Some Interesting News Items

Hello Gang, Here are a couple of interesting bits of news I found on the Internet recently. Alex TEEN GOES NUCLEAR: He creates fusion in his Oakland Township home http://research.lifeboat.com/teen.goes.nuclear.htm
On the surface, Thiago Olson is like any typical teenager.
He's on the cross country and track teams at Stoney Creek High School in Rochester Hills. He's a good-looking, clean-cut 17-year-old with a 3.75 grade point average, and he has his eyes fixed on the next big step: college.
But to his friends, Thiago is known as "the mad scientist."
In the basement of his parents' Oakland Township home, tucked away in an area most aren't privy to see, Thiago is exhausting his love of physics on a project that has taken him more than two years and 1,000 hours to research and build -- a large, intricate machine that , on a small scale, creates nuclear fusion.

Now all we need to do is send this kid to the Moon and give him an endless supply of helium-3. Moonbase: In the Dark On Lunar Ice By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer
posted: 26 December 2006
05:53 am ET

NASA is on a flight path to replant astronauts on the Moon, looking to sustain a human presence on that cratered, airless orb on a go-as-the nation-can-afford-to-pay basis. That approach is seen as letting people step back onto the lunar surface no later than 2020.
Space engineers have honed in on one possible site for a lunar outpost: the Moons south pole. Its a tactical setting on the rim of Shackleton Crater, a feature some 12 miles (19 kilometers) in diameter. Theres real estate here that basks in near-perpetual sunlight. Also, its a region that is a doorway into the depths of always dark, Sun-deprived, territory.
Whats possibly lurking there in that super-cold darkness is water iceportrayed by some researchers as the gold standard for future exploration on and from the Moon. Yet there is considerable debate about this resource. If there, such a raw storehouse might be processed into usable oxygen and hydrogen.
Experts have been chipping away at the water ice on the Moon issue for years. http://space.com/scienceastronomy/061226_lunar_ice.html I came across two organizations devoted to the long term survival of the human species. Namely: the Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC) http://www.arc-space.org/ and the Lifeboat Foundation http://lifeboat.com/ex/main Both organizations have a number of distinguished people associated with them. To just mention a few: William Burrows, Robert Shapiro, Ray Kurzweil, and Robert A. Freitas. Take a very close look at the literature of both these organizations. I found the projects of the Lifeboat Foundation especiallyaudacious and very bold in its broad scope. Now I can sleep easily at night knowing that people are actually working around the clock against the terrors of asteroid impact, nuclear and bio terrorism, alien invasion, micro black holes, and nanotech gone amuck. : )