Richard V. Rupp

September 20, 2022

Good Tuesday morning.

 

Welcome to RUPP'S NOTES/FBI SPECIAL AGENT HARTMANN SERIES post for September 20, 2022. I'm novelist Richard V. Rupp, writing from Burbank, California.

 

My upcoming novel, SKYWARD, seems to be in a constant state of change. I think that I like to drive myself crazy. My decision to add a narrator who appears in her own separate chapters (and is like a book within a book) has put an interesting touch for me in developing the story. Developing Madison Bowman, a human riding on a spacecraft traveling 100s of years from now toward a potential new earth requires a lot of research and deep thought. Her trip is nothing like what we have seen in the STAR TREK series.

 

STAR TREK seems to ignore the zero-gravity problem, which significantly impacts the human body, health, and other things. In SKYWARD, I recognize the problem and have added an artificial gravity workout pod and the artificial gravity sex pod. Yes, it's kind of hard having sex in zero gravity. I discovered several scientific/technical articles that address both of these problems. It is suggested that if humans spend a lot of time in space, they will end up with bird legs and puffy faces due to lost bone mass and muscles. The body's spine will lengthen by about 2 inches due to the lack of gravity. If you cry, tears will be replaced by blobs of liquid on your face. Not a pretty sight. Also, you cannot just walk about but are in a difficult-to-control float. So, I have to figure out or at least use the concept of "writer's license" (deviating from rule, conventional form, logic, or fact to produce a desired effect) to address these problems in SKYWARD.

 

American novelist Vanna Bonta recognized the having sex in space problem and came up with the 2-Suit as a solution. It is a garment designed to facilitate low-effort sex in weightless environments such as outer space or on planets with low gravity. Thank you, Vanna. I'm adding hot-effort sex in the spacecraft sex pods with artificial gravity.

 

I've also determined that sperm and eggs can be frozen indefinitely. You will have to read my novel to see how I use this fact. Or you can probably guess.

 

I started writing SKYWARD because I believe Earth has an expiration date and that we humans were designed to be able to survive beyond it. I was reminded the other night of the expiration date thing in watching a 2016 Ron Howard movie starring Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones titled INFERNO, which was based on American novelist Dan Brown's book by the same name. Clips of Bertrand Zobrist, a dangerously unstable villain, caught my attention. He believes rigorous measures are necessary to reduce the Earth's growing population. Interestingly, he wants to start a plague to reduce the population. The explicit clips include statics that supports my belief (and apparently Ron Howard's) that humans are currently speeding up the Earth's expiration date.

 

The above took my crazy mind to compare humans to cockroaches and rats in their ability to survive no matter what. The cockroach popped up here on Earth 300-350 million years ago. It is estimated that 2.5 trillion of them are running around today even though they are constantly sprayed with pesticides and eaten by rats. Rats sprang up here on Earth 66 million years ago, and there are somewhere around 7 billion of them. They used to be the most populous mammal on Earth. Then we humans joined the cockroaches and rats some 315,000 years ago. Today there are close to 8 billion of us. We have taken over the Earth from pole to pole, increasing by 50 million a year. It's possible cockroaches, and rats are eyeing space, but humans are the only ones designed to go there. So SKYWARD.

 

I think humans were meant to colonize space. It's part of human expansion. And it will generate an educated society with the objective of survival. Maybe humans are the worst pests ever to evolve. Or is there some alien form out there that is more pesty than us?

 

Coming back to Earth, this is from the Introduction to a September 2022 WORLD BANK Report titled IS GLOBAL RECESSION IMMENIANT. It provides a good insight into where the world economy stands today - 

 

"Just two years after the pandemic-induced global recession of 2020, the world economy is again facing difficult challenges. As growth is slowing sharply, fears of an impending global recession are rising. Stagflation pressures are also mounting as inflation reaches new multi-decade highs in many countries. Geopolitical tensions are casting a long shadow over global growth prospects, with the Russian Federation's invasion of Ukraine magnifying pre-existing supply-side challenges and intensifying volatility in commodity markets. Moreover, rising global borrowing costs are heightening the risk of financial stress among the many emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) that over the past decade have accumulated debt at the fastest pace in more than half a century."

 

Then there is this from an NBC News Release –

 

His military is on the retreat, his rivals are increasingly bullish, and even his supporters are voicing rare unease: Russian President Vladimir Putin may be in his weakest position since he launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than 200 days ago. In Washington, Europe, and even Moscow, the question now is what Putin might be planning to regain an initiative that seems to be slipping away from him with every new battlefield update. Could the Kremlin order full military mobilization, press harder in its energy war, or even countenance a drastic move like a tactical nuclear strike? Western officials and military analysts agreed that Putin appears to have few good options available."

 

Will this push the bully too far? Will trying to fix our economy drive our poverty-level citizens and emerging nations further into poverty?

 

Here's what the HOOVER INSTITUTE Fellows are currently working on – "How much trouble is China in? Can America fix our schools post-Covid? How serious are current challenges to the tenets of the Constitution?

 

With all the above in mind -

Take me to the moon,
If you want to.
Take me to the stars,
If you can.
Take me to the moon
As soon as possible
And back again.
Take me to the moon.

 

Lyrics from the song "Take Me to the Moon."

 

Not sure about "And back again."

 

Two shots in the gin and tonic tonight.

 

Cheers,

 

Richard V. Rupp, Author

Website – www.richardvrupp.com

Email – rupprisk@gmail.com

Copyright©2022 by Richard V. Rupp