Re: [DIYbio] Fwd: [luf-team] New Projects - New Paradigm

Whoa. I have no doubt that this is just a tl:dr for most list members,
but since my own space-related NPO's strategy was partially inspired
by analyzing how the Living Universe Foundation -- endorsed by Arthur
C. Clarke no less! -- turned out to be unviable, I'm grateful.

DIY satellites already make getting stuff into a space much more
accessible than ever before. DIYbio suggests a way to start populating
space (in a way) with DIY satellites. The Frontier Metaphor -- "let's
go and build worlds" -- probably got it all backwards. Perhaps a more
scalable approach is to build worlds (telerobotically and
biotechnically), then go.

I'm gonna render this into a dead-tree version and read it over lunch.

Regards,
Michael Turner
Project Persephone
1-25-33 Takadanobaba
Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 169-0075
(+81) 90-5203-8682
turner@projectpersephone.org
http://www.projectpersephone.org/

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward
together in the same direction." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 11:47 AM, Bryan Bishop <kanzure@gmail.com> wrote:
> This is slightly off the usual biology track, but it's an interesting
> twist on funding.
>
> From: Eric Hunting <erichunting@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 9:27 PM
> Subject: [luf-team] New Projects - New Paradigm
> To: luf-team@yahoogroups.com
>
>
> I've been pondering lately a new paradigm for space advocacy which
> I've been developing around some new project concepts.
>
> There has long been something of an identity crisis in space advocacy
> because there has never been a definitive model for what a space
> advocacy group is and is supposed to do. And this tends to manifest in
> a perpetual debate over the question of whether one should be
> advocating a future/development vision to the public, the government
> and their space establishment, or taking an entrepreneurial route and
> realizing this vision on one's own. Lately that latter approach has
> become most popular as New Space entrepreneurs emerge and the space
> advocacy community increasingly comes to view the public and
> government/establishment as 'lost causes', too distracted and
> self-absorbed to ever be reached by any conventional appeal. But the
> hard reality is that there is no capital lining up for space and never
> has been because very little near-term space activity has any
> realistic prospect of a near-term return-on-investment. It's all
> speculatively 20 years or more down the road. The basic idea of a
> comprehensive space program as, simply, a 'business' has never made
> sense to Capital and ultra-wealthy individuals spending personal
> fortunes built in other industries on personal space pursuits is not a
> practical example the rest of society can follow. The organizers of
> space advocacy groups also share much the same demographic as their
> rank-and-file audience--the poorer lower skill/talent end of the
> white-collar/service industry middle-class spectrum. This is not the
> best entrepreneurial material and they have much work to do building
> their own skills. The science and engineering professionals who
> originally founded space advocacy have generally abandoned it as they
> found their jobs in the establishment, relegating it to the status of
> a fandom they will occasionally pander to when they feel a need for
> political support, but otherwise dismiss. They never really
> participate--can't because of the hazard to their professional status.
> Thus many debates over the purpose and focus of space advocacy seem to
> sound rather like peculiar kids arguing over which of a number of
> impossible superhero characters they want to be when they grow up, and
> one proposal after another dies hitting the wall of practical reality.
>
> I think that business development is a critical aspect of space
> development, but cannot be considered independently from outreach to
> the larger society because, ultimately, that's where all the money,
> skills, and talent have to come from. If space has no relevance to the
> public, why should we expect it to be relevant to Capital? But with
> public interest in space at an all-time low thanks to the never-ending
> distractions of soft, culture, political, class, race, and economic
> war raining down on society, how do we effectively reach people? What
> can we do to re-catalyze public interest and turn that interest into
> the resources--the money and skill/talent--we need to build with? How
> do we bridge the huge gap between what we desire to do and what we
> realistically can do?
>
> I think there is a relatively straightforward model for space advocacy
> groups that has been largely overlooked because of their very
> technological focus--their focus on the end-product rather than the
> process. I call it the Cousteau Paradigm because the example was most
> definitively set by the famous marine explorer Jacque Cousteau and his
> Cousteau Society. At a time, post Apollo, when space started declining
> in public interest, this non-profit organization was accomplishing
> many of the things space advocacy groups aspire to do today, all
> supported by individual donations, corporate sponsorship, and
> cooperative effort from many institutions. They acquired and
> re-purposesd a host of ships and vehicles, built cutting-edge
> equipment, experimental ships including wingsail and turbosail ships,
> custom-designed submersibles and marine robots, underwater habitats,
> and elaborate research facilities and maintained a sophisticated
> lifestyle for Cousteau, his family, and his 'team' of science,
> engineering, and media pros. Cousteau even had plans for a floating
> eco-city. When Cousteau started his career the undersea environment
> was as challenging and unknown an environment as outer space and what
> he created was akin to a government-independent space
> program--basically on about the same scale as the Mercury program. He
> recognized this analog and even called his diving team 'aquanauts'.
> How was all this possible, especially when none of it produced
> straightforward products, an economic ROI, or had any government
> backing driven by Cold War gamesmanship?
>
> Well, in fact Cousteau did produce a very specific, powerful, product
> and to understand it one needs to understand exactly what his career
> was about. Cousteau was, essentially, a 'professional adventurer',
> coming out of a tradition that goes back to at least the late 18th and
> early 19th centuries. Professional adventurers are people who make a
> living by traveling to exotic places the average person may never get
> to travel to and bringing back cool stories from those places to
> present to the public as paid entertainment. (this was different from,
> but often crossed with, the traditional explorers assaying frontiers
> and 'professional naturalists' who went to exotic places to collect
> samples of new species to sell to scientists and zoos) In the past,
> this was basically about books, magazine articles, and theater
> presentations and the adventurer's travels would be speculatively
> financed by wealthy patrons, sometimes science institutions if the
> journey was more science-oriented, and publishing and theater
> companies seeking exclusive distribution rights. It then tended to be
> rather sensationalistic as with today's 'action films' as the
> characterization of the adventurer in western culture was then
> commonly seen as a gung-ho, ultra-masculine, gun-toting superman
> taking on Mother Nature mano-a-mano.
>
> This tradition of professional adventuring has continued to the
> present day, evolving to suit new media, new twists on the style of
> the masculine ideal (strangely, we rarely see women in the adventurer
> role in media today despite their powerful impact in sports, the field
> sciences, and as astronauts--old traditions die hard), and slowly
> adopting a generally 'scientific' motif. Adventure/nature films were a
> well established genre by Cousteau's time and he pioneered a new venue
> for that through the invention of the Aqua-Lung--what we more commonly
> call scuba systems today--and a host of new color underwater
> photography and film hardware that really opened up the sea to this
> medium. But Cousteau did more than just revolutionize underwater
> photography. He cultivated for himself a totally new cultural model of
> the adventurer. He was not the gung-ho he-man of the past. Rather he
> portrayed himself as a soft-spoken, reflective scientist-explorer. A
> seafaring naturalist. An environmental guru. This was totally
> different from the traditional cultural model but much more in-tune
> with the ethos of the emerging environmental movement he allied to.
> And he cultivated a style of documentary that didn't just focus on the
> sea life and underwater archeology he was going out to capture on
> film, but also on the process--the journey--of capturing those images
> and thus his own and his 'team's' novel sea-faring lifestyles. His
> films have some of the character of both science documentaries and,
> oddly enough, surfer documentaries. Even equipment and vessels, like
> the Calypso, the nostalgic and romantic converted Catalina PBY (which
> sadly crashed, taking his son Phllippe's life. Note how, later on,
> Greenpeace felt compelled to get one of these iconic planes for
> themselves…), the Secoup, became recognizable re-ocurring 'characters'
> in his films, just like iconic spaceships in SciFi media. His key
> breakthrough was teaming up with Metromedia, ABC and NBC, which got
> his films on TV and into millions of homes across the world,
> magnifying the value of brand association drawing ever-more commercial
> sponsorship. It was a pre-cursor to reality TV and totally changed the
> way nature/science documentaries would be produced from then on.
> (though late '60s/early'70s documentaries from the BBC, like Jacob
> Bronowski's The Ascent Of Man, probably had as much influence on
> general science media and its cinematic approach--Bronowski taught
> Sagan his schtick)
>
> So, basically, all the amazing technical feats and journeys of
> Cousteau's organizations were financed chiefly on the entertainment
> value of his own lifestyle as documented in film and put on TV. That
> was the product--a very powerful product because the vicarious
> experience of seeing people doing interesting things in exotic places
> is universally popular and corporations will pay for the eyeballs. The
> basic formula of the traditional professional adventurer still works
> very well; go to the wilderness, bring back cool stories, deliver awe
> and/or laughter, profit.
>
> We generally think of projects in the context of bootstrapping a
> business or getting philanthropic support to build specific Big
> Hardware, which seems perfectly logical on the face of it but leaves
> untenably large gaps to fill in implementation. This stuff is just too
> often impossible to justify to Capital or government. It's all like
> building arcologies. But everyone (crazy as it seems to me
> personally…) seems to crave attention and media exposure, for
> themselves, their companies, their products, their brands. It may be
> necessary to start thinking of projects more in the context of their
> catalytic potential as a function of their entertainment value, their
> 'cool factor', their potential to produce photographic and video media
> as a means to inspire the donation of resources to accomplish them. We
> must think about ROI in terms of numbers of eyeballs. How many times
> have I said that space advocacy is show-biz, yet even I've tended to
> think of this in the context of developing and publishing traditional
> futurist media we can no longer easily produce because the artists and
> designers that needs aren't culturally with us. They no longer get
> what we're trying to do as any relevant venue for their work. But
> while professional art and design have become inaccessible, video
> technology and digital media distribution have become cheap and
> ubiquitous. Cousteau needed to specifically partner with TV networks
> to reach people. Now we have YouTube and such and can reach the world
> with ease--if we have something to _show_ them. Amateurs--even just
> idiots doing random stupid stunts--now win audiences of millions. We
> need to leverage that at-hand power. Some people in space advocacy
> have started cluing into this idea. The recent Mars One program is
> based on the idea that its one-way travel settlement scheme would be
> sponsored largely on its exploitation as the ultimate in reality TV
> and the greatest feat for corporate sponsors to attach their brands
> to--and for the moment this is actually working and gathering momentum
> among corporate sponsors. There are corporations large enough that
> they could actually finance a manned mission to Mars and who might
> just do it for the sake of having that feat associated with their
> brand forever.
>
> Now, I've generally been averse to the notion that space programs need
> astronauts regardless of their cost because without them there is no
> one for the public to identify with. I think Hubble and the Mars
> rovers have well put paid to that idea. (and, truth be told, the
> compulsive top-down image-control applied to astronauts, much like
> presidents, has long made them ironically un-relatable until quite
> recently, when the stranglehold began occasionally being loosened-up
> and engineers, scientists, and astronauts in the space program could
> start expressing themselves through their own media. Still, we have
> more active astronauts than ever in history, yet few can name any of
> them) But there is a grain of truth here in that what people generally
> want is a human interest story and a vicarious experience. It's not
> just about the end-result but the human story in the process of
> getting there. This, I think, is the overlooked key to motivation for
> our rank-and-file membership that they have never been able to
> articulate themselves. What they ultimately really want is to _see_
> people _doing_ things! It's by that which the credibility and vitality
> of a space advocacy group is measured.
>
> When you think about projects in this context it opens up a new range
> of possibilities at more modest scales. Not everything has to result
> in Big Hardware or fit exactly in the specific development plan of TMP
> as long as it catalyzes public interest, captures eyeballs, draws
> support, and by that helps build resources and capabilities. Take, for
> instance, the IOSI program. I had the interest of fledgling TV network
> OWL TV in that because they realized that, in the idea of a global
> community of space robotics developers, and more specifically in the
> idea of expositions where they would demo and sometimes participate in
> trials and competitions, was this potential human interest story about
> people in different parts of the world with a common dream and
> objective but unique problems and approaches for pursuing that given
> their different locations, cultures, and stations in life. And that
> could be the basis of a compelling documentary series. One can imagine
> this hypothetical story about a smart but poor kid in Mumbai who comes
> up with a clever solution to a particular robot design problem and we
> can follow him as he tries to get it to prototype and then makes the
> arduous journey to the next IOSI expo to meet with like-minded people
> for the first time and show his work to the world. That's a story that
> people will watch--and that's money in the bank. The only problem was
> that OWL were too small and poor to sponsor this alone and I've had
> too much difficulty communicating the telebase concept to a space
> advocacy community that still has its head in the 1960s.
>
> Many projects in this context come down to 'feats' of some kind. Take,
> for example, the Swiss PlanetSolar project. (largely ignored by US
> news media) The premise was simple; build the first solar powered ship
> to sail around the world. And their design was hardly minimalist. This
> was a custom-engineered 31 meter ship with a 4 man crew and
> accommodations for up to 12 passengers that cost 15 million euros to
> build. And here are the sponsors they won for this project in just a
> couple years of shopping it around;
>
> http://www.planetsolar.org/partners/our-partners
>
> Another similar project, and another Swiss endeavor, Solar Impulse
> aims to fly an exclusively solar-powered aircraft non-stop around the
> world;
>
> http://solarimpulse.com
>
> Being a much greater technical challenge, this has taken much longer,
> having started in 2003 and currently expected to complete its goal in,
> perhaps, 2015. But look at this sponsor list;
>
> http://www.solarimpulse.com/en/team/partners/
>
> Why are all these companies supporting such a project? For this;
>
> http://www.solarimpulse.com/en/multimedia/videos/
>
> What sort of projects might we devise in this context suited to TMP's
> narrative? Well, the IOSI is one good example. In addition to the
> IOSI's potential to delve into participants' stories and the appeal of
> its public expositions, there are a number of key activities that
> would have great media event potential. The near-term goal of the IOSI
> is to deploy unmanned test bases here on Earth to test and demonstrate
> the prototypes of hardware that would ultimately be deployed in space.
> So the plan is to create several test-bed outpost facilities where we
> deploy, without any on-site human intervention, prototype robots and
> hardware to do exactly the same stuff they're intended to do in space
> but in a more accessible location such as Iceland or the Atacama
> desert. These facilities would be covered by wired and wireless
> network of web cameras--the most basic element in the hardware of the
> facilities being 'trail markers', WiFi cluster network transponders,
> 'lamp posts', charging/power stations, and robotic task-lamps that all
> can feature cameras providing many POVs to aid teleoperation--and
> views for the public on-line. Instead of spacecraft to deploy this
> hardware we would use cargo drop planes and robotic aircraft such as
> prototype Aquarius Airship hulls or rotorcraft that provide an analog
> to the use of soft and rough lander technology. So we could stage and
> televise various landing/deployment missions just like the eventual
> space missions and put the testbed outposts built on-line 24/7 though
> their network of deployed cameras. We can even create on-line
> 'sandbox' areas where people can participate in operating these robots
> themselves. Anything where you have a story of groups of people making
> some new interesting pieces of hardware and deploying it in an unusual
> place that can culminate in some sort of NASA-like televised event in
> a 'mission control' setting has potential for visual drama of a sort,
> and thus potential for media that can win commercial sponsorship. And
> this is something where the showcase potential for robotics, IT, and
> telecom companies in particular is vast.
>
> Another possibility is 'lifestyle experiments' as the basis of reality
> TV. This is what Mars One intends to do with its prototype
> outpost--another demo outpost in a desert setting. Recently I made the
> comment, in the context of the Aquarian Seed settlement, that people
> would not be taking out mortgages to invest in a Mars 500 project (the
> Mars mission simulation recently done by ESA and Russian Space Agency)
> in a bunch of shipping containers when what they are trying to make is
> a home to live in. But, in this other context, that is in fact
> something commercial sponsors would pay for as a temporary televised
> event if it accomplished something interesting and put their brands in
> a positive setting. I'm skeptical about the practical value role
> playing space missions, but there are legitimate things like
> ergonomics and lifestyle that can be explored with mockups and I see
> the possibility for many such scenarios relating to the different
> places/settlements TMP intends to build.
>
> One relatively easy to implement idea that comes to mind is a project
> I call Space-At-Home, which relates to the idea of an open home show
> of the future as part of the IOSI expos. The basic idea is to create a
> mock-up of a permanent home or very small community on Mars or the
> moon--which means its design is based not on pre-fab habitats but on
> the TMP2's proposed architecture for permanent settlement; excavated
> and built-up vault/bunker structures. It's not intended to be a
> psychological study in 'roughing it' but rather an ergonomic study in
> how to do exactly the opposite--to live well in space. It would be
> intended to explore ideas of ISRU and the spectrum of materials,
> foods, and such that would produce early-on and how that applies to a
> particular lifestyle--and not some military-like utilitarian existence
> but rather an attempt at a very comfortable, attractive, way of life.
> That's the novel twist. No one has ever really illustrated or
> demonstrated space as a place to live well in. It's always been--when
> it comes down to it--some variation of an army base or submarine
> rather than a home. This is why I call this Space-At-Home. We want to
> cultivate a positive vision of the future so we want to demonstrate,
> as plausibly as we can, something better than the usual sub-duty in a
> junk yard viewed through a kaleidoscope that NASA tends to
> demonstrate. Something better than most people's lifestyles right here
> on Earth. As I often say, the reason Star Trek trumped NASA for public
> appeal is that Star Trek portrays a future that looks swank. This is a
> new perspective for space advocacy and we can totally own that from a
> media perspective.
>
> To showcase this we record people living that settlement lifestyle for
> a time in a mockup habitat built in an analog to the real and likely
> permanent settlement structure--places like the Kansas City
> Subtropolis, in large opaque or translucent industrial domes (even the
> inflatables would work), old airship hangars, etc. There's a simple
> narrative here; telerobots have built our basic structures and
> installed our basic life-support, communications, and easily
> accessible resource-gathering systems. Now we move in with a basic kit
> of tools, and some modest light furnishings and supplies brought with
> us, and, in X amount of time, we're going to turn these raw spaces and
> available local materials into a comfortable home. We're ultimately
> exploring the question of how good a life can you craft in this
> situation--which poses a lot of interesting design questions, the
> chief one being how to live well when you're indoors all the time. It
> would be like This Old House in a Colonial Williamsburg of the
> future--and that would make for a lot of media people can push their
> company logos and show-off their products on. It would also be a
> powerful venue for educating the public on the new tools of digital
> fabrication, soft technologies, renewable energy, and urban farming
> that are now becoming available. It might not be suited to the
> trumped-up drama and engineered conflict of reality TV where the
> underlying lesson always seems to be negative/anti-social. They always
> go for the cheap and easy schadenfreude. It would probably work better
> as a web-based multi-media project where you're following the 'vlog'
> diaries of different team members linked by key live events. (the
> arrival, periodic teleconferences, mockup exploration missions or
> failures, etc.) Ikea would sponsor something like this. Much
> settlement design is going to parallel their basic product design
> theory and some of their products might be showcased as-is or
> re-designed just to suit this showcase. Makers of laser cutters, CNC
> machines, etc. would sponsor this. It would directly show-off their
> products. And, just as in a real space settlement situation, settlers
> are going to be connected to the Internet, which makes the Fourth Wall
> permeable so viewers can optionally participate in helping the
> pretend-settlers solve problems, walking them through issues of their
> use of tools, offering design suggestions, gardening tips, you name
> it.
>
> How about scenarios based on more dramatic feats? One idea comes to
> mind for bootstrapping the Aquarian Airship that starts out at a
> modest scale--though this may need people with a bit more skills than
> we have at the moment. Right now stratospheric balloon launches are
> something of a fad, particularly as student projects. It's already
> been heavily exploited commercially. There are even some small
> companies that specialize in designing these balloon launches so a
> company can get pictures of their products sitting in 'space'. Can we
> one-up this idea to give it new interest? One way would be to make a
> 'balloon' that can go higher than anyone else's, stay up longer, is
> reusable, and hosts more and better gear. And the basic concept behind
> the Aquarian Airship offers us a way to do that because it's based on
> developing a rigid lenticular composite hull hosting a flex-cell PV
> array. Essentially, we can make a solar 'flying saucer' that actually
> works and can beat these simple balloons by using vacuum lift at high
> altitude to get that little bit closer to the actual edge of space.
> Balloons self-destruct at a certain altitude because they increase in
> internal pressure as they rise until they burst. A rigid hull would
> continuously vent gas to keep climbing until it can actually start
> pumping out residual gas to achieve a partial vacuum and float in the
> edge of the atmosphere in the manner of a submarine in water at an
> altitude determined by its displacement relative to its payload and
> structural mass. So it can get to higher altitudes than anything short
> of rockets and, once up there, stay indefinitely as long as there is
> power to keep the hull evacuated. (some day diamondoid materials will
> let us do this without lighter than air gas transition--which is the
> ultimate goal of Aquarian Airship development--but for now we must go
> with more common composites that are only strong enough to do this at
> stratospheric air pressures) With a large area of on-board solar power
> it can run more sophisticated cameras, panorama cameras, host science
> instruments, and maintain live connections by long range WiFi. We can
> then have it land on command, by parachute. It would be a
> sophisticated vehicle--really, a reusable non-orbital satellite--but
> it's well within the means of garage-shop development (basically,
> we're talking a very thin shelled hollow surf board) with the right
> sponsorship to cover its electronics and materials costs and this is
> enough of an interesting new advance on this kind of feat to get some
> of that sponsorship.
>
> Now, we can keep going with this. Once we've demonstrated this basic
> technology the same hull can be used for more feats. We can make it
> larger, engineer more communications range into the hull using it as
> integral antenna structure, add electric propulsion, add more
> sophisticated science instrumentation and fly the thing by remote
> control around the world as an atmospheric lab--maybe do the first
> non-stop circumpolar flight. We can also fly it point-to-point by GPS
> and have it deliver small payloads to remote locations. Get a small
> medicine and good-will package to some very remote village or the
> like. All these things can lead to progressively better composite
> fabrication skills and facilities making, with commercial sponsors,
> progressively larger experimental hulls with more sophisticated
> propulsion. We would quickly get to a scale for permanent telecom
> aerostats and stratospheric remote-viewing airships, sky-cranes,
> products we can found a business on that which could then bootstrap
> manned vessels. With green intercontinental transportation and
> satellite-like telecom of our own at-hand, everything we want to do in
> TMP becomes easier and faster. As I've said, the Aquarian Airship
> should have been the original TMP's first project.
>
> Then we have the Exocet Alpha project, the proposed program to develop
> early sub-orbital in-water-launched rockets deployed by bi-plane
> wingsail catamaran. This is essentially the same thing as Copenhagen
> Suborbitals is doing, but with the long-term intension of developing a
> commercial launch platform. People in space advocacy don't seem to
> take unmanned suborbital rocketry too seriously despite the popular
> interest in high-power amateur rocketry, but there's real science
> applications to this and you have to start somewhere in building your
> rocketry development capability and this is accessible--especially
> when you consider the freedom of deployment at sea and, most
> importantly, the _story_ that resides in this development and
> deployment narrative. The scenario of sailing in a cool-looking Bright
> Green/Eco-Tech vessel from Hawaii, San Diego, or San Francisco to
> launch rockets from the sea is a very cool one and a feat that would
> make for great media while at the same time leveraging the commercial
> sponsorship for that to establish a critical engineering industrial
> capability. You can imagine the space-themed equivalent of classic
> surfer films. This could bootstrap both rocketry development and the
> composites fabrication technology we need for so many other things in
> TMP.
>
> Another interesting feat that comes to mind would involve sea towers.
> Like the Exocet Alpha project, this is probably on the high-end of
> things and would probably be comparable to the PlanetSolar project in
> costs but is still possibly accessible, especially if we exploit the
> interest the SeaSteaders have attracted but not done much of anything
> practical with. This project would basically be the prototype they
> should have made long ago but have so far proven unwilling to create
> and test--which I find odd because you can apply all the techniques of
> modern yacht design and fabrication to make even a modest sized sea
> tower pretty posh. You can make money with it and make a splash in the
> design community. As I've noted, while I don't see them as a basis of
> permanent settlement because you can't yet replicate them from aboard
> them, they have poor self-sufficiency potential, and they're not
> convenient to move people and stuff too and from, I do see the sea
> tower as a useful tool and lucrative product. Ultimately, TMP may need
> sea towers for very practical uses of science research, marine launch
> support, remote renewable power, stand-alone OTECs, communications,
> down-range telemetry networks, and other uses. We could win
> sponsorship for the basic development of that using promotional feats,
> just as with the Sea Orbiter. The Sea Orbiter--essentially a mobile
> sea tower--is elegant, but overly elaborate and likely to be very
> costly to build. But a more basic sea tower as can do most of what
> that's intended to do at less cost and with much faster development.
> Experimental ones could be engineered and deployed in as little as 6
> months and could be used for unique demonstration feats of
> long-duration open-sea travel that use the unique stability of the
> structure to make such journeys more comfortable, continuously linked
> by telecommunication, and suited to a lot of science activity.
>
> Take the suggestion I made a while ago of a sea tower used as the
> basis of high-value tuna farming combined with the geodesic AquaPod
> fish pen. One of NELHAs current projects is based on towing an AquaPod
> behind a sailing yacht around Hawaii to grow native pelagic fish.
> Imagine staging a feat of slow-sailing a whole self-contained fish
> farm raising tuna to maturity as it travels from California or Hawaii
> to Japan and doing all sorts of oceanographic science along the way.
> Some tuna species are now so valuable that one farmed 'crop' of them
> from could pay for a fairly large luxury sea tower structure. That's
> an epic story akin to a futurist version of the classic American
> cattle-drive with a new kind of cowboy--and now we have the means to
> cover that story by live telecom. Once we've done it, we've got a
> thriving business making these things as people wake-up to all the
> things they might use them for--which, again, is exactly the same
> spectrum of fabrication capability we need to make green ships,
> composite hull airships, and spacecraft. If a Swiss watch company can
> come up with the 15 million euro to build a solar ship, surely
> American and Japanese companies could pony up the dough for something
> at least as cool to hang their logos on.
>
> There are endless possibilities for bootstrapping projects with media,
> and hence commercial sponsorship. We just need to start thinking about
> the stories that are inside the projects we might do and the
> entertainment value of those stories as the primary product, not just
> the physical/hardware end result. Again, the ROI is measured in
> eyeballs. That idea could transform space advocacy and bring it out of
> a 1960s/70s mentality and into the contemporary culture. We need a new
> Team Cousteau to sail out to the wilderness of the future and bring
> back the cool stories from there to share.
>
> Eric Hunting
> erichunting@gmail.com
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> ______________________________________________________________________
>
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> --
> - Bryan
> http://heybryan.org/
> 1 512 203 0507
>
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