Promotion is both easy and hard

Recent messages distributed on this ssi-list question renewed promotion
of O'Neill's (and other) ideas about using space. I encourage that, and can
tell you how it can be done, I suspect, by many of you. I just came back
from Nease High School in St. Johns county Florida where I spoke to ~ 250
"International Bachelorate" students, which are academically gifted. Their
reaction to my lecture, Colonizing Space, may be characterized by one of the
students who spoke to me afterwards. He said he was "blown away" by the
idea that materials in space could be use in industries in space and on
Earth.
All of you retired engineers and scientists can surely talk to local
grade, junior high and high schools about these ideas. This is easy. The
teachers there will surely welcome you as extra human resources to enrich
their classes and stimulate their students. Promote your helping by being
academic and listing your degree(s) and work experience. Few elementary,
junior high or high school students get to hear an engineer talk about the
ideas of engineering.
This is also hard, and you must get outside of the speech patterns you
normally use with other engineers. Practice talking to kids or
"non-technical" adults, who will be honest about what they understand and
what they don't. This is also hard in that there are more classes, teachers
and students than you will ever be able to talk to. After doing this for 30
years now, I get a little tired in that I don't ever seem to run out of
students and adults who have never heard of or thought about such things. I
need your help, but more to the point, the human future needs your help in
this.
Writing letters to this ssi-list is not bad, but we mostly already know
about O'Neill's ideas.
Sincerely, Jay S. Huebner at jhuebn@...