Ecocosmology

Putting A Face On Machine Mutation - 2

2012-01-24T12:42:00.014-06:00

When we speak of "life" or "the cosmos", starting our discussion at "the beginning" is difficult.

Especially when, in some ways, "the beginning" is as illusive to us as defining or grasping the meaning of "a line."

Wikipedia tells us that "a line" can extend to infinity, in either direction, having no beginning, and no end.

Or "a line" can be finite in both directions, having one point described as the "beginning point", with another point being described as the "end point".

Still, those two points exist on that other "line" which, as I said, has no beginning point and no end point.

Interestingly, "a line segment" has the same property as one type of line, that is, it has both a beginning point and an end point.

When a beginning point exists, but no end point exists, then the entity is not called "a line segment" or "a line", instead it is called "a ray."

In the first post of this series we dealt with "the beginning", in the sense that plane geometry deals with it, i.e., somewhat like the discussion of "a line."

We looked at where life begins, not in the sense of time, not in the sense of the past or future, but in the sense of locus, that is, where in terms of location, does the "machine" world end, and the world of "life" begin?

To be sure, in this series we have set forth a valid reason to equate "machine" with "inorganic", likewise to equate "life" with "organic":

"Our cells, and the cells of all organisms, are composed of molecular machines. These machines are built of component parts, each of which contributes a partial function or structural element to the machine. How such sophisticated, multi-component machines could evolve has been somewhat mysterious, and highly controversial." Professor Lithgow said.
...
"François Jacob described evolution as a tinkerer, cobbling together proteins of one function to yield more complex machines capable of new functions." Professor Lithgow said.

"Our work describes a perfect example of Jacob's proposition, and shows that Darwin's theory of evolution beautifully explains how molecular machines came to be."

(ibid, quoting Science Daily and Monash Univ.). Our science describes those "component parts" of molecules with the word "atoms", which are said to be the smallest unique identifier of what our science calls "the elements."

What we call "simple cells" are said to be complex molecular machines (inorganic) with something more, hence, more complex organization (organic).

Thus, in this context when we ask about "the beginning", we are simply asking "when we use super microscopes and/or other tools for looking deep into the micro world which our eyes alone cannot detect, where does the 'machine' essence end, and where does the 'organic' essence begin?"

In some cases the answer to that question will depend on definition, on nomenclature.

It probably behooves us to substitute "boundary" in place of "beginning", when we discuss "machine" or "life", at least in the context of locus.

So, concerning inorganic machine entities compared with organic life, our nomenclature should change as scientific discoveries improve to bring us results that boil down to a better scientific understanding.

Einstein once said: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler" (paraphrased "don't oversimplify").

Based upon the statements of Professor Lithgow, above, we can define two categories of entities, machine (inorganic) and life (inorganic bound with organic).

In that sense, all plants, animals, and elements are either "machine" or "life", it is just that "life" in this nomenclature is "machines bound to additional organic essence", and "machine" in this nomenclature is "atoms and/or molecules without organic essence", or as a recent comment by a scientists indicates:

Dr Clarke said: “There are a lot of fundamental questions about the origins of life and many people think they are questions about biology. But for life to have evolved, you have to have a moment when non-living things become living – everything up to that point is chemistry."

(Univ. of York, cf Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry). So, for purposes of this discussion, looking into our super microscope at the lowest level of the machine world, we will see atoms, then moving up a level we will see atoms organized into molecules, then moving up another level we will see very complex molecules, then at the level where we approach the boundary between machines and where life begins, we will see a very complex molecular machine with something more, something that transforms it into life, a super complex machine with super organization, something we call organic, then eventually we reach the level of "a cell" (cf. Are Toxins of Power Machines Or Organisms?).

Leaving the concept of boundaries, now turning to concepts of "the beginning" in terms of time, The Big Bang Theory deals with "the beginning" in that context.

There is a specific term used to define "the beginning" of elements in the sense of time, thus the beginning of machines in the sense of time, which is called Big Bang Nucleosynthesis.

Following nucleosynthesis, in time sequence, more complex machines developed, which we call stars.

Going on in time sequence in Big Bang cosmology, once those stars formed they then produced even more elements, i.e., more machines.

Clearly then, cosmological evolution advocates and hypothesizes that machines replicated, and/or formed other machines, in the earliest evolutionary processes of The Big Bang.

This is a good place, then, to characterize machines as being able to replicate other machines, but to characterize organics as being able to reproduce their own kind, but change through morphing.

Machines replicate not only their own kind, but other kinds of machines, but observation gives us evidence that life, in its organic reproductive process, reproduces only its own kind but experiences morph from time to time.

This is also a good place to mention that the combination of machine and organic is really what science fiction likes to call "a cyborg", a combination of inorganic machine with non-machine organics.

But, we can also see that organics cannot exist without the underlying machine foundation which organics extend upon.

We can also note that death, then, is the removal of the organic essences, so that the entity can revert back to the purely inorganic (machine) components underneath the organic level.

Shoot, Aim, Then Roundup The Damage

2012-01-14T05:56:00.007-06:00

The photo is from an ENENEWS article which shows garden produce downstream from nuclear propaganda.

The odd fellow is from a garden in the suburbs of Tokyo, Japan, according to eneNews.

The phenomenon is confirmed by another Japanese source of information.

The incompetence of local and national government, concerning environmental issues, brings suffering to billions around the planet:

The closure of Mexico's biggest garbage dump has highlighted the absence of a comprehensive policy for urban waste collection, disposal and processing, a failure that has serious consequences for health and the environment.

The leftwing government of the Mexican capital decided in December to close Bordo Poniente, the biggest refuse dump, located in the east of the city, without coming up with an alternative solution. Now municipalities adjacent to Mexico City are refusing to accept its waste.

(Garbage, Garbage, Garbage). Incompetent legislation and regulation of herbicides is bringing on extinctions, mutations, and danger to Americans via use of the most "popular solutions", which are human cell damaging chemical poisons:

Used in yards, farms and parks throughout the world, Roundup has long been a top-selling weed killer. But now researchers have found that one of Roundup’s inert ingredients can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells.

The new findings intensify a debate about so-called “inerts” — the solvents, preservatives, surfactants and other substances that manufacturers add to pesticides. Nearly 4,000 inert ingredients are approved for use by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Glyphosate, Roundup’s active ingredient, is the most widely used herbicide in the United States.

(Scientific American, Herbicide Roundup). Not that Roundup leaves anything out of its deadly gun sights:

The global decline in amphibian diversity has become an international environmental problem with a multitude of possible causes. There is evidence that pesticides may play a role, yet few pesticides have been tested on amphibians. For example, Roundup is a globally common herbicide that is conventionally thought to be nonlethal to amphibians. However, Roundup has been tested on few amphibian species, with existing tests conducted mostly under laboratory conditions and on larval amphibians. Recent laboratory studies have indicated that Roundup may be highly lethal to North American tadpoles, but we need to determine whether this effect occurs under more natural conditions and in post-metamorphic amphibians. I assembled communities of three species of North American tadpoles in outdoor pond mesocosms that contained different types of soil (which can absorb the pesticide) and applied Roundup as a direct overspray. After three weeks, Roundup killed 96–100% of larval amphibians (regardless of soil presence). I then exposed three species of juvenile (post-metamorphic) anurans to a direct overspray of Roundup in laboratory containers. After one day, Roundup killed 68–86% of juvenile amphibians. These results suggest that Roundup, a compound designed to kill plants, can cause extremely high rates of mortality to amphibians that could lead to population declines.

(ESA - Journal). As if the extinction of amphibians was not enough, see also Roundup - Pitts, Nature's Country Store, Mother Jones, and Huffington Post articles about this calamitous failure of government.

The word ecocide is really just another word for mass murder brought about by criminal insanity of government puppets controlled by mad, careless, unethical, inhumane, rogue businesses.

The public incessantly picks up the tab for the ongoing plunder of the earth, for the nightmare of the dark lords of "business."

It is time to round them up.

Honored Environmentalists

2012-01-11T13:01:00.009-06:00

This post begins a series that honors environmentalists who are not paid, but rather volunteer their work to help not only the animal and plant kingdoms, but the entire environment including human beings.

Ode To Dr. Alexandra Brooklynn Koehne

As a tree
I have
conundrums
conflicts
as I stand

my leaves
experience enlightenment
my roots
experience darkness
as I stand

I am composed
of
my leaves above ground
I am composed
of
my roots below ground
as I stand

The dark below ground
the light above ground
energize me
as I stand

I take it all in
while I give it all out
the dark
the light
as I stand

I love to munch
carbon dioxide
to make oxygen
for you
as I stand

Some of you
take me
for homes
for poems
for maple syrup
for white oak bark
for Cinnamon
for shade
for granted
as I stand

for you.

Some Way Out Of Here - 2

2011-11-20T09:59:00.009-06:00

In the first post of this series we touched upon ways of freeing ourselves from the addiction to fossil fuels.

Other posts have touched upon that theme (e.g. A Green Way Out of Here, BioChar: A Green Way Out of Here, A Methanol Economy Way out of Here, and Nanoengines For Spacecraft? to name a few).

The following video continues the technical discussion:

Scientists tend to focus on the technical problems so they can sometimes be very optimistic, because there are scientific remedies which can be done.

At the same time, others focus on the problems that the Toxins of Power bring to this table, and they are not as optimistic.

They tend to be of the opinion that there are indications that we are confronting a plague rather than an engineering problem.

On the other hand, there is an element of criminality because when millions need not be poisoned but are poisoned, there is a criminal insanity in the mix.

IPCC News Conference

2011-11-18T08:43:00.007-06:00

The IPCC has released a report on extreme events as a result of climate change:

On 18th November 2011, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) launched its ‘Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation’ (SREX). The findings were approved by 194 governments following a four-day meeting in Kampala, Uganda in which the Report’s Summary for Policy Makers was agreed line by line. Written over two and a half years by over 200 hundred authors, reviewed by many hundreds more and involving academics, practitioners and policy makers from Fiji to Senegal and from Russia to Chile, the report presents a dramatic and precise set of findings ... Key messages of SREX are as follows ...

(Ten Key Messages). An in-depth discussion of the ten key points is available in PDF format here.

The following recording is of a news conference about the report:

On The New Meaning of "Human" - 2

2011-11-13T05:58:00.007-06:00

In the first post of this series we touched upon the difference between the ancient concept of homo sapiens contrasted with the startling new, emerging, modern concept of a human being.

The ancient concept is that we humans are human because we are composed of human cells.

The emerging modern concept is radically different, even something not yet in the textbooks.

That new, emerging, modern concept resembles nothing your mother and father told you about yourself when they taught you to say "foot", "arm", "leg", "head", "eyes", or "me".

Before we tie these new concepts about what it means to be human together, later in this post, let's get a feel for the magnitude of the issue we are dealing with:

... the fields of medical and environmental microbiology have begun to merge. The resulting hybrid discipline embraces the complexity of a larger system; it’s integrative rather than reductive, and it supports the gathering view that our bodies, and the bodies of other animals, are ecosystems, and that health and disease may depend on complex changes in the ecology of host and microbes ...

(The Body Politic, Seed Magazine, emphasis added). A singularity is at the core of the way we see ourselves, not a community, but that concept is now outdated:

“We’ve all been trained to think of ourselves as human,” he says. Bacteria have been considered only as the source of infections, or as something benign living in the body. But now, he says, it appears that “we are so interconnected with our microbes that anything studied before could have a microbial component that we hadn’t thought about.” It will take a major cultural shift, says Karasov, for nonmicrobiologists who study the human body to begin to take microorganisms seriously as a part of the system.

(ibid, emphasis added). This is a challenge to some of our western notions, so it will need to be handled gingerly, so as not to confuse some of us:

Equally challenging, though in a different respect, will be changing long-held ideas about ourselves as independent individuals. How do we make sense of this suddenly crowded self? David Relman suggests that how well you come to terms with symbiosis “depends on how comfortable you are with not being alone.” A body that is a habitat and a continuously evolving system is not something most of us consider; the sense of a singular, continuous self is a prerequisite for sanity, at least in Western psychology.

(ibid, emphasis added). A new sense or definition of sanity comes with this new foundation, this new psychology of self as a community, a concept of self as an ecosystem within the Earth's global ecosystem, which in turn is part of a larger cosmic community which we call the universe.

The modern concept will also have an impact on our vision of government.

Some nations have already made inroads into that vision via advanced legislation, based upon modern environmental understanding.

International gatherings fostered by The United Nations, and other organizations, work to coordinate environmental protection, recognizing the reality that ecocide is not a sane way for mature, properly functioning nations to behave.

A Cold Fusion Plant Is Being Tested

2011-11-12T05:44:00.001-06:00

From time to time we take a look at new, hopeful forms of energy solutions that may become viable.

For a concrete in-the-now example see A Methanol Economy Way Out Of Here, or for a futuristic example see Nanoengines For Spacecraft?

Across the pond in Europe, specifically Italy, a test is taking place on a new energy system based on what some are calling "cold fusion" while others call it an "E-Cat (Energy Catalyzer) device".

The test is described as:

For the next few days, PES will be scanning the net to bring you the latest and most up-to-date information about the important October 28 test of the 1 megawatt E-Cat (Energy Catalyzer) device, taking place in Italy. PESN's founder, Sterling D. Allan, will be in attendance at the private event. Keep checking this page for the latest news and updates!

(Pure Energy Systems). Others describe it as a scam, or just another event in the relentless pursuit of magic energy:

I’m going to go out on a limb here with a prediction. The energy world will look exactly the same the day after October 28th, 2011, as it did yesterday. Why? On October 28th we’re expecting a public demonstration of a “revolutionary” new energy device in Bologna, Italy. The magic technology? Another too-cheap-to-meter construct called the “e-cat” machine invented and promoted by Italian Andrea Rossi. Cold fusion … again, but with an updated label; Low-Energy Nuclear Reaction. Will it change the world? No. Will it work? Doubt it.

(Forbes). The Forbes author then goes on to say purchase oil stock and keep focused, steady as she goes, on the status quo.

Thus, it is unlikely that the oil wars are going to be replaced with an era of peace any time soon.

Evidently the test did well enough to satisfy the customer:

"Q&A just finished; reading of results; 470 kW maintained continuously during self-sustain; customer satisfied; sale made; more later."

(Twitter). Will check up on this to try to verify it in the days ahead.

On The Definition of Sanity

2011-11-10T10:38:00.004-06:00

This post deals with the definition of the sanity of nations and civilizations.

There are similarities to the definition of the sanity of individuals, however, to implicate the notion of the sanity of national government as well as the sanity of civilization, we must rise above the limitations of current definitions which tend to be designed to apply exclusively to individual persons.

It would seem to be axiomatic, as well as compelling, to say that a sane nation or a sane civilization is one without dementia at that level, that is, sanity is simply the substantial absence of dementia at a particular, applicable level.

But, in our doublespeak world, words of this nature have been torn asunder to the point that they typically have only a localized meaning within a local context.

In other words, a comprehensive definition takes a comprehensive scope, and in the real universe, it requires a cosmic scope.

The tenets of Ecocosmology offer a good foundation for a comprehensive, cosmic (meaning widest in scope) definition of sanity:

The four tenets are:
1) The stars like our Sun at the center of all solar systems will support life forms for an amount of time, but will then destroy life on the planets near them at an unknown time during each solar system's developmental life cycle.
a) For stars that are late K thru M, such as red dwarfs, this applies to the deadly outbursts that come short of physical destruction of the planets orbiting close to that type star.

2) That final catastrophic event (destruction of life on inner planets), and all events leading up to it, comprise "The Test". This test is composed of all the preliminary and final evolutionary requirements for the life forms on all planets near central stars. The Test works as a wall, moat, or barrier, to divide those species who may continue to live in the physical universe from those who may not.

3) To pass The Test, intelligent life forms which inhabit any planet will be required to:
a) first learn to live and work together within, and in accord with, their planet's ecosystem, and to substantially coexist with all the other species on that planet, overcoming any toxins of power that are contrary to that social harmony;

b) develop technology that produces space vehicles able to substantially meet or exceed the speed of light;

c) find another solar system with a habitable planet which contains a central star still having enough time left in its stellar life cycle for them to colonize a habitable planet in that solar system; since it is unknown whether the toxins of power are to be found on all planets as they are on Earth, the possibility of that should be taken into consideration when selecting any new planet or moon as a home world; since red dwarfs are the most stable & most abundant stars, they should be favored over Sun-like stars;

d) colonize that habitable planet, and then improve their ecocosmological skills;

e) then repeat the entire process ad infinitum;

f) or, experience a morph into another species free from that type of solar/planetary cosmic dependence.

4) The seeds of intelligence (genetic and memetic clues) required to successfully perform The Test are distributed into all species, races, religions, sciences, creeds, and genders; thus all individuals should be respected as carriers of some quanta of the seed of intelligence required to pass The Test, lest a fundamental quantum of necessary intelligence be lost.

(The Tenets of Ecocosmology). Avoiding the death of humanity is sanity, perpetuating the human species and its earthly realm is sanity, which is to say that anything to the contrary equates to the definition of insanity.

There you have it.

So we can take a look at our nation, our civilization, and do a sanity test by asking how we are doing on each point: a) are national educational systems teaching that all life on this planet is doomed if we stay here and fail to migrate out into the cosmos (or morph), b) are we dedicating the mental and physical resources of civilization toward that end, c) are we demanding and practicing world peace and cooperation toward that end, and d) as we do so are we feverishly taking care of all species on this planet?

This is the line between sanity and insanity, so you decide how your nation and our civilization is doing on the cosmic IQ and the cosmic sanity test:

On The New Meaning of "Human"

2011-10-25T05:52:00.008-05:00

I have a "gut feeling about this" is a common utterance amongst some people.

Once upon a time we would chuckle or giggle at the question: "Is a 'gut feeling' a signal from your microbes?"

But more and more a "yes" answer to that question is looking neither fully impossible nor fully improbable, according to experts in this field of human-microbe symbiosis:

Scientists originally expected that the communication between animals and their symbiotic bacteria would form its own molecular language. But McFall-Ngai, an expert on animal-microbe symbiosis, says that she and other scientists have instead found beneficial relationships involving some of the same chemical messages that had been discovered previously in pathogens. Many bacterial products that had been termed “virulence factors” or “toxins” turn out to not be inherently offensive signals; they are just part of the conversation between microbe and host. The difference between our interaction with harmful and helpful bacteria, she says, is not so much like separate languages as it is a change in tone: “It’s the difference between an argument and a civil conversation.” We are in constant communication with our microbes, and the messages are broadcast throughout the human body.

(The Body Politic, Seed Magazine, emphasis added). The Dredd Blog System has been looking into the human-microbe symbiosis for a while, for example, see The Undiscovered Side of Science and Life, Hypothesis: Microbes Generate Toxins of Power, Hypothesis: Microbes Generate Toxins of Power - 2, and Weekend Rebel Science Excursion.

It is even beginning to look more and more like we are simply not "human" in the sense we have always thought we were:

After all, our cells carry an ancient stamp of symbiosis in the form of mitochondria. These energy-producing organelles are the vestiges of
symbiotic bacteria that migrated into cells long ago. Even those parts of us we consider human are part bacterial. “In some ways, we’re an amalgam and a continuously evolving collective,” Relman says.

... life as we know it is built upon microbes, whether we look in the deepest oceans or our own intestines. We once had the luxury of ignoring the diminutive members of our bodies and other ecosystems. Now the blinders are off.

(ibid, emphasis added). Yes, "Our bodies harbor 100 trillion bacterial cells, outnumbering our human cells 10 to one", so we need to rethink "environment", "mother nature", and "ecosystem" in terms of humans being separate from them, because we are decidedly not separate from them.

We defined human sanity more in accord with the revelations of that recent science in On The Definition of Sanity, and also pointed out that we reached The Peak of Sanity when we abandoned the reality of our nature to become our own worst enemy by going in the direction of Ecocide.

The next post in this series is here.

The Exceptional American Denial

2011-08-28T17:51:00.022-05:00

Some things can't really be improved upon.

One of those "things" is the presentation of a professor from UCSD, detailing the history of global warming science.

Not stopping there, the professor then details the greatest propaganda hoax ever fostered on the American people (agnotology), which ends up being the diagnosis of those who are suffering psychologically from the impairment "climate science denial".

Senator Inohfe, there is no way you could have been there, even if your body had been there.

For the other readers, use the video below to enjoy a free class lecture at a very well respected American university, or, read the history here.

Key times in the video (Note: GW = global warming; GG = greenhouse gas, CC = climate change):

00:40 - Schwarzenegger: no debate, GW is happening.
06:20 - Proper amount of GG is good, keeps us warm.
07:00 - Too much GG is a bad thing.
07:09 - Tyndale in mid 1800's began research into GG.
07:45 - Arrhenius did first degree calculations re: CO₂ content.
08:25 - Callendar discovered GG increases in 1930's.
09:02 - Hulburt accord in 1930's.
09:43 - Depression / war stopped GG research.
10:00 - Gilbert N. Plass developed CO₂ atmospheric calculations.
10:49 - Suess & Revelle do paper in 1957 warning of GW dangers.
12:30 - Kelly warns of polar ice cap melt.
13:25 - CO₂ levels discovered to be high.
16:30 - Lyndon Johnson in 1965 says fossil fuels causing GW.
17:00 - GW, CC not political originally.
18:20 - White of NOAA, 1978, warns of GW dangers.
24:20 - IPCC formed in 1979 with consensus on GW.
26:00 - Bush I signed GW treaty.
26:45 - Denial of GW begins.
27:40 - Luntz injects GW denial propaganda into political debate.
28:25 - Oil baron Cheney propagates GW denial.
29:00 - Oil companies do massive scale denial propaganda.
29:30 - Marshall Institute
30:30 - Marshall Institute formed to support Reagan SDI (star wars)
32:50 - Marshall Institute "cigarettes not related to cancer".
36:50 - Marshall Institute does GW denial campaign.
42:54 - Marshall member Seitz worked for big tobacco.
47:20 - Singer of Marshall Institute politically attacks GW.
53:35 - Cigarette smoking is ok rhetoric applied to GW science.

A new study done by skeptics confirms global warming, reports the Wall Street Journal.

The Little People - 2

2011-08-18T06:25:00.036-05:00

In the first post of this series, The Little People, we broached the subject of microbes within the context of the Fourth Tenet.

We urged acceptance of the notion contained in that tenet, which asserts that even the tiniest of living organisms on this planet should be highly esteemed and protected along with every other "big" living organism on the planet.

Now, the Dredd Blog and the Toxins of Power Blog have shown how utterly critical "the little people", the microbes, really are.

In the posts The Tiniest Scientists Are Very Old - 2, Hypothesis: Microbes Generate Toxins of Power, and A Structure RE: The Corruption of Memes - 4, recent incredible scientific discoveries concerning symbiotic relationships between humans and microbes are pointed out.

Those two posts show that microbes are players in human genetics, as well as human cognition.

Before that science became known, in one of his many papers Richard Dawkins elaborates:

Since all organisms alive inherit their genes from their ancestors, rather than from their ancestors' unsuccessful contemporaries, all organisms alive tend to possess successful genes. This is why organisms tend to inherit genes that build a well-designed machine, a machine that behaves as if it is striving to become an ancestor.

(Universal Parasitism ... Co-evolution ... Phenotypes). Dawkins did not have the benefit of later genetic research that caused "shifts in perspective ... occurring throughout cellular biology ... seem as dizzying as what happened in cosmology ... issues once thought settled are up in the air".

Dawkins is also criticized by creationists for attributing almost an intelligence to genes:

Since evolution can't consider an intelligent designer, they have elevated the genes themselves with intelligence beyond the species. Genetics becomes a collective mind that spans species in the sci-fi world of evolution.

(Intelligent Genes). In the post Will Humans Evolve Into Machines? the evolution from machine to organism is perused and reviewed, noting that combining machine-into-organism evolution with consideration of Dollo's Law (reverse-evolution back into machines is a no-no according to Dollo's Law), we must have some skepticism when considering Dawkins' quote above:

"... organisms tend to inherit genes that build a well-designed machine, a machine that behaves as if it is striving to become an ancestor"

This skepticism is required because going back into any machine state is a no-no per Dollo's Law, so we must assume that Dawkins conflated the meaning of "machine" with the meaning of "organism".

Furthermore, Dawkins fails to mention the role human symbiosis with microbes has on his hypothesis, because that discovery had not yet been revealed and considered when he did that paper.

So, it is not out of line to recall and consider that:

Microbes existed on the Earth billions of years before humans did.

Why do microbes need humans, seeing as how humans have been on the planet such a very tiny amount of time?

Do the microbes need humans via symbiosis in order to become fit enough to survive in this cosmos?

How does all that fit into The Tenets of Ecocosmology?

We will address those issues now that we have set forth the preliminary considerations.

The first fundamental consideration is the scientific fact that the Sun will destroy all life on this planet Earth, including microbes, at some unspecified time in the future.

Next, in order to survive, microbes and humans must care for this planet while developing a way to leave this planet in order to find another planet or moon with microbe and human life sustaining capability.

We violate the criticism above in the "Intelligent Genes" quote (which alleges that evolutionists attribute intelligence to microbes) if we say "microbes are aware of the condition of the Sun, so they became symbiotic with humans because humans are the only species capable of developing space travel to another habitable planet, therefore microbes are preserving their species via symbiosis with humans".

There are many questions that arise unless we relegate the whole evolutionary scheme to absolute chance mutation, because "genes that build a well-designed machine" attributes way too much to microbes without explaining at all how that could be, not to mention that it violates Dollo's law if it was meant literally.

Perhaps we can say that there is now a requirement to determine when the first meme concerning space travel came to the human mind, how it came there, and where it came from?

Exploded Planet Hypothesis

2011-08-07T09:06:00.028-05:00

Is the act of contemplating life on other planets in the universe a "scientific" thing to do?

At least in the sense of wondering how they might approach the issue of clean sources of energy compared with the other side of that coin, the many pollution generating sources of energy?

Or is such contemplation an activity properly left to mystics, UFO folk, and others of that "unscientific" ilk?

In prior posts we have mentioned the contemplations of scientist Freeman Dyson, who wondered how civilizations on other planets, if they exist, would deal with the energy crisis our existing civilization faces.

If scientists like Freeman Dyson professionally contemplate, and even go so far as to predict forms of alien energy systems, such as the "bubble" shown in the photo above, then the contemplation of extraterrestrial potential is by definition scientific:

A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure originally described by Freeman Dyson. Such a "sphere" would be a system of orbiting solar power satellites meant to completely encompass a star and capture most or all of its energy output. Dyson speculated that such structures would be the logical consequence of the long-term survival and escalating energy needs of a technological civilization, and proposed that searching for evidence of the existence of such structures might lead to the detection of advanced intelligent extraterrestrial life ... In Dyson's original paper, he speculated that sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilizations would likely follow a similar power consumption pattern as humans, and would eventually build their own sphere of collectors. Constructing such a system would make such a civilization a Type II Kardashev civilization.

(Wikipedia: Dyson Sphere). There are other strange shapes out there in the cosmos that give scientists pause.

For example, the photo just below and to the right shows yet another star enclosed within a strange shape.

Scientists go through the exercise of figuring out how natural forces could craft these shapes, while other scientists try to figure out how an alien civilization could do so.

The title of this post alludes to the fact that there is a hypothesis floating around about a planet in our solar system which exploded long ago.

It was said to have been located in the gap between Mars and Jupiter, where now only the debris we call the asteroid belt remains.

Let's add to that hypothesis the notion that the planet exploded while a prior civilization which inhabited that planet was engaged in the engineering necessary in order to develop a Dyson energy grid system.

Let's further hypothesize that parts of their grid energy system still remain, and that one part of that Dyson energy grid system is the hexagon on Saturn's north pole.

The elaborate systems talked about by Dyson would quite feasibly be set up on several planets in a solar system energy grid designed to harness clean energy.

Hypothetically, perhaps the people who inhabited the planet that exploded were engaged in efforts to do a Dyson Grid, but came upon an unknown, perhaps they rushed it a bit knowing that the Sun has a limited lifespan, and in the foray perhaps a disaster was triggered that in turn destroyed the planet.

If so, they were probably the first of the human species, since destroying seems to be so human.

Biochar: A Green Way Out Of Here

2011-07-02T10:52:00.009-05:00

This blog has asserted over and over that there are many ways out of the climate changing cycle we are currently in.

That is what makes not feverishly working toward climate safety criminal.

We have discussed some of the ways out of our predicament, including methanol, dandelion, and solar, to name a few.

There are many others.

In this post today we mention another one for your perusal.

Yes, it is TIME for a biochar solution:

More information is available at BIOCHAR Solution.

Are We Really Sure How Stars Decline? - 2

2011-06-20T05:02:00.005-05:00

In the first post of this series this blog asked Are We Really Sure How Stars Decline?

In that post it was pointed out how important it is, in terms of The Tenets of Ecocosmology, to know solar science, and know it well.

The obvious reason for that is because our future as a planetary society in the long run is utterly dependent on the way the Sun behaves.

The dogma of science is quite assertive and impatience with questions about its authority, even though scientists are constantly being surprised by new discoveries, such as huge waves on the Sun.

The recent decade saw scientific expressions of certainty as to how the Sun would enter an active period soon, after having been relatively quite for a period of time.

Now, all of a sudden, a flip flop is taking place and scientists are now saying it looks like the Sun will be going quiet for a prolonged period instead.

The question that arises, in the context of the climate of this planet, is how will that impact global warming:

How much light the sun emits affects the Earth's weather and climate. And sunspots — dark dots on the face of the great fusion reactor in the sky — do alter the orb's output. So when solar scientists said last week that sunspot cycles might be going into hibernation, the impact on our planet's climate became a hot topic.

Previous prolonged weakenings in the solar cycle may have launched mini-Ice Ages. An example is the so-called Maunder Minimum in the 1600s and 1700s when the Thames River routinely froze, something that never happens today.

So if we're to face a temporarily cooler sun, maybe all those greenhouse gases we've been putting into the atmosphere will keep us toasty?

A cooler sun might mean a drop in global average temperatures of at most 0.3 degrees Celsius. But the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere today will add 0.6 degrees Celsius to global average temperatures by the end of the century. And more, since greenhouse gas emissions show no signs of diminishing. So the slightly cooler sun won't counteract a much hotter earth.

(Scientific American, David Biello). The political animals who also espouse dogma, and who have in general been in denial about global climate change, are likely to seize upon this new scientific "position" to defend the status quo.

As time goes on, this blog will research the issue and present the results to Ecocosmology Blog readers for their perusal.

But one thing is for sure concerning the Earth environment being impacted by the Sun in this decade, it is absolutely minuscule compared to the damage that human civilization is doing.

The Fukushima Coverup

2011-05-13T14:09:00.024-05:00

Things are continually getting worse at the ill fated Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan.

It is quite likely that the Fukushima disaster will surpass the Chernobyl disaster before long, if it hasn't already.

The government cannot be trusted to drop the propaganda and just tell the truth, nor to halt construction of new plants like Fukushima.

These nuclear power plants are not shielded from storm outbreaks or global climate change.

The video below indicates that Reactor 4 at Fukushima may tumble over since the ground underneath it seems to have been undermined with water, plus the Reactor 3 explosion damaged Reactor 4's structural integrity.

Washington's Blog has an interesting post about the coverup of the fact that one reactor melted down within a few hours of the earthquake and Tsunami.

Germany has decided to stop all existing nuclear plants by 2022.

Japan admits that three reactors had a complete meltdown within hours of the earthquake and tsunami.

It is now known that "the worst possibility in a nuclear accident", something that is "far worse than a core meltdown" has taken place:

The nuclear fuel in three of the reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant has melted through the base of the pressure vessels and is pooling in the outer containment vessels, according to a report by the Japanese government.

(Telegraph). Hot particles from Fukushima have been detected in Seattle, and one expert estimates that people in the Seattle area ingest up to 10 "hot particles" a day.

The trust in nuclear power seems also to have melted down and it is not likely it will be trusted again going forward.

A good idea, filtering radiation out of standing water in the reactor buildings, got underway but had to be shut down in a few hours because the radiation was too intense for some of the filtering to continue.

The filters were expected to last for weeks, not hours.

Dredd Blog and other blogs envisioned a cover-up from the beginning. In other words, news in advance. Now the cover-up has unraveled completely.

Seattle is getting more from Fukushima than meets the eye or what the government will admit.

It is even getting worse as shown in this post.

Four commissioners of the NRC are sabotaging efforts to improve safety, according to a member of congress.

The USA is not immune from this type of catastrophe:

Someone Figured It Out

2011-04-12T12:43:00.011-05:00

Bolivia is considering a human law that acknowledges what is already law of a different sort, the laws of nature.

It would not matter any if nations passed what they might call "The Law of Gravity", since that is already the law whether we like it or not.

However, it would be a sane gesture to acknowledge a superior, immutable law.

That is, acknowledge natural law which always issues its own equal-justice-for-all punishment each time it is violated.

In that vein, Bolivia is considering passing national laws which declare that the environment has the same rights as human beings:

Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country's rich mineral deposits as "blessings" and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.

(There Otta Be a Law). Like gravity, the law of the environment already exists, in that, the law of this planet is that if we destroy nature we destroy ourselves, seeing as how we too are nature.

But hats off the Bolivians who are bringing focus to the laws that really, really matter.

A Green Way Out Of Here

2011-03-31T12:01:00.003-05:00

One of the myths that the destroyers of the Earth want us to believe is that there is no way around dirty oil, gas, and coal.

Even some of those who fancy themselves to be astute, enlightened, and aware of our plight as a civilization, have been propagandized into the fallacy that there is no way out.

This blog and others have intimated that there are many ways out of it, but that the criminally insane powers that be are making the deliberate choice to continue down the path of destruction.

A recent report says that there is a sunny way out of addiction to oil, coal, and gas:

Arguably no challenge is more serious for the world’s future than bringing about a rapid decarbonation of the energy infrastructure with the possibility of preventing the onset of catastrophic climate change. With a mathematical model we demonstrate that this transition is technically plausible using modest inputs of existing fossil fuel reserves in the creation of a global solar power infrastructure even with existing solar technologies such as wind turbines. In addition, this global power capacity can likewise provide energy consumption per person levels for all of humanity consistent with high human development requirements.

(Sunny Transition, PDF Version). There are criminally insane elements who do not want that reality to be known or to be believed.

Why MOMCOM wants that to be kept secret, or wants to brand it as pie-in-the-sky, can only be known by those who understand the criminally insane mind.

Nevertheless, we street people do not need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, or to know that environmental destruction is a suicidal endeavor for civilization as we know it.

The Dieing - Lying Continuum

2011-02-21T06:00:00.004-06:00

The government keeps on lying while the Gulf of Mexico keeps on dieing.

This is rank criminality taken directly from the operation manual developed during the Exxon Valdez catastrophe which still continues to poison the planet.

Dredd Blog had a series early on in this grotesque charade, detailing its history while predicting a long lasting episode of propaganda.

Huffington Post has a piece which quotes the scientists as well as the government propaganda mouthpieces:

Oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, according to a top scientist's video and slides that she says demonstrate the oil isn't degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor.

That report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012.

At a science conference in Washington Saturday, marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia aired early results of her December submarine dives around the BP spill site. She went to places she had visited in the summer and expected the oil and residue from oil-munching microbes would be gone by then. It wasn't.

(Gulf Oil Update). Not surprisingly, the scientists and the government wearing the rose colored glasses of propaganda have different stories.

The government says all is well because they were the ones who said all the dangers of offshore drilling were in the past, a short six weeks before the Deepwater Horizon disaster began.

A disaster that continues to destroy life as we know it:

The deep-sea hydrocarbon discharge resulting from the BP oil well blowout in the northern Gulf of Mexico released large quantities of oil and gaseous hydrocarbons such as methane into the deep ocean. So far, estimates of hydrocarbon discharge have focused on the oil released, and have overlooked the quantity, fate and environmental impact of the gas. Gaseous hydrocarbons turn over slowly in the deep ocean, and microbial consumption of these gases could have a long-lasting impact on oceanic oxygen levels. Here, we combine published estimates of the volume of oil released, together with provisional estimates of the oil to gas ratio of the discharged fluid, to determine the volume of gaseous hydrocarbons discharged during the spill. We estimate that the spill injected up to 500,000 t of gaseous hydrocarbons into the deep ocean and that these gaseous emissions comprised 40% of the total hydrocarbon discharge. Analysis of water around the wellhead revealed discrete layers of dissolved hydrocarbon gases between 1,000 and 1,300 m depth; concentrations exceeded background levels by up to 75,000 times. We suggest that microbial consumption of these gases could lead to the extensive and persistent depletion of oxygen in hydrocarbon-enriched waters.

(Natural GeoScience, emphasis added). Seventy Five Thousand times more toxic than normal is clear, convincing, and beyond a reasonable doubt proof of the criminality of the republican minds who want to shut down the EPA.

The oceans are a prime source of food that is getting more and more critical:

The United Nations has predicted the global population will reach seven billion this year, and climb to nine billion by 2050, "with almost all of the growth occurring in poor countries, particularly Africa and South Asia," said John Bongaarts of the non-profit Population Council.

To feed all those mouths, "we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000," said Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

"By 2050 we will not have a planet left that is recognizable" if current trends continue, Clay said.

(Raw Story). The fringe elements (the death bringers) are the establishment propagandists.

A House Committee dedicated to false information called a scientist who had made dubious claims in previous years to their delight. During the hearing that scientist recanted to point out not only that he had been mistaken, but that climate science data are accurate.

Ancient Ecocosmology?

2011-02-12T06:58:00.012-06:00

The taste of mystery does not belong only to the fanciful among us.

Mystery is real and powerful.

Take for example the most mysterious book so far known, a book older than the Gutenberg Bible, a book not yet translated, the book with an unknown name, but now called The Voynich Manuscript:

The Voynich manuscript is a handwritten book thought to have been written in the early 15th century [circa 1404] and comprising about 240 vellum pages, most with illustrations. The author, script, and language remain unknown: for these reasons it has been described as "the world's most mysterious manuscript".

(Wikipedia). Tenet Four advances a theory that within the ecosystem are answers to questions we need to have as a civilization.

Some of the most profound mysteries of science and power are very, very old, as we pointed out in an earlier Ecocosmology post:

While watching the other species in the world around us, scientists noticed that some of the tiniest of them are good at quantum mechanics:

A team of University of Toronto chemists have made a major contribution to the emerging field of quantum biology, observing quantum mechanics at work in photosynthesis in marine algae.

"There's been a lot of excitement and speculation that nature may be using quantum mechanical practices," says chemistry professor Greg Scholes, lead author of a new study published in Nature. "Our latest experiments show that normally functioning biological systems have the capacity to use quantum mechanics in order to optimize a process as essential to their survival as photosynthesis."

(Quantum Mechanics at Work in Photosynthesis). Algae have been familiar with these quantum mechanical processes for nearly two billion years.

(The Tiniest Scientists Are Very Old). Contempt for the natural world is an exceptionalist religious doctrine of modern origin.

Is what we call the The Voynich Manuscript some missing wisdom this civilization could use to stem the tide of the epoch of criminal insanity that threatens to bring us down?

In any case, it is no mystery that the new phrase "global weather wierding" should give us pause.

A Heartbeat of Unobtainium

2010-11-17T06:24:00.003-06:00

Some will remember that "unobtainium" is a word used by scientists as a humorous reference to things not yet obtainable.

While some scientists worry about a mission to Mars, regular readers of The Ecocosmology Blog know that this blog worries first about the mission to Earth.

We worry because that mission to the Earth is failing.

We have cited to research recently that debunks climate change and global warming deniers.

We are concerned by such denial because it is a dementia which prevents a remedy in dangerous situations.

Carte Blanche disregard for the work of scientists who have impeccable credentials, and the obvious tons of evidence they cite to, is reckless because it often diminishes the reputation of the entire realm of science in the minds of the public.

For example scientists inform us that the Gulf is still contaminated to the degree that seafood is generally not safe to consume, yet politically motivated government officials, who appear willing to risk the health of the public, quarrel with these scientists who are warning of an existing danger.

We are adding yet another post which offers yet another study that strikes at the heart of the arguments the deniers have historically used to bolster their denial:

The troposphere, the lower part of the atmosphere closest to the Earth, is warming and this warming is broadly consistent with both theoretical expectations and climate models, according to a new scientific study that reviews the history of understanding of temperature changes and their causes in this key atmospheric layer.

...

In the 1990s, observations did not show the troposphere, particularly in the tropics, to be warming, even though surface temperatures were rapidly warming. This lack of tropospheric warming was used by some to question both the reality of the surface warming trend and the reliability of climate models as tools. This new paper extensively reviews the relevant scientific analyses -- 195 cited papers, model results and atmospheric data sets -- and finds that there is no longer evidence for a fundamental discrepancy and that the troposphere is warming.

(Science Daily, emphasis added). The mission to the Earth is failing because the toxins of power corrupt the minds of politicians who then care more and more about their own election chances, but less and less about the public safety and health.

This blog has posts regularly which point out that if the mission to Earth fails, the missions to other worlds are going to fail too.

Carbon Dioxide & The Kooks

2010-10-17T06:08:00.017-05:00

No, "Carbon Dioxide & The Kooks" isn't a country music band.

It is a story of the climate change deniers who do not get the science about the carbon dioxide in the Earth's carbon cycle.

More recently it is a story by climate change scientists who confirm the important role carbon dioxide plays in the global warming of the Earth in our time:

Water vapor and clouds are the major contributors to Earth's greenhouse effect, but a new atmosphere-ocean climate modeling study shows that the planet's temperature ultimately depends on the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide.

(CO2 Controls Earth's Temperature, bold added). The deniers have wacky tales:

For a start, carbon dioxide is not the dreaded killer greenhouse gas that the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and the subsequent Kyoto Protocol five years later cracked it up to be. It is, in fact, the most important airborne fertiliser in the world, and without it there would be no green plants at all.

That is because, as any schoolchild will tell you, plants take in carbon dioxide and water and, with the help of a little sunshine, convert them into complex carbon compounds - that we either eat, build with or just admire - and oxygen, which just happens to keep the rest of the planet alive.

(Junk Science, a website of S.J. Milloy, a Fox News columnist). It is just as invalid to say drowning can't happen because water is natural to the environment.

They do not seem to get the notion of excess, nor the notion of balance, thus, they can't fathom the reality of the dangers inherent in polluting ecological realms to get them out of balance.

Like a fine-tuned turbine that will destroy itself and anything near it if it looses balance, the ecosystem is a conglomeration of balanced cycles that depend on the other cycles it interacts with also staying balanced.

If an ecological cycle, such as the CO2/carbon cycle, goes out of balance it can take the others with it ("Ecosystems will fail if they do not remain in balance.").

Climate scientists intend to counter the junk science blather:

Hundreds of US scientists are joining a mass effort to speak out on climate change, experts said Monday after skeptics gained political ground with last week's Republican gains in Congress.

The moves signals a bold approach by scientists, typically reluctant to get involved in policy debates, as US President Barack Obama's efforts to set stricter penalties for polluters face near-certain defeat in the legislature.

(Terra Daily). The growing public danger from climate change deniers will be debunked until kookiness is more easily identifiable by non-scientists.

Pricing The Priceless At The Plantation

2010-10-17T05:34:00.012-05:00

Historians have argued about whether or not slavery in the United States was economically efficient.

It is as if The Plantation Era is to be judged by the cost of a slave, since labor is a fundamental part of the cost of goods and services.

The bottom line is that we rejected slavery whether or not economists from Cygnus considered it to be efficient or inefficient, because we consider human life to be priceless.

A new plantation mentality has developed in the "economics" of environmental law, which basically "bargains" over the cost to be paid for human life.

When the Supreme Court said it was legal to use "cost benefit analysis" to decide environmental damage assessment, that court basically put a price on the heads of all members of civilization.

The Supreme Court is saying that it is legal to protect the environment so long as it does not cost big business too much money.

When a price is placed on the priceless environment it puts a price on the priceless human life that the environment makes possible.

Dredd Blog has pointed out the reality that the main function of human government should be to enforce the laws of nature, not to ignore them by passing human legislation at odds with the laws of nature.

This blog has also posted, in accord with that view, posts pointing out that it is delusional to think human law trumps natural law.

In the United States the return to a plantation mentality is a function of the federal judiciary, which has gone back to its 1930's configuration, a time when it was a right wing "institution".

Shadow of Time Governs The Earth - 2

2010-10-13T11:16:00.022-05:00

In the first post in this series, we touched upon the convergence of needs that are approaching, that are here already, and that are endangering civilization as we know it.

The "time" focused on in that post was the year 2030 when "the perfect storm" would converge such that the whole danger would be greater than the sum of its parts.

In this current post lets update ourselves using The Living Planet Report from the WWF.

Here are some interesting findings contained in the report:

1.5 years are needed to generate the renewable resources used in 2007 (use was more than the Earth produced, i.e. decline)

71 countries are experiencing blue water resource stress

2 earth's will be needed by the year 2030

5 major threats to civilization (habitat loss, exploitation, pollution, climate change, invasive species)

(Living Planet Report, PDF, 24 megabites). For the rest of this post lets focus on the statement "2 earth's will be needed by the year 2030" (to accommodate the needs of civilization).

This statement is in agreement with The Tenets of Ecocosmology, although for different reasons.

Tenet One is based on the demise of the Sun which requires us to find a new home world, but the Living Planet Report is based on the demise of the Earth caused by violations of Tenet 3(a).

The shadow of time is approaching fast upon current world civilization, and there is no time at all to waste, seeing as how it may already be too late.

Are We Really Sure How Stars Decline?

2010-10-09T10:43:00.023-05:00

The tenets of ecocosmology are based on the scientific understanding concerning how stars decline then die out.

In recent years there have been discoveries which challenge the existing models of stellar decline, also challenging the tenets of ecocosmology to some degree because the science and the tenets are inextricably linked together.

It behooves us, then, to revisit the tenets periodically as we revisit the current stellar models, hypotheses, and theories.

Two quick examples will illustrate the point, the first concerns red dwarf stars:

One mystery which has not been solved as of 2007 is the absence of red dwarf stars with no metals. (In astronomy, a metal is any element heavier than hydrogen or helium). The Big Bang model predicts the first generation of stars should have only hydrogen, helium, and trace amounts of lithium. If such stars included red dwarfs, they should still be observable today, but none have yet been identified. The preferred explanation is that without heavy elements only large and not yet observed population III stars can form, and these rapidly burn out leaving heavy elements which then allow for the formation of red dwarfs. Alternative explanations, such as that zero-metal red dwarfs are dim and could be few in number, are considered much less likely as they seem to conflict with stellar evolution models.

(Red Dwarf Stars, emphasis added). Another issue challenges our understanding as well:

"A massive star a million times brighter than our sun exploded way too early in its life, suggesting scientists don't understand stellar evolution as well as they thought."

(Star Explodes, So Might Theory, emphasis added). There is some mystery about the red giant Betelgeuse also.

The First Tenet of Ecocosmology states:

The stars like our Sun at the center of all solar systems will support life forms for an amount of time, but will then destroy life on the planets near them at an unknown time during each solar system's developmental life cycle.

(Revised 6/20/11, See Tenet One Basics). That is true for all planets orbiting stars which fit that mold, but what about a red dwarf?

The current teaching is that they do not destroy the planets near them, they die out orders of magnitude more slowly than our Sun will, and they just fizzle out so to speak.

So, in one sense the tenet holds true for all star types, it is just that some stars require a relatively quicker response from any species on the inhabited planets around them.

That response is the same for all species on all planets, which is finding another habitable planet to live on when the star which the planet orbits expands to destroy them, or fizzles out to leave the planet no longer habitable.

The difference among those like us who inhabit planets orbiting destructive-decline stars, and those who might inhabit planets orbiting red dwarfs, is that they have a much, much, much longer time frame within which to find another home world than we do.

The silver lining in this cloud is that red dwarfs would be very, very long lasting locations for "bases" from which to search for new home worlds, perhaps taking the pressure off planets like Earth whose inhabitants have a million times less time to find a new home world.

A Lovely Planet In The Neighborhood? - 2

2010-10-02T04:17:00.007-05:00

Astronomers are being quoted as having found a planet that is "near" us.

But what is called "near-by" is quite relative, because we can ask "near-by compared to what?"

Well, compared to far, far, far, far away for example?

Never-the-less, astronomers are happy to have discovered the most earth-like planet orbiting a star as only one of several planets in that distant (or close?) solar system.

The red dwarf star Gliese 581 has not only six known planets, but it also has at least one planet that orbits at a distance that places it in what is called the habitable zone.

That zone is also called the Goldilocks zone, because planets within that zone are at a distance from the star so as to allow liquid water to exist in some places on those planets, which in itself makes it an interesting solar system:

Gliese 581 is a red dwarf located 20.5 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Libra. Like other red dwarfs, it's smaller and much dimmer than our sun. Scientists believe Gliese 581 is old — at least a few billion years — and relatively stable. Both are qualities conducive to the evolution of life, scientists have said.

(Space; also White Paper PDF). So how excited should we get about this discovery, in terms of potential human space travel to check it out?

As was pointed out in an earlier post on Ecocosmology blog:

For example, our B.C.E. technology (burning chemicals to produce energy (thrust) in rockets) which we fondly call rocket science, is not going to get us to the part of "the block" where the "near" star with planet GJ-1214b is.

Light travels at about 670,618,800 miles an hour (186,283 miles per second x 60 x 60) or 5,878,644,400,800 per year (670,618,800 x 24 x 365.25). A planet orbiting a star 40 "light years" away, then, is 235,145,776,032,000 (5,878,644,400,800 x 40) miles away.

Our spacecraft Voyager I and II travel at about 38,000 miles per hour, or 333,108,000 miles a year (38,000 x 24 x 365.25).

So it would take them 705,914.53 years (235,145,776,032,000 / 333,108,000), one way, to get to that planet salaried scientists say is "on our block".

Many scientists' salaries come from military sources in the Pentagon budget. The military scientists are only concerned with being able to destroy things on the earth, so "rocket science" is the apex of their intellect. If it kills better than the last one they love it.

(A Lovely Planet In The Neighborhood?). What that means is since the star Gliese 581 is half the distance to GJ-1214b, it would "only" take us 352,957.27 years (705,914.53 / 2) to get there, ONE WAY.

We see, then, that the science produced by our political systems on Earth is so heavily controlled by military considerations that we have unwisely focused on chemical propulsion for space travel.

Thus, we are still way, way out of range and cannot realistically consider travelling to Gliese 581, or any other star system for that matter, even though our continued existence depends upon the ability to do so.

Humanity has expressed hope, through the SETI program, to find another planet out there where a civilization exists that has the ability to do competent space travel, and could help us continue to survive when it gets close to the time when our solar system catastrophically dies out.

For now, then, all that any warmonger controlled planets like Earth can ask of "near-by" planets is the Mr. Robinson question, "would you be my neighbour?"

The Wind Is Not Just For The Birds

2010-09-27T05:48:00.003-05:00

The memes that say the human species on the earth is the epitome of evolution, or on the other hand the epitome of creation, resides in meme-complexes of a strange form of "species exceptionalism".

It is a mix of religious fanatics, secular ideologues, scholars, and religionists who think that environmentalism is much ado about nothing because humans are exceptional while the environment is nothing by comparison.

The history of the ancestors of these ideologues is not well settled or certain.

At least it isn't if you compare Wikipedia with Wikipedia Critic.

Thus, perhaps the reason for the conflict between these dogmas is the usual dual set of "facts" based upon the same evidence or data:

There are widely varying interpretations of this text, but it is safe to say that all presume human beings have inherited the earth to be used as they see fit. For many, God's gift to Adam and Eve of "dominion" over the earth and all its creatures has been taken as the right to unlimited exploitation.

(Bill Moyers). The fundamentalists of the ecocide-is-no-biggie persuasion think that the earth is a 7,000 year old plaything for them to do anything the want to with; that green energy can never work, and we are thus enslaved to pollute the earth until the rapture saves us from the ecocide of our indiscretion.

Meanwhile, their counterparts took only two years to construct the largest offshore wind farm to date:

Construction work at the £780m wind farm began two years ago and was completed in June.

The 380ft (115m) tall turbines are spread over an area of more than 35 sq km and are visible from the shore on a clear day.

There are currently about 250 wind farms operating in the UK, with a further 12 offshore, with 2,909 turbines in operation in total.

Vattenfall also owns the 30-turbine Kentish Flats wind farm, off Herne Bay, which was one of the UK's first such projects when it opened five years ago.

A company spokesman said more than 3,600 people have worked on the Thanet wind farm, with 30% of workers from the UK.

(BBC News). Wow, clean, renewable energy and job creation all in one.

Who knew?

Chemosynthetic Community Extinction

2010-08-16T04:58:00.004-05:00

In 1984 life forms were discovered in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) that resemble those found near vents in the mid-Atlantic Ridge.

They are endangered by the Deepwater Horizon oil gusher remnants, released along with millions of barrels of crude oil, methane, and other hydrocarbons.

The toxic chemical dispersant BP used to keep the oil from the surface added yet another extinction disaster threat to the area.

For the most part British Petroleum, BP, has controlled information about daily events during the time the catastrophe absorbed the news.

Knowledge of dispersant flow, underwater methane flow, and crude oil flow, including plumes, was discovered by independent, private researchers from colleges and universities using research vessels.

One of those marine biologist teams collected data from various places, since government vessels were not tasked with that effort.

Their basic sentiments are:

The Deepwater Horizon wellhead that tapped the Macondo reservoir was capped on 15 July 2010. After the venting of oil and gas into the Gulf waters was stopped, everyone felt a sense of relief. Multiple news outlets have reported that the surface oil has disappeared, for the most part. I read many reports that stated conclusively the oil had been either transferred to the atmosphere (via evaporation) or that it had been consumed by oil-eating microorganisms. Everyone’s reaction was, not surprisingly, ‘what a relief !!’.

Should we be relieved? Is this disaster over?

On the whole, I believe the answer to both questions is no.

(Where Has The Oil Gone). The long term body count now begins, the next phase we are entering will have intense scientific scrutiny mixed with years of litigation in the federal courts.

BP will try to defend itself to the maximum, but who will care for the gulf now?

Ents & The Entities Become Nomadic

2010-06-10T05:28:00.011-05:00

If a keyword on this post is biomimicry, why is "Ent" in the title?

Before the answer begins, lets contemplate some statements by scientists a few years ago.

At that time the study was probably poo pooed by the climate change deniers.

But we can't debate the undebatable, so lets move on and reflect on the words of those scientists:

"Geographers have projected temperature increases due to greenhouse gas emissions to reach a not-so-chilling conclusion: climate zones will shift and some climates will disappear completely by 2100. Tropical highlands and polar regions may be the first to disappear, and large swaths of the tropics and subtropics will reach even hotter temperatures. The study anticipates large climate changes worldwide."

(Completely New Climates). Ok, so how does that tie in to the Ents and Nomads?

For those who do not know what an "Ent" is, lets start off with this:

Ents are an old race ... Shepherds of the Trees to protect the forests from ... perils ... the Ents were sentient beings ...

(Wikipedia - Ent). They are tree-like mythical creatures that could move their locus from place to place, making them totally unlike the real trees.

Right?

Wrong.

New scientific studies, following up on the climate change studies linked to and quoted above, show that in fact the trees are moving out of Dodge:

Vegetation around the world is on the move, and climate change is the culprit, according to a new analysis of global vegetation shifts led by a University of California, Berkeley, ecologist in collaboration with researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service.

In a paper published June 7 in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, researchers present evidence that over the past century, vegetation has been gradually moving toward the poles and up mountain slopes, where temperatures are cooler, as well as toward the equator, where rainfall is greater.

(Major Vegegation Shifts, emphasis added). The Earth's vegetation has enough sense to move when it is in danger.

Biomimicry is what the human species does when it sees some beneficial behavior in the biosphere that helps us.

Could this be a harbinger of things in store for us?

Let The Phony "Debate" End

2010-05-20T09:48:00.009-05:00

On the heals of the NOAA report that the past few months presented global warming data, like those months had not done before, comes climate data which climate scientists say removes the phony "debate" from the halls of sanity.

The climate change and global warming deniers will have to wax more and more eratic, irrational, and plain dishonest if they choose to continue their religious boycott of strong scientific evidence.

The NOAA report indicated that March and April were the warmest ever, and that the quarter was likewise very significant in terms of global warming:

The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for both April and for the period from January-April, according to NOAA. Additionally, last month’s average ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for any April, and the global land surface temperature was the third warmest on record.

The monthly analysis from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which is based on records going back to 1880, is part of the suite of climate services that NOAA provides government, business and community leaders so they can make informed decisions.

(The Most Poisonous Months On Record?). Following that a panel of scientists has published reports that give the deniers a way out if they choose to join the only movement that can get through to the halls of power:

A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems, concludes this panel report from the America's Climate Choices suite of studies. As decision makers respond to these risks, the nation's scientific enterprise can contribute both by continuing to improve understanding of the causes and consequences of climate change, and by improving and expanding the options available to limit the magnitude of climate change and adapt to its impacts. To make this possible, the nation needs a comprehensive, integrated, and flexible climate change research enterprise that is closely linked with action-oriented programs at all levels.

(Advancing the Science of Climate Change). It is time for Senator Inhofe and other ethically challenged government officials to wake up and avoid the horror.

West Texas Winds Blow Greener

2010-05-19T08:11:00.005-05:00

The wind power project in Texas is 15 years ahead of its goal.

Ahead of its goal in megawatts of power it already generates, and even more good power is yet to come beyond that goal.

The idea immediately comes to mind that solar could be partnered with the wind, because we all know that West Texas gets its share of strong sunshine.

Anyway, the winning wind story goes something like this:

Texas has reached its goal of having 10,000 megawatts of renewable energy capacity this year, 15 years earlier than scheduled, thanks to an ample supply of West Texas wind.

According to a report (.doc) filed with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) Friday, the Lonestar State has 10,367 megawatts of renewable energy capacity, and generated 21,594,278 megawatt-hours of clean electricity in 2009.

(Texas Meets Renewable Energy Goals Early). Now if the federal government will get their act together and generate green jobs for rebuilding and retooling the power grid, the winds of Texas will send clean power to the east coast.

We are very impatiently waiting congress.

Good job West Texas wind pioneer patriots!

Are You In Good Hands With Oilstate?

2010-05-11T11:52:00.007-05:00

The goo hands people have spread what they consider to be their holy oil upon the lives of millions once again.

It looks like blood mixed with oil, and in reality the blood, sweat, and tears of millions is in the hands of the goo people we know as MOMCOM.

MOMCOM wishes all of you a Happy Earth Day and a Happy Mothers Day.

We can only hope that there can be memetic evolution away from the tenets of death into cosmic concepts instead, in tune with the cosmos we live in.

Happy Mother's Day Mother Earth

2010-05-09T07:35:00.016-05:00

The photo shows the gift the oil barons gave to Mother Earth on Earth Day a few weeks ago.

The government is controlled by the mother-polluters of MOMCOM.

The Administration of Barack Obama is in no way free from that control.

Mother's Day is the day when mothers are likely to have an experience unique to them:

“There’s a time when you have to explain to your children why they’re born, and it’s a marvelous thing if you know the reason by then.”

(Hazel Scott, Quotable Women, Running Press, 1989). On this Mother's Day, can MOMCOM do the duty of mothers around the globe, and explain to the children why those children were born into a civilization that seems to be doomed to destroy, maim, and kill its mother?

If not, then this Mother's Day and the recent Earth Day took place during The Criminally Insane Epoch.

The mother-polluters of MOMCOM have run amok, and now seem to be growing more and more fond of giving the gift that keeps on killing.

They seem bent on destroying their mother, the Earth, which will in turn destroy themselves too by what we call ecocide.

Anyway, there is an answer to the question children of the Earth ask:

You were born to take care of Mother Earth along with your brothers and sisters, not to destroy her.

Then when you mature into a cosmic civilization composed of cosmic adults, you are to care for other places in the cosmos.

Your legacy is not intended to be a short lived binge of planetary destruction leading to extinction.

(Tenets of Ecocosmology). We have the clean, renewable energy available but we do not seem to love our Mother or ourselves enough to do it, to do solar:

A massive switch from coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power plants to solar power plants could supply 69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050.

(Scientific American). Add the potential of wind energy, and we are on our way to a clean life of clean energy:

After all, a massive three-megawatt wind turbine "pays back" the carbon dioxide emitted in its making—mining iron, smelting steel, trucking blades, among other things—in roughly seven months of operation by displacing emissions from fossil fuel–fired power plants, according to Michael Zarin, director of government relations at the Denmark-based wind turbine–maker Vestas Wind Systems. Wind power is now responsible for 100 percent of Samso's electricity needs, 20 percent of all of Denmark's, and has become the largest single type of new electricity generation installed in the U.S. "There's nothing alternative about wind anymore," Zarin notes.

(Scientific American). All it takes is the will to live being expressed in a national effort to go clean by shaking the dirty addiction to death oil.

Ice & Bees Gone, Rain, & Ocean Rivers

2010-04-27T10:33:00.028-05:00

Several dangerous events along with some new discoveries are the subject of this post.

The tropical rain forest amount of rain that fell on Tennessee, along with tornadoes, flooding modern cities and destroying towns there and in neighbouring states, was a record and therefore a sign of climate change.

The catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the recent volcanic eruption in Iceland have all harmed commerce too.

Some new discoveries add an even more grim reality to the picture emerging in all of this.

We posted some disturbing information about the value of bees a while back, I mean their value in keeping the human species alive:

It has been stated by several biologists that, if it were not for the honey bee pollinating plants, humans would only last 3 or 4 years as our food supply would disappear [see UPDATE below].

(Will We Destroy Food - The Bees, emphasis added). That is a shocking statement in itself.

Well, an equally shocking development happened this winter concerning the bee population:

The world may be on the brink of biological disaster after news that a third of US bee colonies did not survive the winter.

Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.

The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

(Guardian, UK, emphasis added). Meanwhile the ice continues to melt, which puts more moisture in the air, which means more rain, and then when that rain reaches the oceans, a rise in ocean levels.

Scientists have discovered that when the water reaches the ocean, it may find its way to what could be called "ocean rivers" or currents deep in the ocean.

These currents can carry toxins quickly around the globe, and could increase "dead zones" around the globe.

There is also the spectre of catastrophe when potable water is also considered.

We truly have entered the Criminally Insane Epoch and civilization may not weather this storm.

There is an important distinction between human civilization and the human species.

The post What Do You Mean - World Civilization? and Confusing Civilization With Species point out the difference between human "civilization" and the human "species".

The honey bee is essential to the food economy of civilization and the failure can cause civilization to collapse even though the species will continue on.

Remember the distinction.

The damaged minds who officially doublespeak call the demise of the honey bee "marginally encouraging" because only a third of them died again four years running now.

Tea Party Needs To Change To Green Tea

2010-04-26T14:08:00.009-05:00

A massive Earth Day demonstration dwarfed the media darling Tea Party demonstrations, however, the media did not cover it.

According to posts of record, the media is owned by anti-environmental movement and pro-oil and war forces.

Media forces that are quite ignorant of the dire straits that "civilization" has gotten itself into:

Yes, the biggest single climate rally in U.S. history is dismissed by comparison with the hypothetical cumulative turnout of dozens of future rallies on immigration. Who says the media isn’t fair? Apparently preserving the health and well-being of countless future generations isn’t “hot-button” enough for the media to be interested [kind of an ironic phrase, considering the rally was for action of global warming].

(Climate Progress). Like Nero, they foolishly fiddle while their civilization is burning up energy as the emergence of many catastrophic effects begin to converge.

Happy Earth Day

2010-04-22T07:50:00.004-05:00

My daughter was born on Earth Day.

Earth day was born in 1970 at a teach-in.

Since then the Earth's environment has, unfortunately, been more and more abused by humanity even though we must have a healthy Earth to have a healthy humanity.

But in some ways we have come a long ways.

Even the NY Times in those days warned of the growing "hysteria" of the idea of global warming.

Almost everyone is "hysterical" about it now.

It can even be discussed in the context of economy and the survival of the human species on the earth.

A Close Up Look At The Test of Time

2010-04-21T08:12:00.008-05:00

The photo looks like a pile of pomegranate seeds, with some salt grains between them.

It is actually a close up of our Sun, the nearest star to us.

The white line at the bottom left of the photo represents a distance of 5,000 km (3,107 miles).

Imagine that image being turned into a wave much larger than the earth during solar disturbances, as was reported in a post about waves on the Sun.

I suppose it could be called a mystery as to why the Sun will one day destroy Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars when it goes through its expansion phase.

That is what scientists teach us, causing some of us to wonder why did the cosmos evolve like this?

Why do scientists have to be "doomers", telling us our beautiful home world will be destroyed by the very Star that is giving us life sustaining energy and light?

These questions need not cause us to go into denial, but instead we could get busy with adapting to the requirements which the tenets of ecocosmology set forth.

Global Warming & Potable Water

2010-04-20T05:55:00.015-05:00

We have been talking about global warming spotted by NASA, a tiny Atlantis sinking below the rising waters of the sea, and global warming induced volcanic & earthquake activity.

There is another challenging portion of this subject matter that needs to be mentioned:

Forecasts suggest that when the world's population soars beyond 8bn in 20 years time, the global demand for food and energy will jump by 50%, with the need for fresh water rising by 30%.

But developing countries are already using significant proportions of their water to grow food and produce goods for consumption in the West, the report says.

"The burgeoning demand from developed countries is putting severe pressure on areas that are already short of water," said Professor Peter Guthrie, head of the Centre for Sustainable Development at Cambridge University, who chaired the steering group.

(BBC News). All this talk about global warming raising the depth of the ocean yet there being less and less drinking water, makes one think of the "water water everywhere, nor any drop to drink" saying of old.

The bottom line we have been told about year after year, decade after decade, which we have ignored up until now, is that the global ecosystem is one united and interwoven living realm, so when we do anything to it that is harmful, it propagates through the entire system.

The point to remember now, since we are so far into the sequence of damaging events, is that at some point in time there is a convergence into a perfect storm:

Song writers mentioned that "time keeps on slipping slipping slipping into the future" in a popular song some time back, while the exclamation "just in time" indicates that only a portion of the vast amount of the totality of time is available for some efforts.

Time is another one of those invisible realms, like gravity, that governs the earth from "the shadows", that is, the realm we cannot see even though we can see the effects of the unseen power at work.
...

[John Beddington, the UK government's chief scientific adviser] foresees each problem combining to create a "perfect storm" in which the whole is bigger, and more serious, than the sum of its parts.

(Shadow of Time Governs Earth). Like Toyota and its accelerator pedal problem, we have ignored the problem but that does not make it go away, it only gets worse.

The clock is still ticking on this time bomb, but our subconscious fear of death, which can lead to denial, is also still kicking.

UPDATE: A recent study, conducted both in the field and in the lab, indicates that 4/5ths of drinking water is located in Antarctica, and may melt into the ocean in this century.

That would do two things, destroy "civilization", and make drinking water worth its weight in gold.

Global Warming & Volcanic Eruptions

2010-04-17T13:35:00.011-05:00

In August of 2007, over 2.5 years ago, a geologist had studied the historical record for global warming events which were not anthropogenic (not caused by human activity).

His conclusions were that global warming has caused volcanic eruptions and earthquakes in the ancient past.

He went on to say that the anthropogenic global warming occurring now will do so too.

Over two and a half years ago he mentioned by name the very volcano that just erupted in Iceland shutting down air traffic over Europe.

He also indicated that earthquakes could result from anthropogenic global warming:

"In places like Iceland, for example, where you have the Eyjafjallajökull ice sheet, which wouldn't survive [global warming], and you've got lots of volcanoes under that, the unloading effect can trigger eruptions," McGuire said.

With the changing dynamics in the crust, faults could also be destabilized, which could bring a whole host of other problems.

"It's not just the volcanoes. Obviously if you load and unload active faults, then you're liable to trigger earthquakes," McGuire told LiveScience, noting that there is ample evidence for this association in past climate change events.

(Live Science, 2007, emphasis added). A paper recently published in the journal Arctic indicates that in fact the ice sheets have been melting and vanishing:

Close to 50 years of data show the Devon Island ice cap, one of the largest ice masses in the Canadian High Arctic, is thinning and shrinking.

A paper published in the March edition of Arctic, the journal of the University of Calgary's Arctic Institute of North America, reports that between 1961 and 1985, the ice cap grew in some years and shrank in others, resulting in an overall loss of mass. But that changed 1985 when scientists began to see a steady decline in ice volume and area each year.

"We've been seeing more mass loss since 1985," says Sarah Boon, lead author on the paper and a Geography Professor at the University of Lethbridge. The reason for the change? Warmer summers.

(Science Daily). We all know that there is volcanic activity exactly where he said some would be, and there have been many earthquakes over the past several months.

It behooves scientists to rethink these possibilities, because it can cause severe economic impact, and perhaps tempt one nation to attack another because they know the other side's military aircraft are grounded.

Ice Sheet melt is not the end of the story:

McGuire conducted a study that was published in the journal Nature in 1997 that looked at the connection between the change in the rate of sea level rise and volcanic activity in the Mediterranean for the past 80,000 years and found that when sea level rose quickly, more volcanic eruptions occurred, increasing by a whopping 300 percent.

(ibid, Live Science, link above). In other words as the melting ice around the world is released into the atmosphere, causing climate change, it will eventually find its way to the oceans where weight on the crust will be redistributed causing different stresses than usual on the tectonic plates.

Which means more "surprises".

Some major networks are carrying the story that global warming causes or can cause volcanic activity in some circumstances: Warming Could Wake Up Volcanos (MSNBC), Global Warming May Trigger More Volcanoes (Telegraph, UK). If you know of any more, feel free to post a comment.

The Rebel Orbits of the Rebel Planets

2010-04-13T17:38:00.014-05:00

When are the stars and planets going to conform to the law passed by human governments?

Or conform to the doctrine of human science?

Funny questions, but governments seem to think that their laws are more important than the actual laws of the cosmos it sometimes seems.

The universe does not change when we pass environmental laws or when we make doctrinal declarations about this or that cosmic reality.

That applies to our sense of cosmology, our hypothetical sense of the cosmos, and our theoretical sense of the cosmos, taught in the state universities.

Yes, the state has an approved dogma for you and I to learn, which they call "education", but some scholars have a different name for it:

And, of course, there are power systems in place to facilitate this. Throughout history it's been mostly the property holders or the educated classes who've tended to support power systems. And that's a large part of what I think education is — it's a form of indoctrination. You have to reconstruct a picture of the world in order to be conducive to the interests and concerns of the educated classes, and this involves a lot of self-deceit.

(Noam Chomsky, emphasis added). Another scholar, a noted physicist, uses similar language to point out his belief that much of "advanced" scientific theory is nothing more than fantasy:

Quantum mechanics is an incredible theory that explains all sorts of things that couldn’t be explained before, starting with the stability of atoms. But when you accept the weirdness of quantum mechanics [in the macro world], you have to give up the idea of space-time as we know it from Einstein. The greatest weirdness here is that it [quantum mechanics] doesn’t make sense. If you follow the rules, you come up with something that just isn’t right.

...

The [new Penrose] book is called Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe. Each of those words stands for a major theoretical physics idea. The fashion is string theory; the fantasy has to do with various cosmological schemes, mainly inflationary cosmology [which suggests that the universe inflated exponentially within a small fraction of a second after the Big Bang]. Big fish, those things are. It’s almost sacrilegious to attack them. And the other one, even more sacrilegious, is quantum mechanics at all levels—so that’s the faith. People somehow got the view that you really can’t question it.

(The Memes of Penrose, see Discover). In general these scholars point out that you are judged by how well you learn their scientific dogma, not on how well you learn how to think or apply rigorous scientific processes.

Thus, after all your hard work to memorize doctrine and dogma, every once in awhile you get blind sided with some new information, new data, or new experimental results that give you reason to throw out the window some of the textbooks you memorized from:

Planets are thought to form in the disc of gas and dust encircling a young star. This proto-planetary disc rotates in the same direction as the star itself, and up to now it was expected that planets that form from the disc would all orbit in more or less the same plane, and that they would move along their orbits in the same direction as the star's rotation.

...

They even found that six exoplanets in this extended study (of which two are new discoveries) have retrograde motion: they orbit their star in the "wrong" direction.

"The new results really challenge the conventional wisdom that planets should always orbit in the same direction as their stars spin," says Andrew Cameron of the University of St Andrews, who presented the new results at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM2010) in Glasgow this week.

(Turning Planetary Theory Upside Down). That is the way it has been for decade upon decade, however, that is not what scientists tend to feel, because they actually have made a faith out of portions of what they call science.

Delusional Government Must Be On LSD

2010-04-02T09:48:00.015-05:00

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) seems to be of the opinion, as is the U.S. federal government in general, that they make the rules.

They are constantly hallucinating that the environment of this planet earth must go by their EPA rules and regulations, and must patiently await until the all-wise EPA decides what is fit here and what is not.

Black is white and white is black in their delusional world inspired by the toxic effects that power has on them.

One day a president says it is great to drill baby drill, and the next day the government says this Regulation X will do just fine for the environment.

The photos in this post are of the planet Mars taken from a satellite in orbit.

Mars looks more and more like a planet that once had a watery environment, but was somehow destroyed.

The reality facing the federal government is that the earth's environment is being made into the image of Mars.

That is, the earth's ecosystem can also be destroyed and the earth can become like Mars.

More to the point, contrary to their delusion, the governments are not the ultimate deciders of what environmental law is.

The only legal decision they are allowed to make, in terms of human extinction contrasted with human enlightened evolution, is to obey the regulations of the cosmos or not to.

They can not make regulations that govern the cosmos as they seem to think they can.

Thus, the new epoch that currently plagues us must give way to an epoch of mature cosmic adults who are aware of where they are and who they are.

The Criminally Insane Epoch Arises

2010-03-28T10:58:00.015-05:00

The fact that human extinction can only come about via choices made by segments of humanity, who do not care enough about their fellow sojourners on this planet to allow them to live on, is perplexing.

Obviously the notion that there are those who have caused the deaths of millions of people is not a fantasy; no, in fact it is well documented in history.

The notion that it is the result of criminally insane cognition has also been considered.

At any rate, there needs to be a term we can use to describe the times we live in.

Some serious scientists are petitioning their peers for an official term for our era of environmental devastation, requesting that it be called The Anthropocene Epoch:

The scientists propose that, in just two centuries, humans have wrought such vast and unprecedented changes to our world that we actually might be ushering in a new geological time interval, and alter the planet for millions of years.

Zalasiewicz, Williams, Steffen and Crutzen contend that recent human activity, including stunning population growth, sprawling megacities and increased use of fossil fuels, have changed the planet to such an extent that we are entering what they call the Anthropocene (New Man) Epoch.

First proposed by Crutzen more than a decade ago, the term Anthropocene has provoked controversy. However, as more potential consequences of human activity -- such as global climate change and sharp increases in plant and animal extinctions -- have emerged, Crutzen's term has gained support. Currently, the worldwide geological community is formally considering whether the Anthropocene should join the Jurassic, Cambrian and other more familiar units on the Geological Time Scale.

(Science Daily). The tenets of ecocosmology would have us take care of our environment, this planet's ecosystem, so that we have a chance to avoid extinction as a species.

These new revelations cast some doubt on that vision, and do support the notion that governments will probably resort to triage as a global policy.

Goodbye Itsy Bitsy Atlantis

2010-03-24T10:05:00.010-05:00

India & Bangladesh will fight no longer over an island in the Bay of Bengal.

The rising ocean level, as a result of global warming, has sunk it beneath the waves, like the legendary Atlantis of ancient times.

Even though war has been avoided this time, the effects of the rising oceans in the future, because it will cause mass migrations, may lead to conflicts or even wars.

The scientists in India report:

The uninhabited territory south of the Hariabhanga river was known as New Moore Island to the Indians and South Talpatti Island to the Bangladeshis.

Recent satellites images show the whole island under water, says the School of Oceanographic Studies in Calcutta.

Its scientists say other nearby islands could also vanish as sea levels rise.

(BBC). There are populated islands that face the same fate, some of which have governments who know how to make the point.

We really do not know if we can stop the rise of ocean levels, but we know that if we do not it will destroy what we call world civilization.

Billions of people will live on into the post-civilization world, with oral tales of lands that sank below the sea.

UPDATE: The first inhabited island has now gone under as a result of global warming induced ocean rise:

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

(Climaction, see also this and this). We can't call it apocalyptic predictions anymore, it should now be referred to as history and history still in the making.

Being Natural Is Not Always Good - 2

2010-03-05T09:48:00.016-06:00

A post on this blog a while back offended some people.

There are those who evidently think that the natural world is full of good and only good, so that nothing "bad" ever happens that is natural.

The frequency of earthquakes recently, which kill hundreds of thousands of people, is a natural phenomenon that terrorises the human and other species.

These events show that there are terrifying events against innocents that seem to be built into the cosmos.

In that sense there is natural terrorism which is not "good".

Asteroids, another natural phenomenon in the sense they are not man made, have even made some species extinct:

A panel of 41 international experts ... reviewed 20 years' worth of research to determine the cause of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction, which happened around 65 million years ago. The extinction wiped out more than half of all species on the planet, including the dinosaurs, bird-like pterosaurs and large marine reptiles, clearing the way for mammals to become the dominant species on Earth.

The new review of the evidence shows that the extinction was caused by a massive asteroid slamming into Earth at Chicxulub (pronounced chick-shoo-loob) in Mexico.

(Science Daily, see also). Not so nice for a natural event is it? Great quantities of the oil reserves buried under the earth are also, in my opinion, the results of catastrophes that have happened during the history of this planet:

The original organic source material of both oil shale and petroleum was at least associated with, and probably derived from, at least in part, green algae, since Treibs (28) has found chlorophyll porphyrine in all oil shales examined by him and in all petroleums containing asphalt or, in other words, in all petroleums not purified by selective adsorption during migration. This discovery of chlorophyll porphyrins is undoubtedly the most important single discovery bearing upon the question of petroleum origin. It definitely connects up both oil shales and petroleum with green algae and proves that both have never been at any time in their history subjected to high temperatures and, in agreement with other evidence, shows that the original organic source material was deposited sufficiently rapidly to seal in the organic debris under anaerobic conditions.

(Ohio Journal Of Science; Vol. 48, Num. 4; emphasis added). If catastrophes destroyed the dinosaurs, why would it not also destroy other animal and plant species, burying large masses of them instantly?

At one time scientists were dead set against any catastrophe theories, because for one thing, the concepts of biological evolution were taught as if there was a perfecting process in place where everything was heading naturally to a better place.

Disruptive catastrophe was not seen as part of a perfecting process, but rather as anathema to it.

All we need to do is look at the nature of our Sun, and if we give it the full import we should, we see that catastrophe is natural to the cosmos as it is currently functioning.

Part of our avoidance of extinction, then, is to avoid the catastrophes built into the cosmos, not to ignore them.

eMail From Repower America

2010-03-01T06:18:00.008-06:00

I received this email from Repower America:

Next week could make or break America's climate and energy future.

Last summer, the House passed a comprehensive clean energy and climate bill that could create millions of clean energy jobs and begin to address the climate crisis. Now, a new Senate version, with significant support from key Senators, could be less than a week away* -- but lobbyists from Big Oil and Coal are already lining up to do whatever they can to gut critical provisions.

We can't let lobbyists and special interests win. America needs clean energy and the jobs it will bring to our economy.

That's why we're launching our biggest calling campaign ever. We're joining forces with a coalition of climate groups to create a perfect storm of grassroots pressure from Tuesday through Thursday of next week. Can you get us off to a big start by pledging to call your Senators next Tuesday?

Clicking here will record your pledge to call next Tuesday.

[CLICK HERE TO PLEDGE.]

Your calls were crucial to shutting down Senator Lisa Murkowski's attack on the Clean Air Act last month.

Now, with the Senate negotiating the contents of this critical new bill, its fate is in our hands too. We need to keep our Senators' phones ringing off the hook -- the more they understand that passing this bill is our top priority, the more they will make it theirs.

To get it done, we're setting the ambitious goal of 20,000 calls from the Climate Protection Action Fund alone next week. And to reach that number, we want to start off with 1,000 pledges to call next Tuesday that we can count on from committed supporters like you. Can you help us reach our goal?

Clicking here will record your pledge to call your Senator next Tuesday.

Successful legislation isn't just important here in the U.S. As we saw at the Copenhagen Climate Conference, countless nations are relying on our action to catalyze global efforts to promote clean energy and reduce carbon pollution.

But for this bill to make a real impact, it's got to include two things:

1) Strong investment in clean energy to create American manufacturing and construction jobs, and

2) A cap on carbon pollution that limits the amount of carbon companies can emit, giving them incentives to reduce emissions while holding violators accountable.

Your calls have made a difference before. And next week, your barrage of phone calls will tell our Senators to stop wasting time, stop caving to big oil and coal, and finally pass a strong clean energy and climate bill -- because we can't afford the consequences of their inaction.

Please click here now to pledge to make a call to your Senators to support strong clean energy and climate legislation.

Thanks,

Dave Boundy
Campaign Manager
Repower America

* Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson, "Reid demands climate bill ASAP," Washington Post - Post Carbon blog, February 24, 2010.

Chronesthesia Must Replace Amnesia

2010-02-25T09:53:00.009-06:00

We have bemoaned the battles between religion and science concerning human origins.

We have advocated letting go of that, replacing it with a view to our future, so that we may take the steps to insure that we avoid certain human extinction.

Looking into the future mentally is said to be a purely human trait:

Setting humans apart from other species is the ability to travel subjectively through time, a process termed chronesthesia. Mental time travel enables people to tailor their behavior to satisfy the challenges of daily life.

(Psychological Science). We are aware of experiments that contradict that premise, however, we do feel that humanity is the lead species in the endeavour to comply with the tenets of ecocosmology.

Currently we are influenced more by amnesia, about our planet, our solar system, our Sun, and our future, than we are by Chronesthesia.

Is it time to do some mental time travel?

Tyranny Of Dogma In Science

2010-02-19T11:58:00.011-06:00

The common public relations front which scientists naturally like to put out there for all to see is that they are not like the political world, the religious world, or any other world that uses dogma in place of method.

There are those who set forth a lot of documentation to counter that notion, and to point out that it is a myth:

"Textbooks present science as a noble search for truth, in which progress depends on questioning established ideas. But for many scientists, this is a cruel myth. They know from bitter experience that disagreeing with the dominant view is dangerous - especially when that view is backed by powerful interest groups. Call it suppression of intellectual dissent. The usual pattern is that someone does research or speaks out in a way that threatens a powerful interest group, typically a government, industry or professional body. As a result, representatives of that group attack the critic's ideas or the critic personally-by censoring writing, blocking publications, denying appointments or promotions, withdrawing research grants, taking legal actions, harassing, blacklisting, spreading rumors."

(The Suppression of Inconvenient Facts). It would be one thing if our science had a track record of always being correct, never having to change fundamental doctrines or theories, but that is far from the case.

The case is that fundamental scientific dogma changes, and it seems that yet another dogma has bitten the dust:

A temple complex in turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution ...

The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is "unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date," according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford's archeology program. Enthusing over the "huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art" at Göbekli, Hodder—who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites—says: "Many people think that it changes everything … It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong."

(Newsweek). This is another one of those situations we are constantly pointing out.

We caution the scientific world that it has no business whatsoever denigrating people or ideas contrary to current dogma.

It is time for us to start recognizing how primitive our science is, instead of how enlightened it is, so that we can get where we must to avoid extinction.

The Extinction Clock Nears Midnight

2010-02-17T17:36:00.016-06:00

Most of us have heard of the "doomsday clock", which is moved closer or further away from midnight from time to time.

It is arbitrary, so it is not linked, in any specific scientific manner, to the reality of human extinction.

Here on this blog we feel that the earth and cosmos are the ultimate clock, so we see the "doomsday clock" as being somewhat farcical.

Doom is not a function of midnight, old, or young, rather it is a function of ignorance, which is composed of ignoring.

Lake Baikal is said to be the deepest fresh water lake on the planet which holds one of each five gallons of all the Earth's surface fresh water.

Nevertheless, governments do not respect the wisdom of age, thus the oldest and the youngest are all threatened by government dysfunction (doom) worldwide.

Russia, under the control of Putin, is following the example of the ecocidal mania of governments worldwide, and is now threatening Lake Baikal:

As the oldest, largest and deepest lake on planet Earth, ancient Lake Baikal is known as the “grand dame” of all lakes. UNESCO declared it a World Heritage due to its stunning bio-diversity. Most of its 2500 some odd plant and animal species, including the freshwater seal, evolved in pristine isolation and are found nowhere else on the planet.

In late January, Russian police raided the offices of the Baikal Environmental Wave group after it criticized a plan to reopen a paper mill next to Lake Baikal in Siberia that had been closed since 2008 due to pollution fears. Russian PM Vladimir Putin decreed that the mill could reopen. The Baikalsk Paper and Pulp Mill is the biggest employer in Baikalsk, a town of 17,000. The mill is owned by Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska.

(Daily Galaxy). The ecocidal sameness of governments really comes out, under the microscope of comparative observation, doesn't it?

The U.S. is ramping up construction of nuclear power plants even though Russia has shown us Chernobyl, we have 3-mile Island, Italy has the mafia ocean killers, and everyone everywhere knows the planet is being destroyed.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.

The Tiniest Scientists Are Very Old

2010-02-06T03:40:00.002-06:00

Tenet Four of the tenets of ecocosmology indicates that we should preserve all species.

One good reason is that they may have within them some quantum of intelligence we need in order to survive as a species in this cosmos.

A complete field of science, biomimicry, is dedicated to listening and watching what other species have to say.

While watching the other species in the world around us, scientists noticed that some of the tiniest of them are good at quantum mechanics:

A team of University of Toronto chemists have made a major contribution to the emerging field of quantum biology, observing quantum mechanics at work in photosynthesis in marine algae.

"There's been a lot of excitement and speculation that nature may be using quantum mechanical practices," says chemistry professor Greg Scholes, lead author of a new study published in Nature. "Our latest experiments show that normally functioning biological systems have the capacity to use quantum mechanics in order to optimize a process as essential to their survival as photosynthesis."

(Quantum Mechanics at Work in Photosynthesis). Algae have been familiar with these quantum mechanical processes for nearly two billion years.

Note also that these creatures use all their ability to help others, including humanity, for without photosynthesis we would not exist today.

It behoves us to learn what we can from the cosmos around us, including our ecosystem here on the earth, because we have a long road ahead of us, according to the tenets of ecocosmology.

It behoves us to stop destroying species at such an alarming rate.

Mystery Bubble - Signal, Grid, or What?

2010-02-04T10:16:00.009-06:00

The hexagon of Saturn is not the only geometric, or should I say astrometric, shape that has scientific folk scratching their heads these days.

An astronomer at Mount Wilson Observatory, Dave Jurasevich, observed a sphere-shaped phenomenon in an area of Cygnus shown in the photo.

The sphere is about the size of our solar system, evidently with a star within its parameters.

Those who are aware of Dyson's theories about sphere shapes in space were quick to revisit his theories.

You can read more about the bubble here.

We discussed the subject of signals from space a la SETI in a post here, suggesting that detecting planets around stars that are near the end of their life cycle could be a more likely candidate for signal origination.

Put two and two together, a sphere, a star near the end of its life cycle, and the odds of a signal are theoretically increased.

Whatever the source, these objects out in the cosmos are wonderfully mysterious and interesting.

Cassini Stays At Saturn Until 2017

2010-02-04T07:31:00.006-06:00

A very successful NASA mission, Cassini, has been given many more orbits of the gas giant Saturn.

It is a multi-national effort:

"The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL".

(Cassini, NASA). We have covered some of the mind boggling, beautiful, mysterious, and even uncanny developments during the years of the mission.

Space travel, competent space travel that is, is a must it seems for the survival of the human species.

Competent space travel means we lose the loser rocket science we use today, and develop a new physics for new technology to replace this ancient form of propulsion.

One major accomplishment, here on earth, of the mission is that nations worked together to improve our global understanding of our solar system.

The Toxic Mind Produces A Toxic World

2010-02-02T03:52:00.003-06:00

Scientists have been observing the increase of a toxin more powerful by far, at producing global warming, than carbon dioxide:

Despite a decade of efforts worldwide to curb its release into the atmosphere, NOAA and university scientists have measured increased emissions of a greenhouse gas that is thousands of times more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide and persists in the atmosphere for nearly 300 years.

(Emissions of Potent Greenhouse Gas, emphasis added). It is fortunate for us that HFC-23 is a small percentage of greenhouse gases, so, this post is all about not letting it get out of hand.

Scientists acknowledge that the quantity of HFC-23 in our atmosphere is increasing despite our efforts to limit it.

Meanwhile a toxin that stays around for 20,000 years, nuclear toxin, is being embraced as nuclear energy is being embraced as a solution to the energy crisis.

Twenty six new plants are awaiting permits.

The origin of destructive, runaway toxins in our ecosphere is the toxins of power inside the minds of those who wield power in the nations of the world.

There is a blog that focuses on those toxins as a means of limiting environmental toxins.

Being Natural Is Not Always Good

2010-02-01T06:59:00.006-06:00

Humanity is a natural member of the species of the Earth, but the problem is that we do not act like we are.

Our behavior is not in accord with the balance in nature, the natural laws of our world.

In fact, we are corrupting the natural systems so badly that they are becoming unnatural in the sense of turning on their own, "mother nature", and thereby becoming suicidal at our human command.

We, the human species, could just as well be called unnatural aliens, bent on wide spread destruction of the Earth.

An article a while back pointed this out clearly:

The world faces a compounding series of crises driven by human activity, which existing governments and institutions are increasingly powerless to cope with, a group of eminent environmental scientists and economists has warned.

...

"Energy, food and water crises, climate disruption, declining fisheries, ocean acidification, emerging diseases and increasing antibiotic resistance are examples of serious, intertwined global-scale challenges spawned by the accelerating scale of human activity,” say the researchers, who come from Australia, Sweden, the United States, India, Greece and The Netherlands.

(Human-made Crises, emphasis added). Some natural terrorism is not a result of human behavior, but that portion of it that will make us extinct in the near term is our own doing or undoing as the case may be.

It has been noted in the past that the government solution to the coming catastrophe is triage for the masses, but as the movie "2012" points out, they are probably making secret Arks for themselves.

We should really consider monitoring government closely because chemical toxins seem to have their genesis in the toxins of power lurking invisibly around us.

Global Warming Spotted By NASA

2010-01-22T07:34:00.005-06:00

There is a growing abundance of evidence for global warming, global climate change, and the coming future shock to civilization.

Read about some of it on Dredd Blog posts.

Meanwhile the deniers dig deeper into the dark recesses of their being as they run from the reality into the fantasy lands, infecting others with the denial meme as they go along.

NASA has determined that the 2008 cooling was an aberration in the long term trend:

A new analysis of global surface temperatures by NASA scientists finds the past year was tied for the second warmest since 1880. In the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year on record.

Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade because of a strong La Nina that cooled the tropical Pacific Ocean, 2009 saw a return to a near-record global temperatures as the La Nina diminished, according to the new analysis by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

(Last Decade Was Warmest on Record). It is time to turn the ship of state around before new meaning is given to Waterloo.

Natural Terrorism v Human Terrorism

2010-01-18T05:50:00.015-06:00

Sorry if I offend naturalists with the term "natural terrorism".

But the facts which compose reality are not our own.

We can have our own version which we call opinion, but the actual facts are not personal, they are global and therefore belong to none of us personally, but to all of us collectively.

What brings this post up is the ongoing earthquake disaster in Haiti, the great earthquake & tsunami of 2004 in the Indian Ocean, and an email I received from some mystics about the word "eco-cosmology".

The gentleman who emailed me wondered why I did not mention the word "eco-cosmology" as being his creation since he brought it up in a chapter in a book he wrote some decades ago, where his primary focus was eco-philosophy, eco-theology, and the like.

I explained that this blog is "ecocosmology" not "eco-cosmology", then offered to let him write a post here, or I would write one about his blog, or whatever.

In the mean time I put a link to his blog on the blog list here, thinking that would be a compliment in the mean time.

For whatever reason he did not want a link to his site from this blog, and curtly severed the conversation.

One of the statements on his blog is "the cosmos is all light" or something toward a fuzzy feeling effect.

My take on this is that science offends some mystics, and some of the valid mysticism offends some scientists.

Nevertheless, I can't bother myself with the hurt feelings of others, but if they can prove or disprove some aspect of science or mysticism that is fine with me.

But hurt feelings or opinionated offence will not dissuade me from seeking the facts that are not mine personally, but belong to us all.

With that in mind, I advance the notion that terrorism is a natural phenomenon in this galaxy.

It wasn't all love and light that brought the tsunami disaster or the Haiti disaster was it?

It was natural terrorism.

People were killed, maimed, and destroyed.

People were terrified, which is pure natural terrorism.

When people do that to other people it is human terrorism.

All terrorism is "bad", but some of it is natural bad, some is human bad.

The tenets of Ecocosmology point out that the Sun, at some point, will become a terrorist, destroy every living thing on this planet, then destroy the planet itself.

You can call that light and get all warm and fuzzy with it if you want to, but I call it natural, cosmic terrorism.

If our solar and stellar science is correct stars support life for a span of time, but then they take it all back ... UNLESS ... we become cosmic adults.

This blog takes the position that we become cosmic adults via the developments of memetic evolution, not biological evolution.

We evolve our cosmic ability by working together toward developing competent technology for our collective good, rather than killing each other off, killing the ecosystem of this planet, thereby becoming unfit to survive in this cosmos.

The war on terrorism must be a cosmic effort against natural, cosmic terrorism as well as our human habit of depraved terrorism of various and sundry sorts.

The tenets of Ecocosmology point out that we can become fit, we can survive natural terrorism, if we first rid ourselves of human terrorism.

P.S. The photo at the top of this post is from Los Alamos National Laboratory reflecting, in part, the nature of our terror based technology today.

The military has control of the development of technology so we use primitive rocket science, mainly focused on delivering terror on this planet in the form of WMD.

The definition of "terror" is:

ter⋅ror –noun

1. intense, sharp, overmastering fear ...

2. an instance or cause of intense fear or anxiety; quality of causing terror ...

3. any period of frightful violence or bloodshed ...

4. violence or threats of violence used for intimidation or coercion; terrorism.

(Dictionary). The definition of "ism" is:

ism –noun

a distinctive doctrine, theory, system, or practice

(Dictionary). It would seem, then, that a natural action which causes terror fits the mold of this post because we are talking about a solar system wherein terror occurs.

Terror is a matter of degree of fear, it is extreme fear, and need not be caused by humans to have the effect of terrorism.

But either way, terror is not good so neither is terrorism, no matter what the source.

Faster Than We Think?

2010-01-14T06:08:00.005-06:00

As readers who frequent this blog know, one of the tenets of ecocosmology is that we must master competent space travel by losing the dumb "rocket science" we currently employ to clumsily try to shuttle us around our solar system.

We need that competent technology to replace chemical propulsion systems that have their origin several hundred years B.C.E.

If the Kepler mission finds habitable worlds we can't get there with the military oil complex's war oriented technology that is as ancient and incompetent as war is for solving cosmic problems.

There are some new discoveries being looked at over at Los Alamos National Laboratories that may clue us in to a faster than light phenomenon.

There is a need for a new physics that must consider the potential for near or beyond light speed travel.

That is because even planets orbiting other stars cannot be reached with our current physics and technology.

Clean Air Under Attack

2010-01-13T08:54:00.000-06:00

Dear Friend,

It's an outrage. 2010 should start in a way that reflects our movement's amazing accomplishments from last year -- moving the ball forward to passage of comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation. Instead, our elected leaders are proposing policies that would set us back decades and let the worst polluters completely off the hook.

Despite the chorus of alarm bells sounding the need to address the climate crisis and stop polluting the air our families breathe and the water we drink, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski and her allies are attacking the Clean Air Act -- for the second time in six months.

And it gets worse. Last night, news broke that the original version of the amendment was literally drafted with lobbyists for the oil and coal industry.*

We can't let this attack succeed. Write your Senators right now and tell them to vote NO on Senator Murkowski's proposal.

Take Action

We defeated this same effort once already, just six months ago -- but the fossil fuel lobby is at it again. The amendment would strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its ability to regulate most carbon pollution, letting the worst polluters completely off the hook.

Efforts like this are designed to do one thing and one thing only -- slow our transition to a clean energy economy that will create millions of new jobs, reduce our dependence on foreign oil and solve the climate crisis.

Help flood your Senators with messages to vote NO on this attack on the Clean Air Act.

The very last thing we should do in the fight to end the climate crisis is throw away tools that we already know are effective at reducing pollution. But that's exactly what Senator Murkowski's proposal does.

For decades, the Clean Air Act has kept millions of tons of pollutants out of our air and water. Senator Murkowski's proposal would create an Alaska-sized loophole in the Clean Air Act, giving a pass to the biggest carbon polluters.

Email your Senators now and tell them to vote NO on Senator Murkowski's amendment -- and protect our air, water and climate:

http://cpaf.repoweramerica.org/cleanair

In 2010, our movement to solve the climate crisis will face its biggest test yet -- passing comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation. But if Senator Murkowski's amendment passes, some in Congress will use it as an excuse to keep stalling -- and the long overdue promise of progress toward a 21st century clean energy economy will be lost.

You helped stop this toxic amendment once before. Together, we can and must stop it again.

Thank you,

Al Gore

Find & You Shall Seek

2010-01-05T06:16:00.006-06:00

The Kepler mission that is looking for a new home for all of us received first photo contact from the NASA spacecraft some months back.

The Kepler mission is to hunt for another "earth" for all of us.

Various articles point out the reason that there is no choice in this matter. We must eventually find another planet since this one will be destroyed by the Sun some day.

There is a post on the similarities, in some ways, that religion and science have on this topic.

Kepler has found planetary objects so the mission is producing results. Five exo-planets were recently detected and are being analysed.

Congratulations Kepler mission folks!

Keep looking for a planet we must seek to get to and live on.

Dandelion Farmers of the World Unite!

2009-12-31T09:49:00.008-06:00

Even I could grow Dandelions, but I have a difficult time not growing them, if you know what I mean.

That which may seem to be bad news can actually lead to some good news upon occasion. For example, Time Magazine has awarded the invention of the year to those who invented a way to make rubber from Dandelions:

A fast-spreading fungus is ravaging the world's rubber trees. But thanks to researchers at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology, there's now an alternative: dandelions. Scientists have long known that the weed's sap contains latex, but it's difficult to harvest because dandelion ooze polymerizes — goes gummy — when it hits the air. The Fraunhofer team overcame that sticky problem by switching off a key enzyme. The new, improved dandelion produces 500% more usable latex than the old weed does.

(Time). Add to that the fact that the methanol economy would allow plastics and fuels to literally be made from the air / atmosphere around us, powered by wind, wave, and solar generated electricity, and we can say "the green revolution got game baby"!

We could have the best year ever in 2010 if we really want to. I mean really want to in the sense of rejecting some world destroying bad habits.

eMail: Alliance For Climate Protection

2009-12-21T16:45:00.002-06:00

Dear Friend,

In the United States, more than half of all global warming pollution comes from just a handful of sources.

The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to use the Clean Air Act to reduce emissions from these big polluters. It is a major decision, and the EPA wants to hear from you about it first.

Tell the EPA you wholeheartedly support their proposal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from our biggest polluters.

The Clean Air Act has proven an extremely effective weapon in reducing other types of air pollution. Using it to reduce emissions from our biggest GHG polluters, including coal-fired power plants, would be a powerful tool for reducing the carbon placed into our fragile atmosphere and thus for fighting the climate crisis.

Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA could require new facilities to utilize technologies that would limit their greenhouse gas emissions. It would also require existing facilities to limit their emissions should they upgrade. The EPA has successfully used this process for decades, and it works.

Last week we scored a major victory when the EPA finalized their determination that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. That decision gives the EPA access to new tools to fight pollution -- including using the Clean Air Act to regulate the biggest polluters -- and it was pushed forward by over 380,000 public comments from across America.

We need to continue voicing our support for these EPA efforts and demanding real action to reduce carbon pollution. The EPA is leading the way to curb our carbon pollution and we must support them in their efforts.

Using the Clean Air Act to regulate GHG pollution by the worst offenders would help reduce harmful emissions while advancing the development of clean energy technologies and ultimately a new clean energy economy.

Tell the EPA today that you support this common sense, cost effective approach:

http://acp.climateprotect.org/epadec

Thanks,

Maggie L. Fox
President and CEO
The Alliance for Climate Protection

A Lovely Planet In The Neighborhood?

2009-12-20T06:01:00.020-06:00

Upton Sinclair is said to have made a very lasting observation concerning the nature of humanity: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".

Scientists are paid salaries, which seems to make them very energetic in the direction they "should" be:

The extrasolar planet, now named GJ 1214b, is about 40 light-years away.

It orbits a red dwarf star.

It is the only known "Super-Earth" exoplanet — worlds that have masses between Earth and Neptune — with a confirmed atmosphere.

"Astronomically speaking, this [planet] is on our block," meaning it's in our cosmic neighborhood, said study leader David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Mass. "For perspective, our own TV signals have already passed beyond the distance of this star."

(Space). Sometimes "astronomically speaking" is misleading, but for the most part it is probably just a bad habit.

For example, our B.C.E. technology (burning chemicals to produce thrust in rockets) which we fondly call rocket science, is not going to get us to the part of "the block" where the "near" star with planet GJ-1214b is.

Light travels at about 670,618,800 miles an hour (186,283 miles per second x 60 x 60) or 5,878,644,400,800 per year (670,618,800 x 24 x 365.25).

A planet orbiting a star 40 "light years" away, then, is 235,145,776,032,000 (5,878,644,400,800 x 40) miles away.

Our spacecraft Voyager I and II travel at about 38,000 miles per hour, or 333,108,000 miles a year (38,000 x 24 x 365.25).

So it would take them 705,914.53 years (235,145,776,032,000 / 333,108,000), one way, to get to that planet salaried scientists say is "on our block".

Many scientists' salaries come from military sources in the Pentagon budget.

The military scientists are only concerned with being able to destroy things on the earth, so "rocket science" is the apex of their intellect.

If a new discovery kills better than the last one, they will love it.

The scientist whose salary must depend on our use of current military rocket science, which is based on principles of technology developed thousands of years ago, is literally involved in a dead end endeavor in more ways than one.

This "rocket science" is not what I call modern, nor is it compliant with the tenets of ecocosmology, because we will cease to exist as a species unless we develop competent space travel technology.

UPDATE: For those who think I might have been a bit hard on the boys, note that my speed calculations were liberal.

That is, the speed I gave as the probable speed for current space craft was probably a bit more than the speed at which they really travel.

I came across an article quoting salaried scientists who did some of that "astronomy speak" I mentioned above.

Notice the way speed is portrayed:

The spacecraft is just a little past the midpoint between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus, and is speeding toward Pluto at a speed of about 750,000 miles (1.2 million km) per day.

(Speedy Spacecraft Now Halfway to Pluto). The rub comes when you calculate the miles per hour of the vehicle (750,000 / 24) which comes out to 31,250.

I had given them a speed of 38,000 miles per hour in the calculation that it would take us 705,914.53 years to get to a star "on our block".

The "Speedy Spacecraft" would take longer than that at 31,250 so note that I was giving the salaried scientists, who tend to bloviate sometimes, the benefit of the doubt.

Email From 350 Dot Org

2009-12-19T13:07:00.002-06:00

Dear Friends,

We need you to read this closely, if you would.

You've always counted on us to tell the truth, and it would be useless to pretend we're happy with the outcome of the Copenhagen climate talks.

You'll likely hear the Copenhagen drama spun in a thousand different ways, but here's our honest take on the outcome: our leaders have been a disappointment, and the talks have ended without any kind of fair, ambitious, or legally binding global agreement. It's unclear whether the weak "accord" which emerged early this morning will provide a platform strong enough to deliver the kind of action we'll need in 2010 and beyond.

That doesn't mean you have failed. On the contrary, the movement you have built around the world allowed everyone to understand the scientific issues at stake. Over and over in Copenhagen, UN delegates came up to anyone wearing a 350 t-shirt with words of wonder and gratitude. We were told repeatedly how much this movement has altered both the tone and substance of these negotiations.

For the first time since these climate talks began almost 20 years ago, a citizens' movement has made it much harder for the great powers to simply impose a weak agreement on everyone else - that's why the US, China, and India had to cut their own deal amongst themselves. Many small nations, poor nations, and vulnerable nations simply refused to go along smoothly with a global suicide pact-because they knew that 350 equaled survival.

Indeed, that very chant--"Three-Five-Oh...Sur-vi-val!"--went up spontaneously among the crowd of hundreds of young people who gathered in the freezing cold at 1 a.m. under the subway stop outside the Bella Center, where the talks were being held in Copenhagen. They hadn't been allowed inside for days -- last night they came to stand outside and deliver the verdict from the movement: this is not enough, this is not over, and we are witnessing a monumental failure of leadership.

That failure can't be allowed to stand. It is our future, the future of every spot on earth and of every person in every generation to come. So we will together, in the weeks and months ahead, figure out how to build a stronger movement, one that will head this earth back where it needs to go. You'll hear from us in the weeks ahead with new ideas, and if you have some of your own please share them by e-mailing organizers@350.org.

We're approaching a period of holiday around much of the world, and when the new year dawns it won't be all that we'd hoped for. But we are confident, and that confidence comes from you. From every corner of the world, in places warm and cold, poor and rich, Muslim and Christian and Hindu and Buddhist and Jewish and none-of-the-above, we share one basic message: 350 equals survival, and we'll stop at nothing to get there.

On we go.

The 350.org team

Another Way Out Of Here

2009-12-12T10:01:00.006-06:00

It is fun to touch upon the countless ways to avoid destroying the home we live in, our home planet the earth.

A German firm builds fully compliant human houses, which they describe as "triple-zero" construction:

Overlooking the city of Stuttgart in southern Germany, a four-story modern glass house stands like a beacon of environmental sustainability. Built in 2000, it was the first in a series of buildings that are "triple-zero," a concept developed by German architect and engineer Werner Sobek, which signifies that the building is energy self-sufficient (zero energy consumed), produces zero emissions, and is made entirely of recyclable materials (zero waste) ... The most recent addition to the triple-zero series raises the bar for energy efficiency: It produces more energy than it uses, Sobek said.

(Scientific American). What an attitude these people have to do it instead of saying it can't be done.

Not only can we can live at peace with the earth, we must, because it is essential to our being able to avoid extinction by passing The Test.

Mystery Hexagon The Great

2009-12-10T12:35:00.005-06:00

The hexagon on Saturn is one of the greatest mysteries the Cassini mission has encountered.

Saturn has a 15 year "day / night" cycle, so when Voyager first took pictures of the hexagon nearly 30 years ago, it was taken in visible light because the Sun was illuminating Saturn's north pole way back then.

Now as the hexagon emerges from the night into the daytime of the "visible light" world of Saturn once again:

After waiting years for the sun to illuminate Saturn's north pole again, cameras aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft have captured the most detailed images yet of the intriguing hexagon shape crowning the planet.

(NASA). Previous Cassini images had to be taken with the infrared cameras because the north pole of Saturn was covered in darkness, in terms of visible light.

As it turns out, these new photos have not accomplished much toward solving this mystery within the Saturn equation, in fact, it may have increased the mystery a bit.

"Let The Planet Hunt Begin" - NASA

2009-12-09T09:37:00.005-06:00

Some people do not understand space missions to be an endeavour mandated by the tenets of ecocosmology.

Or that the strategy of space travel is necessary because of the nature of our solar system and our sun.

Ecocosmology states that human space endeavours must fundamentally be a mission to find a home world we can colonize so as to perpetuate the human species.

NASA says this about the Kepler mission:

NASA's Kepler spacecraft has begun its search for other Earth-like worlds. The mission, which launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on March 6, will spend the next three-and-a-half years staring at more than 100,000 stars for telltale signs of planets. Kepler has the unique ability to find planets as small as Earth that orbit sun-like stars at distances where temperatures are right for possible lakes and oceans.

(NASA Kepler, emphasis added). The obvious in that NASA statement may escape some scientists, but the reality is that focused scientists know that we must find another home world or cease to exist as a species.

They know that because they know the Sun will eventually destroy all of the life on this planet.

What we do not know is when the Sun will destroy the earth.

Tenet one discussions point out that the "when" has become more uncertain due to the recent, unexpected, and revolutionary discoveries concerning a star's life cycle.

Thus, the sooner we find other habitable planets with the Kepler mission the better.

Mafia Contract Out - On Mother Earth

2009-12-08T16:17:00.002-06:00

The most disgusting microcosm of what our species is doing to the earth has recently surfaced.

The Sicilian mob is sinking ships in the Mediterranean Sea.

These are not normal ships that would potentially make a beneficial reef.

No, these are ships that contain deadly radioactive material on board:

Pressure is growing on the Italian government to act over revelations that 30 or more ships with radioactive cargoes, deliberately sunk by the Mafia, may be polluting the Mediterranean.

(The Independent). I think we can dispense with the "may be" and get right to the point.

This is a crime against humanity and should be dealt with as such.

There are reports that human skulls may be in the radioactive material so there is a possible murder case involved as well.

The Illusion of Environmental Security

2009-12-07T13:59:00.004-06:00

The general illusory feeling "it can't happen here" is spreading into the environmental catastrophe realm.

It is getting to be chic to think environmental catastrophe is something that happens to the other people, but not to us.

Thus, it is an illusion.

Currently about half of the earth is suffering drought conditions, in seven years it will be about 60%, and in fifteen years 70% will be suffering from drought.

It causes massive upheaval:

Norman Myers, an Oxford University professor and one of the first scholars to draw attention to the unfolding problem, estimated that by 2050 there will be more than 25 million refugees attributable to climate change, which will replace war and persecution as the leading cause of global displacement.

"The numbers could go off the charts," he said.

(LA Times). Some of the causes of these catastrophic problems cannot be undone because we have already gone too far.

Even the scientist quoted above in the LA Times has his blind spot:

Africa would be heaviest hit because so many people's livelihoods are dependent on farming and livestock.

(ibid, emphasis added). Did you notice that pattern? The "other people" depend on farming but we don't depend on farming because we get our food at the supermarket.

Wrong, every human being and every society is as dependent on farming as the other.

Food does not magically show up in the supermarket by using the Star Trek food making computer.

Reliance on "heroes of war" or superheroes will not change the reality either.

Our food production and delivery system, as well as other life support systems, are subject to severe damage from many natural sources:

IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation.

(New Science, emphasis added). It is a fact that people who know how to farm and raise livestock, who are not dependent on delivery trucks and supermarkets, could in fact be more secure and last longer when environmental catastrophe and upheaval takes place.

It depends on where they are as well as the circumstances involved.

In an old Mothers of Invention song there were some prescient lyrics:

We are the other people
We are the other people
We are the other people
You're the other people too

(Mother People). It was a wise thing to consider, so don't reject truth or fact because of where or who it comes from.

The suicide bombers are not the only ones to think the other people are the only ones that will be harmed.

Sun Spots Reappear

2009-12-04T11:00:00.001-06:00

After an unusual hiatus sun spots are back.

There are some posts on Dredd Blog that explain why sun spot activity is a national security issue.

Also discussed is why it is an issue in the greening of the power grid which will be done by upgrading it to accept wind and solar generated electricity.

During the upgrade the power grid needs to be made more safe from other events associated with Sun Spots, or catastrophic results may develop.

The good news is that the Sun has not gone strange on us into some mode we do not understand with our current scientific model of the Sun.

New Judas Rising North of America

2009-12-03T18:16:00.010-06:00

It hurts when those one expects to behave badly do so, but it really, really hurts when those who have always been friends turn to become bad actors.

According to Monbiot, this is exactly what the government of Canada has done to the people of Canada and to the world:

When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world’s peace-keeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, well-governed? Think again. This country’s government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee’s tea party. So amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I’ve broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto.

So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petrostate. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

...

In Copenhagen next week, this country will do everything in its power to wreck the talks.

...

It feels odd to be writing this. The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada. How could that be true?

(Monbiot, see also Guardian UK). The people around the world who have considered Canada to be one of the beacons, one of the sources of environmental sanity, one of the places to always be a solid hope for the future of humanity, now fear that Canada has fallen into the abyss of human error.

Some Way Out of Here

2009-11-29T09:20:00.009-06:00

It isn't often that I can see a path that fits what the Joker said to the Thief: "There must be some way outta here said the Joker to the Thief ..."(All Along The Watchtower, by Bob Dylan).

I mean some way out of the energy crisis.

A device has been built by University of Michigan scientists and students.

It takes water current (e.g. wave motion) and converts it into electricity:

A revolutionary device that can harness energy from slow-moving rivers and ocean currents could provide enough power for the entire world, scientists claim.

(Ocean Wave Electric Generator). A technical discussion of the physics and mechanics of it are discussed here.

The electricity produced by the generator can then be used to convert earth atmosphere into methanol.

This process actually takes the "green house gas" carbon dioxide (CO²) out of the atmosphere during the process. Yes, green house gas is converted into clean energy in the form of methanol during the process.

Another positive in this approach is that methanol works in current internal combustion engines, including gas and diesel versions. Methanol is not ethanol.

See, there is a way "outta here". Several ways.

The next post in this series is here.

What Do You Mean - World Civilization?

2009-11-27T03:20:00.004-06:00

World civilization means the nations of the world interconnected by trade, travel, treaties, and international commerce.

So, when climate change scientists talk about dangers to the existence of civilization they do not mean that the population of human beings as a species is going to become extinct.

In other words, the human species would live on even if civilization ended.

For example, Greenland alone has enough ice that if that ice was to melt it would raise the world's ocean level by 21 feet (7 meters).

That alone would destroy the ocean-port cities of the civilized world, and thereby destroy world civilization by destroying its primary commerce.

But if you add Antarctica to the equation, much more than just the coastal ports would be lost, because the ocean level would rise beyond belief.

Scientists have not been worried about Antarctica before 2006 when it was shown that some of its western ice sheet was getting a bit shaky.

The eastern ice sheet, however, was considered to be "inviolate", meaning "not to worry", nothing will ever happen to it.

But like many things climate scientists considered to be "inviolate", the eastern ice sheet of Antarctica is now going somewhere:

Using gravity measurement data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission, a team of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin has found that the East Antarctic ice sheet-home to about 90 percent of Earth's solid fresh water and previously considered stable-may have begun to lose ice.
...
"While we are seeing a trend of accelerating ice loss in Antarctica, we had considered East Antarctica to be inviolate," said lead author and Senior Research Scientist Jianli Chen of the university's Center for Space Research. "But if it is losing mass, as our data indicate, it may be an indication the state of East Antarctica has changed. Since it's the biggest ice sheet on Earth, ice loss there can have a large impact on global sea level rise in the future."

(Science Daily). I am really sorry if that scares Barbie and Ken, but we must keep in touch with reality if we are to do anything about it.

Write your congress people and the president to let them know you do not want this trend to continue one second longer than it has to.

Otherwise we will be giving new meaning to "Atlantis" some day if our descendants live far inland from what is now considered to the the coast.

They would live in a society that would be much like the society now living in the mountain regions of Afghanistan and Tibet.

Space exploration as we now know it would be ended to await the development of a new civilization which would again have to resume what humanity must do in order to survive the demise of the Sun.

Extinction Is Not For The Sane At Heart

2009-11-26T06:20:00.009-06:00

Nations become suicidal sometimes when enough people lose a grasp on reality to begin to act like an individual person does when that individual threatens to jump off the bridge.

Take NAZI Germany in the late 1930's as an example. Thankfully Germany fully recovered.

We have a growing problem of suicidal thinking in the United States.

People who are primarily not college graduates, or otherwise educated about ecology and environment, are buying into a notion that humanity can do no permanent or serious damage to the environment, in terms of changing the climate.

Some Russian hackers stole emails from a climate research facility which they interpreted as proof of a vast global conspiracy to deceive the world about climate change.

A NASA scientist was interviewed to get his take on the situation:

Last week, someone leaked e-mails obtained by hacking into the server at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Activists who have long denied the reality of climate change ... say they show that climatologists have engaged in a grand conspiracy to manufacture a case that global warming is occurring due to human activities. Do the hacked e-mails undermine the case for anthropogenic climate change?

No, they have no effect on the science. The evidence for human-made climate change is overwhelming.

(Newsweek). The Piltdown man scientific fraud, a clear case of scientific fraud, did not mean that all evidence for human evolution was thereby made fraudulent. The hacked email controversy is not a clear case, but even if it was it would not prove the case alleged by the climate change deniers.

It is essential that we learn the tenets of Ecocosmology so that our understanding is expanded to a cosmic understanding.

That is, a broader understanding of what humanity must do, including taking care of the earth, in order to avoid extinction of the human species.

The Solar Wave Of The Future Now

2009-11-25T10:55:00.006-06:00

Scientists have now confirmed that waves much higher than the size of the earth form on the surface of the Sun.

The wave in the photo shows a surfer at "Ghost Tree", a northern California surf spot.

The entire earth would be about the size of the surfer on one of these solar waves:

Years ago, when solar physicists first witnessed a towering wave of hot plasma racing along the sun's surface, they doubted their senses. The scale of the thing was staggering. It rose up higher than Earth itself and rippled out from a central point in a circular pattern millions of kilometers in circumference. Skeptical observers suggested it might be a shadow of some kind — a trick of the eye — but surely not a real wave.

"Now we know," says Joe Gurman of the Solar Physics Lab at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "Solar tsunamis are real."

(NASA). Surfs up on the Sun. Only the fittest surfers will survive when the Sun eventually "does the Sun thing", like all stars do, and destroys all the planets near it.

The reality that humanity is very tiny in the cosmos should inspire us to become fit to survive, to pass The Test.

Ecocosmolgy tells us that we are a tiny species surrounded by enormous giants that are certain to destroy us utterly, so we should band together as a sane group working to help each other.

The World Beneath Their Feet

2009-11-21T02:12:00.005-06:00

Many people remember the movies about hidden worlds beneath our feet, such as Journey To The Center of the Earth. As it turns out, there is a world underneath the feet of the many people wearing warm boots while doing their research in Antarctica.

They have found a world that no one expected, a world that has caused lots of textbooks to be recycled, rewritten, or worse.

It is a world where liquid water, beneath an always subzero ice shelf miles deep, makes up some 70 lakes.

One lake is the size of Lake Ontario of the Great Lakes between the United States and Canada.

They have found a world of mountain ranges, valleys, rivers, plus they found ancient life in the form of microbes and the like. The finding is not yet over:

Currently the drilling works are interrupted because of the huge risk of contamination by further drilling the way it has been done. No matter what mysteries the lake keeps in itself, today the scientists are concerned with the question on how can researchers study a place so unique and delicate without contaminating or, even worse, destroying it? All possible alternative to drilling methods are being examined, all possible methods for studies and researches are still going on.

(United Nations). Perhaps the bigger picture is the impact on future space exploration this find may have.

Many scientists think that one of the moons of Jupiter, Europa, and one of the moons of Saturn, Enceladus, may have an ocean under their ice layered surfaces.

Thus, the information to come from these discoveries may eventually help to establish an outpost in our solar system, on one of those moons that seem to be like Antarctica, where there is plenty of water deep underneath the ice covered surface.

All Weather Is Local

2009-11-19T06:46:00.005-06:00

How many times we have heard the political pundits repeat the statement that "all politics is local"?

A well known saying that has been attributed to Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill.

Some have likewise observed that "all weather is local" in the same sense it was intended by Tip.

The posts "Parochial Climate & Parochial Mentality" and "Coldest July or Warmest July?" point out the fact that people tend to base global climate concepts on the phenomenon of their local weather, the same way they fashion their political views.

Something close to home strikes them as being the way things are everywhere, which gets them in deep trouble on the world scene.

The parochial global climate view of things makes it difficult for governments to fashion a global policy because of a million beliefs that "all weather is local".

For that reason theory is emerging which states that governments will be forced to deal with the climate induced environmental catastrophes headed our way with a policy of triage.

Parochial Climate & Parochial Mentality

2009-11-17T06:49:00.003-06:00

This blog has been pointing out the folly of those who cite local weather as proof of global climate trends.

Or the folly of using an unreasonably small span of time to replace longer term trends.

Such folly is tantamount to using a local city counsel as proof of what foreign nations are doing.

In short the folly of parochial climate arguments is brain dead.

The Atlantic is quiet this year, in terms of number of hurricanes, but the Pacific has been more active than the Atlantic, with several recent typhoons and hurricanes. The news of note may be the ineffective ability to react:

The homes of nearly 1.9 million people in the capital and surrounding areas were inundated by flooding unleashed by Tropical Storm Ketsana at the weekend, the National Disaster Coordinating Council said. Nearly 380,000 people have sought shelter in schools, churches and other evacuation centers.

(Guardian). This Katrina syndrome and the growing triage syndrome is not the preferred policy, however, cash strapped governments simply are not able to do the job alone.

The slow down this year was a relief, but long term planning should not be based on a parochial mind set.

Coldest July or Warmest July?

2009-11-16T06:52:00.004-06:00

It depends on where you look on the map.

The blue areas were colder in July, the red areas were hotter in July, and the other colors were in-between degrees. Thus, depending on the location the answer is "both".

If you look at only the local data in some northern states you can argue that it was one of the coldest July's, but if you look else where you can find it was the hottest July.

As we have pointed out here, the big picture is the true picture and the big picture is the global picture:

NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) has determined that July of 2009 was the second warmest July globally, since records were kept going back well over a hundred years.

(Huffington Post, AccuWeather, emphasis added). If you want to be intellectually honest about global climate you can't cite the weather in Paducah, Kentucky as the true picture for the entire global reality.

Proper analysis also depends on whether you are talking land mass or oceans, because there is some evidence that "July was the hottest the world's oceans have been in almost 130 years of record-keeping."

Disparate Or Equal Climate Change?

2009-11-15T06:54:00.003-06:00

When you read wacko blogs which say there is no global climate change caused by the behaviour of human civilization, you will most often run across reasoning based upon a unified climate change dogma.

In other words, they labour under the illusion that climate change will treat every square mile of the globe equally, without variation, because it is "global climate change"; and so they find a narrow area of the globe that fits their pre-conceived climate viewpoint, then cite that as representative of the whole picture around the globe.

Thus, their analysis can't help but misrepresent the case.

The reality is that some areas may warm up for a time, then cool for a time, some areas will grow drier while others become wetter, rain measurements will fluctuate, but in general over the long haul there is an observable trend.

For example, Arctic sea ice so far this year is not radically out of whack when compared to some recent years, however, the big picture is:

Arctic sea ice reflects sunlight, keeping the polar regions cool and moderating global climate. According to scientific measurements, Arctic sea ice has declined dramatically over at least the past thirty years, with the most extreme decline seen in the summer melt season.

(NSIDC, emphasis added). There is a general trend which can be observed in a thirty year window, but which may not appear in some areas using only the results of a few years.

For example, if we take Greenland, the sea ice in Greenland is at its lowest in 800 years, not just 30 years, and within that 800 years there has been fluctuation up and down.

The thing to focus on, then, in global climate change analysis, is trend over a longer period of time.

Challenges to some who embrace the local weather focus led government officials to order that ice-field photographs from satellites be kept secret.

These localized photos could scare anyone who did not realize you have to keep trends as well as the global picture in mind.

Will We Destroy Food - The Salmon?

2009-11-14T09:00:00.002-06:00

The odd looking creature is one of the favorite foods of Salmon, and Salmon is one of our favorite fish foods.

A problem we are causing in our oceans is very likely to cost us dearly for generations to come:

The same things that make Alaska's marine waters among the most productive in the world may also make them the most vulnerable to ocean acidification.

According to new findings by a University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist, Alaska's oceans are becoming increasingly acidic, which could damage Alaska's king crab and salmon fisheries.

(Science Daily). One of the crude and rude sayings of some environmentalists, when trying to get the point across to dullards who do not get this "pinko environmental conspiracy", is "don't sh*t where you eat", that is, don't crap where you eat.

We eat from the ocean in a sense, and therefore we should not crap there, is the lesson for dullards to take from the saying.

Related post: Will We Destroy Food - The Bees?

The Icy Stares Of The Ice Wars

2009-11-13T05:00:00.002-06:00

It is astounding that there are those of the species, including some within government, who do not consider the import of the notion that the planet and the Sun must remain in a healthy condition for the species to survive.

The import of the effect of climate on economy is also sometimes missed even in a time where we have been focused on economy because it was devastated by the Bush II regime.

A recent report which looks at evidence and indicators going back hundreds of years indicates that ice is at a low in some telling areas of the globe:

By combining the curve of the climate with the actual historical records of the distribution of the ice, researchers have been able to reconstruct the extent of the sea ice all the way back to the 13th century. Even though the 13th century was a warm period, the calculations show that there has never been so little sea ice as in the 20th century.

...

"We see that the sea ice is shrinking to a level which has not been seen in more than 800 years", concludes Aslak Grinsted.

(Science Daily). I am sure that the meaning and significance of this study as well as any others that can be done, will not dissuade some from ideology and policy that is a danger to our planet and life on it.

Life According To Science

2009-11-12T06:03:00.011-06:00

The Sun will eventually "burn out".

Before that happens the Sun will expand out to about the orbit of Mars, well beyond the Earth.

All planets within that orbit level are doomed and have a time limit upon them. All life on those planets is in jeopardy in the very long run:

Earth's fate is precarious. As a red giant, the Sun will have a maximum radius beyond the Earth's current orbit, 1 AU (1.5×1011 m), 250 times the present radius of the Sun. However, by the time it is an asymptotic giant branch star, the Sun will have lost roughly 30% of its present mass due to a stellar wind, so the orbits of the planets will move outward. If it were only for this, Earth would probably be spared, but new research suggests that Earth will be swallowed by the Sun owing to tidal interactions. Even if Earth would escape incineration in the Sun, still all its water will be boiled away and most of its atmosphere would escape into space.

(Tenet One Basics). The only way out for the human race, according to non-religious doctrine, is to learn space travel.

After that humanity must colonize other planets within the solar system first, then branch out to other solar systems in this galaxy.

In other words find another habitable planet before the Sun destroys us.

To do that the people of the earth are going to have to allow the earth to last perhaps one to two million years. Who knows, maybe more, because it depends on technology and its proper use.

But the earth can't be destroyed or the story is over. The human story will be over.

So the mission for humanity is to survive that long. At the current rates the earth will be destroyed by humanity well before that time. We are headed for that disaster if we don't care for the planet and for ourselves.

To survive we must learn to live together, eventually get rid of the weaponry that would destroy humanity if used. We must have a functioning world order where nations live together in peace like our states live together and let live here in the United States.

The petty, mindless, and doomed wars and fightings while thousands starve each day has got to go. Or humanity has to go.

Noam Chomsky says it is not clear that we will make it long enough to mature.

Perhaps it is natural for species, who cannot develop social skills, to perish.

It looks as if the solar expansion and collapse in the great distance of time is sort of a time limit or the test.

We are very, very, very far from that date ... yet we are considering human survival even now, because we seem to want to beat the Sun to utter human destruction.

That is to say we are underscoring the notion that perhaps we can't make it to that distant date under our current social means and methods. The critical skills are missing.

We need survival skills.

If we were to escape off into space beyond our solar system before we became cosmic, mature, and wise adults, we would only be spreading the disease to another location.

If we did solve our social problems before the solar problem gets us, and did develop the skill of space travel, then we would be spreading social wisdom out into the universe.

We have to decide which side we are on ... destruction of life or survival of life ... then work in that direction.

While browsing I found a David Ho painting that depicts (to me anyway) humanity's current efforts to find a new star. I found it at astropixie, a very interesting blog.

The Mother of All Memes

2009-11-10T02:31:00.010-06:00

The graphic to the left shows The Mother of All Memes without her clothes on or with her clothes on, depending on which scientists you are prone to believe.

One would think that her children, poor little ole memes, could have a life of their own free from the tugs, pushes, and pulls of the gravity of scientific bloviation, hypothecation, and even pontification.

But not so, alas, all things are within the grasp of scientific thought-gravity so each and every lowly meme is pulled and tugged asunder, abroad, to, fro, ever looking for a home but always a captive somewhere somehow.

The tug of war begins between the competing camps concerning the likely mother of all memes, the mind and/or the brain.

That old tug of war started by the philosophers, but now pumped up with cosmic steroids by the quantum mechanics, those meme bags even Mr. Goodwrench bows down to.

In the beginning (cool meme huh?) there was dualism and monism gravity which pulled folks into the belief that mind is a non-physical component on the one hand, but pulled folks into the belief that mind is the result of purely material processes of the physical brain on the other hand:

Philosophy of mind is a branch of modern analytic philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e. the relationship of the mind to the body, is commonly seen as the central issue in philosophy of mind, although there are other issues concerning the nature of the mind that do not involve its relation to the physical body.

(Philosophy of Mind). Well now doesn't that make a meme a bit insecure, in as much as every meme has been told that it is:

a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena

(Wikipedia, Meme). One of the scientists, a meme maker of cosmic proportions in terms of causing gastric pains to the establishment scientists, one Roger Penrose, is constantly causing memetic gamma ray wars between factions within the 100 year meme war community.

He is a master at hiding from both sides of the meme grabbers, so he postulates that:

In my view the conscious brain does not act according to classical physics. It doesn’t even act according to conventional quantum mechanics. It acts according to a theory we don’t yet have.

(Discover, emphasis added). Oh my the man is saying we have had 100 years of psychotherapy but we do not know fundamentally what we are talking about?

The memes are shuddering. No, he is saying we work on faith in science some times. His new book deals with the faith of science and will ruffle feathers.

But he is saying we don't know how the mind works at the fundamental level, so we activate our science based upon what the mind does, not on what the mind is.

That is why this blog calls for a new approach based upon what the human species needs to do in order to survive, not what we need to do just to win silly arguments.

Shadow of Time Governs The Earth

2009-11-09T06:06:00.012-06:00

Time is everywhere and there are different types of time.

Song writers mentioned that "time keeps on slipping slipping slipping into the future" in a popular song some time back, while the exclamation "just in time" indicates that only a portion of the vast amount of the totality of time is available for some efforts.

Time is another one of those invisible realms, like gravity, that governs the earth from "the shadows", that is, the realm we cannot see even though we can see the effects of the unseen power at work.

Dredd Blog talks about a shadow that governs in the sense of a powerful unseen movement.

A movement that influences the national governments without there being any conspiracy involved.

And that is the sense of this post, a notion of vast unseen realms that govern the entire earth from the shadows, that is, "govern" in the sense that no single nation can change what is going to happen globally to climate patterns.

(One example of that can be discerned in the discussion of the G8 Summit in a previous post on Dredd blog.)

The graph above shows world population numbers increasing thereby adding to the problems the nations of the earth face, whether they want to face those problems or even can face those problems or not:

That's the simple idea at the heart of the warning from John Beddington, the UK government's chief scientific adviser, of a possible crisis in 2030.

Specifically, he points to research indicating that by 2030 "a whole series of events come together":

* ... population will rise from 6bn to 8bn (33%)
* Demand for food will increase by 50%
* Demand for water will increase by 30%
* Demand for energy will increase by 50%

He foresees each problem combining to create a "perfect storm" in which the whole is bigger, and more serious, than the sum of its parts.

(BBC News). Everyone, from the Mayan date 2012 watchers to the scientist quoted above, calculates something happening at a particular point in time.

What is really being said is that there are powerful energies at work in the shadows which we cannot seem to govern.

Instead, they seem to govern us, so the best we can do is watch the effects which we think will converge to have tangible results at a particular time.

But that has not proven to be a timely indicator because scientists are as surprised as politicians are from time to time.

This does not bode well for the hope that the human species will pass "The Test" of Ecocosmolgy by conforming to the governing requirements of the cosmos.

No Need To Shoot In The Dark

2009-11-08T03:38:00.004-06:00

Imagine a large city on a planet near a star; a star that will be called a nova in a hundred years or less.

The SETI institute and NASA through its Kepler Mission are looking for planets that are or can be inhabited, which means they are looking near stars, some of which will go nova or destroy the planets near them in another way.

Under current scientific models the stars which have planets near them will destroy those planets at some time. Our star, the Sun, will do so by expanding out past the orbit of Mars.

Since we know that, it seems obvious that we will try to leave this planet to find another star with habitable planets. It seems obvious because if we do not do that, we cease to exist as a species.

Since we can assume that any other intelligent life that wanted to continue to exist would do the same, try to find another home world, I offer a search technique for consideration which could fine tune the search Kepler and SETI are doing.

If they look for signals from solar systems where the star has gone catastrophic, that is, gone nova, super-nova, or has expanded out to destroy the planets near it like the Sun is going to, if there was any life there the catastrophe may have caused signal transmission from any intelligent life there.

But when we do the looking, we should look at the record of events before the catastrophe, we should also look back as many years before the catastrophe as possible, in cases where we have those astronomical records in our grasp.

For those systems where there were species who could not develop a way to do space travel to another planet, we might detect a signal for help.

And in those cases where the species could and did develop space travel, did find another star with a habitable planet, then did thereafter travel to it, we would expect a different signal to find its way toward us.

But remember that, in any search of this type, any signal will in most cases be older than our species, since great distances of space are involved.

Which involves great spans of time for signals to travel through, even at the speed of light.

Any signals received will be very, very old.

Will The Earth Follow The Sun?

2009-11-07T12:23:00.004-06:00

The song "I'll Follow The Sun" mentions that the singer will do just that, some day.

Lets hope the Earth does not do that, does not do what the Sun is going to do again, until we get ready for it.

On February 15, 2001 the Sun flipped its lid, and the Sun's north magnetic pole switched to the south magnetic pole, and vice versa:

The Sun's magnetic north pole, which was in the northern hemisphere just a few months ago, now points south. It's a topsy-turvy situation, but not an unexpected one.

"This always happens around the time of solar maximum," says David Hathaway, a solar physicist at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "The magnetic poles exchange places at the peak of the sunspot cycle. In fact, it's a good indication that Solar Max is really here."

The Sun's magnetic poles will remain as they are now, with the north magnetic pole pointing through the Sun's southern hemisphere, until the year 2012 when they will reverse again. This transition happens, as far as we know, at the peak of every 11-year sunspot cycle -- like clockwork.

(NASA). What about the Earth, what is the big deal about the Earth flipping its lid like the Sun does every 11 years?

That would not be good because the human species has not been paying attention, at least those of us in this modern space and computer age have not:

Earth’s magnetic field also flips, but with less regularity. Consecutive reversals are spaced 5 thousand years to 50 million years apart. The last reversal happened 740,000 years ago. Some researchers think our planet is overdue for another one, but nobody knows exactly when the next reversal might occur.

(NASA, above, emphasis added). And nobody knows exactly what would happen to human civilization; civilization meaning our modern space age, computer age, electronic machine age, way of life.

Human civilization could be destroyed even though there would be plenty of human survivors remaining to rebuild our civilization in due time:

The collapse of the Earth's magnetic field, which both guards the planet and guides many of its creatures, appears to have started in earnest about 150 years ago. The field's strength has waned 10 to 15 percent, and the deterioration has accelerated of late, increasing debate over whether it portends a reversal of the lines of magnetic force that normally envelop the Earth.

During a reversal, the main field weakens, almost vanishes, then reappears with opposite polarity. Afterward, compass needles that normally point north would point south, and during the thousands of years of transition, much in the heavens and Earth would go askew.

A reversal could knock out power grids, hurt astronauts and satellites, widen atmospheric ozone holes, send polar auroras flashing to the equator and confuse birds, fish and migratory animals that rely on the steadiness of the magnetic field as a navigation aid. But experts said the repercussions would fall short of catastrophic, despite a few proclamations of doom and sketchy evidence of past links between field reversals and species extinctions.

(NY Times, emphasis added). That is the number one problem our modern engineers and scientists have been lax about, as was mentioned in a post on another blog:

IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn't create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.

(Dredd Blog Post, emphasis added). In that post (see UPDATE comments in that post) engineers and scientists were urged to use the current green grid modifications debate and remedies to beef up the power grids.

Those grids need to be upgraded so they will be able to handle a magnetic pole reversal, because such an event might allow a time of no protection from solar flares, or might damage the power grids even if protection from solar flares stays intact during the reversal.

We must pay closer attention to the things listed in the Tenets of Ecocosmology if we are to survive as a species.

Death & Resurrection Of Memetics

2009-11-06T14:37:00.010-06:00

Some of us watched and participated in The Journal of Memetics, hoping against hope that it would lift off like the "aircraft" of the Wright Brothers.

But alas, the winds beneath the wings were frivolous, so the final transmission from that part of space was "This incarnation of JoM-EMIT is now terminated".

In light of the recent post about our Sun and its star type in our galaxy, and the limited time intelligent species have as sojourners with that Sun, this Ecocosmology Blog will make the bold statement that memetics is the next realm of cosmic evolution.

Memetic evolution follows biological evolution in the sequence, replacing biological evolution as a means of survival of the fittest, indeed, as a means of avoiding human extinction.

The Tenets of Ecocosmology point out two ways that memetic evolution may avoid human extinction:

The first is memetic evolution whereby competent astronomical searching for, then finding, habitable planets orbiting stars develops into competent space travel whereby we colonize those newly found habitable home worlds with our species. This must be repeated ad infinitum as each newly found star eventually dies out.

The second is memetic evolution whereby we morph into a species that does not require biologically habitable planets orbiting Sun-like stars for our existence.

In either case, memetic evolution is mandated by this cosmos, which means we must lose the biological evolutionary discourse and creationism discourse as the means of going forward, because that wastes time with useless rear view mirror historical perspectives.

We need a memetics which looks out the wind shield into the space of the future to find where we are going, because where we must go is not determined by where we biologically came from.

The old memetics that tried somehow to cognitively mimic biological evolution was buried with the eulogy "This incarnation of JoM-EMIT is now terminated".

The new memetics must free us from all of that history so we may become a cosmic species focused on where we must go instead of where we have been.

The new memetics must develop the new physics that will bring us close to, or take us beyond space travel at light speed.

The new memetics must free us from conflicts of war that constantly sap us of our global potential and strength.

The new memetics must counsel us to treasure our oasis in space, our home world of wonder we call the Earth, so we may all be healthy going forward.

Finally the new memetics must use all the talent available to get us there by fusing, using, sharing and always respecting the respectable in science and in religion.

Rebel Science: Gravitating Conflicts

2009-11-05T13:22:00.007-06:00

When papers are published in journals of science or law the "well behaved" tend to bow down and accept the assertions and enlightenment in that paper.

But there are rebels among us who just will not accept things as they should, but instead like to rock the boat to make us a bit nervous.

When the robe-wearing scientist publishes a decree, unlike those proclaimed by the robe wearing judges, there is no system of appeal.

Even though some church systems have appellate systems, science tends not to.

So, some miffed scientist will hoist up the pirate flag and fire off a few rounds into the grotto so as to tell those who published the papers what for. We recently pointed out one such altercation over "dark matter" here and here.

Another case in point is the attempt to measure "the speed of gravity" or the "speed at which it propagates". Note that the two may not be the same according to some scientists.

Anyway, after an experiment was done the results were declared to the American Astronomical Society. That article generated a rebuttal paper that was published a few months afterwards.

The rebuttal paper pointed out or argued that the experiment hadn't proved or disproved anything concerning the speed of gravity.

That controversy is still ongoing with points and counterpoints going to and fro at the speed of paper, as the fate of humanity awaits the outcome of the controversy to some degree.

The Fittest Stars, Planets, & Species

2009-11-05T07:50:00.013-06:00

As it turns out the survival of the fittest does not apply exclusively to biological organisms or to species.

It applies also to non-biological stars and planets in the sense of the evolution of sentient beings who want to become fit to survive in this cosmos.

The tenets of Ecocosmology map out the route or path which the fittest must take in order to master survival instead of becoming extinct.

Those tenets point out that biological evolution only goes a tiny part of the full distance of that route. That aspect of looking forward is focused by a study conducted by some scientists who have done a survey of stars in the milky way galaxy.

They have found that our Sun is of a type of star that only makes up roughly about 10% of the stellar population in our own Milky Way galaxy.

That discovery ends up being very significant in several ways:

The distinction between habitable planets and planets harboring intelligent life is based on the fact that intelligent life requires stars with lifetimes greater than the time required for intelligence to evolve. For example, in the case of this solar system, we could not find ourselves around a star with a lifetime less than 4.5 billion years.

Indeed, sun-like stars seem to have the right balance: They are of high enough mass that they are more likely to host habitable planets, but they are of low enough mass that they live long enough for intelligent life to develop, and are not extremely scarce. Whitmire estimates that 10 percent of the Milky Way's stars might fall into the category they've outlined. This would still leave over 10 billion candidate stars in the Milky Way alone.

(Space). The factor that leaves biological evolution behind on this route toward fitness to survive is the factor that these Suns eventually destroy all the planets in the habitable zone, together with all biological life on them.

Survival of the fittest, which Ecocosmology calls "The Test", requires that intelligent life which develops on any habitable planet must develop competent space travel, must develop the ability to locate other younger stars with habitable planets, then must colonize those planets.

As if that were not enough, the tenets of Ecocosmology point out that those intelligent planetary species must then continue that behavior ad infinitum because all stars die out or otherwise destroy life on their planetary neighbors.

Thus, the greater part of survival of the fittest is in developing competent astronomy followed by the development of competent space travel so as to successfully locate then colonize new home worlds.

The bottom line of this area of science is that we are cosmic nomads until, as tenet 3(f) says, we "morph into a species free from that type of solar/planetary cosmic dependence".

Will We Destroy Food - The Bees?

2009-11-05T05:25:00.010-06:00

There has been concern in the past ten years or so about the mysterious disappearing of entire groups or hives of bees.

Bee keepers and scientists alike share the concern, and we who rely on the bees should too:

It has been stated by several biologists that, if it were not for the honey bee pollinating plants, humans would only last 3 or 4 years as our food supply would disappear [but see here].

(Space). How it got to this is debatable, but we can agree to describe the bee / human relationship not as symbiotic, because the bees do not rely on us in return in the way we rely on them.

We are intelligent but they are intelligent too. A professor was doing an experiment, moving a source of nectar 25% further away each day, testing their navigation skills.

His student charged with the duty of calculating and moving the nectar each day called in one morning reporting to the professor that he had car problems and could not do the task on that day. The professor opted to do it himself:

When the professor arrived at the nectar source there were no bees present. But when he arrived at the place where the nectar should have been for that day (but had not been moved there yet), there were all the bees waiting for him! Not only had the bees gotten the math correct (25% farther), but the implication is that they had demonstrated the imagination to be able to picture the future by picturing the nectar—not where it was—but where it was going to be! The professor wrote that he would never have done such an experiment on purpose since he never would have thought that the bees could have been so intelligent!

(ibid, Space, link above). Those of you who read the biomimicry posts know that one of the tenets of Ecocosmology urges us to remember that we can learn about how to bring about our own survival by watching and studying nature appropriately.

Learning such behaviour from nature is called biomimicry.

We must also be careful to not destroy the bees or their habitat, because then we would cease to exist as well, according to some scientists.

Heretics Deny The Dark Matter of Faith

2009-11-04T15:33:00.006-06:00

In the post "Rebel Science: The Dark Matter of Faith" the issue of faith was discussed in the context of the "dark matter" debate.

Evidently the rebellion is now growing, and the dark matter of faith may be losing out to the more tangible universe:

Dark energy is itself a hasty fix to an inconvenient truth discovered by astronomers in the late 1990s: that the universe is expanding, and the rate of this expansion seems to be constantly picking up speed.

To explain this startling finding, cosmologists invoked dark energy, a hypothetical form of energy that is pulling the universe apart in all directions (note that dark energy is wholly separate from the equally mysterious concept of dark matter - a hypothetical form of matter that populates the universe, interacting gravitationally with normal matter, but which cannot be seen with light). In this interpretation, the whole universe is blowing up like a balloon, and from any given point within it, all distant objects appear to be speeding away from you.

But not everyone is happy with the dark energy explanation.

"It just seems like an unnatural correction to the equations - it's like a fudge factor," Temple told SPACE.com. "The equations don't make quite as much physical sense when you put it in. You just put it in to fit the data."

Temple thinks the idea of an expanding wave makes more sense.

(Space). Rebel science sometimes becomes main stream science. Perhaps our little discussion about faith helped? To the extent that article indicates a scientific difference between dark matter and dark energy it is a canard. Gravity, the expander in the expansion hypothesis, is a function of mass.

Energy and mass are equivalent in the sense of e=mc², showing that if energy increases or decreases mass also increases or decreases, and vice versa. Which came first, mass or energy, is unanswerable in the dynamic of this equation because they co-exist.

A simple expansion of the universe formula is H² = 8/3 π G p.

Italian scientists claim to have discovered dark matter but other scientists in the United States are not buying it.

Note that "dark matter" is not the only area in science where faith may be an issue.

Both the article 13 Things That Don't Make Sense and the book written after the article explain 13 similar scenarios where scientists figuratively scratch their heads faithfully.

The controversy is still raging: WIMP Wars.