How to Build a Star Trek Culture to Generate the Age of Infinite w/ Brent Ziarnick #57

Hello, everyone. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the Age of Infinite. Throughout history, we've seen humanity undergo transformational shifts that are so impactful, they define entire ages. Just recently, we lived through the information age, and what an incredible journey it's been. Now think about this. You could be right now entering into the mist of another monumental shift, the transition to the age of infinite.

We're talking about an age that transcends the concepts of scarcity and abundance. It introduces a lifestyle rich with infinite possibilities, enabled by a new paradigm that links the moon and the earth together. We call this term Mearth. This synergy will create a new ecosystem and economic model, propelling us into an era of infinite possibilities. It does sound like a plot for an extraordinary sci fi story. Doesn't it? But this is a story you'll see unfold in your lifetime.

Now this podcast is brought to you by the Project Moonat Foundation. We look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn the innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking from the endeavor back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species.

If you're looking for more information, you could visit our website at projectmoonhot.org where you can check out our 40 year plan, an incredible new design. If you've not seen it yet, I would suggest you go there. You could click on the tab for the work that we're engaged in so you could see the type of activities we're engaged in and so much more along with all the other podcasts that have been produced with the bios and backgrounds. We are a nonprofit.

So if you're if you're there, consider making a donation by clicking the button in the top right hand corner. Let's dive into the podcast now. Okay. The title of this is is how to build a Star Trek culture to generate the age of infinite. Oh my god. Wow. That's a big one. So today, we have with us Brent Czarneck. How are you, Brent? Very good. How are you? I'm I'm great. I'm looking forward to this. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. Nope. Well, we're looking forward again.

So as always, we do a very brief bio for everybody. Brent is a space power theorist. I don't even know what that is. So that's we wanna find out a little bit about that. But the senior fellow at defense studies at the American Foreign Policy Council and a visiting associate professor in the US Space Force, in the US Space Force Professional Military Education Program at John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. That's a mouthful.

He's an author and a retired lieutenant colonel in the US Air Force and a reserve officer. This little section I'm going to add right now for everybody who's listening is very important. People believe that I have heard or know the topic and the direction of this program. Very quickly, I do not know anything about where we're going with this topic. So this is the way it works. We select a guest or a guest has been selected for us or are referred to us. Brent was referred to us.

The guest watches the videos about Project Moon Nut, learns a little bit about us. We create a title of the program. In Brent's case, it probably took us about an hour. We create a title for the program. We then disappear from one another. I have not seen anything. I don't know where he's gonna go. I don't know the direction of it, and his job is to put together an outline. This is the first time since that date of creating the title that we're getting together.

I don't know where this program's going to go. So it's not that I know it in advance. That said, Brent, do you have a set of bullet points or an outline for us to follow? I do. Okay. Can you give it to us? Well, I have about 6 points I would like to go, through. They're Give it to me one at a time so I can write them down.

Yeah. They they definitely I I'm trying to get them to build up on each other, but the first point I just wanna try to get across is that, really, if I start thinking about an age of infinite or No. No. Just just give me the give me the line. What's the outline line? Well, the the Star Trek universe universe reflects an age of infinite very well in a, you know, in a fiction universe that a lot of people can Wait. Wait. Wait. No. I need I need the outline. So what the Star Trek universe what?

What is the outline? A bullet point. It reflects the age of infinite very well in Okay. Reflects the age of infinite. Okay. What's the next one? And then central to the Star Trek universe is the importance of starfleet. Okay. Importance of starfleet. What's the next one? So developing organizations sympathetic to social movements is important. Okay. Developing organizations that are, organizations to social movements. Okay. Next one.

And then I would argue that the US Space Force can be an important ally to Project Moon Hut goals because they overlap a great deal. Oh, go okay. And number 5? The way it would it would do that, as I see it, would be a potential avenue for young people to join the space professional community, building your avatars in your language. Okay. I'm gonna put it as avenues to join the community. And what's the last one?

Well, I guess I've got one other, sub bullet here, but, the other one is the Space Force can can translate Boone Hunt goals into enlightened self interest in national defense. And then, the last one is that, important Space Force cultural leaders, especially in my research, have expressed visions for the Space Force that are very, very close to Project Moon Hide goals. Okay. I'm gonna call it visions alignment with Foundation and Space Force. Okay. So let's start with number 1.

The Star Trek universe reflects the age of infinite. Help me understand this. Well, just a little bit about my background is I watched a lot of Star Trek as a kid. You know? And if you see what I've done, it it doesn't it's not that hard to see. But, it's if you look at it, it reflects a future. A lot of people talk about it. It's a future that people would like to be in. Right? Okay. And and obviously you want to be in it. Well, of course, right?

Okay. A lot of people say, hey, it's because I saw this show in the sixties. That's why I joined NASA. That's why I became an astronaut. That's why I wanted to be a rocket scientist. And that would reflect its power. But why do people wanna show up in a Star Trek universe? It's because it really is an age of infinite, you know. The big selling point is that it was a utopian society that nonetheless felt like it could be real. You know, they, earth has settled its differences.

It's, you know, eliminated poverty, eliminated disease, you know, eliminated war, even though there's a lot of action in the series. Right? But, But it's But there are always a story behind the conflicts. Sure. Sure. And the conflicts really don't happen among humans. It's among the Federation and some, you know, rubber suited bad guy of the week. Right? Or just Isn't that supposed to also represent the bad guys of unearth? The original? Yeah. So, yes. Go ahead.

Well, if if you want to, what I like about your Project Moon Hunt is that you try to be, you know, practical. Right? So there's, it's one thing to try to say, hey, this is the future I want. And then there's, it's totally different and a lot harder to try to figure out how you get from here to there. And, quite honestly, if Project Moon Hut is a success, it will make that Star Trek universe so much closer to reality that, more and more people will start to see it as, you know, a reality.

So So so wait. I I'm I'm reading between lines, and please take it as just that. You've watched a bunch of the videos. You've got you've got a sense of what we're working on. But as you said, if if we get well, Project Moon Hot will do it. So you believe based upon what you've seen, which is a small tiny segment of what we've been working on, you see that potential future based upon the plans that we have. Is that what you're kind of getting across? Oh, absolutely. Okay. I didn't know that.

I don't know. I mean, you and I haven't spoken. So I don't know if Yeah. You you've you've watched the videos and it did something to you. You can see a connection. Oh, yeah. And it's, it's a workable plan that is, you know, it's well, you know, I don't I don't wanna, you know, you know, flatter you too much, but it's one of those things where a lot of people can say, hey. I would love to see this future, but this is the steps that we have to take.

And Project Moon Hut's, you know, steps, the way I saw it, you know, the the different phases of development of the moon for for economic purposes rather than just science or exploration, you know, really trying to bring benefits to Earth, right, to solve some of the big issues. What what do you call them? The, the mega challenges? The the 6 mega challenges. Yes. Yeah. The 6 mega challenges. Those are the mega challenges that, you know, Star Trek essentially solves.

And that's why they're Utopian. Right? I mean, that's I had never tied that together in my head at all. That the Star Trek what they had solved to get there were the challenges that we have defined as the 6 mega challenges. We're basically, so climate change, mass extinction, ecosystems collapses, which is more environmental and conditions. And then there's the human side of it, which is displacement, unrest, and explosive impact from things that humans do that are over the top.

So that's interesting. I never tied those 2 together in that to Star Trek. That's that's kinda no. I'm glad you said it. I'm I'm if if you if you saw my body language, which you can't, my body language is well. I that's a great observation. Okay? Well, thank you. Alright. Let's try not to just let me not blow it here in the rest of the day. You're you're the the thing that I the Star Trek reflects the age of infinite. So can you get a little bit more specific on you're doing it some.

You see the age. You see the real, the Earth differences, the war and conflict. What else do you see that is tied to that, which is your Star Trek y, it sounds like it. What else did you see? Well, if you want to go over it, I mean, what is you know, it starts to get a little bit more, you know, idealistic going from the original series to the next generation.

But, you know, at least the culture of the federation is, you know, money is mostly I mean, it's not it hasn't disappeared, but it's lost its centrality to, to life. Mostly because everyone has access to what they need to live.

So as you go up, you know, Maslow's hierarchy, you know, the the real excitement about the Star Trek future is that people get to, you know, improve themselves to the best of their, you know, human ability, without regard for, you know, what we would consider very serious economic constraints. Right? So, the infinite is infinite possibilities for the for each individual to, you know, of you know, to evolve into their their best, you know, possible, state. Right?

They're either best possible person. And, that is such an optimistic message, you know, for people to realize that, you know, or to see that the future could be much better than anyone can possibly imagine, you know. But you do that through hard work and eliminating, you know, the age of, you know, scarcity and even going beyond the age of abundance. Right? That's what you said in your intro. You know, we're trying to go even more than abundance.

And, you know, most people some people would consider that a fantasy, But then other people that look into it can can see that space and what, you know, what you call Mearth, I might consider cislunar space from a military perspective. Yeah. I just I don't I I'm not so smart. So I just call them. It's it's, they're they're they're synonymous for the most part. They may be The reason what Mearth is something a 9 year old can get, a 12 year old can get, a 20 year old.

But when you talk cislunar or a lunar or a regala, when you those words are used, we've got 8,000,000,000 people on this planet. It's very difficult for people to get their mind around things such as cislunar and lunar. They have to get educated. We call it the moon. I mean, why don't we just call it the moon?

So when you are talking to a 9th grader, an 8th grader, a 15 someone who's in university and you said we're talking about the geography of Mearth, it's easily understood moon and earth and that whole geography. So that's why it's Mearth. Oh, that's good. And I appreciate that. In sort of the sterile bureaucratic military mind, we have to do something that seems a little bit more, you know, it you can't talk about the moon. You have to talk about cislunar space.

You know, for a tongue in cheek example, it's like you can't really talk about UFOs. You have to talk about unidentified aerial phenomenon now. Right? Oh, really? Okay. Well, you know, that's, it's it's just it comes up every now and then. It's funny. But, you know, we have to pretend we're smarter than we are, so we come up with 30 simple words. And acronyms. Like, you have to be the 13th warrior to talk with space people. And that's one of the challenges I had. I am not a space person.

I I do look up sometimes. My background is sciences. But after doing this for 8 years, I still don't I don't get excited. I mean, I Star Trek, Battlestar, Galactica, Star Wars. I love all those. But when someone's trying to communicate with me about this new future, if I have to have a physics degree to understand it, which I have physics in my background, but I I don't know about the trajectories of the moon and how things align and how there's Lagrange points. You have to know a lot.

And you if we wanna get the world to rethink where we live, it's easy to say we live within Mearth. And then if someone wants to delve into it, that's the scientific side. We call it a cell phone, But it's actually not a I mean, there's a more technical term for a a mobile phone. Making things easy just helps rapid transformation of information. At least that's what I think. No. I think you're absolutely right.

That's very good. So I'm I'm gonna I'm going to help try to help you with something if it's okay with you on one area. The Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Do you know where that came from? I did at one point, but probably not, to where I could name chapter and verse at the moment. Okay. This guy by the name of Maslow wrote a paper, and a, a speaker consultant business person in the United States took it and formed it into the pyramid.

He then said, as you go up the pyramid, you become more self actualized. Maslow didn't like what he produced. It was not accurate. But yet he was being asked to speak in making money. Before he died, he wrote another paper that kind of debunked what was being said. Because Maslow says that once you take care of your food, once you take care of all different levels, you can become a higher self of you. But that means, according to even Maslow, that you can't be self actualized if you're poor.

You can't be self actualized if you don't have all of your needs met. And I've met amazing people, I know you have too, that don't have all their needs met and they're still wonderful amazing human beings. So the actual pyramid in Maslow's eye did not exist, but it was a marketing phenomenon. And everybody believes that it's true. But if you think about it for a moment, you could be self actualized and be starving. No. That's an interesting point, you know.

And especially as an academic, it's like, hey, someone taking your idea and running with it in a direction you never wanted it to go. Well, welcome to, welcome to marketing. Right? Yeah. And so that's where in terms of our world now take that with what you've learned about what what you've been researching and working on for today and ask yourself, does that kind of mean that we have to have our plans build plans that are a little bit different?

Because we don't have to make them all self actualized. We just have to make them who they are. Well, you know, maybe the, maybe ultimately what we're looking at is the freedom to make, you know, the the decisions that you would like without worrying about anything else. You know, if someone's are you know, might be starving or or something like that, but it doesn't bother them as much to where they can do other things anyway or in spite of these roadblocks. That might be more important.

Yeah. But even if they can overcome a roadblock, it's probably better. Maybe. You know, I guess you could get into the philosophical points of, hey, do we need to have adversity in order to grow? You know, if you take down the barriers as much as you can, that might be in itself a a general good thing regardless of anything else, you know, a good in and of itself. Right? But, that's that's an interesting thing to think about.

Yeah. When I learned it, I was I sat back and I said to myself when I read a little bit about it, I said, it's absolutely right. You meet people who don't have a lot of money, and they're wise as can be. And they're happy, and they've got all of those pieces. So our world that's why there's 6 mega challenges instead of the 17 SDGs or the millennial goals or all of those that are kind of extraneous to us. We have to solve some of the basic or address some of the challenges on earth.

So what else with the Star Trek universe in the age of infinite did you parallel? Well, you know, the the economic development side is is obvious. I mean, there was a book a while back. I guess you sent me a link, but I remember, a book that I read called Economics in Star Trek, which Oh. You know, started talking about, you know, when you're not, you know, what happens to humanity when you don't have to worry about scarcity.

As as much as I tend to think that there will always be some kind of scarcity, if only about immediate time, you can only do one thing at a time, at least at the moment. Right? Mhmm. But, it allows when when you can have a serious economist talk about, you know, the end of scarcity, that opens up a whole lot of new pathways for thinking and for possibilities. You know, it it goes from a very small potential you know, field of potential futures to a very large one.

So it might not be infinite, but it's getting a lot closer. So, the economics of Star Trek is is very much a big deal. The, the idea of how people relate to each other is also very important to where we don't necessarily see, you know, a person walking across the street as a threat to Mhmm.

You know, safety or security or financial, you know, or like resource, you know, sustainability, you know, your, your lifestyle and whatnot to where we can relate to other people much more on a, from a sense of security, I suppose. And, you know, and then just the concept of the the infinite frontier. Right? I mean, I guess in Star Trek, they call space the final frontier, but it goes on for a long time.

So if anyone wants to get out and explore, you know, there's always gonna be another place to go. Whereas on Earth, perhaps right now, you know, there's not really a whole lot of new uncharted territories or or or that where you can you can head to the frontier. Right? Yeah. I guess there's the deep ocean, but, you know, that that in a lot of ways is more difficult than even outer space.

I I had a guy on yesterday that we're talking to about a possible podcast, but he's not going to do one because we ended up speaking for 2 and a half hours. He was one of the partners in the, submersible that collapsed. Whatever you've read, whatever you've heard, I I heard some different stories too from him. But he said that the ocean is still still so completely unmapped, understood. We don't have data for so much of the oceans. It's incredible.

And then one of our teammates once said, if you try to build at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, it would be more difficult than building on the moon. Oh, yeah. And by a lot. But and that's what the the guy agreed. He said, absolutely. And one of the things we use in Project Moon Hut is we say the he was we were talking about this topic, and he said, David, you look at you look at the moon as like the 8th continent.

And because we were talking about building the Sahara Desert, building in the Amazon, building in Antarctica are all challenging. And building on the moon to me, because I'm not a space I'm not in love with the moon. I'm in I'm in love with the changes we can create, is he said, you look at the moon as the 8th continent. It's a it's a logistics. And to me, it's a logistics challenge. How do we get there? And then how do we build? That's it. You know, harsh conditions in Antarctica.

Harsh conditions in, the Sahara Desert. So it's an 8th continent. And that means that the the world, the opportunities for people to rethink possibilities, infinite possibilities within Mearth, is extremely powerful because it gives a new construct. Oh, absolutely. You know, a space enthusiast has said a lot. It's like, hey, as soon as people realize that space isn't unique, it's just another place to go with a different set of, you know, engineering specs you have to have to get there.

You know, the possibilities open up an awful lot, and you're absolutely right. You know, as soon as we get I always said that, you know, we're we're gonna know when space arrives, when you can have an astronaut that is a, you know, a 4 year staff sergeant, you know, in the space force and I'm I'm not saying this because, you know, I like the military. That's just how I relate it to it at the moment. You know, if you can get a guy that says, hey. I'd like to go into space.

And he did okay in high school, but he graduated reasonably fit, and, you know, a a man or a woman, doesn't matter, you know, and are able to get out there just because that's what they would like to do, and you don't have to be a superhuman to get there, we've arrived. Or at least we've gotten far more into the age of infinite than we were before. So so here's a way to change it a little bit. They're not gonna be astronauts. I mean, you think about it.

When the white brothers started flying, they they were pilots. And then eventually, we get on a plane. You and I get on a plane. We're not pilots. Nope. Okay. We're we're passengers. We're not a pilot. I'm who I am. You you are a a professor at a university, associate professor at a university. I'm who I am, but I'm not a pilot no matter how hard I try. The astronaut to me is the person who manage, creates, evolved, and going out like a like a the person who works on a ship is the sailor.

Mhmm. But the passengers are not. So we can't call them astronauts if you don't do anything. And we but are they cosmonauts? Are they taikonauts? What's the word? So we think they should be called spacers. You get a certification. Like, I've got a certification that I can go down into the ocean. I can I mean, I could scuba dive? I've got my scuba license. Well, what if you just had to get a spacer license? You're certified to go up. You know about microgravity. You know about these things.

You know about how to eat or whatever it may be. And so now instead of the astronaut is the person flying the machine or managing and taking care of it. But the people who get on the ship, like your guy you're talking about, the staff sergeant, he's a spacer. He's qualified to work in space. He's got the he's got the skill sets. Hey. I I completely agree with that. That's actually what I wanted to call the, Space Force personnel, you know, spacers. Ultimately, it went to Guardian, which Yeah.

Also has some positive connotations, which I don't have a problem with at all. But, I'm glad that you thought that because it reinforces the fact that I was you know, I had a good argument, doggone it. Yeah. Yeah. And and now you have a you have another argument when you're talking to people that reinforces that the challenge is there was no Project Moon Hut when you were doing it. Now you can see the 4 phases. Yep. So I I do I do wanna circle back. Did you read this book?

Because I have not, Economic Development in Star Trek. Did you read it? I did. This was a a while back, and, probably, gosh, 3 years ago now. I I can't recall an awful lot of it other than the fact that, you know, he definitely pushed abundance in in a big way and how it was, you know, how it would psychologically adjust, human societies, which is which is in a broad perspective an economic, concern. Now I started out my my academic career as an engineer.

So as soon as he started saying, well, we can do this and this and this, it's like, alright, but I want to see maybe not the schematics, but I want to see the idea. Where's the raw material that we go from here to there? Because one of the things that interested me, very early on was, the resources available in, what the planetary scientists back in the nineties called near earth space, right?

The moon, the inner, you know, the asteroids that are around that orbit earth, you know, other things like that. So I wanted I was hoping to get a little bit more, okay, this is how many tons of resources are out there that we can get to that's easier to get to than, than the moon, you know, like like an engineer, like an astronautical engineer. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, he was a little bit more philosophical and it was interesting, his philosophical ideas.

But as you can maybe tell, I don't recall a whole lot of it. Oh, it's it's interesting because you brought up the other word as, and it's a word that somewhat on our team will laugh. There there is no plan for much of beyond Earth. It is yada yada yada yada yada save Earth. And you need the plan to get there. That's why we're only 40 years. Uh-huh. We're 40 years because that's a reasonable timeline.

And it there are things that we have, the the platform that we're working on, the tech transfer component, the immersive ARVR digital twin haptics 3 d 40, and then the 4 phases of the moon hut actually create a plan. And that's when I the reason I asked about the book is it I I'm always missing the there's a there's a it's kinda like, you know, when you draw a line, you put the 2 hash marks to say that there's a gap in between. It's like, okay. We do this and then we get that.

So I wanted to know if this economics person and we have an economics paper on our website, but we're having another economics paper being written on Mearth. So it's interesting that you didn't have much that you could recall. Well, I wouldn't say that it really drew the line from here to there or, to use the the South Park reference, you know, collect underpants then question mark then profit. Right? Right. But You just Sorry. I I had to get No. No. I love it. I love it because I like okay.

I never would have used that, but it's a good one. I I would say if you were ever going to look from a maybe not an engineering point of view, but as a a layman's guide to try to figure out how we can go from point a to point b, a book that really meant a lot to me when I read it, in the mid nineties was Mining the Sky by John Lewis. That was a great book.

And I am trying to find the the Star Trek book here for you just so I can, you know, plug it, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to find it here all that quick. And Oh, we could pull it up on Amazon. It would take a second if you wanted to. Yeah. The the challenge and so I I love the things that you said about the correlation. And and, again, I I I know you're not trying to you're not patting us on the back. I I want to know. So let's get on to this the the next point.

I think we've kinda covered this. Let's get on to the next point. The importance of starfleet. What did you mean by that? So this is essentially a connecting bullet from how do we go from the Star Trek future to trying to come up with the organization that might allow a Star Trek future to to flourish. Right?

And again, this is reflecting my personality because apparently, when I was younger and I had that 10 minutes where whatever I saw in the next 10 minutes was going to dictate what I was gonna do for the rest of my life, I saw Star Trek 2. So, you know, the, I think I wanted to join the military about when I saw that, the space military in general. So Star Fleet always seemed to me like a fun organization to join. Right?

But, and it was part of the the writing of of Star Trek itself, not that Star Fleet was, like some people say, you know, the the fascist military of a, of a nondemocratic utopian fascist society. I don't think that's it at all. It's just a military or pseudo military show and set in space. But even though, you know, Star Trek isn't Star Fleet, the Star Fleet had a lot of, of input and, and was a major organization in allowing that future to happen.

So, if you're going to try to build a future, you wanna try to build parallels that you can build today that will eventually emerge as what you want it to in the future. So, my initial thought when I wanted to figure out what to do with my life was join the Air Force because it was close it was about as close to a space military as we had in the, you know, the late nineties and early 2000s when I joined up. And they really did have Air Force Space Command.

Or if I went pilot, which I didn't because I'm left handed, which means I can't fly worth a darn. Real oh, because everything is is right handed. Yeah. The pointing to, the pointing nose jets are right handers, so that's okay. Yeah. My my my father was a was a dentist, and we went to dental school. They had a 100 seats, 100 chairs, one seat for lefties. So he made the choice to do dentistry right handed. Oh, I see.

And he and he learned in right handed chairs, so he didn't have to wait for that one chair. Oh, interesting. Well, you know, just to to get back into it though, it's, I ended up joining Air Force Space Command because that was a space military. And that has emerged now as the US Space Force.

And, that connectivity, if you, assume that, you know, central to the Star Trek universe is the importance of starfleet as a symbol of that future and sort of the heroic, you know, a heroic organization in there. Starfleet is probably important, for, if you can build starfleet now, you can help build, you know, the star trek future, you know, get us on the path to building that Star Trek universe. And that's really all that I had for that second bullet.

No. But but I I wanna I I wanna dig a little deeper here because I'm gonna make a statement. I'd like to hear your response to this. I never looked at Starfleet as military. I always looked at it as a bunch of people who decided to make a choice to go out into the universe. They do do protection, but they're also meeting because it's strange new worlds and encounters and and collaboration. I never until just now when you're saying it, you're like, wow. I never even looked at it that way.

I never saw it like that Oh. At all. Yeah. And, you know, some people have a, you know, a negative you know, they don't want to think that, you know, Star Fleet is military. So they bend over backwards to try to say no. No. At most, it's paramilitary and and stuff like that. I would No. I I don't even see it as parallel maritime. I'm thinking it sounds exciting. You wanna go to a distant place. You need a ship. You need to be on it, and you're going to go.

And there's commands that have to be done in order to get there to be you know, the people running the ship. The the people on the in the bridge have to manage it, but I never saw it that way. Well, in, you know, in a lot of ways, that's probably a good thing because you're looking at, you know, this group of people that are actually out there trying to, you know, help people in, you know, what what is it, you know, sort of exploration, science and, defense diplomacy, that kind of stuff.

Defense is there, but it's not really the number one thing and you're only sort of pressed into service when when a bad guy is trying to come and and beat you. Yeah. As opposed to maybe today's military where we're, you know, we sort of see ourselves as a, you know, an agent of, you know, national will or, you know, an instrument of national power. Right? Where, you know, it's it's it's just we're we're here to kill people and break things to hear some say it. Right?

And Star Fleet was never talked about There's no saluting. There's there's no marching in order. You don't see people getting into lines and and standing at attention, waiting for the captain to give their responses. You don't have I mean, there's so many things missing from Star Fleet that I mean, if you're on a boat, if you're on a a cruise liner and the captain walks by, you would say, hello, captain or I captain or whatever they would say. You'd you'd respect the role.

But I don't think of the captain as captain of the ship. He's the guy running he's taking care of the ship. No. That's true. But then let me let me turn it around on you. You know, who has the monopoly of violence in, in the in the Star Trek universe for the Federation? Well, that's in Star Fleet. You know, a captain can order you to your death. So heaven forbid if you're a red shirt. Right? Which Oh, hey. The captain can order you.

Okay. You know Maybe I'm watching I don't I maybe maybe I've I got rosy eyes. I you know, I've just if you assume that, you know, no matter what, even in a an age of infinite, there is going to be, some expression of, of the warrior, I guess. Yeah. We would love to do an enlightened warrior, but, that's that's pretty much when I say military. That's that's what I mean, you know. But it's so in my mind, it's so far away from that Oh, yeah.

That I don't I I I don't think of the captain putting anybody to death by sending them out. I do think that there are conflicts out there, for example, the klingons and how they have to interact with them, But I don't see and they have to they have to rise to the occasion. I don't know how many people are on a Star Trek, on a, on a not not vessel. Star Trek vessel. Yeah. I don't know how many there are, but let's say there's a 200 or 300. We don't see a lot of their engagement.

But I'm thinking they're going about their day. They're dating people. They might get married. You don't hear children. You don't hear any children. So I guess that's a no no on the on the flights. Well, I did not hear you. Generation you did. But that's okay. So, yeah, it's it's interesting that you took it in that direction. That's why I just thought if you heard that I never had I didn't think about it that way. I just thought of it as this is safety. It's what you need.

There's a semblance of order. But you're right. There are no passengers on the enterprise. Like, you don't have people doing tourism. No. And, you know, you'd be surprised how much this is actually a, an an argument that comes up in real life. Like, you know, I've done a lot of history reading on trying to figure out the space force idea, and a lot of it goes to Robert Heinlein, which will, you know, it's later on in the bullets, but I'm not going to try to give too much away.

But he he, you know, Heinlein, big time science fiction writer, he wanted to be an army officer and then ultimately decided to go to the Naval Academy and was a naval officer for a long time until or, you know, for a few years, but then he got tuberculosis and got medically retired. So he had to do this writing thing to pay the bills.

But, he I think he gives the the template for what other people would try to grab and take as something like Star Fleet in his, juvenile book Space Cadet from 1948.

And, he goes out of his way to explain that the space patrol is a military organization but is has a broader enlightened self interest on how they're supposed to keep the peace by, keeping everyone safe, by being able to rescue people, by, but also respecting all sentient life in the solar system, you know, because there's, you know, in his future, there's Venetians and Martians and some of them are human, but but there there are other sentient species out there.

And then he says, well More like the more like the expanse. You have people living in different places. Well, except for for the Venusians or actual aliens. But Oh, okay. But the other thing is and it base it basically say, hey. If you wanna kill people and break things, you join the marines over there. You know? Okay. So it was it was interesting. But, so there's there's a lot to that.

And it goes to the space force even today where a lot of people, myself included, that were really enthusiastic, supporters of the Space Force and have been arguing about that for I for years didn't want a United States Space Force at all. We wanted a United States Space Guard patterned after the coast guard, which we argued was military but not war fighting. Okay. And that you know, but that's That's a there's a big difference there. I can understand that.

Yes. So but we can get into that a little bit later. But if you just Okay. No. That I I would like to get into that. So I guess the next one was the, the developing the organization and the social social movement and the needs for that. So where do we go here? So, this one is okay. Now let's take it from a, this argument from the, the Project Moon Hunt Gold's perspective. Right? You want to solve the mega challenges. Address. The challenges you can't solve for climate change, but address them.

Yes. Gotcha. Sorry. No. No. No. No. That's okay. This is learning. We're all I'm learning from you. You're learning from me. Well, as much as I'm an academic, I still tend to think simple and, you know, pretty much a hayseed. Go forgive me. But Okay. You know, but these these things, you know, in order to address and, you know, deal with the mega challenges, you have to sort of pattern yourself or at least accept the fact that, that these are challenges that need to be addressed. Right?

And they have to be maybe not forefront on everyone's mind at all times, but seen as something that's, you know, that that needs attention. Right? Mhmm. So these are challenges also that are that are global in nature. Yes. You know? And if you, you know, we can I think when we were first talking a little bit, we talked a little bit about the overview effect where, you know, some people argue and I think you had the actual person that came up with this whose name Frank White? Frank White.

Yep. Yes. Thank you. Yep. You know where he's like, hey, if you look from space to this big blue ball, you're changed. Well, maybe not.

But I would I would argue that there there probably does exist maybe a weak type of overview effect where if you're presented to, you know, earth as this marble, blue marble in a black sky, you have the you get a little bit more sensitivity to perhaps start looking at challenges as a global challenge rather than, you know, just whatever impacts your, you know, traditional sort of national security and stuff like that.

So, you know Across across the to to add to it, I think what I don't know if I said this. So let's, what I had said was there is the overview effect, the belief that when people go out into, beyond earth and they look back and they see their earth, they're going the big blue marble from the first time they had seen it, that they're going to have a different perspective. And, yes, at the first time that first picture came back, people went, wow.

But my argument was that has the world the world has changed, but has it become so much better because of that? And the kind of I'm gonna say the space, ecosystem says, well, that changes people. So I say, okay. There's been 570 people who've been above above earth. Have we become a better species? Are we taking care of the planet better? Would we communicate with other speech with other people around the world better? Are we more interconnected?

And so and almost everybody says, well, no. And I said, okay. So what's the magic number? Is it 5,000 people? Is that the number where we all change? Is it 50,000 people? And the challenge is it's not the number of people, and you can't fake it. You can't send a picture back. And I'm gonna be crude here. It's like well, I'll try not to be crude. It's like watching someone drive a car and driving a car. They're very different.

Well, seeing a picture of something and being up there are different, but we still haven't had that overview effect that changes our world in the way of the age of infinite and infinite possibilities. So the argument then is, what if instead of everybody having to experience this, what if it was a a global decree that any person who takes office in a country has to go up and take a look down once? Now there's 200 and some odd countries and territories. Might might might the world be different.

So some people will get up and say, I could dominate this. Some people would say, we really are one society. And there aren't multiple oceans. There's only one ocean. We only have one ocean. We just give it different names. So maybe if 200 and some odd people went away up to office and they're not going up every day, some people stay in office for a very long time, maybe the world would be different. Well But with Mearth with Mearth, we change that dynamic completely.

I believe it's possible to to to change that, that that attitude. And I would say that when you're dealing with, you know, whether or not space can actually give you more of a global, you know, consciousness or can will you start to look at Mearth rather than just your particular nation? We're dealing with probabilities, right?

And the below the more you put up there, like you said, you know, the more you're probably going to get people that are actually influenced to at least some degree by the overbook, which is a good thing. So what do we need to do? Well, we need to get everyone up there. That would be or as many people as possible up there. That requires the right technology, the right economics, and all that kind of stuff, building the MRF economy. Right?

I do want to ask you if you can, star something that to make sure that I return to this. But you said that someone will go up there and say and think that I can dominate this. Yep. One of our who I would consider a, you know, one of the, the secular saints of, you know, Space Force thinking, a person named Cynthia McKinley, addresses this specifically. But it's in my last bullet. So I want to get your opinion on her, on her charge to guardians as we go, as we get a little Okay. I got it.

I got it. I started. So we're good. We can cover that. That's interesting. And you know her, obviously, Cynthia, or have you just read Yes. You know? Or Okay. My point is if she's really good, let's get her on the program too. Oh, well, you know, I would, I would probably agree with you. Oh, yeah. Just make the introduction, and we'll take it from there. Okay. So where do you wanna go? Is there anything else with this social movement side and how valuable that is to move us forward?

Yeah. I would say the Space Force isn't something that is going to say, hey, Project Moon Hunt is our, is our is our load star, right, for our reason for being. But the, the Space Force can develop important allies and other, you know, fellows that can help along the way that see generally in the same direction and want to move there. So it moves into my other, you know, my next point where the space force can do a lot of things that can help build the Murph ecosystem.

And I would argue that it would probably be, you know, either in avatar development and then, maybe even steering the directions of countries. And I'm not just talking the US Space Force, but National Space Forces, you know, in general, can maybe help, their nations in a couple of ways towards a, you know, towards looking at the age of infinite because they see it as their job.

So, one of the interesting, commercials, recruiting commercials that the Space Force had when, they first stood up a couple of years ago, It was, very flowery, science fiction y sort of, and I really enjoyed it. And, the tagline was, you know, maybe your purpose on earth isn't on earth. Right? So it's like, oh, that's pretty cool. That means, you know, space is neat. But then you you have to think back. It's like, okay, but but you still don't know what that purpose is, you know.

Mhmm. It just means that you look at it from somewhere else. And, I would argue that space in general, has that ability to, well, I I will just straight out say that a lot of people think that the way that you solve or address a lot of the problems on earth is through space activity. And space activity has to help everybody. I mean, that's in the outer space treaty, that space is the province of all mankind.

And, if we, embrace that, you know, in a way that's realistic, that's not just idealistic but solves real problems, but in a very, you know, sort of positive way as opposed to someone saying this is mine and no one else can use it. That's a huge deal. And if the Space Force can develop a positive social message or at least embrace the positive social message of space, that would, by itself, independently help, Moon Hut's goals quite a bit.

But from a practical point of view, something that meant a lot to me when I started looking into it is that is the role historically, at least in the United States, although this is probably it's everywhere. The military has always been a way to take people that have no real prospects of joining a, you know, the industry or the community as you would say, through their own, you know, resources.

So it's amazing how many people that became leaders in ocean industries or in the merchant marine or in, you know, ocean activity in general to have joined the Navy first or the Coast Guard as kids or as, you know, young adults. Right? In air power and the air industry and the commercial aviation industry, you know, you've got people that are very important in the twenties and later like Charles Lindbergh, who crossed the Atlantic, right? How did he become a pilot? Well, he wasn't rich.

He joined the Army Air Corps as a reservist and became a pilot through military training. Juan Tripp, who people not a lot of people have heard of, but Juan Tripp is the person that, that developed Pan Am Airlines, which, you know, doesn't exist anymore but was, but pioneered international aviation international commercial aviation. How did he get his start? He was, a World War 1 bomber pilot in the Navy Reserve, an aviator.

Now he didn't make it to World War 1 before it ended, you know, and thank God that it ended. But it's, it's important that these people started out, that they really enjoyed aviation, but their father wasn't rich. Their father wasn't an engineer. They went into the military to develop their human capital, and then that human capital's return was almost infinite. You know, they they became heroes of the industry.

And space now is is in is finally at a spot where if you were if you were in high school now, but you don't have maybe the grades or you don't have the money to go to college, you can join the industry directly now by joining the US Space Force as a as an enlisted person. And that didn't used to be the case because, a few years ago, I would argue it's like, hey, if you were a reasonably bright kid, who did you wanna join?

What organization did you wanna join if you were going to get into the space industry? I'm just asking. What would Yeah. And I I I'm going through my mind. My best friend growing up became a marine, a presidential guard in the marine. And if I'm looking at my other friends, another one went to West Point. Oh. Another one went into the navy. If I look at a bunch of my best friends growing up, they they all went into military services.

Well, it's it it's a it is sort of interesting how, a lot of there's a lot of history behind, you know, the military academies, you know, Navy, Army, Air Force, you know, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine, all that kind of stuff, is an avenue for, you know, middle class folk to become, you know, to get a good education and become national leaders. But, you know, I would say back in the day, if you were a pro space kid that wanted to join someone, you would join you would wanna join NASA.

That's still probably the case even today. But if you wanted to join NASA, what did you have to do? Well, you had to go to university. You had to go to college. Yeah. You had to go to college and get a technical degree, which, you know, a lot of people can do, but it is sort of expensive. And maybe not everyone's going to be able to do that. And then it takes you another 4 years at least, you know, to get through that education before you can start your career.

Well, now the barriers to entry for people that would be considered, you know, enthusiasts or just youngsters that want to, you know, do something. It's like, Ah, space sounds like a really cool idea. Well, now with the Space Force, they can go in and they can get their degrees, you know, just like you can in any of the other military services, but start building your space professional credentials, right away.

If the Space Force trains their human capital correctly, which we can get into a little bit later.

But, I I really do think that, you know, the space, the level of space awareness in the United States will probably increase noticeably as you start having more people get familiar with the Space Force and you start having people that went into the Space Force for 5 years and then got out and then became leaders in whatever it is they're going to be doing, you know, you can develop the human capital of space like that and, you know, a feeder organization to, to develop new new avatars for the, you know, the Mearth economy and stuff like that.

It's I I'm loving this I'm I'm getting my mind around the concept. So I think you're extremely spot on with what you've said in terms of historically how individuals have, have grown through ecosystems and industry. So, pilots today, the American system has a lot of pilots that could be, in normal commercial aviation because they got their training in the military. That's one of the advantages of having a large institution such as the US Air Force.

I am a globalist, so I do see the world, and I'm looking around the world, focusing because you're focusing on the US. And I do see this parallel track of developing people in the Space Force. My question is, the Space Force was not allocated to a separate, unit within the military. It was put under the Air Force. And in doing so, I think it still maintains more of the military stance than it would have been if it was allowed to be its own, Air Force Marine.

And you've got the the Navy, Air Force, Marines. I'm gonna miss one now. What's the other one? Oh, Navy. Navy. You know? Coast Guard Navy. Yep. And Space Force. It would have probably I think this transition you're talking about would happen easier, probably I think this transition you're talking about would happen easier or faster if it wasn't a subset of the Air Force. What do you think? Well, I would definitely agree because we're getting again towards my, another, bullet.

Okay. But So if you if you got it now, you can go over it now. You can go over it later. It's up to you. Oh, yeah. Let let me let me go ahead. Let me take a shot at it then. But in Yeah.

You know, in addition to developing, you know, these these new avatars, I would also say that, the Space Force can help out the Moon Hut's goals by, if you train and educate your guardians correctly, they can hopefully, what we would have is an enlightened self interest that's developed among Space Force Guardians that will actually take, you know, the opportunities in space and the mega challenges, I mean, maybe not directly, but something very close to the mega challenges, of the of Moon Hunt and interpret national security and national interest in space, not simply, you know, maybe, the defense of American allies or, you know, to represent or, you know, to keep the sea lanes open in the South China Sea or something like that that might be more realist goals, that are sort of a zero sum game of international relations where if my adversary or my, you know, competitor, gains, I have to lose by definition, and adjust it more towards a an age of a, you know, of infinite thinking.

Age of infinite. Yeah. For an infinite game. Right? Or not just an infinite game, but, you know, an infinite amount of possibilities where every, you know, everyone's interests might well be, satisfied if we, you know, develop these things correctly.

And I would say that, you know, if a Space Force Guardian can take those mega challenges and interpret them through a national security lens, that would make things a great deal more easy for, you know, steering the United States, and other other nations towards developing this mega challenge. I'm gonna try to translate this because tell me if I'm getting this right because I like what you're saying.

I never thought in this dimension, so it's kind of neat you're pushing me in in different places. Is you're saying that through the introduction or the development of Project Moon Hot inside of the space force, What you what we end up creating is individuals who become more globally aware because the 6 mega challenges are not national, they are global. And the interconnectedness of all the life journeys that must happen in order for us to have a a different future.

And in doing so, they will also learn or see where a 40 year plan. They will understand that over 40 years that if we don't address these challenges around the world, it doesn't matter where you live, you will be impacted. So maybe as a collective whole, bringing in allies from around the world, we can change that future. Is that kind of what you're saying? Yes. And Okay. Truth be told I know it was long, but, yeah.

Well, the Space Force is already doing that in a the US Space Force, anyway, is doing that in a large, part now. They, it doesn't get said very often, but there's a lot more, there's a lot of partnerships going on and developing partnerships around the world, mostly with, you know, European allies, Japan, you know, South Korea and other groups like that. But to solve what or to at least address global challenges like space debris, which is a subset of, you know, you know, speeding up.

Severe and and balances or something like It's explosive impact. Yes. Life. And and we call and if you remember, I think I told you Marie Bajau was on the call. We came up with in our pre call. We called it space environmentalism. Oh, yeah. You know, I yeah. I I forgot about that. So sorry. You know, this is Yeah. No. No. No. It's okay. That's okay. You wouldn't you're not supposed to remember all of it. But space environmentalism, what you're saying is perfectly correct.

Yeah. So the Space Force is already taking, these first steps into, you know, trying to think this way. And they're doing it for very, you know, I I would I would hate to say it, but sort of war fighting nationalist reasons. You know? Yes. They don't wanna you know, I hate I mean, let's just be real. Most people don't I mean, environmentalism is good, you know, but we're not going to trade security for it necessarily.

But even if you have a hard nosed realist point of view, you're already starting to see people moving towards this direction to, to address these global challenges because that's just by sheer necessity, you know, and everyone can see this particular necessity. So if they're already moving in that direction, as much if the more you can nudge them into seeing broader and broader, they've already expressed the fact that they have that inclination to move that direction. So that's a good thing.

But maybe they need to move faster. You know? Yeah. Probably. They need to move faster. The challenge that and I'm I know people in the space force, and I know people in most of the disciplines. And there are 2 people who kind of reference the same thing, and they've both been on our guests. Andy Aldrin and Dan Dunbocker. Andy Aldrin is Buzz Aldrin's son. He has about 350 graduate students in beyond Earth.

He's got 500 schools that he's working with in terms of education beyond Earth, as well as Dan Dunbuck, who runs the American Institute For Astronautics or Astronautics and Avionics or Avionics and Astronautics. I forget the order and a aiaia 33,000 members. They both in the month this January said, what is missing across NASA and others is that narrative spin, the the collective set of conditions that Project Moon Hut or offers. And I'm not trying to promote Project Moon Hut what I'm saying.

And I'm saying that as you're talking and I'm thinking about the people I know in the space force or the people I know in other areas, they're missing that that global that linkage of what is the story that unfolds, that plan. And so I think the way you're articulating it is interesting. Well, I think it's interesting to the younger people that are joining the Space Force too.

One of the interesting things is and we'll get in a little bit later, but there was a a very quick, very behind the scenes cultural fight over what the space force was actually going to become, or at least culturally. And, you know, basically in my interpretation, the, the, you know, the frozen middle and the, the Air Force won. You know, the cultural conservatives, I guess, won.

You know, where the Space Force turned into nothing more than Air Force Space Command, writ large with a slightly different uniform. Mhmm. And, really what other people I mentioned it before, it was more of a coast guard of space where it's like, hey, we're military, and if bad people need to be, you know, have force force use against them to stop, we will do so. But that's not the only way we're going to define ourselves or our importance.

And, you know, that, that that push was sort of quashed by leadership. Probably had a little bit to do with the fact that, the Air Force, the Department of the Air Force got to select the Space Force's leaders. And, you know, but it turns out that, you know, we keep getting, you know, me and other folks get, get contacted all the time by, you know, the lieutenants and the junior, enlisted people and captains. Even some majors and and lieutenant colonels, like, hey, you know, telling us, look.

There's gotta be more to the Space Force than this. So they're looking for that mission, and they're looking for that, that sense of purpose, which is just Right. And that's right. You're saying it. It's missing that piece. They're looking for it. Yeah. Cool. I the I I don't know if you know rear admiral, Bill Baumgartner. He ran the 7th fleet in the 7th the 7th Coast Guard District Headquarters in, in Miami, which is the, I think, one of the largest coast guard units in the world.

Yeah. Bermuda Triangle. No. I'm just kidding. Yeah. But he he he and I have spent time together, and I ended up speaking for the the his group. But it's interesting that you're tying those together, and I like the idea of the guard. And it's because it becomes and this is not gonna be politically correct across every ecosystem. Like, I think I told you, I lived in Hong Kong for a decade. I've lived in Luxembourg. I I've worked in over 50 countries.

So I'm trying to be I'm trying to take the tone of what you're bringing and trying to expand it on a global scale the best I can without going into too much, is that I think that if what you're saying, what you're suggesting is there could be even a more inclusive a conclusive, storyline for the world's world individuals who are interested in moving in this direction to participate. And I think it's an interesting angle that I had not pursued. Yeah. No. I I'd like to to think so.

And I think I'm seeing the first glimmers of this kind of thing. I'm not really okay. You know, I talk a lot about the United States, but that's because I'm an American. I'm, you know, I'm a US officer. But that doesn't mean that, you know, people from, you know, Canada or China or Russia or, you know, Brazil or, you know, anyone, you know, can't be a part of this kind of stuff.

And I really do think it's important that everyone, you know, put their best people forward to conquer space because the challenge is hard enough that we're going to need all hands on deck, right? So Here's a balancing thing that might help you. There's there's a 4 I don't know how mathematics. My son taught me this because I called it 5 d. There's 4 d's in the world. There's there's location, time, length, width, and height. So where you're sitting today is a a point in time.

There's a dimension in time, but there's length, width, and height. So if I went forward 20 years from now, your location that you're sitting at is not gonna be where you're sitting at today. So in Project Moon Hut, we're looking at a 40 year timeline.

So the things and the challenges we're facing today, which are becoming more and more complex, and I would say complex in terms of the 6 mega challenges, In 20 years, your children, my children, or or relatives or friends are all gonna be 20 years older. They're going to have lived through a world where they potentially will want something different. And a lot of the leadership that we have today will not be the same leadership in 20 years.

So, therefore, when we talk about countries, we could say that country is this way today. That leadership is this way today. But in 20 years, it could be a whole different ball game based upon sea level water rise or or extreme heat to Northern Africa where it's 50 degrees c at all the time where people are now moving either sub Sahara or they're moving north into Europe. We could see Mexico or the the Central America is having challenges with heat. Or we're seeing Prosecco.

If you the in Italy, I was talking to someone recently, and they said Prosecco probably won't be able to be produced in Italy in the future because it's too hot. And so our world will change. And in 20 years, we could see a dynamic shift. And that's where my mind goes. Even though you're talking about it today, I'm saying, okay. But that doesn't mean Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka. Doesn't mean Japan, South Korea.

And you'd add those timelines in, going Estonia a lot via Lithuania. They could be a different type of contributor. And I think they will be more likely a contributor if they see a great storyline. Oh, absolutely. And the the fun thing is is, you know, being a a PME professor or sorry, professional military education professor, you get to, see a lot of, at least for us, it was air officers from around the world. And you brought up Singapore.

I will tell you that Singapore, pound for pound, have always been some of the brightest folks, in, in, you know, Air Command and Staff College. And we had 1 space, 1 he was a pilot, an F 16 pilot in our space program last year that was just, you know, unbelievably, skilled. So if he becomes a leader in his air forces, you know, in the next couple of years, you might see a lot of very interesting things come out of Singapore, space related.

So it it's just exciting stuff, but everyone can play definitely. There's a $100,000,000,000 deal that was just fetched out of a company out of Singapore. They, it's a French individual who's, I think, living in Singapore. It's funny because when you look at their executive team, not a single person on the executive team on their website is a full time employee. But they just etched, with with Airbus, a $100,000,000,000 program for transport satellite type system.

And Singapore with Tamasac, which is more government connected, is a huge funding arm. So, yes, Singapore has a tremendous amount of opportunities. We have teammates in Singapore right now. And I'd be interested in, you know, someone like, this individual you're talking about. I wonder if he was to have a conversation or listen to the podcast, how he might react and become inclusive of the project that we're talking about. So if we wanna make that kind of push, maybe he should hear about it.

I'm, writing that down now. Okay. So you you understand what I'm saying is the the podcast is a mechanism for individuals to hear a different dynamic about beyond Earth. And, you know, I don't space is not an industry. It's a geography. So we people are often talking about space, but we have to be careful. A lot of individuals don't care about Mars. They don't care about the asteroid, Venus, or or Jupiter. They that's so far away and so distant in their mind.

But when you create Mearth, this moon earth symbiosis symbiosis that we have, the the moon keeps us at the axis that we have, spins the earth that the rotational has. It makes our tides work the way they do. Animals hide and reproduce based upon, the cycle of the moon. All of the we're very symbiotic. And by creating this geography of Mearth, it's something that we can fill.

We can we can focus our energy on building within one geography instead of saying, yeah, but we need to go to distant galaxies. We're pretty far away from distant galaxy travel today. It doesn't mean it can't happen tomorrow. There can't be someone working on something. I'm I'm optimistic so it'll one day happen. But in our realistic timeline without, you know, the the throwing the Hail Mary, Mearth is a possible an easy possibility for all of us.

Yeah. So this this individual or any individuals you have, this is a great conversation for them to hear. Absolutely. And, you know, it's it's maybe sort of trite, but, you know, we take tend to look at, okay, this big utopian future that we're looking for, where when would it show up? It's like, well, 200 years, 300 years. Okay. Yeah. But the first the beginning of any journey starts with a single step. Right?

It's like most people, if you just look at, hey, 300 years from now, I'm gonna be dead 240 of it or whatever, you know, so I'm not even gonna take a step. It's important to have pragmatic, you know, plans and actions so you can step forward. You know, you can take a step and it's in the direction you're gunning for. Right? That that's why it's 40 years. I I'm often on calls. I say, okay. Let's try this. Take your age at 40 years to it. How old are you? And they say their age. I say, okay.

Tell me what you think the future will be like in 40 years. Be surprised. Most people don't have any clue what it would be like. Mhmm. And then I say, you could be an optimist, and you could see we're gonna be like the Jetsons. The world's gonna be amazing. We're gonna have robots cleaning our houses, taking care of our dog. They're gonna feed us. We're gonna have flying cars. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great. The world is gonna be solved. How? They have no answer for that.

You say, then there's the pessimist. Well, we're gonna have so many satellites in light. We're gonna have so many conflicts. It's gonna be climate change, and the world's gonna fall apart. Okay. Tell me how that works, and what do you want to do to change that? And then there's what we try to fit in is that realistic timeline. In 40 years, what could we do? Sure. What if we could the next 25 years probably will not be like the last 50. But what if we could influence?

What we could address the 6 mega challenges, which takes that pressure off of people to going back to your Armazolov conversation, that individuals can feel that they see hope. And 30% of all kids on planet Earth today under the age of 30 have a negative prospect of the future. Well, what if we can turn some of those into people who say, you know, maybe there is a possibility. Maybe it's 10% of them. That would definitely make for a better world. Absolutely.

Or a different world, not a better world. So, yeah, the, that single step that you've said, you need to have a plan, we're sticking with 40 years. I don't think that's a bad timeline. And exactly to your point, a 100 years or 300 years is too far. I I would like to add, if I could, a military spin on your 40 years. Yeah. Just from the from a US military point of view, we generally there can be people that do they go a little bit longer if they achieve very, very high ranks.

But, most people are forced to retire at 62 years old from the US military. And the reason that is is because at least from an officer point of view, the an officer normally gets commissioned, you know, if they come straight out of high school into an academy or something like that, at about 21 to 22 years. So how long is that? A 40 year career. So how would I, why would I bring this up?

Because in the space force right now, we have lieutenants that might well be the flag officers, you know, 4 stars in 40 years. So when you talk about a 40 year timeline, in a 40 year plan, even, you know, some people like 40 years. I'm I can't think, you know, 6 months in front. I have to, you know, the term is, you know, we have to address the gators that are almost off the boat, right?

Yeah. But that's not really the case because some of the people we hope, that are going to see the end of the 40 year project or at least the first project for Project Moon Hunt, it actually be, you know, achieved while they're still in, you know, the service.

So the people that need to, enact, Project Moon Hunt now and might be into the leadership, national level leadership, maybe even international level leadership by the time, you know, this, this timeline the first timeline closes, you know, Project Moon Hut is very, very much relevant to their careers. They just are. It's yeah. That goes back to the the the reflection of the age of infinite, the Star Trek universe, that timeline.

So we're actually fitting and I'm I'm taking it out of of the military. We're taking it to a human career. Yes. And the human career, 40 years, 50 years, it's still in the timeline, yet someone can articulate that. And here's the example. People can often I've done this in audiences. I've done this with executives. I've said, try to give me a 40 year plan, and they can't. I say, what's your 40 year plan? They can't. They they have troubles with this. They have troubles with the 5 year plan.

You can't think that far out. And then I say, when your child was being born, it was you you got pregnant, did you think about having a child? Of course, I did. Okay. Did you think of it as a boy or a girl? And how would what type of attitude? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I hope it's a nice one. You know, it doesn't have all the challenges growing up. I said, did you wonder what they might be like when they're maybe 10? Of course, I did.

Did you even think about one day they'd go to college, university? Yes. How about if they do you think your child might did you think about them possibly getting married? Of course I did. I said, how about them having children? Well, David, come on. That's I mean, that's what happens when you have a child. I said, so you're able to think 40 years about your child's future, but you hadn't thought about 40 years of your future or how the earth in which they live will be.

And it's kind of a paradigm shift for them. And I I, well, yeah, I can in certain areas. And so what you're doing, which I love, is you've tied it to a human career of a 20 year old today. I love it. This is good stuff. I didn't think about the, the whole, the whole child thing. You know? I think someone asked me that. It's like, why do you wanna have kids? And I think I told them, like, offhand. It's like, well, I'm pissed off. I'm not gonna be able to command a starship.

So I want my children to have that opportunity. So But that's but that's an ex you can do that for kids. And when I said it, you probably you know a mother is sitting there holding the bike. They're thinking about grandchildren one day. So they've already gone through multiple iterations of what their child might look like, how it might might grow, what school.

People move school districts before their children are born so that they can get their children in the right school district, which would go for 18 years or 12 years. So they can forecast, but we haven't taught people how to forecast to bring in complex, scenario planning. And what we're doing with Project Moon Hut is we're not going over the the broad brush of every challenge in the world. There are 6. Those 6 are really going to impact us a lot.

And then if you forecast them, we're going to have about 20 years of real challenges. And with Project Moon Hut, the intersection is that there will be a light at the end of the tunnel. And have you ever seen the movie, 2012 with, John Kuzeci? No. If you can believe it, I haven't. Well, at the end of this movie, I'm not gonna destroy it, they're they go into a, big Himalaya, I think, mountain. And the world is falling apart. Things are happening. The world's sea levels are rising.

The continents are going down. It's just everything's cracking. And he gets to the top of he goes down into this arc in this big tunnel not tunnel, but open expanse cave. Like, you would have 4 military submarines or but they had a bunch of submarines because they knew these things would happen. And John says, when did you build all this? And his reply was something to the effect of, we knew you wouldn't listen, so we built it anyway. You know? You know?

You hope that someone actually understands what's going on. Right? Well, we we are getting there. So how else with this, lieutenant, the flag? I love what you did. Is there any more you wanna cover on the social movement? Because I didn't is there anything with that social side that you were trying to address? Well, maybe, I think my the next one, my next bullet was about, the cultural leaders and visionaries and how they express vision similar.

So Okay. I would like to tell the story because it needs to be told of Lieutenant Colonel Cynthia McKinley. She was a squadron commander or an air force space officer, in the late 19 nineties that was a squadron commander and had a really bright career. She went to the school for advanced air and space studies and, did pretty well.

Of what I understand, she got, a line number for colonel, which means she went from lieutenant colonel to, was just about ready to be promoted to colonel, and then wrote a paper in 2,000, called The Guardians of Space. And this article was, explaining in the Air Force's professional journal, the Aerospace Power Journal at the time, of, you know, explaining, look, the Air Force wants to have an aerospace force with a seamless, you know, combat projection from air and space.

That was the big thing at the time. But that really isn't gonna work that well. So probably what needs to happen is, the Air Force can keep the mission, the war fighting, weaponeering mission in space with, you know, in the in the Air Force.

But you have to split off most of what then was considered Air Force Space Command that worked on the Global Positioning System satellites that, managed the space launch ranges, on the West Coast and East Coast and provided communication services and all this other stuff, these support services, because the Air Force needed to realize that they're not just military systems anymore, but they're actually global utilities. That GPS is used by everybody, not just the Air Force.

And if we can split the war fighting Air Force into, you know, a military but still more, you know, society sustaining, US space guard based off the coast guard, model, which is, you know, she basically said, hey, look, the, the the coast guard is a military organization, and their cruisers have weapons.

But no one thinks that if a coast guard cruiser shows up, even if they do have a 5 inch deck gun on the front, they don't say that they're militarizing anything, because they know that the Coast Guard is there to protect people in general. You know, aids to navigation, rescue services and stuff like that.

And she argued that this is the split that we needed to have because there needed to be a focused military organization that focused on protecting the environment of space and doing all these other things that are unique to space, while the war fighting could be done by airmen. Guardians needed to, ensure space's, you know, the national interest in space from this point of view. And I remember I was a cadet at this time at the Air Force Academy, and I couldn't stand that article.

I could not stand it. It, totally defeated my, you know, my world view. It was totally I was totally against it. I was all air force all the way. And then I reread it about 4 years later when I was an early captain, and then it became as close as I could ever read to secular gospel. You know, I mean, I totally had a complete, a completely changed perspective on it to where I thought she was absolutely right. And, but what happened is that I never heard about Colonel McKinley again.

And it was only later I found out that once she published that article, the chief of staff who wanted to keep air and space together at the time in the Aerospace Force, pulled her promotion. And later on, she had to, she was forcibly retired. And, that is, that was devastating to hear. But, it it goes to show that, one, the air force might not have always been completely above board on on letting the space force do what it was supposed to do.

But also that we had, people that have fought for a different type of, of of space force than we have now and, paid the price on it. But I wanted to tell that story because she, you know, she retired, to, to somewhere in Arizona, and, she's she's certainly still around. And I tried to contact her a while back when the Space Force really was going, the the argument in 20 18, 2019.

We just didn't get together, but she posted something on her LinkedIn page, if you can believe it, called Guardians 2,050. And if you don't mind, I would just like to read it. No, please.

She said here, the single most important task for the Guardians is to employ elegant, constructive capabilities that guarantee peaceful use of space to enhance life on earth and beyond, contribute nothing to the demise of earth's oceans or orbits, and rise above the impulse to infuse energy into destruction by responding in kind or by claiming that which cannot be controlled.

In succeeding in this task, the Guardians will emerge as keepers of a mid 21st century vision of space exploitation, which recognizes that the goal is temporal, not spatial, to be, not to have, to give, not to own, to share, not to control, to be in accord, not to subdue. And then she said, enjoy the journey, stay safe, stay strong, cherish your transformative calling.

Now that, you know, that I thought was exceptionally powerful, coming from a person that really had a lot of influence on developing me. But if you, you know, think about it. This was a military officer, a Space Force advocate before the Space Force was a thing, although she would have changed it to a model after the Coast Guard rather than a war fighting air force in space.

Saying things to, you're not supposed to control, you're supposed to share, you know, and resist the impulse for someone to say, I can dominate this, into something that, you know, we can share and that we can all, you know, gain from. I bring that up not necessarily to, to, you know, say that, hey, this is a great thing, even though I think that is.

It's that the same kind of mentality that, you know, you have with Project Moon Hunt and other people have are being expressed by people that come from the military itself. You know, that is a huge deal. And I bring that up because, I think not only was Colonel McKinley a martyr, for lack of a better term, for, you know, Space Force independence, but also a visionary for what the culture of that Space force should be. And I think that culture is very well in line with Project Moon Hunt.

But I'll get to my last point now, which is, the space force's culture is, you know, we've talked about it pretty much the whole time, but there's still a debate on what the Space Force needs to be and needs to do. And we argued in 19 or 2019, 2020 about 2 visions for what the Space Force is and supposed to be. And we borrowed it from, I'm almost certain it came from Pete Warden, who I believe you had on your show. It was the first interview we did. He was a it was an intro very quickly.

It was very interesting that he's working at Breakthrough Foundations. I was told I had to meet Pete. He was he ran NASA Ames at the time, just before it. And I go to see him, and I tell him about Project Moon, and he says, stop. Stop. I'm done. I will do the podcast, and I will advocate for the project. Yeah. He's pretty decisive. It's it's nice. It was it was just like that. And then I I last time I saw him, I was in Luxembourg, and we had some fantastic hamburgers. Oh, very good.

You know, it's always fun to hang out with, with him even though I'm, like, definitely a secondary worker bee. But, you know, well, anyway, he he called it, 2 different visions, the brown water versus the blue water space forces. And there's the brown water vision, which we would probably call lack of a vision, which says the space force really needs to look at geosynchronous Earth orbit and towards Earth. So geo and below.

And we liken that to the brown water navies, which don't have deep sea capabilities. They have usually small river craft and deal with the brown water, which is the inland, you know, rivers and the close to the coasts where the mud and silt from the rivers sort of pollute not really pollute, but, you know, they get into the, the ocean water close to shore.

And then there's the blue water, which, in the Space Force perspective, which means you look out towards deep space and you see space as, you know, a geography that can be, used to advantage, and not in a bad way, but, you know, I really like how Colonel McKinley in that in her poem says that it's an exploitation, you know, vision. Because a lot of people think exploitation is bad.

But really, it's just using, you know, our, our environment in ways that that harm the environment as little as possible, we hope, while making our lives better and the lives of, you know, like what you would approach the, you know, all the species on earth or as many as we can impact positively. You know, make life these lives as as, you know, good as possible, as, you know, as infinite as possible. And, you know, it was it really boiled down to, you know, these 2 different visions.

And the Brownwater vision, we argued, was focused on being the satellite maintainers of the terrestrial forces, which means the Space Force was meant to make sure the satellites worked just fine. So the army can fight, the air force can fight, the navy can fight, everyone can fight.

And if bad guys tried to take out our satellites, the Space Force would fight them too, which I'm not saying is unnecessary, but it springs from a mindset of threat, of almost to a certain extent paranoia, you know, to always look beside, you know, around to see who can hurt you and to try to mitigate that hurt. Now that's an impulse that's important. But when you are only focused on that impulse, it turns you into a person that you might not like. Right?

Mhmm. But, the alternative version, this is the army version of the military. You're supposed to kill people and break things. But there used to be an older understanding of what a military organization too that sprung from the Navy, which is, you know, navies are not meant to fight all the time.

They're meant to, expand, to explore, to understand how the seas worked, so commerce was better able to be, you know, so merchant mariners could go to all corners of the ocean, all the corners of the world through the ocean, trans, trade and goods and communications and all this other kind of stuff to make life better.

And, the role of the military was to protect those civilians that were out there making life better and, to sort of subdue the seas, which really meant that we were supposed to operate as safely and as effectively as possible on the seas. Which so there was the Coast Guard sort of mentality. And when we fought, when the Navy had to fight, they weren't out to kill as many bad guys as possible.

It was really to inflict damage, economic damage, through, pressure that was hopefully going to end a war with far fewer casualties because you were applying very, you know, specific pressure, but actually hurting very few. And, it was more of a military point of view, not necessarily a strictly war fighting point of view.

And that's why we argued that, that the Space Force needed to have more of a blue water or coast guard mentality because there are legitimate military operations and military missions that are not solely focused on killing people and breaking things. And we had to relearn that. Because if we didn't, we would have a Space Force that was focused on maybe not killing people, but almost entirely focused on breaking things in space. Now, I'm not saying that doesn't have a role.

I'm just not saying it should be the only role to the exclusion of everything else. But there's this, this cultural fight was not really, didn't really happen because, in my opinion, the Space Force got, you know, made independent a little bit too fast because we couldn't have this cultural debate beforehand. And what do we have now? We have a Space Force that is focused on war fighting to the exclusion of most everything else.

And they are not particularly, interested in something like, you know, Project Moon Hut or the Murph Economy. Although, external pressure and some of internal pressure by the, you know, the rebellious people in in the Space Force bureaucracy are pushing the moon on them, and they have to respond. So every now and then, we do tend to respond.

But the the cultural fight, at least the initial phase between whether the Space Force would be a war fighting organization or a coast guard like organization was won handily by the war fighters. But that probably doesn't comport with reality enough to last very long. People that are space enthusiasts tend to like a vision that Project Moon Hut is trying to push, you know.

So, maybe the Space Force is supposed to protect commerce and protect the people that are in your hut while, you know, in phase 1 where you say that you have a a door and a roof, you know, in a box. And then as it extends to, you know, you know, the the what do you call it? The industrial park. And then Extend end of stay and then community class.

Yeah. I mean, there's going to be in order for people to go or at least go easier, you're going to need assurances that if something bad happens, there will be at least someone out there that is going to do whatever it takes to get you back, and they have the ability to do so. So the, the expression of the Space Force as a spaceborne Coast Guard might well be inexorable.

It will probably happen eventually, but it really the more someone like Project Moon Hut pushes the space force in this direction from external, you know, from external pressure, the easier it will be for the internal pressure, that does exist in the Space Force, will be able to carry the day or at least start to develop these kinds of capabilities, you know, in addition to, the war fighting mission of the Space Force as it is.

So it's not going to be, easy to transition the Space Force to something that really embraces the Age of Infinite. There is a lot of I do think that especially the more introspective Guardians are going to, are going to at least think that there is something to this Age of Infinite and they have a huge role, at least a huge supporting role in making it happen. But there's still the, you know, 0 sum mentality, understanding in the Space Force 2.

And that's going to be a challenge because overcoming that 0 sum thinking that's in the Space Force now is going to be a huge issue and a huge victory, that is necessary in order to push the age of infinite that much closer to reality. It's, tell me if I'm wrong, but I I think this is correct. I'm listen, everything's very good.

There's a post World War World War 2 and the end of World War 2 and the advancement of the US military across the seas did one thing for the world that is not normally or openly spoke about. You might hear about it, but the average person doesn't hear this. That the US military had become so large, the air force, the navy had become so strong, that what it did is it started to, in line with what you're saying, it started to watch the seas.

It allowed commerce around the world for the first time in history to be able to operate wherever they went. You didn't have pirates the same way. You did and have bad guys the same way. You could go out into the seas and know that your shipping containers, whatever you're shipping, is gonna make it to its port. And for the past 50 years, the US has more or less I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing. Again, I'm a globalist.

The US has more or less said to the seas, we're gonna make sure that the seas are fairly safe. We don't have a lot of, terrorist activities. We don't have a lot of boarding of vessels. And we're getting to a point in history where we're seeing a little bit of a breakup of that where and, again, not a this is just an as is conversation. China is saying, well, these are RCs.

And I do believe that if we see and I've worked with the CEO of Maersk and the executive team, which is 5th oh, more than 50% of all the the freight that's moved on the oceans. If we start to see multiple incursions, multiple ransoms, multiple, cargo containers or, tourists, or whatever on the ocean on the seas starting to be interfered with, taken over, hijacked, and the risk of commerce becomes great enough, then a lot of what we do will break down.

And so the way you were looking at this in terms of the Air Force, the Air Force, yes, it does have AWACs. Yes. It does have surveillance that are hap that's happening all the time. But protection in the air is not something the same as, as you've said, the waters. Their job is to go out to make sure things operate, to make sure cargo gets to the next destination and commerce can happen.

You're really making a fundamental argument that beyond Earth has a completely different, it has more symbolism to the oceans and the vastness of it and the allowance of things to happen than it does have from protecting land and and using it for political purposes or to be able to, change, I'm not gonna go into all the details of that. I don't wanna go too deep. But it's it's it's really a a completely different shift.

And there's a person in the space force who said to me, David, what happens if some bad guys go to the moon? Have you thought about it? And, yes, we do think about that. What happens if someone comes to the moon to one of our phases and and, does something bad, tries to blow something up? Or if there's bad people, do you have a brigade do you have a brig? Do you have a place to put them? Do you have police officers? That comes to the question, how do you even decide what rules do we follow?

We're not on earth. We don't have the same policies. We will have to create new governance models. So my, where I'm going to is I had 2 questions. And the first one that I was asking myself is with all that you've said about this new group of people who are or internal group of people who wants to see this change, if you had to come up with some type of, I'm gonna call it plan, but some type of storyline or some type of incursion or some type of insert Project Moon Hut here.

How would you do it to get these individuals to say, yeah, this makes sense. We should be aligning, self interest here. We should be aligning with a lot of the narrative that Project Moon Hut is putting forward. How would you do that if it was up to you? This is why, you know, as it turns out, I'm sort of an educator. I would not have thought that, when I was younger, though in retrospect it seems fairly obvious.

But, you know, it's it's telling the story in, you know, telling the story in broad form. And, you know, I wasn't aware of Project Moon Hut until I, talked to you. But, you know, do I agree with everything? Or, you know, is is how you developed it exactly how I would develop it? No. But it's very easy to realize that we're allied in pretty much every, you know, specific you know, not specific, but, you know, it's like, yeah, if if we were going to go with your plan, I'm all on board.

But seeing the, it trying to reach out and having that narrative, in the Guardian sphere means an awful lot to me. So how do I, tell that story? It's hard. Since we don't have the, what you could call the commanding heights of the space force leadership itself. We have to be, content right now with, explaining the larger ideas, you know, the visions that Colonel McKinley and Robert Heinlein have said of what the space force should be to our students. You know, that's not everything we do.

We're not a propaganda school at PME. But really if you're going to learn about space in, you know, as a domain, you're going to come into the contact with these kind of ideas over and over and over again. Because the only way that you can avoid them is to specifically ignore them, right? So that's why you heard in a lot of, early Space Force, you know, interviews and stuff like that in 2019, it's like, well, what about astronauts in space? What about search and rescue?

Space Force people would say, that's not our job. So they were defining themselves out of the debate. Right? Yeah. So it's like, no. We have to think about this. We have to, confront this because it's part of our domain. It is. And we're supposed to be the ones that can exploit the domain for the benefit of the United States and the larger world, than anyone else. That's that's our responsibility. So we have to do that. Now, the the problem is is can you impose a culture from on high?

It would be really easy if, we had someone, you know, our chief of space operations, our 4 star, saying, yay, verily. Our new mission, and I'll I'll tell you our mission statement for the Space Force right now, is And we're talking we're talking about Saltzman. We're talking about, Bennett Vega. We're talking about Thompson. These guys Yeah. Saltzman now is our 2nd chief of space operations.

He changed our mission statement to read the Space Force's mission statement to secure our nation's interests in, from, and to space. Now, I'm fairly critical of Space Force leadership a lot. But this one, in my opinion, they hit it out of the park. I mean, that was a great mission statement because it was so inclusive that everyone could see themselves in it. Even a, you know, a grizzled, you know, pro coast guard guy like me that's been in 20 years.

Mhmm. A person that is all about terrestrial support to the war fight like, you know, most of the people in the space force and the young guardian. And the question is, you know, what are our nation's interests in space? That's the question that that mission statement is begging. And, the way you answer that is where you fall on this.

So if our national interests are determined to be, you know, address these global challenges, you know, be there while we, protect our, you know, civilian and our commercial, businesses and explorers and adventurers that go out into space to secure advantages to earth and its people and all the, you know, species of earth from space. You know, that's what our national interest is. The space force has to salute smartly and move on. Right?

So, if we had the generals, tell us, hey, this is what, this is how the space force sees our national interest. And then insert something that's very close to what colonel McKinley said or what you say with Project Moon Hunt. That would be great. So how? So I'm going I'm I'm moving it I'm going from the theoretical. So if if you were responsible for helping us to create the ecosystem of change, how might you do it? You've done some great research about us.

You've done you've thought about this a lot before you even met us. I think we kind of filled a void that you might have been looking for, something that was a holistic story that can bring some of these, thoughts together. How would you what would be your approach? I you would have to, I mean, short of, you know, massive organizational change in the space force, which I don't really think needs to you know, is necessarily needs to happen.

What you need to have happen, and this might be sad to say because it's been tried so often, you have to get, a national vision for space and a, you know, policy from civilian leadership to potentially force the, the Space Force's hand in certain things. Like, hey, you know, the Artemis Accords, for instance, is a new approach towards interpretation of the outer space treaty. So Yeah. You know, towards sort of pro private, pro development kind of, kind of ways.

And then, so you should say, Hey, Space Force, this is a national level interest that the State Department and NASA really are interested in. So guess what? You have to defend and secure these interests.

And then the Space Force will have to start doing that or say, hey, look, because we need the Space Force to be involved in this, we have to, develop or build the, the Judge Advocate Corps of the Space Force, which would be, you know, legal lawyers in Space Force uniform, to, come up with this new governance.

You know, how do you how do you make operational plans for this governance that we think need to be done to make space, you know, a positive benefit for all of Earth and secure national interests and, you know, be developed in a, in a deliberate, maybe sustainable is right, but that has a lot of negative connotations to some people. But, you know, in a, in an enlightened manner. Right? So, we tried fighting for a JAG corps, for a long time. And it's just like, hey, we don't have enough people.

We don't have enough, the the Space Force would come back. We don't have enough work for them to do. And then our response would be, it's like, no, there's a whole lot of work that you refuse to do, you know. But, so the military has to be it's sort of a weird systems dynamics issue, where the military sometimes has to be forced by civilian, leadership to do certain Well, that's correct. That it has to there's there's a combination of commercial, educational.

There's all of the pieces come together that put pressure on government governance to change. So if there's a lot of commercial activity, governance will change. If there's a lot of educational changes, governance has to change. So there's a lot of pressures. And so what you're I think what you're articulating is that the fastest route to the change in the space force is the change through, I don't wanna say commerce, but it's a combination of political and commercial, interests.

Yes. I would like to say though that some of the best, the holistic thinkers of domains tend to come from the military though. So when you think about air power theory or what, you know, how the air force should develop or commercial aviation should have developed, Billy Mitchell had a lot of great ideas that was used very well. He was a, you know, a general officer.

So there's a push factor from the military too that the people that tend to sit there and really think hard about policies and about how we can do the best we can do in space are probably going to come from the space force themselves. At least that's what educational and you know, academic sort of, culture that we have in the space force that I'm trying to develop. So there's a push pull model too. The space force cannot just be a passive, you know, a passive executor of other people's ideas.

Right? They need to have they need to offer ideas too. That's also in our, in our job jar to give best military advice to civilian leaders. So there's, everyone has a role to play, and and I'm very interested in, hey, I don't care who does it as long as someone does it. Well, it's I I you're reminding me of a this is reminding me of a conversation I had with someone I was working with NASEC, the National Air and Space Intelligence Center. Is that what it's called? There's a space center.

Nash yeah. So I worked with some people at NASAC NASAC, and this one guy was trying to get something to be changed. He worked on it for almost 2 years trying to get people in meetings, trying to get this changed, trying to get that changed, and he couldn't get it changed. And I said, no. You gotta go to the commander. And he said, well, we wanna get everybody on board. I said, no. No. No. You just gotta get the commander. And he said, yeah. But he's never gonna listen to me.

And I said, no. He will listen to you. Your your plans are not right. And what I said to him was this. What you need to do is set up a set of scenarios that this individual then comes on board with it. And so we came up, and I'm gonna give ones we have multiple, approaches that we're using. And I said, you need to get him at a point where he's a little frustrated with you, and he sits down with you. And you say that he says, yeah. You gotta get this done. You gotta get this done.

And I said, he talks with him regularly. And I said, but he has to be frustrated. And you say to him, well, let me show you all the projects I'm working on. And there were way too many projects for the number of people they had. It was just off the charts. You couldn't fill you couldn't feasibly do them all well. All of them had to suffer in order for all of them to be done. And I said, so you ask him, you show him the numbers, you show him the pieces, and you tell him how would he solve this.

Well, he ended up sitting down with him. The guy cut out, like, 5, 6, 7 projects just like that. And then he said, but what about this one? And then I had a conversation about that one, and the decision was made. And once the commander got it, it was done. So I, I've I don't like my personal approach is never is not always to try to herd cats or cattle or whatever you wanna use or sheep. It's to try to figure out where's that precision execute precision shot. I hate to use military terms.

Precision shot that's going to bring down or to change or to modify whatever you're trying to modify. So I'm looking at it from 2 different perspectives. I've gotta believe in the ecosystem of beyond earth and the space eco the space force, we're talking specifically then, In the Space Force. And I've gotta believe the Air Force and the DOD. And there's probably about 6 people that if those 6 people may change, the rest would follow.

But you need to hit them in the right order to kinda be able to say, no. No. I just I just spoke with Kevin. Kevin's on board. Oh, he is? Well, then let me take a look at it. Oh, no. Sally already went through all that. Oh, well, then I'm good. You need to figure out that order. So I was trying to ask you we can we can get the information out. We're doing that already. Project Moon Knight, you're involved. We have a lot of people who've been on the podcast, which you've seen.

I was just trying to ask a different type of, strategic question. How do we solve for rapid speed assuming that we had to get it done quickly? So not that you have to answer it here on the call because you might have names and and approaches that we could use, but I just wanted to hear that overview. And, yes, there are a lot of brilliant people who sit in these seats, and we have to try to figure out how to make that happen. So yeah. Are are there let me take a jump.

With everything the the experience that you've just had, I'm hopeful hopefully, it was an enjoyable one. What's the big thing that you took away from it? Not the the call. I mean, everything. From the first time we met and the challenges to create a title, which are very is challenging. And then the whole journey of you going through the experience to get to the point to deliver it today. And what's your impression? Well, my overall impression is is fairly positive.

I mean, that's overall, I mean, I know that's not what you want, and I'll get more specific. But it's No. I'm okay. It's it's good because, you know, I've always thought that if, you know, 2 people, can come up with with a similar idea independently of each other, you've got something there.

So it's it's reinforcing that, you know, the overall goal, let's say, that I've always wanted to do was to to wrap it back into it is to one day get on, you know, do my part to get on the path for a Star Trek future. Right? Okay. Oh, wow. So then we we we had a I had a very specific, you know, I chose a very specific profession to try to solve part of that problem which is, you know, try to get a Star Fleet like proto Star Fleet organization, you know, sort of moving forward.

But you know, it doesn't a good Space Force does not work. It's not necessary unless you have a larger vision of what space could be for everybody, you know. It's the Space Force is a part, not the whole. Right? So when, dealing with, with you and, you know, going over your videos and going over the ideas, it was, very exciting, that you actually thought that I could have a, you know, my ideas could contribute in a certain way. It's like, oh, good.

Maybe I'm actually helping to do my job, because my job is one simple piece. You know, what y'all are doing here is definitely the larger, you know, the pie. I I guess, I hope my, you know, the, the the apples that I bring to the pie are decent enough to get a good pie going for Thanksgiving. Right?

So it's, it's one of those things that I'm glad that, one, to see an organization like yours that, that has that broader vision, that is moving forward with that, that is, is doing this kind of stuff, providing some of the ideas that I haven't thought through because I've been hyper focused on one particular thing, but that is compatible, that are mutual, you know, visions, let's say, are compatible and maybe even, symbiotic in a certain way.

So it's just, you know, it's good to see what your work is going, what you all are doing and how I might be able to help because ultimately, I don't have the, the grand total of, you know, good ideas or the solutions. But working with other people like you, we can probably come up with it. So, you know, hopefully, that's not too generic and wishy washy. No. No. No. That that's, we just spoke with someone.

I just I've been speaking with someone for a few months now, and he's at the University of Texas at Austin. And he's looking to possibly introduce a Mearth program or into his ecosystem. Have to give him an accelerator and give him contact in since we live in the same area. We're talking we're trying to bring that together, and then we're talking to somebody in Dubai who's introducing to some or a large organization, a gaming company. This person has been on our team now for about 2 years.

She's talking to this gaming company to see if they would invest in creating a Mearth accelerator focusing in on immersive technologies, gaming, AR, VR, digital twin, haptics 4 d, all of that 3 d, and to build products and services that resonate with young and old alike and financing that so that Mearth could be a part of an ecosystem that's built. So even in your education that you're delivering, you might be able to add a component a few days where you say, well, let's talk about Mearth.

Let's talk about project Muna. Let's talk about this future. Right or wrong, we're not looking for a right or wrong. We're looking for that inclusion and that open mindedness of individuals to to work with others, to find new pathways. So there there are plenty of ways that we can collaborate. One of them is on the the side that you've been focused on when the military or the the space force that we've spoken about. But other is on the educational side.

What is wrong with having instead of just space, which goes out to never never land, but this new geography of Mearth and how it could be optimized to improve life on earth. So I think what your answer was is fantastic. So I thank you for that. Well, you know, so I guess we just need to, to to, you know, high five and then get, get back to work. Get back well, we we are getting back to work because this will be produced and put out there. So Namrata was the one who introduced us.

So I thank her for that. So, look, I'd love to thank you for being a guest on our on the program and and the work that you've done. It sounds like you've spent the time on it, so we definitely appreciate that. And we wanna thank everybody who's listening today to taking taking their time out of the day, and we do hope that you learn something that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others.

Remember, Project Moon Hut is where we look to establish a box of the roof and a door on the moon. We're not about colonization and settlement. We're about a home through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem. And then we turn those innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking from the endeavor back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. As a reminder, go to a project moon hot dot org. Take a look around.

Also, all of the interviews with all the bios are under the immersive tab, and there's also another podcast series called Redefining Tomorrow. Brent, what is the single best way for people to connect to you? Email is probably easiest, and, it shows you how dated I am. But, it's, my email address is brent.carnick, just my first dot [email protected]. So even even, you know, technically a little less I'm gonna spell it. B r b r Yes. Okay. Oh. Okay. B r e n t Dot. I got an I got an echo.

Yeah. Say it again. I got an echo coming through, which is really weird. [email protected]. There we go. Okay. So, I personally would love to connect with all of you. You can reach me at [email protected]. You can connect to us on Twitter at Project Moon Hut. You can connect to me personally at at Goldsmith. I'm we're on LinkedIn. We are on Facebook. You've got Instagram. Right now, it's just me at Dave mister David Goldsmith.

We are working hard with our team to put up new content, new information to reach out to everybody. So if you like this, reach out to us. We'd love to hear that. And for that and that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening. Hello, everyone. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the Age of Infinite. Throughout history, we've seen humanity undergo transformational shifts that are so impactful, they define entire ages.

Just recently, we lived through the information age, and what an incredible journey it's been. Now think about this. You could be right now entering into the mist of another monumental shift, the transition to the age of infinite. We're talking about an age that transcends the concepts of scarcity and abundance. It introduces a lifestyle rich with infinite possibilities, enabled by a new paradigm that links the moon and the earth together. We call this term Mearth.

This synergy will create a new ecosystem and economic model, propelling us into an era of infinite possibilities. It does sound like a plot for an extraordinary sci fi story. Doesn't it? But this is a story you'll see unfold in your lifetime. Now this podcast is brought to you by the Project Moonat Foundation.

We look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn the innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking from the endeavor back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species. If you're looking for more information, you could visit our website at projectmoonhot.org where you can check out our 40 year plan, an incredible new design. If you've not seen it yet, I would suggest you go there.

You could click on the tab for the work that we're engaged in so you could see the type of activities we're engaged in and so much more along with all the other podcasts that have been produced with the bios and backgrounds. We are a nonprofit. So if you're if you're there, consider making a donation by clicking the button in the top right hand corner. Let's dive into the podcast now. Okay. The title of this is is how to build a Star Trek culture to generate the age of infinite. Oh my god.

Wow. That's a big one. So today, we have with us Brent Czarneck. How are you, Brent? Very good. How are you? I'm I'm great. I'm looking forward to this. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. Nope. Well, we're looking forward again. So as always, we do a very brief bio for everybody. Brent is a space power theorist. I don't even know what that is. So that's we wanna find out a little bit about that.

But the senior fellow at defense studies at the American Foreign Policy Council and a visiting associate professor in the US Space Force, in the US Space Force Professional Military Education Program at John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. That's a mouthful. He's an author and a retired lieutenant colonel in the US Air Force and a reserve officer. This little section I'm going to add right now for everybody who's listening is very important.

People believe that I have heard or know the topic and the direction of this program. Very quickly, I do not know anything about where we're going with this topic. So this is the way it works. We select a guest or a guest has been selected for us or are referred to us. Brent was referred to us. The guest watches the videos about Project Moon Nut, learns a little bit about us. We create a title of the program. In Brent's case, it probably took us about an hour. We create a title for the program.

We then disappear from one another. I have not seen anything. I don't know where he's gonna go. I don't know the direction of it, and his job is to put together an outline. This is the first time since that date of creating the title that we're getting together. I don't know where this program's going to go. So it's not that I know it in advance. That said, Brent, do you have a set of bullet points or an outline for us to follow? I do. Okay. Can you give it to us?

Well, I have about 6 points I would like to go, through. They're Give it to me one at a time so I can write them down. Yeah. They they definitely I I'm trying to get them to build up on each other, but the first point I just wanna try to get across is that, really, if I start thinking about an age of infinite or No. No. Just just give me the give me the line. What's the outline line?

Well, the the Star Trek universe universe reflects an age of infinite very well in a, you know, in a fiction universe that a lot of people can Wait. Wait. Wait. No. I need I need the outline. So what the Star Trek universe what? What is the outline? A bullet point. It reflects the age of infinite very well in Okay. Reflects the age of infinite. Okay. What's the next one? And then central to the Star Trek universe is the importance of starfleet. Okay. Importance of starfleet. What's the next one?

So developing organizations sympathetic to social movements is important. Okay. Developing organizations that are, organizations to social movements. Okay. Next one. And then I would argue that the US Space Force can be an important ally to Project Moon Hut goals because they overlap a great deal. Oh, go okay. And number 5? The way it would it would do that, as I see it, would be a potential avenue for young people to join the space professional community, building your avatars in your language.

Okay. I'm gonna put it as avenues to join the community. And what's the last one? Well, I guess I've got one other, sub bullet here, but, the other one is the Space Force can can translate Boone Hunt goals into enlightened self interest in national defense. And then, the last one is that, important Space Force cultural leaders, especially in my research, have expressed visions for the Space Force that are very, very close to Project Moon Hide goals.

Okay. I'm gonna call it visions alignment with Foundation and Space Force. Okay. So let's start with number 1. The Star Trek universe reflects the age of infinite. Help me understand this. Well, just a little bit about my background is I watched a lot of Star Trek as a kid. You know? And if you see what I've done, it it doesn't it's not that hard to see. But, it's if you look at it, it reflects a future. A lot of people talk about it. It's a future that people would like to be in. Right?

Okay. And and obviously you want to be in it. Well, of course, right? Okay. A lot of people say, hey, it's because I saw this show in the sixties. That's why I joined NASA. That's why I became an astronaut. That's why I wanted to be a rocket scientist. And that would reflect its power. But why do people wanna show up in a Star Trek universe? It's because it really is an age of infinite, you know. The big selling point is that it was a utopian society that nonetheless felt like it could be real.

You know, they, earth has settled its differences. It's, you know, eliminated poverty, eliminated disease, you know, eliminated war, even though there's a lot of action in the series. Right? But, But it's But there are always a story behind the conflicts. Sure. Sure. And the conflicts really don't happen among humans. It's among the Federation and some, you know, rubber suited bad guy of the week. Right? Or just Isn't that supposed to also represent the bad guys of unearth? The original?

Yeah. So, yes. Go ahead. Well, if if you want to, what I like about your Project Moon Hunt is that you try to be, you know, practical. Right? So there's, it's one thing to try to say, hey, this is the future I want. And then there's, it's totally different and a lot harder to try to figure out how you get from here to there.

And, quite honestly, if Project Moon Hut is a success, it will make that Star Trek universe so much closer to reality that, more and more people will start to see it as, you know, a reality. So So so wait. I I'm I'm reading between lines, and please take it as just that. You've watched a bunch of the videos. You've got you've got a sense of what we're working on. But as you said, if if we get well, Project Moon Hot will do it.

So you believe based upon what you've seen, which is a small tiny segment of what we've been working on, you see that potential future based upon the plans that we have. Is that what you're kind of getting across? Oh, absolutely. Okay. I didn't know that. I don't know. I mean, you and I haven't spoken. So I don't know if Yeah. You you've you've watched the videos and it did something to you. You can see a connection. Oh, yeah.

And it's, it's a workable plan that is, you know, it's well, you know, I don't I don't wanna, you know, you know, flatter you too much, but it's one of those things where a lot of people can say, hey. I would love to see this future, but this is the steps that we have to take.

And Project Moon Hut's, you know, steps, the way I saw it, you know, the the different phases of development of the moon for for economic purposes rather than just science or exploration, you know, really trying to bring benefits to Earth, right, to solve some of the big issues. What what do you call them? The, the mega challenges? The the 6 mega challenges. Yes. Yeah. The 6 mega challenges. Those are the mega challenges that, you know, Star Trek essentially solves.

And that's why they're Utopian. Right? I mean, that's I had never tied that together in my head at all. That the Star Trek what they had solved to get there were the challenges that we have defined as the 6 mega challenges. We're basically, so climate change, mass extinction, ecosystems collapses, which is more environmental and conditions. And then there's the human side of it, which is displacement, unrest, and explosive impact from things that humans do that are over the top.

So that's interesting. I never tied those 2 together in that to Star Trek. That's that's kinda no. I'm glad you said it. I'm I'm if if you if you saw my body language, which you can't, my body language is well. I that's a great observation. Okay? Well, thank you. Alright. Let's try not to just let me not blow it here in the rest of the day. You're you're the the thing that I the Star Trek reflects the age of infinite. So can you get a little bit more specific on you're doing it some.

You see the age. You see the real, the Earth differences, the war and conflict. What else do you see that is tied to that, which is your Star Trek y, it sounds like it. What else did you see? Well, if you want to go over it, I mean, what is you know, it starts to get a little bit more, you know, idealistic going from the original series to the next generation.

But, you know, at least the culture of the federation is, you know, money is mostly I mean, it's not it hasn't disappeared, but it's lost its centrality to, to life. Mostly because everyone has access to what they need to live.

So as you go up, you know, Maslow's hierarchy, you know, the the real excitement about the Star Trek future is that people get to, you know, improve themselves to the best of their, you know, human ability, without regard for, you know, what we would consider very serious economic constraints. Right? So, the infinite is infinite possibilities for the for each individual to, you know, of you know, to evolve into their their best, you know, possible, state. Right?

They're either best possible person. And, that is such an optimistic message, you know, for people to realize that, you know, or to see that the future could be much better than anyone can possibly imagine, you know. But you do that through hard work and eliminating, you know, the age of, you know, scarcity and even going beyond the age of abundance. Right? That's what you said in your intro. You know, we're trying to go even more than abundance.

And, you know, most people some people would consider that a fantasy, But then other people that look into it can can see that space and what, you know, what you call Mearth, I might consider cislunar space from a military perspective. Yeah. I just I don't I I'm not so smart. So I just call them. It's it's, they're they're they're synonymous for the most part. They may be The reason what Mearth is something a 9 year old can get, a 12 year old can get, a 20 year old.

But when you talk cislunar or a lunar or a regala, when you those words are used, we've got 8,000,000,000 people on this planet. It's very difficult for people to get their mind around things such as cislunar and lunar. They have to get educated. We call it the moon. I mean, why don't we just call it the moon?

So when you are talking to a 9th grader, an 8th grader, a 15 someone who's in university and you said we're talking about the geography of Mearth, it's easily understood moon and earth and that whole geography. So that's why it's Mearth. Oh, that's good. And I appreciate that. In sort of the sterile bureaucratic military mind, we have to do something that seems a little bit more, you know, it you can't talk about the moon. You have to talk about cislunar space.

You know, for a tongue in cheek example, it's like you can't really talk about UFOs. You have to talk about unidentified aerial phenomenon now. Right? Oh, really? Okay. Well, you know, that's, it's it's just it comes up every now and then. It's funny. But, you know, we have to pretend we're smarter than we are, so we come up with 30 simple words. And acronyms. Like, you have to be the 13th warrior to talk with space people. And that's one of the challenges I had. I am not a space person.

I I do look up sometimes. My background is sciences. But after doing this for 8 years, I still don't I don't get excited. I mean, I Star Trek, Battlestar, Galactica, Star Wars. I love all those. But when someone's trying to communicate with me about this new future, if I have to have a physics degree to understand it, which I have physics in my background, but I I don't know about the trajectories of the moon and how things align and how there's Lagrange points. You have to know a lot.

And you if we wanna get the world to rethink where we live, it's easy to say we live within Mearth. And then if someone wants to delve into it, that's the scientific side. We call it a cell phone, But it's actually not a I mean, there's a more technical term for a a mobile phone. Making things easy just helps rapid transformation of information. At least that's what I think. No. I think you're absolutely right.

That's very good. So I'm I'm gonna I'm going to help try to help you with something if it's okay with you on one area. The Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Do you know where that came from? I did at one point, but probably not, to where I could name chapter and verse at the moment. Okay. This guy by the name of Maslow wrote a paper, and a, a speaker consultant business person in the United States took it and formed it into the pyramid.

He then said, as you go up the pyramid, you become more self actualized. Maslow didn't like what he produced. It was not accurate. But yet he was being asked to speak in making money. Before he died, he wrote another paper that kind of debunked what was being said. Because Maslow says that once you take care of your food, once you take care of all different levels, you can become a higher self of you. But that means, according to even Maslow, that you can't be self actualized if you're poor.

You can't be self actualized if you don't have all of your needs met. And I've met amazing people, I know you have too, that don't have all their needs met and they're still wonderful amazing human beings. So the actual pyramid in Maslow's eye did not exist, but it was a marketing phenomenon. And everybody believes that it's true. But if you think about it for a moment, you could be self actualized and be starving. No. That's an interesting point, you know.

And especially as an academic, it's like, hey, someone taking your idea and running with it in a direction you never wanted it to go. Well, welcome to, welcome to marketing. Right? Yeah. And so that's where in terms of our world now take that with what you've learned about what what you've been researching and working on for today and ask yourself, does that kind of mean that we have to have our plans build plans that are a little bit different?

Because we don't have to make them all self actualized. We just have to make them who they are. Well, you know, maybe the, maybe ultimately what we're looking at is the freedom to make, you know, the the decisions that you would like without worrying about anything else. You know, if someone's are you know, might be starving or or something like that, but it doesn't bother them as much to where they can do other things anyway or in spite of these roadblocks. That might be more important.

Yeah. But even if they can overcome a roadblock, it's probably better. Maybe. You know, I guess you could get into the philosophical points of, hey, do we need to have adversity in order to grow? You know, if you take down the barriers as much as you can, that might be in itself a a general good thing regardless of anything else, you know, a good in and of itself. Right? But, that's that's an interesting thing to think about.

Yeah. When I learned it, I was I sat back and I said to myself when I read a little bit about it, I said, it's absolutely right. You meet people who don't have a lot of money, and they're wise as can be. And they're happy, and they've got all of those pieces. So our world that's why there's 6 mega challenges instead of the 17 SDGs or the millennial goals or all of those that are kind of extraneous to us. We have to solve some of the basic or address some of the challenges on earth.

So what else with the Star Trek universe in the age of infinite did you parallel? Well, you know, the the economic development side is is obvious. I mean, there was a book a while back. I guess you sent me a link, but I remember, a book that I read called Economics in Star Trek, which Oh. You know, started talking about, you know, when you're not, you know, what happens to humanity when you don't have to worry about scarcity.

As as much as I tend to think that there will always be some kind of scarcity, if only about immediate time, you can only do one thing at a time, at least at the moment. Right? Mhmm. But, it allows when when you can have a serious economist talk about, you know, the end of scarcity, that opens up a whole lot of new pathways for thinking and for possibilities. You know, it it goes from a very small potential you know, field of potential futures to a very large one.

So it might not be infinite, but it's getting a lot closer. So, the economics of Star Trek is is very much a big deal. The, the idea of how people relate to each other is also very important to where we don't necessarily see, you know, a person walking across the street as a threat to Mhmm.

You know, safety or security or financial, you know, or like resource, you know, sustainability, you know, your, your lifestyle and whatnot to where we can relate to other people much more on a, from a sense of security, I suppose. And, you know, and then just the concept of the the infinite frontier. Right? I mean, I guess in Star Trek, they call space the final frontier, but it goes on for a long time.

So if anyone wants to get out and explore, you know, there's always gonna be another place to go. Whereas on Earth, perhaps right now, you know, there's not really a whole lot of new uncharted territories or or or that where you can you can head to the frontier. Right? Yeah. I guess there's the deep ocean, but, you know, that that in a lot of ways is more difficult than even outer space.

I I had a guy on yesterday that we're talking to about a possible podcast, but he's not going to do one because we ended up speaking for 2 and a half hours. He was one of the partners in the, submersible that collapsed. Whatever you've read, whatever you've heard, I I heard some different stories too from him. But he said that the ocean is still still so completely unmapped, understood. We don't have data for so much of the oceans. It's incredible.

And then one of our teammates once said, if you try to build at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, it would be more difficult than building on the moon. Oh, yeah. And by a lot. But and that's what the the guy agreed. He said, absolutely. And one of the things we use in Project Moon Hut is we say the he was we were talking about this topic, and he said, David, you look at you look at the moon as like the 8th continent.

And because we were talking about building the Sahara Desert, building in the Amazon, building in Antarctica are all challenging. And building on the moon to me, because I'm not a space I'm not in love with the moon. I'm in I'm in love with the changes we can create, is he said, you look at the moon as the 8th continent. It's a it's a logistics. And to me, it's a logistics challenge. How do we get there? And then how do we build? That's it. You know, harsh conditions in Antarctica.

Harsh conditions in, the Sahara Desert. So it's an 8th continent. And that means that the the world, the opportunities for people to rethink possibilities, infinite possibilities within Mearth, is extremely powerful because it gives a new construct. Oh, absolutely. You know, a space enthusiast has said a lot. It's like, hey, as soon as people realize that space isn't unique, it's just another place to go with a different set of, you know, engineering specs you have to have to get there.

You know, the possibilities open up an awful lot, and you're absolutely right. You know, as soon as we get I always said that, you know, we're we're gonna know when space arrives, when you can have an astronaut that is a, you know, a 4 year staff sergeant, you know, in the space force and I'm I'm not saying this because, you know, I like the military. That's just how I relate it to it at the moment. You know, if you can get a guy that says, hey. I'd like to go into space.

And he did okay in high school, but he graduated reasonably fit, and, you know, a a man or a woman, doesn't matter, you know, and are able to get out there just because that's what they would like to do, and you don't have to be a superhuman to get there, we've arrived. Or at least we've gotten far more into the age of infinite than we were before. So so here's a way to change it a little bit. They're not gonna be astronauts. I mean, you think about it.

When the white brothers started flying, they they were pilots. And then eventually, we get on a plane. You and I get on a plane. We're not pilots. Nope. Okay. We're we're passengers. We're not a pilot. I'm who I am. You you are a a professor at a university, associate professor at a university. I'm who I am, but I'm not a pilot no matter how hard I try. The astronaut to me is the person who manage, creates, evolved, and going out like a like a the person who works on a ship is the sailor.

Mhmm. But the passengers are not. So we can't call them astronauts if you don't do anything. And we but are they cosmonauts? Are they taikonauts? What's the word? So we think they should be called spacers. You get a certification. Like, I've got a certification that I can go down into the ocean. I can I mean, I could scuba dive? I've got my scuba license. Well, what if you just had to get a spacer license? You're certified to go up. You know about microgravity. You know about these things.

You know about how to eat or whatever it may be. And so now instead of the astronaut is the person flying the machine or managing and taking care of it. But the people who get on the ship, like your guy you're talking about, the staff sergeant, he's a spacer. He's qualified to work in space. He's got the he's got the skill sets. Hey. I I completely agree with that. That's actually what I wanted to call the, Space Force personnel, you know, spacers. Ultimately, it went to Guardian, which Yeah.

Also has some positive connotations, which I don't have a problem with at all. But, I'm glad that you thought that because it reinforces the fact that I was you know, I had a good argument, doggone it. Yeah. Yeah. And and now you have a you have another argument when you're talking to people that reinforces that the challenge is there was no Project Moon Hut when you were doing it. Now you can see the 4 phases. Yep. So I I do I do wanna circle back. Did you read this book?

Because I have not, Economic Development in Star Trek. Did you read it? I did. This was a a while back, and, probably, gosh, 3 years ago now. I I can't recall an awful lot of it other than the fact that, you know, he definitely pushed abundance in in a big way and how it was, you know, how it would psychologically adjust, human societies, which is which is in a broad perspective an economic, concern. Now I started out my my academic career as an engineer.

So as soon as he started saying, well, we can do this and this and this, it's like, alright, but I want to see maybe not the schematics, but I want to see the idea. Where's the raw material that we go from here to there? Because one of the things that interested me, very early on was, the resources available in, what the planetary scientists back in the nineties called near earth space, right?

The moon, the inner, you know, the asteroids that are around that orbit earth, you know, other things like that. So I wanted I was hoping to get a little bit more, okay, this is how many tons of resources are out there that we can get to that's easier to get to than, than the moon, you know, like like an engineer, like an astronautical engineer. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, he was a little bit more philosophical and it was interesting, his philosophical ideas.

But as you can maybe tell, I don't recall a whole lot of it. Oh, it's it's interesting because you brought up the other word as, and it's a word that somewhat on our team will laugh. There there is no plan for much of beyond Earth. It is yada yada yada yada yada save Earth. And you need the plan to get there. That's why we're only 40 years. Uh-huh. We're 40 years because that's a reasonable timeline.

And it there are things that we have, the the platform that we're working on, the tech transfer component, the immersive ARVR digital twin haptics 3 d 40, and then the 4 phases of the moon hut actually create a plan. And that's when I the reason I asked about the book is it I I'm always missing the there's a there's a it's kinda like, you know, when you draw a line, you put the 2 hash marks to say that there's a gap in between. It's like, okay. We do this and then we get that.

So I wanted to know if this economics person and we have an economics paper on our website, but we're having another economics paper being written on Mearth. So it's interesting that you didn't have much that you could recall. Well, I wouldn't say that it really drew the line from here to there or, to use the the South Park reference, you know, collect underpants then question mark then profit. Right? Right. But You just Sorry. I I had to get No. No. I love it. I love it because I like okay.

I never would have used that, but it's a good one. I I would say if you were ever going to look from a maybe not an engineering point of view, but as a a layman's guide to try to figure out how we can go from point a to point b, a book that really meant a lot to me when I read it, in the mid nineties was Mining the Sky by John Lewis. That was a great book.

And I am trying to find the the Star Trek book here for you just so I can, you know, plug it, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to find it here all that quick. And Oh, we could pull it up on Amazon. It would take a second if you wanted to. Yeah. The the challenge and so I I love the things that you said about the correlation. And and, again, I I I know you're not trying to you're not patting us on the back. I I want to know. So let's get on to this the the next point.

I think we've kinda covered this. Let's get on to the next point. The importance of starfleet. What did you mean by that? So this is essentially a connecting bullet from how do we go from the Star Trek future to trying to come up with the organization that might allow a Star Trek future to to flourish. Right?

And again, this is reflecting my personality because apparently, when I was younger and I had that 10 minutes where whatever I saw in the next 10 minutes was going to dictate what I was gonna do for the rest of my life, I saw Star Trek 2. So, you know, the, I think I wanted to join the military about when I saw that, the space military in general. So Star Fleet always seemed to me like a fun organization to join. Right?

But, and it was part of the the writing of of Star Trek itself, not that Star Fleet was, like some people say, you know, the the fascist military of a, of a nondemocratic utopian fascist society. I don't think that's it at all. It's just a military or pseudo military show and set in space. But even though, you know, Star Trek isn't Star Fleet, the Star Fleet had a lot of, of input and, and was a major organization in allowing that future to happen.

So, if you're going to try to build a future, you wanna try to build parallels that you can build today that will eventually emerge as what you want it to in the future. So, my initial thought when I wanted to figure out what to do with my life was join the Air Force because it was close it was about as close to a space military as we had in the, you know, the late nineties and early 2000s when I joined up. And they really did have Air Force Space Command.

Or if I went pilot, which I didn't because I'm left handed, which means I can't fly worth a darn. Real oh, because everything is is right handed. Yeah. The pointing to, the pointing nose jets are right handers, so that's okay. Yeah. My my my father was a was a dentist, and we went to dental school. They had a 100 seats, 100 chairs, one seat for lefties. So he made the choice to do dentistry right handed. Oh, I see.

And he and he learned in right handed chairs, so he didn't have to wait for that one chair. Oh, interesting. Well, you know, just to to get back into it though, it's, I ended up joining Air Force Space Command because that was a space military. And that has emerged now as the US Space Force.

And, that connectivity, if you, assume that, you know, central to the Star Trek universe is the importance of starfleet as a symbol of that future and sort of the heroic, you know, a heroic organization in there. Starfleet is probably important, for, if you can build starfleet now, you can help build, you know, the star trek future, you know, get us on the path to building that Star Trek universe. And that's really all that I had for that second bullet.

No. But but I I wanna I I wanna dig a little deeper here because I'm gonna make a statement. I'd like to hear your response to this. I never looked at Starfleet as military. I always looked at it as a bunch of people who decided to make a choice to go out into the universe. They do do protection, but they're also meeting because it's strange new worlds and encounters and and collaboration. I never until just now when you're saying it, you're like, wow. I never even looked at it that way.

I never saw it like that Oh. At all. Yeah. And, you know, some people have a, you know, a negative you know, they don't want to think that, you know, Star Fleet is military. So they bend over backwards to try to say no. No. At most, it's paramilitary and and stuff like that. I would No. I I don't even see it as parallel maritime. I'm thinking it sounds exciting. You wanna go to a distant place. You need a ship. You need to be on it, and you're going to go.

And there's commands that have to be done in order to get there to be you know, the people running the ship. The the people on the in the bridge have to manage it, but I never saw it that way. Well, in, you know, in a lot of ways, that's probably a good thing because you're looking at, you know, this group of people that are actually out there trying to, you know, help people in, you know, what what is it, you know, sort of exploration, science and, defense diplomacy, that kind of stuff.

Defense is there, but it's not really the number one thing and you're only sort of pressed into service when when a bad guy is trying to come and and beat you. Yeah. As opposed to maybe today's military where we're, you know, we sort of see ourselves as a, you know, an agent of, you know, national will or, you know, an instrument of national power. Right? Where, you know, it's it's it's just we're we're here to kill people and break things to hear some say it. Right?

And Star Fleet was never talked about There's no saluting. There's there's no marching in order. You don't see people getting into lines and and standing at attention, waiting for the captain to give their responses. You don't have I mean, there's so many things missing from Star Fleet that I mean, if you're on a boat, if you're on a a cruise liner and the captain walks by, you would say, hello, captain or I captain or whatever they would say. You'd you'd respect the role.

But I don't think of the captain as captain of the ship. He's the guy running he's taking care of the ship. No. That's true. But then let me let me turn it around on you. You know, who has the monopoly of violence in, in the in the Star Trek universe for the Federation? Well, that's in Star Fleet. You know, a captain can order you to your death. So heaven forbid if you're a red shirt. Right? Which Oh, hey. The captain can order you.

Okay. You know Maybe I'm watching I don't I maybe maybe I've I got rosy eyes. I you know, I've just if you assume that, you know, no matter what, even in a an age of infinite, there is going to be, some expression of, of the warrior, I guess. Yeah. We would love to do an enlightened warrior, but, that's that's pretty much when I say military. That's that's what I mean, you know. But it's so in my mind, it's so far away from that Oh, yeah.

That I don't I I I don't think of the captain putting anybody to death by sending them out. I do think that there are conflicts out there, for example, the klingons and how they have to interact with them, But I don't see and they have to they have to rise to the occasion. I don't know how many people are on a Star Trek, on a, on a not not vessel. Star Trek vessel. Yeah. I don't know how many there are, but let's say there's a 200 or 300. We don't see a lot of their engagement.

But I'm thinking they're going about their day. They're dating people. They might get married. You don't hear children. You don't hear any children. So I guess that's a no no on the on the flights. Well, I did not hear you. Generation you did. But that's okay. So, yeah, it's it's interesting that you took it in that direction. That's why I just thought if you heard that I never had I didn't think about it that way. I just thought of it as this is safety. It's what you need.

There's a semblance of order. But you're right. There are no passengers on the enterprise. Like, you don't have people doing tourism. No. And, you know, you'd be surprised how much this is actually a, an an argument that comes up in real life. Like, you know, I've done a lot of history reading on trying to figure out the space force idea, and a lot of it goes to Robert Heinlein, which will, you know, it's later on in the bullets, but I'm not going to try to give too much away.

But he he, you know, Heinlein, big time science fiction writer, he wanted to be an army officer and then ultimately decided to go to the Naval Academy and was a naval officer for a long time until or, you know, for a few years, but then he got tuberculosis and got medically retired. So he had to do this writing thing to pay the bills.

But, he I think he gives the the template for what other people would try to grab and take as something like Star Fleet in his, juvenile book Space Cadet from 1948.

And, he goes out of his way to explain that the space patrol is a military organization but is has a broader enlightened self interest on how they're supposed to keep the peace by, keeping everyone safe, by being able to rescue people, by, but also respecting all sentient life in the solar system, you know, because there's, you know, in his future, there's Venetians and Martians and some of them are human, but but there there are other sentient species out there.

And then he says, well More like the more like the expanse. You have people living in different places. Well, except for for the Venusians or actual aliens. But Oh, okay. But the other thing is and it base it basically say, hey. If you wanna kill people and break things, you join the marines over there. You know? Okay. So it was it was interesting. But, so there's there's a lot to that.

And it goes to the space force even today where a lot of people, myself included, that were really enthusiastic, supporters of the Space Force and have been arguing about that for I for years didn't want a United States Space Force at all. We wanted a United States Space Guard patterned after the coast guard, which we argued was military but not war fighting. Okay. And that you know, but that's That's a there's a big difference there. I can understand that.

Yes. So but we can get into that a little bit later. But if you just Okay. No. That I I would like to get into that. So I guess the next one was the, the developing the organization and the social social movement and the needs for that. So where do we go here? So, this one is okay. Now let's take it from a, this argument from the, the Project Moon Hunt Gold's perspective. Right? You want to solve the mega challenges. Address. The challenges you can't solve for climate change, but address them.

Yes. Gotcha. Sorry. No. No. No. No. That's okay. This is learning. We're all I'm learning from you. You're learning from me. Well, as much as I'm an academic, I still tend to think simple and, you know, pretty much a hayseed. Go forgive me. But Okay. You know, but these these things, you know, in order to address and, you know, deal with the mega challenges, you have to sort of pattern yourself or at least accept the fact that, that these are challenges that need to be addressed. Right?

And they have to be maybe not forefront on everyone's mind at all times, but seen as something that's, you know, that that needs attention. Right? Mhmm. So these are challenges also that are that are global in nature. Yes. You know? And if you, you know, we can I think when we were first talking a little bit, we talked a little bit about the overview effect where, you know, some people argue and I think you had the actual person that came up with this whose name Frank White? Frank White.

Yep. Yes. Thank you. Yep. You know where he's like, hey, if you look from space to this big blue ball, you're changed. Well, maybe not.

But I would I would argue that there there probably does exist maybe a weak type of overview effect where if you're presented to, you know, earth as this marble, blue marble in a black sky, you have the you get a little bit more sensitivity to perhaps start looking at challenges as a global challenge rather than, you know, just whatever impacts your, you know, traditional sort of national security and stuff like that.

So, you know Across across the to to add to it, I think what I don't know if I said this. So let's, what I had said was there is the overview effect, the belief that when people go out into, beyond earth and they look back and they see their earth, they're going the big blue marble from the first time they had seen it, that they're going to have a different perspective. And, yes, at the first time that first picture came back, people went, wow.

But my argument was that has the world the world has changed, but has it become so much better because of that? And the kind of I'm gonna say the space, ecosystem says, well, that changes people. So I say, okay. There's been 570 people who've been above above earth. Have we become a better species? Are we taking care of the planet better? Would we communicate with other speech with other people around the world better? Are we more interconnected?

And so and almost everybody says, well, no. And I said, okay. So what's the magic number? Is it 5,000 people? Is that the number where we all change? Is it 50,000 people? And the challenge is it's not the number of people, and you can't fake it. You can't send a picture back. And I'm gonna be crude here. It's like well, I'll try not to be crude. It's like watching someone drive a car and driving a car. They're very different.

Well, seeing a picture of something and being up there are different, but we still haven't had that overview effect that changes our world in the way of the age of infinite and infinite possibilities. So the argument then is, what if instead of everybody having to experience this, what if it was a a global decree that any person who takes office in a country has to go up and take a look down once? Now there's 200 and some odd countries and territories. Might might might the world be different.

So some people will get up and say, I could dominate this. Some people would say, we really are one society. And there aren't multiple oceans. There's only one ocean. We only have one ocean. We just give it different names. So maybe if 200 and some odd people went away up to office and they're not going up every day, some people stay in office for a very long time, maybe the world would be different. Well But with Mearth with Mearth, we change that dynamic completely.

I believe it's possible to to to change that, that that attitude. And I would say that when you're dealing with, you know, whether or not space can actually give you more of a global, you know, consciousness or can will you start to look at Mearth rather than just your particular nation? We're dealing with probabilities, right?

And the below the more you put up there, like you said, you know, the more you're probably going to get people that are actually influenced to at least some degree by the overbook, which is a good thing. So what do we need to do? Well, we need to get everyone up there. That would be or as many people as possible up there. That requires the right technology, the right economics, and all that kind of stuff, building the MRF economy. Right?

I do want to ask you if you can, star something that to make sure that I return to this. But you said that someone will go up there and say and think that I can dominate this. Yep. One of our who I would consider a, you know, one of the, the secular saints of, you know, Space Force thinking, a person named Cynthia McKinley, addresses this specifically. But it's in my last bullet. So I want to get your opinion on her, on her charge to guardians as we go, as we get a little Okay. I got it.

I got it. I started. So we're good. We can cover that. That's interesting. And you know her, obviously, Cynthia, or have you just read Yes. You know? Or Okay. My point is if she's really good, let's get her on the program too. Oh, well, you know, I would, I would probably agree with you. Oh, yeah. Just make the introduction, and we'll take it from there. Okay. So where do you wanna go? Is there anything else with this social movement side and how valuable that is to move us forward?

Yeah. I would say the Space Force isn't something that is going to say, hey, Project Moon Hunt is our, is our is our load star, right, for our reason for being. But the, the Space Force can develop important allies and other, you know, fellows that can help along the way that see generally in the same direction and want to move there. So it moves into my other, you know, my next point where the space force can do a lot of things that can help build the Murph ecosystem.

And I would argue that it would probably be, you know, either in avatar development and then, maybe even steering the directions of countries. And I'm not just talking the US Space Force, but National Space Forces, you know, in general, can maybe help, their nations in a couple of ways towards a, you know, towards looking at the age of infinite because they see it as their job.

So, one of the interesting, commercials, recruiting commercials that the Space Force had when, they first stood up a couple of years ago, It was, very flowery, science fiction y sort of, and I really enjoyed it. And, the tagline was, you know, maybe your purpose on earth isn't on earth. Right? So it's like, oh, that's pretty cool. That means, you know, space is neat. But then you you have to think back. It's like, okay, but but you still don't know what that purpose is, you know.

Mhmm. It just means that you look at it from somewhere else. And, I would argue that space in general, has that ability to, well, I I will just straight out say that a lot of people think that the way that you solve or address a lot of the problems on earth is through space activity. And space activity has to help everybody. I mean, that's in the outer space treaty, that space is the province of all mankind.

And, if we, embrace that, you know, in a way that's realistic, that's not just idealistic but solves real problems, but in a very, you know, sort of positive way as opposed to someone saying this is mine and no one else can use it. That's a huge deal. And if the Space Force can develop a positive social message or at least embrace the positive social message of space, that would, by itself, independently help, Moon Hut's goals quite a bit.

But from a practical point of view, something that meant a lot to me when I started looking into it is that is the role historically, at least in the United States, although this is probably it's everywhere. The military has always been a way to take people that have no real prospects of joining a, you know, the industry or the community as you would say, through their own, you know, resources.

So it's amazing how many people that became leaders in ocean industries or in the merchant marine or in, you know, ocean activity in general to have joined the Navy first or the Coast Guard as kids or as, you know, young adults. Right? In air power and the air industry and the commercial aviation industry, you know, you've got people that are very important in the twenties and later like Charles Lindbergh, who crossed the Atlantic, right? How did he become a pilot? Well, he wasn't rich.

He joined the Army Air Corps as a reservist and became a pilot through military training. Juan Tripp, who people not a lot of people have heard of, but Juan Tripp is the person that, that developed Pan Am Airlines, which, you know, doesn't exist anymore but was, but pioneered international aviation international commercial aviation. How did he get his start? He was, a World War 1 bomber pilot in the Navy Reserve, an aviator.

Now he didn't make it to World War 1 before it ended, you know, and thank God that it ended. But it's, it's important that these people started out, that they really enjoyed aviation, but their father wasn't rich. Their father wasn't an engineer. They went into the military to develop their human capital, and then that human capital's return was almost infinite. You know, they they became heroes of the industry.

And space now is is in is finally at a spot where if you were if you were in high school now, but you don't have maybe the grades or you don't have the money to go to college, you can join the industry directly now by joining the US Space Force as a as an enlisted person. And that didn't used to be the case because, a few years ago, I would argue it's like, hey, if you were a reasonably bright kid, who did you wanna join?

What organization did you wanna join if you were going to get into the space industry? I'm just asking. What would Yeah. And I I I'm going through my mind. My best friend growing up became a marine, a presidential guard in the marine. And if I'm looking at my other friends, another one went to West Point. Oh. Another one went into the navy. If I look at a bunch of my best friends growing up, they they all went into military services.

Well, it's it it's a it is sort of interesting how, a lot of there's a lot of history behind, you know, the military academies, you know, Navy, Army, Air Force, you know, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine, all that kind of stuff, is an avenue for, you know, middle class folk to become, you know, to get a good education and become national leaders. But, you know, I would say back in the day, if you were a pro space kid that wanted to join someone, you would join you would wanna join NASA.

That's still probably the case even today. But if you wanted to join NASA, what did you have to do? Well, you had to go to university. You had to go to college. Yeah. You had to go to college and get a technical degree, which, you know, a lot of people can do, but it is sort of expensive. And maybe not everyone's going to be able to do that. And then it takes you another 4 years at least, you know, to get through that education before you can start your career.

Well, now the barriers to entry for people that would be considered, you know, enthusiasts or just youngsters that want to, you know, do something. It's like, Ah, space sounds like a really cool idea. Well, now with the Space Force, they can go in and they can get their degrees, you know, just like you can in any of the other military services, but start building your space professional credentials, right away.

If the Space Force trains their human capital correctly, which we can get into a little bit later.

But, I I really do think that, you know, the space, the level of space awareness in the United States will probably increase noticeably as you start having more people get familiar with the Space Force and you start having people that went into the Space Force for 5 years and then got out and then became leaders in whatever it is they're going to be doing, you know, you can develop the human capital of space like that and, you know, a feeder organization to, to develop new new avatars for the, you know, the Mearth economy and stuff like that.

It's I I'm loving this I'm I'm getting my mind around the concept. So I think you're extremely spot on with what you've said in terms of historically how individuals have, have grown through ecosystems and industry. So, pilots today, the American system has a lot of pilots that could be, in normal commercial aviation because they got their training in the military. That's one of the advantages of having a large institution such as the US Air Force.

I am a globalist, so I do see the world, and I'm looking around the world, focusing because you're focusing on the US. And I do see this parallel track of developing people in the Space Force. My question is, the Space Force was not allocated to a separate, unit within the military. It was put under the Air Force. And in doing so, I think it still maintains more of the military stance than it would have been if it was allowed to be its own, Air Force Marine.

And you've got the the Navy, Air Force, Marines. I'm gonna miss one now. What's the other one? Oh, Navy. Navy. You know? Coast Guard Navy. Yep. And Space Force. It would have probably I think this transition you're talking about would happen easier, probably I think this transition you're talking about would happen easier or faster if it wasn't a subset of the Air Force. What do you think? Well, I would definitely agree because we're getting again towards my, another, bullet.

Okay. But So if you if you got it now, you can go over it now. You can go over it later. It's up to you. Oh, yeah. Let let me let me go ahead. Let me take a shot at it then. But in Yeah.

You know, in addition to developing, you know, these these new avatars, I would also say that, the Space Force can help out the Moon Hut's goals by, if you train and educate your guardians correctly, they can hopefully, what we would have is an enlightened self interest that's developed among Space Force Guardians that will actually take, you know, the opportunities in space and the mega challenges, I mean, maybe not directly, but something very close to the mega challenges, of the of Moon Hunt and interpret national security and national interest in space, not simply, you know, maybe, the defense of American allies or, you know, to represent or, you know, to keep the sea lanes open in the South China Sea or something like that that might be more realist goals, that are sort of a zero sum game of international relations where if my adversary or my, you know, competitor, gains, I have to lose by definition, and adjust it more towards a an age of a, you know, of infinite thinking.

Age of infinite. Yeah. For an infinite game. Right? Or not just an infinite game, but, you know, an infinite amount of possibilities where every, you know, everyone's interests might well be, satisfied if we, you know, develop these things correctly.

And I would say that, you know, if a Space Force Guardian can take those mega challenges and interpret them through a national security lens, that would make things a great deal more easy for, you know, steering the United States, and other other nations towards developing this mega challenge. I'm gonna try to translate this because tell me if I'm getting this right because I like what you're saying.

I never thought in this dimension, so it's kind of neat you're pushing me in in different places. Is you're saying that through the introduction or the development of Project Moon Hot inside of the space force, What you what we end up creating is individuals who become more globally aware because the 6 mega challenges are not national, they are global. And the interconnectedness of all the life journeys that must happen in order for us to have a a different future.

And in doing so, they will also learn or see where a 40 year plan. They will understand that over 40 years that if we don't address these challenges around the world, it doesn't matter where you live, you will be impacted. So maybe as a collective whole, bringing in allies from around the world, we can change that future. Is that kind of what you're saying? Yes. And Okay. Truth be told I know it was long, but, yeah.

Well, the Space Force is already doing that in a the US Space Force, anyway, is doing that in a large, part now. They, it doesn't get said very often, but there's a lot more, there's a lot of partnerships going on and developing partnerships around the world, mostly with, you know, European allies, Japan, you know, South Korea and other groups like that. But to solve what or to at least address global challenges like space debris, which is a subset of, you know, you know, speeding up.

Severe and and balances or something like It's explosive impact. Yes. Life. And and we call and if you remember, I think I told you Marie Bajau was on the call. We came up with in our pre call. We called it space environmentalism. Oh, yeah. You know, I yeah. I I forgot about that. So sorry. You know, this is Yeah. No. No. No. It's okay. That's okay. You wouldn't you're not supposed to remember all of it. But space environmentalism, what you're saying is perfectly correct.

Yeah. So the Space Force is already taking, these first steps into, you know, trying to think this way. And they're doing it for very, you know, I I would I would hate to say it, but sort of war fighting nationalist reasons. You know? Yes. They don't wanna you know, I hate I mean, let's just be real. Most people don't I mean, environmentalism is good, you know, but we're not going to trade security for it necessarily.

But even if you have a hard nosed realist point of view, you're already starting to see people moving towards this direction to, to address these global challenges because that's just by sheer necessity, you know, and everyone can see this particular necessity. So if they're already moving in that direction, as much if the more you can nudge them into seeing broader and broader, they've already expressed the fact that they have that inclination to move that direction. So that's a good thing.

But maybe they need to move faster. You know? Yeah. Probably. They need to move faster. The challenge that and I'm I know people in the space force, and I know people in most of the disciplines. And there are 2 people who kind of reference the same thing, and they've both been on our guests. Andy Aldrin and Dan Dunbocker. Andy Aldrin is Buzz Aldrin's son. He has about 350 graduate students in beyond Earth.

He's got 500 schools that he's working with in terms of education beyond Earth, as well as Dan Dunbuck, who runs the American Institute For Astronautics or Astronautics and Avionics or Avionics and Astronautics. I forget the order and a aiaia 33,000 members. They both in the month this January said, what is missing across NASA and others is that narrative spin, the the collective set of conditions that Project Moon Hut or offers. And I'm not trying to promote Project Moon Hut what I'm saying.

And I'm saying that as you're talking and I'm thinking about the people I know in the space force or the people I know in other areas, they're missing that that global that linkage of what is the story that unfolds, that plan. And so I think the way you're articulating it is interesting. Well, I think it's interesting to the younger people that are joining the Space Force too.

One of the interesting things is and we'll get in a little bit later, but there was a a very quick, very behind the scenes cultural fight over what the space force was actually going to become, or at least culturally. And, you know, basically in my interpretation, the, the, you know, the frozen middle and the, the Air Force won. You know, the cultural conservatives, I guess, won.

You know, where the Space Force turned into nothing more than Air Force Space Command, writ large with a slightly different uniform. Mhmm. And, really what other people I mentioned it before, it was more of a coast guard of space where it's like, hey, we're military, and if bad people need to be, you know, have force force use against them to stop, we will do so. But that's not the only way we're going to define ourselves or our importance.

And, you know, that, that that push was sort of quashed by leadership. Probably had a little bit to do with the fact that, the Air Force, the Department of the Air Force got to select the Space Force's leaders. And, you know, but it turns out that, you know, we keep getting, you know, me and other folks get, get contacted all the time by, you know, the lieutenants and the junior, enlisted people and captains. Even some majors and and lieutenant colonels, like, hey, you know, telling us, look.

There's gotta be more to the Space Force than this. So they're looking for that mission, and they're looking for that, that sense of purpose, which is just Right. And that's right. You're saying it. It's missing that piece. They're looking for it. Yeah. Cool. I the I I don't know if you know rear admiral, Bill Baumgartner. He ran the 7th fleet in the 7th the 7th Coast Guard District Headquarters in, in Miami, which is the, I think, one of the largest coast guard units in the world.

Yeah. Bermuda Triangle. No. I'm just kidding. Yeah. But he he he and I have spent time together, and I ended up speaking for the the his group. But it's interesting that you're tying those together, and I like the idea of the guard. And it's because it becomes and this is not gonna be politically correct across every ecosystem. Like, I think I told you, I lived in Hong Kong for a decade. I've lived in Luxembourg. I I've worked in over 50 countries.

So I'm trying to be I'm trying to take the tone of what you're bringing and trying to expand it on a global scale the best I can without going into too much, is that I think that if what you're saying, what you're suggesting is there could be even a more inclusive a conclusive, storyline for the world's world individuals who are interested in moving in this direction to participate. And I think it's an interesting angle that I had not pursued. Yeah. No. I I'd like to to think so.

And I think I'm seeing the first glimmers of this kind of thing. I'm not really okay. You know, I talk a lot about the United States, but that's because I'm an American. I'm, you know, I'm a US officer. But that doesn't mean that, you know, people from, you know, Canada or China or Russia or, you know, Brazil or, you know, anyone, you know, can't be a part of this kind of stuff.

And I really do think it's important that everyone, you know, put their best people forward to conquer space because the challenge is hard enough that we're going to need all hands on deck, right? So Here's a balancing thing that might help you. There's there's a 4 I don't know how mathematics. My son taught me this because I called it 5 d. There's 4 d's in the world. There's there's location, time, length, width, and height. So where you're sitting today is a a point in time.

There's a dimension in time, but there's length, width, and height. So if I went forward 20 years from now, your location that you're sitting at is not gonna be where you're sitting at today. So in Project Moon Hut, we're looking at a 40 year timeline.

So the things and the challenges we're facing today, which are becoming more and more complex, and I would say complex in terms of the 6 mega challenges, In 20 years, your children, my children, or or relatives or friends are all gonna be 20 years older. They're going to have lived through a world where they potentially will want something different. And a lot of the leadership that we have today will not be the same leadership in 20 years.

So, therefore, when we talk about countries, we could say that country is this way today. That leadership is this way today. But in 20 years, it could be a whole different ball game based upon sea level water rise or or extreme heat to Northern Africa where it's 50 degrees c at all the time where people are now moving either sub Sahara or they're moving north into Europe. We could see Mexico or the the Central America is having challenges with heat. Or we're seeing Prosecco.

If you the in Italy, I was talking to someone recently, and they said Prosecco probably won't be able to be produced in Italy in the future because it's too hot. And so our world will change. And in 20 years, we could see a dynamic shift. And that's where my mind goes. Even though you're talking about it today, I'm saying, okay. But that doesn't mean Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka. Doesn't mean Japan, South Korea.

And you'd add those timelines in, going Estonia a lot via Lithuania. They could be a different type of contributor. And I think they will be more likely a contributor if they see a great storyline. Oh, absolutely. And the the fun thing is is, you know, being a a PME professor or sorry, professional military education professor, you get to, see a lot of, at least for us, it was air officers from around the world. And you brought up Singapore.

I will tell you that Singapore, pound for pound, have always been some of the brightest folks, in, in, you know, Air Command and Staff College. And we had 1 space, 1 he was a pilot, an F 16 pilot in our space program last year that was just, you know, unbelievably, skilled. So if he becomes a leader in his air forces, you know, in the next couple of years, you might see a lot of very interesting things come out of Singapore, space related.

So it it's just exciting stuff, but everyone can play definitely. There's a $100,000,000,000 deal that was just fetched out of a company out of Singapore. They, it's a French individual who's, I think, living in Singapore. It's funny because when you look at their executive team, not a single person on the executive team on their website is a full time employee. But they just etched, with with Airbus, a $100,000,000,000 program for transport satellite type system.

And Singapore with Tamasac, which is more government connected, is a huge funding arm. So, yes, Singapore has a tremendous amount of opportunities. We have teammates in Singapore right now. And I'd be interested in, you know, someone like, this individual you're talking about. I wonder if he was to have a conversation or listen to the podcast, how he might react and become inclusive of the project that we're talking about. So if we wanna make that kind of push, maybe he should hear about it.

I'm, writing that down now. Okay. So you you understand what I'm saying is the the podcast is a mechanism for individuals to hear a different dynamic about beyond Earth. And, you know, I don't space is not an industry. It's a geography. So we people are often talking about space, but we have to be careful. A lot of individuals don't care about Mars. They don't care about the asteroid, Venus, or or Jupiter. They that's so far away and so distant in their mind.

But when you create Mearth, this moon earth symbiosis symbiosis that we have, the the moon keeps us at the axis that we have, spins the earth that the rotational has. It makes our tides work the way they do. Animals hide and reproduce based upon, the cycle of the moon. All of the we're very symbiotic. And by creating this geography of Mearth, it's something that we can fill.

We can we can focus our energy on building within one geography instead of saying, yeah, but we need to go to distant galaxies. We're pretty far away from distant galaxy travel today. It doesn't mean it can't happen tomorrow. There can't be someone working on something. I'm I'm optimistic so it'll one day happen. But in our realistic timeline without, you know, the the throwing the Hail Mary, Mearth is a possible an easy possibility for all of us.

Yeah. So this this individual or any individuals you have, this is a great conversation for them to hear. Absolutely. And, you know, it's it's maybe sort of trite, but, you know, we take tend to look at, okay, this big utopian future that we're looking for, where when would it show up? It's like, well, 200 years, 300 years. Okay. Yeah. But the first the beginning of any journey starts with a single step. Right?

It's like most people, if you just look at, hey, 300 years from now, I'm gonna be dead 240 of it or whatever, you know, so I'm not even gonna take a step. It's important to have pragmatic, you know, plans and actions so you can step forward. You know, you can take a step and it's in the direction you're gunning for. Right? That that's why it's 40 years. I I'm often on calls. I say, okay. Let's try this. Take your age at 40 years to it. How old are you? And they say their age. I say, okay.

Tell me what you think the future will be like in 40 years. Be surprised. Most people don't have any clue what it would be like. Mhmm. And then I say, you could be an optimist, and you could see we're gonna be like the Jetsons. The world's gonna be amazing. We're gonna have robots cleaning our houses, taking care of our dog. They're gonna feed us. We're gonna have flying cars. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great. The world is gonna be solved. How? They have no answer for that.

You say, then there's the pessimist. Well, we're gonna have so many satellites in light. We're gonna have so many conflicts. It's gonna be climate change, and the world's gonna fall apart. Okay. Tell me how that works, and what do you want to do to change that? And then there's what we try to fit in is that realistic timeline. In 40 years, what could we do? Sure. What if we could the next 25 years probably will not be like the last 50. But what if we could influence?

What we could address the 6 mega challenges, which takes that pressure off of people to going back to your Armazolov conversation, that individuals can feel that they see hope. And 30% of all kids on planet Earth today under the age of 30 have a negative prospect of the future. Well, what if we can turn some of those into people who say, you know, maybe there is a possibility. Maybe it's 10% of them. That would definitely make for a better world. Absolutely.

Or a different world, not a better world. So, yeah, the, that single step that you've said, you need to have a plan, we're sticking with 40 years. I don't think that's a bad timeline. And exactly to your point, a 100 years or 300 years is too far. I I would like to add, if I could, a military spin on your 40 years. Yeah. Just from the from a US military point of view, we generally there can be people that do they go a little bit longer if they achieve very, very high ranks.

But, most people are forced to retire at 62 years old from the US military. And the reason that is is because at least from an officer point of view, the an officer normally gets commissioned, you know, if they come straight out of high school into an academy or something like that, at about 21 to 22 years. So how long is that? A 40 year career. So how would I, why would I bring this up?

Because in the space force right now, we have lieutenants that might well be the flag officers, you know, 4 stars in 40 years. So when you talk about a 40 year timeline, in a 40 year plan, even, you know, some people like 40 years. I'm I can't think, you know, 6 months in front. I have to, you know, the term is, you know, we have to address the gators that are almost off the boat, right?

Yeah. But that's not really the case because some of the people we hope, that are going to see the end of the 40 year project or at least the first project for Project Moon Hunt, it actually be, you know, achieved while they're still in, you know, the service.

So the people that need to, enact, Project Moon Hunt now and might be into the leadership, national level leadership, maybe even international level leadership by the time, you know, this, this timeline the first timeline closes, you know, Project Moon Hut is very, very much relevant to their careers. They just are. It's yeah. That goes back to the the the reflection of the age of infinite, the Star Trek universe, that timeline.

So we're actually fitting and I'm I'm taking it out of of the military. We're taking it to a human career. Yes. And the human career, 40 years, 50 years, it's still in the timeline, yet someone can articulate that. And here's the example. People can often I've done this in audiences. I've done this with executives. I've said, try to give me a 40 year plan, and they can't. I say, what's your 40 year plan? They can't. They they have troubles with this. They have troubles with the 5 year plan.

You can't think that far out. And then I say, when your child was being born, it was you you got pregnant, did you think about having a child? Of course, I did. Okay. Did you think of it as a boy or a girl? And how would what type of attitude? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I hope it's a nice one. You know, it doesn't have all the challenges growing up. I said, did you wonder what they might be like when they're maybe 10? Of course, I did.

Did you even think about one day they'd go to college, university? Yes. How about if they do you think your child might did you think about them possibly getting married? Of course I did. I said, how about them having children? Well, David, come on. That's I mean, that's what happens when you have a child. I said, so you're able to think 40 years about your child's future, but you hadn't thought about 40 years of your future or how the earth in which they live will be.

And it's kind of a paradigm shift for them. And I I, well, yeah, I can in certain areas. And so what you're doing, which I love, is you've tied it to a human career of a 20 year old today. I love it. This is good stuff. I didn't think about the, the whole, the whole child thing. You know? I think someone asked me that. It's like, why do you wanna have kids? And I think I told them, like, offhand. It's like, well, I'm pissed off. I'm not gonna be able to command a starship.

So I want my children to have that opportunity. So But that's but that's an ex you can do that for kids. And when I said it, you probably you know a mother is sitting there holding the bike. They're thinking about grandchildren one day. So they've already gone through multiple iterations of what their child might look like, how it might might grow, what school.

People move school districts before their children are born so that they can get their children in the right school district, which would go for 18 years or 12 years. So they can forecast, but we haven't taught people how to forecast to bring in complex, scenario planning. And what we're doing with Project Moon Hut is we're not going over the the broad brush of every challenge in the world. There are 6. Those 6 are really going to impact us a lot.

And then if you forecast them, we're going to have about 20 years of real challenges. And with Project Moon Hut, the intersection is that there will be a light at the end of the tunnel. And have you ever seen the movie, 2012 with, John Kuzeci? No. If you can believe it, I haven't. Well, at the end of this movie, I'm not gonna destroy it, they're they go into a, big Himalaya, I think, mountain. And the world is falling apart. Things are happening. The world's sea levels are rising.

The continents are going down. It's just everything's cracking. And he gets to the top of he goes down into this arc in this big tunnel not tunnel, but open expanse cave. Like, you would have 4 military submarines or but they had a bunch of submarines because they knew these things would happen. And John says, when did you build all this? And his reply was something to the effect of, we knew you wouldn't listen, so we built it anyway. You know? You know?

You hope that someone actually understands what's going on. Right? Well, we we are getting there. So how else with this, lieutenant, the flag? I love what you did. Is there any more you wanna cover on the social movement? Because I didn't is there anything with that social side that you were trying to address? Well, maybe, I think my the next one, my next bullet was about, the cultural leaders and visionaries and how they express vision similar.

So Okay. I would like to tell the story because it needs to be told of Lieutenant Colonel Cynthia McKinley. She was a squadron commander or an air force space officer, in the late 19 nineties that was a squadron commander and had a really bright career. She went to the school for advanced air and space studies and, did pretty well.

Of what I understand, she got, a line number for colonel, which means she went from lieutenant colonel to, was just about ready to be promoted to colonel, and then wrote a paper in 2,000, called The Guardians of Space. And this article was, explaining in the Air Force's professional journal, the Aerospace Power Journal at the time, of, you know, explaining, look, the Air Force wants to have an aerospace force with a seamless, you know, combat projection from air and space.

That was the big thing at the time. But that really isn't gonna work that well. So probably what needs to happen is, the Air Force can keep the mission, the war fighting, weaponeering mission in space with, you know, in the in the Air Force.

But you have to split off most of what then was considered Air Force Space Command that worked on the Global Positioning System satellites that, managed the space launch ranges, on the West Coast and East Coast and provided communication services and all this other stuff, these support services, because the Air Force needed to realize that they're not just military systems anymore, but they're actually global utilities. That GPS is used by everybody, not just the Air Force.

And if we can split the war fighting Air Force into, you know, a military but still more, you know, society sustaining, US space guard based off the coast guard, model, which is, you know, she basically said, hey, look, the, the the coast guard is a military organization, and their cruisers have weapons.

But no one thinks that if a coast guard cruiser shows up, even if they do have a 5 inch deck gun on the front, they don't say that they're militarizing anything, because they know that the Coast Guard is there to protect people in general. You know, aids to navigation, rescue services and stuff like that.

And she argued that this is the split that we needed to have because there needed to be a focused military organization that focused on protecting the environment of space and doing all these other things that are unique to space, while the war fighting could be done by airmen. Guardians needed to, ensure space's, you know, the national interest in space from this point of view. And I remember I was a cadet at this time at the Air Force Academy, and I couldn't stand that article.

I could not stand it. It, totally defeated my, you know, my world view. It was totally I was totally against it. I was all air force all the way. And then I reread it about 4 years later when I was an early captain, and then it became as close as I could ever read to secular gospel. You know, I mean, I totally had a complete, a completely changed perspective on it to where I thought she was absolutely right. And, but what happened is that I never heard about Colonel McKinley again.

And it was only later I found out that once she published that article, the chief of staff who wanted to keep air and space together at the time in the Aerospace Force, pulled her promotion. And later on, she had to, she was forcibly retired. And, that is, that was devastating to hear. But, it it goes to show that, one, the air force might not have always been completely above board on on letting the space force do what it was supposed to do.

But also that we had, people that have fought for a different type of, of of space force than we have now and, paid the price on it. But I wanted to tell that story because she, you know, she retired, to, to somewhere in Arizona, and, she's she's certainly still around. And I tried to contact her a while back when the Space Force really was going, the the argument in 20 18, 2019.

We just didn't get together, but she posted something on her LinkedIn page, if you can believe it, called Guardians 2,050. And if you don't mind, I would just like to read it. No, please.

She said here, the single most important task for the Guardians is to employ elegant, constructive capabilities that guarantee peaceful use of space to enhance life on earth and beyond, contribute nothing to the demise of earth's oceans or orbits, and rise above the impulse to infuse energy into destruction by responding in kind or by claiming that which cannot be controlled.

In succeeding in this task, the Guardians will emerge as keepers of a mid 21st century vision of space exploitation, which recognizes that the goal is temporal, not spatial, to be, not to have, to give, not to own, to share, not to control, to be in accord, not to subdue. And then she said, enjoy the journey, stay safe, stay strong, cherish your transformative calling.

Now that, you know, that I thought was exceptionally powerful, coming from a person that really had a lot of influence on developing me. But if you, you know, think about it. This was a military officer, a Space Force advocate before the Space Force was a thing, although she would have changed it to a model after the Coast Guard rather than a war fighting air force in space.

Saying things to, you're not supposed to control, you're supposed to share, you know, and resist the impulse for someone to say, I can dominate this, into something that, you know, we can share and that we can all, you know, gain from. I bring that up not necessarily to, to, you know, say that, hey, this is a great thing, even though I think that is.

It's that the same kind of mentality that, you know, you have with Project Moon Hunt and other people have are being expressed by people that come from the military itself. You know, that is a huge deal. And I bring that up because, I think not only was Colonel McKinley a martyr, for lack of a better term, for, you know, Space Force independence, but also a visionary for what the culture of that Space force should be. And I think that culture is very well in line with Project Moon Hunt.

But I'll get to my last point now, which is, the space force's culture is, you know, we've talked about it pretty much the whole time, but there's still a debate on what the Space Force needs to be and needs to do. And we argued in 19 or 2019, 2020 about 2 visions for what the Space Force is and supposed to be. And we borrowed it from, I'm almost certain it came from Pete Warden, who I believe you had on your show. It was the first interview we did. He was a it was an intro very quickly.

It was very interesting that he's working at Breakthrough Foundations. I was told I had to meet Pete. He was he ran NASA Ames at the time, just before it. And I go to see him, and I tell him about Project Moon, and he says, stop. Stop. I'm done. I will do the podcast, and I will advocate for the project. Yeah. He's pretty decisive. It's it's nice. It was it was just like that. And then I I last time I saw him, I was in Luxembourg, and we had some fantastic hamburgers. Oh, very good.

You know, it's always fun to hang out with, with him even though I'm, like, definitely a secondary worker bee. But, you know, well, anyway, he he called it, 2 different visions, the brown water versus the blue water space forces. And there's the brown water vision, which we would probably call lack of a vision, which says the space force really needs to look at geosynchronous Earth orbit and towards Earth. So geo and below.

And we liken that to the brown water navies, which don't have deep sea capabilities. They have usually small river craft and deal with the brown water, which is the inland, you know, rivers and the close to the coasts where the mud and silt from the rivers sort of pollute not really pollute, but, you know, they get into the, the ocean water close to shore.

And then there's the blue water, which, in the Space Force perspective, which means you look out towards deep space and you see space as, you know, a geography that can be, used to advantage, and not in a bad way, but, you know, I really like how Colonel McKinley in that in her poem says that it's an exploitation, you know, vision. Because a lot of people think exploitation is bad.

But really, it's just using, you know, our, our environment in ways that that harm the environment as little as possible, we hope, while making our lives better and the lives of, you know, like what you would approach the, you know, all the species on earth or as many as we can impact positively. You know, make life these lives as as, you know, good as possible, as, you know, as infinite as possible. And, you know, it was it really boiled down to, you know, these 2 different visions.

And the Brownwater vision, we argued, was focused on being the satellite maintainers of the terrestrial forces, which means the Space Force was meant to make sure the satellites worked just fine. So the army can fight, the air force can fight, the navy can fight, everyone can fight.

And if bad guys tried to take out our satellites, the Space Force would fight them too, which I'm not saying is unnecessary, but it springs from a mindset of threat, of almost to a certain extent paranoia, you know, to always look beside, you know, around to see who can hurt you and to try to mitigate that hurt. Now that's an impulse that's important. But when you are only focused on that impulse, it turns you into a person that you might not like. Right?

Mhmm. But, the alternative version, this is the army version of the military. You're supposed to kill people and break things. But there used to be an older understanding of what a military organization too that sprung from the Navy, which is, you know, navies are not meant to fight all the time.

They're meant to, expand, to explore, to understand how the seas worked, so commerce was better able to be, you know, so merchant mariners could go to all corners of the ocean, all the corners of the world through the ocean, trans, trade and goods and communications and all this other kind of stuff to make life better.

And, the role of the military was to protect those civilians that were out there making life better and, to sort of subdue the seas, which really meant that we were supposed to operate as safely and as effectively as possible on the seas. Which so there was the Coast Guard sort of mentality. And when we fought, when the Navy had to fight, they weren't out to kill as many bad guys as possible.

It was really to inflict damage, economic damage, through, pressure that was hopefully going to end a war with far fewer casualties because you were applying very, you know, specific pressure, but actually hurting very few. And, it was more of a military point of view, not necessarily a strictly war fighting point of view.

And that's why we argued that, that the Space Force needed to have more of a blue water or coast guard mentality because there are legitimate military operations and military missions that are not solely focused on killing people and breaking things. And we had to relearn that. Because if we didn't, we would have a Space Force that was focused on maybe not killing people, but almost entirely focused on breaking things in space. Now, I'm not saying that doesn't have a role.

I'm just not saying it should be the only role to the exclusion of everything else. But there's this, this cultural fight was not really, didn't really happen because, in my opinion, the Space Force got, you know, made independent a little bit too fast because we couldn't have this cultural debate beforehand. And what do we have now? We have a Space Force that is focused on war fighting to the exclusion of most everything else.

And they are not particularly, interested in something like, you know, Project Moon Hut or the Murph Economy. Although, external pressure and some of internal pressure by the, you know, the rebellious people in in the Space Force bureaucracy are pushing the moon on them, and they have to respond. So every now and then, we do tend to respond.

But the the cultural fight, at least the initial phase between whether the Space Force would be a war fighting organization or a coast guard like organization was won handily by the war fighters. But that probably doesn't comport with reality enough to last very long. People that are space enthusiasts tend to like a vision that Project Moon Hut is trying to push, you know.

So, maybe the Space Force is supposed to protect commerce and protect the people that are in your hut while, you know, in phase 1 where you say that you have a a door and a roof, you know, in a box. And then as it extends to, you know, you know, the the what do you call it? The industrial park. And then Extend end of stay and then community class.

Yeah. I mean, there's going to be in order for people to go or at least go easier, you're going to need assurances that if something bad happens, there will be at least someone out there that is going to do whatever it takes to get you back, and they have the ability to do so. So the, the expression of the Space Force as a spaceborne Coast Guard might well be inexorable.

It will probably happen eventually, but it really the more someone like Project Moon Hut pushes the space force in this direction from external, you know, from external pressure, the easier it will be for the internal pressure, that does exist in the Space Force, will be able to carry the day or at least start to develop these kinds of capabilities, you know, in addition to, the war fighting mission of the Space Force as it is.

So it's not going to be, easy to transition the Space Force to something that really embraces the Age of Infinite. There is a lot of I do think that especially the more introspective Guardians are going to, are going to at least think that there is something to this Age of Infinite and they have a huge role, at least a huge supporting role in making it happen. But there's still the, you know, 0 sum mentality, understanding in the Space Force 2.

And that's going to be a challenge because overcoming that 0 sum thinking that's in the Space Force now is going to be a huge issue and a huge victory, that is necessary in order to push the age of infinite that much closer to reality. It's, tell me if I'm wrong, but I I think this is correct. I'm listen, everything's very good.

There's a post World War World War 2 and the end of World War 2 and the advancement of the US military across the seas did one thing for the world that is not normally or openly spoke about. You might hear about it, but the average person doesn't hear this. That the US military had become so large, the air force, the navy had become so strong, that what it did is it started to, in line with what you're saying, it started to watch the seas.

It allowed commerce around the world for the first time in history to be able to operate wherever they went. You didn't have pirates the same way. You did and have bad guys the same way. You could go out into the seas and know that your shipping containers, whatever you're shipping, is gonna make it to its port. And for the past 50 years, the US has more or less I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing. Again, I'm a globalist.

The US has more or less said to the seas, we're gonna make sure that the seas are fairly safe. We don't have a lot of, terrorist activities. We don't have a lot of boarding of vessels. And we're getting to a point in history where we're seeing a little bit of a breakup of that where and, again, not a this is just an as is conversation. China is saying, well, these are RCs.

And I do believe that if we see and I've worked with the CEO of Maersk and the executive team, which is 5th oh, more than 50% of all the the freight that's moved on the oceans. If we start to see multiple incursions, multiple ransoms, multiple, cargo containers or, tourists, or whatever on the ocean on the seas starting to be interfered with, taken over, hijacked, and the risk of commerce becomes great enough, then a lot of what we do will break down.

And so the way you were looking at this in terms of the Air Force, the Air Force, yes, it does have AWACs. Yes. It does have surveillance that are hap that's happening all the time. But protection in the air is not something the same as, as you've said, the waters. Their job is to go out to make sure things operate, to make sure cargo gets to the next destination and commerce can happen.

You're really making a fundamental argument that beyond Earth has a completely different, it has more symbolism to the oceans and the vastness of it and the allowance of things to happen than it does have from protecting land and and using it for political purposes or to be able to, change, I'm not gonna go into all the details of that. I don't wanna go too deep. But it's it's it's really a a completely different shift.

And there's a person in the space force who said to me, David, what happens if some bad guys go to the moon? Have you thought about it? And, yes, we do think about that. What happens if someone comes to the moon to one of our phases and and, does something bad, tries to blow something up? Or if there's bad people, do you have a brigade do you have a brig? Do you have a place to put them? Do you have police officers? That comes to the question, how do you even decide what rules do we follow?

We're not on earth. We don't have the same policies. We will have to create new governance models. So my, where I'm going to is I had 2 questions. And the first one that I was asking myself is with all that you've said about this new group of people who are or internal group of people who wants to see this change, if you had to come up with some type of, I'm gonna call it plan, but some type of storyline or some type of incursion or some type of insert Project Moon Hut here.

How would you do it to get these individuals to say, yeah, this makes sense. We should be aligning, self interest here. We should be aligning with a lot of the narrative that Project Moon Hut is putting forward. How would you do that if it was up to you? This is why, you know, as it turns out, I'm sort of an educator. I would not have thought that, when I was younger, though in retrospect it seems fairly obvious.

But, you know, it's it's telling the story in, you know, telling the story in broad form. And, you know, I wasn't aware of Project Moon Hut until I, talked to you. But, you know, do I agree with everything? Or, you know, is is how you developed it exactly how I would develop it? No. But it's very easy to realize that we're allied in pretty much every, you know, specific you know, not specific, but, you know, it's like, yeah, if if we were going to go with your plan, I'm all on board.

But seeing the, it trying to reach out and having that narrative, in the Guardian sphere means an awful lot to me. So how do I, tell that story? It's hard. Since we don't have the, what you could call the commanding heights of the space force leadership itself. We have to be, content right now with, explaining the larger ideas, you know, the visions that Colonel McKinley and Robert Heinlein have said of what the space force should be to our students. You know, that's not everything we do.

We're not a propaganda school at PME. But really if you're going to learn about space in, you know, as a domain, you're going to come into the contact with these kind of ideas over and over and over again. Because the only way that you can avoid them is to specifically ignore them, right? So that's why you heard in a lot of, early Space Force, you know, interviews and stuff like that in 2019, it's like, well, what about astronauts in space? What about search and rescue?

Space Force people would say, that's not our job. So they were defining themselves out of the debate. Right? Yeah. So it's like, no. We have to think about this. We have to, confront this because it's part of our domain. It is. And we're supposed to be the ones that can exploit the domain for the benefit of the United States and the larger world, than anyone else. That's that's our responsibility. So we have to do that. Now, the the problem is is can you impose a culture from on high?

It would be really easy if, we had someone, you know, our chief of space operations, our 4 star, saying, yay, verily. Our new mission, and I'll I'll tell you our mission statement for the Space Force right now, is And we're talking we're talking about Saltzman. We're talking about, Bennett Vega. We're talking about Thompson. These guys Yeah. Saltzman now is our 2nd chief of space operations.

He changed our mission statement to read the Space Force's mission statement to secure our nation's interests in, from, and to space. Now, I'm fairly critical of Space Force leadership a lot. But this one, in my opinion, they hit it out of the park. I mean, that was a great mission statement because it was so inclusive that everyone could see themselves in it. Even a, you know, a grizzled, you know, pro coast guard guy like me that's been in 20 years.

Mhmm. A person that is all about terrestrial support to the war fight like, you know, most of the people in the space force and the young guardian. And the question is, you know, what are our nation's interests in space? That's the question that that mission statement is begging. And, the way you answer that is where you fall on this.

So if our national interests are determined to be, you know, address these global challenges, you know, be there while we, protect our, you know, civilian and our commercial, businesses and explorers and adventurers that go out into space to secure advantages to earth and its people and all the, you know, species of earth from space. You know, that's what our national interest is. The space force has to salute smartly and move on. Right?

So, if we had the generals, tell us, hey, this is what, this is how the space force sees our national interest. And then insert something that's very close to what colonel McKinley said or what you say with Project Moon Hunt. That would be great. So how? So I'm going I'm I'm moving it I'm going from the theoretical. So if if you were responsible for helping us to create the ecosystem of change, how might you do it? You've done some great research about us.

You've done you've thought about this a lot before you even met us. I think we kind of filled a void that you might have been looking for, something that was a holistic story that can bring some of these, thoughts together. How would you what would be your approach? I you would have to, I mean, short of, you know, massive organizational change in the space force, which I don't really think needs to you know, is necessarily needs to happen.

What you need to have happen, and this might be sad to say because it's been tried so often, you have to get, a national vision for space and a, you know, policy from civilian leadership to potentially force the, the Space Force's hand in certain things. Like, hey, you know, the Artemis Accords, for instance, is a new approach towards interpretation of the outer space treaty. So Yeah. You know, towards sort of pro private, pro development kind of, kind of ways.

And then, so you should say, Hey, Space Force, this is a national level interest that the State Department and NASA really are interested in. So guess what? You have to defend and secure these interests.

And then the Space Force will have to start doing that or say, hey, look, because we need the Space Force to be involved in this, we have to, develop or build the, the Judge Advocate Corps of the Space Force, which would be, you know, legal lawyers in Space Force uniform, to, come up with this new governance.

You know, how do you how do you make operational plans for this governance that we think need to be done to make space, you know, a positive benefit for all of Earth and secure national interests and, you know, be developed in a, in a deliberate, maybe sustainable is right, but that has a lot of negative connotations to some people. But, you know, in a, in an enlightened manner. Right? So, we tried fighting for a JAG corps, for a long time. And it's just like, hey, we don't have enough people.

We don't have enough, the the Space Force would come back. We don't have enough work for them to do. And then our response would be, it's like, no, there's a whole lot of work that you refuse to do, you know. But, so the military has to be it's sort of a weird systems dynamics issue, where the military sometimes has to be forced by civilian, leadership to do certain Well, that's correct. That it has to there's there's a combination of commercial, educational.

There's all of the pieces come together that put pressure on government governance to change. So if there's a lot of commercial activity, governance will change. If there's a lot of educational changes, governance has to change. So there's a lot of pressures. And so what you're I think what you're articulating is that the fastest route to the change in the space force is the change through, I don't wanna say commerce, but it's a combination of political and commercial, interests.

Yes. I would like to say though that some of the best, the holistic thinkers of domains tend to come from the military though. So when you think about air power theory or what, you know, how the air force should develop or commercial aviation should have developed, Billy Mitchell had a lot of great ideas that was used very well. He was a, you know, a general officer.

So there's a push factor from the military too that the people that tend to sit there and really think hard about policies and about how we can do the best we can do in space are probably going to come from the space force themselves. At least that's what educational and you know, academic sort of, culture that we have in the space force that I'm trying to develop. So there's a push pull model too. The space force cannot just be a passive, you know, a passive executor of other people's ideas.

Right? They need to have they need to offer ideas too. That's also in our, in our job jar to give best military advice to civilian leaders. So there's, everyone has a role to play, and and I'm very interested in, hey, I don't care who does it as long as someone does it. Well, it's I I you're reminding me of a this is reminding me of a conversation I had with someone I was working with NASEC, the National Air and Space Intelligence Center. Is that what it's called? There's a space center.

Nash yeah. So I worked with some people at NASAC NASAC, and this one guy was trying to get something to be changed. He worked on it for almost 2 years trying to get people in meetings, trying to get this changed, trying to get that changed, and he couldn't get it changed. And I said, no. You gotta go to the commander. And he said, well, we wanna get everybody on board. I said, no. No. No. You just gotta get the commander. And he said, yeah. But he's never gonna listen to me.

And I said, no. He will listen to you. Your your plans are not right. And what I said to him was this. What you need to do is set up a set of scenarios that this individual then comes on board with it. And so we came up, and I'm gonna give ones we have multiple, approaches that we're using. And I said, you need to get him at a point where he's a little frustrated with you, and he sits down with you. And you say that he says, yeah. You gotta get this done. You gotta get this done.

And I said, he talks with him regularly. And I said, but he has to be frustrated. And you say to him, well, let me show you all the projects I'm working on. And there were way too many projects for the number of people they had. It was just off the charts. You couldn't fill you couldn't feasibly do them all well. All of them had to suffer in order for all of them to be done. And I said, so you ask him, you show him the numbers, you show him the pieces, and you tell him how would he solve this.

Well, he ended up sitting down with him. The guy cut out, like, 5, 6, 7 projects just like that. And then he said, but what about this one? And then I had a conversation about that one, and the decision was made. And once the commander got it, it was done. So I, I've I don't like my personal approach is never is not always to try to herd cats or cattle or whatever you wanna use or sheep. It's to try to figure out where's that precision execute precision shot. I hate to use military terms.

Precision shot that's going to bring down or to change or to modify whatever you're trying to modify. So I'm looking at it from 2 different perspectives. I've gotta believe in the ecosystem of beyond earth and the space eco the space force, we're talking specifically then, In the Space Force. And I've gotta believe the Air Force and the DOD. And there's probably about 6 people that if those 6 people may change, the rest would follow.

But you need to hit them in the right order to kinda be able to say, no. No. I just I just spoke with Kevin. Kevin's on board. Oh, he is? Well, then let me take a look at it. Oh, no. Sally already went through all that. Oh, well, then I'm good. You need to figure out that order. So I was trying to ask you we can we can get the information out. We're doing that already. Project Moon Knight, you're involved. We have a lot of people who've been on the podcast, which you've seen.

I was just trying to ask a different type of, strategic question. How do we solve for rapid speed assuming that we had to get it done quickly? So not that you have to answer it here on the call because you might have names and and approaches that we could use, but I just wanted to hear that overview. And, yes, there are a lot of brilliant people who sit in these seats, and we have to try to figure out how to make that happen. So yeah. Are are there let me take a jump.

With everything the the experience that you've just had, I'm hopeful hopefully, it was an enjoyable one. What's the big thing that you took away from it? Not the the call. I mean, everything. From the first time we met and the challenges to create a title, which are very is challenging. And then the whole journey of you going through the experience to get to the point to deliver it today. And what's your impression? Well, my overall impression is is fairly positive.

I mean, that's overall, I mean, I know that's not what you want, and I'll get more specific. But it's No. I'm okay. It's it's good because, you know, I've always thought that if, you know, 2 people, can come up with with a similar idea independently of each other, you've got something there.

So it's it's reinforcing that, you know, the overall goal, let's say, that I've always wanted to do was to to wrap it back into it is to one day get on, you know, do my part to get on the path for a Star Trek future. Right? Okay. Oh, wow. So then we we we had a I had a very specific, you know, I chose a very specific profession to try to solve part of that problem which is, you know, try to get a Star Fleet like proto Star Fleet organization, you know, sort of moving forward.

But you know, it doesn't a good Space Force does not work. It's not necessary unless you have a larger vision of what space could be for everybody, you know. It's the Space Force is a part, not the whole. Right? So when, dealing with, with you and, you know, going over your videos and going over the ideas, it was, very exciting, that you actually thought that I could have a, you know, my ideas could contribute in a certain way. It's like, oh, good.

Maybe I'm actually helping to do my job, because my job is one simple piece. You know, what y'all are doing here is definitely the larger, you know, the pie. I I guess, I hope my, you know, the, the the apples that I bring to the pie are decent enough to get a good pie going for Thanksgiving. Right?

So it's, it's one of those things that I'm glad that, one, to see an organization like yours that, that has that broader vision, that is moving forward with that, that is, is doing this kind of stuff, providing some of the ideas that I haven't thought through because I've been hyper focused on one particular thing, but that is compatible, that are mutual, you know, visions, let's say, are compatible and maybe even, symbiotic in a certain way.

So it's just, you know, it's good to see what your work is going, what you all are doing and how I might be able to help because ultimately, I don't have the, the grand total of, you know, good ideas or the solutions. But working with other people like you, we can probably come up with it. So, you know, hopefully, that's not too generic and wishy washy. No. No. No. That that's, we just spoke with someone.

I just I've been speaking with someone for a few months now, and he's at the University of Texas at Austin. And he's looking to possibly introduce a Mearth program or into his ecosystem. Have to give him an accelerator and give him contact in since we live in the same area. We're talking we're trying to bring that together, and then we're talking to somebody in Dubai who's introducing to some or a large organization, a gaming company. This person has been on our team now for about 2 years.

She's talking to this gaming company to see if they would invest in creating a Mearth accelerator focusing in on immersive technologies, gaming, AR, VR, digital twin, haptics 4 d, all of that 3 d, and to build products and services that resonate with young and old alike and financing that so that Mearth could be a part of an ecosystem that's built. So even in your education that you're delivering, you might be able to add a component a few days where you say, well, let's talk about Mearth.

Let's talk about project Muna. Let's talk about this future. Right or wrong, we're not looking for a right or wrong. We're looking for that inclusion and that open mindedness of individuals to to work with others, to find new pathways. So there there are plenty of ways that we can collaborate. One of them is on the the side that you've been focused on when the military or the the space force that we've spoken about. But other is on the educational side.

What is wrong with having instead of just space, which goes out to never never land, but this new geography of Mearth and how it could be optimized to improve life on earth. So I think what your answer was is fantastic. So I thank you for that. Well, you know, so I guess we just need to, to to, you know, high five and then get, get back to work. Get back well, we we are getting back to work because this will be produced and put out there. So Namrata was the one who introduced us.

So I thank her for that. So, look, I'd love to thank you for being a guest on our on the program and and the work that you've done. It sounds like you've spent the time on it, so we definitely appreciate that. And we wanna thank everybody who's listening today to taking taking their time out of the day, and we do hope that you learn something that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others.

Remember, Project Moon Hut is where we look to establish a box of the roof and a door on the moon. We're not about colonization and settlement. We're about a home through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem. And then we turn those innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking from the endeavor back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. As a reminder, go to a project moon hot dot org. Take a look around.

Also, all of the interviews with all the bios are under the immersive tab, and there's also another podcast series called Redefining Tomorrow. Brent, what is the single best way for people to connect to you? Email is probably easiest, and, it shows you how dated I am. But, it's, my email address is brent.carnick, just my first dot [email protected]. So even even, you know, technically a little less I'm gonna spell it. B r b r Yes. Okay. Oh. Okay. B r e n t Dot. I got an I got an echo.

Yeah. Say it again. I got an echo coming through, which is really weird. [email protected]. There we go. Okay. So, I personally would love to connect with all of you. You can reach me at [email protected]. You can connect to us on Twitter at Project Moon Hut. You can connect to me personally at at Goldsmith. I'm we're on LinkedIn. We are on Facebook. You've got Instagram. Right now, it's just me at Dave mister David Goldsmith.

We are working hard with our team to put up new content, new information to reach out to everybody. So if you like this, reach out to us. We'd love to hear that. And for that and that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.