GeSp1023

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Number: 1023 Name: TREEHOUSE FIVE

Address: J.E.D.CLINE1 Date: 891006

Approximate # of bytes: 31500

Number of Accesses: 11 Library: 7

Description:

Article applying envisionary techniques

as a next step in the creation of

massive space colonization in our time, applying

the concepts of kinetic energy

supported transportation structures

directly connecting earthsurface

with geosynchronous earth orbit,

where a ring of space habitats is

built, civilization moving there, and

earthsurface being restored to ecological health.

Keywords: envisioning,meditation,KESTS,transportation,habitat,GEO

---------------------------------

TREEHOUSE FIVE

by J. E. D. Cline October 6, 1989

Changing mankind's relationship with the planet may be

necessary for long-term survival of both. Here is a

recently-conceived undeveloped technology that may be a key

to making possible a huge expansion of civilization while

also enabling the restoration of planetary ecology to nearly

a pre-mankind primal state. The scenario presented here is

seemingly outrageous, yet its tremendous potential for

helping mankind's relationship with the earth's ecology

shows that it needs to be considered. In meditation herein

help develop this new technology in your imagination,

projecting its ramifications. Then form your own initial

decision as to its desireability, in the Light of its

possibilities.

As a youth, it was fun building a treehouse. Climbing

the tree, helping each other haul the boards up into the

tree, together figuring out how to place the pieces among

the treelimbs to build the treehouse. Once it was built,

climbing the tree, looking down from the treehouse to the

ground far below, experiencing a feeling of being in a safe

haven that reached instinctual roots in the mind.

A fun adventure, being part of a spontaneous team

creating a place which had a deep sense of safe haven, a

feeling of accomplishing something worthwhile. Now as an

adult, an analogous opportunity has arisen, and there is

opportunity for anyone to share by participating in the

constructive meditation in the last part of this article.

Remember, each person envisioning something adds energy to

make it more likely to manifest, simply by meditating upon

it.

So in a moment we will explore paths that lead to

envisioning a safe haven for people, atop tree-like "KESTS"

rooted in the Earth and extending so high that they reach

where our telephone and TV relay satellites exist already.

And the "leaves" of the trees are solar power satellites,

which supply the energy to run it all, independent of any

earth resources. Atop the KESTS is a vast string of space

habitats ringing the whole earth, with room enough for all

of mankind three times over, taking the load of mankind's

greatness off of Mother Earth. With civilization moved into

space yet still attached directly to the earth surface,

Planet Earth can be restored to a global balanced ecology

again, like a planetwide national park.

Let me show you this exciting picture of an extention

of Mother Earth. It is a picture of the earth surface

connecting, along KESTS (Kinetic Energy Supported

Transportation Structures), like spokes of a wheel out to

GEO (Geosynchronous Earth Orbit) where a gigantic space

habit encircles the Earth. This extention of the

earthsurface would allow the shift of the major worldwide

civilizations off the planetary surface so as to enable the

earthsurface ecology to be restored to a thriving health,

just as civilization would be enabled to do, with a huge

increase of livingspace and easier access to the enormous

resources of our solar system.

Picture it something like a bicycle wheel, where the

tire and rim is the GEO space habitat, the spoke wires are

the KESTS transportation structures, and the hub is the

Earth itself. Building and living in it would be something

like that youthful adventure of building a treehouse. A

marvelous adventure.

More than adventure, it appears to be a way to fulfil

our responsibility to both our planetary ecology and to our

civilization. Mankind's present worldwide population

currently each week is piling up two million more tons of

garbage, causing the extinction forever of one more of our

fellow lifeforms on this planet, and depleting 40 more

square miles of cropland, for example. It is as if Mother

Earth is very pregnant with mankind ...the womb is not

normally meant as a permanent habitat. Just as an unborn

child in the womb, mankind has just about outgrown the

environ's ability to contain, nurture, and absorb the

resulting wastes. The immense resourses of sheer room,

endless solar energy, and vast resources of raw materials on

the moons and asteroids seem patiently await mankind to

bring life to them as they circle in our vast solar system.

The treehouse urge to build a high haven has often

played its notes on the song of mankind. The "Tower of

Babel" is an example. Thousands of years ago the ancient

Babylonians attempted "to build a tower so high that it

would enable man to enter the heavens." The remains of this

zigurat exists at a site known as E-Tamen-an-ki. It was

written that the "gods" did not want man loose in the

"heavens", and so confounded the builders that they could

not understand each other's speach, and thus could not

continue the project together. Yet even then, seeking a

better life for all, there was the urge to use the unique

constructive talents of mankind to build a means to reach a

place of great resources that was safe from the predators

that roamed the land.

In the 1960's a Russian by the name of Artsutanov

conceived of building a tower so tall that it would extend

out past GEO, so high that the centrifugal force of the

rotating earth swinging the tower around would hold it up.

Many others since then have reinvented this concept for

eficiently moving between earth surface and space, each to

dismally then discover that the necessary strength of

construction materials far exceeds anything known to man.

The trunk of the tree isn't strong enough to grow that tall.

So it looked as if rocket propulsion was the only way

to get from earth to space. But chemical rockets, as are

used today, are far too inefficient for the kind of exodus

necessary to take the burden off of the earth environment,

because most of their fuel energy is used just to lift the

weight of the fuel itself. At a current cost of $3,000

dollars a pound, a 160 pound person's fare would be $480,000

to GEO, using conventional technology like the space

shuttle. Yet the lure of vast resources of the solar system

still called to those experiencing the cramping and

messiness of earthsurface.

In a summer workshop in 1975 NASA designed a space

settlement of 10,000 people, to be located at the distance

of the moon. This space habitat was designed in great

detail. For example, it would have a community area of

980,000 square meters, and agricultural area of 650,000

square meters. (A meter is about the length of a yardstick).

The shell uses 156,000 tons of aluminum, and 48,000 tons of

glass, all of which was to come from the moon. Inside,

there is 1 million square meters of dry soil, with 22,000

tons of water for it; biomass of people is 600 tons, animals

900 tons, and plants 5,000 tons, in a nearly closed

ecology. Due to the increased sunlight for crops, the

increased productivity factor of cucumber is 8.5, of

eggplant 12.6, of lettuce 2.3, and tomato 2.3.

Spaciousness is achieved by terracing the housing structures

up the curved walls inside the rotating habitat, and

landscaped lawns, trees and flowers abound. And so on in

great detail. In the scenario being proposed here to you,

for convenience this design is utilized, using 1-and-a-half

million of them strung together like beads in a necklace

circling Earth synchronously with the earthsurface 22,300

miles below.

Although conventional rocket propelled space

transportation now requires thousands of dollars per pound,

the actual energy needed to lift an average sized human

being from the earth's surface to escape the earth's gravity

is only about a thousand kilowatt hours, as once pointed

out by the author of "2001: A Space Odessy", Arthur C.

Clarke. Thus an electrical elevator would use less than $100

(instead of the previously-mentioned $480,000) of

electricity to lift each person to space.

Yet the structure of such an elevator would require

strengths of materials far greater than now even thinkable.

So new structural principles began to come to the mind of

creative mankind.

In the mid '80's Rod Hyde and Keith Lofstrom conceived

extraordinary forms of transportation structures into space,

which were supported by the kinetic energy of high-velocity

mass travelling within it in a loop, instead of being

supported by the mere strength of structural materials.

Hyde's fountain-like dynamic structure went straight up

and down, using a stream of magnetic discs magnetically

flung up an evacuated tube, and used some of the energy of

those speeding magnets to support the weight of the tube. At

the top of the structure, the discs would be magnetically

bounced off of a weight, and return back down the tube to

the ground to be again flung up the tube, continuously

supporting it. The tube is necessary because air would slow

down and burn up those very fast discs, if it was attempted

without the tube. But this method alone will not be able to

reach GEO, because at GEO there is no weight-force to be

used to bounce the stream of disks back toward the ground.

Lofstrom's concept used a continuous flexible iron belt

to be flung up, spanning a continent just above the

atmosphere perhaps 90 miles up, before returning to

earthsurface, then reversing its direction forming a

continuous loop. Picture a pair of pulleys connected by a

flexible belt, one pulley located, say, somewhere on the

east coast, and the other pulley located somewhere on the

western coast of Europe, and a very very long belt running

between them, being flung upward from the pulleys so as to

be above the atmosphere for most of the span.

Yet any object getting off of either of these dynamic

structures would just fall back to earth, not being fast

enough to orbit on its own. So the structures would have to

be merely carriers for conventional rocket propelled

vehicles; the overall transportation process would be more

efficient, but perhaps not worth the effort and considerable

risk these immense structures would represent.

So Earle Smith thought of extending Lofstrom's iron belt

to circle the earth, touching earthsurface at one point and

circling all the way up to GEO, above the opposite side of

the earth, then continuing the circling on around again to

the earthsurface. At GEO, an object leaving the elevator

would stay put, instead of falling back to earthsurface.

However, this belt lacked a way to support its

protecting tube's weight on the downward direction. And the

iron belt would be stretched too severly in parts of its

trajectory, risking breakage. And the process of building

it in collapsed form all the way around the earth on the

surface, prior to speeding it up to raise it, seemed quite

an incredibly difficult undertaking. Yet the thought of a

transportation structure, supported by the energy within it

all the way up to GEO, was a key idea.

What is so special about "GEO"? Geosynchronous Earth

Orbit, or GEO for short, happens to be the distance from the

earthsurface where the speed necessary to stay in orbit is

exactly the same speed that the earthsurface would go at, if

it were that high. In other words, the orbit there takes

24 hours to go once around the earth, the same amount of

time it takes the earth to spin on its axis. So an object

in GEO appears to not be moving, as seen by one on the

ground. Note that an orbiting object further that GEO would

appear to rotate slower than the earth, for example, the

Moon. Likewise, an orbit closer to the earth appears to

move faster than the earth, such as the space shuttle taking

only an hour and a half to go once around the earth.

At GEO, 22,300 miles up, it takes exactly one day to go

around once...just like the earth takes one day to spin on

its axis. Circling the Earth above the equator, and

rotating in the same direction as the Earth rotates, it

appears motionless to a person on the ground. Find a

satellite dish in your neighborhood: its center is pointing

at a point on GEO, where the TV relay satellite sits,

appearantly motionlessly, as far as the satellite dish is

concerned. Just what one would want for an exit door of an

elevator!

So here is where the edge of technlogic thinking has

stopped. The linear-thinking mode of conventional science

and technology has to embrace holistic whole-picture

synthesis processes, to advance further.

And that is something that the envisioning mode of

meditation can do quite well.

Right-brained holistic picturing of the relationships of

whole designs needs to be a frequent step in the creative

cognitive process, alternating with the left-brained linear

rational analysis with which conventional science and

technology is familiar. Scientists, engineers, and

technicians typically are extremely weak in the synthesis

mode of thinking. The holistic design synthesis mode of

thinking is necessary to anticipate the potentials in the

overall scene, and readers of this publication are much more

likely to be able to do this than the average engineer. And

meditation is a common link for both left-brained and

right-brained thinking, enabling communication between

otherwise otherwise rather incompatible experiential

viewpoints.

For this treehouse, first we must grow the tree.... Let's

look at how we can apply existing science and technology to

do this. Grow the concept in your mind. In this creative

mental process, start with a thought, then stretch it and

add to it, add qualities, look and see what it has become

occasionally in its entirety as it evolves in your mind.

Meditation can be passively receptive, and it can be

creatively constructive. As in dreamily watching and in

actively envisioning. Analogous to reading and writing; to

listening and talking; to appreciating a painting and with

paint and brush creating a painting. I invite you to

dreamily watch the flow of ideas as you read this article,

and then to actively envision an alternative path which

could lead to restoring the planetary ecology while

providing a vastly expanding civilization at the same time.

In meditation first consult your inner Source of Higher

Wisdom as to your participation in this.

The concept of a KESTS appears simple. But remember,

the physical manifestation of applied basic concepts tend to

appear quite complicated, due to the interplay of the many

auxilliary basic concepts; yet physical manifestations can

work. Witness this the next time you use your car to go

somewhere: while enroute note the enormous complexity of the

actual structure of your car, yet it all works together to

get you down the road OK with hardly a thought. Every

detail of that complexity had to be envisioned, designed,

modeled, tested and manufactured to fit with all the rest of

the complexity. The manifestation of this concept can be

similar. So, let your imagination now easily follow along,

doing some mental experiments.

Starting to grow the concept of a KESTS in your

imagination...fling something solid upward, watch it coast

far up, then slowing and dropping back down. Now imagine

yourself so powerful that you throw the object to far above

the earth's atmosphere. Now let an electric motor do the

throwing, rest your own muscles. However, the air is in the

way, impeding the object's travel, in fact at that very high

speed the object would rapidly heat and even burn up. So

next time you fling the object upward, let it fly through a

tube that keeps the air out of the path of the object. Let

the object drag slightly on the tube as it rises, supporting

the weight of the tube.

And then...you know how two magnets act when they are

close together...depending on whether the same or opposite

poles are facing each other they push or pull on each other

without touching physically...well, let the object you throw

have magnets on it, and let the electric motor and tube

touch it only by magnetic fields. And fling a steady stream

of these objects upward, inside the tube, reaching high

into the sky.

So here we have a picture of an electric motor on the

ground flinging a steady stream of magnetic objects upward

very fast, through a tube, all the way to above the earth's

atmosphere. From the outside you see only a tube reaching

up from the ground, far into the sky. Now observe that,

just as the weight of the tube is supported by the energy of

the stream of speedy magnetized objects, so can it support

the weight of objects on the outside of the tube, like

railroad cars or elevator cars, if the tube is big enough.

Some of that fast magnetic energy stream can be used to lift

these cars far above the earths atmosphere, along the

outside of the tube.

This is the basic concept of a KESTS. But like the

concept of a car's engine piston is basic to your car's

motion...and there are a lot more parts in the engine and

the car than just a piston... there is more to the KESTS

concept. For example, the stream of magnetized objects

needs to flow around and around in a circuit, so they are

not used up, and so they are storing their energy. The

streams current flow either up and down next to each other,

with turn-around loops at both ends, or the stream can flow

from the earth's surface at one point, then circle the earth

reaching a high point above the opposite side of the earth,

then continuing on around the earth, back to its starting

point and continuing on in an endless loop. And the changing

weights of the payloads will require frequent automatic

adjustment of the bending angles of the magnetic stream, so

as to keep it in position.

So, now, on the tube that surrounds the flowing stream

of fast magnets, attach tracks, like cablecars or the new

high speed traintracks that use magnets to keep the train

from quite touching the tracks, so it can go very fast. Let

this train be big enough, and the supporting stream of

magnets big enough, that a lot of people and construction

materials can ride it from the ground up to the site of the

telephone and TV relay satellites.

Let those people build the first of a string of very

large hollow innertube-like structures. Each innertube is

over a mile across. Inside they are about 500 feet wide,

are filled with air, and lazily rotate just enough so that

inside the tube it feels much like earth's gravity. The tube

is built of metal, and windows allow reflected sunlight

inside. Up here where there is no day/night nor clouds,

seven times the sunlight reaches every square foot, as

compared to the average sunlight reaching a square foot on

the ground.

Divide the inside of each tube into six equal sections.

Alternate sections are each occupied by an intensive farm a

half mile long and 500 feet wide, slightly curved as in a

mountain valley. There, corn, wheat, rice, vegetables and

citrus trees grow splendidly in the endless sunlight. Ponds

hold a fish farm, and the water from the fish farm waters

the crops. Chickens, rabbits, a few cattle also thrive there

on the grain crops.

In between those agricultural areas there are the homes

and light-industry areas. These three suburb sections are

also resembling half-mile long valleys, with homes and

landscaping built up and down the valley sides, complete

with lawn, trees, birds, playgrounds. Pumps supply a flow

of water flow as in small streams in the park areas, where

perhaps Koi goldfish brightly swim.

With this string of innertubes already started high

above the earth surface, standard space technology can go

from there to our moon, to get the raw materials for

building the rest of the string of innertubes. A similar

tube transportation system is built up from the Moon's

surface, and soon a flow of raw materials moves from the

Moon to GEO for the construction of the remainder of this

string of innertube-like space habitats, eventually built

all the way around the Earth. Since each innertube

comfortably houses and supports 10,000 people, and there is

room for one and a half million of the innertubes in GEO,

then there is room for up to 15 billion people to live very

well there, triple the whole earth's current population.

These space habitats will be designed to be nearly

closed ecological units, so everything is designed with 100%

recycling in mind. Some of the resulting recycling methods

may be useful for the few people who choose to remain

permanently on the earth surface as caretakers.

Let each nation have several of those tubes with

streams of fast magnets that we first envisioned, carrying

trainloads of people and materials up to GEO. So each

nation has access to the string of innertubes, where the

population can resettle at: first the excess populations,

then others as soon as the quality of life there becomes

better than that on the ground. Each nation then has the

opportunity to begin the restoration of its earthland back

into ecological balance, perhaps eventually allowing the

entire Earth to become as one gigantic international park

area, where a great abundance of kinds of living creatures

can again thrive. And lastly to this envisioned picture you

are painting, let it happen soon enough before vastly more

kinds of species have vanished forever, and before the world

is completely covered with our garbage dumping. Cancel out

the current picture of ongoing reality of worldwide dumping

one billion tons of garbage somewhere each year, killing off

one more species of life at a rate of about one species a

week, slashing-burning-exhausting rainforests, converting

good land into arid wasteland at a rate of 40 square miles

per day, and replacing none of the billions of dollars of

fossil petrochemicals we burn up in our cars and power

stations each year. Time has this price and probably more.

Declare mankind gaining sufficient responsibility and

altruism to allow this new scenario of KESTS and GEO

Treehouses to be an option. See the enormous new real

estate it creates being available to all for an affordable

price, evemtually attracting the majority of mankind to its

high standard of living. See the Treehouse dwellers then

respnsibly and lovingly restore the planetary ecology back

to a thriving balance. Eventually going down to

earthsurface on a KESTS may be like going on a vacation

camping trip, taking time out for admiring nature.

And perhaps most of all, let this whole picture of

advancing civilization while also restoring the planetary

ecological health be achieved and populated by people who

have learned to live in peaceful constructive wisdom,

meditating.

Thank you for your help in making possible this

alternate path for restoring our planet while providing an

ever-improving civilization! Meditative active envisioning

IS the first step in creating anything, you know. In your

first reading of this while dreamily watching the flow of

the growth of ideas toward goals, what does your inner Wiser

Self tell you intuitively about your response to this? Is

mankind ready to live peaceably, responsibly, and creatively

constructively enough to achieve this scenario? Are the

goals of the "Tower of Babel", a tower so tall as to enable

people to enter the heavens, now permitted mankind? Look to

the Heavens Within.

Know that meditation, envisioning with emotional

feeling, can tip the scales of Causative Formation in either

direction (from here-and-now). Current aerospace

technologists are far too busy with the details of the

nuts-and-bolts of what-has-been, to seriously consider a

project that has a seemingly overwhelming number (to the

linear-thinking mind) of new kinds of things involved in

making a "risky" gigantic unprecedented structure; and their

childish side gets cought up in the destructive fairy tale

of "Jack and the Beanstalk" archetypal terrorist energy

whenever the subject is brought up. They tend to be totally

unable to comprehend what could be done with an

earth-to-space transportation system able to deliver payload

measured in hundreds of millions of tons per year, instead

of the current ability of only a few hundred tons per year.

Engineering analysts are, in general, unable to excape the

linear thinking mode, and thus unable to see the overall

design of Earth, the environment, KESTS treetrunks,

Satellite Solar Power Station treeleaves, and the GEO

Habitat Ring treehouse, and the unmatched opportunity for

enabling the enormous expansion of a thriving human

civilization while at the same time enabling the restoration

of earth's precious ecosystem to a primal state of

health...with the major burden of mankind's greatness no

longer upon Mother Earth. Whereas the meditating

scenario-synthesising mind can paint an inner picture of all

this in harmonious complex imagery, with the greatest of

ease.

Now that you have the picture, here is a short form of

the visualization:

Start now with picturing a small mass passing you by,

going so fast that it would continue on out into space. The

mass is travelling within a tube which has had all the air

pumped out of it. Now mentally stretch that hurtling mass

into a steady stream of mass, all speeding up that tube

toward outer space. Imagine magnets along the stream of

mass, and more magnets occasionally along the tube which

keeps out the air from the path of the mass stream. The

magnets in the mass stream magnetically pull upward on the

tube just enough to support the tube's weight here on earth,

and keep the mass from touching the tube itself.

There are powerful electromagnets, pulsing magnetic

fields such as to push the magnets which are part of the

moving mass stream faster. Electric generators power those

pushing electromagnets. Look again at the tube, from the

outside, now. See its potential as a climbable treetrunk!

Reaching from the ground upward, and extending all the way

to GEO. Up and down this treetrunk can move an electric

train. Some of the kinetic energy of the moving mass stream

inside of the tube, magnetically can be coupled through the

tube to power the electric train. Let the mass stream flow

within a circuit, returning to its starting point for

reaccelleration, continuing on again within the tube

endlessly. Call this combination of orbital velocity mass

stream, evacuated tube, and electric train a "KESTS", short

for a Kinetic Energy Supported Transportation Structure.

Let the electric train travel from the ground up along

the tube all the way to GEO, Geosynchronous Earth Orbit,

which is motionless relative to the earth surface. Using

the train, haul up building materials to start building a

hollow donut a mile across and 500 feet wide inside. The

donut spins slowly, just enough so as to create earth normal

gravity along the inside of its outer surface. Within the

immensity of this hollow donut, build landscaping, houses,

farm areas, light industry, built of materials hauled up

from the ground, 22,300 miles below. Now from this high

haven build large spacecraft, go set up a materials

processing industry on the moon's surface, build another

KESTS up from the moon to make it easier to transfer the

construction materials back to GEO for building more of the

hollow donut space habitats. Build a string of the space

habitats all the way around the earth filling GEO, and build

more KESTS occasionally down to each of the nations on the

earth surface. Invite civilization to move to this high

haven, and restore Mother Earth's beautiful ecology back to

thriving health.

And from the high treehouse-like haven in GEO, look

outward, toward the immensity of space, building materials,

and energy within our solar system, awaiting the precious

spark of life to be brought there from Earth.

........................................................

Bio: J. E. D. Cline (AKA "Dave", "Jim",and "Jed") is active

in the risky combining of metaphysics/meditation with

science/technology, toward the objective of improving the

quality of life for all. A member of the staff of Meditation

Magazine, and newly an ordained metaphysical minister

through the University of Metaphysics in Los Angeles. He

earns a living mostly in electronics development work, and

has contributed 22 articles on space transportation and

colonization in the GEnie Spaceport Library, available

worldwide to people with home computers connected with a

modem.

J. E. D. Cline. Permission is granted for material to be

distributed without restriction, provided credit is given to

GEnie, SPACEPORT, and J.E.D.Cline.

An Excalator Hi page titled GeSp1023 by J E D Cline started on Wednesday, April 2, 2008 5:17:02 PM US/Pacific

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