• My life in brief (3 paragraphs)
• Most important issues in this generation (3 issues)
• My businesses
• Details on my life and stories of my most interesting experiences, including personal pictures
• Links to selected other sites

Last updated: 10 January 1999
Quickly reviewed 7 April 2007 - this page is very outdated ...

My Life in Brief

In brief, I was born in the USA (Little Rock, Arkansas) in 1959 and grew up in the borderline countryside, in the then-pristine foothills of the Ouachita Mountains around the western border of Little Rock ... As a legal adult I meandered around my state's main university until finally formalizing a B.Sc. in physics with lots of classes outside the curriculum that counted ... Left for Washington DC where I worked briefly for the US Patent Office and then for advanced planning in the Pentagon's space program ... Opted out of the 8-to-5 routine at the ripe old age of 27 to become a freelance computer consultant doing communications, PC software and PC hardware ... Set up one of the first private public-access Internet service providers in the Washington DC area (many lines coming into my home) ... Wrote on philosophy with my free time (occasionally taking breaks by getting back in touch with the world by making money) ... Pushed the empowerment of the individual by decentralized Internet communications (down with the centralized power of paper-press journalists on the leash of their valuable and manipulative "intelligence" informants) ... And when the web finally arose as a powerful world medium I felt lucky at the opportunity to make the most of the decentralization of power in my generation and, well, took a break to diversify new ventures which I hope will take a life of their own, with good will.

In 1994 I settled down on the other side of the planet from Washington, D.C., exactly 12 time zones different. Where? Where else -- Thailand, the only country in southern Asia never colonized by a western power, a Buddhist place, and one of the most laid back and civil civilizations on the planet. Very safe, beautiful and refreshingly different in a root natural way ... while its culture lasts.. (Don't get me wrong, I believe in most American values far more than in most but not all alternative values. But I wanted to get far away from Washington, and by serendipity via a State Dept. related situation I got an opportunity to go to Bangkok, the city of the Asia Regional Office of the US govt. After 4 months of things and consulting, I decided to stay here on my own and headed out solo into pure Thai culture, Internet linked but way out physically.)

In 1995-97, I consulted to the engineering and construction industry in Thailand, mainly in project management communications, I.T., and occasionally other things like electrical troubleshooting. This pretty much ended with the 1997 Asia economic crash, which started in the Thailand property development sector. In my spare time in 1998, I finished and self-published a book (see "PERMANENT" below).

Things didn't take off with PERMANENT, and with the Thai economy depressed after the crash, my money eventually ran out in 1999. However, I made some changes in my life, and reinvented myself in new areas of business. With my partners Wanida and Sam, I have set up a couple of companies and we have successfully grown them and are doing OK. This is a long story for another day. I hope to get some time to write up the 1999 to 2007 part of my life.

I now have two daughters. My first marriage did not work out, but my current wife, Wanida, a journalist turned businessperson, has been very important in both my business and personal success in Thailand.

I have travelled quite a bit around Asia from 1994-2007.

Actually, I live on the Internet.

Most Important Issues in Life

PERMANENT - the main project in my life. Commercial (private sector) space development using materials already in space, including colonization self-sufficiently. PERMANENT is an acronym for Projects to Employ Resources of the Moon and Asteroids Near Earth in the Near Term. I also have self-published a book titled PERMANENT, as offered on the home page. It is my goal in life to help lead our species and life from Earth off of our planet, privately, sustainably, and self-sufficiently, in our key generation. This is something I vow repeatedly not to fumble the ball over, and to implement to success with my life.

Cryonics - a brief page on freezing your body when you die so that future technology can bring you back to life in a future world, including my own commentary regarding the way these services are marketed vs. what I think will be the reality of the future -- we will become memory museums on a future bio-Internet. Preserve the intangible experiences of history -- have your brain frozen when you die! As a second priority to #1 above, I'd like to facilitate the freezing of brains of people from diverse cultures, especially those which have been relatively isolated and native.

Environmental preservation is another issue that's critically important in our generation, such as preservation of the rain forests, saving wolves, elephants tigers, whales, and other unique, valuable and beautiful forms of life. There is no other planet like Earth, and we are destroying most of the species which evolved over millions of years ... in just a few generations. Of course, we will eventually destroy ourselves and potentially the Earth's environment by biotechnology and/or nanotechnology. Hopefully, if we destroy ourselves by biotech, we won't decimate the environment, too, so that another advanced technological species may evolve on this planet sometime in the next hundred million years or so. If we are to survive as a species, and preserve life from Earth, then we will need to have space colonies stocked with animals and plants, item #1 above, and real soon now.

As an American based in Thailand, I co-founded and manage the company Export Quality Services Co., Ltd., as well as Serena Property Co., Ltd. (named after my daughter).

Details on my life and stories of my most interesting experiences

A lot of information was lost when I moved this website between servers. I wrote all this up thru 1999, except for a few updates today (April 7, 2007) mainly in regard to my second daughter, Selene, born in the year 2000 (see below).

A picture of me at ..., a business social around 1996.

What Our Names Mean

My last name is Prado. You probably heard of the Toyota Prado land cruiser. Prado is a Spanish name. When I was young, a Spanish friend told me that "a prado" is a ranch of lush vegetation continuously fed by springs from mountains or hills, prime real estate in the old days. Another strained to think, and told me it was like a meadow. Well, in 1998, I finally got to see for myself. I travelled to Taos, New Mexico, the oldest capital city in the United States, an outpost established by the Spanish in the early 1500's, though after Indian attacks the main outpost retreated to Santa Fe. Anyway, just a mile or two down the road from Taos is another old town called El Prado. Yes, there it was, a prado, a ranch town fed by bordering mountains with snow-capped tops in the month of May. Click here for a view of the beautiful cowboy town of El Prado, New Mexico, USA.

My first name is Mark, which comes from the Roman god of war, Mars. (Too bad it didn't mean asteroid or moon). My middle name, Evan, is a shortened form of Evangel. While my father's side of the family immigrated from Spain, my mother's side is a combination of English and French, with last names of King, Langford, Avery ... and Falwell. The latter had moved south from Lynchburg, Virginia. Someone told me that Jerry Falwell may be a distant cousin, which would be remarkable since I disagree with so much of what he preaches (and attacks), the outdated primitive dogma. I'd say, "sorry but my karma ran over your dogma". Anyway, perhaps Evan is fitting in that sense.

My two daughters were born in Thailand so they got a Thai first name and foreign middle name. My first daughter's first & middle name is Aiya Angela, born in 1996, and my second daugher's first & middle name is Selene Serena, born in 2000. Obviously, Angela comes from "Angel", and the Thai name Aiya is the translated name for Angel. Selene is a Thai name as well as a western name, and Selene is Goddess of the Moon in Greek mythology. I think she will own part of the moon at some time in her life. I already named my second company after her, Serena Property Co., Ltd.

The country England and the language English also come from the word Angel, in turn from the Anglo-Saxon heritage. Here's how that happened:

English is actually a new written language, compared to others around the world. The oldest written English comes from around the 7th century A.D., and is mostly imported Roman alphabetic letters applied to the sounds of the language spoken in England. Back then, the people who inhabit what is now England were considered primitive by the people from the Mediterranean. They were often brought back to Rome to work as slaves. The Romans thought they were beautiful, with their blonde hair, blue eyes and fine features, and said they were like "angels". From that time onward, they were referred to as Angels from a place called the land of the angels, or Angel Land (EngLand). It's also spelled Angles (like centre vs. center). This is similar to Filipinos being so named due to the spanish colonization of that large island archipelago and naming it after the spanish king of that time, King Philippe. (Imagine naming a whole people after your king...) The Philippines... and Angle-Land / England.

While English is a European language, it was of a different branch than Roman (and Spanish). Because there was no writing, the origin of English is derived by comparisons of words and grammar to other languages, to which it is clearly closest to German (Deutsch) and Dutch, and then with added Norse (Viking/Norwegian) -- the "Germanic" branch. Systematically, it was not like Roman/Latin or Greek. In subsequent centuries, it has transformed so much with borrowed words and stories (e.g., the spread of Christianity) that now it has a lot in common with Spanish, French and Italian (the latter three of the "Italic" branch of the European language). Notably, besides the Germanic and Italic branches, the third branch of European language is Celtic. Though on the same island archipelago, English is different from native Irish, Welsh and Scottish. (But in America, we call them all WASPS -- White Anglo-Saxon Protestants -- many of whom came to America because they protested European Christianity. But that's another blur.)

The English didn't start making colonies until a couple of hundred years after the Portuguese (Port) and Spanish, who in turn had succeeded Rome after a long Dark Ages in European history. The Portuguese and Spanish had already gone around the horn of Africa, as well as westward to the Americas (after Columbus discovered America in 1492). But after the English saw the Spanish Armada and survived a Spanish attack by a lot of good luck such as the weather (otherwise we'd probably be speaking Spanish today), England realized that it needed big ships to survive. That was the arms race of the times.

English is the predominant international language today, but the writing is Roman. Other countries outside of Europe have also "romanized" their language, e.g., Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, i.e., using only Roman-derived alphabetic characters and no indigenous writing.

Words are concepts of consciousness, and communications is a key to the evolution of human consciousness.

Now that we have the Internet and the English language is becoming even more predominant (and thank Hollywood and World War 2 for some of that, too), it looks like the future is destined to be most descended from the Romans and their beautiful Germanic slaves from Aengeland.

When I design my own wheel space colony and get an artist to touch up the 3D architectural model, and after I think it looks just right with all its terraced little water steps and vegetation everywhere, I'll call it "el Prado" and start looking for engineering contractors.