May2024 Update #1: note about recent formal work by cosmologists.
May2024 Update #2: note about a beautifully profound article by Ben Zweibelson, PhD.

This led to new Ideas to describe the topology of the universe.

Mobius Universe

I’ve been reviewing patenting matters; and being fascinated by all things New Space, got to speculating. Does patent enforceability define the edge of the known world? Of human civilization? How will the Court enforce patent rights off-Earth? Here’s the link to the full diagram [pdf link].

I’ve named the line of enforceability “Firenzian Enforceability Orbits” (FEO) = the halfway mark of a physical no-layover trip by counsel (or bailiff!). The FEO name is in honour of the City of Firenze, Tuscany, Italy; city descendant of the Florentine Republic: the first State to award the first recorded patent, granted to Filippo Brunelleschi, architect and engineer (1421).

Using current law, Duration will be 17years. But what about Locus of Origination (LOO)? Will LOO be 17years from an Earth court, or Launch pad, or Space Station? Will enforcement commence from the Court of the “local” planet, or will system-wide law prevail?

And what about Faster-than-Light (FTL) Enforceability? Imagine the legal conundrums of FTL paradoxicality! 

Thomas Aquinas wondered: “Can several angels be in the same place?” If angels are quantum beings, it seems that they could be. What about FTL Process Servers? (ha!).

** Some parties might call it FOMO.

Bio-mimicry idea: Can we connect Space Elevator strands from Earth to Orbit, by mimicking the use of spiders of electric fields to execute Cable-Pulling? The idea comes from the discovery that spiders ‘fly’ using an electric field: “A study was conducted at the University of Bristol in 2018. The study said that electric field generated due to weather activity was capable of drag a single electrostatically-charged strand of web (and the spider) off the ground” https://www.wionews.com/science/spiders-fly-using-electric-field-you-are-allowed-to-be-scared-and-ask-why-461024

By their garbage, shall ye know them

Searching for the garbage signatures of alien civilizations

The Civage Scale (“Civilization Garbage”) is a proposed scale for detecting and measuring a civilization’s level of technological advancement based on the amount of garbage it dumps to foul the local neighbourhood. ‘Neighbourhood’ ranges from planetary to Kardashev Type V neighbourhoods. The current practice of searching for alien civilizations is called SETI: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. This thought experiment proposes SETG: the Search for Extraterrestrial Garbage.

[pdf here]

PPP – Pathogen Pandemic Prevention: It is all in the data. A method to finance natural areas conservation as a public health project. To reduce pandemic Zoonosis Risk (pathogens jumping from species to species). See attached 1-page poster.

Now that we all know what PPE is, it is time for PPP – Pathogen Pandemic Prevention. Could this help? Have a look! Then network the method. See if it can help your business community, farmers, consumers, volunteer groups, health authorities, and local government.

1-page poster (pdf link) + 1-page poster (png image link)

Summary:

In April 2021, I was in conversation with a public health analytics team. We were investigating public health as an adjacent future market for OrbMB’s analytics tools. OrbMB is not a fit to help, but we passed along the EAP accounting method published by waterbucket.ca (called EAP: as contractor, my work was to develop the root systems’ logic to unpack the financing validation problem): https://www.linkedin.com/posts/davehuer_esg2-the-kilmer-creek-eap-report-to-government-activity-6697755256257961984-3E9- The public health team suggests using EAP to reduce Zoonosis Risk.

The EAP method is a way to put a price on the value of public natural areas. To invest in protecting those lands to protect the superior services provided by nature. It is unusually hard for government agencies to allocate cash to do this in a political environment, which has conflicting pressures from taxpayers. Because it is hard to assign a budgetable cost/benefit since public lands are not taxed, so often there is no valuation history. We figured out the EAP method of practical, scalable cost-accounting.

Applications’ examples:

* Financing protection of the urban-rural-wildland fringe (encroaching into wild habitat where pathogen reservoirs reside);
* Protecting the benefits that nature provides (ex, bats are a major pollinator for flowers, fruit, and some vegetables; and consume vast quantities of insects that otherwise would consume human crops);
* Creating market demand for new food products to cut consumption of high-risk wild animals (bats, monkeys, pangolins, etc.).

Notes:

• This is an independent conceptual application of the EAP process.
• Public interest project. Educational public policy comment. Fair dealing image use.
• Zoonosis transmission source image: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/covid-19-emerging-viral-diseases-journey-animals-humans/

• – end –

New possibilities for space commerce
Many small steps.

Inspired by Robert Zubrin and Stephen Petranek.

Project Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nff2CiAydTo
Territory ideas: Animations start at 8:12
1-Page Summary: https://davehuer.com/plan-b-summary/

Before starting OrbMB, I’d separately started exploring ideas to grow our capacity to become a fully-functioning, off-Earth society: ways to tackle the wicked problem of building “secure, resilient, rapidly-evolving distributed systems at scale.”*

We live in a new age, with enabling technologies and possibilities. This project proposes ways to use property rights and commercial law to de-risk the uncertainties, to bootstrap the trading webs we need to grow ourselves to sister worlds. The goal being to spark new thinking about what we want, as we transition to systems of sustainable commerce. Here and out there: #spacecommerce

Many thanks to all contributors. Special thanks to cg artists Evgenia Tikpapanidou & Guy Brochard and voice artist Marek Montoya for animatedly bringing the project to life.

Inspirations:

(2014) The Mars Underground: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcTZvNLL0-w
(2016) Stephan Petranek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9c7aheZxls
*(2018) N.Forsgren, J.Humble, G.Kim: Accelerate, p.4: (Amazon book link)

The Atlantic has published a piece about surviving uncertainty: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/08/how-embrace-uncertainty-pandemic-times/615634/

This is powerful stuff. I’ve done intensely challenging whitewater kayaking, learning through the discipline and art that there is a place beyond the edge; and learned that some of us have deep need to go beyond that edge to know where it is. This is where we all of us are with this thing. I, for one, have hope. Our species has a bright future because we are learning to manage deep uncertainty together. And we will learn to thrive.

From How to Solve the Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever, by Nautilus‘ assistant editor Brian Gallagher, comes a study of Raymond Smullyan’s logic puzzle of the same name, deriving from use of a logician’s law; the “law of the excluded middle”, which is that “every statement is either true or false—there is no middle ground.” And “In the hardest logic puzzle ever, one must determine the true identities of gods named True, False, and Random.“

The law is a law of statements, not a law of answers.

Could we entertain banqueting with the god named Both? Could the conversation take us out, flying into the real world, flying to divers places, accompanied by Mercury to get us everywhere?

Image: “Mercury Bronze 1570 van der Schardt 5” by mharrsch (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0): https://ccsearch.creativecommons.org/photos/2d615852-04af-4e54-8850-956ddf5ba076

A “mysterious” gravitational mass has been discovered buried below a 4-billion-year-old crater on the Moon: https://www.theloop.ca/ctvnews/mysterious-gravitational-mass-found-buried-on-far-side-of-moon/

As reported in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists say the mass may be remnant metal from an asteroid that created the South Pole-Aitken basin. I’ve written to the study’s lead authors, asking…

“Is it Dahak?” 🙂

Significant implications arise when we redefine the fundamental nature of data for use across society:

The metrology and framing of the data to be gathered [1] will become vitally important. Making it important that we use “measurement uncertainties” to design ‘data harvesting’ plans and user instructions.[2]

This suggests that there is a need to:

(i) Develop an entirely new educational & scholarly UD discipline;
(ii) Develop UD Big Data computing certification programs;
(iii) Develop UD as a basic skill set in pre-college schooling.[3]

Uncertainties Design or UD will touch the entirety of Data Pre-Harvest Planning.

It will be used to design Uncertainty Measures for a wide range of subjects including: Accounting, Finance, Tax Law, Investing, Trading, Governance, Long-Term Climate Strategies, Ecosystems Stewardship, Weather, Energy, Food, Water, Sustainable Cities, and Economics Forecasting.

Notes

[1] In February 2019, researchers reported the results of a study which concludes that “students would probably exercise better judgement, say the researchers, if they knew more about measurement uncertainties and had a framework for determining when a difference is significant—things that are often left out of the curriculum.” cf. http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2019/02/more-data-can-lead-to-worse-decisions.html?m=1 and https://journals.aps.org/prper/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.15.010103;

[2] 06 February 2019 at 17:21 pm by email: Proposing “Uncertainties Design” to the researchers of Note [1] at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Hofstra University: and to George Verghese (PhD, Curtin University).

[3] ‘ “Given what’s at stake, the researchers recommend that teachers make time to include these concepts in science classrooms and beyond.” ‘ “Since data, and judging the quality of this data, is becoming so prominent in our everyday lives, teachers in all subjects should try to incorporate this into their classes,” they write.” cf. Ibid., http://physicsbuzz.

Image: No-charge download from Pixabay