Monday, January 11, 2010

Evolution to the Moon

All of the biological history of the world since three galactic rotations ago - about 650 million years - was influenced by tidal activity to be continually sensitive to the Moon. Every living creature has tidal wash to and fro evolved into its cells. The Moon thus became a goal very early in Earth's history.

During at least 450 million years the Earth was dominated by cold-blooded reptilian dinosaurs. They evolved some flying forms, the Pterodactyl and Archeopteryx. But the Moon always remained beyond even their reach, though undoubtedly while in flight it was possible to sense the Moon's gravity apart from that of the Earth. With those early flying creatures, flight to the Moon became a possibility, then a precept, a dream, and finally a concept that endured.

Considering the duration of the cold-blooded and early mammalian life, human evolution took place in a very short time. Only thirty million years elapsed after the collapse of cold-blooded dinosaurs to the world dominance by warm blooded equivalents, including the flying, warm-blooded birds. The consummate demonstration of global mammalian supremacy entirely equivalent to and surpassing anything that dinosaurs ever did caused certain other factors to come into being. Mainly, these were walking upright on two legs, versatile hands free to work, and brains with bodies responsive to thought.

They did not all appear together at the same time. Ground running two-legged lizards had been around long before, and they had sanctioned the use of reasonably versatile hands. Brains, the most primitive forms of which were in the brain corals, had evolved in ancient ocean water the essential entropy-gradient filtering into the folded structures which exist in modern animal brains of all kinds. It's not clear whether brain corals are actually intelligent. They sort certain things efficiently; they are well practiced at it; and very good at using continuity, diffusion, flow, differentiation and other such equities in time independent ways.

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Cnidaria
Class: Anthozoa
Subclass: Hexacorallia
Order: Scleractinia
Suborder: Faviina
From Wikipedia

It took about thirty million years to evolve monkeys into human beings and assemble all the parts that went into the first intelligent, upright, handy, smart human beings that would be obedient to the way of the Moon.

Monkey won. Pigsy lost, duck lost, donkey lost, cow and horse lost. Human beings, people, won the Moon.

One can imagine a scenario - some men were looking at the Moon and talking to a snake. The question came to their collective spirits, how far is it to the Moon. The snake, being a flatland sort of creature and working from long experience in climbing that raised its chin up off the Earth, suggested building a hill and climbing up on it. The men thought that was a good idea. They built a mound and climbed up on it. Nope, not high enough. But that's the right direction. They build more mounds, still not enough. They persuaded other people to build the mounds, and eventually began cudgeling the people to work on building mounds. Still it was not high enough. They punished people who refused, and some of them died under the punishment. Still, the mounds were not high enough, yet the new mounds were higher than the people that had been killed to get there, and those dead were of the Earth, so it was closer to the Moon.

That went on long enough to spread mound-building all over the world.

Eventually someone invented the sandstone block. Yeah, Baby. Go Daddy. It's almost passe to say "Here we are" on reaching the pyramids from evolution.

But more happened. Carrying sandstone blocks, of more or less uniform size and simple form, began to register with the consumption of energy. It always took the same amount of energy to lift a sandstone block a certain distance if it was of a certain size, and the energy and size were smoothly proportional. Of course we know now that was the volume and density. It was close enough to sensible, that energy was what was being used in the construction of systems to reach the Moon. And so here we are.

Now, in retrospect of the first, Apollo flights to the Moon, we can see that energy and conservation of momentum were the critical dimensions in flights into space. At the present time, the engines are rudimentary in that huge coarse quantities of flaming exploding energy are composed roughly into a subset of the dimensions of energy. That subset is momentum.

In the rocket, the momentum sub-dimension of energy is used to propel the rocket just like the octopuses and squids moved themselves around in the oceans where they were swimming around the brain corals. Presumably, we still base our ideas of energy on how much energy it takes to lift a sandstone block.

Now, how smart is a brain coral? Are physicists smarter than brain corals? Of course. When is that? Probably soon, in evolutionary time. By now we can see milennia stretching into the future like pyramids vanishing, and the question of time travel, or at LEAST the transfer of information from the future to the past, or from the future to now, or from now to the past, is almost looming at us.

In order to reach the Moon, evolution had to be narrowly dedicated to energy and flight for almost ten thousand years. Suddenly, within fifty years, it is all over and both animals and human beings all over the world are completely re-conceiving the World, Earth, the Planet, the Moon and Sun, and the Solar System and universe.
All the old bets are off. The snake withdrew - I saw it happen.

In other words, all the narrow constraints on what human beings should be were literally abandoned, relinquished to the earth, dropped. The result is certain to be a divergence in the human population, and it is best to let it go peacefully. That is why it will be wise to be generous in sanctioning households of all types, for human beings will increasingly live in single family households, apartments, groups, collectives and other patterns rapidly now. It will not be possible to constrain human habitation patterns to some one or another of the various ideals that were creating in special places and times, even the best. Justice and mercy,
dignity and health are more important. Gender will never be abandoned, but its origins are very deep and old. One of its dyadic, yin-and-yang dualities is light and space, energy and space. These are the penetrating and the receptive - which go back to sunlight coming through the ocean surface above into the waters below. To prove this yourself, YOU'll have to go SWIMMING.

No comments: