The Eos Project

The International Research Institute for Space–AsteronX proposes a global effort, a large space project which we call The Eos Project, that utilises the most sophisticated technologies and scientific principles to develop extensive non-terrestrial infrastructure, to enable the highest possible living standard for all human beings, on Terra and future non-terrestrial settlements. The proposed aim of this effort is the improvement of the standard of living on Terra through the development and incentivisation of new technologies, including Clean Fusion Energy and Vacuum Energy, and the establishment of a Terran Union, a global cooperative union of individuals.

Faced with the current state of the world, the political situation, the ongoing destruction of the climate, diseases, resource shortages, goods shortages, many of us feel helpless, even apathetic, what could any one of us do?

Let's change the question: what could all of us do? Large scale changes don't happen overnight, but they do happen—however quickly—when a mass group, moves in unison. Instead of being British, or Indian, or Russian, or Chinese, or German, or Brazilian, or American, what if we think of ourselves as Terrans? Terra has become the more-or-less accepted scientific and technical name for our shared planet. What if we strove to create something new, a non-governmental multi-national organisation of individuals, not of nations, or corporations. A cooperative, voluntary, democratic group of interested individuals from anywhere in the world, from any background, of any ethnicity or ethnicities, all striving to, by our own collective and laborious effort, build the start of a new civilisation, not one of any single nation, or even of Earth itself necessarily, guided by a philosophy, that we're all Terrans regardless of any other considerations, even future colonists on Luna, Mars, and elsewhere, are still of Terran birth, of Terran origin.

The Earth is a lone habitable planet with finite natural resources, the amount of arable land is limited, and the quantity of resources such as metal ore, mineral ore, coal, and oil, is likewise limited. In order to permit a very high standard of living for all human beings, not only those fortunately enough to be born in an industrialised nation with abundant resources, we must establish major infrastructure in space. In the sterile and microgravity environment of space new kinds of manufacturing and new alloys and compounds are possible which will help reduce or eliminate our dependence on non-renewable resources, non-terrestrial bodies such as the asteroids can supply humanity with many times more resources than currently needed, and likely to be needed for some time to come.

The lack of a filtering atmosphere or clouds in space, and the absence of gravity or terrain and other obstructions will permit the construction of gigantic solar energy arrays. These arrays will provide many times more energy than needed to meet humanity's consumption, and will do so without destroying the environment or occupying land or sea surface necessary for the planet's biosphere or living space. In addition, boron, an element critical to radiation and radioactivity free proton-boron fusion, is produced in the Universe largely by cosmic ray spallation, where cosmic rays impact the surface of airless bodies with weak magnetic fields, producing various elements including boron. In comparison, boron on Terra is relatively scarce, and like lithium is currently, may shortly become in very high demand. Mining it on Luna will avoid future conflict and further environmental destruction due to mining and overexploitation.

Beyond meeting our material needs, the exploration, study, and settlement of space and non-terrestrial worlds will provide us many discoveries and insights that will in turn make life on Earth and other worlds we settle more comfortable, more fulfilling, and enable us to achieve things that we cannot imagine at present. The very nature of the Universe, and beyond it, other universes, means that there are many things that we cannot find out about if we are limited to remote observation from the Earth, from Terra, or even the Solar system. The only way to discover these things is to travel out into the vastness of our universe, and later other universes, and find them through patient and systematic survey, study, and contemplation.

It is now possible, and even critical to begin the effort of exploring space and settling non-terrestrial worlds, doing so will bring many-fold benefits back to terrestrial mankind and our descendents. Through the settlement of the other worlds of our system, an incentive system will develop that encourages the development of faster and longer ranged spacecraft, and with them, new technologies that immediately and directly improve the standard of living here on Terra, with ever greater rewards for humanity's efforts. Even the elderly will soon begin to see the first fruits of this labour, and subsequent generations will have the means and drive to achieve things currently deemed impossible.

Living on a lone habitable planet is too great of a risk over the long term, the logical course of action is to expand our civilisation-in-the-making to other worlds, transforming their environments to be more suitable for life where necessary.

We suggest the term Transstellar Settlement in place of the more usual ‘Interstellar Colonisation’. This is for two main reasons: the first is that interstellar means ‘between stars’, whereas transstellar means ‘across interstellar distances’, the second is that the term colonisation means ‘the establishment of political control’, as many folks know all too well. ‘Interstellar’ is still the most appropriate term for general travel between and among stars.

In comparison, the term transstellar settlement refers to a place or region near stars other than the Sun, typically one that has up until that point been uninhabited, where folk establish a community. This is in sharp contrast with the notion of colonisation and the related idea of colonialism.

The idea of a Martian colony, respectively, a colony on Mars, is frequently associated with the idea—unfortunately often romanticised and even promoted—of a future revolt of this hypothetical Martian colony against colonial masters on Earth. But does the idea of a Martian community invoke the same thoughts? Probably not.

With the creation of a Terran Union, humanity will have physical resources and information available in such abundance that their cost will be negligible. In other words, by means of space and space travel, and with the indirect benefits of such, we will begin meeting the prerequisites for a Resource-Based Economy, a term coined by Jacque Fresco, and advocated and worked towards by the organisation he and Roxanne Meadows founded, The Venus Project: https://www.thevenusproject.com/

Even a transitional economy, in-between our current monetary-based economy and a Resource-Based Economy, will benefit space travel greatly, in turn aided the transition to a full Resource-Based Economy. At the same time, the development of technologies needed for achieving interstellar and later galactic and even intergalactic flights, will greatly benefit the life of every human being on Terra and on future settlements on other worlds. As an example, the development of vacuum energy would not only provide unlimited energy for all of our needs, but allow us to synthesise raw material directly from ‘empty space’, which is not in fact empty at all, as many scientists have known about for over half a century now.

Our effort concerns itself with these primary factors: Energy, Propulsion, Industry, Economics, Humanity, and the Environment. We encourage you to delve in and learn more about these factors, the International Resource Institute for Space—AsteronX, and The Eos Project, a project to establish a Transstellar Nation, and thereby ensure humanity's long term survival.

A fantastical new material, and new means of energy production has been discovered by Prof. Leif Holmlid of the University of Gothenburg (Göteborgs universitet), and independently confirmed by Dr. Sindre Zeiner-Gundersen of the University of Iceland (Háskóli Íslands).

This discovery will revolutionise energy production, and provide the means to power ultrafast starships of the near and distant future. Strange as this may seem, it is possible, and relatively simple to catalyse hydrogen or deuterium into a metastable ultradense metallic state. Due to its extreme density, this strange material exhibits an self-annihilation-like process under further compression, and could be used to produce inexpensive energy, for both space travel and Earth's energy needs. This process might be a a kind of matter-antimatter annihilation, where the required antimatter is generated spontaneously due to the close packing of the atoms, which is increased further by laser bombardment that induces the ultradense material to collapse further very briefly, until the distance between the atoms is on par with the minute scale of the bulk of the electron field—which forms the main part of the quantum vacuum field or zero-point field that we can interact with.

At extremely high densities of energy or mass, the duration and distances of interactions comes closer to the extremely small and ultrafast interactions of the electron field energy, allowing the high density mass or block of energy to interact more with this gigantic energy. It's as though the electron field is ‘boiling’ around the ultradense material, with electron field radiation condensing into solid particles of matter and antimatter, some of which may ‘annihilate’ with the quarks that make up the protons and neutrons that comprise hydrogen and deuterium, destabilising them.

Ultradense hydrogen or deuterium ‘annihilation’ generates large amounts of kaons, which decay into pions, and then muons and neutrinos. The quantity of muons produce is great enough to enable muon-catalysed fusion even with large muon losses. With such a large quantity of muons, it is also possible to accelerate certain kinds of radioactive decay via muon-capture, as proposed several decades ago in a patent, as a means of dealing with nuclear waste. Using muons, we can build compact and efficient fusion reactors to generate clean power without radioactive by-products.

Muon-catalysed fusion can quickly and directly replace most combustion-based power stations in the world, providing clean, sustainable, and environmentally harmless energy, with no radioactive by-products or other pollution of any form, in this way eliminating most CO2 emissions. Subsequent replacement of all combustion-powered ground vehicles, cars, buses, trains, etc., will further reduce CO2 emissions, as they will be charged and powered by clean fusion energy. Annihilation-based energy will replace most other uses of fossil fuels in a short time, including all manner of vehicles, including spacecraft, where it can provide a greater amount of energy in a small volume at high efficiency. Annihilation energy and more broadly, electron energy in general, will allow us to even approach and exceed the speed of light with future spacecraft.

Using fusion power and magnetohydrodynamic technology we will be able to construct spaceplanes and other more futuristic kinds of aerospacecraft capable of bringing many tonnes to Terra orbit, eliminating the need for cumbersome rockets. Initially these aerospacecraft will make use of plasma assisted combustion with a magnetohydrodynamic bypass, together with electrodynamic air control systems, allowing the vehicle to reach orbital speed or nearly so without the use of rocket engines. Rocket engines would only be needed to circularise the orbit.

At very high speeds there is enough energy available from the oncoming air as it moves through the magnetohydrodynamic generator, which is within the bypass, that a small portion of the extracted energy can be diverted to jump-start an onboard clean fusion reactor, which then takes over from the combustion engine in heating the air. This way it is unnecessary to have specialised—and expensive—capacitor banks and high-power systems on the ground, allowing the use of ordinary commercial airports. Once in space, the fusion reactor will continue to supply power to a magnetohydrodynamic rocket—a plasma rocket—which has very high efficiency and good thrust, giving these aerospacecraft excellent range and the capability of transporting heavy payloads even to high orbits, or launching them out into the Solar system.

Eventually we will either develop fusion reactors that do not need as much power to start up, or high-energy infrastructure will become commonplace at aerospaceports—we can't really call them airports anymore.

By this point our aerospacecraft will be highly streamlined, with the wings blended in with the body, and lacking any visible control surfaces, ailerons, elevators, and so on. These aerospacecraft of the not-so-distant future will use electrodynamic means to repel the air—or even water—to steer themselves, in space the lack of an atmosphere will be made up for with compressed air, which is taken in during the flight to orbit. These purely-electric vehicles will fuse hydrogen and boron for clean, non-polluting power, hydrogen is the most common element in the Universe, boron we can find on the surfaces of airless bodies in space, where it is produced by cosmic ray bombardment, or we might synthesise by bombarding ordinary carbon with high-energy protons, we have no need to crudely dig apart and destroy Planet Earth.

In space we will use fusion energy and direct-fusion propulsion systems to propel exploration, research, cargo, and mining craft, the effective mass of these craft will be reduced by manipulating the electron field with complex higher-order (superordinate) electromagnetic fields. Many of these space vehicles will have minimal crews or will be entirely automated, mining Luna and the asteroids to supply Planet Earth—and other settlements on different worlds and in space—with abundant raw materials. If we manage these resources conscientiously and recycle everything we can, then we should have more than enough metals and other materials to last us indefinitely.

Ultradense hydrogen represents one way to extract energy from the electron field, in the near future we will increasingly use laser-like resonators alongside ultradense hydrogen and other energy sources, both as closed and open devices, to draw energy from the electron field directly. Ultimately this ‘space-energy’ will be how we power everything from a pocket light to faster-than-light starships.

Astronomers have found asteroids made almost entirely of platinum, in fact, the total platinum content of one of these asteroids is greater than all of the platinum mined on Earth up until now. Platinum is a rare metal on Earth, with most of Earth's reserves locked away deep down in its mantle and core. Platinum is used in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries as a catalyst, where its affinity for hydrogen and corrosion resistance make it unparalleled, it is also used in medicine due to its inert nature, and its relatively good electrical conductivity combined with its corrosion resistance makes it extremely useful for electronics. An abundant supply of platinum, if distributed in an as-needed basis, will greatly reduce the cost and therefore increase access to all industries and products using platinum. And there are other raw materials, both rare and common, that we can find abundantly and easily accessible in space.

As humanity increasingly realises that Earth's biosphere is vitally important, coming to see it as a kind of bio-infrastructure every bit as important for humanity's survival as our plumbing, roads, electrical lines, telecommunications equipment, etc., then in future there may be a movement to move all mining and most manufacturing off-planet, preserving Earth as a living space for humanity and all other species. During this period there will be an increasing amount of resources exchanged between planetary and free-space habitats, so that massive ships even larger than our current ocean-going freighters will become commonplace. Some resources and speciality items won't be produced in sufficient quantities to justify large freighters, and so aerospacecraft powered by fusion energy and electron field energy will transport these goods and materials, lifting off from one planet and flying directly to another planet or space habitat in mere hours.

Eventually we will make use of yet another kind of energy: artificial singularities. Matter that has been compressed to such a great extent that its gravitational field prevents anything from escaping, even light. Small ‘black holes’ are not actually black, as while nothing can escape directly, the intense gravitational field of a small black hole causes space to boil, losing mass-energy as it radiates. If we take an artificial singularity and spin it up, then we can extract energy via the Penrose process at a much higher efficiency than even possible with antimatter. This is because we are directly converting angular momentum into electrical energy, which follows a much larger ratio than mass and energy.

Instead of creating gigantic solar arrays to collect the energy needed to make a singularity, starships of the not-so-distant future will instead create them on the fly, using electron energy, much as earlier aerospacecraft would ignite fusion on the fly using the energy available from moving through the air at high speed. You see, the electron field cannot instantaneously regenerate itself after energy in a certain frequency range is tapped, therefore we can speak of a certain energy regeneration time, this limits the amount of energy that can be extracted in a given amount of time, by continuously moving to new and untapped regions of space, starships of the future can greatly increase the energy available at any given moment.

By diverting some of the tremendously large energies available at very high speeds, these future spacecraft can create artificial spinning singularities, and use them to increase the energy available even further. Our future ships will grab a hold of and accelerate exponentially up to the speed of light, using the energy of the electron field, feeling no resistance, with the crew and passengers as comfortable as if they were standing on Earth. The acceleration builds until it becomes so great that the starship hurls itself across several light years in a single unit of time, a single chronon, by doing so the ship becomes a tachyon and momentarily—specifically, for a single chronon—leaves spacetime and enters ‘hyperspace’, which simply means any space of more than 3 dimensions, including the hyperspaces of the past and future, therefore there is no risk of collision, and unlike with rockets, only a little fuel is needed to start up the starship. There is no inconvenient and irresponsibly long travel time, or grave danger of ultra-high speed collisions, and all of the energy needed is supplied freely and efficiently in unlimited amounts by the electron field which exists everywhere all throughout the Universe.

With the mining of asteroids and other uninhabited bodies in space, we will be able to reduce or eliminate the need for mining on Earth and the resulting destruction of Earth's environment and climate. Space provides benefits to manufacturing as well, a microgravity environment permits many new kinds of manufacturing, such as new alloys that are stronger, lighter, with greater strength at very high and very low temperatures. Biotechnology in particular will benefit from the sterile and micro–or–low–gravity space environment. And while eventually we will be able to control gravity and create microgravity environments on Earth, for the time being we will need space for such, and even then, the microgravity environment of space does not require a constant input of energy to maintain.

In space we will also build large solar cell arrays, which will provide free and abundant energy without any pollution or need for fuel, higher-order electromagnetic wave antennas, or even wormhole-like electromagnetic vortices may be used to transmit the collected energy to the ground with less hazard than microwave beaming.

Luna may prove more suitable for many kinds of manufacturing, due to the presence of a gravitational field, solid ground, and nearby resources for construction and manufacturing. Asteroid mining, as well as Lunar mining, could easily supply all of the raw materials required for human civilisation for centuries, even millennia, especially if we are efficient and thoughtful with our material use.

Hydrogen-boron fusion is clean, safe, and can generate electrical energy at a very high efficiency within a small volume, making this kind of energy not only clean and safe, but compact, requiring less material to construct reactors and power stations. The required boron is a relatively rare element, usually found in salt pans as various borate salts. In the near future we will extract boron from sea water instead as a part of a desalination plant, powered by clean fusion energy, simultaneously providing clean, fresh water, and fuel for clean, abundant, and inexpensive energy. As the new fusion economy grows, so will the need for boron, so we may begin collecting it make scraping up the dust found on the surface of the Moon and other airless planets and planetoids, where it is produced by cosmic rays bombardment of exposed and unprotected planetary and comet surfaces.

Eventually we can do away with all mining entirely. And instead synthesise the raw materials we need directly from the electron field and other ‘vacuum fields’ or other components of the ‘zero-point field’, respectively. We will do this by creating very small artificial black holes using either solar energy from gigantic solar arrays in high Terrestrial or Lunar orbits or orbiting independently, or from some kind of annihilation energy. As these tiny black holes very rapidly decay, they emit all kinds and equal parts of matter and antimatter, we can collect the matter and a little bit of the antimatter—we won't need much antimatter, as in most cases any needed antimatter is generated as needed from the electron field—the remainder that we don't want is collected and shot into a machine where it helps form a new black hole, which again emits equal parts matter and antimatter, regardless of what kind of mass or energy it was made with.

These machines will likely be placed in far orbits around the Earth, the Moon and elsewhere, producing limitless amounts of whatever elements we might need or desire. In addition to generating protons, neutrons and electrons, the extremely intense gravitational field very close to these artificial singularities can be used to fuse subatomic and atomic particles into whatever elements we want, even transoganessic elements—elements with an atomic weight greater than element 118, oganesson.

While creating artificial singularities seems like pure fantasy, recent findings by Robert Zubrin, among others, has demonstrating that we can create small singularities and grow them to practically any desired mass, relatively easily. We start by creating a very small black hole just using gamma ray lasers, a technology which is currently in development and which we will start seeing in use in the next few years, this kind of black hole made of light is called a Kugelblitz, a German word meaning ‘ball lightning’, or literally ‘light ball’ or ‘ball of light’, this Kugelblitz is creating inside a mostly solid sphere—perhaps made of strong steel—with a very small cavity in the centre, and shafts drilled into it for the laser beams to enter. The newly formed Kugelblitz promptly begins radiating very intensely, this vaporising the inside surface of the sphere, producing plasma jets which are able to overcome the radiation pressure and force their way into the tiny singularity, force-feeding it. As Zubrin illustrates, this will continue until the entire spherical mass has been consumed, with the artificial singularity now having nearly the same mass as the sphere it just consumed, allowing us to grow the singularity to any desired mass.

Gigantic machines called ‘duplicators‘ and ‘multi-duplicators‘, respectively, will be fed with the raw materials gathered from space and eventually from artificial singularities, where batteries of lasers and coherent ultrasonic wave emitters—sasers—will assemble elements into any atomic configuration desired and also into larger configurations without the need for riveting or hot fusion of materials, which produces weak points in a structure, instead the material will be joined in a ultrasonic and electromagnetic cold fusion, even dissimilar and non-metallic materials can be built and assembled this way.

From space we can monitor Earth's environment and climate, and our impact on it, precisely. In the future, large stations in stationary orbits will act as ‘brains‘ for a kind of planetary nervous system, and also as hubs for planetary, interplanetary, and even interstellar travel and transportation. Efficiency electrodynamic aerospacecraft will ferry the abundant resources of space down to Earth, and all kinds of manufactured goods, as well as students, researchers, engineers, who will study Earth from space and carry out research in the sterile and low gravity environment of outer space.

Space and space travel are still considered abstract by many, even in industry. Where space is not considered abstract, it is considered as a new area for commercial exploitation, an extension of terrestrial resources and markets. To ensure humanity's survival, a new direction for space is needed. The old paradigm of nations launching space missions for the sake of political manoeuvring or pure scientific research is likewise unsustainable and insufficient, respectively. This is at best a poor approximation of reality, with little to nothing to do with humanity's survival, at worst it is actively detrimental to humanity's survival.

What it is needed is a new system, a participatory environment or ‘space‘, that enables and encourages creativity, curiosity, exploration, discovery, and research, in a humane, free, open, sustainable, equal, and equitable manner, a truly democratic and scientifically-oriented space exploration and development system.

Looking at historical examples, individuals have had a more progressive and optimistic attitude about the future in those times when new frontiers were being opened up, when the world seemed to be getting bigger, and consequently the overall cultural attitude was, more progressive overall. Space represents the final and ultimate frontier, we should explore and expand into it for the sake of giving individual human beings, and humanity as a whole, a progressive and optimistic future, even a society that is progressive and ever-changing, and that strives to be stimulating eventually becomes boring and then self-destructive without any major change or growth in some form, empires collapse when they cease expanding, companies fold when they fail to continue growing their market share, and individuals become indifferent and callous when their environment becomes stale and unstimulating.

We need to change our fundamental attitude, and wake up to the simple fact that we cannot expand and increase our population or wealth or power, etc., indefinitely. It is time to set about beginning a new age, an age where ‘growth’ doesn't mean simply expanding our population, or conquest of our fellow human beings or other self-thinking conscious beings, or accumulating material wealth or power, but instead expanding our knowledge and wisdom, conquering and ‘subduing’ not fellow intelligent beings, but conquering and mastering the space environment, the undersea environment, even universal space itself, and accumulating not material wealth for its own sake, but accumulating wisdom, and giving all human beings, both living and yet unborn, the highest standard of living long into the future. Growth in this new paradigm, this new age, means improving our lives, becoming better, wiser, kinder, more humane human beings, it means exploring the depths of the oceans, the vastness of space, it means finding and establishing peaceful and mutually beneficial relations with other intelligent, thinking, conscious beings out there in the vastness of the Universe, and even beyond.

Perhaps this seems fantasy, a utopian dream, but the alternative is, quite simply: self-destruction. But overall, with the freedom to try and the resources to do it, humanity can grow and become… Better, wiser, more just, and more far-sighted. The purpose of the Eos Project is to ensure humanity has this freedom, to usher in a new age in which space is explored and developed in a peaceful, sustainable, humane, progressive, and free manner, an age in which a human being no longer needs to fear for his or her or children's lives, an Age of True Civilisation.

We can do this if enough folks get interesting and want to participate actively. The needed resources need not be collected all at once, we can be somewhat patient and gather what it necessary for this grand effort over time, but not too long, for this is critical to mankind's survival. You can be apart of this, and join this tremendous and unprecedented effort, and make these dreams a reality. All it takes is effort.