This website is dedicated to ways for enabling the continued wholesome growth of civilization while also enabling the restoration of the earth's balanced diverse ecosystem.

Life proceeds by a negative-entropy process, powered by the energy in sunlight. Life thrives by accelerating the rate of entropy of its surroundings, converting the naturally purer down to entropically made mush, particularly by the animals and people; the plants recycle the mush material back again to purified re-useable material, by accelerating the depletion entropically of the energy in sunlight, from high frequencies down to low frequencies of radiation. On the earth, the amount of sunlight averages to a constant, about one-seventh of the sunlight actually intercepted by the planet, due to weather, day-night cycles, slant-path through the obscuring atmosphere. the source of the sunlight, our Sun, constantly pours out huge amounts of this energy, nearly all of it headed out into the darkness of interstellar space, essentially wasted in terms of needs of life here on Earth; the potential supply of energy from the Sun is enormous, spent minute by minute by the Sun whether we access it or not.

The enormously complex sub-cycles of conversions of that original solar-energy input to Earth's ecosystem can be interpreted as energy conversions from one storage system to another, such as sunlight to plant material, to little fish to big fish to human. Some of this energy storage has been inaccessible for millions of years, accumulated in the form of petrochemicals. Civilization requires vastly more energy consumption rate than is supplied by the natural fall and conversion of sunlight onto the Earth, requiring release of that additional energy stored as petrochemical, currently consuming the amount of energy every year that took nature to accumulate in a million years. This is clearly a process that has a limited time it can happen, the large but limited amount of petrochemicals that powers our slave-machines (automobiles, washing machines, refrigerators, computers, cook stoves, for examples) stored supply is rapidly being spent, and nature cannot replace it at this time, without the lush forests covering the land to capture the energy in the sunlight, and the millions of years in which to do it. Throughout history mankind has encountered the sense that the local population has exponentially increased and in Malthusian expansion will soon exceed the resource supply if the accumulation of waste material does not clog the system terminally first; this currently expresses in various forms of limiting the rate of population expansion, ignoring the fact that the rate of petrochemical depletion seen at current population levels, with no further expansion, soon reaches terminal levels, just a few years late if population control means are active. mankind has little urge to return to the population levels and lifestyles of the jungle people and Amerinds Plains Indians, hunter-gatherers. The aggregate intelligence of large numbers of humans is what discovers the ways for civilization, the more people, the more impressive the data processing potential. Life. Unlike the "lower animals", human population first filled those caves and population level shelterable by those caves increased beyond the quantities which can fit in the caves and be fed by the reachable environment, humans went forth to access fresh supplies of food for hunter-gathering, and did this by building their own "artificial caves" of many types from the available physical resources. Look around you, see what wondrous "cave" has been built to shelter you now, its many accessories meeting many of your needs, formed as a sheltering and nurturing complex for human life, can you imagine what your living space was like before civilization, back when it was part of "nature"? And can you imagine the enormously complex flow of energy utilized in that civilization process and sustenance processes ongoing? A small portion of that energy came recently from the sun, such as the warming sunlight coming in the window, and gave the energy that grew the trees from which the wood was made, and supplies a small portion of electrical power for our use, such as by the hydroelectric powerplants and wind farm generators. Some small amount of energy came from energy stored in further antiquity as radioactive material in nuclear power plants. Most of the energy comes from the burning of petrochemicals, however, a process rapidly causing a large but supply-limited to a few more decades, and burning it consumes the oxygen from the air we breathe and dumps enormous amounts of carbon dioxide "greenhouse gasses" into the air when the once breathable oxygen had been, and its accumulation causing global warming and the alteration in climate inhospitable to life as we know it in many ways. Up until now, mankind has always successfully met the challenge, formed by expanding his numbers beyond the capacity of the local food, shelter, and energy supply , although surely also at times having created long-term balance with the natural resource base, such as done by he rainforest jungle people, small numbers can live almost indefinitely as top of the jungle food chain. However, most people are not content for such extremely limited lifestyle, and for those people this website's information is dedicated.

There are more of us now that the "jungles" of the planet can support, and this is by no accident of extreme reproductive rate. It is rapidly reaching the time of limits again, time to use our remaining stored resources to reach out and build where vast supplies of resources are, particularly energy resources. The Sun is pouring incredible quantities of high-grade energy out constantly, wasted into the darkness of interstellar space, it is there available for us to interrupt and use to power life's complex processes, entropically degrading the sunlight to low frequency radiation in he process, that low frequency radiation can then proceed on out to the darkness of interstellar space instead of the high quality light originally spewed out endlessly by the Sun each moment. Civilization proceeds by reaching out for new resources, and finding new part of those new resources to recycle civilizations waste products too. gathering more of the solar energy that could have been mindlessly bypassing our planetary ecosystem, and directly converting it to the high level electrical power that energizes our civilization, by Solar Satellite Power Stations high in GEO, beaming their power down to earth's electrical power grids, was first proposed in the 1960's, over 40 years ago, yet still none are built and in use. How to get them up there, maintain them there? How to economically and safely lift the enormous amounts of construction materials from ground to high earth orbit, then build them there in the Van Allen radiation Belt at GEO, maintain those immense powerplants stations, and eventually tear down those worn out obsoleted stations? Back in the 1960's and 1970's , it was concluded we could not build them from Earth's resources too much energy and resources would be consumed to lift the SSPS station materials. And no spacesuited construction workers want to spend much time assembling stuff in the radiation environment of the GEO as it currently exists, so it ws proposed that we go to the Moon to get the materials needed to build the SSPS, even to built immense colonies in space from which the SSPS would be could be built, proposed by Gerard O'Neil and urged by the L-5 Society. But the effort to go back to the Moon, build the mines and launch mass drivers there was all complex, required unprecedented cooperation among peoples, and was easier to forget doing it, and instead just "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow...", too bad for the future, it will have to take care of itself, it always has somehow. Even distract s ourselves by bashing at each other for possession of dwindling reserves of energy, water, land, and raw materials of other types. Yet, sometimes, it is necessary to "take a break" when we are exhausted or reach an apparently immovable obstacle. Let's say that is what we really are doing now, instead of those other interpretations. We've rested, pondered the situation, time now to get up and get going again, time's processes won't wait very long. For awhile we can build wind farms of windmills for new sources of electric power, we can recycle aluminum cans, those kinds of things activities are helpful yet quite limited in terms of the enormous needs of civilization worldwide. It is time for civilization to extend itself solidly into the resources of nearby space, in steps, first going for that otherwise-wasted solar energy passing by just beyond the edges of our planet. Build and use CPS in GEO, to supply the enormous amounts of high quality electrical energy needed to power worldwide civilization, and conserve petrochemical resources for better uses of making organic compounds such s plastics. Crude oil can even be processes by bacterial into food supplies for cattle, bu t not if we have burned the oil to drive our cars and electric powerplants, too late then.

So, while we have been "taking a break" since the 1970's, two ways for transporting the building materials from the ground to GEo for building SSPS have come of age, potential ways to bypass the limits to growth formed by the enormous amounts of chemical energy consumed by conventional rocketry transportation to GEO, in world rapidly being depleted of such cheap energy supplies of our petrochemical reserves. One transportation technique is the earth anchored tether space elevator concept, which has been largely prevented by lack of adequate strength-to-weight tether materials; the other bypasses that limitation of tether material strength by utilizing kinetic energy stored within a kind of space elevator the stored energy used to support the weight of the structure as well as to distribute .lift energy throughout the structure for lifting people and goods to and from space from the ground. Since the task is great, that of existing civilization solidly into nearby space potentially at earth synchronous orbit as an overall structural consideration, both the anchored earth tether and the stored-energy structure approaches will be would be well to be undertaken as soon as possible. Since the anchored tether technique has been getting a lot of attention and supporting development in the past 2 years by a group led by Bradley Edwards, as presented at Space 2002 conference, this website will focus more on the of "space elevator" that utilizes store kinetic energy to support the elevator structure and to move payload between ground and high earth orbit, as also presented in a paper at the same Space 2002 conference, and also at the conference Space 200 two years before that in more limited form. Is it the end of "break time" now, shall we get up and go back to work?

By James E. D. Cline, Glendale, CA, 20020708.