My esteemed father's reluctance to run for political office spurred me to design a system of government where good people are empowered. My first four publications on this topic have been at aerospace conferences, using mathematical and algorithmic...More
My esteemed father's reluctance to run for political office spurred me to design a system of government where good people are empowered. My first four publications on this topic have been at aerospace conferences, using mathematical and algorithmic tools to study the governance of far-future space habitats. I am ready now to open up my audience, address social factors more thoroughly, and invite dialogue and critique to refine these ideas further. My policy white papers and legislative testimony illuminate for me the challenges of making responsible, long-term decisions. Yet, our global civilization requires that we wise up, and soon. This realization leads me to develop a range of technologies, systems integration, and governance studies which create a nearly-comprehensive vision for how humanity can operate sustainably, for all people, for all time to come. Without smart government, none of my technical solutions are likely to be realized early enough to steer us from a diminished future. Energy is where I started. Sunlight is the ideal power source, and the place to capture it is in space, where the day/night cycle of the earth does not apply. Power is beamed wirelessly and safely through the atmosphere to collecting antennas from which it is distributed to cities and industrial parks in every nation on earth. For rural or remote regions, distributed energy generation comes from non-food biomass and from carbon-based waste products, converted into chemicals, fuels, electric power, and heat. For portable and mobile applications hydrogen is produced either by splitting water (in cities) or by separation from syngas (countryside) and stored in low-pressure porous silicon to power fuel cell vehicles. In this way our entire society can be powered by sunshine and water, sustainable forever. Promoting smart choices requires: (1) including non-costed economic externalities into decision-making; (2) multi-factor optimization, including aesthetics, in which every generation can contribute to the selection of metrics; and (3) a system of governance which encourages a balance of short-term response and long-range thinking. I believe my father would have been an exemplary contributor to such a system, and I believe there are enough good people in this world that a system of governance can be designed which fairly represents us all but is resistant to undue influence and corruption. It is towards these ends that I have been developing Stochastic Democracy. I look forward to your thoughts and inputs.
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