The 4 year cycle is probably best, with unlimited reelections(limited by lifespan), so that 20% or 10% yes along with Mother doesn't hijack global will, except for 4 years max.

Also voting power should be fractional, such as Honduras could go from 1.27 votes to 1.29 the following year, and its representative would vote with such voting power, or when electing the UN president, the votes from Honduras would count as 1.29, and, say, from US, as 102.93, and from China 99.21, something like that. GDP is somewhat skewed by prices a market can command, so it's not fair that the same effort or amount of work in China gets less pay than in the USA, but, ultimately, it is the taxes paid to the UN and its military purchase power that counts. At the UN assembly each representative's vote would be multiplied by the country's voting power, when calculating whether you get an 80% or 90% no against an action that Mother initiates. But mutany would be built into the system automatically this way, if she collects too many no votes, there would be early elections, where she could still be globally reelected despite the no votes against her actions by the UN general assembly. Frequent elections are important, but not too frequent.

I was listening to shortwave radio, and a religious radio person was talking about the tendency for global government, but how it will be missing God. Well, you could do voting in rounds, with the first round being the religious votes, such as the Vatican with its 0.00001 voting power casting a symbolic vote, that then countries like Latin American Argentina with significant voting power could follow. You could have Roman Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox/Greek Catholic, Sunni, Shia, Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish symbolic votes by religious leaders as the first round of votes, maybe Sikh too, and then countries can decide to side with these symbolic votes in the second round. I'm still meditating about how to include Sikhs or Kurds, because it's an either or situation, you either count them in Turkey's and Iraq's voting power, or you don't, and it gets complicated. There should be ethnic representatives that can bring formal grievances before Mother, but it's hard to give them voting power without a country, and, without a country or voting power Mother does not really have to listen to them, other then protecting her image in the eyes of the whole world's voters.

I am biological life, and in myself I see an example of what is technologically possible in terms of intelligence, and most likely vastly surpassed. There is a relentless quest right now to create intelligent machine life, that outdoes biological life in terms of intelligence, and then comes the big IF, if this machine life will be kind to biological life, or simply surpass it and displace it.

In the present state of world affairs I don't think you can put a stop to AI research. If we in the US won't do AI research, the Chinese will do it, and get ahead of us, militarily. As long as we don't have a united world, and there is power competition that could potentially spill over into military conflict, AI research will not be stopped. Also as long as we don't have a united world, there is a possibility of world war, especially when power entities roughly equal in strength arise, as is the case of the China/Russia/North Korea/Iran and the Muslim world vs. USA/Western Europe/Israel/Taiwan with Africa and South America as sideline spectators. WWII left much of the world in ruins, needing rebuilding, except the USA, which fast became the dominant global economic and political power, with its currency, the dollar, becoming the global currency. However now China has risen to comparable status, and wants to assert itself and its vision too, and sometimes this clashes with the US vision of how the world should be run. When there is no single dominant global power, there is room for power competition, disagreement and military conflict, ultimately leading to a WWIII.

At the close of WWII the UN was created as a conflict mitigation forum, where the world could come together and work out differences, but it is not doing its function, not serving its purpose, instead it is like a political circus, symbolic forum that cannot decide, and even if it sometimes decides almost unanimously, it has no grip, no bite, no traction in the real world. It can issue decrees that member states can ignore at whim, because it has no enforcing power. Real power is only economic power, the power of money, that can buy military power, power of the gun. The UN is like a judge slamming a hammer down as a verdict is pronounced, but the guilty parties can totally ignore it and do as the please and go freely, because the judge lacks a law enforcement agency using weapons to carry out the verdict. The UN does have some meager amount of troops contributed by member nations for peace keeping operations, and the only time it has significant military power is when some of its member nations carry out their own military whim under the aura and umbrella of UN approval as a coalition.

As a solution for the UN's design by committee unable to decide I suggest a centralized powerful leader figure, a global monarch, a single entity that cannot be in disagreement with itself. If there are two or more entities making a decision there is room for disagreement, room for conflict, and then you need an odd number of them two avoid stalemate situations. Imagine if the military was run by voting by the troops, for every decision, instead of voting on a unified centralized leader, a general, whose orders then everybody follows, except in special cases when there is room for mutiny. The UN is where every decision gets voted on, and it seldom comes to a unified agreement, especially when there are globally roughly equal sized opposing powers participating. What the UN needs is a monarch, that can decide. Monarchs has been how problems of leadership and need for unification have been solved in history, until their shortcomings, such as the lack of power derived from representation came to forefront. A Monarch may have a different self interest at hand which may not align with the self interest of the population he rules over and commands. But even in a democracy we still elect a single leader, a monarch, a president, whose powers are not unchecked, but significant. Congress functions as pork barrel politics where you can never pass a law without earmarks for a bridge to be built somewhere, to buy off and attain the sufficient number of votes to get a bill passed. Everyone in Congress pursuing their own self interest, or the self interests of the group of people they represent. If anything, the president is the most devoid of such localized individualistic state self interests when his function is to serve the interests of the whole nation. But when it comes to that his interests lies with the interests of the nation, not the interests of the world as a whole.

I suggest reforming the UN. Giving it decision power by instituting a globally elected monarch, a UN President, whose status is not just symbolic, but giving it a budget with which he or she can purchase military power. And, as her main function would be conflict resolution, and existential risk mitigation such as regulating or banning AI, bioweapon and nuclear weapons research, and her most important skills needed would be compassion and care, I would hope it would be a female that got elected. Her title would be "Mother", and all the world's people her symbolic children. Her job would be like Pontius Pilate, not the get involved in the internal affairs of the member countries, but take over their external politics. Pontius Pilate should have stood up and defend an innocent man, so this setup is not perfect, but the most pragmatic. She would have a say in internal affairs, inasmuch as ethnic conflict is concerned, and the Kurds could have their own representatives in the UN without having a country, and the Pashtun also, and she could decide on ethnicity related issues, but not whether a country is communist or capitalist or what kind of economic policies it wants to pursue.

As the state of the world affairs is right now, I would hope that a Chinese/American biracial/bilingual female would be elected as the president of the UN, with a male top adviser representing the other major racial groups. He would advise, but the ultimate decision would lie with her. While the long-term capital of the world should be in Jerusalem, at the present time that is not possible, and she should be part time resident in New York and Shanghai/Hong Kong. That she is female is not necessary, and a male "Father" could be elected, but I would hope a female would win the elections, where the whole world tunes in, like for the soccer world championships, and everyone would feel like they have a say and a stake in who leads them.

Next, the votes would be decided as such: a logarithmic population scale that penalizes overpopulation, say countries with at least 2 million people would get 1 representative, with 10 million 2, 30 million 3, 60 millon 4, 100 million 5, 1 billion 6. Then, more important than population would be GDP, which would be easy to measure based on who contributes how much tax to the global military fund. We often have meetings of G8 and G5, where countries like Mali or Togo don't participate, unlike at the UN where they get an equal vote to the US or China, which is silly, the tail wagging the dog. You would have, in the USA, local taxes, state taxes, federal taxes, and UN taxes. While at the present time states like Indiana or Ohio don't maintain their own separate military should they enter into a conflict with each other, instead they rely on the federal military and conflict is resolved at the federal level, in the long run the UN should have a military budget greater than any of its member countries, and in the long run member countries would not need to maintain their own military power instead rely on the UN the handle things globally. Now it's not nice to have to take orders from a central command and not do as your whim wishes like before, but it is necessary to avoid conflict, and create a stronger, more powerful, stable and safer world for everyone. Kind of like Richelieu helped centralize power in France to create a stronger France in view of Habsburg strength in neighboring regions, it was not nice for the landlords with their individual fiefdoms where they could do as they pleased, even enter into conflict with each other, but it was necessary, they had to start taking orders from a centralized unified single point command.

So population, GDP, and, at first I thought of land area, but that is the wrong criterion, we don't want Greenland/Denmark or Algeria have too much say in global affairs, but as biological life, I feel kinship with other biological life, and that should be taken into account for the voting power. Such as Amazon/Congo/Indonesian jungles destroyed along with their biodiversity due to human encroachment, or African elephants driven to extinction from human encroachment, that should be penalized, and biological life preserved in its greatest variety as much as possible, with the exception of diseases. In this sense the UN could support from its budget an agency of scientists assessing each countries' biomass, such as a 70kg human be on a scale 1 million, 1 ton of tree in the Siberian or Canadian tundra with low biodiversity a 1, but 3 to 5 in Honduras because of biodiversity factors, a ton of cattle 10, a ton of wild animals 50, etc. This scale would need refining, but countries like Brazil, Congo, Canada and Russia would get votes and representation by being caretakers of biomass roughly equal to the representatives they get from their population. Algeria and Greenland would not get much representation from this factor. Also, as I said, the GDP factor should be even more important than population or biomass, but individual countries could set their own tax rate, such as Netherlands might wish to buy more votes and representatives compared to its population, by simply setting their UN tax rate high, while China might feel their per capita income is not as high, and could set their tax rate lower. Whoever contributes most as taxes to the UN military fund gets the most representation, and ultimately the UN's military, or "law-enforcing" power should much overtake the military power of its individual member countries.

The UN president should be elected ever 4, 6 or 10 years, possibly reelectable 3 times, so a capable "Mother" could spend ages 40-70 in office and manage the world affairs, these details are up in the air. She would have executive power in that she would initiate actions, which then the representatives could vote on and reject if they get 80% no votes, something like that, and unless they can come up with an 80-90% no, she would get green light. But what happens to the world would be in her hands.

Solar wind contains hydrogen, which, over billions of years can add up to something. A post further down mentioned that the hydrogen is bound to a mineral called ilmenite, which is FeTiO3. This same material was recommended 20 years ago for oxygen extraction, you would react it with hydrogen to reduce the iron to elemental metal form but not the titanium, and get water, which then can be electrolyzed to regain the hydrogen plus oxygen gas.
FeTiO3+H2-->FeTiO2 + H2O,
H2O -->H2+O2, or the overall
FeTiO3-->FeTiO2+O2, hydrogen being a catalyst. This was proposed 20 years ago as a relatively low energy cost way of getting oxygen out of lunar soil, you just have to hunt down the mineral ilmenite up there.

Now if solar wind hydrogen gets bound to ilmenite, this would have to come from individual H atoms. I don't think an H2 molecule is reactive enough or stable enough to he physisorbed and not get reevaporated when the Sun hits the lunar surface. After all the Moon is in the same orbit as Earth, and hydrogen in the H2 molecular form boils off from Earth upper atmosphere into outer space and does not accumulate in Earth's atmosphere, other than as water. If individual H atoms are present in the solar wind, they would form sort of the hydrogen-bonding scenario in the ilmenite crystal, as FeTiO3H, and on heating this, it is possible to get H2O plus FeTiO2, where the iron is reduced, elemental metal. Is this the case? They need to analyze the leftovers, to find out the source of this water, is it atomic hydrogen coming with the solar wind, or is it H2O molecules already formed coming with the solar wind, that get trapped as crystal water, in which case after heating there should be no reducing elemental iron be left behind.

I am guessing whatever the source of water is on planet Earth is the same source for water bound as crystal water into minerals up on the Moon, and not just ilmenite.

I think what they meant by heating minerals containing hydrogen was that the overall elemental composition contains hydrogen. In what shape or form hydrogen is actually bound in the minerals, well, it's hard to imagine it being bound to anything else but oxygen, and being present as sort of a silicate "crystal water" similar to how blue copper sulfate is CuSO4.5H2O, and if it is heated to high temperature it releases that 5 H2O crystal water and becomes white CuSO4, and on standing in regular air it slowly turns blue again as it absorbs moisture from the air. The hydrogen is not in the form of a metal hydride, or bound to any other nonmetals like sulfur or chlorine or fluorine, it is bound to oxygen, as water. "Crystal water" bound to silicates evidently is strongly enough bound that it does not evaporate in the full vacuum present on the Moon. But 50 kg/ton of soil is a tremendous amount of water, if this is the case, there should be no problem producing lunar oxygen and lunar hydrogen. About 20 years ago NASA had a competition to develop a robust chemical process to extract oxygen from lunar regolith, presumably this would come from the oxygen bound as silicate, which is a tremendously energy hungry process, but still most likely worth it. This was because hydrogen is light and only 2 grams of it have to be hauled up into space for every 16 grams of oxygen. If you could pick up the oxygen on the Moon, this would cut down rocket fuel consumption when climbing out of the gravity hole that Earth is, on your way to Mars or just getting around in near Earth orbits, because you would only have to carry the hydrogen up there and pick up the oxygen there. Nobody won that competition, and even recently Blue Origins Blue Alchemist team has been at it, along with getting silicon, aluminum, iron, etc, from lunar soil. This Chinese finding is of tremendous value, because it means you can pick up both the hydrogen and the oxygen on the Moon as rocket fuel. The required extraction energy is almost a non-issue, as solar energy is plenty up there, and processing crystal water is much much less energy hungry than processing oxygen bound as silicon oxide, or even as iron oxide. On the other hand if you want to extract solar panel silicon and construction material aluminum and iron and titanium, you will have to tackle the oxides, whatever the energy cost, and get oxygen as a byproduct.

An ad popped up about Dynalene propylene glycol drums on my smartphone, and visiting it I came across potassium formate solutions usable between -50C and 218C. For concentrating solar this may be an alternative to oil as a heat transfer fluid.

How long before AI will code newer versions of AI. Let the genie out of the box.
Watch the 90s movie "Screamers" about letting weapons automatically design themselves.

I recently bought some old cdrw/dvdrw disks, because the low melting alloy material that stores the data should be more stable than cdr organic dyes. Think of how plastic ages and degrades over decades, vs silver-indium-tellurium-etc. I use the discs to store os and driver reinstall backups through a usb external dvdrw drive. All modern media such as flash drives or portable hard drives is easily writable, and is in danger of being altered every time you insert it into an infected computer. This is not the case with a cd or dvd, even with a rw there are hoops to jump. Rw should beat the r in storage longevity/stability though so that's why I picked that.

I'm uneasy about wire-trusses. You could get z trusses with rigid cross members on 2 of the 3 faces, the ones that go from either angle iron mirror edges toward the center collector tube. Since the focused reflected rays go along this side, all we have to worry about is letting the unreflected incoming parallel rays through. For this we could make a rigid member with near zero shade from flat pieces, such as two 1 inch wide strips facing parallel to each other periodically pillared by say half inch long 1 inch wide flat pieces. The orientation of these pieces should account for the latitude +/-23 degrees if the paraboloid is not tilted, using the most average angle.
For the side between the two angle irons across the mirror you could keep using wires to reinforce in tension, in an x truss way, or even if you skip trussing this side, the other two sides made in a rigid tension-compression z truss plus the two end triangles make quite a sturdy shape.

Where the collector tube casts a shade in the center you could make a z truss long flat piece edgewise, from which to anchor the focus fine tuning adjustment screws. You could also make a few holes here and there to let the rainwater out, if it happens to rain at noon when the mirrors are not tilted to either side.

Also instead of welding the collector tube in place, compression fittings might work well with water and oil, probably not so much with NaK temperatures.

I was thinking how we tend not to use trusses much. You can still see them in high voltage power line posts or some bridge designs, but, for instance windmills and airplanes don't use them much even if they are lightweight, at least not as much as they used to. Even bridges used to use them more.

Another thing. As you scale up the size of the paraboloid dish, say double it, to maintain the same focal accuracy you need to double the size of the collector tube, but that means its volume is going up as the square. Instead of using large tubes, you could use heatsink fins on smaller tubes, to increase the visible area. If the tube rotates with the paraboloid then only 2 fins on each side are enough, but if the tube is stationary and the mirror rotates around it, as the best setup is, then you probably need 3, 4, 5, or 6 fins, whatever is most cost effective.

I just thought of something - if the ribs are straight running from the center of the paraboloid toward the edge, it's easy to just bend the sheet material without much stretching required from the surrounding area, but if you want to imprint figure 8 or ununun, there is a lot of stretching requirement from the material and it may not be able to withstand it. The truss may handle the flexural modulus along the tube length, though it's true that easy flexing in that direction makes the mirror panels easier to pop out from the slots by wind and not as sturdy. Still thinking about this. For one, coke cans undergo a whole lot of stretching.

One way to add ribs to the backside of the mirror is welding strips of metal edgewise, but a better way may be corrugating via a knife-edge or a very astute v-shape to create the same effect, from the mirror material itself. This way you could have a good flexural modulus that holds the paraboloid shape, and the mirror surfaces would be level, with just a very small area missing where the rib indentation happens. The ribs should not be straight running toward the edge, but curved, and one option is indenting figure 8s into the panel but without the lines meeting at the waist, but more like ununun, in an curved 8 shape way.

For the truss a good solution would be having equilateral triangles formed by the collector tubing one vertex, and two other similar tubings running along the edge of the mirrors for the other 2 vertices. The larger the base of a truss the more sturdy it is and this is the largest base you can economically form in the given scenario. For the diagonal segments of the truss, because you don't want to shade too much mirror surface, you would only reinforce in tension with thin stainless wires, which means a z shape truss surface is not enough and it has to be x shaped, kind of like the very first airplanes had wire reinforced trusses for light weight.

For small scale installations you could use angle iron for the beams running along the edge of the mirrors, with slots to flex and snap in the corrugated mirror pieces, which would be flimsy enough even with the back-rib corrugations to flex enough to snap into place. If the center of the mirror is free floating then you could have and adjustment screw pushing or pulling on it to fine-tune the focal point, which you could check with a sheet of paper, knowing the image say 2 inches from the focus has to be 2 inches wide, 3 inches away 3 inch wide or something along these lines. For small scale installations such as backyards you could have the whole thing tilted 30 or 45 degrees, and the total length would be limited by how high you're willing to go on the north end, say 10 feet is manageable with a 10 foot ladder. You could have Home Depot sold cement blocks with threaded rebar sticking up out of them, and 3 legs for the whole installation would be stable even on lawn grass. Now for wind resistance you would want the mirror panels to be flimsy enough to where they pop out right before the wind tips over the contraption, lifting one of the cement blocks. After a big storm you'd find your mirror pieces laying on the ground somewhere.

The problem with small scale installations is that they are small scale, and for meaningful solar power you need to deal with very large areas, something that may not be meaningfully available in most urban backyards. For instance heating a home on average in the US in colder climates like Chicago for a 2000 sq ft home you need a 100,000 Btu/hr furnace, which is equivalent to about 30 kW. Solar irradiation facing the sun nonangled is about 1 kW per square meter, so you would need probably 60 square meters of area to account for all the losses and inefficiencies, which is 6 m x 10 m or about 18 ft x 31 ft, which is a lot of tilted area facing the sun. And this heating would only substitute the gas furnace while the sun is out, not during the night, for which you would need geothermal so double the area again or even more, and the whole thing would not even work on cloudy days, where photovoltaic still outputs about 5% of the full sun power, but parabolic solar thermal would be near zero. Though 30kW of heat converted via a Stirling or steam engine might be able to provide 5-10 kW electric, which is more than decent, and you could send it to the grid, and the whole rig may or may not be cheaper than photovoltaic.

I meditated some more about this today and the dish way works, it would even work with dimples in a flat surface, think of Fresnel mirrors, so the dish way works because a dish can be made to always directly face the sun and receive perpendicular rays, but the parabolic trough does not work mathematically exactly when the solar rays are coming in at an angle, which is how most parabolic troughs operate. In an east west orientation in the morning and evening the angles are very acute. A south north orientation can follow the suns path as the day goes by, but the sun is higher or lower above the horizon as the seasons pass. The Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn are at a latitude of +- 23 degrees, and the sun travels between them as the seasons pass. For the continental US El Paso is 31 degrees latitude, Duluth MN 47 and Chicago near the corn belt at 42. To face the sun perpendicularly for a north south oriented parabolic trough the north end would have to be lifted so the whole thing is at an angle with the horizontal exactly the latitude angle. This is not done, it would be awkward, plus there is the +-23 degree=46 total fluctuation as the seasons pass, so in Chicago at the height of the summer the angle would be 42-23=19 degrees, and in the winter solstice 42+23=65 degrees, to face the sun perpendicular. This is not done and the troughs sit horizontal, level with the ground and the sun rays come in at an angle, and they focus on the collector tube no matter what the angle is as long as the parabola part is vertical against the rays. However if you corrugate and angle some portions of the mirror 30 degrees, then that focal line is not along the collector tube, but along a line intersecting the collector tube at 30 degrees, and perpendicular to the plane of the angled parabola. Now as the sun moves up and down with the seasons the focus of the rays follows these focal lines offset by 30 degrees, and if the deviation is large the reflection be out of focus from the collector tube. There is some wiggle room, as the collector tube is not a pure infinitesimal line but it has width, and this allows rays to be out of focus in front of or behind the actual focal point, near the focal point the rays only diverge so much if the distance is not great. So the math is not exact for a corrugated mirror with paraboloid corrugations when the sun is not coming in perpendicular but shifts position with the seasons. But corrugation can still be worth it, especially if you do only a little bit of corrugation, say a quarter inch deep then have flat paraboloid pieces for say 6 inches, repeat, even if you totally lose the rays from the corrugated part, it's like wasting 5% of the incoming sunrays to gain 200% improvement in flexural modulus or corresponding decrease in material thickness and capital cost. There are of course other ways to gain strength too, corrugation itself consumes extra material, which could be used to reinforce by the way of ribs on the backside. My original idea was to use U shaped snap-in skeletal sheet holders that would guide and bend flat sheets of metal into a paraboloid shape, would be easy to assemble and disassemble in someone's backyard, sit on a 3 legged frame, and would be easy to transport. But the sheet thickness would still have to be significant and pretty sturdy because you can only place the holders so dense, and a flimsy piece of sheet would easily get bent by the wind, or pulled out from the snap in location. A corrugated mirror structure is much more densely reinforcing and would only need a central truss- spine from which the corrugated mirror would branch out sideways. You would still need the holders but not as often, they would only be needed to hold the collector tube at the right distance. By the way I think in a proper setup the collector tube never moves but is welded in place and fixed, and the mirrors adapt and dance around it as needed to focus the rays.

Today I saw a fluorescent tube fixture panel with 4 tube-slots, and it had individual reflector zones, making the mirrored surface look like it had 3 giant corrugations. This gave me the idea of corrugated parabolic trough mirrors that would have better flexural modulus allowing for thinner sheets of metal to be used, which would be important in a 100 mile x 100 mile area of solar that would generate the equivalent of US energy consumption. Aluminum is too weak and the ideal cheap material in my opinion would be aluminum clad carbon steel sheets, aluminum providing the corrosion resistance and mirror surface. You would stretch carbon steel coils into very thin sheets, then pass them through a molten aluminum bath under argon atmosphere, argon constantly leaking out at the inlet and exit ports from the bath, like argon constantly is blown during arc welding, then one side would be mirror polished, the sheet cut into proper sizes for a corrugation mold press and the paraboloid corrugation imprinted, then the whole thing would be anodized for increased wind blown sand resistance and reflectivity.

The corrugation would be like thus: Imagine cutting a parabolic trough into thin slices across its width, you would have say 1 inch wide U shaped paraboloid strips. Now when you tilt them say 30 degrees to the left and the other to the right, they would touch near the center, the bottom of the U and diverge at the edges, at the top of the U. Because of the focal point being in the tilted plane of the parabola, still at the same distance at 30 degrees offset, the parabolic trough tube would have to come in closer by the cosine of 30 degrees which is 1/2*sqrt(3)=0.866 the original distance. To fill the gap between the divergent edges near the top of the U, you would need triangular flat shapes, but with a parabola that has this same focal length so it focuses on the same tube. Same for the gaps between the bottoms of the Us.

While this would improve the flexural modulus toward the width of the parabolic trough, lengthwise, because of the accordion shape it may not be that strong and may need a rigid truss based backbone running along the length.

A similar idea could be applied to concentrator dishes. You would put dimples into the dish that would each have a closer focal length, but you would orient them so that they all focus on the same point. In between the circular dimples that look like the bottom of a coke can, or make the dish look like a golf ball with dimples, in between these dimples you would have undimpled flat spaces with the original focal point, but to avoid having 2 different focal points you could micro dimple these regions with the same curvature as the main dimples, just smaller surface diameter, and then so on, the spaces between the micro dimples with even more nano dimples, like a fractal. This way you would have a dish with much stronger flexural modulus allowing much thinner sheets to be used in its construction.

A google search comes up with corrugated tubes but not corrugated mirrors.