When the last energy revolution occurred, fossil fuels began with coal taking over the roads. For century it was like the huge UNIVAC computers, limited to large scale in the form of railroads and factories. Then Henry Ford became the Bill Gates of fossil fuels.

Neither Ford nor Gates claimed to be original. Gates said he was waiting on personal computers to reach a certain level, and he named the new PC that developed and caused him to tell his partner, “Now it’s time to get going.“

Certainly Ford made even less claim to being original.

In fact, who exactly invented something is usually a historical detail. Some Chinese invented one thing after another, OR it got to China from White India, but each time the invention stopped when it got to China. The printing press was there but died, the gun was in Japan in the sixteenth century but died.

There is a lot of debate about whether China invented GUN powder. They did have rockets that made no difference to their history, so the question is did they have GUNS that made no difference to their history?

But the real, the HISTORICAL question about Oriental inventiveness is already answered: If you have to look so closely to see whether gunpowder was ever there, then clearly the Oriental use of it is entirely different from the Aryans’.

In a white society there is a lot of debate about who invented something. The reason for this is that the SOCIETY had reached a point where the ingredients are there and someone will put them together. There has never been a debate in Oriental society about who invented what.

Unlike Al Gore, Gates did not claim to invent the Internet just as Henry Ford never claimed to have invented the automobile. Ford‘s mass production methods were what made Eli Whitney rich after he found the cotton gin was simply too simple to keep patent rights on.

But both Gates and Ford did the thing that is utterly lacking in Oriental societies. They took a concept and made it a societal advance.

The space program is going through a similar process. When the USSR’s Sputnik went up in 1958 a number of giant programs were adopted to counter that achievement in the US. What most people didn’t know was that a rocket that could do the same thing was sitting in the US stockpile.

I wonder if the Soviets ever invented ANYTHING?

But there is nothing the media like like a national crisis, so a national crisis Sputnik became.

If you read science fiction from the 50s and 60s you consistently find the computers involved are giants, Univac’s big brothers, as dependent on size as on advancing technology. In China, the things which impress Americans in history, like iron foundries, were huge projects.

But it is on the Ford stage that Western technology is built. In 1958 Sputnik, which was putting an overweight basketball into orbit, was a massive project that showed that only The Collectives of the Peoples’ Democratic Republics, working the entire economy under Mommy Professor’s planning, could produce such a marvel.

Now putting things into orbit is regular business, and each year the businesses able to do it get smaller.

Right now a person can construct an A-Bomb off the Internet if he has the uranium. It is the power that is missing. So BoardAd and I are watching for the new power source.

With that new power source will come a time when private use of outer space is as common as it is in old sci-fi stories.

We are now seeing problems with regulating the Internet between countries like the ones they will encounter in regulating space.

But you will not see any of these future realities discussed anywhere but BUGS.