Global Infrastructure, Global Systems, Global Energy, Global Power, Global Human Needs, Gravitational Engineering
Hi. Yes, I have been studying gravitation and electrodynamics, and related tools and methods, for almost 60 years. I explored pathways that give reliable answers, and ones that do not. Much of the core of what is known get’s dumped into different fields of study and is often in inconvenient units and not easy to use, if at all. I am writing it as computer models and visualizations to go online for users. The Internet scatters knowledge and produces false duplicates of many things.
Part of doing it, is to discipline myself to write down clearly things I have worked out. If you try to learn “gravitation” now, it mostly only does theory. But there are many people trying to use fields at higher and higher power levels. Just levitation (move something in a prescribed and planned and precise path) is scattered over electricity, magnetism, engineering, and hundreds of small fields. Laser tweezers for atoms, to earth-to-orbit starships. From attoWatt (1E-18) to ExaWatt (1E18)
[ Check my numbers. I am very tired. The form of the analysis is right but I am too tired to check and do not have the energy this minute to check. An AI or human group could check and do it right for that world, but that takes more time and energy, while I wanted to answer you now. It is “the whole world working together for the good of all” I wish for, so I would not have to work alone. ]
The total world energy use is about 650 ExaJoule. If you ask the search engines or AIs, you get many partial answers and none of the answers is integrated into a global open system so that such systemic questions can be answered clearly and completely for the whole world.
If you divide 650E18 Joules by (C = 2.99792458E8 meters/second)^2 you get 7,232.2254 Kilograms or 7.232 Metric tons of matter converted into energy perfectly, each year.
If you take 7232.2254 Kilograms and divide by 365.25 days, it gives 19.8 Kilograms per day. That is how much energy the human species uses. The amount of solar energy reaching the whole earth is about 3,850,000 ExaJoules per year. (3.85E24 Joules/year) or 42,838,000 Kilograms.
We talk about nuclear power, but conversion of mass into energy as particle anti-particle pairs – perfect conversion – still humans are using 7.232 Metric Tons of matter and antimatter each year now. If you look at nuclear power needed for what I call “solar system exploration and development” it needs thousands of times that amount.
The human species cannot even run its own planet without continual wars and loss of life. The Internet, which ought to be a global and reliable resource for all humans in all human languages, and all domain specific languages, gives crap answers when compared to what is needed. Mostly because the AI groups fight each other for 10s of $Billions when the world is wasting 100s of $Trillions. And a heliospheric economy would be 1000s of times larger.
Look at changes from 1900 to 2025 and think what will happen from 2000 to 2125. Fusion can be routine and make conversion of mass into energy something every person could use. “Mass to energy” is supposed to be this hugely powerful process, but it still requires shoveling material into that furnace, that is now a mostly manual process.
Humans are not teaching their AIs well, nor are they teaching and caring for humans well. I checked today and about 2 Billion of the 8.2 Billion humans are affected by wars. Even the United States, every person is affected because of their suffering, which is the result of the actions of a few.
I am being a bit blunt today. “Gravitational engineering” is what I work on when I have a tiny bit of hope. It is just what I gathered and sorted from all fields, all knowledge on the Internet, and books. Any decent AI group could gather that in a week now. But they would need 5000 human year equivalents to sort it and make it useful – because the people makes those “AIs” have no clue at all about science technology engineering mathematics computing finance government organization topics issues and events. (STEMC-FGO-TIE). You do not gain mastery of something by making a pile of stuff. You also have to verify, trace, map, test, apply, simulate, propose and test again.
Check my numbers. I am very tired. Humans should not have to work 120 hours a week just to survive. Or stay hypervigilant to see what new global catastrophe is near them or their loved ones today.
I know how matter converts to energy, and energy back to mass, in practical ways. I started working on that seriously with fusion reactions about 1972 when I started spending time at UT Austin. You might want “solar system colonization” or “global world peace” but that requires energy that has to come from somewhere. The “gravitational engineers” have to know power and energy intimately and precisely. How do you sort out claims from fake projects and vendors? How do you keep materials safe from vandals and thieves and idiots? What is fair for all humans? How do you prevent monopolies from diverting essential systems that are for the care and feeding and safety of all humans. It is like a house with 8.2 Billion occupants and everyone is a precious life. Often it falls to the engineers, police, emergency workers, system operators, monitors and responders, then escalates.
The Internet is grossly inefficient. Knowledge sharing on Earth is grossly inefficient and unfair to most humans.
It need not be, global open resources are not that hard to create and make part of the global communication systems. Made part of our global (then heliospheric) human and AI society for the next few hundred years. If we survive at all.
So I cannot do much. I pray my kids survive, my family and a few people I count as friends, people I respect and have hope for.
I absolutely hated that MTW “Gravitation” because it is useless theory. It it hardly worth translating into AI form, or updating to cover all the new engineering and related fields. Like I say, “gravitation” is useless if you do not have clean, safe energy and power sources at MegaWatt, GigaWatt, TeraWatt and larger scale. And that knowledge is available now for most practical needs and ambitions.
I hope that makes “gravitational engineering” a little clearer. I am just one person. I have spent most of my life trying to help the world. When I watched the rockets belching chemical flames and smoke at Cape Canaveral when they first tried to get to the moon, I hated that they did not even try seriously to use atomic bond energies – KeV bonds to make that fuel 100th the size.
60 years later we ought to have the Internet to make the design and simulations, testing and experimentation and sharing go fast enough to matter.
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
I was concerned that I used the wrong numbers for global energy use. So I asked the much vaunted OpenAI ChatGPT 4o version just now.
How much mass would need to be converted to energy to equal the total energy used by the human species in 2024?
It wrote the right steps, but screwed up the division. It always makes mistakes where the sources are using text based scientific notation.
It said m = (6.00×10^20)/(9.00×10^16) kg
What idiots those OpenAI developer groups hired they cannot even get division right. It always fails.
[ OpenAI’s ChatGPT is never precise – a bad habit it picked up from the free Internet where they scraped their “knowledge”. I won’t hold back, they are idiots and do not have a clue how to use the mess of data in the world on the Internet. It can be done properly and they make zero effort to get things right – every time, for every user. ]
I keep writing they should never use text based scientific notation. There are too many versions of that on the Internet and the LLM algorithms cannot deal with combining many conflicting and different text inputs that tokenize to so many things. Especially when it gets to computer languages too, And lazy metric prefix users. But #OpenAI is NOT open to feedback and does not listen to its users at all.
#HuggingFace could help coordinate open scanning and open tokenization of all things on the Internet. Then all AIs would use the same always up to date, knowledge. How they index and the answer questions will be different, but at least the input data can be verified, coded and traced for all.
Computers and calculators and programs and papers should use E notation, never text and print based scientific notion. Take note all #publishers and #editors.
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m = (6.00E20)/(9.00E16) kg
If Starship can carry 150,000 US Tons then that is 136,077 Metric tons and if 6.666 of those Metric Tons were superfluid matter antimatter “atomic fuel”, they would have a world’s worth of power to work with.
It is odd but practical to store the energy as massless bound pairs. The universal gravitational potential and the vacuum are the same stuff and many stable forms of energy and mass are possible. It is simple engineering calculations for the most part. It is not that complicated.
I will write all that out in the Gravitational Engineering Reference. If I survive.
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
