Garden Party

Not a productive day writing for this blog.  Yet, I've got an audience here and I guess I am expected to produce something.  Earlier today, I went over to Facebook and noticed an old friend had written something that reminded me of a popular song in the early seventies.

It was written by Ricky Nelson, of Ozzie and Harriet fame.  The song was called "Garden Party".  The song is about what is popular and what isn't, and how, as an artist, do you respond to that?  Nelson's response was that you can't please everyone, so you've just got to please yourself.  Popularity can be an ephemeral thing.  Perhaps it's like what was once said that everyone is famous for about 15 minutes.  I don't remember who said that, it just seems to go with the thought.

Well, let's take inventory of what I want to do here.  I want to advance some ideas somehow, which will lead to solutions to certain problems that we are facing.  At the core of this is the energy problem.  This is so much a key to everything.  If you solve that, everything else seems to fall into place.  For instance, if you had fusion power, you can do single stage to orbit.  If you had single stage to orbit, space travel gets economical.  If space travel gets economical, everything opens up.  Not to mention that fusion power will also solve a lot of problems on the ground.  For example, if you had cheap abundant energy, you could desalinate water and make the deserts bloom.  If it sounds pie in the sky, it's only because fusion power doesn't yet exist.

 Another thing is fuel cells.  If you had space colonization, you can get platinum group metals.  Those could help with cost of fuel cells which in turn helps solve the liquid fuel problem.  This in turn solves a lot of economic and political problems.  If, If, If.  But it all starts with energy.  With it, you can do anything.  Without it, you can't do much.

So, I went on my Space Colonization page on Facebook and made a short note.  I said if I had 100k people liking my page, you could tell your local congresscritter about it, and it just might get his attention.  If you had his attention, maybe he would support funding fusion research at NASA.  This was discontinued years ago.  Why?  Because the tokomak research was said to be the most promising.   Why?  Because the tokomak people manage to get the most money.  Kind of a circular argument.  Fund them because they get the money.  Not fund them because tokomaks are better per se, just better at getting money.  Why are they better at getting money?  Because they are better at getting money.  Not solving problems, just getting money.

Here I am, six months into this, and I can't buy a readership.  Yet, if I am right about this stuff, it is worth more than can be imagined.  Can you explain people?  I can't.  It wouldn't take much just to get some funding for this program, but its like pulling teeth just to get some people to do anything about it.  I'd like to get funding for NASA to take up the proposition that Focus Fusion can be used as a means of propulsion.

It is said that Ricky Nelson wrote "Garden Party" in response to getting booed at by the crowd at Madison Square Garden.  They didn't seem to like what he was singing.  Well, popularity isn't everything, even though it may seem that way sometimes.  In case of politics, popularity is everything.  Without it, you can do nothing. You need people in order to move the politicians.  I may as well be Ricky Nelson getting booed off the stage as far as these ideas are concerned.  It doesn't make them bad ideas, though.