Important Projects - Posted by EQF on April 22, 2011

This is some information on the humanitarian types of projects that I have been working on. Earthquake forecasting is just one of them.

These are personal opinions.

First, there are so many of these projects and they are so important to people around the world that I don’t have time to visit the EarthWaves board every day, read every note posted here, or occasionally even to respond to notes addressed to me. So, if I am not aware of some posting or don’t respond to it then it is usually because I didn’t see it or didn’t have time to respond to it.

It has long been my opinion that world governments and major nongovernmental groups (NGOs) such as the United Nations have a very poor sense of direction and relatively little motivation when it comes to understanding the importance of science in our world and with trying to create a world where everyone has the ability to live a reasonably productive and happy life. Obviously, people who commit serious crimes voluntarily abandon many of their basic rights such as the ability to move around freely and to vote.

However, I have always thought that at least some of our governments and NGOs have at least some limited sense of direction regarding those matters.

The 2010 Gulf of Mexico runaway oil well disaster and especially the recent 2011 nuclear power plant fiasco in Japan have now convinced me that governments and NGOs have even less sense of direction than I previously believed regarding those matters.

One of my primary goals with the humanitarian types of projects that I work on all the time has been to try to get governments and NGOs to recognize the fact that some percentage of our earthquakes can be predicted to a certain degree, and to try to get them moving with developing earthquake forecasting technologies and forecast response procedures such as plans for how to evacuate entire cities if necessary.

Because of this recent major downgrade in my personal opinion regarding the competency of our government and NGO officials I am now planning to direct my focus a bit away from earthquake forecasting related matters and towards the more general problems with the governments and NGOs. And the following are some of the project that are scheduled to get more attention.

For certain reasons I don’t want to discuss these projects in any more detail than I have here. One of those reasons is the fact that Special Interest Groups might and probably would try to block some of the projects.

GOVERNMENTS, NGOS, AND THEIR INTERACTIONS WITH SCIENTISTS

One of the major problems that governments and NGOs have with their interactions with scientists is the fact that the government and NGO officials are not really aware that scientists themselves form Special Interest Groups. And the advice that they give to the governments and NGOs is often strongly shaped by the personal or group interests of the scientists themselves rather than represent the truly accurate data that the government and NGO officials need to have. The government and NGO officials often simply and mistakenly assume that most or all scientists provide them with accurate information all of the time.

So, with this particular effort I am planning to try to alert high level government and NGO officials to the fact that their own scientists or international groups of scientists are often deliberately or inadvertently providing them with inaccurate information. And this effort will also provide the government and NGO officials with information regarding how they can recognize when this inaccurate scientific data problem is occurring and how to get around it so that they actually know what the true scientific information is that they need to have.

ELECTED GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS WHO DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT SCIENCE AND WHO LARGELY DON’T CARE THAT THEY DON’T KNOW ANYTHING

The electoral system that democratic republics such as the U.S. have to run their governments have done an extraordinary job over the centuries to help our world move forward. They provide the general public with at least some say in what their government officials are doing.

However, as the following discussion will explain, those same electoral systems have at least one major and extremely dangerous flaw built into them.

When people try to get elected to public office or try to get reelected to some public office the only real qualification that they need to have is the ability to convince voters to vote for them. And there are occasionally a few special qualifications such as the need for U.S. presidential candidates to have been born in the U.S. and be 35 years of age before they are sworn into office. But other than that there are almost no prerequisites. For example, people running for office don’t need to know anything about science.

As a consequence, here in the U.S. we have new Presidents being elected every 4 or 8 years, new Senators being elected every 6 years or some multiple of that, and new House of Representative officials being elected every 2 years or some multiple of that. And none of those people really need know if the world is round or flat, if the Earth rotates around the sun or if everything in the cosmos rotates around the Earth, or if the theory of evolution is accepted by most scientists around the world of if humans just abruptly appeared a few thousand years ago as the result of some supernatural act.

And, immediately after they are sworn into office those elected officials start voting on and approving or rejecting complex and critically important measures involving science, economic policies, and government direction without having any idea regarding what is involved and having absolutely no background or experience regarding those subjects.

History has clearly and repeatedly shown that this is a recipe for certain disaster!!!

I personally feel that it could be a catastrophic mistake to make significant changes in the way that people in the U.S. and some other countries elect their government officials. But there is something that could be added to those electoral systems without changing the original systems that would strongly encourage people who are running for office as well as people who are running for reelection to constantly learn and keep current on various important topics in science such as drilling for oil in deep water, and safe construction techniques for nuclear power plants.

Energy Matters

It has for many years been my opinion that among the purely material problems that face the human race, our global lack of environmentally safe, affordable energy is Problem # 1.

What government and NGO officials need to do is make a determination of what the total energy needs are for an individual in a modern society including personal needs and needs related to his or her profession, multiply that amount of energy by 6 billion, roughly the number of people on the planet at this time, and then attempt to create energy production systems that could generate that amount of energy for us.

Nuclear Fusion energy could probably accomplish that if scientists could develop some type of system that safely produced more energy than was necessary to get and keep the system running. Unfortunately, that accomplishment might be decades away if it can be done at all.

There are a variety of other technologies such as using biofuels and capturing wind, wave, ocean thermal layer, and geothermal energy that can help. And they should be strongly developed. However, no one of them or even all of them put together are likely to be able to provide us with anything approaching the amounts of energy that we actually need.

My present thinking is that what we probably need to develop are some rather unusual and completely safe forms of nuclear fission energy and solar energy. And as with these other projects I have some very specific safe technology types of applications in mind.

Developing Important Nuclear Power Plant Safety Technology

Without going into detail, again largely to avoid Special Interest Group blocking measures, there is one specific type of technology that can and should be developed to improve safety at nuclear power plants. And once developed that technology would have numerous applications elsewhere.

People should actually have begun developing this technology around the time that the first steam engines were developed many decades ago. And for the two reasons discussed above and others, our government and NGO officials still don’t recognize the fact that it is critically important to develop this technology. It would have greatly reduced the problems that those Japan nuclear plant workers are having with their power plants.

This technology could probably be created very quickly and put into immediate production for something like 10 million to 100 million U.S. dollars. And if you consider how many billions of dollars it costs to build a single nuclear power plant and the fact that the Japan power plant workers have reportedly decided that they are going to have to permanently shut down one or more of their plants because of all of the radiation and physical damage, 10 to 100 million dollars is a pretty good deal if it would make it possible to save just one nuclear power plant or to avoid those basic radiation and physical damage problems in the first place.

Forecasting Earthquakes

As I have stated repeatedly, because of the various types of collateral damage associated with powerful earthquakes, they are 10 to 100 times more dangerous than the general public and our government and NGO officials are aware. For example, that catastrophic March 11, 2011 earthquake in Japan resulted in devastating collateral damage including the release of radioactive materials into the atmosphere and ocean.

Government and NGO officials need to become aware that at least some earthquakes can be accurately predicted and that they need to get to work on developing earthquake forecasting technologies and response plans for how to evacuate cities etc. if necessary.

Finally,

The above are just a few of the several dozen important humanitarian projects on which I am presently working. They cover a wide range of subjects including medical technologies, energy development, the election of better educated and more responsible public officials, and disaster response technologies.

Quite a few past efforts along those lines have already been extremely successful. I simply don’t discuss them in public, again, largely because of the various types of problems that Special Interest Groups could and very likely would create.