Dwapara Yuga: Ioncraft

The ioncraft, popularly know as a lifter, is able to lift itself in the air with no moving parts, exploiting an obscure electrical phenomenon for propulsion.

This is just the kind of innovation we would expect to see in Dwapara Yuga, beyond primitive jet and prop engines that have been known for decades.

The lifter is an Internet staple, typically explained as 'anti gravity' and proposed by some as the mechanism of UFOs.

The popular American TV show Mythbusters debunked the anti gravity claim but did verify the lift phenomenon.

To the author, the most interesting aspect of lifters is that home experimenters such as Tim Ventura so raised the profile of this kind of propulsion that is was taken up by NASA! Just such garage entrepreneurs gave us GE, Ford, HP and Apple in the past.

Just as for Philo Farnsworth, the inventory of the television, it continues to be the case that armies of financiers and full-time engineers are not necessarily in the best position to make discoveries, or even to realize what discoveries are already out there that have been neglected.

Rather than mocking unexplained phenomena of all kinds, it would actually be smarter to investigate them rather than doing what most companies and research institutes do, which is bringing out slightly better versions of what is already known and neglecting areas of potential breakthrough. Such an attitude is not simply a lack of imagination but a lack of knowledge of the history of innovation.

In the high stakes of wartime, there is not the luxury of endless refinements, rather breakthroughs are the difference between life and death. Nuclear power, computing, spaceflight, stealth technology and the like are not modern rather themselves refinements of breakthroughs by key individuals in WWII, most prominently in Britain as the last bastion of free Europe at the beginning of the war and in the tail end, as the Germans looked for 'wonder weapons' as they were about to be overrun by the Russians.

In ascending dwapara yuga, the very age demands finer and finer knowledge of energy and the conquest of space in the physical sense and also more subtly in the breakdown of barriers of ignorant hierarchies based on wealth, politics, place of origin, ethnicity or lack thereof, nationality, race, religion, sex and so on. As always, those reactionaries most benefitting from such structures work to prevent change of any kind.

The Internet, more so than the invention of the printing press, makes knowledge and communication available to even the humblest of individuals, leveling the playing field whether with oppressive clerics, politicians or simply the inertia of academics and big business, cashing in year after year on old models sold as new with new names, logos and colors, rather like Hollywood remakes for each new generation.