Back in the day, I went up with my dad (who was a aerospace engineer and rocket scientist) to Cleveland’s University Circle (then to Case Technology Institute — Case Western Reserve) to attend a regional AIAA or Rocket Society meeting where the guest speaker was some German scientist from Huntsville, Alabama named Werner Von Braun who was to discuss the potentials for deep space missions to other planets and beyond.

Von Braun made some interesting comments about how deep space missions should be conducted. He suggested that the space program first send robotic craft to the planet that would build a space-station for human, equipment, scientific monitoring and study, oxygen (and air) production, and act as a fuel depot to refresh incoming and fuel up outbound, or return trip space craft. He explained the space station could be rigid and modular (like the ISS), or it could be inflatable (like some of the earliest USAF designs). The station would operate in orbit around the planet to be explored and could also act as an emergency way station if something on the planet below forced a rapid departure from the landing areas. He explained to overcome potential ailments to the human body, the station would have to have an interior that established an earthlike environment with a main station gravity (from centrifugal force) equivalent to earth’s gravity — and a ‘pod’ for those who were going to the planet with elements that simulated surface conditions in relation to gravity, heat, etc. Other scientists at the meeting, I remember also suggested that such a station should have both computational and deep analyses capabilities, a full tech shop to create needed components on the fly, work bays (like a garage) to make repairs on satellites, robotic craft, and human craft, workout and living facilities, and comprehensive outbound (into space/to the planet/ and back to earth) electronic communications capabilities. (This meeting was in the early ’70’s before the Viking Mars missions of 1976 I recall.)

Anyway, studies done at that time suggested that if you created a R&R rehab capability on the orbiting space station that emulated the conditions found on earth, that you could pretty much prolong the human duration in space indefinitely. (This concept I believe was in NASA’s archives for sometime — even after the Nixon Administration made the first cuts to pay for the Vietnam War. I think Ronald Reagan discontinued its planning when he turned the first prototype concept of this (the space station that would launch later deep space probes from its off-earth platform) into the ISS public relations science center in space concept.

I think that Von Braun’s space station concept of deep space exploration has always made the most sense … so to answer your question Len, I personally believe the Space Station build at the Far Side of the Moon in the L2 stable gravity position makes the most sense for the next deep space prototype system (we should have built it as was planned in the ’60’s — post Apollo (40 years ago)). For details, see:
http://www.space.com/17856-nasa-deep-space-station-moon-farside.html

Think about how this would be a massive and logical extension for human exploration of other planets — even beyond our solar system eventually. (BTW, the Apollo Command Module served this in the most rough way in the original moon missions.)

I have always been interested in the future technologies. However, I am disappointed that we do not yet have Moon and Mars colonies. I expected back in the 60’s that I would have the opportunity to visit in space by the turn of the millenium.
At the moment I work in R&D in catalytic chemistry — fuel cells and high efficiency water purification as well as Lithium isotope separation techniques for Thorium reactors.
My future dream is to develop a non-rocket launcher system — I want to beat the space elevator guys to the punch.
Call me a dreamer, but I believe we can yet save humankind from decimation if we keep communicating and working to produce the energy sources and the education that will pull our race out of medieval thinking that threatens us now.

I’m thinking the prefered modern spelling of “Salon” should probably be “Solon.” See: http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Solon.aspx

Nothing could be any better than the impartation of that sense of wonderment. But it’s hard to compete with the mentally pacifying distraction of visual media, and then produce any new synthesis of written wisdom that the world would like to tax itself to receive. When ancient Salon was queried about his laws, “Are your laws the best possible laws?” He wisely answered, “They are the best the people will receive.” Plato and Aristotle had much of value to transmit; nearly everyone in modern times agrees, but how many moderns have actually ever bothered to read and think about what they wrote? Try to find any modern student of physics, including the university professors, who have actually read Newton’s, Principia. Yet they are all sure they know more physics and math than Newton knew. They are magic minds that can know the contents of books without the bother of reading.

Seems I remember a great old Coleridge essay about the impartation of wisdom through the prosaic written word. He argued that a person is unlikely to learn much from a book that is easy to read, that one should never read a book unless one supposes the author to be much smarter than one’s self, and that any author with much to impart would likely be so perverse that he would deliberately confound the reader so that only those most willing to do the work would ever tease out the message. In Coleridge’s time there was no instant gratification of Cinema, TV, Internet, Radio, CDs, etc. The modern man supposes hardly anyone is smarter than himself. He has grown up with a house full of TVs, not a house full of books, and he doesn’t much relate to the late Age of Reason man. If an idea takes much effort to receive, the modern man is likely to tune it out and tune in something effortless.

Might be the greatest artists and thinkers of today, have figured it out and are all engaged in the production of TV shows and Movies. For example, we could consider Dan Brown’s fanciful novel, Da Vinci Code. A fair read, but nothing special. But the Hollywood movie production was truly great art; forget the so-so plot, the sound score and visual imagery is spectacularly beautiful, and no static oil painting or grand opera by the greatest masters of the past could ever convey so much aesthetic satisfaction. Of course, just like the book publishing industry, there are some ideas and subjects that the Media Moguls think unprofitable, so society at large gets little or no exposure to them, and only those most inspired to know and transmit the obscure truth of it will read and write books, which will be mostly e-books, or underground self-published books. Don’t be too disappointed if most of the literary bread you cast upon the waters is ignored by the game fish and eventually consumed only by the bottom feeders.

I grew up in a house full of books. My father was self taught. He never had a formal education past Grade 6 but he was a voracious reader and collector. When I emptied his house upon his death there were over 10,000 books in stacks that resembled a university library. He had read every one of them and I know because I catalogued them all for him before he died and we talked about them. He was a great enthusiast about Lawrence of Arabia and had a collection of books by Lawrence and about Lawrence. His other passions were Lincoln, Einstein, Roosevelt and Churchill. His art book library was monolithic and I remember as a boy pouring through the masterpieces of art and sculpture by Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Matisse, Rembrandt, Donatello, and DaVinci. He bought me my first science book, “The Boy Scientist.” And he turned me into a collector. My interests were history, science, geology and science fiction. And so I read and collected John Wyndham, and with my dad went to the library to do research on every author and book I collected. He was the same with stamps and coins which we collected together. I recently parted with the stamp collection, 50 volumes worth that I had organized and turned into histories of the countries from which the stamps came.

When I went to university it was my Dad who influenced my final choice of subject matter to study….Islamic Studies and Medieval History. It was an opportunity to experience something exotic and foreign, something I knew nothing about, and therefore, felt I had no valid opinion to express. It opened my eyes to doing research and it exposed me to new ways of thinking. But my love of science and technology remained always a part of my extracurricular reading and research.

I had 3 telescopes at age 13. Two of those came out every night the clouds cleared and the stars and planets came into view. I studied the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, and found Uranus, Neptune and even Pluto through my 5 inch reflector and 3 inch refractor.

Having 13 years of work under my belt in the publishing industry allows me to say without a doubt that your observations about much of the business are correct. I was an acquisitions editor in science and technology and eventually software in my last 4 years with the publisher. I published books on AI, speech recognition, systems analysis, PASCAL, ALGOL, ADA…..even taught myself to code just for the heck of it. The books I published sold because they were well authored by the writers I attracted.

I was down in my stacks this morning looking at my books. I have read every one of them which is a bit overwhelming when you think about it, and I daresay, I can discuss plot and argument for most. When the light finally goes out of my life I hope through my writing I can impart some of the knowledge I’ve gained and give posterity the sense of wonderment that I have possessed as I have uncovered interesting ideas and stories over the years.

Thanks for sharing so much here on my blog site. It is much appreciated.

So many books, so little time. No matter how much time one tries to invest in the reading of books, senescence and death will abbreviate the effort long before even 1/10 of one percent of the most worthy candidates are read. The sad truth is most books are published with indifference to their literary merits or benefits to readers; it’s mostly about the publishers’ expectations of profits. Even university press publications are influenced more by the quest for profit than by any altruistic desire to spread worthwhile knowledge. Most readers would rather read something entertaining than something enlightening, and the most enlightening books tend toward the taxing. So the world is flooded with books that are not worth the effort of reading.

Since my teenage years, I’ve always held that any book worth reading must be worth owning. Lending libraries are mostly whorehouses for the mind. But that’s a tricky proposition. Like you, I have accumulated my thousands of books, but I now wonder how many of them were really worth reading. From time to time I come across an old book, often out of print, that seems far more worthwhile than most of my library. That raises the question of how many great old books I never read, and how many books of lesser merit I wasted time on? So the average young yahoo is confronted with literally millions of candidate books to read, most of which will waste his limited reading time. So maybe the huge shrinkage of the publishing industry is not really so lamentable. If the immortal angels were running the global publishing industry, maybe their approach would be to publish a list of books they constantly keep in print, and the angels would qualify their list by the claim that a smart person should never waste time reading books ranked number 2 on the list until he has read at least one book ranked number 1. And so on; one should never read books ranked in category number 50 on the angelic list until he has read at least one book from each of the 49 higher ranked categories. Might work out that a really well-read person would need to read less than 500 books in his lifetime, and then he could decide whether he has something to say that needs to be said that has not already been better said in the books the angels selected for the top 500 rankings. If he can honestly say yes, and the angels confirm his judgment, then he needs to spend his time writing and not reading books.

The reading world might best be characterized by the observation that most people read way too many books of the ordinary kind, and not nearly enough books of the extraordinary kind. Here in the Houston, TX, area we have a number of half-price bookstores that trade in used, over run, cutout, bankrupt, etc., books. I’m going to take most of my library there and just dump them. But it’s a sad process of deciding just which ones to dump. Dumping a book is like the funeral of an old friend (the older one grows the more funerals he must attend), but life must go on. One difference between the e-book and the tangible book that one has read, even decades in the past, is that a glance at its physical covers evokes recall of its contents, and sometimes prompts a rereading.

No truly honest person has many books on his shelves that he cannot paraphrase. Once I had a close friend with a very impressive library on display in his home. Many of the books were also in my library, and I always wanted to discuss the contents with my friend, but it was impossible because my friend had never read any of his books, and never would. My friend only collected and displayed books that would seem candidates for the angels’ top 500 list. My friend felt smart because he owned books that would likely make him smart if he ever invested the next 40-years reading them. In truth my friend would have been much smarter if he had merely randomly selected any five books from his collection, read them, and burned all the rest.

The printed book is a technology that may not have a significant shelf life going forward. Certainly the publishing industry is contracting rapidly these days. Knowledge is electronically disseminated as is much of our entertainment.

I use a 10 inch tablet for much of my reading these days although I am a regular library goer. My biggest challenge in the next year is finding a home for some of the 6,000 books in my house as my wife and I begin downsizing.

Daniel says: “There will always be paper books since they do not need energy.”

I wonder if you ever said, “There will always be slide rules since they do not need energy?” My old Sharp EL-525 photocell powered 10-digit scientific calculator is now over 15 years old. I use it nearly every day. It still works as good as new and it beats the hell out of the biggest and best slide rule that ever existed in the 1950s when the SR-71 was developed without the benefit of computers. The photocells cover about a square inch. If an e-book reader had 10-square inches of the 15-year-old photocell technology it would work just fine and never need a battery or recharge.

I fear that paper books will go the way of 33.33 vinyl records, and that’s a shame because I’d much prefer to read a lightweight 9 x 6 printed trade paperback (you can keep the hard covers). Still, display screens are constantly improving, and my old eyes are becoming inured to reading off screens. My mother’s 97-year-old eyes can read headlines, but no longer read the standard type size printed word. She can still read large type on a display monitor. Electronic displays allow type size enlargement, and my own 74-year-old eyes have reached a stage of deterioration where I will soon be mostly reading larger type off electronic display screens. I do my MSWord processing in LED 21-inch monitor TrueType full screen 12-point type. Very low eyestrain.

Wikipedia’s technical and scientific coverage has nearly reached a stage of competence where I don’t ever need to consult my printed book reference library, which is now on a closet top shelf. I hope I’m wrong, but I just don’t see enough market scale to sustain much of a printed book industry. In a WiFi world, instant download of text material and MP3 seems to satisfy 99% of the market. I’ve been holding off, but there is probably something like a 9-inch screen Kindle Fire 2 in my near future. Whatever it will be it must get Wikipedia.

Hi Daniel, I too believe that paper books will continue to be published but e-books and the Internet have irreversibly changed publishing just as the digital revolution has radically transformed the music industry. These are disruptive technologies that will continue to push not only the form in which we receive information but the business models of once what were seen to be established companies. But I love a book between hardcovers, having over 6,000 in my home collection.

Thank you for your insight of a rare intensity. Being from Switzerland I remember similar technology leaps. However I cordially disagree on one point. There will always be paper books since they do not need energy.

Keep on publishing.

Yours,

Danstanmart