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When you say, ill equipped I presume it to mean the Weapons, Equipment and Clothing. You would have been downright correct to assert that till about few years ago. Things are gradually changing for the better.The reasons were and continue to be are as follows.Strategically and Militarily illiterate, inept and unconcerned political leadership since Independence.Power hungry, Machiavellian, Militarily illiterate and condescending corrupt Bureaucracy since Independence but vicious against the Armed Forces since 1971 war.Morally degraded, Politically compromised and weak Military Leadership since 1971 war.Bureaucratically aligned, Scientifically inept, Morally degraded Defence Scientists.Politically sheltered, Trade Union dominated, irresponsible and irredeemable Public Sector Defence Production industry.Here’s how they sucked the power, money and lives of the Indian Soldier and continue to do so.Sino-Indian War 1962: Civil-Military RelationsThe extract from Bureaucratic-Organizational Politics and Information Processing in a Developing State by Yaacov Vertzberger published in International Studies Quarterly Vol. 28, No. 1 (Mar., 1984), pp. 69-95 (27 pages) explains basis of my argument since 1962.Current Civil-Military RelationsRead what the self declared Military Battlefield inoculated ex Defence Secretary says.“My views on the subject are tempered by four tenures in the MoD and an opportunity of a life time that allowed me an active participation in the 1971 Indo-Pak war where I was the Forward Observation Officer (FOO) and the authorised Observation Post Officer (OP) of the 11 Infantry Division in their operation in the Western Sector (Rajasthan/ Sindh). This has allowed me abiding friendship both with those in uniform and the much maligned bureaucracy. My assignments as Director (Navy), Joint Secretary (MoD), Secretary Defence Production and Defence Secretary and later as the Deputy National Security Advisor (NSA) allowed me an experience that needs to be shared. “Having eulogised himself as War veteran and Defence Bureaucrat now he tells what is wrong with Military and what is right with Bureaucracy.“ Military as its intrinsic character is expected to possess the ability to assert itself, and this creates a behavioural peculiarity within the armed forces. I need to qualify by calling it the armed forces bureaucracy. At levels of Service HQ the function is quite akin to implementing the policies of the political leadership and providing them professional advice. The attitude grows from a life time of accomplishing a mission, regardless of the costs or methods and means. As opposed to this the civilian counterpart are expected to implement policies without any cause for confrontation or conflict. The uniformed fraternity the world over follows norms and customs that are a little different, to say the least, and peculiar to the uninitiated. This poses no challenge to structures at lower levels of the organisation which do not require external interface. But it becomes discomforting, to say the least, at higher organisational levels, where such interface with civilian bureaucracy and political leadership is required.”Now he argues why Military is not suited to assert itself Higher Defence Management due to democracy.“In essence, a democratic society would demand that policies represent the will of the people and therefore should never be the cause of internal conflict or confrontation. ‘Assertion’, which is an intrinsic military characteristic, is alien to this democratic construct. The political and bureaucratic side is quite open to a system of debate to accommodate various hues of opinion and perspective to preclude subsequent conflict or confrontation. In the military, the senior is always right—but this is how it should be. Neither side can be considered at fault because such an attitude is part of their charter and growth. It is this democratic and participative need that is getting reflected in the public mood that we see around us in the election year. It is therefore obvious that the political vector has shown preference for a layer of civilian bureaucracy between them and the military. This is the default position of the structure. In terms of any civil-military structure we cannot ignore this reality notwithstanding other factors of competence and specialisation.”[1]What they give Military in the garb of Civilian Supremacy“The seventh pay commission changed the way the military and its veterans view the bureaucracy and political leadership, and vice-versa. The commission equated the military with the Central Armed Police Forces on an illogical thought that all those who enter government service through the common CAT exam should remain at par, others be damned, as if only an exam has value, nothing else. Poor analysis, coming from a supposedly eminent group meant to consider the future of all government services. What caused greater hurt was the government ignoring the military in the panel of secretaries and also accepting its downgrading without a murmur. This compelled the military and its strong veteran community, as well as its countless well-wishers, to wonder who runs the government – the bureaucrats or political leaders – and whether its systematic downgrading is part of a deliberate plan.”“The past sequence of events indicates a systematic downgrading of the military. Never in the history of India have so many anti-military announcements been made by various branches of the government in such a short amount of time. It is not possible for bureaucrats to issue such policy letters without having the confidence of their respective ministers. Therefore, it makes the military feel that it is being systematically targeted according to a laid-out plan. The reasons could be many. The first is that the military is gaining prominence within the country and receiving accolades from all quarters for its sacrifice and strong actions in defending the borders, which have made the public feel proud to call themselves Indians. No other government service has ever received such accolades. Further, it is known that the military can never let the country down, irrespective of the treatment meted out to it. Thirdly, the military was always timid and accepted government decisions, without so much as a whimper. However, this time it reacted and did so forcefully. Finally, the veteran community has been very vocal for the first time, criticising the government whenever it attempts to hurt military morale.”[2]State of Ordnance Factories“For nearly 70 years, the ordnance factories that supplied the armed forces with everything from boots to battle tanks thrived as a government monopoly. This meant the armed forces had no option but to buy what they produced.”[3]“With its origin dating back to the British Raj, the OFB is the oldest as well as the largest departmentally-run organisation of the Indian Government. Over the last two centuries, it has been a key supplier of a wide variety of products ranging from tanks and armoured vehicles to artillery guns, small arms and ammunitions, besides various troop comfort items. However, as an organisation, the OFB has been constrained by a host of factors that has forced the organisation to look inward and perform below its potential.Today, it can hardly boast of any worthwhile product of its own as nearly 75-80 per cent of its production comes from technology developed outside the country. The lack of focus on R&D coupled with delayed execution of orders, low labour productivity, and meagre exports have frustrated its key stakeholders, especially the army which accounts for nearly 80 per cent of its supplies. The army is also concerned about the poor quality of the OFB products. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) had once observed that some of the OFB products were passed on to the army with defects which were visible to the naked eyes!1As a departmentally-run organisation, the OFB is barred from making profit from the supplies made to the armed forces, eliminating a major incentive to innovate and improve efficiency. OFB’s cost-plus approach to production, which is globally accepted as inherently inefficient, makes the armed forces’ procurement budget expensive and puts an extra burden on the defence budget.The OFB’s biggest bane, however, is its limited autonomy. Being an attached office of the MoD, major decisions pertaining to finance, human resource, research and development (R&D), technology tie-ups and modernisation of plants and machineries are taken outside the organisation. The highly bureaucratic decision-making process of the external agencies responsible for the OFB’s functioning and wellbeing, and their propensity to adhere to the rules and regulations rather than the outcomes, has made the organisation risk-averse with little incentive to think out of the box.”[4]“As discussions between the Trade Unions and the Centre on the corporatisation of ordnance factories collapsed here on Monday, a month-long general strike called by the three major trade unions will begin in the 41 factories on Tuesday. The trade unions said their request to stop the corporatisation process was not considered by the Centre, and so the strike will be held as planned.”[5]State of DRDOEverybody knows DRDO will not deliver on its promise. It never does. This is the price #India pays to keep discredited and useless PSUs afloat. Politically convenient. National security can wait. https://t.co/4qaDDqu2LC— Kanchan Gupta (@KanchanGupta) June 24, 2019“The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) on Thursday took the unprecedented action of sacking an officer who claimed to be a whistleblower . Senior administrative officer Prakash Singh, posted at the Defence Science Centre at Metcalfe House in North Delhi, was served with compulsory retirement order.”[6]“Some DRDO labs are white elephants where no productive defence research and development takes place. For instance, four DRDO labs exclusively carry out research into foods and agriculture and one institute is engaged in business management.Should defence labs carry out research into vegetables when the Indian Council of Agriculture Research and its affiliates are engaged in similar work? What is the rationale of DRDO studying management techniques when such studies are being done in detail by other institutes across the country?The defence ministry is still sitting on a few proposals to revamp the country's premier defence research organisation. The salient points of some of the in-house proposals:Shift DRDO focus back to the factories from laboratories,Shut down unproductive factories and integrate those units doing similar work.In the process, the ministry proposes to either merge or close down as many as 20 factories and laboratories. But proposals before the government are easier drawn up than executed. No one believes the government will be able to muster the courage to make the necessary changes.Meanwhile, the Indian soldier -- whose life and limb depends on the quality and superiority of his weapons -- and the nation, DRDO remains the only hope.The soldiers would love to fight the kind of war they fought in Kargil last year if they have the best weapons available. If DRDO does not shape up, it will be those on the battlelines who will pay the price.”[7]“Expressing its dissatisfaction for wastage of tax-payers money by sudden closure of projects, the Standing Committee on Defence headed by retired Major Gen BC Khanduri also pulled up the DRDO and advised it to rope in an 'independent agency' to conduct "a scientific, technical and concurrent audit of every ongoing project" to avoid midway closure.Cracking a whip on the DRDO, the panel in its report submitted to both houses of the Parliament on March 13 this year stated, "The Committee, while examining the Demands for Grants, discovered that delays in completion of projects are a part and parcel of DRDOs functioning. For instance, Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) was supposed to be completed in 2008 but the revised date of completion is June 2019. In the case of Aero engine, Kaveri, the original date of completion was 1996 but was revised to December 2009. Further revision of the completion schedule continues to be under process. Similar is the case with LCA-Navy, Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C) System, Air to Air Missile system-Astra, Long Range Surface to Air Missile etc. to name a few. The extent of delay in the execution of above mentioned projects varies from project to project. Although various reasons have been attributed for project delays by the representatives of DRDO, the Committee take very serious note of this unwarranted and unsavoury phenomenon. These delays not only place a burden of unnecessary cost implications but also deprive the Services of critical capabilities. The Committee wish to be kept apprised on the progress made in regard to each of the above mentioned projects."[8]“The Rama Rao Committee report remains a classified, two-volume report, which exposes all that has gone wrong with DRDO. TOI has seen a copy of the damning report. It paints an extraordinary picture of planning and execution failure and abysmal human resource management and says the DRDO brand is “wilting”. The report says: “Sixty years ago the fervour generated by extraordinary leadership won India its political independence. At the present time, technological independence requires a technological independence requires a similarly passionate and inspiring leadership.”The report says poor HR management is the DRDO’s biggest problem and only 3% of its scientists have PhDs in engineering-related subjects, 60% being plain-vanilla graduates or postgraduates in science, humanities or medicine. The DRDO’s staffing clearly is illequipped and ill-prepared to conduct cutting-edge research, which could find its way to the The DRDO has more than 6,750 scientists in its Defence Research and Development Service (DRDS) cadre, which is spread over 51 laboratories. Fewer than 2% of the scientists in 43% of the DRDO’s labs have PhD degrees in their respective core disciplines.The DRDO’s cut off age for entry-level scientists “should ideally be less than 24 years (but) is 28 years and above in more than 40% of the labs,” the report says. It adds that in half its labs, “the average age of scientists in all grades is above 37 years. The average age at various levels is significantly higher than what is desirable. This has to be corrected since it is important for younger people to occupy higher positions.” DRDO’s recruitment process, too, has come under fire. Entry-level scientists are hired through the Scientists Entry Test (SET) and there is some campus recruitment from IITs, IISc and NITs. But SET suffered a 71% drop in applicants between 2003 and 2006, says the report and there is unnecessary delay in hiring, which “is a major deterrent for the highly talented to consider DRDO as a ‘go-to’ organization,” says the report. An internal survey, quoted in the report, says 57% of scientists leave DRDO on account of professional dissatisfaction. A whopping 87% of the entry-level cadre joins the DRDO in the belief that it offers great career opportunities, but is “disenchanted soon after”, laments the report.”[9]Declining Standards of Military Leadership“The Indian armed forces, on the other hand, are fortunate that they have always made their own special code of conduct and lived by it. Traditionally perceived as an entity which stood tall above the civil society, the armed forces were seen as an embodiment of order and discipline, and were held, by their compatriots, in respect and admiration. Today we find, to our great dismay, that due to a tangible erosion of values and frequent displays of venality, the armed forces, too, are rapidly slipping in the estimation of their countrymen. For the armed forces to fob off blame for this decay on society and polity is not acceptable. After all, it is the Services who invented phrases such as ‘an officer and a gentleman’ and ‘officer-like conduct’. It were these attributes rather than any Warrant of Precedence which earned them respect and a high place in society.”“I returned to the NDA, as Commandant, 33 years after I passed out of its portals as a cadet. While the Academy had made huge strides in every aspect of training, and the quality of cadets was better than ever before, I was astonished to note the range and scale of their misdemeanours. Stealing, physical abuse of juniors, cheating in examinations and impersonation were some of the common offences, and it was obvious that most of the offenders had received no inputs about a value system, nor were they provided a moral foundation by parents or teachers. However, more alarming than the gravity or frequency of transgressions by cadets was the benign and tolerant attitude of the training staff towards such infractions of Academy discipline. These young officers, many of them just a few years out of the Academy themselves, felt that it was desirable for a ‘smart’ cadet to possess basic ‘skills’ such as lying, cheating and stealing, since these would not only help him survive the 16 Journal of Defence Studies rigours of Academy training but also make him more effective on the battlefield, especially in the counter-insurgency environment.”“The readiness of an officer to convey his thoughts in a frank and forthright manner to his superior, keeping his words free from prejudice or malice, is a trait to be valued and encouraged. At the same, as they rise in rank, officers must cultivate the strength of character and breadth of mind to be able to hear harsh and unpalatable truths without shooting the messenger. The inability to convey the unvarnished truth and unpleasant news to one’s superiors seems to inflict the higher ranks more than others. In the Service Headquarters (HQs), one discovers that the comprehension levels are lower and tolerance for bad news even less at the political and bureaucratic levels. It often requires all of one’s resources of moral courage to place matters in the correct perspective firmly but politely to a minister or a bureaucrat.”“Regrettably, it is clear that neither the Ministry of Defence nor any other civilian authority in the country either cares about the moral health of the military or can do anything about it. In fact, one can sense a degree of schadenfreude at recent incidents involving senior servicemen in many quarters, especially in the media. The onus for stemming the rot and attempting to reclaim the izzat of the armed forces, therefore, lies squarely on the current military leadership—both in Delhi and in Command HQs all over—with basic training institutions becoming the foci of close attention”[10]That in nutshell is the reason for a poor and ill equipped Military. Not just the equipment, it is the moral courage that has gone missing from the mental kit of the soldier. The Soldier needs to stand up and fight for himself and what is right.Footnotes[1] https://idsa.in/system/files/book/Book_CoreConcernsinIndianDefence.pdf[2] Is the Military's Paranoia Under the Modi Government Justified?[3] Repainting the white elephant[4] In Favour of Corporatisation of Ordnance Factory Board[5] Talks between govt, trade unions fail; ordnance factories strike on[6] Exclusive: Whistleblower DRDO officer sacked for highlighting corruption[7] DRDO, an investigation[8] Parliamentary panel slams DRDO over delay in completion of military projects[9] Why can't India make its own arms?[10] https://idsa.in/system/files/jds_7_2_aprakash.pdf

I would argue that the Moon is by far the best place to send humans in the near future for many reasons. But not for Helium 3. I’ll get to that in a minute.Inside look at one of the ideas for the ESA moon village, using 3D printing on the Moon for the radiation shielding. Image credit Foster + Partners / ESA. Their new director, Professor Johann-Dietrich Woerner is keen on taking us back to the Moon first, and has an exciting vision for a lunar village on the Moon as a multinational venture involving astronauts, Russian cosmonauts, maybe even Chinese taikonauts, and private space as well.It is great for science. I think we are bound to have science bases there similarly to the ones in Antarctica - and the ESA lunar village is a great way to get started on it.It is even, surprisingly, of astrobiological interest. With a near certainty it has meteorites in the permanently shaded lunar craters that have organics preserved for billions of years from Mars, early Earth and even Venus. It may even have intact fragments of ammonites and earlier Earth lifeforms. After a simulated impact on the Moon, fossil diatoms are still recognizable, and indeed the smallest ones are intact, complete fossils. There must be a lot of material from the Chicxulub impact on the Moon, which may also contain fragments of larger creatures such as the ubiquitous ammonites of Cretaceous seas. Perhaps the Moon will be one of the best places for fossil hunters in our solar system, outside of Earth.Artist's impression of Cretaceous period ammonites, courtesy of Encarta. The Chicxulub impact made these creatures extinct. It hit shallow tropical seas and the ejecta could have sent fragments of Cretaceous period sea creatures such as ammonites all the way to the Moon. Fragments in the cold polar regions may even have the organics preserved.The Moon must have meteorites from Mars too, for us to pick up, also from early Venus, from before its atmosphere became as thick as it is now. Early Venus might have had oceans and might have been as habitable as early Earth and Mars. However, most of that record is probably erased even if we get to explore the surface of Venus. It was resurfaced by volcanic processes around 300 hundred million years ago. It doesn't have continental drift, and the leading explanation for its young cratering record is that Venus may have had superplumes so large they resurfaced the entire planet. Its atmosphere is so thick that no meteorites get from Venus to Earth right now, and anyway, a modern meteorite or a sample return would tell us nothing about early Venus. That leaves any Venus meteorites on the Moon as our best, and maybe only way to find out about early Venus, including any biology from those times. That's especially so if they have the organics preserved. For more on this see Search for life from Mars, Venus, or the Earth - on the Moon in Meteorites! below.The Moon also must have collected organics from the comets and asteroids of the early solar system that bombarded Earth, so it can help give us an inventory of the organics that lead to kick starting life on Earth. For more about all this, see Charles Cockell's paper: Astrobiology—What Can We Do on the Moon?For more on this see the chapter Search for past life from Earth on the Moon in my Touch Mars? book.It is a great place for certain kinds of telescopes - infrared and very long wave radio. Also the optical telescopes we build there can be joined together to get long baseline optical interferometry because it is stable geologically with only minor tremors and small earthquakes. Also larger versions of the Arecibo telescope could eventually be built in the craters there and liquid mirror telescopes.The Moon itself is also far more interesting than we realized with Apollo. That includes the ice at the luanr poles - which is of great scientific interest, whether or not it is useful as a resource, and lunar caves probably over 100 km long and some may be kilometers wide. It is also known to be still active with argon vented, and some small areas that have been resurfaced recently, with the processes involved not clear yet - there are many mysteries to sort out. For more on this see the Moon science surprises chapter of my Case for Moon First book.And - it is differentiated with wide variations in mineral content - it is not at all the bland uniform “all the same” body that it is sometimes made out to be. There were many processes on the early Moon that concentrated and separated out minerals although many of them are different from the Earth and there are still processes going on depositing meteoritic iron and materials from the solar wind - and probably also ice from comets at the poles. The processes includeFractional crystallization - as a melt cools down, some minerals crystallize out at a higher temperature than others so form first. They then settle or float, so remove the chemical components that make them up from the mix, so changing its formula, leading to new crystals to form in a sequence.Gravitational settling, lower mass material floats to the top.Volcanic outgassing can concentrate materials such as iron, sulfur, chlorine, zinc, cadmium, gold, silver and lead.The processes that lead to volatiles condensing at the poles - which it seems can also concentrate silver tooProcesses unique to the Moon (perhaps electrostatic dust levitation may concentrate materials)?Volatiles brought in as part of the solar windAsteroid and micrometeorite impacts bring materials from asteroids to the lunar surface such as iron and possibly platinum group metals etc.For more on this see the Metals section of my book.ASSETS AND RESOURCESThen - it actually does turn out to be a great place for in situ resource use, and to set up human habitats. Also for export of materials to the Earth and LEO. I’d go so far as to say that if you can’t set up a human settlement on the Moon at the lunar poles, or in the lunar caves, you probably can’t do it anywhere off planet.Some of the main assets areSolar power 24/ 7 at the lunar poles.Dust is easily managed (no dust storms)Meters deep regolith good for radiation shielding from the solar storms and cosmic radiationThe regolith has nanphase iron in it which makes it possible to melt a surface layer using microwaves - useful for constructing a landing pad - and for a layer of glass to keep the dust away from the habitatIt is easy to land and take off. You can get to lunar orbit with only about half of your spaceship mass as rocket fuel. Also the landing is reversible until the last minute. Apollo 11 could have aborted back to orbit right up to just before the moment of touchdown (not possible on Mars or the Earth). Also it happens on a slow enough timescale to permit manually piloted landing as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin demonstrated (not possible on Mars)The hard vacuum is itself a resource - it may eventually be the prime place for manufacturing computer chips in the Earth- Moon system.Easy to make solar panels in situ using mainly in situ resources.It seems to have a fair bit of ice at the poles. Though the evidence is rather contradictory, the LCROSS impact data does suggest the presence of ice in pure crystal form. If so it may have larger deposits of pure ice. These are of scientific interest of course, but assuming there is a fair bit, can probably also be used for human settlersThe lunar caves may be the largest in the solar system that we know of - we don’t know how big they are but the Grail evidence suggests over 100 km long for the longer ones and tens to hundreds of meters wide but they may easily even be many kilometers in diameter and still be stable in the low lunar gravity.It has many useful metals - including calcium which in vacuum conditions is as good as copper, also aluminium.It has iron - pure iron, not the oxides - mixed in with the regolith and also probably as ore bodies from meteorite impacts. This is very variable in its platinum group and metal content. But amongst its thousands of craters it probably has at least a few that were made by particularly platinum rich meteorites. And - if we are lucky - well there are signs of magnetic anomalies from the impactor that formed the south pole Aitken basin. It may well be platinum rich - that’s Paul Spudis’ business case for the Moon - he thinks it may be a rich source of platinum. I don’t know for sure - but it seems likely that amongst all those craters, at least a few happen to have been made by platinum rich iron meteorites and have tons of ore just below the surfaceFor more on this see the The Moon is resource rich section of my book.It is also a great place to find out about human impacts on the solar system as we explore it. For instance the problem of trash. What do we do with the many tons of trash that build up around a settlement every year? What about footprints on the Moon, does the entire area around the base get covered in them? What about fuel for the rockets landing and taking off? Does the contamination of the lunar surface cause problems for science studies and if so, how do we minimize these effects? What about other organics and contamination and waste products from human bases, how does this impact on science and indeed on other human activities there? It is something we can study in much simpler situations than further afield. The Moon is huge and it doesn’t have a connected environoment, apart from ballistic motion of gases and electrostatic levitation of dust. What you do in one part of the Moon will for the most part only affect the nearest few square kilometers. So we can learn about these issues without the risk that the entire Moon gets contaminated in ways that we find a nuisance before we understand what we are doing in practice.For more on this see the Trash on the Moon - testing ground for planetary protection measures for a human base section of my bookLIFEBOATS ON THE MOONIt’s also the place in our solar system that I think has most potential for industrial exports to LEO or to Earth. I don’t know if it is possible even for the Moon to make this economic as a business. But if you can’t do it on the Moon you can’t do it anywhere probably. And even fi it is not economic as a business it could still be a very useful sideline for reducign costs. E.g. maybe your main objective is to make a lunar railway, but your byproducts include the platinum group elements and gold which you don’t need in situ and export to Earth to offset some of the costs of your habitats on the Moon.That’s partly because it is so easy of access from Earth. You can get there in a couple of days. This makes it far safer . The ISS has lifeboat spacecraft attached to it at any time that can take you back to Earth within hours. It is practical to add lifeboats to a lunar habitat to get you back to Earth within two days kept constantly stocked with food, fueled and ready to go. We can’t at present do this with voyages further away.The main problem there is life support. You can't test life support intended for a zero g environment on the ground, not properly. The ISS has had numerous life support issues which were only fixed due to resupply from Earth. See this list of some of them. None were immediately dangerous, and some were relatively minor but some of them would have been fatal on a timescale of months.If issues like that arose on a spacecraft like the ISS as far away as Mars many of those issues would have lead to the entire crew dying as they could never have got their spaceship back to Earth in time. The same would be true of other issues that arise over long timescales only, e.g. damage to equipment or to hull integrity from a micrometeorite - food gone off, harmful microbioal films build up, fire fire, or release of harmful chemicals, damaging vital equipment for life support, or essential provisions.The retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, former commander of the ISS, interviewed by New Scientist, put it like this in their article "We should live on the moon before a trip to Mars""I think ultimately we’ll be living on the moon for a generation before we get to Mars. If the world and the moon were threatened and the only way to preserve our species was to launch from Earth, we could go to Mars with yesterday’s technology, but we would probably kill just about everybody on the way.""It’s as if you and I were in Paris, paddling around in the Seine in little canoes saying, 'We’ve got boats, we’ve got paddles, let’s go to Australia!' Australia? We can barely cross the English Channel. We’re sort of in that boat in space exploration right now. A journey to Mars is conceivable but it’s still a lot further away than most people think."For more about this see the Lifeboats on the Moon section of my Touch Mars? book.TRANSPORT TO / FROM EARTHMost authors talk about how the ice at the poles of the Moon will make it easy to transport materials back to Earth, and especially ice itself as an export to LEO. I think this is at least a possibility but not yet proven.However there is one way we can achieve easy transport to / from Earth that is already worked out. I am a big fan of the Hoyt cislunar tether system. This doesn’t get anything like the attention it deserves. The compelte system which synchronizes a tehter so that its tip is stationary momentarily on the lunar surface for materials to be loaded and unloaded once per cycle would be rather an engineering marvel. But even if they don’t achieve that, to be able to hop from the lunar surface up a few meters, catch onto the tether and end up boosted with no extra fuel all the way to LEO and then get caught by another tether for a gentle re-entry - that’s a big game changer. The ingenious thing is that it is powered by the potential difference between the lunar surface and the Earth which is further down in the gravitational well. It works not unlike a syphon which lets you syphon water over the edge of a bath.It is cleverly designed and the details are important - but the basic idea is simple. Just two tethers and material flowing both ways, from Earth to the Moon and from the Moon back to Earth. So long as more material is moved from the Moon to Earth then that generates an excess of power much like the way a difference in water levels powers a waterwheel and that then can be used to keep both tethers spinning. Both tethers alternately are raised and lowered in orbit depending on whether they receive or send their loads to the other tether.The thing is - it is made of ordinary materials. You can build it with kevlar. It doesn’t need carbon nanotubes. Also its total mass is low. That means that if you are sending payloads to the Moon once a week for a year, you would already save on the total payload if you set up this tether system first (given that once it is set up, you no longer need any fuel at all to send payloads to the Moon).At least - that’s for the tether system itself. It assumes some infrastructure on the Moon of course to load and unload payloads at that end and you need to be mining the Moon - but it can just be dummy payloads of luanr regolith if needed, maybe used for radiation shielding in LEO. At any rate - whether they do it in the first few years or a decade or two later, it is not a distant future thing like the space elevator.For more about this see the Exporting materials from the Moon section of my book.WHY HELIUM 3 IS NOT LIKELY TO BE A MAJOR ASSET ON THE MOONThe Moon is a source for helium 3, deposited in the regolith by the solar wind, and some say that helium 3 will be of value for fusion power in the future because it is not radioactive and doesn't produce radioactive waste products. If so, small amounts of helium 3 from the Moon could be worth a lot on Earth and be a useful commodity to export. Apollo 17's Harrison Schmidt is a keen advocate of helium 3 mining on at a reasonable rate at a reasonable rate the Moon.However, we don't yet have fusion power plants at all, and one able to use helium 3 is a tougher challenge. Frank Close wrote an article in 2007 describing this idea as "moonshine" saying it wouldn't work anyway. Frank Close says that in a deuterium - helium 3 tokamak, at normal temperatures for a tokamak, the deuterium helium 3 reaction proceeds so slowly that the deuterium would instead fuse with itself producing tritium and then fuse with the tritium (the original article is here, but it's behind a paywall). For a critical discussion see also the Space Review article The helium-3 incantationSee also Mining the Moon by Mark Williams Pontin. If you can use much higher temperatures, six times the temperature at the centre of the sun by some calculations, the helium 3 will fuse at a reasonable rate, but these are temperatures way beyond what is practical in a tokamak at present. The reason such high temperatures are needed for a tokamak is because the plasma is in thermal equilibrium and has a maxwellian distribution which means that to achieve a few particles at very high temperatures you have to heat up a lot of particles to lower temperatures to fill up the maxwellian distribution so that just a few will react. This is potentially feasible for the lower temperatures of DT but not feasible for the higher temperatures of 3He 3He.However if you use electrostatic confinement, a bit like a spherical cathode ray tube with the fusion happening at the center where the negatively charged "virtual cathode" is, then the particles are all at the same high energy and the result is much more feasible with lower power requirements. This is the approach of Gerald Kulcinsky who achieves helium 3 fusion in a reactor 10 cm in diameter. However though it does produce power, it produces only one milliwatt of power for each kW of power input so is a long way from break even at present.Gerald Kulcinski who has developed a small demonstration electrostatic 3He 3He reactor 10 cm in diameter. It is far from break-even at present, producing 1 milliwatt of power output for each kilowatt of input. See A fascinating hour with Gerald KulcinskiPerhaps this line of development will come to something. Perhaps one way or another we will achieve helium 3 fusion as the enthusiasts for helium 3 mining on the Moon hope. However it is early days yet, and we can't yet depend on this based on a future technology that doesn't exist yet.However even if we do achieve helium 3 fusion, it might not be such a game changer for the lunar economy as you might think. Crawford says (page 25)" that to supply all of our energy from Helium 3 would mean mining 5,000 square kilometers a year on the Moon, which seems ambitious (and would mean the whole Moon would only last 200 years). So, even if we develop Helium 3 based fusion, and it turns out to be a valuable export, it's probably not going to be a major part of the energy mix.Even more telling, he also calculates that covering a given area of the Moon with solar panels would generate as much energy in 7 years as you'd get from extracting all the Helium 3 from that region to a depth of three meters.Also - there are many other ideas being developed for nuclear fusion, such as laser fusion, and the Polywell which has the same advantage that no significant radiation is produced when it uses fusion of boron and hydrogen. I think it is far too soon to know whether or not the helium 3 on the Moon will be an asset in the future when we achieve nuclear fusion power. For a summary, see ESA: Helium-3 mining on the lunar surface.This doesn't mean that there is no point in helium 3 mining however. As Crawford suggests (page 26)", Helium 3 is useful for other things, not just for fusion power. It's used for cryogenics, neutron detection, and MRI scanners, amongst other applications, so some Helium 3 from the Moon could be a valuable export right away, even if it doesn't scale up to the huge quantities you'd need for Helium 3 based power generation on Earth. You'd get it automatically as a byproduct while extracting the more abundant volatiles from the solar wind in the regolith, so it might well be a useful side-line to help support lunar manufacturing economically as part of the mix along with everything else.(this is from the Helium 3 section of my book)CASE FOR MOON FIRST AND THE VALUE OF ASTROBIOLOGY ON MARSFor more about the case for the Moon and the many benefits of sending humans there see my Case For Moon FirstI wrote that book originally because I care deeply about the science value of Mars for astrobiology. It concerns me a lot that NASA are contemplating sending humans there before they can assess what effect our microbes could have on any native Mars life - especially in the case of a crash of a human occupied ship on the Mars surface. They agree that so long as there are habitats there for our microbes to survive in, that the process of introducing Earth microbes to Mars would become irreversible as soon as humans land on the planet - never mind crash there. For more on this see NASA's plan for safe zones - based on finding Mars life easily in my Touch Mars?A crash could spread the debris with microbes over hundreds of kilometers of the Mars surface, by analogy with the Columbia space shuttle crash on re-entry to Earth. For more on this see the Elon Musk's fun but dangerous trip to Mars section of my Touch Mars? bookYou might wonder, who cares, the life there is probably only microbial? Or at most perhaps lichens? Well - it could easily be microbes from an earlier era of evolution, for instance RNA only microbes. After all that is one hypothesis for the structures in ALH84001, and whether or not those structures are early living cells, it is a possibility for early life on Mars. Then, it is possible that Mars life has hardly evolved since then. Or it could be highly evolved. Nobody seems to know if Martian conditions would favour vastly more rapid evolution than on Earth, or evolution that ran to a standstill at a very early stage of evolution and has barely changed since then, or something roughly parallel to evolution on Earth, so that it has reached about the same stage as us.Anyway - if it is an early form of life like that, it could be amazingly precious for science, fill in a vast gap in our understanding of how life evolved - and yet be very vulnerable.For more on this see the What if Mars has really tiny cells - like the structures in the Mars meteorite ALH84001? section of Touch Mars?And it need not have been exposed to Earth life. People talk a lot about panspermia - transfer of lifeon meteorites from Mars to Earth or Earth to Mars - but it has never been establisehed in either direction yet. The obstacles are formidable even though life is also far hardier than previously thought. Especially from Earth to Mars, the shock of ejection at a speed fast enough to LEAVE the atmosphere at the Earth escape velocity is huge. Also at such speed as that - it has to travel through the atmosphere at such speed that it is already a fireball in the first few hundred meters as it leaves the surface of the Earth - otherwise it is far too slow to leave Earth’s gravitational field. Any photosynthetic life on the surface would be destroyed by the fireball. It then has the vacuum of space, cold, cosmic radiation, solar storms and then has to find a habitat on Mars when it gets there, from the interior of a rock (remember the exterior was roasted already as it left Earth’s atmosphere) and if in modern Mars in an environoment with almost no running water even when during its occasional periods of somewhat thicker atmosphere.It may never have happened in that direction for billions of years and it is also possible that life from Earth never got to Mars (depends how robust Early Earth life was).For more on ths see the What about Zubrin's meteorites argument? section of Touch Mars?HOW THE MOON TURNS OUT TO BE BETTER THAN MARS FOR HUMAN SETTLEMENTSAnyway - so that was my original motivation for writing this book. I thought - if we can find that the Moon is good enough to at least delay the colonization of Mars attempt - it gives us some breathing space and time to assess the impact of humans on Mars before they actually get there.But - as I worked on the book I was amazed to find that not only is the Moon a good second fiddle to Mars - it is actually a far better place for an attempt at human settlement. In one comparision after another.Meanwhile, many of the ideas for Mars colonization can be used on the Moon - though not all. If you look at the Moon with “Mars colonization” preconceptions you will keep thinking about how it is not as good as Mars.That’s because solutions devised for Mars don’t necessarily all of them work on the Moon - especially e.g. using the CO2 to make fuel from hydrogen. But then - maybe you don’t need to do that on the Moon. It takes less fuel to get back to Earth anyway - and you can use the Hoyt cislunar tether sytem which doesn’t work on Mars - or use water mined at the lunar poles. You also have abundant solar power 24/7 at least at the lunar poles. And the pure iron on the lunar surface and the hard vacuum are major assets compared to Mars, also the higher levels of solar power are never blocked out by Mars dust storms. Then you have the easy way you can clear areas of its surface from dust by glazing it. None of that will work on the Mars, because of its atmosphere and the winds blowing the dust around.So those are all disadvantages of the Mars atmosphere. While CO2 is not at all needed for greenhouses - for space habitats if it is a perfect closed system then human breathing + composted or burnt plant wastes produce all the CO2 you need forthe next crop and ifyou have to import any food then you get a CO2 excess that has to be scrubbed. And the Mars close to 24 hour day is much less of an asset than you’d think if you realize it means it gets bitterly cold at night, so cold that the CO2 freezes out as dry ice at night even in the tropics for many days of the year.Meanwhile things like the “suitport” spacesuits to keep out dust are useful in both places.For more on this Mars or Moon spectacles and the old woman young woman illusionTERRAFORMING AS A PLANET CENTRIC APPROACH THAT WOULD TAKE THOUSANDS OF YEARSAs for the idea of terraforming Mars - the Kim Stanley Robinson books are science fiction with a lot of fudging of figures to fit the story into a timescale of a few generations. In reality the optimistic projection of the Mars society is for a thousand years to get to the point where you have a pure carbon dioxide atmosphere with trees and humans using air breathers - based on very optimistic projections of amounts of dry ice on the surface. It could be tens to hundreds of thousands of years after that to reach a breathable atmosphere (you have to extract so much carbon from the atmosphere that you create a meters thick layer of organics over the entire surface of the planet, in the low light levels of Mars) and that’s with vast use of megatechnology. When you think also of what you could do with that level of megatechnology in decades rather than centuries, for other space activities - well -it becomes more of a fantasy future than a likely near future reality. Also with much to go wrong and the prospect of making the planet less rather than more habitable for humans in the worst cases.Why use so much mega technology to create an atmosphere tens of kilometers thick when you only need the bottom couple of meters, and to cover a planet with seas filling up bone dry desert sand with water to depths of hundreds of meters (perhaps by bombarding it with comets) when you just need a few inches depth of water for aquaponics or growing plants in normal soil, or perhaps meters depth of soil for trees? Why commit to making an entire planet into a human habitat when you only need a few square meters to square kilometers to start with? And when it comes to the area available for colonization - well it would take a long time to exhaust even the areas available on the Moon and in lunar caves. But if we do eventually have billions and then trillions in space - you get much more surface area for far less resources invested if you use the materials from the asteroid belt. Enough to build habitats sufficient to have a surface area total of a thousand times that of the land area of Earth just from the asteroid belt.If we do ever engage in terraforming, it seems like something we’d do at a later stage, not one of the first things we attempt in space. Learn our lessons in smaller scale habitats. After all there was plenty to go wrong even with Biosphere II never mind trying a similar project for an entire planet in one go.And we can also try paraterraforming, starting with the Moon - covering large areas of the surface with habitats - or indeed, building large habitats in the lunar caves. It’s actually much easier to live in the lunar caves than many realize - the caves have a stable temperature, shieled from cosmic radiation, may be vast inside, already “built” as a structure to live in. The main disadvantage is the 14 day lunar night. However humans don’t need an acre or even a thousand square foot of agriculture to grow enough food for one person, but only 30 square metres. Also nowadays we can use LED lights optimized for growing plants at only 100 watts pwer square meter. With these sorts of figures it is feasible to deal with the lunar night using only battery storage and other energy storage solutions and solar power. For that matter, the Russians in their early BIOS-3 experiments in the 1970s found out that there are many plants that can crop fine with 14 days of darkness every month so long as the roots are cooled to just a few degrees above zero during the long lunar night.For more on this, see my An astronaut gardener on the Moon - summits of sunlight and vast lunar caves in low gravity in MOON FIRST Why Humans on Mars Right Now Are Bad for Science .And for lunar paraterraforming and even terraforming, see Terraforming or paraterraformingBUT WHAT ABOUT ZUBRIN?Zubrin makes what seem to be knock down arguments to his supporters - that we need to go to Mars right now and that there is no need to protect Earth or Mars in the process. However, convincing as he may sound, it’s important to know that when it comes to planetary protection then almost nobody is in agreement with him;. He is not the decision maker.For the background on planetary protection going back to Lederberg in 1957, and how Zubrin’s arguments seem within that context, see Planetary protection - researches by Sagan and Lederberg onwards - and Zubrin's argumentsMy main concern is with NASA, and only indirectly his effect on them. He can’t get them to ignore planetary protection altogether as he is not supported in that by the planetary protection department or COSPAR - the international group who discuss planetary protection or anyone. He can get them to put the Mars mission on the top of the agenda but I think with Trump his influence on US space policy is waning somewhat.My hope is that as we start to explore the Moon and space geeks get excited and fired up by the new things we are finding out there - and faced with the practicality of actually being able to go into space and visit the Moon and do cool things there right nowm that the Mars fever will calm down.SpaceX is the only commercial company in support of Mars first - Blue Origins and everyone else is in the New Space business is focused on LEO and the Moon.Under Obama, the US was the only country focused on Mars first and is now changing itts stance towards Moon first. The rest of the world including Europe, China and Russia have always been keen on returning to the Moon first.Also just about all astronauts agree that we should go to the Moon first. Even Buzz Aldrin, one of the keenest advocates for humans to Mars, thinks we should go to the Moon first - he was misquoted by Obama as his “been there done that” was meant as a joke as he made clear in his autobiography published soon after.It just makes more sense, apart from planetary protection issues. Iam not saying that they agree on the need to find out more about Mars before landing humans there. Their focus on going to the Moon first is mainly for safety and practical reasons and many of them are thinking in terms of a follow on mission to Mars a few years later. But it can give us a breathing space to both find out more and raise public awareneess of the need for planetary protection and get it more discussed so that we make a wise informmed decisions for Mars. It will also help take the pressure off from those who are desparate for humans to go further away than LEO and currently see Mars as the best way to do that.It will be a few years before we have humans on the Moon too probably, at least for Russia, the US and EU because of our commitment to the ISS. It is very expensive to maintain and there’s no suggestion at the moment of taking on a second big project for humans in space at the same time. Though I’ll be sad to see the end of thre ISS when it de-orbits probably some time in late 2020s, the funding will then go into these Moon missions and the ESA village will be international and also involve private / public partnerships and collaborations. It makes it far more feasible than the ISS was for development and expansion plus there is so much we’d be learning about the Moon.China or some other country could surprise us with astronauts to the Moon beforoe then. But there is no sign of that at present and indeed China are keen to join ESA in the lunar village concept.Meanwhile we have many robotic missions to look forward to .This year we have China and India both sending government missions and four teams for the lunar X Prize by end of March and astrobiotic, who were the leadingcontender for the X Prize until they pulled out probably some time this year or next. We will soon be at the point where we have multiple robotic missions to the Moon every year - which we can do because it is cheaper and easier to get to the Moon than to Mars - and that will make a big difference with streaming HD video as our robots explore the caves, surface and lunar poles and then find the best location for a human base and start prepairing for it. ?And lots of science discoveries streaming back.This is not going to detract from Mars robotic exploration but is additional to it.That’s how I see things unfolding. I am much more hopeful about a planetary protection friendly future exploration of space than I was, say, two years ago. And I think people will be surprised at how many minor but niggling issues there are on the Moon such as the trash, rocket exhaust and contamination of the site around the base for human investigations. So leading them to take more care as we explore further afield rather than just landing on Mars and hitting all those issues for the first time there,THE MOON AS AN ASTEROID CATCHERWhatever you have in Near Earth Asteroids you also have on the Moon. Asteroids have impacted on the moon for billions of years so it is like an asteroid collecting station - smaller material mixed in the regolith, metallic ore bodies buried in craters probably, iron core of the impactor that made the Aitken basin splashed out over the rim of it possibly by the magnetic evidence, and there is ice at the lunar poles.The main advantage of the Moon is that it is so close and easy of access to Earth while the asteroids which require the lowest delta v to get to from Earth are also the ones that phase in and out with our orbit most slowly, typically easisest to access once a decade.Perhaps the most practical idea for the most easily accessible asteroids with low relative delta v is to grab a chunk and bring it back to the Earth Moon system for further reprocessing.But the Moon has done that already by catching them in the impact craters. I think we need to explore both and see what happens but if I were a betting man my money would be on the Moon to be the lions share of the economy if we do get a space economy in the near future exporting to Earth.The asteroids do have advantages especially for autonomous mining, the spin can be used to deliver materials back to Earth since many are spinning, the low gravity may be an advantage in some ways, the idea to bag an asteroid with heated carbon monoxide - then heated by the sun 24/ 7, solar power continuouslyu which you only get at the poles on the Moon. But the latency for controlling operations from the Earth may be an issue plus distance to go for servicing. Hard to say as we may get rapid progress in autonomous operation and in how easy it is to get to the asteroids - but both those would benefit the Moon too.SWIMMING ON THE MOON AND RUNNING ON WATERI’ll just finish with some fun thoughts. Did you know that in the luanr surface - if we ever have habitats there with large amounts of water - humans could run on the water like the Basilisk (“Jesus”) lizard?Running on water - a possible future lunar Olympics sport :). Four out of six subjects were able to run on water in simulated lunar gravity using small rigid fins - similarly to the way Basilisk lizards can run across rivers. So running on water could be a future lunar sport (in an air filled habitat of course) paper hereAnd a strong swimmer could easily leap out of the water like a dolphin? See Hilarious XKCD about lunar swimming :). You'll be amazed by what humans could do on the Moon if or when we have our first swimming pool there. Lunar Swimming on XKCDThat might be somethign we can explore sooner than you expect. After all a lunar habitat will need water stores for both living there and perhaps for rocket fuel too. Why not have some of it in the form of a swimming pool? And especially if the water can be mined locally on the Moon then it might be quite easy (comparatively) to set up a lunar swimming pool.CASE FOR MOON FIRST BOOK AND OUR FACEBOOK GROUPYou can find the book here: Case For Moon First - has more on nearly all the things I’ve covered here (though not on the dolphin leaps and running on water, I have yet to add a section about that).Also my Touch Mars? Europa? Enceladus? Or a Tale of Missteps? and MOON FIRST Why Humans on Mars Right Now Are Bad for Science,Also see our facebook group hereCase for Moon for Humans - Open Ended with Planetary Protection at its CoreIt is for anyone interested in a Moon first approach - not necessary at all that you agree with my views on everything or anything :). There are still so few places for discussion of a Moon first prespective, at least compared with Mars colonization discusisons.

Humans make 29 billion tonnes of CO2 which is 919,584 Kg per second. (nearly 1000 tons a second). 85,300 tons a second is needed by grass alone!!! A blade of grass adds in weight by 0.0000008 grams per second. For 0.0000008 grams per second of increase in biomass (growth), you also need 1.75 times that weight of CO2 which is 0.0000014 grams of CO2 needed every second by every blade of grass on our planet. 1 square mile of grass requires about 4.4 Kg of CO2 per second. Every second.So humans produce 1% of what grass needs every second.(Surface area of the Earth is 510,072,000 Square kilometres. 33% is land = 168,323,760 Square kilometres and 30% of land is grasslands = 50,497,128 Square kilometres.)Now 80% or more of the CO2 is absorbed by the oceans.IPCC says that plants need: 450 GT i.e 450,000,000,000,000 Kg (14,269.5 tons a second). I think this is wrong.oceans need: God Only Knows (GOK) maybe a minimum of 338 GT (10,718 tons a second) is needed but it could be extremely high. As CO2 easily dissolves in oceans. Even 1000s of GT can easily dissolve into oceans if such quantity of CO2 were available. IPCC says oceans need 338 GT per year. Since 95% of photosynthesis (or 75% as a lower estimate) of photosynthesis happens in the oceans, I suspect that this is wrong also. GOK.Let me remind you… Humans only manage to provide 1000 tons a second. This means we are not taking care of our planet.All of what humanity produces is about 1% of what the grass needs.Yeah…!Thanks for reading.<<<Further reading on this public madness: >>>I love our planet enough to choose Biology to specialise in, Molecular Immuno Biology to be more precise. So naturally I almost joined Greenpeace in 1991 as I went to two of their ‘recruitment’ meetings/seminars. Some inner voice warned me not to. I also wanted to do my immunobiology research. I was angry at humanity for destroying our planet, or so I thought. Fast forward to more recent times. I was seeing claims such as CO2 is causing forest fires. This caught my attention. How can mainstream media say such weird things? Oxygen causes fires and CO2 PREVENTS fires. This made me research into a lot of claims. I knew for example that kerogen (crude oil) is found a lot in space. I used to be an avid NASA publications reader in the 80s and 90s and I have seen the CHANGE in NASA to what they endorse. It has been a proper U turn that we only see in politicians. On researching I found many things that I actually studied that has been systematically altered in University and school level after year 2000. I have come to realise that this is a result of an anti humanist thought process that is gaining traction.AGW via CO2 appears to be a POLITICALLY motivated statement to promote group identity at the expense of individualism and individual human worth. It is the first step in an anti humanist move towards human population curtailment. STOP FUNDING so called scientists and universities with public/government money and all these will go away!!! It will get replaced by good science that is Pro Life. If scientists have the need to find things that promote life, increase life, and create more private investment, then there will be more honest discoveries. Climate changing, if anything, is pro-life. Climate by its very nature is never static. Never in stasis. NEVER. It should be obvious that climate change is not bad. So the question is why are some academics and media obsessing over how bad any change is? It has always been swinging up and low. Always. So why?So why is there a big political movement with the message that climate change is a disaster in the making? I think it is partly ideological and partly a kind of group behaviour in a desperate effort to unify the world under some context or the other, but, why?From a “technological future” point of view: There will never be any problems from climate as humans are too advanced. Our houses don't blow away from winds and rain. Animal husbandry, agriculture, genetics, well, all of technology is the reason that such things as weather and climate will be welcome by humans no matter what. Of course, we can get used to not having a hurricane and then be taken aback where there is one.It surprises me that many learned people succumb to this madness, saying bizarre things like saying there are more hurricanes than ever, or that the ocean is acidifying because of excess Co2 in the atmosphere, or something ridiculous like that. I wish people were taught honest science in school so that they all grew up to think for themselves. There is a massive lack of anthroposophical contentment in people in general. It is a shame that throughout the ages people obsessed over the “end of times” and people still do despite Facebook, Quora and Snapchat :) It is a failure of civilisation and education that it seems to have mass produced such unimaginative pessimists.Climate is peachy. There is nothing to worry. We have done our biome a favour by adding what little CO2 we can into the atmosphere and thereby into the food chain. Dynamic sun and a dynamic system as a whole has and will remain dynamic.CO2 = results in carbon based life, i.e., us humans.It is just a war between anti humanists who want less population to conserve resources VS humanists who want more humans as they see more humans as more brains, more money and more prosperity.Anti humanists want people to fornicate less and believe in the idea that humans are like ants where an ant colony develops, gets big, and someday collapses. They are attracted to the philosophy of scientism and positivism.…………..There is a fundamental obfuscation of ecological conservatism. As the divide between the wealthy and the aspiring classes widen, imagination of the world leaders wane, malthusian ideologies rears its head again.Firstly: All through recent history, scientists who depend on funds and grants have always shown an aptitude to do research only in those areas that have political interest. We have put private scientists and public sector scientists into a tight spot. They do not have true freedom.Secondly: Humans are social beings and have intense group behaviour that often supersede independent thought. The potential for individuals in societies around the world to attain their natural anthroposophical ends are often not met because large swathes of populations are often either too busy being agreeable and making ends meet, or rebelling pointlessly and involving in partisan conflict(war). Often it is quite simply people behaving in ways they are expected to behave, like Skinner’s pigeons. Everyone wants to be a positive person. In a country at war, everyone wants to help out with the fight! In a country at peace, everyone wants to be agreeable. To me, an ideal country must encourage independent thought and debate thereby never having a need for conflict. Conflict arises when recourse to independent thought and healthy debates end.Before democracy, during the times of monarchy around the world, the monarchy worked by being symbiotically associated with the religious institution. So the religion and the religious leader (the learned priestly classes) appoints the monarch and the monarch ‘funds’ the priestly classes. They made each other exist and legitimised each other. Today, in democracy, there is a struggle to install virtual monarchs… ideological monarchs and ideological high grounds.. today’s learned priestly classes are the scientists and they need to be funded. As fundamental science gets more difficult to expand, scientists want jobs and funding based on more trivial stuff. Propensity to lie and obfuscate in the name of wanting to stay employed among published, “peer reviewed” scientific papers appears to be rampant. When the peers who review it are all equally playing the game, everything starts to be “peer reviewed” and “scientific”. There is also a resistance towards funding study on totally new technologies and areas simply because the political will is not there. Why would a professor want their own work to get refuted? So aspiring PhD students who wish to research on areas that threaten status quo will never get funding. Even if it gets privately funded, and even if it turns out to be a precious gem of a paper, it can easily be buried in the sea of pointless research papers that fill the corridors of hundreds of universities around the world.Since with democracy, voting behaviour is controllable through media, media has become an important part of the equation.Media may easily turn against the scientists too, however, since the ruling system needs the priestly learned class to sanctify political decisions and laws, it can only happen if the political tides change, or the way science and scientists get funded change drastically. Aggrandising interest in a study and biased finding to garner private funds or taxpayer money which could have otherwise gone into legitimate uses is actually morally repugnant and a possible criminal offence.Even with democracy, if a party wins a majority, then they can completely suppress the ideas of the minority. What if there were one, or two, good ideas within the minority? It will depend on the maturity of a particular country or society how these things get handled. There is a similar occurrence in climate ideology.There is an underlying unifying behaviour among diverse countries and groups that common issues like this are the future of humanity. By forming more and more cross country, international organisations like IPCC, which have people in it who are not voted by anyone, democracy as well as nationalism can be superseded. Very importantly, the general public’s inertia can be superseded. It is difficult to fast track bias. e.g. Parliamentary debate is meant to be constructive, considered and debated. However, an international body like IPCC can bully various countries to fast track acts through the parliament and silence debate.Currently, the majority are of the view that human influence is so profound that human activity dictates climate change. The assumption here is that the change in climate is never good regardless of whether the temperature is going up or down. If it goes down then an ice age is on the way, and if it goes up global warming is on the way. There are ‘holes’ in the atmosphere and we are all going to be irradiated by UV and get cancer and die. The oceans are acidifying. The list is endless. It is like the Groundhog Day of the Book of Revelations. The point is, by engaging people in this way, people can be unified. Quite surprisingly, it has also been able to introduce an international class hierarchy. More developed countries are able to control the developing countries. It is possible for the developed countries to retain an edge, and free market gains subtle control.Organisations like IPCC may perhaps have benefits in preventing a worldwide conflict and war. After all, that is the kind of idea behind other international organisations likeNorth Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)World BankGroup of 8 (G8)United Nations (UN)International Monetary Fund (IMF)Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)World Wildlife Fund (WWF)World Health Organization (WHO)United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)World Trade Organisation (WTO)G20and so on… keeps increasing…even the EU, hence the British people opted to leave the EUIt is surprising that organisations that we do not directly vote for, end up controlling your politicians, parliament, and every individual’s life to such an intense level.It does good for governments to remain a little thin, and not overpowering your life. Not too thin, as I like NHS and public toilets! It is a sad state of affairs if the only toilets available are privately owned pay to use toilets. A balance between private enterprise and public good. The government must not manipulate the funding of science and scientists. *or* Is it the scientists who are manipulating the media and the government? After all, they are the learned class!?!Ideally, a scientist must feel the urge to pursue a study or a research, e.g., on disease control, because they either saw a relative being ill or saw someone being ill on the streets while they were on holiday and felt inspired to apply for funding in that area. It is taxpayer’s money. Such motivations like that are what I deem to be honest motives. The motives of all the great minds whose fruits of labour we enjoy infinitely more than those scientists themselves got to enjoy is the best example. Take as examples Madam Curie, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Feynman, or John Sulston of Welcome Trust for that matter who believes that ‘no one’ must own the human genome base pairs.Such lack of transparency, and on occasions when transparency may be present but the public is unable to vote on it. it becomes a way to both unify as well as polarise the public!! In my humble opinion, this is what has happened to the the efforts by humans to conserve ecosystems. A pure idea of conserving ecosystems is overtaken by an ideological approach.An idea that population growth is bad can easily become populist notions. After all, more populated catholic countries appear to be poorer than less populated protestant countries. Surely population must be the reason for poverty. A closer look will reveal other things. But such ideas can have rapid public assimilation. Our Bible is prominent with ides of the ‘end of the world’. This idea is therefore rooted in our psyche. We are unable to imagine the transformative progress of mankind said in genesis, namely that man is going towards immortality like the gods, instead we are only able to contemplate the destruction of revelation.We are unable to imagine heaven on earth. We are unable to imagine lack of diseases and immortality. Science is at the verge of it all. It is just a matter of another 300 years or so. Some appear to desire heaven on earth through rapid technological progress and such people are labelled cornucopians (!). Some are able to discern independently and dissent the idea of climate change as a bad thing; two reasons: independent thinking and courage to dissent, or pathological optimism. :)Personally, I have drawn my own conclusions about ozone, CO2, Hydrocarbons (oil) in this universe and our planet, oceans, and so on. It is not difficult. The desire to join the bandwagon of doomsday and climate alarmism is strong in me too. I feel like putting aside my own common sense, my own knowledge, spirituality and understanding to belong to a larger group who I know are incorrect, as I don't want to be alone. It is not about being right, it is about being social. I often wonder if I should be happy to be misled in order to belong. It is because I am good and I hate being the one to have a ‘correct’ opinion, about where to eat tonight for example. I would rather eat where the rest of my family wants. I don't want to be a bother. A big part of me wants to belong to the popular crowd.…………………………….It is surprising to see such poor quality science disseminate into general public. Well, it is ghastly and unfortunate that such poor quality science papers are formally emerging from the universities in the first place. It is unhealthy for society and human progress.Why? Such poor information, and false science, is going to lead to false choices during democratic elections and going to put the wrong kind of policy makers and ideologically driven (wrong kind/anti humanist) of people in power.Without CO2: Everyone Dies™. All of life is heavily dependent on the availability of CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 being a primordial molecule, earth’s atmosphere was made up of 97% CO2 in the beginning. Life began in this rich CO2 atmosphere. Billions of years ago this allowed anaerobic bacteria and first photosynthesis to begin. The photosynthetic organisms flourished and used up all the CO2 causing oxidising O2 to build up resulting in a die out. To this day, photosynthesis waits for volcanic activity and v6 engines to bring the CO2 back into the atmosphere.Today’s plants have evolved to stay alive in 0.04% CO2 atmosphere. They are able to suck up trace amounts!! If you supply higher amounts of CO2 then plants will grow exponentially faster. There will be more algae, plankton, and plants. More food, and more fish. More of everything in turn depleting the CO2 in the process. The reason CO2 does not deplete beyond 0.018% (180ppm) is because, under that level even plants cannot use the CO2 and plants start to struggle. at 0.005 (50ppm) they will not be able to suck the CO2 and starve till they die. And at 10ppm (0.001%) they will all die. Including microscopic, hardy ones. Long before it reaches 0.0%.Photograph courtesy Craig Idso as seen in the picture.Currently, in the atmospheric environment, only the lowest possible amount is now present in the atmospheric air. All CO2 is trapped in the mantle and ocean floor. Releasing this back to atmosphere causes plants and algae to grow and cycle to continue. CO2 is a primordial element and found throughout the universe. e.g., it is a prime ingredient of comets.So, sequestration is bad. BAD.Oxygen is displaced from H2O and not from CO2. The CO2 forms the body mass or biomass of plants and animals, whereby, this is a net loss from the atmosphere. Not a gain!These same plants breathe O2 just like animals. So they are producing CO2 to maintain biomass. But the creation of biomass is so much that all growth of algae, plants and plankton displace much more CO2 than they ever breathe out (produce via respiration). This net loss of CO2 from the atmosphere is proportional to the addition of bio mass. Proportional to the creation of life.Much of this Carbon in the biomass sinks to the bottom of oceans and land, before they get a chance to become CO2, and this is a net loss of Carbon and CO2. This causes a reduction in biomass and biodiversity, over time.So the atmosphere is continually depleting and dying if it were not for v6 engines and Chinese coal plants.CO2 maintains the oceanic ‘hardness’ or alkalinity. Dissolved CO2 allows for algae to grow causing a bloom and a subsequent food chain supporting the largest animals on our planet. The polar ice melts and sinks causing upwelling of trapped CO2 that causes algal or plankton bloom and this melting of ice in the poles are good for the upwelling to happen.Why is there a picture of my wife holding some cakes she made? It is almost entirely made of SOLIDIFIED CO2. That is why! Well, the smart readers might have observed that I am not just talking about the cakes but also my wife, even the cotton top is wearing, is all solidified CO2. In our planetary history, the abundance of CO2 has always determined the abundance of biodiversity and biomass density. There has been the largest number of living things during the times of most prolific availability of CO2 in the atmosphere.CO2, light, O2, H2O are the four fundamental elements of life. Carbon Di Oxide is therefore the source of life itself and here are the uses of CO2:Fondant cakes, well, all cakes, in fact, ALL food, actually, all biomass is fixed from CO2 mostly in the Calvin cycle with sunlight (or other process used by some bacteria using energy gradients such as geological heat)·Our supermarkets and food industry would struggle without CO2 canisters. Some of the food freshness and preservation would be hard to implement.Bread will be ‘flat’ :)My aquarium would struggle without CO2 canister based calcium reactor, I use it to dissolve aragonite (dead corals) to feed calcium to live bony corals in it.Some others use CO2 to increase crop yield using hydroponicsyet others with freshwater aquariums use CO2 for aquatic plant growthCoke and Pepsi would be quite flat. Club soda will be water.All Plants around the world are currently experiencing a depletion of their primary nutrient with less then 400 ppm of CO2An increase in CO2 would double the growth rate of plants and probably increase rainfall around the world.Plants are themselves responsible for the depletion of CO2.CO2 is useful for putting out fires.Higher atmospheric CO2 will decrease forest fires and make forests greener and denserCO2 can be used to aid manufacture of cementYou can’t make dry ice without it!CO2 gas is useful to pump crude oil upCO2 acts like a hormone in human bodysome 10% of humans are deficient in CO2 !!!This is what the yoga of pranayama tries to do, increase CO2 in cellsHumans can adapt up to 5% (50,000ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere!!Humans in higher CO2 atmosphere might grow bigger and live longer!CO2 build up is human trigger for breathing and not O2 need!!Not having enough CO2 causes blood vessels to constrict and will force you to take aspirin. Well all you need to do is breathe less!!! Increased levels of CO2 in the blood will relax blood vessels and restore circulation. (This is the point of breathing into a paper bag when someone has a panic attack!)It is CO2 that tells haemoglobin to release the O2 to the cell or tissue and not the O2 itself, so a depletion of CO2 inhibits the release of O2So not having enough CO2 in your body actually causes your body and brain to starveCarbon di Oxide is extremely important for human health! I do not have a clue why doctors do not tell you that!!!In medicine, Meduna Mix, up to 5% carbon dioxide (130 times atmospheric concentration) is added to oxygen for stimulation of breathing after apnea and to stabilize the O2/CO2 balance in blood.Oxygen canisters with up to 50% Carbon dioxide is used as an inhalable gas known as carbogen, has medical and research uses. Carbogen was used in “psychedelic psychotherapy” where users inhaling it experienced visions, psychedelic experiences, culminating in deep relaxation afterwards. Carbogen - WikipediaCO2 maintains the oceanic balance. Forms ionic balance creating life. Yes more CO2 is better for corals. Not the other way around!CO2 is the primary ingredient of ALL human food. All cakes. All biscuits.Fatty acid biosynthesis requires CO2 and CO2 derived bi-carbonatesPharmaceutical industry and medicines use both liquid and gaseous CO2 in various industrial processes, e.g., Kolbe-Schmitt processValuable inert gasCO2 is used on slides in scanning electron microscopePractical use as a refrigerantValuable coolant in nuclear reactorsCO2 can be used to control Ph in aquariums and swimming poolsSupercritical CO2, liquid CO2 is used as a solvent. Liquid CO2 is good solvent for lipophilic (fat-dissolving) organic compoundsPyruvate carboxylase requiring bacteria fix CO2 in a different way to photosynthesis (Calvin cycle)CO2 is used as a safe pesticide and insecticide in some applicationsCO2 is used in decaffeinating coffee beansCheap to put in canisters, liquifies at 60 bar at room temperature and a lot can be put in a canisterMitochondria requires CO2 and carbonates to functionSo ATP cycle itself requires CO2Most snails and corals would be shamefully naked without their shells which has its basis in dissolved CO2 or carbonate hardness. Entire islands would not have existed. Not even the Sphinx in Egypt which is entirely made of carbonates.Thanks for reading********************As for the oceans: There is nothing to worry. CO2 dissolving is good. We only do our oceans a favour by adding what little CO2 we can into the atmosphere and thereby into the surface waters. This enters the food chain. Upwelling in oceans brings more CO2 from the depths to surface waters. This gives photosynthesis a chance to fix all that into food.Look at my personal fishtank. I pump CO2 into it.Yet there are government funded documentaries claiming CO2 kills corals!?!Why!!?!!Ceteris paribus, more CO2 >>more algae in oceans >>more fish >>more biodiversity and density >>better for humans.Ceteris paribus, more CO2 >>more plants and forest growth >>more rain >>more crops and more food >>better for humans.Ceteris paribus, more CO2 >> more polar ice melt >>more upwelling of the oceans >> more planktons >>more fish >> more food and warmth for humans.Ceteris paribus, more CO2 means less forest fires.Ceteris Paribus, more CO2 >>more carbonate hardness in oceans >>more alkalinity >>more corals >>more shelled animals and fish >> more biodiversity >>better for humans.At an annual average of 400 ppmv, CO2 is historically extremely low today. The richest periods in Earth’s history has always been when the CO2 is higher. In fact, animals have gotten smaller as the amount of CO2 has decreased. When the atmospheric CO2 is higher, the animal mass seems to increase. When there is less oxidative stress inside tissues, the animals and trees grew huge, for example during the cretaceous period.Note: Climates are cyclic and will always remain cyclic. This is primarily the result of having a dynamic sun and a dynamic system as a whole.If we have more Oxygen in our atmosphere (ceteris paribus) then that will be bad for us! If we have more CO2 in our atmosphere then it will be good and healthier for us!CO2 = results in carbon based life, i.e., us humans.In the past only a falling comet or intense volcanic activity, once in tens of thousands of years as a chance event resulted in delivering precious CO2 to our atmosphere, kickstarting plant diversity and boosting life, periodically. If human activity can pump CO2 into the atmosphere boosting plant growth and earth’s life in this manner, then it is a blessing.Ice melting is an important contributor to oceanic upwelling. CO2 has a way of settling in the bottom of the sea. CO2 availability at surface water where sunlight is maximum is key and this is the source of all life.CO2⇣ + H2O → CO3H2 ⇌ (CO3)2- + 2H+water contains, CaCO3 (solid) ⇌ Ca2+ + (CO3)2-and(CO3)2- + 2H+ ⇌ CO3H2 → CO2⇡+ H2O (works both ways)along withCa(HCO3)2 <--> Ca++ + 2 (HCO3--)andCa(OH)2 + 2CO2 <--> CaCO3 + H2Oand(H+) + HCO3- (Bicarbonate) + Ca(OH)2 <-->2 H2O + CaCO3 !!!El Niño is a condition where surface waters lack CO2 and becomes an Oxygen rich desert.So in a nutshell: the acidity introduced by CO2 is also resulting in the alkalinity hardness of water giving life its beginning. The free proton (Hydrogen ion) misidentified as creating acidity actually does not create acidity because of the overall carbonate hardness that gets introduced as a result. Moreover, this proton is critical for planktonic photosynthesis. So without this CO2 brought to the surface, there is no hardness (alkalinity) that is brought up. The arctic sea is the least fertile when there is no melt.When the ice breaks up and melts this causes upwelling which causes plankton bloom supporting the largest biomass when it happens.No ice melt = no whales.Don’t you like whales?Thanks for reading,Dee Francis Padamadan.This new religion is a less pro-human religion than the ones we are replacing. I know everyone hates the old religions. The amount of anti Christian rhetoric is surprising. Judaeo-christian beliefs were once foundational to our society. Yes, if you feel judaism is old fashioned and you want a new religion based on science, nothing, absolutely nothing new is achieved. You still have the same head scratching business of deciding which science department department receives how much funding. Science does not act in the domain of rank-ordering the meanings of values, or value-systems. The meanings and relative importance of various aspects of life is not any clearer. Are old people less valuable? Is abortion alright? Science often replaces older religions with a newer religion which is less capable of answering fundamental questions about the value of, or the transcendence of, human life. Do you want to adopt a religion where you are transcendent individual with a divine spark? Or… Do you want to adopt a NEW religion where you are an insignificant vermin?Thanks again for reading.I get comments saying that my tank is not indicative of the oceans and the science of MY fish tank is different from the science of the universities and the science of the oceans! Hmmmmm… what do you want me to say to that?Thanks yet again for the opportunity to converse.