Right now the alternative-science movement is in a better position to shape
the future of mankind than any other community on Earth. It can do this
through providing a clear, unified vision of the future that offers
innovative solutions to technical problems in energy, propulsion, healing,
and general physics that have been thus far intractable to the mainstream
scientific establishment.

For the first time in history, alt-science has build solid, supportive
relationships with mainstream academia, government, and military concerns
based on mutual need and the realization that no single group can solve
these challenges by itself. The establishment has failed miserably at
offering 21st century solutions to the world's problems, and a transition is
ready to occur in which alt-science becomes accepted into the establishment
to help change and revitalize it from the inside.

If this positive, optimistic thinking is news to you, it's because the
transition hasn't happened yet, and it probably won't. The reason is simple,
and has nothing to do with conspiracies or big brother. Quite simply, the
once-supportive efforts in the alt-science environment have fragmented into
a hundred competing interests too busy with infighting and politics to
actually work together for community-based activism.

We are additionally haunted by another problem which threatens to overwhelm
our best efforts: despite the incredible innovation emerging from the
alt-science environment, the hard truth is that this community has never
toned down it's rhetoric to actually participate as a new part of the
mainstream establishment. Furthermore, the rhetoric of conspiracies,
alien-abductions, and crop-circles are outdated themes that belong in the
last century, and play stale to a 21st century public trying to solve the
immediate challenges in today's environment. In a world haunted by wars over
oil, economic hardship and global terrorism, nobody cares about cattle
mutilations in Montana, and fanatical statements about the government
causing this to happen because of underground alien bases is, in short,
insane.

It's likely that the major themes driving the alt-science community
originated in the cold-war mentality that dominated the 20th century - they
arose from the fear & uncertainty of living in a world split in half and
perpetually threatened by a policy of Mutually Assured Destruction that
could begin unannounced at any time. Further, these stories were compounded
by massive government investment in secret military technologies, and
imaginative speculation on what these technologies might be within the
community itself. Nearly two decades after the end of the cold war, and a
decade after the start of the internet revolution, things have changed, and
alt-science hasn't remade itself to stay relevant in a world that's very
different today than it was yesterday.

Today's public is smarter, more globally-aware, and far more technically
savvy than they were 20 years ago. They have access to far more information
on science & technology, and spend more of their household income in it. The
public is not only generally aware of the direction that technology is
going, they're also more aware of the true limits of contemporary
technology, and have a better understanding of the terminology used in
describing complex scientific & technical terms. As such, alternative
science needs to remold it's image to speak in terms that are acceptable to
the general public based as closely as possible to concepts within
mainstream science. Otherwise, the public will continue to interpret alt-sci
as being "fringe crackpots wearing tinfoil hats".

American Antigravity's past success has come from working not in
mainstream-science, nor fully in alternative-science, but essentially from
finding a bridge between the two worlds to allow visionaries to communicate
ideas "across the fence", and hopefully provide robust solutions to
challenges in energy & aerospace as a result. We've been far more successful
than our contemporaries in terms of mainstream acceptance, and thus what we
publish is typically accepted more easily and given the due diligence it
deserves, in comparison to more traditional alt-science material that gets
ignored because of the language, wording, presentation that it's delivered
with.

Fragmentation in the alt-science community began in the late 1990's with a
rapid transition from a conference-based community model to one based around
online information & community resources. While sharing information online
is a vastly more efficient tool for educating the public than conferences
are, it nonetheless lacks the solid business-model based on conference fees
and vendor exhibits that the earlier model had. This is further complicated
by a similar transition from the "indy-newsletter" as a means of
communication to the use of online newsgroups, which again don't provide a
sustainable revenue model. Thus, fragmentation occurred as various interests
flocked from an established model to a non-sustainable one with a low cost
of entry, leading to thousands of small, poorly designed websites that do
more harm than good for the alt-science community.

With the exception of having no financing, the alt-science community
experienced the dot-com boom in exactly the same way that other online
businesses did: a series of small, initial efforts gave way to a period of
market consolidation, followed by the emergence of a few large business
entities with more sustainable models. However, as none of the models in
alt-science have thus far proved sustainable, a period of soul-searching and
general desperation has set it as the larger entities struggle to retain
their role as the last bastions of public interaction within this community.
This has led to infighting and the general collapse of the community itself,
as illustrated by the following examples:

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1. NEWSGROUPS: Because of Yahoo!'s dominance as a major online web-portal in
the 1990's, the vast majority of alt-science discussion took place in a
series of newsgroups. The newsgroup peak occurred around 2002 or 2003, where
in the realm of antigravity by itself a series of 5 or 10 major discussion
forums had enrollment of nearly 100,000 users. Since that period, Yahoo!
newsgroups have declined by an order of magnitude, with enrollment in 2006
reaching only tens of thousands or less. The newsgroups are no longer major
forums filled with practical discussion of new ideas, inventions, and
concepts in alt-sci - they are now dominated by a few holdover
"power-posters" pushing socio-political agendas, further pushing enrollment
to record low levels.

2. COAST TO COAST AM: After a record-breaking streak of community-building
during the 1990's, Coast to Coast AM was sold to a major radio network,
followed immediately by the departure of show-host Art Bell. The show
immediately lost 90% of it's audience, and as a response, the new management
company prompted show host George Noory to focus on less technical topics in
an effort to recapture lost ratings by engaging a larger female demographic
to boost ratings. This well-intentioned idea backfired by driving away the
remaining "hangers-on" waiting for Art to return, and despite Noory's
efforts to at least rebuild the audience to semi-sustainable efforts, Coast
to Coast AM is no longer in a leadership position as a major community
resource pushing alt-science ideas, concepts, and visionaries. As point of
fact, the new format actively discourages this, as innovators like John
Hutchison are black-listed from the show due to complaints from the "new,
non-technical" audience, and long-term guests like Richard C. Hoagland are
stereotyped into roles that greatly limit their ability to make a positive
impact to the alt-science community. In any event, Coast to Coast AM has
gone from #3 on the Arbitron ratings list of top talk-radio shows to the #10
position in 2004, indicating that regardless of focus or intent, the show is
not in nearly the position that it once was to contribute anything to
alt-science.

3. INFINITE-ENERGY MAGAZINE: In addition to publishing a true scientific
journal detailing ongoing research in Cold-Fusion and Low-Energy Nuclear
Reactions, founder Gene Mallove worked diligently as a community-spokesman
for alternative science, and contributed greatly to building a sense of
participation and community in an otherwise fragmented community. Even
before his murder in 2004, Mallove cited concerns about public interest
waning in LENR due to the time elapsed since that topic had received it's
initial surge of mainstream public interest from Pons & Fleischmann in the
early 1990's. While editor Christy Frazier admirably struggles to keep the
magazine alive, many have speculated that Infinite Energy's days are
numbered.

4. NEW ENERGY TECHNOLOGIES: Created by innovator Alex Frolov, New Energy
Technologies Magazine served as a central resource for alt-science activism
in Russia, and promoted a globalist-view of innovations that exceeded former
national rivalries. During it's heyday, the magazine was quite spectacular
in featuring innovations previously unseen in the west, and doing it in a
solid, rigorous format that exceeded expectations to serve as a truly
international journal for alternative science. NET Magazine made a very
large impact, but never achieved a large audience - at best selling only
around 2,000 copies a month. Thus, the magazine itself was financially
supported by philanthropist Christopher Bremner, and when we was no longer
able to provide fincial support, the magazine was forced to cease operations
in 2005.

5. OPEN-SOURCE ENERGY NETWORK: Founded by dot-com media guru Matthew Carson,
the Open Source Energy Network was an online multimedia project hoping to
provide a full range of media delivery and content-management system driven
resources for the alt-science community. While officially OSEN is still in
existence, the project has shown no movement since early 2006, and
widespread speculation supports the notion that Matthew Carson and the OSEN
team found a general attitude of apathy in the alt-science community that
undermined their efforts to make a positive impact. Certainly after spending
several hundred thousand dollars on the CMS system, they must have been
surprised when less than a handful of innovators actually migrated their own
poorly-constructed sites onto the slick, well-run OSEN platform. The belief
is that inventors were concerned about losing either their individuality or
"potential" ability to generate income with their own sites if they
migrated, thus limiting OSEN's ability to acquire content effectively. Thus,
this project is believed to be effectively over.

6. AMERICAN ANTIGRAVITY: Founded in 2002 by Tim Ventura, American
Antigravity achieved immediate media success by showcasing "Lifter
technology" on a variety of national and international television networks.
This led to the establishment of a strong traffic base to that later served
as the basis for a news-bureau focused on emerging & breakthrough
technologies (primarily aerospace), by Tim Ventura. While American
Antigravity eventually lost much of the initial audience as the novelty of
Lifters began to wear off, it eventually rebuilt the audience to 2 million
visitors a year by serving as a primary resource for multimedia content on a
variety of technology concepts. However, as an open-source non-profit,
American Antigravity's primary limitation was the ability to effectively
derive sustainable income from the content that it generated and delivered.

7. TESLATECH: Founded by former International Tesla Society organizer Steve
Elswick, the TeslaTech Conference has suffered from a loss of audience as
interest shifts from expensive conference-settings into less expensive
online media format based on web-centric multimedia tools. During the
1990's, TeslaTech reportedly had thousands of attendees, and was thus able
to support a high-budget conference capable of bringing together diverse
interests from a variety of sources into a single community forum. Since
that time, despite the gallant efforts of Elswick to support a positive
community forum, the conference has encountered severe hardship as its
audience continues to contract. While Elswick optimistically declared that
the 2006 conference was better than 2005's, the concern still exists that
this community resource is having difficult facing general community apathy
in the new century.

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The examples above are indicative of the state of alt-science, and obviously
not a total summary of all the organizations attempting to promote this
research online. The simple truth is that public interest, in-general, is
subsiding, as shown by trend-analysis from a widespread pool of online
venues that I have access to statistics for. As this community contracts,
it's boundaries will continue to fragment across the traditional fault-lines
until the public's perspective of alt-science as being "a million isolated
kooks" once again becomes the reality.



Sincerely;

Timothy M. Ventura
American Antigravity, Inc
http://www.americanantigravity.com <http://www.americanantigravity.com/>
Phone: 425-605-0928
Mobile: 425-260-4175
tventura6@...



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