Robert X Bishop

                                                                                                          

EGOGRAM 2024

Friends, Earthlings, ETs — lend me your sensory organs!

Humans are drawn to boundary regions. You will always find humans flocking to locations where Earth meets sky and ocean meets land. So here we find ourselves at the temporal confluence of two years. With 2023 now over, humans together began the next journey around the sun.

This EGOGRAM continues a tradition started by my dear friend and associate Sir Arthur C. Clarke.  

Arthur’s final EGOGRAM began this way:

EGOGRAM 2008

I send you greetings and good wishes at the beginning of another year – and we’re getting closer to 2010, ‘the year we make contact’ (according to the movie 2010: Odyssey Two).

Making contact, or at least receiving some evidence of extra-terrestrial life, was one of three wishes I included in a short video released online in December reflecting on my 90th birthday. I said:

“I have always believed that we are not alone in the universe. But we are still waiting for ETs to call us – or give us some kind of a sign. We have no way of guessing when this might happen – I hope sooner rather than later!”

I added two more developments that I would like to see accomplished – kicking our addiction to oil by going for clean energy sources, and achieving peace in Sri Lanka. That makes up Clarke’s Three Wishes, neatly complementing the well-established Clarke’s Three Laws.

Arthur moved to Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) in 1956, mainly because of his love for SCUBA diving. Arthur lacked mobility on land owing to post polio complications, but in the water, his mobility was like that of a dolphin. And while some might say he was a victim of his disability, I believe he adapted to his situation and instead of complaining that he was in a wheel chair, he transported himself and those who read his books or watched his films on fantastic journeys around the solar system and beyond.

Early in his career, Arthur had published science fiction with some success, but it was when Arthur collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the motion picture 2001: A Space Odyssey, a story line loosely based on his short story “The Sentinel”, Arthur’s fortunes changed for the better. While not a commercial success at first, the film established Arthur as one of the pre-eminent science fiction writers of his time. He even shared the camera with Walter Cronkite as a commentator during the Apollo mission to the moon.

In early 2008 I began organizing a trip for the Russian engineer Yuri Artsutanov to meet with Arthur in Colombo. Arthur had met with Yuri during the Soviet period and Yuri had infected him with his idea of an elevator to space. Arthur used Yuri’s concept of the space elevator in at least two of his books that I know of. “The Fountains of Paradise” was based entirely on Yuri’s dream of an elevator to space. I had also been introduced to Yuri on one of my many trips to Russia and considered him a friend as well. While I was preparing Yuri’s papers I received an email from Arthur that he had fallen and had hurt himself rather badly asking that we postpone the trip. Arthur passed away on 19 March 2008, at the age of 90.

Because of my extensive contacts with the scientific community in Russia, in 1995 I received a fax from Arthur asking if I would assist him to arrange a test of a device called the YUSMAR. That device just happened to be located in Russia. I didn’t have to think about it, I simply got to work putting the project together. Arthur suspected that the YUMAR device had certain properties that allowed it to produce more energy out, than was put into the device. To even suggest such a thing was taboo in the mainstream scientific community, but Arthur was a true visionary and I have always believed that the most important scientific discoveries are found on the fringes of science. I arranged for the testing, the results of which seemed to confirm that there was slightly more energy being produced by the device than was used to power the device. Different scientists, including Eugene Mallove put forth theories to explain the over unity data. I noticed that the device produced a high-frequency sound of very high amplitude. While Eugene put forth theories relating to cold fusion that he thought was the result of energetic cavitation, I theorized that the phenomenon may have been related to the stimulation of the water in the device by acoustic or sound energy. But sadly because terms like cold fusion and over unity had been used to describe the project, the project was highly ridiculed by the mainstream scientific community. Over the intervening years I applied what I had learned from the YUSMAR project to different chemical reactions. In numerous experiments the data repeatedly indicated that the application of acoustic or sound energy seemed to modify certain chemical reactions, including the dissociation process commonly used for producing hydrogen from water.  In the early part of the 21st century other scientists around the world began to report a similar acoustic or sound related phenomenon.

The human race desperately needs a new energy source that is clean, reliable and affordable and will not damage the Earth’s biosphere. At this point I believe that dissociation of water by acoustic means could one day provide an energy source that just might change the course of human civilization. With trillions of dollars being allocated these days to the production of hydrogen as a zero carbon fuel option, the year 2024 might just be the year when everything changes.

The human race is not a very advanced species. According to many surveys the average human is less happy today than ever, despite or maybe because of technological advances. While I am a person of science, I am also a person of faith. In my opinion, at no time in human history have the essentials of happiness been held in such low regard. Love, beauty, compassion, family and community are being eroded by things like social media and artificial intelligence. There are now schisms between almost every possible difference that humans have. There is a strange hypocrisy today whereby the many of the humans who are preaching love, seem to hate the most. Victimhood has become a very destructive lifestyle and the ability of two human beings who disagree to have a polite conversation seems to be a thing of the past. Science in particular, but civilization as a whole cannot advance without disagreement. Civil disagreement is the engine by which scientific, sociopolitical and other ideas are advanced and tuned. If this trend is not reversed soon, it may be the straw that breaks the  back of civilization itself.

In the famous black and white science-fiction thriller, “The Day the Earth stood still”; Klaatu, played by Michael Rennie confronts the bureaucracy of Washington DC. After listening to the president’s envoy, Klaatu equates the bureaucracy of Washington, DC to stupidity, and explains how his people have learned to live without it. The human race has very little time to do just this, to learn to live without stupidity. No quantity of cloud servers and smart phones will ever bring the happiness and joy of a single human hug. In a time when humans are more connected technologically than ever, so many are actually starving for love and connection.

For 2024 I will offer the sage advice of another science fiction writer, Kurt Vonnegut:

Go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

But above all, be grateful for what you have. And share a little of what you have with others. Take out a piece of paper and a pen and write a letter to someone you care about. Or better yet, write a letter to someone you hate and while you do so try and understand why you hate and if there is a possibility that you are being used by others trying to achieve geopolitical goals. Hang on to your very own free will, and use your time wisely, because free will and time are the two most valuable things in a human life.

In my humble opinion there is only one race of hairless bipeds on the planet Earth, and that is the human race. And there are only two kinds of humans in the world, humans who try, and humans who don’t try.

Human life, in fact almost every form of life on the planet Earth requires water to live. The next time you’re caught in a downpour, don’t complain about being caught in the rain, and just remember that on the planet Earth, water, the very elixir of life, falls from the sky.

All my very best,

Robert X Bishop

 

EGOGRAM 2022

 Friends, Earthlings, ETs — lend me your sensory organs!

I send you my heartfelt greetings and best wishes at the beginning of another year. Over this last year I have lost many of my friends to mortality. My life has been more amazing than I could’ve ever imagined as a child. I accept that this could very well be my final EGOGRAM, as well as my last and final trip around the sun as a fellow traveler on this beautiful blue-green spaceship we call Earth. I’m certainly not afraid to die. My only regret, if I had one, would be that I haven’t done more to help the human race. Very few have ever understood me. I have never been motivated by money and yet I refuse to live a mediocre life. For someone like me mediocrity is worse than death. That is why I believe that Sir Arthur C. Clarke and I got along so well. We both wanted humanity to survive until it makes it out of the cradle. Therefore my EGOGRAM this year will be a bit more personal.

My friend Sir Arthur Clarke was born the year the Bolsheviks began their tyrannical rule over 11 time zones of the earth’s northern hemisphere. Arthur traveled to Leningrad during the days of the Soviet Union where he met Yuri Artsutanov. Yuri was known as one of the fathers of the space elevator. Arthur lived to see the collapse of the Soviet Union and Leningrad once again becoming St. Petersburg. Because of Arthur’s friendship with Yuri, the space elevator became a key component of “Fountains of Paradise”, one of Arthur’s many visionary novels. Because of my friendship with both Yuri and Arthur I often enabled communications between the two. The Soviet state had left Yuri with few resources and both Arthur and I contributed much needed support. There are many kinds of poverty, but in my mind the greatest poverty is to live in a society where freedom is in short supply. I grew up in the southern United States. By any modern measurement I lived in absolute poverty. But it was only a financial poverty. And honestly, I never really noticed that I was living in poverty as a child because I had so much freedom to experiment, to become a better person and create a better life for myself. Today I realize that living in poverty as a child gave me an incredible advantage and allowed being to become the person that I am today. There were many around me when I was a young person who considers themselves victims. Instead of simply being grateful to be alive and having the freedom to create lives they wanted for themselves, they simply wasted away in the mental prison of victim-hood.

When I first visited the Soviet Union I met some of the most amazing people, people who were living in the poverty of socialism and limited primarily by a lack of personal freedom. It was during one of those trips that I decided to devote myself to helping my friends in the Soviet Union achieve some of the freedoms that I had known in my younger days. Once the Soviet Union was no more, most I knew there embraced freedom and capitalism with the vigor.

Just after the collapse of the Soviet Union times were tough. It was like the Wild West. Several friends and I opened a successful telecommunications company there. That period of my life was a most amazing opportunity to gain an education in the crucible of history.

One cold -50° night flying back from Siberia on an aircraft that was barely airworthy my Russian partner and I asked the stewardess what kind of alcohol was available. She told us there was only vodka and champagne. I paid her for the remaining alcohol and tipped her 1000 ruble note. She looked at the colorful piece of paper and started crying. I felt bad and asked her if I had under tipped. She told me that she only made 300 rubles a month, and that if I were willing to give her 1000 rubles as a tip, then what she had feared must be true, her country had fallen. I don’t know exactly why, but that moment had a grand impact on my life. My friend and I mixed the vodka with the champagne and consumed ridiculous quantities of the beverage. My friend informed me that in Russia this concoction was known as northern lights. Several minutes after he informed me of this I noticed that everyone was moving to the starboard side of the aircraft to peer out the windows. We were in route to Perm to switch to a more airworthy aircraft so our flight path took us to the edge of the Arctic Circle. When I looked out the view-port I saw that the aircraft was engulfed in the most amazing light show I had ever seen. My friend and I looked at each other and just laughed. Our aircraft was being illuminated by the northern lights. At that moment I knew the universe had just winked at me and that I was on the right path.

Because of my unique experience I can often see things that go unnoticed by others. I remember having meetings in the Kremlin in the 1980s knowing that the Soviet Union was about to collapse. Yet no one in the Soviet government seemed to have a clue. These daysseems like Déjà vu all over again.

I find it interesting that many Americans are embracing the very evils that the Soviet peoples have only recently escaped from. It feels like many are infected with a sort of virus of the mind. I can only hope that if this is true, some sort of herd immunity will develop in time. George Orwell it would seem, in his visionary work 1984, was an optimist. I too am an optimist. I feel that once people understand what they have lost they will find a peaceful way back onto the path.

Arthur C. Clarke felt that the solution to saving the human race was to find a new source of energy. Energy is the lifeblood of any civilization. Fossil fuels are limited, nuclear fission is problematic and nuclear fusion doubly so. Solar and wind are secondary energy sources and for many reasons cannot be the long term solution to humanity’s energy needs. What if humanity converts primarily to wind and solar and there is an ice age?

Working with Arthur for over a decade I conducted due diligence on many emerging energy solutions. Much of our work focused on Cold Fusion or as it is now called “low-energy nuclear reactions”. Much of this work was coordinated with the editor of Infinite Energy magazine, Eugene Mallove. Arthur and I both thought that we were getting close to an energy and zero pollution solution, but then Eugene was murdered. About the same time Arthur was accused of doing some terrible things. And at that point I focused my time on helping Arthur. With a global cooperative effort and some behind-the-scenes deals, Arthur’s name was finally cleared. But these two events put an end to our joint energy research. The greatest take-away from our work was the belief that there is a phenomenon of an unknown nature that allows for the efficient dissociation of water. This phenomenon seems to be connected to cavitation and sonoluminescence. If this phenomenon could be used to enable the stable dissociation of water then the energy needs of the human race could be satisfied by green hydrogen. Hydrogen is the perfect fuel. It can be used in both internal combustion engines and in fuel cells to produce electricity for electrical vehicles. The combustion byproduct of hydrogen is clean water. It can be said that hydrogen is greener than green. The United States Department of Energy is currently funding the development of hydrogen fuel stations across the nation. Toyota is currently road testing a hydrogen passenger vehicle in Japan and Lufthansa is converting an Airbus A320 to be fueled by hydrogen. It would seem that hydrogen as an energy source may offer hope for the human race.

 Should we achieve over unity production of hydrogen the main problem would be the economic effects. Hydrogen is such a perfect fuel that it could soon replace all other forms of fuel. The governments of the world would have to be very careful implementing a new global economy based on hydrogen in which fuel costs would be near zero and pollution would be zero. With careful planning a hydrogen economy could end poverty, homelessness, hunger and allow humanity to finally exit the cradle. It would allow those who wish to create, incredible opportunity. It would also most likely put an end to war. For these reasons the most powerful forces on the planet Earth would most likely be against it. The tyrants, the dictators, the hawks and the oligarchs would no longer be able to steal away the opportunity, freedom and free will of the peoples of this world. It would place humanity at a crossroads.

I have no hubris, only faith so I certainly could be wrong about everything, but one thing that I’m certain of is that the most powerful thing that the human race has ever produced is an idea. That is why governments are so often against the free exchange of ideas, labeling the ideas that they like as information and the ideas that they don’t like as disinformation or misinformation. Without the free flow of ideas science is dead, creativity is stifled, free will is eliminated and civilization is ended. But thankfully an Idea is a difficult thing to kill.

This EGOGRAM is not to motivate anyone to do anything. This EGOGRAM is written only to share my ideas and a bit of history behind how I came by them.

Here are a few additional ideas that may or may not be true, but just to provoke other ideas:

There is no greater good if it requires the elimination of freedom. There is no true love without free will. There is good and evil. Evil always has the advantage because evil can benefit from pretending to be good, but good gains no advantage by pretending to be evil. Good has the power of creation. Evil can only appropriate and pervert the creativity of good. Good always communicates. Evil isolates and prevents communications. Good enables free will. Evil uses addiction, fear, lies, victim-hood and paranoia to steal away free will. The greater the good, the truer the love, the more viciously that evil will attack. Never stop loving, never stop talking, never hate, and never stop trying. No good thing, no success, no love is ever gained without trying.

These ideas come from lessons I have learned. I hope you can learn from my mistakes so you can avoid making a few less mistakes yourself. I do apologize for the length of the EGOGRAM this year, but there was much to say.

Please excuse the typos, errors in grammar etc. I just write whats on my mind in the last hours of the year and send as-is.

Please share if you find the EGOGRAM worth sharing.

All my very best,

Robert X Bishop

 

Sir Arthur C Clarke

                                                                                                

‘LESLIE’S HOUSE’, 25, BARNES PLACE, COLOMBO 7, SRI LANKA.

 PHONE: (94 11) 2694 255, 2699 757, FAX: (94 11) 2698 730

 

EGOGRAM 2008

 

Friends, Earthlings, ETs — lend me your sensory organs!

I send you greetings and good wishes at the beginning of another year – and we’re getting closer to 2010, ‘the year we make contact’ (according to the movie 2010: Odyssey Two).

 

Making contact, or at least receiving some evidence of extra-terrestrial life, was one of three wishes I included in a short video released online in December reflecting on my 90th birthday. I said:

“I have always believed that we are not alone in the universe. But we are still waiting for ETs to call us – or give us some kind of a sign. We have no way of guessing when this might happen – I hope sooner rather than later!”

 

I added two more developments that I would like to see accomplished – kicking our addiction to oil by going for clean energy sources, and achieving peace in Sri Lanka. That makes up Clarke’s Three Wishes, neatly complementing the well-established Clarke’s Three Laws.[1] 

 

My 90th birthday celebrations went extremely well. My business partner Hector, his wife Valerie and their children Cherene and Melinda returned from Melbourne in time for 16 December. They joined my staff and a few close friends for cake and champagne that morning. The same evening, the government of Sri Lanka held a felicitation ceremony in my honour, which was chaired by the President and attended by over 150 people including several cabinet ministers, diplomats as well as scientists, artistes and the media. The space agencies of India, Pakistan, Russia and the US sent senior representatives. It took all my well known modesty to survive over 90 minutes of raving remarks about my life and times from half a dozen speakers! The highlight was when my old friend cosmonaut Alexei Leonov turned up representing both the Russian space agency and the Association of Space Explorers – and presented me with the latter’s highest honour.

 

One morning two weeks later, I suddenly found myself unable to rise from bed after a good night’s sleep. The unexpected back injury forced me to enter Colombo’s Apollo Hospital where doctors found I had a cracked vertebra. This puzzled everyone as there was no accident or incident – perhaps it was all that walking with dinosaurs that I now do in my vivid dreams… I returned home 10 days later, but full healing would take many weeks during which I have to be extremely careful.

 

I’m now surviving on 16 hours of sleep everyday, and getting used to doing some reading and light work from my semi-reclined position. I’m very well looked after by my doctors, physiotherapists, staff and valets, and am in no pain or discomfort. But I can’t wait to get back to my hover-chair…

 

One of my current priorities is to get through the heavy manuscript of The Last Theorem, written by Frederik Pohl expanding on my story line developed four years ago. Our publishers and agents were remarkably patient and supportive as Fred and I swapped ideas and comments from opposite sides of the planet for much of 2007.

 

Meanwhile, Firstborn – the third in the ‘Time Odyssey’ series written with Stephen Baxter – came out from Del Rey in December. During the year, Stephen also wrote a delightful tall story using the same London pub setting that formed the backdrop to my collection Tales from the White Hart, first published 50 years ago. This new story is included in an anniversary edition just brought out by the UK’s PS Publishing.

I was involved in marking other golden jubilees during the past year. In April 2007, my old friend Patrick Moore completed hosting The Sky at Night programme on BBC TV for 50 years without a break – a broadcast world record. I filmed a tribute with the BBC and wrote an essay recalling some of our celestial adventures.[2] In October, Patrick and I joined worldwide celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Space Age. In an essay written for the official commemorative volume published by the Russian Academy of Sciences, I noted that in spite of many impressive accomplishments in the past half century, the best is yet to come. The same month, New Scientist listed me as one of the top 10 influential space thinkers of all time ‘who really made the Space Age happen’ – the list included Tsiolkovsky, Korolev, Tsien and Spitzer.[3] In November, I joined (by video) the 50th anniversary meeting of the Pugwash movement held in Bari, Italy – after thanking its members for preventing our self-destruction from nuclear warfare, I suggested they also address the spread of ‘techno-porn’ that glamourises violence.

 

Despite limitations of time and energy imposed by Post Polio, I joined via video selected global events on topics close to my heart. Among them were the 20th anniversary of International Space University, the birth centenary of the late Robert Heinlein, and NASA-JPL Cassini spacecraft’s flyby  of Saturn’s moon Iapetus, where astronaut Dave Bowman discovered the larger monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

 

The Arthur Clarke Foundation continued its good work to promote my vision, and pursued plans for the Arthur C. Clarke Center “to investigate the reach and impact of human imagination”. The Board members of the Foundation, led by Tedson Meyers, have taken on the challenge of raising US$ 70 million for this project. I thank them for their hard work and persistence.

 

My brother Fred, Chris Howse, Angie Edwards and Navam Tambayah look after my affairs in England. My agents David Higham Associates (www.davidhigham.co.uk) and Scovil, Chichak & Galen Literary Agency (www.scglit.com) insulate me from rapacious editors and media executives.

 

Here in Colombo, I am well supported by my staff and I want to thank them all:

Office Manager: Rohan De Silva                   Executive Officer: Nalaka Gunawardene

Secretary: Dottie Weerasooriya                     Valets: Saman, Chandrasiri, Dharmawardena

Drivers: Lalith & Anthony                                Domestic Staff: Jayasiri, Mallika & Sumana

Handyman: Jagath

 

I have always had mixed feelings about posterity (as a cynic remarked, what good does it do to me?). Yet completing 90 orbits around the sun was a suitable occasion to reflect on how I would like to be remembered. As I said in my birthday reflections video: “I’ve had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer, space promoter and science populariser. Of all these, I want to be remembered most as a writer – one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well.

 

“I find that another English writer — who, coincidentally, also spent most of his life in the East — has expressed it very well. So let me end with these words of Rudyard Kipling:

If I have given you delight

by aught that I have done.

Let me lie quiet in that night

which shall be yours anon;

 

And for the little, little span

the dead are borne in mind,

seek not to question other than,

the books I leave behind.”

 

Arthur C Clarke                                                                       

Colombo, Sri Lanka: 30 January 2007