Dinosaurs Gradually Evolved into Mammals

Gradualism existed throughout the transition from dinosaurs to mammals.

What appears to be a determination to resurrect something about dinosaurs is mostly without value, and somewhat misleading. Mammals already evolved from dinosaurs.

It was not the case that dinosaurs totally disappeared, and then mammals emerged from square one. Dinosaurs ran into contradictions when their heat content and its nature and magnitude created an overheating problem. They could not stay cool during hot days, in great part because of their size, and at night they could not stay warm. Only vestigial reptiles and fishes do that now.

The heat, rapid motion of atoms and molecules, came into contradiction with the direction of gravity, with the hand of rotation of the galactic, ecliptic and equatorial rotations, and with the charge sign of plus and minus between positively ionized atoms and molecules, and electrons. The problem was how to move heat effectively in blood circulation.

Some progress was made in dealing with the contradictions before the extinctions began, because of such things as stegosaurus, which appears to have had large fins to radiate heat.

Dinosaurs had to adapt, and when the spawned early mammals, they began the path to extinction. In fundamental internal contradiction, they began to abort reproduction that did not make some kind of favorable change.

At a million years a whack, it was not long before some of their young violated the contradiction and hatched young that would survive.

From the fossil record, five or ten million years passed from the time the dinosaurs began to hatch better heat management than fins, and the time when they were gone completely. Their grand-hatchlings were self sufficient and doing nicely all the way through the reproduction cycle. During that time, attempts to deal with the heat and other internal contradictions had gradually succeeded. In the process, live birth was evolved.

This is very different from the Public Broadcasting System's children' cartoons.

It would be a good idea to present the relatively gradual evolution of dinosaurs into mammals in the public media. Doing so would avoid some fundamental miscalculations.

Cross-fertilized Imagination and Hybrid Reruns

Science fiction is in a rut, caused by science fact. It would be an excursion stimulating to young minds for science fiction shows to present tokens of cross-fertilization occasionally. These should be between shows that are fairly different. Heroes in SG-1 could encounter a Klingon spaceship from Star Trek. A Tardis from Dr. Who could show up in a Red Dwarf episode. Some wierd slime from The Invaders could be presented on Buck Rogers, who might appear in turn in a scene from Star Wars. Maybe this could go international, too. A visit by the Vampire Woman from Mars could spark the imaginations of American viewers looking exclusively at Luke Skywalker's kind.

The ones mentioned here would all be adaptations in re-runs. New movies, though, could be designed with crossover tokens in advance. The purpose would be to get out of the ruts in which shows seem to have their own nearly exclusive populations of viewers. Compartmentalized imagination will hardly do. It would be like genetically modified corn pollen blowing in the wind. Early guest appearances would certainly have results not anticipated here, and better movie makers could draw on the results in future shows. Otherwise science fiction seems to be making its own stale atmosphere.

A TENTATIVE HEADS UP

This following still remains vague. It seems that it might be possible to show that untrammeled development of ordered release of energy has the potential to initiate chronically costly, or even catastrophic, release of energy.

Unless they are carefully governed to prevent it, ordered processes could gradually bring the Earth's state of existence closer to uncontrolled releases of energy.

It has been the practice to presume that every ordered process for the release of energy will be interrupted by any uncontrolled release, even if fail safe precautions are not taken. Presumably, the reactor will be destroyed, and at least the finite fuel supply will stop reactions whether they are controlled or not. The assumption is that Earth is too small to hold so much heat that it can sustain any significant runaway reaction.

On the cosmological scale, though, what does "significant" mean? Why is the consumption of fuels of all kinds in the distributed transportation, electricity systems and obsessive need for development of new forms of energy production almost a runaway economic juggernaut?

It is beginning to appear that the difference between empty space and a star releasing energy, might be little more than topological. That is, the two are adjacent domains that only different in some criterion within a single otherwise indistinguishable topological continuum. This is somewhere close to what is symbolized by SU(2) X U(1), possibly with a SU(3) attached.

Or maybe it's the frozen burritos and beer.

The Loveliest Planet

One of the current states of the world is that it just ended (we hope) millions of years of raw evolution and thousands of years of difficult construction, almost all of which was completely new. Now, people from the loveliest planet have reached the Moon and increasing numbers of people routinely view the Earth from orbital space.

Bringing living witnesses back from orbit is such an important activity that the whole emphasis of space flight should turn to that as a worldwide goal for the foreseeable future. It will probably never become unpopular.

Every nation should have had an opportunity to send one or two of their country to Earth orbit. Probably that should include both men and women.

The orbital space program should be expanded, if necessary by construction of a second station which can accommodate visitors for a few days. Visitors would have appropriate training of course. At least one visitor to the International Space Station is said to have required almost no training.

Constructing such a station expressly for visits by persons, without an extensive outlay for research, will be important. An appropriate module would be a conference room. At one time, flying in an orbiting space station was only a dream, and was vaguely understood as being at once a privilege, a statement of the importance of that person, a pleasure, an honor and a thrill. By now it is becoming understood as a valuable necessity for the Earth which should provide first hand understanding of the world for as many people as possible,

Manned space flight by tourists, professional persons, officers, government officials, businessmen, lawyers, writers, clergymen, doctors, engineers, farmers, and other persons in as many different fields as possible should be made a priority goal for every industrial market nation that can afford to participate. Those nations which are on the verge of attaining that kind of economic prosperity should be given the understanding that their own participation will be welcome and important.

Nations in stages of development that preclude their own space flight program should be given flights for selected persons from their own countries - and who speak their country's native language. Of course, the procedures for selecting visitors to the space stations are extraordinarily important and it is beyond this writer to know.

A long-term project to ensure that eventually hundreds or thousands of actual living witnesses to the Earth's existence from orbit walk the Earth, is a good, timely project appropriate at this time, and will be welcome throughout the world.

This emerges from considering a least-action path for Earth from the zero sum predation of raw primitive evolution to a state of civil planet-hood, just government, and laws made by human beings.

Hellish Worry about Nuclear Disarmament

Years of worry about nuclear war (practically a job description for a physicist) brought the conviction that many problems faced by human beings are rooted deeply in nature. The killing of large predatory land and sea animals, to the point where each species so decimated yields to human conquest, is one of the interpretations of the Biblical injunction to "have dominion over the Earth." The slaughter seems abhorrent and endless, yet when well conducted, sufficiency is recognized and it ceases as a species yields. Perhaps the God of Moses comprehended life on other planets at other star systems and merely did not mention it.

Ovid mentioned metamorphosis at the time when Rome set future millennia to the goal of reaching the Moon. The Moon attained, a change is taking place on Earth, a global metamorphosis spanning thousands of years. This wild, savage planet is shedding its primitive, intemperate, toothy rapacity, as when predacious larva change into adult dragonflies that, even when dining on living prey, do it with both in communion. That is why cats play with captured living mice - cats resonate with mice, and a mouse is drawn into resonance with a successfully hunting cat. In mammals, the resonance is crude, merely being enough that the two, members of different species, are not clearly distinct in long, then as play commences, shorter and shorter wavelengths.

The resonance is at low frequencies first. In microwaves it is not easy to distinguish a cat from a mouse. As the "play" continues, absence of distinction increases and soon even in millimeter waves the two are not distinct except in size. They become indistinct in far infrared, then near infrared. As they become indistinct in the visible it becomes a communion grisly for mouse and satiating for cat. The act of predation is evolving to an act of communion. That kind of dining contains a savage gap not easy for human beings to face. That is why human beings have to fill that gap with Cadbury Snack, or other bars. Cats are recent, only about 25 million years since they began (Wikipedia). The communion of cats with prey is crude and brutal. Yet human beings are even more recent.

Many photos exist of dragonflies dining on other insects. In these, the act of predation has been practiced over three hundred million years (Wikipedia). In what faces the human species now, the Moon has shoe prints on it and molecular evolution is already implacable. That is why there is so much interest in chemistry and nanotechnology.

Human beings and even animals are taking up the civilized practice of killing food prey mercifully. These are bloody times as the vestiges of savage action are full of teeth and claws, and one is reminded of kittens becoming tame for the first time. Fleas, mosquitoes and other parasites try to predate on us humans all the time.

Current threat perception is rank, from much more ancient and wild hungry animal predation, cunning entrapment and treacherous ambush from carnivores than can easily be comprehended, much less believed in civil society or understood well. However, some aspects of the problem can be described. Our natures are alarmed at the savagery of even human instincts. Worse, it was thought that horrendous weapons like atomic and hydrogen bombs would be necessary to counter these imagined threats.

Because the Moon and the tides were linked since the earliest evolution of life in the seas, flight to the Moon was a dream of living organisms, mainly land animals, since at least 400 million years ago. The creatures on land could view the Moon independently of seawater tides, and of course the earliest perceptions of it as a place began then. There is no way of knowing what those perceptions might have been except that, for instance, birds which sensed its gravity could have wondered if it was like a mountain they could fly to.

Something like that fanciful origin was the origin of mammals, and then human beings, in their relation to the Moon. It is no wonder that the Moon figures heavily in history. Human beings did not appear out of the laundry in a world in which dinosaurs disappeared without a trace. Mammals are descended from dinosaurs which gradually adapted to control heat and warmth, and human beings are evolved mammals.

We walk upright, can grasp with our hands, and use our minds to work with our hands. A long time ago we could make marks with sticks in the dirt, and mark on rock with clay and burnt sticks. Around 37,000 years ago, cave and rock wall drawings began to include star patterns. These drawings are found in many parts of the world, notably near Auxerre, France and in South Africa. They launched the human imagination to the stars. Art began to eke images of the Moon's influence from the Earth-Moon system. The result was ancient ornaments resembling women.

The first we know of the moon from ancient constructions seems to have begun with early earth mounds and pyramids. Among the very first extant evidence is a now famous depiction of bird-headed men standing in winged boats sailing across waters to a great disk in the skies. It was an image that appeared often. It must have been figurative in the construction of later dynasties, and one may reasonably suppose that attaining the Moon was an almost continuous though sometimes vague goal in human civilizations throughout the world since then.

As for the monstrous atomic and nuclear weapons now being dismantled, it appears they were partially invented and created for the purpose of destroying the great cities and human populations if flight to the Moon was not achieved. Well, that possibility no longer threatens, because flight to the Moon WAS achieved, in fact and in truth. If enough people believe that truth is another thing. I know some who do not.

Human beings face each other with a bewildering variety of horrendous nuclear, chemical and biological weapons capable of inflicting unprecedented and ENTIRELY UNNECESSARY catastrophes on the Earth. It is alarming to see these weapons exist. The world has attained the Moon and better. It is even now using orbital space as a vast resource in communications, transportation, weather prediction, and many other valuable and peaceful purposes. There is no justification for ignorance on that point.

It seems important to make some kind of competent determination of the extent to which nuclear weapons were or were not intended for the destruction of any opposition to attaining the Moon. No alien armed resistance was ever found on the Moon, and no opposition or any significant diversion of resources away from the successful attainment of the Moon occurred - except for military activity which even now is enormously costly. Much of the conflict appears to be rooted in the diverse languages-English, Russian, Chinese, Indian-and the different orders in which these languages relate time to distance, mass, identity and other human factors.

Of course, the Moon was reached-several times, in the 1969-1974 Apollo manned flights, and the net cost of those journeys was exceeded many times in the value returned by orbiting systems in the human activities named above.

It was not necessarily anticipated that great war would be involved in the final, hasty struggle to reach the Moon before the end of the second millennium, i.e. 2000 A.D. ten years ago. But war had turned out to be a rich field for scientific research, although at obscenely brutal cost in lives on a scale so massive it dwarfed every prior prediction of disaster. Even now, there are those who monger the idea of a 'holocaust' that in some way is punishment or reprisal for not attaining the Whole, whatever that is.

Is holocaust reserved for attaining some undiscovered goal in the sky?

Is holocaust a punishment for not establishing cities on the Moon or Mars?

Is holocaust the elimination of an "excess" of human populations which was inadvertently created, for instance by extending the human reproductive season to span the entire year? Just what is a holocaust, and who is proposing that such a think be given weight, or that it continue to be some kind of specter or foreboding of doom, and why?

The closest thing that can be discerned about holo-, holy, or whole, cost, is that in some predictions, Earth is inevitably doomed sometime in the future millions or hundred millions or billions of years, to lose all its air and water as Mars did in the past.

So far, no responsible authority I know has made it clear to the public that no danger exist of that kind.

Some of the ghastly errors in the past included, for instance, the confusion about the value of the number 3,000, in the Hitler program to create V-2 missiles with which to continue its Axis war in Europe. Another, related error was the attempt to exterminate the Jewish population. The very use of war as a form of research is now known, because of the vastly more efficient forms of research institutions in use today, to have been an atrocity of the first water.

Just so, continued and powerful examination of these and related deep questions about the validity of even the existence of weapons of mass destruction now that actual Moon rocks exist on the Earth's surface in human hands, is vital.

It is also vital to understand that just because the Moon was found to have NO life on it, does not mean that the ancient myths of dangerous alien beings or space monsters or demons have been quelled. Those myths die hard.

The correct but extraordinarily brief assessment by the Republican party, that the only places in the solar system other than Earth where a human person can stand without being quickly dying of heat or cold or lack of air or lack of surface to stand on, are the Moon and Mars, was short-lived. It was thought to have died on the vine.

Instead, it needs to be made into a continual, accessible message that is present all the time everywhere on Earth. A similar assessment regarding the feasibility of flying to the stars for other places to live must be made common sense too. It will take generations for that understanding to displace the simple minded but ancient errors of the past.

There is no other way of countering the reappearance of primitive superstition except by the secular truth presented in quiet, persistent, civil ways that are courteous to the viewer or listener, and not threatening.

I personally know of people who are convinced the story was false, about what the men who landed on the Moon in the Apollo flights. They are convinced the entire project was a fiction. They do not merely think it a good joke to say so, they believe it was entirely a deceit and a deliberate fiction intended to deceive exactly them. They insist they cannot help it, that the conviction comes from instinct and nature. One, a neighbor, asked me if I thought there were stars in the sky where only black people live.

The myth that human beings are all going to the stars is, for now, far more likely to cause more grief now than it is worth in haste and speed in attempting to get there in a hurry. It is certain Earth will be designing, dreaming, planning, tinkering, experimenting, and maintaining a civil background of research institutions working exactly toward that goal - of antigravity or some other way of reaching orbit without the horrendously dangerous rockets; of propulsion in space that can take ships, and human beings, to the stars.

An honest scientist may say that may not occur for a hundred thousand years, and even if that is the course Earth follows, it will be well within the lifetime of the planet and its air, water and other resource supplies.

Anybody who wants haste or war to attempt to reach the stars is a fool, a potential Hitler, and a danger to the Earth.

The logic of all this is based, as far as possible, only on premises that stand the truth of time. No doubt they can be better assessed. But it remains true that no danger from Earth itself exists that is worth the strident military attempt to keep the world at a nuclear standoff for all time, or the relentless military attempt to thwart progress in disarmament of these costly, unnecessary and maliciously destructive weapons.

The United States, in particular, because of its aggressive (yes, aggressive) state in relation to the rest of the world, which at all times presses hard line, high potential nuclear capital logic on a world of living organic beings and then insists they represent some sort of evil intrinsic to the nature of life, is making itself into an exact but immense equivalent of the deranged householder who has assembled a lunatic arsenal of guns, bombs, knives, explosives, grenades and other weapons against his wife and kids and the neighbors. He is pursuing a course that could result in tragedy, or not, but the rest of the world will not lose that war, and he will end up dead or in jail.

That is why people from other countries are pussy-footing around the United States.

DIGGING UP THE MOON

The Moon and Earth orbit each other around a common center of gravity. Because the Moon is so small, and thus light in weight, it does not move the Earth much, and so the two orbit around a point that is within the radius of the Earth. That point is called the barycenter of the Earth-Moon system.

Of course the barycenter moves laterally, around under the surface of the Earth near the equator, and drifting north and south somewhat because of the Moon's inclination. Yet it always remains closer to the center of the Earth than the surface on which we live.

Since living animals first swam in the seas, life has always taken the Moon into account in its reproductive cycles, because the most balanced sense of gravity resulted in the best conceived eggs. That started at least half a billion years ago and more like up to three billion years. Always, the barycenter of the Earth-Moon system was within the Earth, and so the net gravitational field in which life existed, was always down, roughly toward the center of the Earth.

That means the Moon was always assumed to be at once both somehow in the sky and within the Earth. The result is profound. Gravitationally the Moon seemed to be within the Earth, yet visually the Moon seems to be, half the time anyway, in the sky. Sometimes, like today, it seems almost nowhere to be found, except that on looking carefully, and with the aid of my pocket computer, it is there, close to the sun, a very dim faint pale white crescent in the intense light blue haze from the air.

So what of this? It means that in terms of the Earth, men often assume the Earth contains something which must be dug up - the Moon - and so they set to digging vast quantities of the Earth with bulldozers, steam shovels, hole diggers, giant scrapers and many other machines. Strip mining and even the sheer removal of entire mountains is taking place all around the world. Sometimes it is a light element like carbon in coal that is dug up. Dig, dig, dig! See the men dig! What are we digging? It isn't really the Moon.

If we stopped digging for the Moon, would it cause a recession?

Planning Global Economic Hiatus

There is possibly to be no economic recovery, not of the vast ambitious wars or projects. Yet there is to be peace. There is to be distribution and food and housing; yet whether it is well designed is up to us. If it not carefully handled, possibly with drastic reforms, it could be farcical and leave millions of people unnecessarily homeless.

If the current economic recession in the United States issue is not faced on the global scale, it may become part of a disgusted, total withdrawal from thousands of years of struggle to attain the Moon, and the actual event is likely to be far more difficult even if it is not nearly so vast.

If it is carefully handled, housing will be certain and stable for most of the people most of the time, and it will not be fraught with financial threats, impossibilities or danger of homelessness for anybody.

That is because the world is changing from

I. Over half a billion years of primitive ignorance, superstition, darkness, cold, hunger and fear, through

II. centuries (now only half through) of determined, hurried, urgent, aggressive, necessary, unavoidable and sometimes warlike change and vast overpopulation, to

III. a future of certainty, warmth, understanding, enlightenment, communications, confidence, knowledge, planetary values and many other blessings that come with global civilization.

It may take time, but let us begin. Some of the approaches of the past just won't do. The hopes, voices and opinions of the young, the children, are vital. They can see things that are wrong, and if their dreams are not yet substantiated, they at least can be given credence.

OIL AS GEOLOGICAL INVERSION-LAYER TURNOVER?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

LONG TIME NO SEE

Consider terrestrial weather in the time periods of the major planets. There are four, with periods of 10, 30, 85 and 165 years. For such long term understanding, it is useful to consider those from the outside in, as 165, 85, 30 and 10 years of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter respectively.

Some civilizations have existed thousands of years. To be fair, it is understood that for the most part only Saturn and Jupiter were visible and readily understood. But the two outer planets were anticipated decades before their discoveries.

The United States has existed only one of those longest periods, for the U.S. bicentennial, 200 year anniversary occurred in 1976. Many busy, prosperous cities throughout the Old World are three thousand years old. They know their climates.

It is time for America to stop being the stooge and thug for the Roman Empire, even if Romulus and Remus did move to London. Maybe even modern Europe should call it enough. Rome's heady England has a tendency to conceal plans for itself in its inanimate crown devices, while nobly suggesting tempting, conflict-ridden actions among everybody itself. While loyal to Canada and Australia, England's Romish belief is that the United States has to make a decision whether to be like Spain which did not recognize the founding Kings Romulus and Remus and the borders of which were left to rot so that it was promptly taken over by numerous Moroccans.

That would mean relegating the Declaration of Independence to the status of an English historical document.

Civilizations that have watched Saturn complete its 30 year orbit a hundred times are formidable, just as a father and grandfather are formidable in dealing with potential criminality in a teenage son.

It's not likely that such a son could understand all the events that span more than three times the entire time he has existed. Yet a 17-year old may be, or have, serious problems and his impatience only makes understanding and maturity more difficult for himself and others. 3*17 is only 51; his father may be that and his grandfather certainly will is.

This is familiar in the way children have little ability to foresee the next hour, or tomorrow, and a week hence is very difficult for a small child. It is related to their attention span, which is the length of time one can keep as a single perceptual environment. It takes practice to pay attention to an entire inning in softball among six or eight-year olds. Older children take the game as a whole event. When they go to work, they are expected, and many do
attain proficiency or expertise at directing their attention to the business for hours at a time. Managers and executives can conduct business as a coherent whole for months, seasons, and
years. Presidents are depended upon to execute the office of the president as a single unified event through the four year sidereal cycle.

But the quadrennial four year cycle is not the longest span of time in which events develop in the evolution of nations.

There are fundamental reasons for that, in the trade-off between time and energy that was discovered in quantum mechanics. Yet the fact that quantum mechanics emerged very recently, within the history of the United States, does not mean that the United States understands, automatically or even potentially, the implications of the passage of thirty centuries of time in the development of other cultures. The study of action itself began three thousand years ago; quantum mechanics was the flower, just as computers are the flower of logic.

It is easy to understand this if one observes with a spectroscope the energy spectra which are emitted by lamps such as neon, sodium and phosphorus. The lines one sees are narrow, and the vary from merely narrow or fine, to hyperfine. A person of recent understanding can look at a persistent fine line for a time. Even considering it with competence in his best good faith, he understands at first that the particular line will be exactly the same energy forever and that it
has the energy now that it will have, say, tomorrow, or next week, next season or next year. If he has some maturity he will catch the sense of it four years hence. He may reflect on that energy in his past if he has a good memory for colors.

The Chinese Spring and Autumn Period was a time in which certain works described events with great depth, and resolved the difference between Spring and Autumn in systematic ways that had been true since immemorial time. One of these was described to me as the difference between hypertrophy and eutrophy. They were asking, what is the difference between spring and autumn since long ago? Oh, see, the past is not merely extended into the future. The future is an entirely different dimensionality than the past. Hypertrophy has to do with an abundance of oxygen in surface waters (I think) and eutrophy with a deficiency. The result has to do with the amount of plant growth.

Now, my understanding of Chinese civilization often appears to me as the memory of the blink of a firefly. That is because each time one learns something new about China, it is lost in a huge, vast, enduring, massive civilization that covers vast area. It is not like arguing with my Daddy about why I never win. When I got into trouble, I always knew as it unfolded that my father was so way ahead of me that it seemed he must be like a time traveler, and knew the future. I did not know he could contrast me with durable things like oak trees or mountains.

China's civilization is so old that few people, even Chinese, have more than an ephemeral sense of the difference between its past and future, because Chinese concepts wrap completely around thousands of years at a time. Modern clocks measure time well, but in a world in which energy of the past is not necessarily distinct from energy of the future.

That's why Charles XII of Sweden, then Napoleon of France, and finally Hitler of Germany all were repulsed when they invaded Russia. Russians knew their land and its climate deeply, in
evolutionary time, and those in foreign countries who did not understand Russia in evolutionary time were naturally encouraged to invade at a time most propitious for Russia.

It should not be necessary to describe the similarity between those events, and the current position of the United States in the Eastern Pacific. For instance, when India developed its
atomic bomb, exactly twenty years to the day passed between the first test and the second. And that is a short period of time. The Asia land mass is not to be regarded as a tempting target
where the lives of others are involved, particularly now that the ancient half-billion year old goal of reaching the Moon is attained and the airless, waterless moon has shoe-prints on it.

The primary inciter of that invasion is in Europe, geologically part of the same Asian land mass. That means the United States does not have a voice either among those waging onslaughts against Asia, or those defending it. Could Asia be subtly goading the rest of the world?

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IS SLAVERY EMBEDDED IN THE CONCEPT OF ENERGY?

Think about this carefully. Your civilization, if it ever existed, may depend on you.

Eight thousand years ago more or less, the first stone block pyramids were constructed.

Much of the work human beings performed in those constructions consisted of lifting block A from lower position 1 to upper position 2.

Though the blocks were not of uniform size, they were of uniform shape.

It was soon understood that the larger they were, the heavier they were in linear proportion to something which was eventually found to be their volume and density.

The same was true of the height through which they had to be lifted. Height 1 plus height 2 equals height 1+2.

The product of weight times height is the same measure of energy used today in the physical quantity called the foot-pound.

Construction of the pyramids established concepts of energy which were to endure until the Moon was attained.

They are still in use, though better understood now. In particular, the energy of lifting is now in stable linear relation to other natural forms of energy.

Stable quantities of energy such as that equivalent to the masses of electrons, protons, and other atomic particles are in use.

The energy of stable spectral terms in light-like radiation is another valuable fundamental source of stable energy measure.

Those who built the pyramids determined the mammalian concept of working energy that exists today.

It was in that concept, or misconcept, of energy that all the subsequent dynasties, regimes, kingdoms, empires, wars, constructions and misconstructions that took place until now existed.

Those ancient concepts of energy were used in the creation of the Apollo rockets which flew to the Moon and took several visitors there to return alive as witnesses to the nature of the Moon.

If the present energy crisis is the resolution of energy of that kind, then no problem exists except for the resolution of the crisis.

If the energy crisis does not take the original concepts of energy into account, and ensure that no error exists in the construction of its powers, then the resolution of the crisis will be itself erroneous in some way.

It cannot be a decision made by one person, such as the author.

The resolution of whether the ancient concepts of energy are good fits to truth and justice or not, will be necessarily the result of considerable thought by many people.

After all, from the very start there is a problem.

Starting even earlier, with earth mounds, these monster constructions involved forced and slave labor, embedding a relentless source of injustice into all subsequent works and probably all human activities that scaled energy in the manner determined by those slave-labor constructions.

Failure to admit that forced and slave labor was a factor in construction of the pyramids will continue to embed slavery in our concepts of energy.

It will cause slavery to will be a problem forever, until the situation is determined correctly.

A Earth-Moon System Without War

It is suspected that the present worldwide economic recession is destined to continue implacably, relentlessly, as the evolution of life causes civilizations to withdraw from, and abandon, the furious attempt to use military power and war to justify and discover mechanisms to reach the Moon.

On the other hand, to the extent that planners correctly foresee the outcome of that withdrawal from the use of military power and war, the world will emerge from the economic recession with new and justifiably greener plans for the Earth.

Meanwhile, the nature of the Moon and the planet Earth which it orbits, is known far better and more quickly than was ever dreamed millions of years ago. The Apollo visitors to the Moon witnessed its nature well enough,

That is not to say that no future journeys are to take place. Certainly they will, probably many, many times. It is just that there is no hurry as far as those on Earth are concerned. Going to the Moon is no longer a worldwide economic incentive, and neither is war.

The only way to resolve this correctly is to get it right in each and all three of daily equatorial rotation of the Earth; annual ecliptic orbit of the Earth around the Sun; and the 250 million year Galactic orbit of the Solar System, Sun and planets and all, around the center of the Milky Way.

As a clue, each year the galactic orbit is about six thousandths of one arc-second. In 170 years, one arc-second. As time passes, the angle of about 121 degrees between the Andromeda Galaxy and the Galactic Center in Sagittarius, slowly increases.

Get all three right and be certain. Guess on one, two or all three, and you have a half, quarter or eighth change of being right.

Ten Thousand Years to the Ancient Moon

The issue with Islam, that they are fighting unbelievers, has to do with confrontation with the Catholic Church which sanctions forcible adherence to the physical concept of mass while leaving the spectra and species of common living beings in rather inferior positions. Colors are relegated to the privileged of royalty, light and right. Roman traditions, both imperial and religious, were extremely powerful throughout Europe from the time of Marcus Aurelius and Christ, until today. Many other cultures throughout the world were also powerful and left value that also exists in the present. Islam is among them and her peaceful intentions and actions must be respected and positively regarded, just as with other nations.

Continuity of the human goals (mainly the Moon) was at first preserved in the mummies of pharaohs and kings in pyramids, sepulchers and the like in and near ancient Egypt. That continuity was transferred to the Italian Peninsula when Rome's church began keeping the remains of its Popes, of which it now has an almost complete reliquary. The preservation of human remains was a part of the struggle to reach the Moon; it was the only naturally obvious means of dealing with formality.

That issue with Islam, said to date back to around 630 AD when the Koran devolved, has to do with the atomic number of Carbon in centuries since the birth or execution of Christ. Atomic number is involved because it is the distinction of charge, which was largely unaccounted until the 16th century AD but which would inevitably cause differences among human groups on the basis of species. Though unaccounted, charge influences species strongly because species arises from electronic transitions in biological molecules of many kinds, and reproduction is very sensitive to both.

The issue of Carbon has to do with the Empire of Nebuchadnezzar, which instituted a distinction between human beings and two realms in the animal world, the Aurochs and the Dragons. It was, importantly, remarkably close to the distinction between mammals and reptiles. That occurred six centuries prior to the Roman Empire at the time of Christ.

The issue of corruption and violence in human civilizations goes back distinctly to the time of earth mound builders around 5,000 years ago when the peaceful traders began to use forced labor in the constructions. That pattern of forced labors evidently began a hand of millennia ago, about when the working of bronze began. Forced labor can be expected to have existed in the constructions of the sand-stone block pyramids and other structures through the middle east.

All of these issues have something to do with El Nino, which also figured into contests between ancient peoples and their attackers, where the weather usually helped the defenders and fended off or even contributed greatly to the defeat of the attackers. That happened twice and more to the Germans and French when they attempted to invade Russia with its ancient experience in unbelievably cold, harsh winters.

All of these issues appear to be transcended by much more ancient evolved instincts that were affected by the tides and Moon since half a billion years ago. If the world is to begin enacting its own freely chosen destiny, the patterns of force, violence and hurried toil must be abandoned and the contradictions between the Catholic Church and Islam must be reconciled on win-win terms that respect each and both of them.

It is not pretended all the details suggested here are accurate, but they are all very large issues which have a great deal with how the world resolves issues throughout the world now that the Moon has footsteps on it and the ancient dream of knowing the true nature of the World has largely come to reality.

The whole temporal period of ten thousand years or so, is in grave need of correct determination in relation to all three of Galactic, Ecliptic and Equatorial order. In ten thousand years the Solar System moved around the center of the Milky Way galaxy just about one arc-minute.

Astronomically that is a large angle, easily measured with surveyor's transits. At ten meters, one degree is 178 millimeters. One arc-minute is three millimeters at a radius of ten meters, and one arc-minute is the angle the galaxy has rotated in ten thousand years. That is why the positions of the Egyptian pyramids at Giza are so important.

The world needed human artifacts in comparison with which human beings would be sensitive to Galactic rotation. That understanding came from depth in the evolution of life on Earth. Prior to the pyramids, galactic rotation only showed up on the unpredictable distribution of atomic nuclei and electrons in the Earth. After the pyramids were constructed, it was just a matter of time before the problem of the Moon was fathomed.

The galactic rotation is in contrast with background galaxies near the galactic plane. Galactic rotation is influential, though vaguely, because there are distinctions between the influence of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and the myriad very distant exterior galaxies. The Andromeda Galaxy is the only galaxy visible with the unaided eye, and it must be keen. Its galactic longitude is 121.17 degrees.

The first recorded description of the Andromeda galaxy was by an Arab, Wikipedia has: "In the 10th century, Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (Azophi) carried out observations on the stars and described their positions, magnitudes, brightness, and colour and drawings for each constellation in his Book of Fixed Stars (964 A.D.). He also gave the first descriptions and pictures of "A Little Cloud" now known as the Andromeda Galaxy. He mentions it as lying before the mouth of a Big Fish, an Arabic constellation. This "cloud" was apparently commonly known to the Isfahan astronomers, very probably before 905 AD.[36] The first recorded mention of the Large Magellanic Cloud was also given by Abd Al-Rahman al-Sufi.

These issues are well known. Their presentation here is faint, not exactly mass news, though it attempts to keep them in formal logical order.