Action, Time, Energy, History and Spaceflight

How much people value the indigenous ways of life on our familiar planet!.  

Flight to the Moon, collecting rocks from that thing in the sky  - actual, absolute rocks - ended thousands of  years of documented history of that ancient instinctive goal struggle.  Egypt's construction of the Great Pyramids was among the very first events of the long great undertaking to reach something in the sky.

Egypt's emergence was preceded by half a billion years of dancing with the Moon.  Early marine life was drawn back and forth in the tides, and its instinct to reach for the Moon began when they anticipated tides and found the Moon came with it.  Phasing in their molecular spectra began to be in phase with both Moon and Tides. We now know both the Sun and Moon cause the tides.  Without tides (as if Earth had no water) the Moon could very well exist anyway.  Without the Moon, there would be no tides even in abundant seas. The tides would be only the solar component, much smaller those caused by the nearby Moon.

Economic change taking place now is occurring as we resolve the relative importance of economic factors given the new knowledge of the Earth attained through technology and especially through flight in space.

In contrast with ignorant and frequently contentious assumptions in ancient, less informed life, we have greater peace now because people find it increasingly sensible that we never actually needed war to go to the Moon.  The vast wars on Earth--which raged for thousands of years and killed hundreds of millions of people worldwide--those wars were savage relics of billions of years of carnivorous zero sum competition.  In savage competition of gladiatorial combat in the Roman Coliseum it was found that the moment of truth, so abundant during the insensate tragedies of battle, revealed truth also about the physical nature of the world around them..   

Other economic factors are changing too, though it won't be necessary to detail them here.  They include an increasingly worldwide distribution of production that was concentrated in only a few countries before spaceflight began to demonstrate success,  Textiles, banking and steel were massively intensive in a small number of countries though as spaceflight emerged they spread throughout the world . Modern housing construction has spread worldwide also, along with newspapers, railroads, electricity, radio media, computers and organized production and manufacture of food supplies.  International bodies such as the UN, ITO, GATT and others have spread high standards for production and utility worldwide.

The action involves the elimination of many old or even ancient factors that are not necessary and never were, and their replacement by the increase of other, newer and better designed factors. Some may have been ancient though they had been abandoned for a time, and are being restored or reinvented.  Totally new  factors are being invented of course.

Finally, the event of attaining space flight has the quality of action, and action was surprisingly found to exist in a smallest amount, called the quantum. This is very similar to the way matter was found to be constituted of aggregates of smallest known quantities of matter, called atoms, and the way in which charge was found to appear, in nature, as protons and electrons. Gathering this information took thousands of years and spans the same time domain as the attainment of space flight.  Now every kind of event, from the cunning placement of robot nuclear powered rovers on Mars, to picking strawberries or waving a magnetic card past a reader, is understood as an assemblage or construction of atoms and quanta of action through industrial design and manufacture, even though life itself is full of action.

Those attainment, of worldwide communications, of the Moon and Mars and other events, signal the end of a great evolutionary scale dynasty.  We are now in the opening phases of change that will span several generations at the outset, and hundreds of years to come to forms that are likely to exist for thousands and possibly millions of years in the future.

In other words, we know that millions of years of future exist for Earth.  It is already billions of years old and life similar to what we ourselves are has existed hundreds of millions of years. We hope that what is to emerge will be more stable than in the most recent thousand, and believe that is possible.  Some things have been invented that are sure to be winners forever, such as communications, transportation, agriculture, and heating and cooling systems in modern houses.

Economic changes that are taking place in these decades and during several generations of future time have a quality unlike no other time in the past.  They are being made with vastly more information about the Nature of the World and the objects in the sky, and they are very likely to be excellent decisions which will increasingly have simply permanent good consequences.  Economic changes now have a quality of finality now, which is likely to be utterly different from the economic changes of the recent past, which we called cycles, and boom-and-bust, prosperity and depression and so on.  Before, the world was much more sensitive to the planets, which moved in cycles lasting from a month to thirty years.  From now on, few people are ever going to change their ways of life greatly because of, say, the motions of the planets. As peace increases, Earth is making deeper, more comfortable, more correct decisions that will increasingly stand the test of time in the future because they are better decisions in the long run. 

Fortunately, some of these decisions already exist, and those that have several decades or more of practical utility are already showing signs of stability.  Consider bricks, glass, iron, transportation, water collection, storage and distribution; agriculture and granaries and food distribution, and electrical energy and fuel production.  These have spread like lightning throughout the world and similar industries exist in almost every country.  The stability these will have during the coming centuries is why the future now is accepted with almost no controversy.  The future portends stability and improvement now far more often than the danger of disaster so characteristic of the past.  Economically significant change toward both improvement and stability is likely to be enduring in ways in which durability has not existed for a long time-it is more likely now to be permanent than in the past. 

The real existence of action quanta is as fundamental as the existence of atoms.  We cannot avoid the existence of action quanta in life.  The action quanta in individual molecules is the same kind of quantum as exists in the motions of a chariot, car, ship, airplane, computer or other machine.  The quantum of action in starlight or ocean waves or Marian springtime is the same as the quantum of action on Earth in our complex machinery although the action in nature was a part of natural processed, and that in our artifice was designed into the machines deliberately by planning and thought.  Action quanta are not merely something depicted in a movie; they are a fundamental natural part of the activity of things of all kinds.


There is one area which was formerly thought of as likely to be terribly disappointing if it did not work out,  It is the matter of space flight to the stars.  Robotic flights to the other planets of Earth's solar system are likely to be numerous during the coming decades.  Already their cost is daunting, but they will continue at least until sufficient evidence exists that life on or in them either exists or does not exist. Interest in human exploration of these other planets does exist, though it is diminishing as people everywhere become increasingly dedicated to what is manifestly the most beautiful world anywhere in the accessible universe-Earth. Sensible visions of travel to the stars are fading rapidly.  Some calculations indicate a likelihood that travel to other star systems is impossible even in principle for living organisms.  The problem is energy - for both fuel and for sustaining meaningful, reasonable life of any stable kind. 

Other calculations find different outcomes possible, yet none are seriously optimistic any more about flitting from star to star like the fantasied depicted on Star Trek.  Fantasies about invaders from alien worlds are similarly evaporating rapidly.  Life may exist on planets at other star systems, yet that life too, faces the same costs if it thinks of space flight.  In that scenario life may exist at other star system on planets orbiting the star, and advanced civilizations may attain space flight to their planets, though not to other stars.  Travel within a solar system is measured in years.  Travel between stars is measured in thousands of years at a minimum, millions of years in most instances.  Flight to the planets of Earth's Solar System already involves years.  It is likely to be hundreds of years before humans have even orbited all the planets of the solar system. Flight to the stars may never happen at all. 

Even communication with other star systems is not likely to yield results soon.  No signals of artificial kind have ever been received, and what the public is given to understand, unless they inquire, is how sensitive and determined efforts have already been to detect such signals if they exist.  The antenna and receivers are enormously sensitive and meticulously scan the entire spectrum in fine detail continuously.  Nothing.  Not so much as an advertisement has ever been received from any other star system.  Almost all human ideas regarding life at other star systems is based on elaboration or extrapolation from human events. 

How much people value the indigenous way of life of the familiar homeland of our planet!.  People love the Earth and are content to care very little about whether there are other people beyond the horizons of the seas.  They understand it is possible, but so what?  When they get here, they will get here by and by.  Earth is likely to unfold into that kind of attitude toward life from the stars within a century and when it does, it won't look back, or worry about the stars much.  After all, the stars will eventually be regarded as "fixed" quite reasonably even though the knowledge that exceedingly careful observations can reveal their proper motion all the same.