Talk Series: Humanity’s Power Basis for Starfaring
Date: 20th July 2021
Time: 8pm UTC (London time)
Presenter: Robert Kennedy III
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Summary
Humanity’s Power Basis for Starfaring: A geoengineering case study that may be one stepping stone to powering our starfaring ambitions.
About the speaker
Robert Kennedy was educated in the classics and foreign languages since boyhood (Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Russian). He studied studied mechanical engineering at California Polytechnic (Pomona, B.S. 1986), with emphases in robotics, machine design, optical physics. Fresh out of school, he designed industrial robotics systems at the Douglas Aircraft Company (1987-1991) in Los Angeles, and pursued research in artificial intelligence at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1987). Robert founded the Ultimax Group, Inc. (1992-present, www.ultimax.com ), a Russian-American company in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He is a published commercial artist and author (nonfiction), and has written about space-based solar power, shell worlds, climate change, linguistics, energy parks, biofuels, and energy security. In 2011 and 2013, he co-organized and sponsored the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshops (www.tviw.us) in Oak Ridge Tennessee and Huntsville Alabama and went onto be a co-founder of the subsequent non-profit TVIW.
He has lectured on geoengineering in Moscow for the Russian Academy of Sciences / Rosgidromet (their national weather service), and also at the International Academy of Astronautics in Aosta, Italy. His work has also appeared in /Journal of the British Interplanetary Society/, /Acta Astronautica/, the /Whole Earth Review/ and a cover story on Soviet Star Wars in the Smithsonian /Air & Space/ magazine. He has patents and trademarks pending for a number of optoelectronic, robotic, security, and space system inventions as well as the concept of Tetrageneration(TM). As the American Society of Mechanical Engineer’s 1994 Congressional Fellow, he spent his year working for the Subcommittee on Space in the U.S. House of Representatives. He participated in the First Interstellar Robotics Conference at NYU, and was a technical consultant on “Deep Impact” (Paramount/Dreamworks major motion picture released May 8, 1998). He is past-chair of the Oak Ridge Section as well as the Technology & Society Division; and currently sits on the Society’s national Energy Committee, tasked with writing Energy Talking Point papers for the 110th thru 113th Congresses and the Society’s Carbon Statement. Currently, Robert is a senior systems engineer at Tetra Tech.
About the series
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