With luck, Man has not become a geologically slow evil genius manipulating mineral resources in the Earth to make the planet shine like a star.
High density saline lakes which develop high buoyancy deep layers due to inflowing fresh water streams are vulnerable to the development of invert stratification. That is where the natural order of depth on the basis of density is violated because the influx of fresh water occurs quietly in smooth laminar flow. Something similar to this happens when Carbon Dioxide escapes into deep waters but dissolves quickly due to pressure at that depth. The result is a deep cold layer of carbonated water, just like carbonated beverage only vast in size. The heavy upper layers of fluid flow rapidly downward, and that triggers even more active effervescence in a positive feed-back cycle that can become almost explosive.
Lakes of that kind have suddenly bubbled over in the past, sometimes resulting in many fatalities when people and animals living in the vicinity are asphyxiated by the sudden flow of the gas, which contains no available oxygen and displaces breathable air.
In geology, something similar can happen when light mineral layers deep in the Earth underlie heavy mineral layers. The largest such layering is likely to be cases where relatively light silicate rock is overlain by extensive iron ore deposits, or where subducted carbon deposits such as coal or oil are overlain by heavier rock of any kind - silicate or iron.
The present Gulf oil pollution leak resembles a small breakthrough in a potential re-inversion pattern in which oil, much lighter than rock, flows upward through a fissure or oil pipe. For every cubic meter of oil that leaks up to the water, a square kilometer of ocean floor settles one micron deeper into the Earth. No other way it can go, the situation is even worse, because the settling destabilizes the rock structure and tends to cause more leaks. With its vast weight, that rock really wants to go down.
If that kind of thing is happening in the Gulf, it will likely occur with increasing frequency in the future. Good statistics and honesty in reporting the sizes and times of leaks will be vital in order to assess whether this is a pattern that is actually taking place. It must be compared with another kind of "leak" - that in which human beings, through the development of powerful machinery, became able to mine vast quantities of limestone and iron ores with which to construct extensive highways and architectural works all over the world. This was just about the same time the Moon as dredged out of the barycenter of the Earth and conceptually put back in the sky where it always was anyway. Much iron and limestone literally came out of the Earth's crust with the Moon, and the limestone and iron were a kind of re-inversion activity in which Man played a part.
The point is that nature will always press for events to take place in ways that conduct the Earth to more stable forms - even if, as with Mars, they are less inhabitable. To be sure these are very long range questions, but a few centuries ago nobody would have thought it possible to draw millions of tons of minerals to the surface, either.
Human beings must avoid creating highly ordered paths by which the world's natural forces can flow more quickly toward events destructive to life. Some of these are subtle. The Dark Skies association reports that the flow of energy from nuclear reactors to night-time light pollution above cities resembles the radiation from a star too well. There is a vector of flow of power directly from the transformation of mass into energy, through the heat, steam, turbines, generators, electric transmission lines, and street lights into the empty cold vast admittance of outer space. Literally, through the agency of mankind's low entropy, ever clever, high-order paths and reasoned order, the Earth is beginning to radiate like a star.
For comparison, consider the white dwarf star orbiting Sirius-it is smaller than the Earth. The only thing we have not found are stars smaller than the Earth which are less massive than the Earth. Then we'll know.
After all, the Pyramids were geologically macroscopic objects.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Friday, June 11, 2010
ALL WAR WAS FOR THE MOON
In the past the actual truth about the Moon was faint among dreams that ranged through perhaps a thousand different possibilities of vaguely equivalent magnitude. Now, the actual truth is a solid One; dreams are of 10^-10, 10^-19, 10^-23, 10^-27, 10^-34 magnitude or less. It's enough to exhaust the war-making. There is nothing false about the Moon and none of the dreams remained true.
There is no air or water, arable land, or life on the Moon. It is bare, barren rock and dry, charged dust. The radiation is lethal, and the temperature changes from utterly lifeless cold to searing, vaporizing hot each of its slow days and nights. Perhaps there are traces of such conditions yet they are as scarce as true dreams.
This is an ancient, coarse problem. No matter how many, dreams can never describe the truth well. They are not supposed to. Dreams are the action in sorting memories until truth remains, which is then not dreamed again. In all the time that life has existed on Earth, it always was and always will be drawn toward the Moon by that most relentless of principles, gravity. That doesn't mean it is vital to go there often or even soon. Some gravity, like that of distant mountains, is rarely worth following unless you get a good place to live at a reasonable price.
The struggle for the Moon became part of life's first activity in the oceans long ago. Somewhat after single celled organisms first survived incomplete mitosis and hanged together, many-celled organisms or metazoa began to change their forms to improve their acquisition of food and other chances of survival. Estimates are, that was a billion years ago to perhaps half that. Tides caused by the Moon were flowing them onto land and then ebbing them to sea relentlessly with one of the most fundamental phenomena in the universe: gravity. So?
So there were no alternatives. The only progress that appeared to be successful and potentially peaceful was made by squids and octopuses and a few of the shellfish which managed to squirt themselves along using a balance between momentum loss and momentum conservation. After life had emerged onto land and creatures were clambering, walking, jumping and flying around it was still several hundred million years before it learned to stabilize its temper and charges, in mammals and electric eels.
Still, no alternative existed: life on Earth was implacably drawn by the Moon's gravity.
Birds flew higher and tried to fly long distances. Yet even when they flew from the North pole to the South and back, gravity inevitably caused them to fall to Earth before they fell to the Moon.
Then Men appeared, who conquered fire, spears, the stick-thrown spear, the bow and arrow. They build earth mounds and tried to climb to the Moon on them, probably inspired by the snake which had peculiar ideas for an organism that had never attained much height. No avail. It was a tempting breakthrough though because the mound could be as high as anyone constructed it.
Earth mounds always collapsed into mud and so the stone mound was constructed. Naturally shaped rocks were the first materials used yet they were always a problem; their stacking could not be relied on and it was far too difficult to find enough natural rocks that were of shapes that would fit stably on rocks that were already stacked. This is a more subtle problem than it may appear to be, because remember, people were drawn to the problem by gravity alone. Nothing else cared whether anybody reached the Moon or not. Gravity gave them only brutally simple choices like returning to the sea, going to the Moon, or going to the Earth. Some tried returning to the sea and became dolphins, whales and porpoises. Some remained close to the Earth – even the cold-blooded could do that, and so, reptiles were left demonstrating it was no avail. You either had to stack rocks or die, or balance between your own moment and that of things that you hurled. What was it that made some rocks stack neatly, and others fall tumbling to the ground? Or fall between the cracks? Men began to really think about Form.
For very simple people with no written record of detail it was not easy to find permanent solutions. Eventually rectangular stones were found to be best. Could they be made of mud bricks dried in the sun? That was tried. It never ascended in height much, although it was a recurrent possibility that endures to the present day because it did evolve into house-bricks. Breaking the rocks did not work. Sometimes soft rocks could be found, and then were discovered in abundance. Large, enduring constructions appeared early in certain places because they were constructed near where stone was found that was soft enough it could be carved into blocks that could be stacked, yet hard enough it would stand the crushing weight of stones stacked on top of themselves.
The problem is being simple enough, without descending or falling into chaos, to describe why Earth's life followed the path it did from the time it was first drawn to the Moon by the tides in ancient seas, to the time when it warred furiously struggling for close to ten thousand years with the wrong principles to reach the Moon. As we shall see, the final centuries presented exactly those principles again in more fury than had ever appeared in the past.
At any rate big, then large, huge, and monstrously titanic piles of rocks were constructed. In the process, remarkably subtle geometry was devised and used, exactly because the work was mandated by the sheer gravity of the Moon. Because gravity was a fundamental principle, and it acts the way it does to form rocks, asteroids, comets, boulders and such other things as planets and stars, it inevitably drew human beings into questions about form. That was why it was possible to graduate, gradually, from piling dirt up on dirt, to common rocks on common rocks, and then to carve soft stone into various shapes until the flat, then rectangular and cubical blocks were formed. That is why the human form was among the first forms carved into stone, in both small forms of art, and in massive sandstone pillars.
Still, the only forms of propulsion were hurling, ejecting, and that most sophisticated form of the latter, the way octopuses and squids moved themselves, by balancing momentum conserved against momentum lost – a form of excretion. That's important, because later it was to lead to war. It was far from clear that would be the first successful, yet still unsatisfactory, means of reaching the Moon. Instead, the best ways that could be imagined and depicted in enduring forms, were floating on water, flying like birds, or just floating in air. The latter was always tempting because after robes and clothing were invented, the spiritual life of human beings could imagine anything it wanted.
Thousands of years ago, none none of those actually worked, actually succeeded in reaching the Moon. But the large stone structures, many of them pyramids, remained in existence. They were at least durable, and though sometimes generations would pass when they were thought to be completely enigmatic, they would always draw people back to the problem of attaining heights. This is similar to the way in which the height of our architectures has resulted in the concept of “the commanding heights” since it became clear that the purpose of attaining the Moon was at least for some purpose rooted in, uh, commanding. Ruling, dominance, governing, leadership, or something like that.
If command is the only goal human beings follow in further attempts to reach space, it will only lead to more war. Science does not have the next solution, but it does have a better approach: patient, persistent research sustained through centuries, millennia, and, if necessary, aeons.
Already, progress is being made. For $39.95 plus a few bucks shipping and handling, you can purchase off the shelf a demonstration device that can sit on your commanding desktop in which a massive – yes, massive – piece of something floats in mid-air suspended only by magnetic fields provided by permanent magnets. You could make a tiny sculpture of a pyramid and so float, permanently, a pyramid in midair on the field provided by permanent magnets. It's not much altitude, not much payload, but the meaning is there. Check out the Edmund Scientific website, and look for “pyrolytic graphite diamagnetic levitation”.
Does this imply the fundamentally most important problem facing mankind is to reach the stars? No, because the stars do not balance human beings exactly on the alternatives of flying to the Moon or falling to the Earth. The Moon did, because, as we now understand, the barycenter of the Earth-Moon system is within the geometrical form of the spherical Earth. To be sure, the barycenter moves around, but it nowhere above themselves surface of the Earth. If the Moon had been slightly farther away or somewhat less massive, the barycenter would have been above the Earth's surface and so would not have compelled living species so neatly in a dance between reaching the Moon and falling to Earth.
That the world was following octopuses and squids only became obvious in hindsight. It was not the result of planning or comprehensive administration. The Roman calendar
had been devised after several empires nearly lasting a millennium had collapsed unable to sustain something unknown but vital. After Rome's new principles were instituted
the octopuses and squids were reinvented using Greek fire and by 300 AD, rockets were invented. Wikipedia has “The earliest verifiable notice of fireworks is a statement in 2 Vopiscus, Carus, Numerianus et Carinus, ch. xix. which says that fireworks were performed for the emperor Carinus (282-283) and later for Diocletian (284-286).” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket).
The final centuries began in the 1600's with the discovery of the principles of lenses, such as those found in the eye, and the resulting optics made it possible to understand light itself. Immediately, the printing press, mass produced books, rockets, telescopes, microscopes, steam and then more sophisticated engines, engine powered wheeled vehicles, telegraph, airplanes, radio, television, atomic energy, transistors and mass production all came cascading into line. What was not foreseen was that it was to be the propulsion techniques of ancient octopuses and squids, embodied in the rockets of which would actually first reach the Moon. It had emerged before the discovery of modern optics.
The problem was that rockets were made into a weapon of war, not that they were used to reach the Moon. Thus, what would have been research was made into a causa bella of
almost continuous war, because war was found to make people inventive. They can be paid to be inventive, though it is not know if that will sustain itself through a thousand years at a time.
Consider the odd untried forms on the beaches at Normandy, like so many concrete jacks, or the odd forms of the Maginot Line.
That's where we are. People would rather stay with the Earth than fly to the Moon in rockets. People do not want to fight wars, particularly wars rooted in ancient instincts so stupid. People would rather work out their own lives for a few or several generations rather than impose massive programs on the Earth on the basis of unknown goals, unknown principles, and unknown consequences.
It is not a question of “embark on massive international cooperative programs to reach unattained goals by unattained (or existing inefficient) means” versus fight wars. It is a point of “sustaining international cooperation to develop the ways of life that people really want to live throughout the world, and letting them live it in peace.”
Even the birds are happy. Once drawn by the gravity of the Moon, they are now watching human beings, because they can see the human concept comprehends the Moon they once sought. They don't need to respond to the Moon as a matter of life or death, though they can if they want. That means that the Administration's cutback on urgency in developing more space flight to the Moon is correct. It is understood that the Moon is not only not that great a place to be, but its gravity was never important at all. The very gravity of the Moon is known to no longer compel people to the garden of life that the Earth is. It is a matter of very great gravity, that the Moon is what it was found to be. Not that something else might have been, or not been, but that what it was actually found to be is a matter of very great though not unexpected importance.
What the Moon actually is was always within the range of all the stories, tales, guesses, speculations, dreams and imaginings of what it might turn out to be when it was actually visited. The contrast between what it might have been and what it actually is changed, when the Apollo flights provided first hand living witness and material evidence of what the Moon actually is. When dreams, ideals, imagination and thought were the only way to understand the Moon, the difference between the most and least likely outcomes covered a range of, say, ten thousand to one, 10^3 to 1. With the actual evidence, the difference between the actual and the dreamed outcomes is more like 10^19, 10^23 or 10^34 to 1.
There is no air or water, arable land, or life on the Moon. It is bare, barren rock and dry, charged dust. The radiation is lethal, and the temperature changes from utterly lifeless cold to searing, vaporizing hot each of its slow days and nights. Perhaps there are traces of such conditions yet they are as scarce as true dreams.
This is an ancient, coarse problem. No matter how many, dreams can never describe the truth well. They are not supposed to. Dreams are the action in sorting memories until truth remains, which is then not dreamed again. In all the time that life has existed on Earth, it always was and always will be drawn toward the Moon by that most relentless of principles, gravity. That doesn't mean it is vital to go there often or even soon. Some gravity, like that of distant mountains, is rarely worth following unless you get a good place to live at a reasonable price.
The struggle for the Moon became part of life's first activity in the oceans long ago. Somewhat after single celled organisms first survived incomplete mitosis and hanged together, many-celled organisms or metazoa began to change their forms to improve their acquisition of food and other chances of survival. Estimates are, that was a billion years ago to perhaps half that. Tides caused by the Moon were flowing them onto land and then ebbing them to sea relentlessly with one of the most fundamental phenomena in the universe: gravity. So?
So there were no alternatives. The only progress that appeared to be successful and potentially peaceful was made by squids and octopuses and a few of the shellfish which managed to squirt themselves along using a balance between momentum loss and momentum conservation. After life had emerged onto land and creatures were clambering, walking, jumping and flying around it was still several hundred million years before it learned to stabilize its temper and charges, in mammals and electric eels.
Still, no alternative existed: life on Earth was implacably drawn by the Moon's gravity.
Birds flew higher and tried to fly long distances. Yet even when they flew from the North pole to the South and back, gravity inevitably caused them to fall to Earth before they fell to the Moon.
Then Men appeared, who conquered fire, spears, the stick-thrown spear, the bow and arrow. They build earth mounds and tried to climb to the Moon on them, probably inspired by the snake which had peculiar ideas for an organism that had never attained much height. No avail. It was a tempting breakthrough though because the mound could be as high as anyone constructed it.
Earth mounds always collapsed into mud and so the stone mound was constructed. Naturally shaped rocks were the first materials used yet they were always a problem; their stacking could not be relied on and it was far too difficult to find enough natural rocks that were of shapes that would fit stably on rocks that were already stacked. This is a more subtle problem than it may appear to be, because remember, people were drawn to the problem by gravity alone. Nothing else cared whether anybody reached the Moon or not. Gravity gave them only brutally simple choices like returning to the sea, going to the Moon, or going to the Earth. Some tried returning to the sea and became dolphins, whales and porpoises. Some remained close to the Earth – even the cold-blooded could do that, and so, reptiles were left demonstrating it was no avail. You either had to stack rocks or die, or balance between your own moment and that of things that you hurled. What was it that made some rocks stack neatly, and others fall tumbling to the ground? Or fall between the cracks? Men began to really think about Form.
For very simple people with no written record of detail it was not easy to find permanent solutions. Eventually rectangular stones were found to be best. Could they be made of mud bricks dried in the sun? That was tried. It never ascended in height much, although it was a recurrent possibility that endures to the present day because it did evolve into house-bricks. Breaking the rocks did not work. Sometimes soft rocks could be found, and then were discovered in abundance. Large, enduring constructions appeared early in certain places because they were constructed near where stone was found that was soft enough it could be carved into blocks that could be stacked, yet hard enough it would stand the crushing weight of stones stacked on top of themselves.
The problem is being simple enough, without descending or falling into chaos, to describe why Earth's life followed the path it did from the time it was first drawn to the Moon by the tides in ancient seas, to the time when it warred furiously struggling for close to ten thousand years with the wrong principles to reach the Moon. As we shall see, the final centuries presented exactly those principles again in more fury than had ever appeared in the past.
At any rate big, then large, huge, and monstrously titanic piles of rocks were constructed. In the process, remarkably subtle geometry was devised and used, exactly because the work was mandated by the sheer gravity of the Moon. Because gravity was a fundamental principle, and it acts the way it does to form rocks, asteroids, comets, boulders and such other things as planets and stars, it inevitably drew human beings into questions about form. That was why it was possible to graduate, gradually, from piling dirt up on dirt, to common rocks on common rocks, and then to carve soft stone into various shapes until the flat, then rectangular and cubical blocks were formed. That is why the human form was among the first forms carved into stone, in both small forms of art, and in massive sandstone pillars.
Still, the only forms of propulsion were hurling, ejecting, and that most sophisticated form of the latter, the way octopuses and squids moved themselves, by balancing momentum conserved against momentum lost – a form of excretion. That's important, because later it was to lead to war. It was far from clear that would be the first successful, yet still unsatisfactory, means of reaching the Moon. Instead, the best ways that could be imagined and depicted in enduring forms, were floating on water, flying like birds, or just floating in air. The latter was always tempting because after robes and clothing were invented, the spiritual life of human beings could imagine anything it wanted.
Thousands of years ago, none none of those actually worked, actually succeeded in reaching the Moon. But the large stone structures, many of them pyramids, remained in existence. They were at least durable, and though sometimes generations would pass when they were thought to be completely enigmatic, they would always draw people back to the problem of attaining heights. This is similar to the way in which the height of our architectures has resulted in the concept of “the commanding heights” since it became clear that the purpose of attaining the Moon was at least for some purpose rooted in, uh, commanding. Ruling, dominance, governing, leadership, or something like that.
If command is the only goal human beings follow in further attempts to reach space, it will only lead to more war. Science does not have the next solution, but it does have a better approach: patient, persistent research sustained through centuries, millennia, and, if necessary, aeons.
Already, progress is being made. For $39.95 plus a few bucks shipping and handling, you can purchase off the shelf a demonstration device that can sit on your commanding desktop in which a massive – yes, massive – piece of something floats in mid-air suspended only by magnetic fields provided by permanent magnets. You could make a tiny sculpture of a pyramid and so float, permanently, a pyramid in midair on the field provided by permanent magnets. It's not much altitude, not much payload, but the meaning is there. Check out the Edmund Scientific website, and look for “pyrolytic graphite diamagnetic levitation”.
Does this imply the fundamentally most important problem facing mankind is to reach the stars? No, because the stars do not balance human beings exactly on the alternatives of flying to the Moon or falling to the Earth. The Moon did, because, as we now understand, the barycenter of the Earth-Moon system is within the geometrical form of the spherical Earth. To be sure, the barycenter moves around, but it nowhere above themselves surface of the Earth. If the Moon had been slightly farther away or somewhat less massive, the barycenter would have been above the Earth's surface and so would not have compelled living species so neatly in a dance between reaching the Moon and falling to Earth.
That the world was following octopuses and squids only became obvious in hindsight. It was not the result of planning or comprehensive administration. The Roman calendar
had been devised after several empires nearly lasting a millennium had collapsed unable to sustain something unknown but vital. After Rome's new principles were instituted
the octopuses and squids were reinvented using Greek fire and by 300 AD, rockets were invented. Wikipedia has “The earliest verifiable notice of fireworks is a statement in 2 Vopiscus, Carus, Numerianus et Carinus, ch. xix. which says that fireworks were performed for the emperor Carinus (282-283) and later for Diocletian (284-286).” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket).
The final centuries began in the 1600's with the discovery of the principles of lenses, such as those found in the eye, and the resulting optics made it possible to understand light itself. Immediately, the printing press, mass produced books, rockets, telescopes, microscopes, steam and then more sophisticated engines, engine powered wheeled vehicles, telegraph, airplanes, radio, television, atomic energy, transistors and mass production all came cascading into line. What was not foreseen was that it was to be the propulsion techniques of ancient octopuses and squids, embodied in the rockets of which would actually first reach the Moon. It had emerged before the discovery of modern optics.
The problem was that rockets were made into a weapon of war, not that they were used to reach the Moon. Thus, what would have been research was made into a causa bella of
almost continuous war, because war was found to make people inventive. They can be paid to be inventive, though it is not know if that will sustain itself through a thousand years at a time.
Consider the odd untried forms on the beaches at Normandy, like so many concrete jacks, or the odd forms of the Maginot Line.
That's where we are. People would rather stay with the Earth than fly to the Moon in rockets. People do not want to fight wars, particularly wars rooted in ancient instincts so stupid. People would rather work out their own lives for a few or several generations rather than impose massive programs on the Earth on the basis of unknown goals, unknown principles, and unknown consequences.
It is not a question of “embark on massive international cooperative programs to reach unattained goals by unattained (or existing inefficient) means” versus fight wars. It is a point of “sustaining international cooperation to develop the ways of life that people really want to live throughout the world, and letting them live it in peace.”
Even the birds are happy. Once drawn by the gravity of the Moon, they are now watching human beings, because they can see the human concept comprehends the Moon they once sought. They don't need to respond to the Moon as a matter of life or death, though they can if they want. That means that the Administration's cutback on urgency in developing more space flight to the Moon is correct. It is understood that the Moon is not only not that great a place to be, but its gravity was never important at all. The very gravity of the Moon is known to no longer compel people to the garden of life that the Earth is. It is a matter of very great gravity, that the Moon is what it was found to be. Not that something else might have been, or not been, but that what it was actually found to be is a matter of very great though not unexpected importance.
What the Moon actually is was always within the range of all the stories, tales, guesses, speculations, dreams and imaginings of what it might turn out to be when it was actually visited. The contrast between what it might have been and what it actually is changed, when the Apollo flights provided first hand living witness and material evidence of what the Moon actually is. When dreams, ideals, imagination and thought were the only way to understand the Moon, the difference between the most and least likely outcomes covered a range of, say, ten thousand to one, 10^3 to 1. With the actual evidence, the difference between the actual and the dreamed outcomes is more like 10^19, 10^23 or 10^34 to 1.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
The Radian of the Galactic Cycle
Cyclic phenomena include an electron orbiting a nucleus, a light wave undulating along at the speed of light, a bee orbiting a hive or flower, a moon orbiting a planet or a planet orbiting a star, or a star orbiting a galaxy.
A RADIAN is an event, the passage of a relativistic distance ds along the circumferential periphery, when the path traversed has become just as long as the radius of the path. At that place and time, the sense of length is confounded into another dimension, orthogonal to the motion, and the length traversed becomes fundamentally, not merely perceptually, confused with the radius of the motion. That distance is called the radian. It is the cycle distance or time divided by 2pi. The radian of a year is 58 days, just under two months.
A thirty five million year radian is associated with the orbit of the Sun and solar system around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. That puts serious constraints on our ability to reconstruct history, and to foresee, forecast, predict, prophesy or dream of the future. To make matters worse, you might be able to deal with history accurately in some ways back that far, but using the whole current radian for only the past severely weakens the sense of the future, and vice versa. It is more reasonable to expect good estimates up to one million years in the past and one million in the future. That is why attempting to estimate the expected lifetime of the high, heavy passive satellites like LAGEOS and ETALON is limited to 1,000,000 years, even though designers know it's possible they will remain aloft - well, forever.
Radians of many different cycles kinds are passing continually, especially since attainment of spaceflight including flight to the Moon, which all began a whole new kind of totally ordered set and thus, destiny.
Among long-term radians are those of the Sun's orbit around the Milky Way Galaxy, and planets of the Solar System from outside in: Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. Neptune, most distant of those, has a 165-year orbit, often thought of as an ideal for longevity. Yet the radian of Neptune's orbit is only 26.26 years. After 26 years, baby, you're on the stars-not on Saturn. By then you should be living in the four-year, 1461-day leap year cycle when the daily rotation comes into phase with the equinox. It should not be necessary to mention the number of letters in the English alphabet, or the atomic number of iron.
To be in on it, you have to be good, honest, clean, smart, well dressed, ordered, walk on water, be a saint, pray a lot, be careful, and have a whole bunch of other virtues that can seem like too, too much. Or you might be among the currently indulged special prognosticators, the current nouveau vogue such as computer programmers. If that sounds complicated, it is. Responsibility for the planet is a planetary concept, not an individual vice or virtue.
Complexity is one of the forms of balance between order and chaos. It is not a desirable attribute and it is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that it is tolerable. This is particularly true of commercial products and human inventions of all kinds. At some point in design, the extent and intensity of complexity must be determined by the designer.
Complexity is a form of the action. Solid objects are also forms of the action, and complexity occurs in all forms of the action. Action accompanies complexity, and apparently, vice versa. Action is fundamental throughout the universe on all magnitudes from galaxies through stars to planets and moons, through lands and oceans down to plants, animals and human beings, down to cells, molecules and atoms.
The action is far more complicated that can be comprehended in merely one lifetime. It is more complicated than is understood yet by human beings. It also ranges over a much greater range of sizes small and large, brief and enduring. individual and shared.
The world, and particularly the action, contains danger.
Developing embryos are protected if possible, at all cost against danger, disorder, chaos, disease, injury, failure and death. It is prepared, if possible, to face all the factors which the mother faces.
Children spend the first ten years of their lives comprehending the world as well as possible, and this means they can often graduate from the first few and most important elements such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen - of atomic numbers six, seven and eight. These form comfortable stages at ages six, seven and eight. Later, in their teens, they will pass the atomic weights, which are in these elements typically just twice the atomic numbers.
'
At any rate, childhood consists of a considerable amount of familiarization with the elements, of which there are around one hundred. That is why the first few years are called elementary school.
It is often said to young people that this or that age ahead of them is some kind of important event after which they will know all they need to know. Fat chance.
One good way of looking at it, though not the only, is with the planets Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter's orbit of ten years and Saturn's of thirty form such important periods of time that they are among the premises for housing. Ten and thirty year mortgages are prevalent in taking on home ownership.
The word "mortgage" comes from the word mort, Latin for death. Mortgages are designed to handle the entire life cycle of the family, and so are designed to intrinsically be legal relationships that comprehend the births and deaths of persons inhabiting the home. This helps simplify a world which is already complex. Mortgages are complex, yet as simple as they can be made. In times of change they are more complicated. In stable times, they are more simple.
Cold turkey, the word times may be taken to mean centuries.
More to the point, the time domain is a little easier to comprehend if it is understood that time has both logarithmic and exponential attributes as well as linear. Second, time is fundamentally relative to, associated with, conjugate to and tangled up with energy. Energy is similarly involved with time. Because of that, understanding is improving about the way time affects civilizations and the individuals living within them. It is so much better now with what was once the primitive World being resolved into a Planet, that human beings now are beginning to consider the destiny of planet Earth as one destiny. Of course, that comprehends the destinies of billions of individual persons and their families.
Prior to the attainments of the past four hundred years, the world was close to absolutely and utterly ignorant of its own nature, of the nature of the earth and sky, sun and moon, and planets and stars. Glimpses, some strong enough to shape empires and encourage the ancient evolution and struggle to reach the Moon, were occasionally attained-many through wars and the honored sacrifices of countless souls in war, as well as the labors of countless persons who lived in peace. The future is far beyond what can be estimated except with such satellites as LAGEOS, Russia's ETALON, Japanese AJISAI, and the French STARLETTE satellites, many of which are in potentially million year orbits.
Until multi-celled organisms, metazoa evolved in the oceans half a billion years ago, nothing lived that compared the earth and sky, sun and moon, or tide-washed shores between the oceans and the land. Until dinosaurs emerged on land, nothing walked up hills or climbed mountains.
Until flowers, birds and electric eels emerged half a galactic cycle ago, nothing that lived packed things in double hulls or flew or wielded electrons and nothing knew of the Sun and Moon in an elect sense.
Until the Pyramids were built, no sign existed from previous generations that any thought or understanding had been attained in previous generations.
No language of any sophistication or recordable complex meaning existed with which the concept of life could be discussed and with which human beings could be resolved as distinct from plants and animals.
Until, with language, human beings could discuss storms, rain, sunshine, clouds, atmosphere, wind, air, atmosphere, scents, smells, odors aromas, rank and fragrance or stench, no concept of the spiritual world existed.
Until the spiritual world was resolved into mortal and immortal, no distinction was made between human beings and gods.
Until rulers like Cheops and other Pharaohs emerged, no concept existed that Man was among the gods, or that Man had any distinct relationship with gods or a God.
Until several millennia of dynasties had passed, man had no concept that there might exist One god, one God, One God and even then it faltered, then slowly returned and returned at great intervals.
Until the Greek philosophers, no concept of the Republic, no logic, and little counting with numbers, no geometry or distinction between order and chaos, and no concept of the atom or of stars existed.
Until Rome, no estimate of the size of the Earth or the distance to the Moon existed; no understanding of the atom or stars was of such order and stability that futures could be planned, and no concept that the Moon would inevitably be attained by human beings existed even if it took thousands of years.
Enlightenment from the future attainment of the Knowledge of the World, of the Earth and Sun and Moon, was from that time far beyond the concepts of the children, grandchildren and foreseeable descendants of human beings.
Until 1,000 A.D. no concept of God had stably spanned a thousand years of ten centuries and still counting with the future enlightenment still ahead of all mortal descent.
Until 1600, no concept of the spectrum, or the origin of the rainbow, or perspective, or lenses existed and no way existed to see minute organisms that lived and moved, no way existed to see mountains on the Moon or moons around Jupiter.
In all that time since Man began constructing large works, many new developments took taken place, that are too numerous to mention here, and they happened all over the world. In the recent past of course, the attainment of space flight, both unmanned and manned, orbits around the Earth, journeys to the Moon, and machines to other planets suddenly changed the entire world forever.
So greatly are the changes now taking place, that the previous billion years of evolution is in a process of change that is beyond recognition. The improvement in understanding is surpasses anything in history, and is so deep in the relation of large and small that it is to be a holistic metamorphosis.
This sounds potentially dangerous and it is. Yet the truth that was sought was sought well and it is so truly recorded that the World, which may be taken as planet Earth with its Solar System, appear to be a sufficiently well ordered basis for understanding that a thousand years and more of peace may be possible. With care, great care, the coming decades may make that more clear.
It is not possible to put the world into "Cloud Computing" without serious danger of war, possibly global thermonuclear war, unless commensurate, high order clarity exists about the most essential specific and general details of the new world. If these are imposed by violence, there will be war. If they are presented peacefully and they are just, there will be peace blessed from the beginning, and enduring for such a time that the world will recover from the massive, intense wars which have already taken place in the centuries and millennia prior to attainment of space flight. Cloud Computing is perilously close to Cloud-Cuckoo Land. Of course not all can be so naive as the author.
After all, the last ten thousand years was the time during which human constructions dedicated the entire evolution of the Earth, with all its history, to that great effort. That the flights to orbit and to the moon resulted more from careful detailed study, work, research, and craftsmanship, and not from brutal thuggish monstrous destructive violence is the fault of carnivorous predation and zero sum one-on-one kill or be killed evolutionary forms of competition in the half billion years of primitive life.
All this reiteration of history was to show that the problem of order and chaos is an issue that still affects human destiny. As long as those city-annihilating weapons exist, a vast choice must be continually made between peace and war. Yet that is so mainly because it was not known, when they were built, whether the Moon or anything sufficiently equivalent to that like orbital flight, would actually be attained. In other words, the nuclear weapons were manufactured, in case flight to the Moon failed.
If flight to the Moon had failed (or as in the opinions of some, if flights to the Moon fail) then the cities will be annihilated.
In the aftermath of attainment of Knowledge of the Nature of the World, it will be determined by human beings how they shall plan and live upon the Earth, whether and to what extent cities are to exist, what the human population shall be, how many plants and animals are permitted, and other conditions of existence, that will be Earth's fate and destiny for a billion years in the future. This will not happen all at once. No matter how lovably pristine each new generation is to be, there will be major change for centuries, and persistent change for thousands of years until the whole period of attainment of what Arthur C. Clarke called "Childhood's End" passes into one smooth serpentine of evolutionary time.
Ten thousand years from now, the world will be stable. Until the, expect chaos and order to be only one of the many dimensions in which change is to take place. Each new generation will be faced with children who say, "we and only we have the final, ultimate order". After times of that magnitude, Earth will begin to found its millions of years of destiny, and prepare for its first Radian of the Galactic Cycle.
The world planet Earth has a better concept of itself, than the individual has of the world, its people and its individuals. After all, Earth has billions of years practicing being a sphere.
A RADIAN is an event, the passage of a relativistic distance ds along the circumferential periphery, when the path traversed has become just as long as the radius of the path. At that place and time, the sense of length is confounded into another dimension, orthogonal to the motion, and the length traversed becomes fundamentally, not merely perceptually, confused with the radius of the motion. That distance is called the radian. It is the cycle distance or time divided by 2pi. The radian of a year is 58 days, just under two months.
A thirty five million year radian is associated with the orbit of the Sun and solar system around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. That puts serious constraints on our ability to reconstruct history, and to foresee, forecast, predict, prophesy or dream of the future. To make matters worse, you might be able to deal with history accurately in some ways back that far, but using the whole current radian for only the past severely weakens the sense of the future, and vice versa. It is more reasonable to expect good estimates up to one million years in the past and one million in the future. That is why attempting to estimate the expected lifetime of the high, heavy passive satellites like LAGEOS and ETALON is limited to 1,000,000 years, even though designers know it's possible they will remain aloft - well, forever.
Radians of many different cycles kinds are passing continually, especially since attainment of spaceflight including flight to the Moon, which all began a whole new kind of totally ordered set and thus, destiny.
Among long-term radians are those of the Sun's orbit around the Milky Way Galaxy, and planets of the Solar System from outside in: Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. Neptune, most distant of those, has a 165-year orbit, often thought of as an ideal for longevity. Yet the radian of Neptune's orbit is only 26.26 years. After 26 years, baby, you're on the stars-not on Saturn. By then you should be living in the four-year, 1461-day leap year cycle when the daily rotation comes into phase with the equinox. It should not be necessary to mention the number of letters in the English alphabet, or the atomic number of iron.
To be in on it, you have to be good, honest, clean, smart, well dressed, ordered, walk on water, be a saint, pray a lot, be careful, and have a whole bunch of other virtues that can seem like too, too much. Or you might be among the currently indulged special prognosticators, the current nouveau vogue such as computer programmers. If that sounds complicated, it is. Responsibility for the planet is a planetary concept, not an individual vice or virtue.
Complexity is one of the forms of balance between order and chaos. It is not a desirable attribute and it is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that it is tolerable. This is particularly true of commercial products and human inventions of all kinds. At some point in design, the extent and intensity of complexity must be determined by the designer.
Complexity is a form of the action. Solid objects are also forms of the action, and complexity occurs in all forms of the action. Action accompanies complexity, and apparently, vice versa. Action is fundamental throughout the universe on all magnitudes from galaxies through stars to planets and moons, through lands and oceans down to plants, animals and human beings, down to cells, molecules and atoms.
The action is far more complicated that can be comprehended in merely one lifetime. It is more complicated than is understood yet by human beings. It also ranges over a much greater range of sizes small and large, brief and enduring. individual and shared.
The world, and particularly the action, contains danger.
Developing embryos are protected if possible, at all cost against danger, disorder, chaos, disease, injury, failure and death. It is prepared, if possible, to face all the factors which the mother faces.
Children spend the first ten years of their lives comprehending the world as well as possible, and this means they can often graduate from the first few and most important elements such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen - of atomic numbers six, seven and eight. These form comfortable stages at ages six, seven and eight. Later, in their teens, they will pass the atomic weights, which are in these elements typically just twice the atomic numbers.
'
At any rate, childhood consists of a considerable amount of familiarization with the elements, of which there are around one hundred. That is why the first few years are called elementary school.
It is often said to young people that this or that age ahead of them is some kind of important event after which they will know all they need to know. Fat chance.
One good way of looking at it, though not the only, is with the planets Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter's orbit of ten years and Saturn's of thirty form such important periods of time that they are among the premises for housing. Ten and thirty year mortgages are prevalent in taking on home ownership.
The word "mortgage" comes from the word mort, Latin for death. Mortgages are designed to handle the entire life cycle of the family, and so are designed to intrinsically be legal relationships that comprehend the births and deaths of persons inhabiting the home. This helps simplify a world which is already complex. Mortgages are complex, yet as simple as they can be made. In times of change they are more complicated. In stable times, they are more simple.
Cold turkey, the word times may be taken to mean centuries.
More to the point, the time domain is a little easier to comprehend if it is understood that time has both logarithmic and exponential attributes as well as linear. Second, time is fundamentally relative to, associated with, conjugate to and tangled up with energy. Energy is similarly involved with time. Because of that, understanding is improving about the way time affects civilizations and the individuals living within them. It is so much better now with what was once the primitive World being resolved into a Planet, that human beings now are beginning to consider the destiny of planet Earth as one destiny. Of course, that comprehends the destinies of billions of individual persons and their families.
Prior to the attainments of the past four hundred years, the world was close to absolutely and utterly ignorant of its own nature, of the nature of the earth and sky, sun and moon, and planets and stars. Glimpses, some strong enough to shape empires and encourage the ancient evolution and struggle to reach the Moon, were occasionally attained-many through wars and the honored sacrifices of countless souls in war, as well as the labors of countless persons who lived in peace. The future is far beyond what can be estimated except with such satellites as LAGEOS, Russia's ETALON, Japanese AJISAI, and the French STARLETTE satellites, many of which are in potentially million year orbits.
Until multi-celled organisms, metazoa evolved in the oceans half a billion years ago, nothing lived that compared the earth and sky, sun and moon, or tide-washed shores between the oceans and the land. Until dinosaurs emerged on land, nothing walked up hills or climbed mountains.
Until flowers, birds and electric eels emerged half a galactic cycle ago, nothing that lived packed things in double hulls or flew or wielded electrons and nothing knew of the Sun and Moon in an elect sense.
Until the Pyramids were built, no sign existed from previous generations that any thought or understanding had been attained in previous generations.
No language of any sophistication or recordable complex meaning existed with which the concept of life could be discussed and with which human beings could be resolved as distinct from plants and animals.
Until, with language, human beings could discuss storms, rain, sunshine, clouds, atmosphere, wind, air, atmosphere, scents, smells, odors aromas, rank and fragrance or stench, no concept of the spiritual world existed.
Until the spiritual world was resolved into mortal and immortal, no distinction was made between human beings and gods.
Until rulers like Cheops and other Pharaohs emerged, no concept existed that Man was among the gods, or that Man had any distinct relationship with gods or a God.
Until several millennia of dynasties had passed, man had no concept that there might exist One god, one God, One God and even then it faltered, then slowly returned and returned at great intervals.
Until the Greek philosophers, no concept of the Republic, no logic, and little counting with numbers, no geometry or distinction between order and chaos, and no concept of the atom or of stars existed.
Until Rome, no estimate of the size of the Earth or the distance to the Moon existed; no understanding of the atom or stars was of such order and stability that futures could be planned, and no concept that the Moon would inevitably be attained by human beings existed even if it took thousands of years.
Enlightenment from the future attainment of the Knowledge of the World, of the Earth and Sun and Moon, was from that time far beyond the concepts of the children, grandchildren and foreseeable descendants of human beings.
Until 1,000 A.D. no concept of God had stably spanned a thousand years of ten centuries and still counting with the future enlightenment still ahead of all mortal descent.
Until 1600, no concept of the spectrum, or the origin of the rainbow, or perspective, or lenses existed and no way existed to see minute organisms that lived and moved, no way existed to see mountains on the Moon or moons around Jupiter.
In all that time since Man began constructing large works, many new developments took taken place, that are too numerous to mention here, and they happened all over the world. In the recent past of course, the attainment of space flight, both unmanned and manned, orbits around the Earth, journeys to the Moon, and machines to other planets suddenly changed the entire world forever.
So greatly are the changes now taking place, that the previous billion years of evolution is in a process of change that is beyond recognition. The improvement in understanding is surpasses anything in history, and is so deep in the relation of large and small that it is to be a holistic metamorphosis.
This sounds potentially dangerous and it is. Yet the truth that was sought was sought well and it is so truly recorded that the World, which may be taken as planet Earth with its Solar System, appear to be a sufficiently well ordered basis for understanding that a thousand years and more of peace may be possible. With care, great care, the coming decades may make that more clear.
It is not possible to put the world into "Cloud Computing" without serious danger of war, possibly global thermonuclear war, unless commensurate, high order clarity exists about the most essential specific and general details of the new world. If these are imposed by violence, there will be war. If they are presented peacefully and they are just, there will be peace blessed from the beginning, and enduring for such a time that the world will recover from the massive, intense wars which have already taken place in the centuries and millennia prior to attainment of space flight. Cloud Computing is perilously close to Cloud-Cuckoo Land. Of course not all can be so naive as the author.
After all, the last ten thousand years was the time during which human constructions dedicated the entire evolution of the Earth, with all its history, to that great effort. That the flights to orbit and to the moon resulted more from careful detailed study, work, research, and craftsmanship, and not from brutal thuggish monstrous destructive violence is the fault of carnivorous predation and zero sum one-on-one kill or be killed evolutionary forms of competition in the half billion years of primitive life.
All this reiteration of history was to show that the problem of order and chaos is an issue that still affects human destiny. As long as those city-annihilating weapons exist, a vast choice must be continually made between peace and war. Yet that is so mainly because it was not known, when they were built, whether the Moon or anything sufficiently equivalent to that like orbital flight, would actually be attained. In other words, the nuclear weapons were manufactured, in case flight to the Moon failed.
If flight to the Moon had failed (or as in the opinions of some, if flights to the Moon fail) then the cities will be annihilated.
In the aftermath of attainment of Knowledge of the Nature of the World, it will be determined by human beings how they shall plan and live upon the Earth, whether and to what extent cities are to exist, what the human population shall be, how many plants and animals are permitted, and other conditions of existence, that will be Earth's fate and destiny for a billion years in the future. This will not happen all at once. No matter how lovably pristine each new generation is to be, there will be major change for centuries, and persistent change for thousands of years until the whole period of attainment of what Arthur C. Clarke called "Childhood's End" passes into one smooth serpentine of evolutionary time.
Ten thousand years from now, the world will be stable. Until the, expect chaos and order to be only one of the many dimensions in which change is to take place. Each new generation will be faced with children who say, "we and only we have the final, ultimate order". After times of that magnitude, Earth will begin to found its millions of years of destiny, and prepare for its first Radian of the Galactic Cycle.
The world planet Earth has a better concept of itself, than the individual has of the world, its people and its individuals. After all, Earth has billions of years practicing being a sphere.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
FROM EGYPT'S ANCIENT PYRAMIDS TO THE MOON
The entirety of human communications can be
viewed as the communications of one entity, planet
Earth, Terra, etc. as it finds itself in a universe in
which spectra reveal a great deal of information
about atomic elements, compounds, gases, stars and
galaxies, even a broad realm of chemical molecules
that have to do with life, yet so far, no replies from
intelligent agents.
On the other hand, some religious groups, both
ancient and modern, assert that living beings do exist
on many other worlds. Among modern groups
adhering to that idea, some assert they have a sense
of it although the communication is nonspecific and
so far not detectable by machines or translatable
symbolically although a sense of the implications is
gradually emerging.
The two camps are not adversaries; rather, they are
like separate team players covering a very large
field. For instance, technical scientists, who are
using some very sensitive instruments, do not say
that intelligent life does not exist in the universe
just because they have not detected any. They say
that life PROBABLY DOES exist elsewhere in the
universe and either the signals are so faint because
of distance, because of the direction of transmissions
in other directions than toward Earth, scarcity and
rarity of transmissions or simply the absence of
technology, none are being detected.
This is similar to the vast teamwork between Church and State, Religion and Science, etc.
In the other part of the team, those who adhere to the more traditional theological sense of life existing throughout the Universe often say that the scientists are simply looking for something that is not as often developed by intelligent, sentient or other living beings as the scientists assumed in this period of technological prowess. For instance they hold that much communication or at least familiarization with the universal codes of life, have implied goodness, devotion, holiness, reverence, and other highly regarded spiritual values already for many thousands of years to many different persons, including some held so virtuous as to be ennobled, exalted or deified.
Thus, the stars were not won by dinosaurs not only because they had not attained intelligence, communication and technology, but because they had not attained spiritual, moral, or even thermodynamic and gravitational senses of justice, mercy, civility, community and cooperation. From the geological record, it is clear that some dinosaurs walked around on two legs, had at least rudimentary hands and used primitive, brute intelligence but it went nowhere until they devolved to the problem of energy. At that time they had some sense of species though it was coarse, and they begin the emergence of species that related to each other on the statistically
much more sensitive phenomena of temperature stabilization and common sense of heat as well as light and color.
Stable temperatures permitted organisms to begin distinguishing more sensitively between differences in spectra and to see commonalities between visible light, and the near ultra violet and near infrared; to begin to find energy has some kind of monotonic scale even when of different kinds (chemical potential; gravitational; thermal, etc.) and eventually to use and control fire.
Ultimately, seriously substantial large ordered constructions began with the building of earth mounds, organized and probably forced labor, and stacked stone structures of rapidly increasing mass and size. Pyramids were, it appears, actually popular, because the gravitational potential energy in their heavy stone blocks were obvious reminders of large energy structures. That is, they left something which would be permanent, visible, respectable forms upon the Earth to justify all that labor. The heaviest have approximately the energy, in the form of gravitational potential energy, which would eventually prove necessary in the Apollo flights, to reach the Moon. That is a very respectable calculation, or rather, empirical, ad hoc estimate, for people who wrote in hieroglyphs and had little mathematics, no electricity or power machinery.
The calculation goes like this:
============================================
The Great Pyramid contains about 3,200,000 massive stone blocks on the order of five feet cubes of sandstone. The total height was around 480 feet then, 455 feet today. The mass is estimated at 5.9 million tonnes. (rough quote)
============================================
Also
============================================
"Thus, the geometric centre of a regular square-sided
pyramid is located on the symmetry axis, one quarter
of the way from the base to the apex."
============================================
If it was 480 feet high then, one quarter would have
put the center of mass at 120 feet. 5.9 million
tons raised to 120 feet is
5,900,000,000 * 2,000 * 120 = 1,416,000,000,000,000
( Which looks like the mantissa of pi! )
That is 1.416 quadrillion foot-pounds of energy.
Egyptians then probably did not have a very clear
sense of the relation of gravity to elevation so
could have assumed it was the same all the way to
the Moon.
The Moon is 240,000 miles away, * 5,280, i.e. 1,267,200,000 or 1.267 billion feet.
Divide 1,416,000,000,000,000 by 1,267,200,000
to get 1,117,424.2424242424242424242424242
or 1,117,424 million pounds.
The first Saturn V, AS-501, before the launch of Apollo 4 weighed 6,699,000 lb .
Considering the Egyptians then knew little of atomic theory and were thus probably ignorant of the atomic number of carbon (the very element of life of course) that six could be forgiven.
So the Egyptians were probably, in constructing the Pyramids, gauging the energy required to reach the Moon.
Life knew of energy, from the chase in predation since half a billion years ago in the oceans and on land.
700 million years ago, too, the Cephalopoda-
Octopuses, Nautiluses and Squids-propelled
themselves with momentum conservation, and
now the Saturn V and all other rockets propel
themselves in exactly the same way.
The Mathematical relation between momentum and
energy is merely a time derivative, of course.
To that should be added that the time derivative
of energy is power.
d(momentum)/dt = energy
d(energy)/dt = power
If momentum is p, energy is E and power is W, then
dp/dt = E
dE/dt = W
Similarly, of course the integrals obtain in the inverse operations.
The point about energy is that its conjugate variable, under the action, is time. In other words, the time that passed between the first earth mounds and pyramids, to today, was spanned with transcendence.
GOT IT?
Transcendence is an attribute of gods, holiness, faith and religion. It was practiced by some ancient species, no doubt, such as the vast lummox Triceratops which lumbered around for over sixty million years. Be cautious about denying the existence of God. God is, among other things, patient. But I won't hurry you either.
viewed as the communications of one entity, planet
Earth, Terra, etc. as it finds itself in a universe in
which spectra reveal a great deal of information
about atomic elements, compounds, gases, stars and
galaxies, even a broad realm of chemical molecules
that have to do with life, yet so far, no replies from
intelligent agents.
On the other hand, some religious groups, both
ancient and modern, assert that living beings do exist
on many other worlds. Among modern groups
adhering to that idea, some assert they have a sense
of it although the communication is nonspecific and
so far not detectable by machines or translatable
symbolically although a sense of the implications is
gradually emerging.
The two camps are not adversaries; rather, they are
like separate team players covering a very large
field. For instance, technical scientists, who are
using some very sensitive instruments, do not say
that intelligent life does not exist in the universe
just because they have not detected any. They say
that life PROBABLY DOES exist elsewhere in the
universe and either the signals are so faint because
of distance, because of the direction of transmissions
in other directions than toward Earth, scarcity and
rarity of transmissions or simply the absence of
technology, none are being detected.
This is similar to the vast teamwork between Church and State, Religion and Science, etc.
In the other part of the team, those who adhere to the more traditional theological sense of life existing throughout the Universe often say that the scientists are simply looking for something that is not as often developed by intelligent, sentient or other living beings as the scientists assumed in this period of technological prowess. For instance they hold that much communication or at least familiarization with the universal codes of life, have implied goodness, devotion, holiness, reverence, and other highly regarded spiritual values already for many thousands of years to many different persons, including some held so virtuous as to be ennobled, exalted or deified.
Thus, the stars were not won by dinosaurs not only because they had not attained intelligence, communication and technology, but because they had not attained spiritual, moral, or even thermodynamic and gravitational senses of justice, mercy, civility, community and cooperation. From the geological record, it is clear that some dinosaurs walked around on two legs, had at least rudimentary hands and used primitive, brute intelligence but it went nowhere until they devolved to the problem of energy. At that time they had some sense of species though it was coarse, and they begin the emergence of species that related to each other on the statistically
much more sensitive phenomena of temperature stabilization and common sense of heat as well as light and color.
Stable temperatures permitted organisms to begin distinguishing more sensitively between differences in spectra and to see commonalities between visible light, and the near ultra violet and near infrared; to begin to find energy has some kind of monotonic scale even when of different kinds (chemical potential; gravitational; thermal, etc.) and eventually to use and control fire.
Ultimately, seriously substantial large ordered constructions began with the building of earth mounds, organized and probably forced labor, and stacked stone structures of rapidly increasing mass and size. Pyramids were, it appears, actually popular, because the gravitational potential energy in their heavy stone blocks were obvious reminders of large energy structures. That is, they left something which would be permanent, visible, respectable forms upon the Earth to justify all that labor. The heaviest have approximately the energy, in the form of gravitational potential energy, which would eventually prove necessary in the Apollo flights, to reach the Moon. That is a very respectable calculation, or rather, empirical, ad hoc estimate, for people who wrote in hieroglyphs and had little mathematics, no electricity or power machinery.
The calculation goes like this:
============================================
The Great Pyramid contains about 3,200,000 massive stone blocks on the order of five feet cubes of sandstone. The total height was around 480 feet then, 455 feet today. The mass is estimated at 5.9 million tonnes. (rough quote)
============================================
Also
============================================
"Thus, the geometric centre of a regular square-sided
pyramid is located on the symmetry axis, one quarter
of the way from the base to the apex."
============================================
If it was 480 feet high then, one quarter would have
put the center of mass at 120 feet. 5.9 million
tons raised to 120 feet is
5,900,000,000 * 2,000 * 120 = 1,416,000,000,000,000
( Which looks like the mantissa of pi! )
That is 1.416 quadrillion foot-pounds of energy.
Egyptians then probably did not have a very clear
sense of the relation of gravity to elevation so
could have assumed it was the same all the way to
the Moon.
The Moon is 240,000 miles away, * 5,280, i.e. 1,267,200,000 or 1.267 billion feet.
Divide 1,416,000,000,000,000 by 1,267,200,000
to get 1,117,424.2424242424242424242424242
or 1,117,424 million pounds.
The first Saturn V, AS-501, before the launch of Apollo 4 weighed 6,699,000 lb .
Considering the Egyptians then knew little of atomic theory and were thus probably ignorant of the atomic number of carbon (the very element of life of course) that six could be forgiven.
So the Egyptians were probably, in constructing the Pyramids, gauging the energy required to reach the Moon.
Life knew of energy, from the chase in predation since half a billion years ago in the oceans and on land.
700 million years ago, too, the Cephalopoda-
Octopuses, Nautiluses and Squids-propelled
themselves with momentum conservation, and
now the Saturn V and all other rockets propel
themselves in exactly the same way.
The Mathematical relation between momentum and
energy is merely a time derivative, of course.
To that should be added that the time derivative
of energy is power.
d(momentum)/dt = energy
d(energy)/dt = power
If momentum is p, energy is E and power is W, then
dp/dt = E
dE/dt = W
Similarly, of course the integrals obtain in the inverse operations.
The point about energy is that its conjugate variable, under the action, is time. In other words, the time that passed between the first earth mounds and pyramids, to today, was spanned with transcendence.
GOT IT?
Transcendence is an attribute of gods, holiness, faith and religion. It was practiced by some ancient species, no doubt, such as the vast lummox Triceratops which lumbered around for over sixty million years. Be cautious about denying the existence of God. God is, among other things, patient. But I won't hurry you either.
Friday, April 2, 2010
America and Hiatus in a Changing World
Judging the condition of the United States, or even the entire North American continent, on the basis of the past three hundred years alone is fraught with missing factors popularly thought to be beyond the court's premises in the time domain. To the contrary, it is not. The picture that is emerging is very much larger than was expected in the aftermath of a century of world war, astonishing successes in technology and space flight, and horrendous atrocities. Yet it is still comprehensible. Television and motion picture media make that almost entertaining.
The United States is well known for, and leads the world in technological development. Just how that came about was the result of slow general emergence of human civilization in the Old World countries which seem to have left the Western Hemisphere in a relatively untouched state until success was literally in sight. The whole thing can only be comprehended with the new timelines provided by radioisotope dating of artifacts, modern geological and evolutionary history, and world wide coordination of archaeology. To make this as painless as possible, a few points along that timeline are listed.
I. Over a billion years ago, multicelled life emerged from monera in the oceans and began adapting adaptively as complex organisms to the ebb and flow of the familiar tides and the Moon which, it was gradually found, the tides had some relationship. During this time cephalopods, the octopuses and squids, evolved rocket propulsion.
II. At least twice the Sun and Solar System, including Earth, orbited the Milky Way galaxy in cycles spanning some 220 million years each. During this time life emerged onto land, reptilian dinosaurs emerged. It seems to have been during this and more recent times that the Moon became an instinctive, evolving goal.
III. Eventually life went through changes during the last 70 million years in which the cold-blooded reptilian forms were abandoned. Warm-blooded mammals emerged, insulated with fur which could sustain stable internal temperatures. For reasons that have to do with order and chaos, temperature stability permits more intelligent, active brains and neural system that worked so well they could evolve two legged motion and hands with opposable thumbs. The precursors of modern human beings began to roam the world. With intelligence, the first technology appeared in the shaping of wooden and stone tools and weapons.
IV. Modern human societies, since about 50,000 years ago, can be said to have begun in earnest with the depiction of star fields alongside images of animals and human beings in cave drawings. Those created the first instances of life imitating art. After that, the Moon was just a matter of time.
V. Much cave painting, tool making, wandering, hunting, foraging, primitive agriculture and domestication of animals and other activities kept human beings busy though only vaguely comprehending, if they did at all, the goal of flying to the Moon. Perhaps birds recognized it as having the kind of gravity similar to that a distant mountain to which one could fly. The Moon was new, this galactic cycle. As always, the futures of objects in the sky are ephemeral. They seem eternal, compelling and in other ways mysterious. Gradually tools, pottery, porcelain and ceramics emerged among useful arts.
VI. An important event was the construction of early earth mounds. These may be accurately described as probably the result of a conversation between man and snake, in which the man wonders what it is or how far it is, and the snake suggests building a pile of dirt and climbing up on it to find out. The man does, while his wife looks on, and finds the mound is too small. So he brings friends and they build a bigger mound. Still too short. They organise, and soon discover it is more important to be strong and make others haul the rocks and dirt, and thus were forced and slave labor born. Suddenly they are making very impressive mounds. They are all too short, and they wash away in the rain. Yet the dream has been dreamed and now it points toward the Moon.
VII. A good deal of time passes, until people find places where stones are soft, about as soft as stones can be; they are abundant, and there is little rain. They begin to carve blocks of sandstond and stack them up. Much grunting later, they are beginning to make progress. For one thing these new stone pyramids endure. They are found by people who know their grandfathers worked on them, or only remembered them from their own ancestors. Stories like "My grandfather spoke of them and said his grandfather's father helped build them" began to create oral traditions that were passed down. These stories made sense, because children could build their own sandstone block pyramids and those structures endured too.
VIII. Seeing the moon at the top of every newly completed pyramid, people vaguely identify a concept which we know today as gravitational energy: mass times height. Now a unit called foot-pounds is exactly that. Not only is the height of each of these new pyramids so great that really big ones can be imagined reaching all the way to the Moon, but it is in the dimension of energy from mass and altitude the gravity of the Earth that they can be imagined extending to the Moon. The dimension of energy stored in elevated standstone blocks truly liberates the species from brute instinct and frees it to consider flight - or some other kind of transportation - to the Moon in an abstract way.
IX. Ambition becomes consummate, transcendent, omnipotent and for all practical purposes omniscient. With fish nets some catch fish in the Nile; others carry the fish to modern equivalents of the chow hall and still others cook the fish and feed the laborers who work the sandstone and carry and stack the blocks using rollers and poles, ramps and God knows what to get the blocks stacked up into pyramids of truly astonishing scale. You know what is wonderous about the three Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt? The gravitational energy of the three million multi-ton sandstone blocks stacked up like that is on a par with the actual energy necessary, and eventually used, in the manned flights to the Moon during the Apollo series in the 1970's. It is on the same order of magnitude. The same scale. That's why those pyramids thenceforth to this day commanded the future.
X. Modern understanding of light, which is quite good (consider modern digital cameras, lenses, lasers and space telescopes) describes the energy and frequency of light being in a certain ratio which is called the quantum of action. The product of energy and time is the same quantum. While good clocks were not known in the days of Cheops, gravitational energy of lifted masses was. And energy is conjugate to time. In those pyramids is stored about the same amount of lift-energy as that necessary to reach the Moon - and its conjugate variable is time. That is why the meaning of those pyramids spanned six thousand years and more and they still retain that transcendent quality.
XI. Yet, it is at this time, as we wonder what is happening to America in the economic activity of the world, that we are faced with the fact that the Moon was won, attained, reached, flow to and returned from, on the extremely primitive terms of octopuses and squids rocketing along in the pre-Cambrian oceans, and huge stone blocks built at least in part by forced labor before good clocks existed. No wonder the time clock appeared only in the final decades of the long construction toward the Moon.
XII. No wonder that ALL our ideas about space flight are now rapidly changing. In the works, for instance, are a great deal of research into other forms of life, including magnetic lifting devices that only support a few milligrams of pyrolytic graphite levitating in a stable magnetic field but which inspire visions of mile-long spaceships floating motionlessly without any visible means of lift. It may take a thousand years to get the flying saucer up and running, but it's in the job jar.
XIII. It is time to summon up faith, confidence, good practical common sense, courage, honor, justice and all the other virtues of civilization, not so much to galvanize ourselves into another war, but to face the extensive devolution of massive constructions that began nearly ten thousand years ago. The most significant part of that devolution will be only back to about the 1600's when the printing press, steam engine, optics and some other factors appeared and set off the high-energy industrial revolution. It was that engine-oriented approach to everything that brought so much mechanized warfare, the vast plundering of fossil fuels, and the struggle to raise nuclear energy and renewable energy to new importance. Almost certainly, energy use is to become much more moderate on the average, and its extremes much more efficient and less destructive.
XIV. The United States should prepare (it is already well prepared) to sustain a solidly sufficient agricultural and residential housing economy. Without many specific plans for Big Projects, it should retain the capacity to undertake them whenever good and patient judgement, or emergency, shows them to be necessary. It is time for a very significant hiatus now after the recent Industrial Revolution which culminated in space flight and attainment of the Moon. Among other things, communication and transportation will continue to be abundant, though the scale might change to reflect the increased conservatism of global consciousness toward the care and feeding of planet Earth. Space satellites will continue to be important, and very likely the embryonic orbital tourism industry will implacably become a great success. Vision from orbit is certain to be of fundamental importance to Earth for all foreseeable future time. Thus, practical quite-economy launch vehicles for satellites will be important. The famous United Launch Alliance Delta rocket series' high reliability is already figurative in that kind of economy, and Europe has its own rocket series, the Ariane, with that intent.
XV. So the world will continue to have very great technological activity, with a very long future, but it is becoming familiar almost to the point of monotony, compared with the hyperinflated science fiction theater that dominated media since the 1950's. Gone are the dreams of romping through the stars and galaxies, meeting new life forms in other star systems, and fighting off fantastic space monsters bent on enslaving Earth. The practical truth is that the stars are at the present time an unGodly great distance off, and will not be attained in this thousand years, probably not in the next ten thousand. We have earth, our only place in the Garden of Eden, and will be here for a long time.
XVI. The seemingly idealistic goals of the United Nations are not idealistic at all. They are becoming hard, practical necessities, and if they have the blessing of at least potentially civil solutions, and the hope of rarely needing to war over them, that too is true.
XVII. Overpopulation, underdeveloped agriculture and anemic civil infrastructure are true, practical, faceable, real-world problems just like rising sea level, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and fires, pests and black rats. Human beings have to face a more boring cosmology, yet one in which, at last, the world is able to take better and more proper care for itself. It's time to roll up ordinary sleeves and get busy doing the ordinary work of caring for a planet for the next million years.
The United States is well known for, and leads the world in technological development. Just how that came about was the result of slow general emergence of human civilization in the Old World countries which seem to have left the Western Hemisphere in a relatively untouched state until success was literally in sight. The whole thing can only be comprehended with the new timelines provided by radioisotope dating of artifacts, modern geological and evolutionary history, and world wide coordination of archaeology. To make this as painless as possible, a few points along that timeline are listed.
I. Over a billion years ago, multicelled life emerged from monera in the oceans and began adapting adaptively as complex organisms to the ebb and flow of the familiar tides and the Moon which, it was gradually found, the tides had some relationship. During this time cephalopods, the octopuses and squids, evolved rocket propulsion.
II. At least twice the Sun and Solar System, including Earth, orbited the Milky Way galaxy in cycles spanning some 220 million years each. During this time life emerged onto land, reptilian dinosaurs emerged. It seems to have been during this and more recent times that the Moon became an instinctive, evolving goal.
III. Eventually life went through changes during the last 70 million years in which the cold-blooded reptilian forms were abandoned. Warm-blooded mammals emerged, insulated with fur which could sustain stable internal temperatures. For reasons that have to do with order and chaos, temperature stability permits more intelligent, active brains and neural system that worked so well they could evolve two legged motion and hands with opposable thumbs. The precursors of modern human beings began to roam the world. With intelligence, the first technology appeared in the shaping of wooden and stone tools and weapons.
IV. Modern human societies, since about 50,000 years ago, can be said to have begun in earnest with the depiction of star fields alongside images of animals and human beings in cave drawings. Those created the first instances of life imitating art. After that, the Moon was just a matter of time.
V. Much cave painting, tool making, wandering, hunting, foraging, primitive agriculture and domestication of animals and other activities kept human beings busy though only vaguely comprehending, if they did at all, the goal of flying to the Moon. Perhaps birds recognized it as having the kind of gravity similar to that a distant mountain to which one could fly. The Moon was new, this galactic cycle. As always, the futures of objects in the sky are ephemeral. They seem eternal, compelling and in other ways mysterious. Gradually tools, pottery, porcelain and ceramics emerged among useful arts.
VI. An important event was the construction of early earth mounds. These may be accurately described as probably the result of a conversation between man and snake, in which the man wonders what it is or how far it is, and the snake suggests building a pile of dirt and climbing up on it to find out. The man does, while his wife looks on, and finds the mound is too small. So he brings friends and they build a bigger mound. Still too short. They organise, and soon discover it is more important to be strong and make others haul the rocks and dirt, and thus were forced and slave labor born. Suddenly they are making very impressive mounds. They are all too short, and they wash away in the rain. Yet the dream has been dreamed and now it points toward the Moon.
VII. A good deal of time passes, until people find places where stones are soft, about as soft as stones can be; they are abundant, and there is little rain. They begin to carve blocks of sandstond and stack them up. Much grunting later, they are beginning to make progress. For one thing these new stone pyramids endure. They are found by people who know their grandfathers worked on them, or only remembered them from their own ancestors. Stories like "My grandfather spoke of them and said his grandfather's father helped build them" began to create oral traditions that were passed down. These stories made sense, because children could build their own sandstone block pyramids and those structures endured too.
VIII. Seeing the moon at the top of every newly completed pyramid, people vaguely identify a concept which we know today as gravitational energy: mass times height. Now a unit called foot-pounds is exactly that. Not only is the height of each of these new pyramids so great that really big ones can be imagined reaching all the way to the Moon, but it is in the dimension of energy from mass and altitude the gravity of the Earth that they can be imagined extending to the Moon. The dimension of energy stored in elevated standstone blocks truly liberates the species from brute instinct and frees it to consider flight - or some other kind of transportation - to the Moon in an abstract way.
IX. Ambition becomes consummate, transcendent, omnipotent and for all practical purposes omniscient. With fish nets some catch fish in the Nile; others carry the fish to modern equivalents of the chow hall and still others cook the fish and feed the laborers who work the sandstone and carry and stack the blocks using rollers and poles, ramps and God knows what to get the blocks stacked up into pyramids of truly astonishing scale. You know what is wonderous about the three Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt? The gravitational energy of the three million multi-ton sandstone blocks stacked up like that is on a par with the actual energy necessary, and eventually used, in the manned flights to the Moon during the Apollo series in the 1970's. It is on the same order of magnitude. The same scale. That's why those pyramids thenceforth to this day commanded the future.
X. Modern understanding of light, which is quite good (consider modern digital cameras, lenses, lasers and space telescopes) describes the energy and frequency of light being in a certain ratio which is called the quantum of action. The product of energy and time is the same quantum. While good clocks were not known in the days of Cheops, gravitational energy of lifted masses was. And energy is conjugate to time. In those pyramids is stored about the same amount of lift-energy as that necessary to reach the Moon - and its conjugate variable is time. That is why the meaning of those pyramids spanned six thousand years and more and they still retain that transcendent quality.
XI. Yet, it is at this time, as we wonder what is happening to America in the economic activity of the world, that we are faced with the fact that the Moon was won, attained, reached, flow to and returned from, on the extremely primitive terms of octopuses and squids rocketing along in the pre-Cambrian oceans, and huge stone blocks built at least in part by forced labor before good clocks existed. No wonder the time clock appeared only in the final decades of the long construction toward the Moon.
XII. No wonder that ALL our ideas about space flight are now rapidly changing. In the works, for instance, are a great deal of research into other forms of life, including magnetic lifting devices that only support a few milligrams of pyrolytic graphite levitating in a stable magnetic field but which inspire visions of mile-long spaceships floating motionlessly without any visible means of lift. It may take a thousand years to get the flying saucer up and running, but it's in the job jar.
XIII. It is time to summon up faith, confidence, good practical common sense, courage, honor, justice and all the other virtues of civilization, not so much to galvanize ourselves into another war, but to face the extensive devolution of massive constructions that began nearly ten thousand years ago. The most significant part of that devolution will be only back to about the 1600's when the printing press, steam engine, optics and some other factors appeared and set off the high-energy industrial revolution. It was that engine-oriented approach to everything that brought so much mechanized warfare, the vast plundering of fossil fuels, and the struggle to raise nuclear energy and renewable energy to new importance. Almost certainly, energy use is to become much more moderate on the average, and its extremes much more efficient and less destructive.
XIV. The United States should prepare (it is already well prepared) to sustain a solidly sufficient agricultural and residential housing economy. Without many specific plans for Big Projects, it should retain the capacity to undertake them whenever good and patient judgement, or emergency, shows them to be necessary. It is time for a very significant hiatus now after the recent Industrial Revolution which culminated in space flight and attainment of the Moon. Among other things, communication and transportation will continue to be abundant, though the scale might change to reflect the increased conservatism of global consciousness toward the care and feeding of planet Earth. Space satellites will continue to be important, and very likely the embryonic orbital tourism industry will implacably become a great success. Vision from orbit is certain to be of fundamental importance to Earth for all foreseeable future time. Thus, practical quite-economy launch vehicles for satellites will be important. The famous United Launch Alliance Delta rocket series' high reliability is already figurative in that kind of economy, and Europe has its own rocket series, the Ariane, with that intent.
XV. So the world will continue to have very great technological activity, with a very long future, but it is becoming familiar almost to the point of monotony, compared with the hyperinflated science fiction theater that dominated media since the 1950's. Gone are the dreams of romping through the stars and galaxies, meeting new life forms in other star systems, and fighting off fantastic space monsters bent on enslaving Earth. The practical truth is that the stars are at the present time an unGodly great distance off, and will not be attained in this thousand years, probably not in the next ten thousand. We have earth, our only place in the Garden of Eden, and will be here for a long time.
XVI. The seemingly idealistic goals of the United Nations are not idealistic at all. They are becoming hard, practical necessities, and if they have the blessing of at least potentially civil solutions, and the hope of rarely needing to war over them, that too is true.
XVII. Overpopulation, underdeveloped agriculture and anemic civil infrastructure are true, practical, faceable, real-world problems just like rising sea level, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and fires, pests and black rats. Human beings have to face a more boring cosmology, yet one in which, at last, the world is able to take better and more proper care for itself. It's time to roll up ordinary sleeves and get busy doing the ordinary work of caring for a planet for the next million years.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
MOMENTUM AND ENERGY IN EVOLUTION TO THE MOON
Around 650 million years, three entire orbits of the solar system around the Milky Way Galaxy, passed as natural evolution distinguished between (I) Momentum, and (II) Energy. Octopuses, squids and certain shellfish which emerged during pre-Cambrian times, have used momentum for propulsion ever since.
That vast passage of time was not because of care or patience. It was because evolution was practically brainless, and thoroughly mindless. Any design that existed was on the spot planning by individual organisms for immediate goals. Care and patience can exploit evolutionary time rates, of course. Now, writing permits very long range goals to be undertaken.
Evolution was not entirely brainless during all this time. It was, though, only after warm-blooded mammals appeared that the solutions began rolling in rapidly.
It may be presumed that energy was first competently distinguished by human beings as they began to lift objects to make tools and shelter, use fire to keep themselves warm and through all of these reduce energy expenditures and requirements necessary to survive. This was probably what allowed human beings to abandon fur.
Eventually with the construction of stone block pyramids, the energy anticipated in reaching the Moon was first approximated. It turns out that in the 3 million blocks in the Great Pyramid of Giza, the total gravitational energy is surprisingly close to the energy necessary to reach the Moon. The advantage of making the demonstration permanent was that the energy stored in those blocks is durably displayed and it was within those structures that now-famous paintings depicting bird-headed men in winged boats sailing over waters to the disks in the sky were preserved.
The pyramids are energy. They were the first enduring models of the energy that would be involved in flying to the Moon. That they still exist is one of the wondrous parts of the story of space flight. Momentum and energy are closely related concepts in physics. In fact, E = (p^2)/(2*m) where E is energy, p is momentum, and m is mass. Conversely, p = SQRT(2 * m * E). The proportionality involves squares and square roots - testament to the efficient information structures which the pyramids were designed to be. Heavy, but simple and direct.
Whether we do better or not is not in question. Modern technology is of course far more sophisticated. The important point is that the Egyptians created something that has physical meaning in the context of flight to the Moon. What is necessary is that we recognize the patient and slow time scale of conscious human activity toward goals it chooses. Human beings were not being patient or wise because they spent 35,000 years or so going from fire to pyramids. To put it most simply, knowledge did not exist, and when it was obtained it was quickly lost because writing had not been invented.
At the present time, human beings have become determined to put Earth, the house of Man, into better order, by taking care of its own population, the Earth itself and of the other inhabitants and living things of the world. Certain aspects are in critical disarray. Human population is so great it is consuming almost all other large animals as food.
The world still preserves an ancient goal of flying to the stars. But that is not viewed with the urgency of the first Moon flight. Orbital flight around the world now makes it possible for people to venture into space far enough to see the Earth in proper scale and proportion. Almost universally, they have returned visions of grandeur and awe, amazement and wonder, and concepts of the Earth as having literally infinite value to all that is known about life anywhere. The concept of Earth as home is inescapable, and it brings all the responsibilities and tender protective regard for the planet that are always equated with home.
This alone is one of the most important reasons to sanction, though carefully, private-industry development of orbital space flight, including permanently inhabited space stations. The aggressive concept of creating a privileged
class of space-flying people is loud but not as important as the fact that
the more people who do orbit the Earth, the more certainly will good decisions
emerge about how to care for it. This is a long term goal with very important consequences. Careful planning in the beginning will be well worth the time.
Space flight to the stars, though, could wait a thousand years and still be called rapid development in the evolutionary time scale. Preliminary research is already under way, yet flight to the stars is an immense project. Advances are being made in the principles and concepts of lift without any kind of wings, jets or rockets. Given rates as history indicates them, flight to the stars could take anywhere from a thousand to a hundred thousand years. It is not likely to happen sooner; this new millennium will be dominated by exploration of the Solar System.
Demonstration devices, presenting levitation with no moving parts no fluctuating electric or magnetic fields, and no expenditure of power, can be purchased from the popular science supply corporation Edmund Scientific. They are not costly - about forty dollars each. Both levitate suitable objects on magnetic fields. One uses cryogenically superconducting material, so energy is required to supply the liquid nitrogen for refrigeration. The other uses room temperature magnets and a phenomenon called pyrolytic diamagnetism to float a carbon object on a magnetic field. Both cause many who first see them to imagine flying saucers.
Tiny models of astronauts and space ships can be supported on the levitating
samples, particularly if a model helps inspire dreams. And as always, as with electricity, someday a tax may be placed on such things.
That vast passage of time was not because of care or patience. It was because evolution was practically brainless, and thoroughly mindless. Any design that existed was on the spot planning by individual organisms for immediate goals. Care and patience can exploit evolutionary time rates, of course. Now, writing permits very long range goals to be undertaken.
Evolution was not entirely brainless during all this time. It was, though, only after warm-blooded mammals appeared that the solutions began rolling in rapidly.
It may be presumed that energy was first competently distinguished by human beings as they began to lift objects to make tools and shelter, use fire to keep themselves warm and through all of these reduce energy expenditures and requirements necessary to survive. This was probably what allowed human beings to abandon fur.
Eventually with the construction of stone block pyramids, the energy anticipated in reaching the Moon was first approximated. It turns out that in the 3 million blocks in the Great Pyramid of Giza, the total gravitational energy is surprisingly close to the energy necessary to reach the Moon. The advantage of making the demonstration permanent was that the energy stored in those blocks is durably displayed and it was within those structures that now-famous paintings depicting bird-headed men in winged boats sailing over waters to the disks in the sky were preserved.
The pyramids are energy. They were the first enduring models of the energy that would be involved in flying to the Moon. That they still exist is one of the wondrous parts of the story of space flight. Momentum and energy are closely related concepts in physics. In fact, E = (p^2)/(2*m) where E is energy, p is momentum, and m is mass. Conversely, p = SQRT(2 * m * E). The proportionality involves squares and square roots - testament to the efficient information structures which the pyramids were designed to be. Heavy, but simple and direct.
Whether we do better or not is not in question. Modern technology is of course far more sophisticated. The important point is that the Egyptians created something that has physical meaning in the context of flight to the Moon. What is necessary is that we recognize the patient and slow time scale of conscious human activity toward goals it chooses. Human beings were not being patient or wise because they spent 35,000 years or so going from fire to pyramids. To put it most simply, knowledge did not exist, and when it was obtained it was quickly lost because writing had not been invented.
At the present time, human beings have become determined to put Earth, the house of Man, into better order, by taking care of its own population, the Earth itself and of the other inhabitants and living things of the world. Certain aspects are in critical disarray. Human population is so great it is consuming almost all other large animals as food.
The world still preserves an ancient goal of flying to the stars. But that is not viewed with the urgency of the first Moon flight. Orbital flight around the world now makes it possible for people to venture into space far enough to see the Earth in proper scale and proportion. Almost universally, they have returned visions of grandeur and awe, amazement and wonder, and concepts of the Earth as having literally infinite value to all that is known about life anywhere. The concept of Earth as home is inescapable, and it brings all the responsibilities and tender protective regard for the planet that are always equated with home.
This alone is one of the most important reasons to sanction, though carefully, private-industry development of orbital space flight, including permanently inhabited space stations. The aggressive concept of creating a privileged
class of space-flying people is loud but not as important as the fact that
the more people who do orbit the Earth, the more certainly will good decisions
emerge about how to care for it. This is a long term goal with very important consequences. Careful planning in the beginning will be well worth the time.
Space flight to the stars, though, could wait a thousand years and still be called rapid development in the evolutionary time scale. Preliminary research is already under way, yet flight to the stars is an immense project. Advances are being made in the principles and concepts of lift without any kind of wings, jets or rockets. Given rates as history indicates them, flight to the stars could take anywhere from a thousand to a hundred thousand years. It is not likely to happen sooner; this new millennium will be dominated by exploration of the Solar System.
Demonstration devices, presenting levitation with no moving parts no fluctuating electric or magnetic fields, and no expenditure of power, can be purchased from the popular science supply corporation Edmund Scientific. They are not costly - about forty dollars each. Both levitate suitable objects on magnetic fields. One uses cryogenically superconducting material, so energy is required to supply the liquid nitrogen for refrigeration. The other uses room temperature magnets and a phenomenon called pyrolytic diamagnetism to float a carbon object on a magnetic field. Both cause many who first see them to imagine flying saucers.
Tiny models of astronauts and space ships can be supported on the levitating
samples, particularly if a model helps inspire dreams. And as always, as with electricity, someday a tax may be placed on such things.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
It's a shame they're giving us another war
Another war is dangerously possible. Now that the Moon has footprints on it, it needn't happen.
It seems the problem is that the Apollo flights did not have enough weight to convince the deeper instincts that the Moon has no air, water, farmland, jungle or life and not even any gods or monsters.
Those deep instincts are figurative, because the development of space flight signaled the end of half a billion years of ebb-and-flow evolution toward the Moon.
Thus, the present recession is but the faint beginning of the heavier lapse of ten thousand years of constructionist civilization, and at the same time, the emergence of a completely new worldwide civilization of unprecedented kind.
Why war about it?
Evidence is that flowering plants emerged not 100 million years ago but 220 million years ago, which is just about one orbit of the Solar System around the Milky Way galaxy. Electric eels emerged 100 million years ago.
If the eels and birds and flowers had got together, and has transcended the cultivation of flowers by ants by inventing cultivation of anything by mammals or possibly even some reptiles, space flight could be in its 80 millionth years of development
If we choose not to war, it will be at the cost of tolerating, enduring, and suffering, all with good cheer, an almost endless and permanent devolution of the constructions as they appeared recently. Only the most stable of forms is likely to be preserved.
Fortunately that means the house, cooking pot, farm and village center. Now, it also means electricity, telephones, television, and cars too. Life like that is almost unimaginable, and sends capitalists into a panic.
But why? Responsible capitalists will simply have to take charge, see that capitalism improves in the light of whatever new responsibilities and necessities it faces, and probably invent a linear negative feedback stabilizing system that prevents economic runaway.
We don't need more war. We need peace. And we need to be correct in all three of Galactic, Ecliptic and Equatorial right rotation. We need to just carefully and patiently relax industrial revolution, capitalism and development until it is possible to see which way they tend, and then guide it all down the mountain.
There is a good clue in the pyramids. They took energy to build, and because the number of blocks, their composition, and height are known for those which survived, it is possible to calculate the total energy which was required to lift all that sandstone into place. It turns out the energy is remarkably close to the energy which was actually required to send the manned Apollo expeditions to the Moon.
That provides a standard by which to gauge the empires, dynasties, kingdoms, republics, religions and so on that have come into existence, of which several exist today. Subtract out the forced labor and slavery, and it might be possible to make sense of it all.
It seems the problem is that the Apollo flights did not have enough weight to convince the deeper instincts that the Moon has no air, water, farmland, jungle or life and not even any gods or monsters.
Those deep instincts are figurative, because the development of space flight signaled the end of half a billion years of ebb-and-flow evolution toward the Moon.
Thus, the present recession is but the faint beginning of the heavier lapse of ten thousand years of constructionist civilization, and at the same time, the emergence of a completely new worldwide civilization of unprecedented kind.
Why war about it?
Evidence is that flowering plants emerged not 100 million years ago but 220 million years ago, which is just about one orbit of the Solar System around the Milky Way galaxy. Electric eels emerged 100 million years ago.
If the eels and birds and flowers had got together, and has transcended the cultivation of flowers by ants by inventing cultivation of anything by mammals or possibly even some reptiles, space flight could be in its 80 millionth years of development
If we choose not to war, it will be at the cost of tolerating, enduring, and suffering, all with good cheer, an almost endless and permanent devolution of the constructions as they appeared recently. Only the most stable of forms is likely to be preserved.
Fortunately that means the house, cooking pot, farm and village center. Now, it also means electricity, telephones, television, and cars too. Life like that is almost unimaginable, and sends capitalists into a panic.
But why? Responsible capitalists will simply have to take charge, see that capitalism improves in the light of whatever new responsibilities and necessities it faces, and probably invent a linear negative feedback stabilizing system that prevents economic runaway.
We don't need more war. We need peace. And we need to be correct in all three of Galactic, Ecliptic and Equatorial right rotation. We need to just carefully and patiently relax industrial revolution, capitalism and development until it is possible to see which way they tend, and then guide it all down the mountain.
There is a good clue in the pyramids. They took energy to build, and because the number of blocks, their composition, and height are known for those which survived, it is possible to calculate the total energy which was required to lift all that sandstone into place. It turns out the energy is remarkably close to the energy which was actually required to send the manned Apollo expeditions to the Moon.
That provides a standard by which to gauge the empires, dynasties, kingdoms, republics, religions and so on that have come into existence, of which several exist today. Subtract out the forced labor and slavery, and it might be possible to make sense of it all.
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