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IGMASS: Towards International Collaboration in the Defense of Mankind
24 September 2012
Conference Report by Benjamin Deniston, Pavel Penev, and Jason Ross Currently, mankind lives on only one planet. We are all subject to similar threats: threats that do not distinguish between nations, religions, political parties or social classes. Irregular solar activity, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, asteroid and comet impacts — these events don’t contemplate national boundaries before they strike. So why should we, when we are defending ourselves from them. This was the issue underlying a high-level scientific conference, Space and Global Security of Humanity, held in Yevpatoria, Ukraine, from September 3-6, 2012, bringing together scientists from largely Russia and Ukraine, with attendees from Kazakhstan, Belarus, Germany, and Canada, as well. The only United States participation came from two representatives of the LaRouche Policy Institute, Benjamin Deniston and Jason Ross, who presented the leading political, economic and scientific work of Lyndon LaRouche’s movement in the United States. The conference itself was sponsored by a number of large Russian, Ukrainian and international organizations, [1] but centered around the activity of the International Global Monitoring Aerospace Systems organization, IGMASS. Although the IGMASS proposal has existed for a few years, this particular conference came in the context of Russia’s Strategic Defence of Earth (SDE) offer fall of 2011, a proposal for direct collaboration between the United States and Russia on both missile defence systems and defending the entire Earth from the threats posed by future asteroid and comet impacts. [2] Seeing this particular SDE proposal as an upgraded re-offer of his original Strategic Defence Initiative program (SDI), Lyndon LaRouche and his associates have very publicly and forcefully supported, most recently in the just-released mass-distribution 68-page report, The Strategic Defence of Earth. [3] IGMASS itself is a proposed “system of systems,” an organization that would integrate various existing, and potentially new, satellite, air, and ground-based monitoring systems from nations all around the world, to provide a unified real-time capability to monitor the entire planet and the surrounding regions of space for a broad range of threats to life on Earth. The idea of integrating and sharing the information from satellite and other observational systems is not unique, with various, somewhat parallel ideas moving forward at the United Nations and through other associations. While IGMASS will tap into these other systems, creating a centralized system of systems, it also sets itself apart from most others by focusing on the signals appearing prior to a disaster, the precursors of both manmade and natural disasters, and using these precursors for the purpose of forecasting disasters before they strike. To continue Click here [1] The State Space Agency of Ukraine, the Space Research Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and National Space Agency of Ukraine, the International Academy of Astronautics, the Russian Academy of Cosmonautics, the International "Znanie” (Knowledge) Association, and the company Russian Space Systems. [2] See “As World War Threatens, Russia Proposes SDE,” http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2011/3846russia_sde.html |
