Let’s keep Elon Musk
out of the Aloha State
We recently witnessed a jaw-dropping display of ring-kissing and cozying up by arguably some of the world’s wealthiest, most powerful men at last month’s presidential inauguration.
The thought that we Hawaii residents are sharing these fair islands with the likes of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg just makes me want to … take a shower.
To real estate agents who deal in Hawaii real estate: I know you love money, but can you control yourselves enough to not sell to Elon Musk? Or have you already done so?
Mary Lee Knapstad
Volcano
A new department
proposed for UH Hilo
We are living in a golden age of astronomy. There is no historical precedent for the explosive growth of our knowledge of the physical universe.
Recent discoveries indicate that most stars host planets. If even 0.000001% of those planets are habitable, we are talking billions of habitable planets in our home galaxy. Those are hard numbers, not speculation.
We are fed nonsense that interstellar travel is “centuries away” with “unknown technology.” That if false.
Faster than light travel is impossible, but that is irrelevant, because at cosmic scales light is abysmally slow. At 100 times the speed of light, it still takes you a thousand years to cross the galaxy.
It is time dilation that gets you to the stars, and a propulsion system delivering the acceleration you feel sitting in a chair will get you anywhere in the galaxy in 30 years. Such a propulsion system could be built in a garage. This is not a joke.
For this reason, the University of Hawaii at Hilo should institute a department and a chair of Interstellar Navigation. Interstellar Navigation is an NP-hard computation problem due to gravity lensing; meaning it is unsolvable by computers, including AI.
But the ancient methodology of Polynesian navigation forms a conceptual and spiritual nexus by which starships can be operationally navigated to interstellar destinations.
Please wake up, Hawaii. The future of the human species needs you. The hour is late. The stakes are high. The time for nonsense is over.
John Powers
Pahoa
