The discussion with Tim Gasco, switching from the comments threads to the front page, makes me wonder why there's no mechanism for the comments to be visible on the blog itself, following each article. There are other options available for blog environments but I've yet to see this idea implemented anywhere. Anyway, Tim's latest comments continue to stimulate a good discussion on issues of the Middle-East and alternative energy sources.
Excellent commentary. I can only wonder how relations between America and the Muslim world would have been different had we not elected GW Bush (oh yeah, we didn't the first time, the Supreme Court did).
Bush is a more ripe candidate for being manipulated to do the bidding of the money wielders pulling the govenment's strings, that's true. But the Democrat leaders eventually fall in step with them also. Both parties and the entire political system are ultimately helpless in resisting being bought because they have no independent source of capital that doesn't come from the merchant masters of the world. A leadership that intends to change the tides of economic oppression must become economically independent first.
In Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, we aided Muslims in their fight to throw off the yoke of totaliatianism. In Indonesia, we sent medical aid after the Tsunami. So maybe these Americans are not devils. More Doctors, less Soldiers is what I say. Food and medicine, not guns and bombs.
This truly is the big hope for the world, knowing that through all the strife, there's been enough of a sense of goodness in America and the Western world to forge these humanistic efforts. This is exactly the spirit we need to strengthen.
The magnetic field energy device would make you rich if you could figure that out.
Scientists, like anyone else, can sometimes become so overly confident and proud that they stop listening to anybody else. They've shut down many discoverers who questioned accepted theorems and this is causing a stagnation today when we need bold and innovative discovery. Freedom of the mind from the peer pressure in the scientific community will do wonders for a new age. Let's consider the following idea as an example.
For those who may remember the 1978 DC Comics Calendar of Super Spectacular Disasters, it sported a Neal Adams cover of The Justice League of America, led by Superman wearing a harness type device with long mechanical cables which connected to the moon in the background, as the heroes tried to guide an operation of bringing the moon back into its proper orbit after it had apparently veered astray and was on a collision course with the Earth. The calendar sported 11 other such super spectacular disasters but that cover image and the feel of the moon's orbit around the Earth was a powerful and thought provoking image for me.
One reason for this was that I was penciling various comics for DC at the time, working out of Neal Adams' Continuity Studious, and I saw this calendar cover as a work in progress from the first layout sketches to the finished inking and production stages. Another reason was that Neal asked me then to design the title for the calendar as I was known for a particular ability with logo and title designs, perhaps due to the earlier experience I'd had as a sign-painter and graphic designer before coming into comics. So, while designing the title over his artwork, I found myself becoming very attached to this fabulous image and it remains one of the stronger comics visuals in my memory to this very day.
This image resurfaced into memory several years ago as I began reading about Neal's science project on his website. Without getting too much into Neal's ideas, it's perhaps important to pay attention to why he's coming to the conclusions he is. How he explains the impossibility of the subduction and Pangea theories and why it doesn't make sense that the continents drifted around on the planet as the Pangea theory postulates. What's more important in Neal's work is how much imagination he's showing in coming to the conclusions he has about our planet having grown in size throughout its formative stages. This thinking process is something that's perhaps missing in the scientific community today. A community of analytical academics with what appears to be little imagination bound by a peer pressure mentality. Comic book creators, on the other hand, exhibit an abundance of imagination in all areas of our knowledge and understanding and can perhaps help science advance in certain areas that it may be stagnating in. Areas important to our collective evolution as a species.
The area paramount to me today is breaking the hold of gravity which binds us to the Earth. Getting closer to solving this problem will clearly help us in so many ways and change the face of civilization as we know it. For example, The energy we waste today for transportation is so absurd and cumbersome that it's depleting a great deal of the Earth's resources, personal and collective. When considering the traffic jams world wide in all of the major cities and the time and resources wasted traveling such short distances, it's clear that the concepts we've come to love in the science fiction world and the comics portraying a future with flying personal vehicles, can put to rest this waste of time and resources we suffer from so greatly.
So here's an idea for scientists to ponder. It's based on a combination of the police radar and the windmill concepts. It calls for the development of a police radar-like device which not only measures the speed of an object coming towards it but also the weight and impact of this object as it's moving, and converts it into an energy source. In the same way a windmill converts the weight and impact of the wind into a similar energy source.
The idea is to place such a device in front of the moon in its orbit around the Earth. The device would be able to measure the weight and thrust of the moon, its enormous mass, speed and impact - and convert this unfathomably powerful energy into an energy source which would then be distributed to a series of other devices in orbit around the Earth. This would create an energy field of enormous magnitude such as we've never imagined before, around the Earth. This field, greater than the power of gravity on most objects that we'd like to make fly, can then be accessed from the Earth with a small device which would free whatever object it's attached to from the hold of gravity. When attached to a vehicle, the vehicle can fly... to a person, well they could then fly also.
So instead of looking to generate a new energy source, why not use one that's so close and readily available? I believe that the scientific community could come up with the mechanism needed to make this idea work. The problem is that they're not looking in the right direction. That's why they can't see it. They've stopped exercising their imagination.
That's why the scientists need comic book writers and artists to break the stagnation of scientific discovery today.
In the news, France is going to be the home of the world's first experimental Fusion reactor. If they can make that work, the world will have clean nuclear power, and our energy worries will be over. They have been talking about this since the '70's, but this reactor will not be finished until 2014 and will cost 13 billion. If they can make it work though, think of the possibilities.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed, Tim - but I'm voting for the Anti-Gravity field.
