Hello and Welcome!
I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. I imagine that by now many of you already realize that in conjunction with White Crow Books we've just launched the new Thinking Allowed Dialogues book imprint, and our first title is "Is There Life After Death?"
Thinking Allowed: Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove
Hello and welcome! I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is space exploration. With me is Robert Bigelow, the founder of the Bigelow Aerospace Corporation. Robert has also founded the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Welcome, Robert.
Thank you, Jeff. It's a pleasure being here again.
It's a pleasure to be with you. In our previous interview, we talked a lot about your childhood experiences and the founding of the National Institute for Discovery Science. Now, we're going to probe more deeply into what it means for humanity to begin exploring outer space.
I guess there are two kinds of humanity: those that never do and those that do, right? And we are falling into the first category of those that never do because it's been over a half a century since we have put people on the moon and not just in orbit.
And so I, like a lot of people, feel that we have missed opportunities. To me, it wasn't just a competition, which is how it started out between Russia and the United States. JFK took the gutsy approach, and he was the right president at the right point in time to take up that challenge and say, "We're going to do it, and we're going to beat you." We're going to do it. So we have missed that kind of leadership virtually ever since, in terms of keep on exploring.
We should not, we should have had other, which there are, other good reasons to go back to the moon, not just to win a contest, not just to win a game, a very expensive game, but it's not where it should have ended.
Livable Habitats in Outer Space
Your focus has largely been habitats in outer space, which is an area that's been largely neglected. It's mostly about getting there and coming back, and very little emphasis has been placed on livable habitats where people can get a lot done. What's the story on commercial habitats?
Okay, NASA wants very badly to get out of the space station and get into something bigger and better and all of that. But more importantly, to have the costs of that shouldered by the commercial sector. NASA is pretty famous for making a lot of bad deals, and the space station has been extremely costly.
The cost of the shuttle was a catastrophe, a billion and a half dollars every time it launched instead of 400 million, which is what they kept broadcasting all the time for years and years, 400 million dollars. It was 1.5 billion every time it went up.
So the commercial sector can spend money much more wisely and frugally than NASA ever thought of doing, and that's applicable to throughout all government agencies. We know that, no argument there.
So the contest, though, to find commercial values to expand orbiting stations around Earth, that is the same kind of problem that there is in harvesting whatever from the moon. The moon is extremely valuable from a standpoint of what your life has been in psychology.
So let's forget helium3 and anything else for a moment and just talk about the psychology of things. And we only have one moon, and we see it in the daytime, we see it at nighttime. Opportunities like this of actually taking control and charge of the moon only happen maybe once a millennia. They're very, very rare, and people worry about the 1967 space treaty as to that being a prohibition against harvesting the moon.
Well, they ought to be more worried about whether or not we can compete against China, and especially if they combine themselves with Russia. But China is perfectly capable if they set their mind to it of going after the moon and beating the United States if they want to.
Everybody knows the financial difficulty that the United States now finds itself in. It's in a huge financial mess. We owe almost 32 trillion dollars compared to 17 trillion three years ago. We were once the largest creditor nation. Now we're the largest debtor. We have less capability than we had before of being able to do large great things.
And part of any large vision of "go west, young man" has to do with financial capabilities. And the United States has spun itself into significant weakness in being able to do that. And obviously that's applicable to conducting effective, efficient wars in another kind of
The Significance of Belief Systems in Controlling People
Belief systems, whether political or religious, play a crucial role in shaping the behavior of individuals. Leaders often seek to control these belief systems in order to influence and unify their population. The 1967 Space Treaty, signed by around 170 countries, grants each signatory the responsibility to engage in lunar activities for the common good. This includes the extraction and sale of resources. However, the treaty does not specify the size or number of bases that can be established on the moon. This ambiguity opens up possibilities for countries to exploit and stake their claim on lunar territory.
The moon is a vast space, a quarter the size of the Earth, allowing for multiple ventures and bases to be established.
Article 16 of the treaty provides an interesting loophole for countries to withdraw from the treaty after establishing their bases. This allows them to confiscate resources and freely survey the moon without any obligations.
Establishing cadastrals and monuments on the moon helps countries define and patent their territory.
Shackleton's crater is considered prime real estate on the moon due to its advantageous location.
The backside of the moon poses challenges due to its lack of protection from craters.
Lunar depots, orbiting stations around the moon, can serve various purposes such as warehouses, hospitals, or rest stops for astronauts.
Article 16 also allows countries to proliferate and stake their claim on the moon by establishing multiple bases of any size.
Land patents, similar to Spanish land grants, can be used to defend territorial claims on the moon in courts.
