts.  Street smarts can be good but it can also lead to crime and gang violence.

Emotional Freedom

I am currently reading Emotional Freedom By Dr Judith Orloff.  It's a great self help book on how to become emotionally free.  Well that seemed rather obvious.  What makes this book stand out is that it integrates Psychology and Intuition to produce a well rounded solutions to emotional problems people tend to have.

As a follow up of my last blog about Balance, Emotional Freedom can help in the area of becoming more balanced by integrating intuition into your life.

Dr. Orloff take you down an educational road where you learn more about yourself than you may have in a very long time.  There are self examination tests that help you understand who and what you are.  Thereby she also gives suggestions of what you need.

She spends a some time about developing the inquiring dreams for information technique for example.  She also has a part of what type you prefer to be when dealing with emotions.

I have not finished this book yet, but I am enjoying it and finding more about myself than I could have hoped for.  Its worth the read.

Balance

After the Second World War, Society enjoyed a time of building and engineering that lasted well into the 70's.  By the time the 80's rolled around there were talks that engineering field was in trouble.  Schools were failing at teaching upper and basic math.  A low hum of chaos was slowly creeping in.  Society was changing.  We had NASA a great pillar of math and science, we had studies coming out for this and that.  Numbers whizzed around conversations.  Computer jobs were promised to the young generation coming out of high school.  But  things still changed.  Now engineering jobs are not as abundant, the IT world has shunned older workers from the 80's and 90's for younger workers, outsourced to other countries, and require a bigger skill set from their workers.  NASA struggles to keep the public's attention.  Science research struggles to get funding.  You have to wonder what happened to common sense?  Where did it all go wrong?  Where was the future we were promised?  Our analytical and digital dreams smashed on the rocks of economic failure and shortsightedness.  The United States was riding on a waive of technological innovation since World War II.  That surge of tech innovation has now petered out.  What we are left with is an imbalance.  We have analytical knowhow and digital equipment but lack in the intuition to promote life.  People in society needs to strike a balance if we are going to make it into the future.

What is striking a balance?  Its really quite simple. To illustrate I will tell you a story. There once was a powerful man in northern Africa. He had wealth and means and live like he did. His doctor one day told him he had just six months to live because of a terminal disease for which there was no cure. He decided to alter his diet. He ate a little of everything that he could find. He set up a dietary regiment of a variety of foods and drinks. The man not only beat the disease but lived to be a good old age. He chose a diet of balance. He did not major on one item. He majored on all items equally.  He chose to go with his intuition regardless of what doctors said.  Another example is my Graduate Math Professor showed the class that applying intuition to a problem to see how it goes together makes for a faster and more complete solution.  Striking a balance with intuitive thinking and analytical thinking is rewarding.

What is the nature of intuition?  How does intuition differ from analytical thinking?  We all think with our brains.  We are all taught in school to put our thinking caps on.  That's the analytical thinking we were taught.  But no one has taught us how to use our intuition.  Where the analytical brain estimates truth, intuition knows.  Where analytics demands evidence, intuition requires non.  Where analytics requires a busy mind, intuition requires a quiet mind.  Where analytics caused frenzies, intuition promotes calm.  In many aspect intuition and analytical thinking are opposites.  So intuition become seemingly contrary to our busy hectic analytical way of thinking.  Yet, intuition can be used in a way to complement analytical thinking.

How can we put the intuitional and analytical thinking to use to better our performance?  When you come across a problem to calm yourself, scan your feelings about the problem, scan possible causes  of the problem that pop into your head, and come up with a possible solution.  Then take that solution and work out a way to figure the details out with the analytical brain.  This may involve pen and paper and/or use of calculators and computers.  When you are working on a problem that is big and you come across a road block, sleep on the problem.  Before you go to bed that night pose your question to yourself and then record what you dream about.  Sleep brings about dreams and intuitive thinking.  You can often find guidance to a solution with this method.  One more thing to do.  On a lunch break go out for a walk, let your mind enjoy the sun, the birds, the plants, and any fountains or bodies of water.  You can go back to work refreshed and ready to tackle the rest of the day.  During this time let you mind wonder free.  It will use intuition to sort out things and give itself a time of healing.  These are only a few ideas you might want to try to incorporate intuition more in your life.

Since we grew up in a society that maximized analytical thinking, we often forget we are also intuitive beings.  Understanding that a balance needs to be struck to better ourselves and our performance, understanding what intuition is, and applying practical ways to incorporate intuition can give us the much needed balance in our lives.  When you start to strike a balance you may feel a little more joyous, or perhaps some relief.  Our society depends on each one doing their part to strike a balance and teach the young to do the same.

Transformation

Earth is undergoing a transformation.  Its a transformation that's in our faces.  It involves the weather, economy, politics, social, and spiritual. 


Tidal And Weather Change
Its not hard to figure out how our weather is changing.  Mega hurricanes, enormous tornadoes, and tsunami's have been in the news in the last few years.  Many people have lost their lives.  In the 70's we had it mild compared to how it is today.  We didn't know if tsunami's were real back then let alone a F5 tornado or a Category 5 hurricane.  We had never seen these.  The weather is definitely changing.

Economic Change
If you  were off planet Earth in 2008 and 2009, you might have missed the Recession.  Some have tried to call it a depression.  It has cause many around the world to loose their jobs, loose assets, and cause shutdown of companies.  Some have reportedly committed suicide.  With new global players and consumers the shift of wealth has been very painful for many.  Perhaps some still hold to the illusion that things will come back the way they were.  This is only a fantasy.  Economies will build back up, but they won't resemble what they were.  Its going to take time for economies to get in sync and grow steadily.  There is economic change in the world.


Political Change
The Middle East countries are going through severe transformations with their multiple freedom revolts.  Barack Obama became president of the United States.  No small feat considering he was an unknown twelve months before the election.  He's African American and that rubs many people wrong.  Older conservatives don't like it, thus they started the Tea Party movement.  They may argue the contrary but Obama is more of a moderate than Clinton was.  The existence of his Presidency shows that politics in the US is indeed changing.

Social Change
Younger generations have started to come into the work force and adulthood.  These grew up with computers and the internet.  They not only understand the importance of having their voice heard, they expect it and demand it.  They are also suffering with the lack of jobs.  They have to make due with less.  Much like the generation that was ready to work during the Great Depression.  That was the Great Generation.  They went through the Great Depression and World War II.  They sacrificed a lot.  They are also the parents of the Baby Boomers.  Thus, the younger generations are suffering now.  How they take over the world will be the subject of history books in the future and debate for many years to come.  At their hand the societies of the Earth are changing and will continue to change.  It will be fascinating to watch.
 
Spiritual Change
Many people today are of the mind that the Human Race is going through a spiritual transformation.  They call it an awakening.  Though its a spiritual awakening, its is not a religious awakening.  In the 18th Century there was The Great Awakening.  It was a Methodist revival and it was supposedly to offset the Age Of Enlightenment  The Age Of Enlightenment is where we get modern science, thus it was a freeing on analytical thinking.  The Great Awakening was a religious in name but it was also spiritual in nature because of the many miracles reported and the emphasis on the Holy Spirit and the like.  The Awakening that is going on is purely spiritual.  Meditation, grounding/centering, and emotions are the cornerstones of this one.  Experiences with dreams, seeing the future, and communicating with the departed have been increasingly reported as well as other things.  It doesn't seem to matter where your from, what you look like, or what religion you claim to be.  Its an awakening of the human soul and spirit.  Its no surprise that this is occurring when you consider that for the longest time the global society have been concentrating on science and engineering, both of which are purely analytical.  I believe this is brought about by our very nature.  We are both analytical and intuitive.  If we major on one then later the other will impose itself on society.  If we can strike a balance then perhaps the swings in this pendulum will decrease.

There we have it, transformation.  The Earth is transforming but into what?  Well, were all along for this ride and we will see the end result.  Rest assure that the human race will continue and find a way to keep this planet afloat.