45 Facts About Keith Henson

Howard Keith Henson was born on 1942 and is an American electrical engineer and writer.

In 1975, Keith Henson founded the L5 Society with his then-wife Carolyn Meinel to promote space colonization.

Keith Henson was raised in a military family and he attended seven schools before 7th grade.

Keith Henson graduated from Prescott High School shortly after his father retired, before attending the University of Arizona and receiving a degree in electrical engineering.

Keith Henson programmed geophysical type cases and wrote data reduction programs for the company.

Keith Henson was known at the University of Arizona as one of the founders of the Druid Student Center, where a campus humor newspaper, The Frumious Bandersnatch was published in the late 1960s.

Keith Henson cited an incident while he was a student as a good example of memetic replication.

Keith Henson worked on extremely low distortion quadrature oscillators and nonlinear function modules.

Keith Henson's first patent was a design for a 4-quadrant log-antilog multiplier.

Keith Henson married his first wife, Carolyn Meinel, in 1967 and divorced in 1981.

Keith Henson co-wrote papers for three Space Manufacturing conferences at Princeton.

In 1980, Keith Henson testified before the United States Congress when the L5 Society successfully opposed the Moon Treaty.

Timothy Leary was influenced by Keith Henson's work-and credited him in publications when he referred to Space Migration and Life Extension.

Keith Henson wrote two articles on memes in 1987, one published in Analog and the other, Memes, Meta Memes and Politics, circulated on the internet before being printed.

Richard Dawkins, who created the concept of memes, approvingly cites Keith Henson's coining of the neologism memeoids to refer to "victims who have been taken over by a meme to the extent that their own survival becomes inconsequential" in the second edition of his book The Selfish Gene.

Keith Henson's daughter is the youngest member to sign up to Alcor.

Keith Henson wrote a column for Alcor's magazine, Cryonics, for a few years.

Keith Henson persuaded Timothy Leary to become an Alcor member, though Leary eventually dropped his membership.

In that same year, Keith Henson moved to Silicon Valley to consult for a number of firms and debugged garbage collection software for the last stage of Project Xanadu.

Keith Henson was working for the company that bought the Xanadu license when Scientology lawyer Helena Kobrin tried to destroy the news group alt.

Keith Henson is one of the focal points of the ongoing struggle between the Church of Scientology and its critics, often referred to as Scientology versus the Internet.

Keith Henson entered the Scientology conflict when it was at its most heated in the mid-1990s.

Keith Henson examined these writings, titled New Era Dianetics, and from his examination of these secret documents, said that Scientology was committing medical fraud.

The NOTS procedures, Keith Henson claimed, were a violation of this decision.

The Church of Scientology immediately initiated legal action, but Keith Henson did not retract his claims.

Keith Henson was served with a lawsuit by the church's legal arm, Religious Technology Center.

Keith Henson began protesting Scientology regularly, standing outside Scientology's Gold Base with a picket sign.

Keith Henson was charged with three misdemeanors under California Law: making criminal threats, attempting to make criminal threats, and threatening to interfere with freedom to enjoy a constitutional privilege.

Ken Hoden, the general manager of Golden Era Productions, claimed that Scientology's allegations against Keith Henson had nothing to do with Scientology Fair Game policy, and that no such policy existed.

Keith Henson stated his belief that if he went to prison his life would be placed in jeopardy.

Rather than serve his sentence, Keith Henson chose to enter Canada and apply for political asylum.

Keith Henson lived quietly in Brantford, Ontario for three years while he awaited the decision.

Keith Henson's request was ultimately denied, and in 2005 he was ordered to present himself for deportation and transfer to US authorities.

Keith Henson was prohibited by the trial judge, for example, from arguing that copying documents for the purpose of criticism is fair use.

Keith Henson was held at the Yavapai Detention Center in Prescott, Arizona, awaiting extradition to Riverside County, California.

At the "initial appearance" hearing on February 5,2007, Keith Henson stated through counsel that he was fighting extradition and requested release.

In spite of these distractions, Keith Henson finished a space elevator presentation for a European Space Agency conference.

The extradition hearing for Keith Henson was postponed until May 8,2007 at the request of Keith Henson's attorney and the County attorney.

At his release from jail, Keith Henson was handed paper work from Riverside County, including a warrant from September 15,2000.

At the May 8,2007 hearing, Keith Henson was presented with an arrest warrant and returned to jail.

In 2007, Keith Henson was jailed in Riverside, California for "using threats of force to interfere with another's exercise of civil rights".

From 2007 on, Keith Henson worked independently and with others on the problems of global energy supply and affordable cost, particularly on power satellites for space-based solar power.

Keith Henson was involved in producing videos about thermal power satellites and beamed energy propulsion the latter of which won an award in an international competition.

Keith Henson visited Reaction Engines in the UK twice: in 2012 on the way back from a power satellite presentation in Germany and in 2016 when he gave a two-hour presentation to the engineering department of Reaction Engines.

In early 2015, Keith Henson created the Google group Power Satellite Economics where various concerned citizens and experts from various fields can discuss the complexities and benefits of power satellites and related work.