Are We Riding Out The Sixth Mass Extinction?

The oceans are rising up

A message is being generated from many, many different origins of information.

The message now being generated is that the Sixth Mass Extinction is strongly under way, furthermore, we are all on the ship of petroleum-civilization that is currently going down.

Regular readers know that the Ecocosmology Blog and Dredd Blog have mentioned that particular species of scientific data for years now (e.g. The Damage Cannot Be Undone?-2009, Shadow of Time Governs The Earth-2009, What Do You Mean - World Civilization?-2009, Confusing "Civilization" With "Species"-2010, Embryonic Look At Civilization's Future-2010, Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch, 2, 3, 4).

This debate and discussion is spreading around the Internet:

The point is simply this: you are welcome to analyse the scientific evidence for yourself and make your own assessment of the timeframe and the degree of severity of the threat. Perhaps human extinction will not occur until next century. But whether we define ‘near term’ as 2030, 2040 or even next century, human extinction is now a distinct possibility. And after 200,000 years of our species, calling this ‘near term’ seems reasonable.

So is near term human extinction inevitable?

In my view, human extinction is the most likely outcome. But not simply because we are inflicting too many insults on the planetary environment. Extinction is inevitable because of human fear and, specifically, unconscious fear: The fear in ourselves and others that is not experienced consciously but which often drives three capacities that are vitally important in any context: the focus of our attention, our capacity to adequately analyse the evidence (if we get our attention focused on it) and our behaviour in response to this analysis. For example, if you do not know that your fear is making you screen out unpalatable information, then you won’t even notice that you have turned your attention elsewhere and have now forgotten what you just read. Or your fear might prevent you adequately analysing the evidence and/or responding intelligently to it. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

So, if you are one of the people still reading this article, you are probably less frightened than most people. The others gave up before they got to this paragraph. So let me now tell you the primary problem with the fear. It distorts the mental focus, capacity for analysis and the behaviour of national elites, that is, corporate owners and their political, military, media, bureaucratic, academic and judicial lackeys.

(Why is Near Term Human Extinction Inevitable?, or here or here). There are scores of papers and books that inform us of the dangers we face:

The Current Mass Extinction:

Human beings are currently causing the greatest mass extinction of species since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. If present trends continue one half of all species of life on earth will be extinct in less than 100 years, as a result of habitat destruction, pollution, invasive species, and climate change. (For details see links below.)

Scroll Down For Hundreds Of Links:

This website began on April 22, 1998 with the posting of the article below. (The article is still here to provide historical context.) Following the article are more than 300 links to recent authoritative reports and updates about the current mass extinction. New articles are added regularly. (Most recent update December 13, 2014.)

(Mass Extinction Underway, emphasis added). There is no doubt in the consensus of scientists that current human civilization faces what all others before it have faced:

Historically, self-destruction is the common denominator for past human civilization, culture, and society:

"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown."

(A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee). As regular readers know, I have posted Sigmund Freud's writings where he indicated that psychoanalysis of groups, including civilization itself, would not prove unproductive ...

(Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch - 4). The difference is that we humans ourselves are causing this the Sixth Mass Extinction.

The tenets of Ecocosmology would have us avoid this predicament by our always having carefully taken care of the Earth (Tenet Three Basics).

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How do you say ...

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"I Am The Highway"

Audioslave
"I am the Highway"
-----//-----

Bless you!

pearls and swine bereft of me
long and weary my road has been
  i was lost in the cities alone in the hills
no sorrow or pity for leaving I feel

i am not your rolling wheels I am the highway
  i am not your carpet ride I am the sky

friends and liars don't wait for me
'cause I'll get on all by myself
  i put millions of miles under my heels
still too close to you I feel

i am not your rolling wheels I am the highway
i am not your carpet ride I am the sky

i am not your blowing wind i am the lightening
i am not your autumn moon I am the sky
sky yeah!

Yeah!
i am not your rolling wheels I am the highway
i am not your carpet ride I am the sky

i am not your rolling wheels I am the highway
i am not your autumn moon I am the sky
sky yeah
yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah


Thank you!

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On The Origin of Propaganda - 2

It is not just for the human species

In the first post of this series we considered some of the ways of deception and propaganda.

Specifically we looked at cases where microbes and other creatures exhibit deceptive behaviors.

Since then, one journal has gone all out by dedicating an entire edition to the subject of those types of microbial manipulations.

On the other hand, there is also a recent paper which shows communicative examples where some microbes issue factual or accurate signals in communication with other species to help other species to navigate to a suitable location where metamorphosis can be initiated (Settlement Signal).

An entire edition of one journal, for an example of primitive propaganda, concerns how some parasitic species can develop processes for the manipulation of the brains of their host species:

The ability of parasites to alter the behaviour of their hosts fascinates both scientists and non-scientists alike. One reason that this topic resonates with so many is that it touches on core philosophical issues such as the existence of free will. If the mind is merely a machine, then it can be controlled by any entity that understands the code and has access to the machinery. This special issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology highlights some of the best-understood examples of parasite-induced changes in host brain and behaviour, encompassing both invertebrate and vertebrate hosts and micro- and macro-parasites. The observation that parasitic infection can modify specific host behaviours is an old one (see Moore, 2002). The general consensus has been that these parasites have evolved the ability to manipulate host behaviour in order to advance their own reproductive success (Moore, 2002). Unfortunately, there has been a lack of information on two key points of this hypothesis. Firstly, it has proved difficult to unequivocally demonstrate that changes in host behaviour benefit the parasite (i.e. enhance parasitic fitness). Secondly, the mechanisms that parasites use to change host behaviour were completely unknown for many years, particularly in the case of vertebrate host systems.

(Neural Parasitology). Regular readers will remember that in other Ecocosmology Blog posts we have looked at how that pathogenic behavior can and has been changed whereby the pathogenic and/or parasitic behavior can become mutualistic once again to benefit both host and symbiont (Microbial Languages: Rehabilitation of the Unseen--2).

This concept of wanting to understand interspecies and intra-species communication for better or worse is a long and winding road:

Many parasite taxa are able to alter a wide range of phenotypic traits of their hosts in ways that seem to improve the parasite’s chance of completing its life cycle. Host behavioural alterations are classically seen as compelling illustrations of the ‘extended phenotype’ concept, which suggests that parasite genes have phenotype effects on the host. The molecular mechanisms and the host–parasite cross-talk involved during the manipulative process of a host by its parasite are still poorly understood. In this Review, the current knowledge on proximate mechanisms related to the ‘parasite manipulation hypothesis’ is presented. Parasite genome sequences do not themselves provide a full explanation of parasite biology nor of the molecular cross-talk involved in host–parasite associations. Recently, first-generation proteomics tools have been employed to unravel some aspects of the parasite manipulation process (i.e. proximate mechanisms and evolutionary convergence) using certain model arthropod-host–parasite associations. The pioneer proteomics results obtained on the manipulative process are here highlighted, along with the many gaps in our knowledge.

(Host–parasite Molecular Cross-talk). Signaling and messaging is common within, between, and among species, and that cross-talk is composed of both propaganda messaging and truthful messaging.

It would seem that our approach to other species sends them a scary message which may affect their behaviors (Are Microbes The Origin of PTSD?).

We attack small and large life on Earth incessantly with pollution, antibiotics, and just about anything else we can throw at them (On The Memorial Daze, Mammals May Be Nearly Half Way Toward Mass Extinction).

In the sense that we live off the bounty of the Earth, yet are destroying it, we are a parasitic species.

But like those pathogens and parasites that have changed their behaviors into benefiting others, we can and must do so as well (Change Is Not An Option - It Is A Must).

The previous post in this series is here

On The Origin of Propaganda

The old Trees of NYC

Would you, as I once did, think that "propaganda" began in the NAZI Germany of old?

Is propaganda only something that humans do?

For the purposes of this post, we will define propaganda as anything that deceives others.

That is, anything that advocates or nurtures a false sense of reality in others so as to lead a victim or victims into any behavioral pattern that is believed to be real, but in fact is actually unreal.

Additionally, we will expand that meaning to include activity in the environment, the ecosystem of the entire Earth.

This is not being done to denigrate the "natural" world around us, rather it is being done to show that many activities that take place deep within that realm we call nature are behaviors that are not "good," in the sense of Ecocosmology, so we need not define them as "good."

Most microbial life is helpful to other life, only about 1% being pathogenic or harmful to humans, who are composed mostly of microbial cells.

Our first example of propaganda usage is about Sacculina, a parasite:

When a female Sacculina is implanted in a male crab it will interfere with the crab's hormonal balance. This sterilizes it and changes the bodily layout of the crab to resemble that of a female crab ... The female Sacculina has even been known to cause the male crabs to perform mating gestures typical of female crabs ... The natural ability of regrowing a severed claw that is commonly used for defense purposes is lost after the infestation of Sacculina. Although all energy otherwise expended on reproduction is directed to the Sacculina, the crab develops a nurturing behavior typical of a female crab... The male Sacculina looks for a female Sacculina adult on the underside ... then implants himself ... and starts fertilizing ... The crab ... then cares for the eggs as if they were its own, having been rendered infertile by the parasite.

(Wikipedia). Can there be any stronger deceit or propaganda than to deceive a male into thinking it is a biologically functioning female, robbing that male of reality?

Let's take a quick look at two other examples, beginning first with the protozoa Toxoplasma gondii:

If you take a lab rat who is 5,000 generations into being a lab rat, since the ancestor actually ran around in the real world, and you put some cat urine in one corner of their cage, they're going to move to the other side. Completely innate, hard-wired reaction to the smell of cats, the cat pheromones. But take a Toxo-infected rodent, and they're no longer afraid of the smell of cats. In fact they become attracted to it. The most damn amazing thing you can ever see, Toxo knows how to make cat urine smell attractive to rats. And rats go and check it out and that rat is now much more likely to wind up in the cat's stomach.

(Hypothesis: Microbes Generate Toxins of Power). The acts of propaganda also take place in order to deceive plant species:

Phytopathogens can manipulate plant hormone signaling to access nutrients and counteract defense responses. Pseudomonas syringae produces coronatine, a toxin that mimics the plant hormone jasmonic acid isoleucine and promotes opening of stomata for bacterial entry, bacterial growth in the apoplast, systemic susceptibility, and disease symptoms. We examined the mechanisms underlying coronatine-mediated virulence and show that coronatine activates three homologous NAC transcription factor (TF) genes, ANAC019, ANAC055, and ANAC072, through direct activity of the TF, MYC2. Genetic characterization of NAC TF mutants demonstrates that these TFs mediate coronatine-induced stomatal reopening and bacterial propagation in both local and systemic tissues by inhibiting the accumulation of the key plant immune signal salicylic acid (SA). These NAC TFs exert this inhibitory effect by repressing ICS1 and activating BSMT1, genes involved in SA biosynthesis and metabolism, respectively. Thus, a signaling cascade by which coronatine confers its multiple virulence activities has been elucidated.

(Cell - Host & Microbe). This is akin to war practices in the days of castles, with draw bridges and moats, in the sense that sometimes enemies would dress up like knights of that castle, then rushing toward the castle would give a secret signal that deceived the guards into lowering the draw bridge, allowing the adversary into the castle to wreak havoc.

What has been illustrated is that propaganda does not exist only in the human realm, and therefore brings the definition of "natural" to the table.

That debate takes place in both politics and law sometimes, so that what is "natural" ends up being defined as "anything that happens in nature."

We can see that there is a better definition of "natural", and that definition is The Tenets of Ecocosmology.

In other words, "natural" is that which perpetuates life forms which are not part of the process that would take away or impair the ability to comply with The Tenets of Ecocosmology on any planet.

Not only does the definition of "natural" require a sense of perpetuating all good life, but it also requires the sense of perpetuating that good life so that all good life may validly continue out into the cosmos as its planet's host star goes into deadly demise.

The next post in this series is here.

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Video about microbes and their communication techniques:

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Putting A Face On Machine Mutation - 2

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 (conceived of by a Belgian Priest) 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.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

Exploded Planet Hypothesis

Mysterious Sphere in Cygnus

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.

A Dyson Grid?

For example, the photo 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.

Remnant of a failed Dyson Grid?

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.

The next post in this series is here.

Are We Really Sure How Stars Decline? - 2

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.

Ancient Ecocosmology?

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, cf. The Voynich Manuscript website). 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.

UPDATE: Software engineers are using AI to figure it out (Famously Indecipherable Coded Manuscript Cracked by AI?).

Happy Earth Day

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

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.

The Rebel Orbits of the Rebel Planets

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.

Being Natural Is Not Always Good - 2

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.

Tyranny Of Dogma In Science

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, see video below). 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.

Mystery Bubble - Signal, Grid, or What?

Dyson Sphere?

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 to the left.

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 sphere or 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

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.

Mystery Hexagon The Great

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.

The World Beneath Their Feet

An Antarctic Outpost

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 (at an Antarctic Outpost).

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.

Will The Earth Follow The Sun?

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.

UBI SUNT Is Not A Rock Band

In the piece "Where Have All The Visionaries Gone?" we discussed the metaphysical realm's much avoided subject "ubi sunt".

Where do species go when they die, do they go anywhere, or do we just decompose back into atoms and molecules?

The latter seems so obvious that even those who believe in an afterlife do not tend to try to dispute it, but those scientists who allow the question of any afterlife into their ears tend to be dismissive of the subject.

What those who believe in an afterlife do say, however, is that we are not composed completely of biological material, instead there is a metaphysical component that continues upon the occasion of our biological death.

The gist of that metaphysical assertion is that we take on a new format to thereby continue on to an existence independent of biological necessities.

Here again we find that some scientists and religionists agree, in a sense, on some aspects of this issue, that is, some scientists teach that the human species will evolve into sentient super robots then spread out into space independent of the need of a biologically habitable planet.

Ecocosmology does not deal with the subject, except to say that our biological species is compelled to live on habitable planets near central stars, from where we must periodically migrate when the star goes into demise (thereby destroying the planets orbiting them, together with any life forms inhabiting those planets).

That is, unless species on those planets orbiting those sure-to-die stars evolve into a species that does not require habitable planets orbiting stars for their survival.

If we evolve into sentient robots, as the scientists urge, or live in a form that does not require a habitable, biological planet, as the mystics urge, then the ubi sunt question has been dealt with looking forward.

That leaves us looking backwards in order to deal with the question of what happened to all those who did not evolve into sentient robots or super beings.

Did they simply vanish?

That is the essence of ubi sunt, it is not a rock band, but it is a popular consideration generating a lot of literary works:

And if that's not enough to convince you, D'Souza provides a checklist of benefits from believing in life after death: it keeps us honest, gives our lives "a sense of hope and purpose"—and "surveys show" that believers have better sex. It provides "a mechanism to teach our children right from wrong"—a mechanism that those who have been subjected to it tend to describe as a neurotic lifelong fear of going to Hell. And if your smart-alecky kid, full of all that Galileo stuff they get in school nowadays, should ask just where this Judgment business takes place, D'Souza provides you with a response. It happens in the multiverse, the infinitely multiplying complex of worlds predicted by some versions of quantum theory. In the multiverse, physical laws can take on different values, and matter itself may have a different form, so "there is nothing in physics to contradict the idea that we can live beyond death in other realms with bodies that are unlike the bodies we now possess."

Admittedly, the multiverse, although a perfectly respectable concept in theoretical physics, is supported by no more empirical evidence than the soul itself.

(Newsweek). The simplicity of Ecocosmology is perfectly scientific (see Occam's Razor).

It simply says that if we stay too long on any biological, habitable planet we will cease to exist, because the star providing life for a limited time eventually also provides utter destruction, as it phases out.

That reality urges biologically bound species to get cracking to find another habitable world, while taking care of the current one they inhabit, so as to survive long enough to develop competent space travel.

The tenets of Ecocosmology are very scientifically based.

Ecocosmology is also is not dismissive of mystical ideas about a more durable species, or the scientific notion of durable robot species, but instead asserts that if we do not become durable we must be cosmic nomads "looking for a home" ad infinitum.

Ecocosmology & Cosmic Surprises

SuperNova-1987-A

The universe is not so stable that it is free of surprises.

So when we consider the ramifications of the tenets of the science of Ecocosmology, in the sense of vast amounts of time, we should remember that the uncertainty principle instructs us not to become complacent just because there is a seemingly vast amount of time within which we may pass "The Test".

The planet Jupiter took a surprise hit on 7/20/09, and thanks to an amateur astronomer who discovered the impact, professionals monitored it closely.

It was a bit odd that it was exactly 15 years from the last observed impact by a comet, and a bit odd that only an amateur first noticed it.

The earth has also taken hits over the eons like Jupiter did that have wiped out much of the life then in existence on earth.

Today official government programs watch for near earth objects which could cause catastrophe on the earth, and have some rudimentary theoretical proposals to try to stop an asteroid or comet impact on the earth should the need arise.

Tenet 3(e) of Ecocosmology says that the universe requires life forms to develop space travel in order to find new home worlds as their sun or star dies out, and that they must keep doing so until their "final morph" takes place.

Thus, even if The SETI Institute was successful and found a species of intelligent life that wanted to communicate with us, that would not do away with our requirement of passing "The Test" ourselves, nor would it remove their requirement of passing "The Test" themselves.

The movie "Knowing" depicted in a science fiction manner, what one species who had evolved to the point of developing sophisticated space travel would think about some of our human endeavours and behaviours, and what they might do if they knew our sun was going to surprise us soon with our utter destruction.

The lesson of that movie was that they only saved the innocent who would not be a danger to them some day.

Then they continued on with their own evolution because even they had not yet passed "The Test" by evolving into a species that no longer relied on stars that would eventually die out.