This is the first in a continuing LaRouche PAC series concerning West Virginia.  The state currently is the second poorest state in the continental U.S. with a poverty rate approaching 18%.  It is also a state where the opioid epidemic struck hard as coal and ancillary manufacturing were shuttered. Dope Inc., this time in the form of Big Pharma, used fake science to exploit the people Purdue Pharma and other death merchants called “pillbillies.” We’ll first examine the various scourges afflicting the state while on a listening tour in which we will offer solutions. 

Donald Trump’s popular and bold vision of returning to manned exploration of the Moon and, from there, voyaging to Mars, implemented as Project Artemis, has so far survived the change of administrations. But the two projects—one which celebrates the human mind and its ability to discover physical and universal truths at the frontiers of science, the other based on a vicious anti-human myth—are hardly capable of co-existence. Hence, my image from the last article of Biden manically shooting rockets into space which are tethered to the earth. So ensconced are the Luddites that Biden/Harris established a brand new position in NASA, that of Senior Climate Advisor. It is led by the fanatical climate modeler, Dr. Gavin Schmidt. Schmidt is also current director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, having occupied that position under Obama while playing a key role in Obama’s radical environmentalist agenda.

A timely excerpt from our 2008 feature documentary, Firewall: In Defense of the Nation State which reveals the devastating—and completely avoidable—catastrophe of both Weimar hyperinflation, and the inevitable hyperinflation the dollar faces if the economy is not put through a top-down reorganization.

Where does profit come from? Did you "invest right" in your mutual fund or bitcoin or did you get lucky at the casino? Or, have you created something which advances society's ability to increase its potential relative population density?  That is what Lyndon LaRouche called "the machine tool principle."

“...The point is, that for any national economy taken as a unified whole, scientific and classical-artistic progress, combined, are the only source of sustainable profit, nothing else. The machine-tool sector illus­trates the role of science in this. For the imperiled economy of the United States, and, of many other nations, today, the lesson told is a desperately urgent one, even if it appears to address only technological progress as such..."
— Machine-tool design: the brains of profit, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. Dec. 7, 1996 

For more on the machine tool principle, see LaRouche's 1997 article, Return to the Machine Tool Principle. 

Some are admitting the physical economic realities of an attempted global transition to "green energy," but will they admit the consequences of those realities, and motivations behind them?

Brian Lantz recently pointed me to a new report from the International Energy Agency, "The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions."  This report shows that a global adherence to the "green energy" objectives being called for by Joe Biden, John Kerry, the Climate Paris Climate Accord, the World Economic Forum, etc. would require mining and production of key minerals at rates far beyond present global capacities (according to the required levels of wind, solar, electric vehicles, and battery storage). 

Mussolini Joe Biden is threatening to unleash a hyperinflationary death spiral for the U.S. economy with his "jobs plan" and other initiatives.  However, the solution to inflation is not to merely stop spending, we have to create actual, physical growth.  The problem is, most Americans (let alone "trained" economists) don't understand the fundamentals of physical economy.  Here is the first in a new LaRouchePAC class series, focusing on the fundamentals of physical economy, but from the most advanced sense.  Pay close attention, the future of your nation depends on this. 

We’re hearing a lot of talk about infrastructure these days. Sure, everyone’s for building and repairing roads, bridges, ports, and modern rail transport. But that is not a solution to the problems we face as a nation. The US has been destroyed as a productive economy over the past 50 years, through deregulation, environmentalism, outsourcing, Wall Street bail outs, etc. The concoction being cooked up by the globalist controllers of the current occupant of the White House has nothing to do with improving our economy, and will actually make it worse. Powering the nation through wind and solar power, as proposed in the Great Reset and the Green New Deal, represents a huge step backward into a far more primitive mode of human existence. The phony debate between pouring resources into make work projects, diversity training programs, the Green New Deal, and other nonsense vs. anti “big government” fiscal conservativism is just that --phony. All their plans will lead to the further destruction of the economy and the living conditions of the people, unless we undertake a real infrastructure building program now.

The way not to make the US once again a manufacturing superpower is the one chosen by all the well-meaning writers in American Compass and American Affairs Journal who propose to rely on special Federal programs to reintroduce advanced semiconductor manufacturing here, or, in the least-worst cases, to introduce “advanced manufacturing” more generally. We do indeed need government action to launch advanced semiconductor manufacture and advanced manufacturing--but it will never work as a boutique project. The reality is that we must mount a Herculean effort, as we did after Sputnik in 1957--and earlier to prepare for World War II--to transform the United States into a “full set” economy which can manufacture anything--because it manufactures everything.

David Brooks’ latest opinion column in the New York Times causes any American knowledgeable about physical economy to pause, cock their head to the side, and ask themselves, “Could this guy possibly be that clueless?”

What's missing in the "infrastructure" debate on all sides is one simple fact: we are living in a doomed financial system, dominated by the policies of the central banks, Wall Street and the City of London. Every policy put forward by JoeBama is in service to a corporatist policy aimed at saving the financial parasite, while keeping the host barely alive.

In preparation for our live Zoom webcast this Thursday (April 8), we're featuring Lyndon LaRouche's 2011 demolition of populist conceptions of make-work infrastructure programs, and his revolutionary notion of economic platforms of development. Simply attacking Biden's boondoggle "jobs' plan and complaining about big government will not make America a manufacturing super power again, we need to think big, with big projects, and a conception of the future we must create. 

Several years ago, in Vancouver, British Columbia, I met a petroleum engineer who was a manager of a Liquid Natural Gas plant. British Columbia having maybe more environmentalists per capita than anywhere else on the globe, I asked him how many people in the BC government and the environmentalist movement believed that lowering the carbon footprint would solve climate change? He said, “I know of no one who does. There may be some who believe in it, but that is rare.”

We are again on Mars. As the pandemic has also made clear, science, and in particular, the principles of physical economy, are the critical activity. The so-called debate over “reshoring” of U.S. manufacturing is already over. We must produce! All of America knows we must secure our supply chains, so that we again can become the leading industrial nation, and a leading exporter to the world. So, too, we will innovate, building a modern, optimistic, outward-looking and exciting nation once again.

Our Republic faces the greatest threat to its existence since the Civil War, and possibly ever. The preservation of our Republic will depend heavily on the emerging political realignment of the United States, in which the producers of the nation rally to rebuild the nation and give our Founding Principles a “new birth of freedom.” It is not only a “Lincoln Revolution,” reflecting what Abraham Lincoln created in 1860; but it must become a Lincoln, Lyndon LaRouche, Donald Trump realignment, because the ideas of each are crucial to its success. 

Trump began with Mexican President AMLO, in the spirit of Lincoln and Juárez, to seal the border from all illicit activity, which mean dismantling the cartels and their Wall Street financiers. At the same time, we need to implement a new system of sovereign nation-based collaboration with our neighbors to the south, and end the free trade looting by globalist corporations. This means, first and foremost, a revival of the American model and the restoration of our nation as a nation of builders and creators, not globalist speculators and liberal drug pushers.

This is adapted from a live presentation, given on Feb. 11, 2021, available here. Just to frame briefly what I am going to be discussing, I will begin with a short quote from Abraham Lincoln: “All creation is a mine and every man a miner.”

We’re going to be discussing the field of physical economy. Physical economy dates back to Gottfried Leibniz, but really has roots that go back to the Renaissance. Today, it is a principle that needs to be rediscovered. In the last 50 to 70 years, there have been people who have understood its conceptions, people like Susan Kokinda’s friend Bill Knudsen, associated with Ford and GM and the wartime mobilization; Henry Kaiser and the aluminum industry; Jesse Jones and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. These were industrialists who collaborated with President Franklin Roosevelt in the war mobilization and beyond. And I think that is a useful starting point: we have to rediscover what they understood, but also take it to another level, which is where Lyndon LaRouche took it, in depth.

The western water crisis has returned with a vengeance over the last three months, shattering "exceptional drought" records for the western states (going back to the formation of the U.S. Drought Monitor in 1999). 20% of the American west has reached the most severe U.S. Drought Monitor level, “exceptional drought,” with 75% in some level of drought, and growing discussion of a “megadrought.”

Lyndon LaRouche organizing students in New York City in 1973.

This is an accompanying piece for: Covid Did Not Shut Down the Economy

As Lyndon LaRouche stated,

“The formalities of the science of physical economy may be described as centered upon refining and scaling the following set of inequalities.

(Thanks to Bill Roberts and Paul Glumaz for their contributions to this report.)

We are not on our knees, thanks to four years of the Trump Presidency.

For all of 2020, during COVID-19, total increases in non-agricultural unemployment in the heartland states averaged around 4.5% overall, while on the west and east coasts, the numbers were roughly half again as high, or in some cases twice as high (New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts), over the course of January through November 2020.

Less than a week into his occupation of the White House, the Avatar President, Joe Biden, has, not surprisingly, launched a head-on assault against the U.S. economy, at the behest of his imperial masters. But unlike during previous, similar wholesale looting attacks and outright robbery of the population, President Trump awakened the U.S. citizenry to their power, and they will not go back to tolerating a less than human condition.

If you want to explore space, and develop the earth fully on a higher infrastructure and living platform suitable for human beings, your feelings about what you have been taught to like or not as an energy source must yield to the actual laws of the universe. As Lyndon LaRouche put it, when it came to this topic: “Anything but the advancement of energy flux density through the means of nuclear technologies is a pollution. The Greenies and environmentalists are the biggest pollutants to the progress of humanity. Zero growth must not be tolerated.” LaRouche was right. Anything that worsens the conditions of life and progress in that direction is a pollution.

How can we restore the promise of “American Exceptionalism” as a continuing, profoundly positive factor in world history? First, you must qualify yourself as a leader. Traditionally, policymaking was a matter of discerning the universal physical and related laws that govern the universe in which we live, with a devotion to the future, and a shared sense of purpose that binds our sovereign republic, as a singular creation of mankind. The General Welfare and Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness are then part and parcel of what it is to be preciously, essentially human.

President Trump has vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and threatens to veto the COVID relief and stimulus bill just passed by Congress. 

More aid for individuals, particularly unemployed and underemployed Americans and small businesses is needed. However, giving every American a check for $600, or $2,000, or $600,000, will not create a recovery. In fact, just handing out money to those the oligarchs deem ultimately unemployable or “non-essential” is a favored scheme of the Davos-aligned oligarchs. And continuing any funding for regime change operations and genocidal wars abroad is a moral abomination.

"We know, speaking broadly on this point, that if a developing nation, for example, is to reach the levels of sustainable population-density obtained in industrialized nations, those developing economies must achieve approximately the per capita energy-throughput of industrialized economies."

— Lyndon LaRouche, A Fifty-Year Development Policy for the Indian-Pacific Oceans Basin, EIR, 1983.

Based on this physical economic reality, in 1983 LaRouche forecast the mass murderous consequences of failing to achieve the energy-flux-density development required for economies globally—unfortunately, LaRouche’s forecast was correct. 

For many in the older generations, Lyndon LaRouche might be most respected for his role in designing and promoting what became the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program. However, most people do not fully appreciate the depth and implications of LaRouche’s SDI program.¹ As much as it was a military defense policy, designed to temporarily eliminate the threat of thermonuclear warfare, it was also designed to ensure the kind of global economic development, for both formerly colonized and industrialized/post-industrial countries, which could create the basis for a durable peace on the planet². 

In a 1983 report Lyndon LaRouche warned: 

“In the coming period, fission sources, increasingly supplemented and later entirely superseded by thermonuclear, must be the leading feature of energy-generation policy. It would not be possible to supply supplies of added energy adequate to approach the requirements of the developing sector, most emphatically, without primary emphasis on unleashing and expanding potentials for fission generation of electricity and process heat today, and proceeding as rapidly as possible toward progress in successively more advanced versions of controlled thermonuclear processes. Without this policy, tens of millions or some multiple of that must die of increased mortality rates, for lack of energy supplies adequate to prevent this.” (Emphasis added.)

 — A Fifty-Year Development Policy for the Indian-Pacific Oceans Basin, EIR, 1983.

Regular followers of the LaRouchePAC website might have seen various references to assessments of the energy or electricity consumption per capita, for either the United States or other nations.  Over recent years, these studies have been carried out with the recognition that energy or electricity consumption per capita is a rough, but useful approximation of the energy flux density of a national economy considered as a self-bounded dynamic system.  In this series of articles, we are taking that approximation a few steps closer to reality by focusing on a deeper understanding of Lyndon LaRouche’s notion of energy flux density. 

The prospects of a re-election of Donald Trump, and a successful defeat of the attempted coup against his presidency, raises the potential for the United States to return to the mission orientation long advocated for by Lyndon LaRouche. The enemy is the British imperial system, including, emphatically, ideological enslavement, as has been increasingly enforced upon the world in the name of globalization (what some call globalism).¹  This present system is responsible for the deaths of countless millions throughout the underdeveloped world, and has left so-called developed countries like the United States in post-industrial ruins. 

What is the alternative? 

Famous Economics Experiment has been Asking the Wrong Question for 60 Years

A recent article caught my attention, "Famous economics experiment reproduced thousands of times" (by Whitney Clavin, California Institute of Technology).

The article, and the study it's based on, call attention to the highly problematic nature of popular discussions of economic theory in the United States today. Rather than endless discussion about supply and demand and free markets, it would be far more useful to study the vast global economic benefits of a Moon-Mars colonization program. To do this competently, the axiomatic problems of modern economic thought need to be highlighted, removed, and replaced.

The article in question opens,

We should then recognize that the development of basic economic infrastructure had always been a needed creation of what is required as an ‘habitable’ development of a ‘synthetic,’ rather than a presumably ‘natural’ environment for the enhancement, or even the possibility of human life and practice at some time in the existence of our human species.… Man as a creator in the likeness of the great Creator, is expressed by humanity's creation of the ‘artificial environments’ we sometimes call ‘infrastructure,’ on which both the progress, and even the merely continued existence of civilized society depends.

- Lyndon LaRouche, “What Your Accountant Never Understood: The Secret Economy,” April 17, 2010.

In 1998, Lyndon LaRouche presented a speech, “How the Top 1% of Americans Think.” Not the top 1% who are rich, but Americans who decided to think their way through an international financial collapse and the spread of deadly viruses. He outlined how we got to our present rotten state in real economy and healthcare. He said we had to become angels and go to war against the intellectual and moral stupidity which put us in this crisis. How do you think about reconstructing the real economy after the tremendous hit it is going to take? That challenge is what LaRouche answers in this presentation.

The full transcript of his remarks can be found here.

Even though opposition to nuclear power has been central to the zero-growth Malthusian movement since the late-1960s, the man-made climate change catastrophe propaganda campaign has increasingly driven some to place a growing emphasis on nuclear fission and fusion power as the basis of a CO₂ emissions reduction policy. 

Any attempt to mandate a CO₂ reduction policy—even while supporting nuclear power technologies critical to mankind’s future—is a horrific policy, and would condemn hundreds of millions of people to unnecessary suffering and premature death.

From California to Colorado, from North Dakota to Texas, the Western United States is being ravaged by what some are calling possibly the worst drought in the modern era. Reducing water use and attempting to recycle limited supplies will not work.

President Trump and statesman & economist Lyndon LaRouche have placed a challenge before all of us. Just as President Kennedy mobilized the Apollo Moonshot, “to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”

In 1988, when Lyndon LaRouche proposed a 40 year project to build a science city on Mars, the imperial minions and stuck-in-the-mud pundits attempted to use the proposal as the basis for their ultimate derision: “Why he’s so crazy, he even wants to build a city on Mars!”

Donald Trump’s popular and bold vision of returning to manned exploration of the Moon and, from there, voyaging to Mars, implemented as Project Artemis, has so far survived the change of administrations. But the two projects—one which celebrates the human mind and its ability to discover physical and universal truths at the frontiers of science, the other based on a vicious anti-human myth—are hardly capable of co-existence. Hence, my image from the last article of Biden manically shooting rockets into space which are tethered to the earth. So ensconced are the Luddites that Biden/Harris established a brand new position in NASA, that of Senior Climate Advisor. It is led by the fanatical climate modeler, Dr. Gavin Schmidt. Schmidt is also current director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, having occupied that position under Obama while playing a key role in Obama’s radical environmentalist agenda.

As inflation surges—in basic commodities, used cars, home prices, etc., the response coming from inside the Beltway is doomed to fail. Monetarist tools, whether it be government spending or adjusting money supply and interest rates, miss the twin elephants in the room: an out-of-control speculative bubble, reignited since the 2008 crash, and the collapse of real physical production, fueled by the pandemic shutdowns and green policies. 

Join My-Hoa Steger as we dive into an investigation of the mind of J.S. Bach, specifically through one of his fugues from his breakthrough Well-Tempered Klavier, to give you a glimpse into one of the greatest and most passionate geniuses that ever lived. We can make America great by coming to know the minds of the geniuses that came before us. Whether it be J.S. Bach, Johannes Kepler, Abraham Lincoln, or Lyndon LaRouche—humanity is happier and more powerful for the gift of these minds.

With Ingenuity and Perseverance we can overcome all obstacles and reach new heights of discovery. Now 117 years after the Wright brothers succeeded in making the first powered flight on Earth, this week the Ingenuity Mars helicopter became the first to achieve powered flight on Mars. The airfield on Mars that Ingenuity launched its autonomous flight from has been named the Wright brothers field, "named in recognition of the ingenuity and innovation that continues to propel exploration." (Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator, NASA Science Mission Directorate)

It is widely recognized that America’s future depends on an increasing emphasis on scientific and technological development. While this requires a broad-based emphasis on science education at all levels, we must go deeper than the popular notion of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). Science education must focus on developing the power of the mind to dig deeper into the causal principles of physics, life and mind. In his writings on education, Lyndon LaRouche set forth a program for this by guiding the students, from the youngest age, in the reconstruction of the seminal conceptual breakthroughs in science from ancient Greeks, to the Renaissance and then to the frontier discoveries and unsolved scientific problems of today. Put down the roots and the STEM will grow! 

Joe Biden has nominated former Senator Bill Nelson to replace Jim Bridenstine as NASA Administrator. This appointment is mission critical for our country; it should be scrutinized by patriots with that in mind.  At 78 years old, Nelson has decades of experience working with NASA, while Bridenstine was the youngest administrator ever to lead our space program.  

We’re being told to “follow the science” on Covid, but the orders from Tony Fauci and other authorities change one hundred eighty degrees from one day to the next. What is science? Do our citizens know what it is? Our schools teach them that science is nothing but a sackful of mathematical formulas, plus the new “Green” religion of “Climate Change.” Is that true?

We are again on Mars. As the pandemic has also made clear, science, and in particular, the principles of physical economy, are the critical activity. The so-called debate over “reshoring” of U.S. manufacturing is already over. We must produce! All of America knows we must secure our supply chains, so that we again can become the leading industrial nation, and a leading exporter to the world. So, too, we will innovate, building a modern, optimistic, outward-looking and exciting nation once again.

The sun and the wind—certain gifts of God and nature—have been “weaponized” as solar and wind “farms” and turned against humanity, God’s highest creation on earth. The loaded term, “renewables,” is used to the same end. In this article we concentrate on the importance of nuclear energy, not on the modern-day solar and wind energy hoax. However, solar and wind energy, financed by the highest levels of the oligarchy’s financial houses and banks, is a weapon of choice to destroy sane, reasonable modes of energy production and collapse the power grids of the advanced sector nations. The United States, as the leading republic and continental in scope, is the target in particular.

38 years ago today, President Ronald Reagan shocked the U.S., European, and Soviet establishments by announcing a policy Lyndon LaRouche had been developing and promoting for years, a crash program to develop beam defense systems capable of defeating nuclear missiles—what Reagan called the Strategic Defense Initiative. In later years, LaRouche, Russian leaders and others proposed that the same technologies could be used to defend our planet from asteroids and other objects, calling it the Strategic Defense of Earth. That mission, coupled with the economic spin-offs flowing from such scientific and technological breakthroughs, makes this policy just as important today, as it was in 1983.

As we get the political power to do it, we’re going to revolutionize all of education in the United States, beginning with K-12 education. Once we work out some of the kinks, we’ll be able, using Lyndon LaRouche’s methods, to graduate students from the 12th grade who have a much better education, all around the spectrum, than four-year college graduates get today.  Not simply quantitatively better, but qualitatively superior, “in a whole different league.”

The western water crisis has returned with a vengeance over the last three months, shattering "exceptional drought" records for the western states (going back to the formation of the U.S. Drought Monitor in 1999). 20% of the American west has reached the most severe U.S. Drought Monitor level, “exceptional drought,” with 75% in some level of drought, and growing discussion of a “megadrought.”

Even the China CDC disagrees with the World Health Organization (WHO) investigative team’s leading hypothesis that the Wuhan wet market remains the most likely origins of the COVID pandemic. A team of Chinese scientists in a paper published in the January 24, 2020 British medical journal The Lancet concluded that the wet market was not the source.

NASA's Perseverance Rover has successfully landed on Mars! 

If you want to see what the future will be like under the Great Reset pushed by Biden and the Davos elite, just look at what’s happening in Texas right now. As a strong winter storm brings below freezing temperatures, with snow and ice over most of the state, there are massive electrical shortages causing untold hardship and death. More than 4 million people are out of electricity and several deaths have already been blamed on the shortages. The state’s cattle, dairy, and poultry farmers face a growing disaster the longer power is out.

Less than a week into his occupation of the White House, the Avatar President, Joe Biden, has, not surprisingly, launched a head-on assault against the U.S. economy, at the behest of his imperial masters. But unlike during previous, similar wholesale looting attacks and outright robbery of the population, President Trump awakened the U.S. citizenry to their power, and they will not go back to tolerating a less than human condition.

If you want to explore space, and develop the earth fully on a higher infrastructure and living platform suitable for human beings, your feelings about what you have been taught to like or not as an energy source must yield to the actual laws of the universe. As Lyndon LaRouche put it, when it came to this topic: “Anything but the advancement of energy flux density through the means of nuclear technologies is a pollution. The Greenies and environmentalists are the biggest pollutants to the progress of humanity. Zero growth must not be tolerated.” LaRouche was right. Anything that worsens the conditions of life and progress in that direction is a pollution.

Ben Deniston is the featured guest on this week's West Coast meeting. Here are his opening remarks.

As a result of the groundwork laid by the first Trump Administration, Idaho National Laboratory (INL) will soon be the site of the first American small modular nuclear reactor module, developed by NuScale Power, as the Joint Use Modular Plant (JUMP). This first module will be dedicated to nuclear research. In October, after NuScale’s small modular reactor (SMR) was the first to receive design approval from the Nuclear Energy Regulatory Commission earlier this year, the Trump Administration’s Department of Energy authorized a $1.4 billion grant to help defray costs for a group of small utilities that will be first in line to buy power from a scaled up, commercial NuScale power plant.

The prospects of a re-election of Donald Trump, and a successful defeat of the attempted coup against his presidency, raises the potential for the United States to return to the mission orientation long advocated for by Lyndon LaRouche. The enemy is the British imperial system, including, emphatically, ideological enslavement, as has been increasingly enforced upon the world in the name of globalization (what some call globalism).¹  This present system is responsible for the deaths of countless millions throughout the underdeveloped world, and has left so-called developed countries like the United States in post-industrial ruins. 

What is the alternative? 

Over a long and productive life, Lyndon LaRouche, Jr. provided a myriad of inter-related original contributions to science, art, and philosophy, all flowing from his central discovery in, what he emphasized, was the over-arching field of the science of physical economy (LaRouche, paraphrasing Carl Gauss, called his science of physical economy the “king of the sciences”). Current and future specialists in these fields, as well the rarer renaissance polymath, will, undoubtedly, bring forth new and unexpected discoveries from the implications of these contributions, especially as mankind extends his economic reach beyond the Earth.

Some have called it cosmoclimatology.  Following pioneering work done by Henrik Svensmark, Nir Shaviv showed that changes in the galactic environment experienced by our Solar System have been the largest drivers of climate change on Earth over the past half billion years—mediated through the role of galactic cosmic radiation in cloud formation.

In 2014 Lyndon LaRouche outlined a new conceptual insight into the development of modern science over the past millennium, identifying two multi-personality, multi-generational processes of scientific revolution: one, successful, and, a second, still wanting completion.[1]  Within LaRouche’s circles, these came to be referred to as the “two triads” of scientific revolution—each consisting of an investigation of (1) a minimum expression, (2) a maximum expression, and (3) a unifying resolution. 

This wasn’t presented as a history lesson.

Our Galaxy presents mankind with a new scientific frontier, expressed in different ways. In astronomical terms, it is not clear how the galaxy exists and operates as a single, unified system. In terms of the Earth's history, we see records of dramatic climate changes, variations in geophysical activity, and even fluctuations in the evolutionary process of life all corresponding to the changing relationship of our Solar System with the Galaxy. While these are often presented as independent studies, the 2015 Basement research report “Towards a Galactic Science Driver” examines these as aspects of a single challenge: the quest to understand the unifying principle of our Galaxy, as Kepler had discovered the unifying principle of our Solar System.

In a continuation of this effort, here we will examine what we know (and what we don't know) about the motion of our Solar System through the Galaxy. This will be addressed in a series of posts.