The Falls of Man, or Why the Children are Curious

Somewhere between sensitive and obvious, Neanderthals fell without the benefit of warning; a particular group of their descendants became Homo Sapiens.

It's probably no surprise to some that the Fall of Man, depicted in famous art works and by theologians since - well, the Fall - is best equated with the phasing out of the Neanderthals, probably by a remarkably successful group of their offspring. Of course the transition then from the Neanderthals was not marked by specific, egregrious, onerous and insufferable violations of God's laws as the events during the most recent few thousand years which signaled the fall of Mankind. Stories like that of Cain and Abel are sufficiently equivalent to be of similar import: they may refer to groups, even very large groups, constituting species, as well as to individuals.

This has some meaningful real-world implications. Neanderthals fell, and the Church says that Man has already fallen. It's only a matter of time before the next group of dominant creatures, probably much like us in some ways, will have such different genetic codes in its chromosomal nuclei that no mating between the two would be possible. Wondering why I felt like an old coot, it's not just me after all.

Nothing symbolized the current Fall more distinctly than the Crucifixion of Christ, nor the rise, both preceding and following it, of great constructions and inevitably (because it was an evolutionary and instinctive goal) the attainment of the Moon.

Attainments and failures by the Neanderthals, while identifiable as an ability to survive almost anywhere and wielding materials in tools and weapons that were too big and clumsy, do not involve such distinct events. Even so, some of the same patterns exist. Modern humans can survive anywhere and already do, yet are extravagantly wasteful of massive quantities of the Earth's resources, and unconscionably savage in the rapacity with which the Earth's living creatures are slaughtered by industrial machinery for foodstuff as if they are so much dirt.

The parallels must be drawn more carefully and completely than is possible by this one author. It is vital from the beginning to equate any extinction of the human species with the Fall of Man described by the priests, because first, that is the eternal theater or arena which is compreheded by religion and it is already highly sophisticated at exactly that; and second, because human beings are now setting out (even though their children are now wireless) to begin a million or ten million years of Planethood, easy.

If the scenarios are well coordinated so that they can be presented as potential yet differing pre-concepts, then the concept can emerge without specific written dedications - as it should, because new people must be born in liberty. If the scenarios are neglected or ignored or badly presented, they will do nothing of value, and the next species of human beings will be clumsy in some other unredeemable way only to find itself in its own Fall, and watching its children doing something new which their parents don't understand.

The measures of the Earth, its people, and other factors are already being understood and compiled well. It only requires being tolerant of those setting out in the new directions. This is not so easy as it sounds for an old warlike civilization with a lot of blood on the hands of its species. Men still worry whether their kids will be good soldiers or better yet, generals and admirals. They worry whether their children are going into space rapidly enough.

Instead, it has to be taken into account that the great space adventures are thousands of years in the future, potentially more. The Solar System has nothing worth hurried development of, except for aggression against somebody else on Earth. On the Moon and other planets in this our Solar System there is no farmland arable or not; no breathable air, no open water, no life of any sort. Only the Moon and Mars even have solid surfaces on which to stand at temperatures that will not kill within minutes, and neither of them has any significant atmosphere.

To comprehend the scale on which no evidence has been found of any signals from transmissions in space almost requires a degree in electronic communications. The sensitivity of the receivers is astonishing, and they continually and minutely scrutinize every wavelength in existence.

This does not mean that those facts must be ignored forever, but the plain real actual honest truth is, there is no good reason to waste money going to the Moon or Mars or any other place in the Solar System, while Earth has the problems that it has. To be obsessively complete, there is no way to even TRY to reach any other star system yet.

Many, many people, apparently all fools, stack ifs like they were layers of cake and popcorn, to conclude that despite those facts, nations should be heavily or not, investing valuable money, time, coordination, human dreams, imagination, cooperation and planning in going to the Moon and Mars with the intention of colonizing those places. The most urgent schedule that can be made for flights to these two places at the present time is to solidly and believably confirm, for the benefit of all the people on Earth, that the reports by the United States, Russia and Japan are true. Gaining that credibility by the sheer integrity of each nation that goes visiting there is truly and vitally important for the whole world's peace of mind.

Beyond that, little more importance can be given to space flight beyond the Moon, a reasonable preferred limit to human space flight for now. Robots to the planets are okay; they seem to endanger no one and tend to be increasingly successful. Eventually when it is a piece of cake, human flights will take place throughout the solar system, but they could wait until technological development reaches a sophistication not yet met by human beings. For instance, exploration of the solar system wants a space ship with the resources to roam at will if necessary, and dispatch landing craft to the surfaces of other planets and moons. It would have to be equivalent preceptually to, say, fusion powered interplanetary space ships with antigravity, or something like that.

Orbital flight around the Earth already pays for itself and is certainly worth its investments in communications, weather, soil, land surface and oceanic surveys and every other kind of knowledge about the Earth. It's not at question. Strangely, it should not be necessary to fend of defensive people who obsessive so much about the need for massive human aggression into space that they attack even on just thinking about the factors involved in making policy. Some seem obsessed with the idea that space aliens must be lurking in every Moon shadow. Still others are utterly convinced the United States is lying about the Moon in its meticulous and candid reports, and falsifying information about nonexistent alien spacecraft, life in canyons or caves, and other crap. I know one person who insists there must be an inner world within the Moon where gardens exist, in which zebras, monkeys, antelopes, animals and crocodiles and alligators must surely live.

Yeah, right.

Some of the most surprising nations are among the most offensive in filling the entertainment world's fertile imaginations with an insistent regime of dogma that we must hurry to prepare defenses against - you can probably see it coming - space aliens. The worst is our own parent, England, which has given some kind of licence to the British Interplanetary Society to trump up UK sovereignty over all the Earth on the basis that only England can provide the sophisticated moral basis for government and negotiations with the new Galactic Empire. Oh, good.

Russians are not bad about developing such nonsense themselves, but they never call it down even when it misleads millions of people. Americans are possibly the most difficult though maybe I see it that way because I am one. We not only tolerate the British invention of fantastically funny, imaginative plot lines like Dr. Who and Red Dwarf, but add to it bathtub plunges like Stargate SG-1...n and weird journeys through tunnels. These and other superviolent shows provide the Pentagon with lots of material to spice up arms and weapons development, which was already way way way way WAY over the top in 1946. But just in case, The War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, the Martian Chronicles, and other Doom From Space theater is available so that Christians can deal with any competing religion.

The problems are so big, Man, that the only path from this species to the species that rules the Earth for millions of years will be through the worm tunnel.

Cost of the Moon

From this observer's view of the slow fine energy terms throughout the elements in evolution, it appears the trillion dollar deficit in the United States is in phase with more factors if it is viewed as the realization of the monetized vast economic outlays required to go to the Moon recently, than any of the short term factors to which it is so commonly attributed.

Those outlays spanned all of agriculture, housing, industry, transportation, war and other factors. Some of these may be described in different ways by different persons of course.

The important thing is that the energy terms, which are trade-offs under the action with chronological and geological time, are in the same range of values and scales in nature - molecular spectra in the quantum electrodynamics of evolution, and in the long slow rotation of the celestial spheres - as the thousands of years old dynastic efforts to reach the Moon, more than anything else.

To be sure, the flights to the Moon were justified by all and everything having to do with human existence. Life began washing back and forth toward and away from the Moon billions of years ago in the tides, even shaping the evolution of Man. The Moon appears to have been the essential cause of construction of the Pyramids and all the empires and events since then. That is why it is vital to make as much of the opportunity to bring the world to common, sound understanding of the nature of Peace, if that can be.

It could be that the United States and other countries are still poised on the brink of violent resistance or worse, if any sign of opposition to the attainment of the Moon appears. Along with potential terrestrial opposition, defense against superstitiously anticipated space aliens from other worlds was included (as in the tanks versus the flying saucers in "Day the Earth Stood Still", "War of the Worlds" and "Mars Attacks") and fortunately the alien threat never panned out. Those at least are ideas that should be among the resources of peacemakers who should be respected by militarists.

In other words, there never were any space monster aliens and in fact never will be, yet it was such extensive superstition that even modern militaries were galvanized against that kind of threat. Nobody on Earth needs that kind of nonsense any more.

Cultural Infrared

Whole villages of houses, trees, paths and bridges drew one's vision to the near infrared of campfires as evening changed into night during thousands of years of time.

China is often interpreted as red, and has what is called in English, a ruddy aspect. One can even see it when looking at Chinese cities on Google Maps Satellite. The implication is that China conceives itself in the INFRARED. Just what part of the spectrum that is will require gentlemanly, polite, courteous, civil scrutiny by specialists in color perception, atomic spectra, and probably several other distinct fields.

It is well known as possible, to train one's eyes to see a shade more deeply in both the ultraviolet and the infrared edges of the visible spectrum; on inquiring of others, they concur. In practice, few persons strain to see every perceptible wavelength clearly. That leaves a region of the spectrum which is still within, on the infrared edge from 700 millimicron to 800, less than twice the wavelength of the 400 mmu ultraviolet limit. While both limits are fuzzy, the violet edge is more sharply bounded. An attractive goal is development of LED's that are bright in the 700-720 millimicron near infrared part of the spectrum, just beyond the edge of the conventionally visible.

As one gradually sees the shapes of a room and its furnishings in the near infrared, the Chinese concept becomes more explicable and common-sense.

Both infrared and ultraviolet regions of the spectrum are hot political issues ancient in both government and religion. Many different animals see in the infrared or ultraviolet, and different plants are responsive to those wavelengths as well. One wonders what Unicorns see.

It would be well worth the time and money to determine just how far into the infrared people perceive-and conceive-their environments and of course, themselves, each other, and foreign groups.

A suspicion is that even if people do not actually see in the infrared, they may have evolved a concept of their world, or at least perhaps its durable forms and structures, through interpretation of heat radiation during centuries or thousands of years of time.

Different social groups may see more or less clearly at 730 or 750 millimicrons than is commonly assumed. During hostilities, it would be stupid to allow others to know one can see in the infrared. In peacekeeping, it might be well to find out.

One harmless test would be to ask volunteers to traverse a maze that is illuminated with infrared light, and account the time required, at different wavelengths of infrared for them to find the exit. This could be entertainment at a carnival.

Might save some bloodshed. It is in the ultraviolet and infrared that many fears are hatched.

Quantum Action and Economic Planning

Action is a fundamental constant in nature and appears with special, universal value in many phenomena. Although action appears in all kinds of mechanics from building pyramids to launching space flight vehicles, it also appears in light and light-like radiation of other frequency and energy.

Money is of supreme importance in economic activity and is often defined as an enumerated constant which is employed in transactions. These are acts in trade in which, usually, an amount of money is traded for some good or service.

The action in light is even more fundamental than that of transactions in economic activity. Even so, economic concepts are thoroughly practiced, and they cover the nature of action in the physics of natural law broadly. Describing nature's action with economic activity is like covering graffiti by repainting the entire wall.

Light-like activity is important at this time in history because economic activity is changing in some ways, and stable in others. Very essential activity involves definitions in finance and trade that have been stable for centuries, even thousands of years, are not expected to change in principle (though perhaps volume of trade) in the foreseeable future, and are highly predictable in a number of their fundamental values. Light also is an important model for economic activity which is changing because its predictable time domain has increased, and agents are in the process of determining which factors will respond to the new time domain and how. (For modeling irregularly fluctuating phenomena, light is not as useful a model; that will require principles different than these, which pertain to slowly varying components and long-term changes of kind.)

The recent past, whether one observes it in centuries or thousands of years, is one of singular change for planet Earth. This is the time when, as many writers have noted, Earth changed from a primitive planet dominated by the instincts of wild evolution, to a more or less civilized, rational planet which knows itself from other worlds in the solar system, and conceives itself as one living system, though with many individual economic agents. While much more can be said about it in detail, the crux is that the planet has committed itself to change for ever, a span of time that already comprehends a half billion to several billion years depending on how one defines economic life. During the time prior to the shaping of tools and the use of fire, economic activity consisted of kill or be killed, zero sum games of life and death and there was no money.

Now, it is changing to a world in which economic activity is always, at least eventually, gauged in terms of win-win transactions with money tokens, rational expectations, demands for human rights, ownership of and responsibility for property and accounts, and automatic systems for performing necessary and extremely valuable calculations. These will be in use thousand of years hence. It is this vast global change from wildness that has caused this time to be one of a vast beginning spanning perhaps millions of years and more.

Light provides a model for change on a vast timescale, because of the early 1900's discovery in astrophysical cosmology by the astronomer Edwin Hubble, of a shift in wavelength in light which originally emanated in the stars of distant galaxies. The fainter the galaxy, the more the light which is emitted by it is observed here on Earth as having become longer in wavelength and commensurately diminished in momentum.

With exact equivalence, the energy of light is known to be equal to the product of the speed and momentum of light. Thus it is understood, and quite valuable, that the longer light takes to reach Earth from distant galaxies diminishes in energy and increases in wavetime. The inverse of wavetime is frequency, which is more often used in this context, in part because the entire frequency spectrum of the United States is defined in commerce by the Federal Communications Commission. So believe what you are reading, and remember it: light does change slowly in energy as it travels, and the action goes into its wavetime. The action is not lost; it merely and slowly shifts or diffuses from the internal, topological-physical energy domain of the wave into the internal topological-physical time domain of the same wave.

What on Earth does this have to do with economic activity?

Consider the economic activity represented by a dollar bill. It undergoes numerous transactions and its economic frequency is understood as the number of transactions each year in which that dollar bill is used. The number of times each dollar bill is used in its lifetime-that is, before it becomes torn, is its total utility measured in acts of trade. The number of transactions is a measure used in designing currency notes to last a long time. Durable currency notes are valuable to a nation; it costs money to print new ones.

In the time from 1900 to 1950, economic activity events were measured in periods of time lasting up to five years (such as two world wars and a monstrous depression) the future was not very predictable. It was in fact frighteningly unpredictable.The world had almost survived two thousand years in one great dynasty called Rome, enumerated with the Gregorian calendar which has been invented by Julius Caesar (maybe one of his graduate students.) No other dynasty, all the way back to Cheops and Tutankhamen, had ever done that. All had fallen apart within a hand of centuries, until just about six hundred years prior to Caesar when the Babylonian civilization of Nebuchadnezzar discovered the difference between reptiles and mammals. That means one could be more effective in trade, if one took into account that human economic activity from barter to finance, would have a cold blooded side in the primitive, and a warm-blooded side more often found among people one could trust.

That's why, after Rome had assimilated that for six hundred years, a carbon's atomic number of centuries, the Roman empire was so fundamentally correct that its calendar would span as many millennia as would be necessary to reach the Moon. The United States has already trod the Moon and fetched samples of rock from it, Russia has fetched samples with robots, and a Chinese Long March rocket is on its way to the Moon to do the same, and it is rationally predicted that someday there will be tourist accommodations on the Moon (though I think the time delay will be longer than expected, it will be WELL within the next thousand years.)

We should assume that if the Moon had not been attained by now, or very soon, there would have been a nuclear war, to start over with some better idea than the cities as they exist. Where was I? Oh, yeah.

Consider two projects that are approximately equivalent in the magnitudes of their action. For various reasons such as relative differences in the rate of availability of labor and supplies, one is planned and completed in a period of five years, the other is planned and completed in twenty. Planners, with their PERT, GANNT and other time scheduling computers will put high energy into the shorter time span, and will prepare lower energy in the longer time period. This is a quantum mechanically balanced, fundamentally efficient tradeoff. Time and energy are efficiently and inversely proportional wherever the total action is constant, because action is a linear magnitude variable. That the smallest amounts of action observable are around the magnitude of the quantum is a consequence of a certain ratio that was discovered in light by atomic scientists such as Franck, Hertz and eventually Max Planck for who the quantum was named. The ratio of energy to wavelength is a constant, and the action adds linearly.

Where this relationship of time and energy are taken into account in industrial market activity, it may be more or less confidently assumed that the players have attained quantum mechanical, and probably atomic and nuclear sophistication. Industrial market activity is far more likely to be well planned in relation to the finite resources, natural environment, and on a large scale, delicate fragility of the planet.

Nebuchadnezzar, Caesar and Mohammed

Nebuchadnezzar's society, the Chaldeans of Babylon, distinguished two important kinds of living beings: Aurochs and Dragons. They were portrayed in the famous Ishtar Gate.

Aurochs were a kind of very large wild cattle that survived until 1627. Dragons were lizards that walked on four legs, unlike lizards which crawl, dragging their bellies on the ground. Both of these are well known in many different cultures.

One difference between Aurochs and Dragons was that Aurochs were warm-blooded creatures, which are mammals, hence homoiothermous. Aurochs are descended from mammals, which emerged in a distinct evolutionary break from dinosaurs around 65 million years ago. Dogs and cats are also warm-blooded mammals.

Lizards are cold-blooded, or more accurately, ambient-blooded creatures called poikiothermous. They include reptiles like crocodiles and alligators as well as komodo dragons, small lizards, turtles and snakes. They never diverged from dinosaurs; they are simply the vestiges of dinosaurs.

After the distinction between Dragons and Aurochs became clear, as in the Ishtar Gate, six hundred years passed and it appears likely that the distinction was one part of what gave Rome its distinct and powerful character. It was an important discovery to find that human beings are warm-blooded creatures and that warm blooded creatures are very distinct from reptiles. Evidence of that power is in some of the events in Rome that involved fire.

In 46 BC the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar introduced a new calendar, based on a 365 day year, with a leap year added to February to compensate for the fact that the year is not exactly 365 days, but within a few minutes of 365.25 days. That calendar is the primary basis for the modern civil calendar, used throughout the world. The extra few minutes would not be accounted for in the period of time discussed here.

That six hundred years between Nebuchadnezzar and Julius Caesar is important. The number six registers in evolutionary time with the atomic number of carbon, essential and fundamental to all life on Earth. The atomic number is the number of positive charges, or protons, in the carbon atom nucleus. The protons are far heavier than electrons, approximately 1732 times as heavy. Electrons are far more mobile than protons, and many events occur in which the difference of these charges appear as differences in potential between objects, entities, and beings. They also become differentiated in trade, including both barter and money.

Thus, six hundred years after mammals were distinguished from dragons, something about that difference began to appear in charges throughout the Mediterranean, Middle East and Southern Asia. It would remain unresolved for another six hundred years, when twelve hundred years would have passed after the distinction between mammals and reptiles was made.

If by the time twelve hundred years passed after human beings began cutting the dinosaurs from the mammals, Rome had not attained a means to balance both masses and charges in civil trade, there would be hell to pay. T. Rex's legacy, "only" consisting of Nile Crocodiles, various poisonous and non-poisonous frogs, lizards and snakes, and turtles, would all be down on H. Sapiens with blood in its eye. Never mind humans were the boss and had weapons and tools. The reptiles were losing and they knew it, but they would cause trouble where they could.

That is why, six hundred years after the Roman calendar began, and twelve hundred years after that distinction was made between cold blooded and warm blooded beings, a spiritual wave devolved to become the Koran. The power of the universe was interpreted by tribal leaders then. The twelve is the atomic mass of carbon, and intrinsic nature of its charge means that twelve is a time of complete accounting of both mass and charge.

The important thing is that a power struggle between reptiles and mammals continued to exist at that time. Disappearance of the dinosaurs spans many millions of years, and is not completed yet. Though crocodiles are officially protected, they are fiercely hunted by poachers. Peculiarly, in some places attempt are being made to raise gigantic crocodiles and alligators. One Florida alligator was photographed banging on the side of house with a car bumper held between its teeth, as if it wanted in, trying to get a piece of the human action. In evolution, competition is electric and crosses every difference. Massive evolutionary contest involved great gravity between dinosaurs and mammals during aeons of time. It still exists now in the reptilian competition against human beings as a nuance of their carnivorous predation.

If so, the GRACE satellites mapping Earth's gravity are a good place to start. No Klingons.

Now, it is known that same sweep and range of power extends from the remote galaxies also, to the Earth and the infinitesimal, delicate nature of its tiniest creatures, with mankind in the middle. If what the United States and other countries we are doing now is good, then twelve hundred years from now the United States, and to be sure those other countries, will be judged in the atomic weight of carbon and remembered as good nations.

It may be sufficient to consider the long term divergence between mammals and reptiles and the implications of that divergence on interest, monetary systems, the Earth, social dignity, justice and other life factors. That is a field for better economists than the author. The United Nations Millennium Goals are carefully thought out, and while nobody can see a thousand years hence clearly, those stand a chance of being at least right. In any case, elemental atomic charge (number) and weight are significant in competition in the evolution of both life and civilization.




































The period constituted the first half
of a set of phenomena which contained both even and odd parity factors.





It did not, though, resolve the massive gravitational distribution
of ancient life. That would not happen until the atomic weight
was considered in relation to that which had inceived the concepts.
Not until roughly 600 AD, twelve centuries past Nebuchadnezzar, did
it sink home that something important was cleaving reptiles from
mammals and that this something was being resolved in charges.

Reptiles, monkeys, persons and truth

ENGLISH Reptile Lizard Snake Serpent Worm

CHINESE ANCIENT 爬行動物 蜥蜴 蛇 蛇 蠕蟲

CHINESE NEW 爬行動物 蜥蜴 蛇 蛇 蠕蟲

RUSSIAN Рептилия Ящерица Змея Змея Червь

GREEK NEW Έρπων Σαύρα Φίδι Φίδι Σκουλήκι

ARABIC دودة أفعى ثعبان سحلية زاحف

Only English and Arabic here distinguish a snake from a serpent. This is not news. It reflects something about the political forms of the cultures, that some distinguish between serpents and snakes, and some do not. Just as an exercise, you figure it out.

LINGUISTICALLY, an implied burden is placed on England to provide sufficient distinctions for common sense distinctions between snakes and serpents, so that the rest of the world can translate English into their languages so that they can:

A. Avoid being punished directly or indirectly by the English, and

B. Avoid falling into internecine conflicts with each other that would, except for invidious English distinctions, not happen.

Otherwise, the return to ancient homogeneity in Europe from Rome to England can suddenly flood the world with what seem to be, from Europe, utterly new demands on the world that can not be met. In that case, one would hope that they can:

A. Avoid being punished directly or indirectly by the Europeans, and

B. Avoid falling into internecine conflicts with each other that would, except for invidious European distinctions, not happen.

Now, when one looks at England, is one dealing with a snake, or a serpent?

To be fair, it is offered that England may have a friendlier and more sensible explanation which will nonetheless solve the problem. An example of the problem is that when a person in any other part of the world accuses a person of some wrong-doing and states that the person is, say, a Russian Zmeya, is he accusing the person of being a snake, or a serpent? These will appear all over the world in innumerable small court cases, and so the nations will be filled with an infestation that falls only on the common people, making them alone appear to be the evils of the world.

Saying “So what?” will not do. To force the common people downward, especially while thermonuclear war hangs over their heads, is simply wrong, especially since thousands of years of warlike struggle for the Moon have culminated in victory, moon rocks have been returned to the Earth by more than one nation, and the Moon actually has shoe prints on it made “in peace for all mankind” compliments of the great American venture. Admittedly the Apollo project was historical; its very name traces back at least two thousand years to an important and of course mythical Roman god of the Sun. The idea of 'for all mankind' is a simple, humble and much appreciated concession that attainment of the Moon did something supernal and transcendent for the world, greater than is yet known. The implications of the Moon flights are only beginning to unfold, and it will be hundreds of years before they are clear; thousands and more before they are quiet, and millions before they are devolved.

It is important for those with sensitive egos not to regard the only important thing about the moon flights is that they justify all that America might be disposed to do. It may be important for the United States, and indeed all who understand, to present the implications of the measurements and observations returned. Ideas which are yet unclear must not be dismissed as frivolous, stupid, alien, or insane. They must simply be answered. The work is relatively easy and important.

Among recurring naive assertions is that the Moon is so important, that the facts, ideas and opinions presented so far about it cannot POSSIBLY (pronounced agonizingly) be the whole truth. There MUST be something more about the Moon than that it is airless rock with no topsoil, no arable land, no water and no normal or survivable temperatures. There MUST be gardens or forests or jungles or oceans or something INSIDE the moon that have never been discovered. There's gotta be more to the Moon.

Nonsense to the person enmeshed and awake during the development of the techniques for flying to, observing and returning from the Moon, who has also studied factual astronomy of the solar system, these ideas circulate common as shoes among the uneducated and poor. They shape responses to other conditions such as economic, civil and developmental in their countries. The United States and other enlightened countries cannot get away from those countries. All are on the same planet.

Why is this important? Because in English law, a snake is not exactly a serpent. Why not? Because there is a letter 'k' in the English word, and to the common sense, k can means that the snake represents in one social sense, the king. But in English word 'serpent' the second letter is a vowel, which is an ethereal letter that is more evolved than the 'a' in snake. The letter r which appears in the third place can mean in the same social sense, royalty. Now, if you see a small snake, is it a member of the royal family or not? Is it the leading member thereof? It is up to the person speaking what sense a character signifies, and to the context of the composition or speech.

Not snakes, ourselves. More properly, not lizards or snakes. Not any kind of reptile, human beings are mammals. More carefully, many consider human beings monkeys, where only agross distinction between human beings and reptiles is necessary, one does not want to include ALL possible mammals, and the human-like qualities of monkeys is too precious to exclude.

In formal activity of course, it is important to carefully to observe certain other parameters such as strict morphological distinctions, DNA classification and the important and newer spiritual and other fine distinctions defined by religion and philosophy.

Sometimes, however, matters of importance are in terms that at first cross conventional assumptions, natural forms, morphology and other common sense definitions so broadly that it is worth the work to go over the whole field meticulously.

Reptiles are called poikilothermous, which means "various-temperatures"; 'poikilo' is a Greek root meaning "varied". It is not clear that the Greek root alone covers enough history in the global context, however, unless translations are readily available into the symbols and words of other cultures.

This case presents such a situation: the Chinese characters for lizard, reptile and dragon are all ancient, yet this does not imply that Chinese people consider themselves dragons. It means that dragons are of definite concern to Asian culture. The little more that I can say is that events when cold blood emerges is are of serious concern in both western and Asian society.

Asian distinctions between humans, monkeys, mammals, reptiles, lizards and snakes are all very ancient and common-sensical. The linguistic characters of Chinese for these forms have not changed in thousands of years. Western distinctions between the same terms are often based on understanding that has changed during many centuries as science, natural history, biology and zoology, medicine and other fields progressed; along with these changes, the language changed almost continually from Egyptian glyphs to early phonetic alphabets to Greek and Roman through medieval Latin to French, German and English languages spoken today.

Even so, the same broad fields of distinctions have serious implications in both Asia and the West, especially in medicine, physics and nuclear energy. Powerful new tools such as genetics allow detailed distinctions to be made among these and other forms, while at the same time the molecular biology allows the differences to be traced to chemistry thermodynamics, and electrical activity in fine detail.

The world is thus in a position to reconcile its concern with space flight, the Moon, and nuclear disarmament in terms that are truly global in that they can be understood by any person in any country no matter what language it is translated in, providing only that the language is modern and the person concerned comprehends the subject.

We GOTTA do something about this poverty.

Vital to Consider Ten Thousand Years of Future

It is urgently vital, necessary and essential to devolve the errors in the thousands of years of civilizations that attained the Moon, and consider carefully what is intended in the future ten thousand years. To dismiss it as impossible is foolish. Various dreams and concepts of the future millennia must be brought into the media.

Failure to determine the most serious errors of the past centuries and attend to the long term future goals is likely to result in increasing the present darkness and catalyze wholesale war in the near term future of say fifty years.

The following is only one person's opinion.

Here is a long-run scenario framework that allows one to visualize several different interpretations of the present decades in terms of the past:

The purpose is to consider patterns that exist, the possible causes of them, and what possible futures they portend.

Assume that the Moon was always figurative in the evolution of life since the first multi-celled organisms washed back and forth in the moonlit tides over half a billion years ago. Assume the Moon was always faintly attractive and gradually became a goal of sorts.

Consider the possibility that the Moon's gravity was sensed by early birds, which of course did not waste too much time on struggling to reach it because it was always too far. Other animals may have sensed its shifting gravity, but of course not as well as bird. paragraph

Possibly, some animals grew tall trying to reach, besides food, also the Moon. Others, like frogs and kangaroos, tried to jump to it. If nothing else, entertain the notions for now as peculiar myths.

Assume the present secular understanding of history of the Earth, of the human species, the emergence of tools, fire and manufactures and the time from the earliest earth mounds and pyramids to now. That all the history of human civilization up to a few years ago was strongly driven by the goal of reaching the Moon and Sun.

That early human beings wondered why they could not climb to the Moon on hills and mountains.

That early Earth mounds were constructed to try to build something tall enough to reach the Moon. That these Earth mounds did prove something - the person climbing the mound did move in the right direction to reach the Moon, only of course not high enough by a vast distance.

That the construction of Earth mounds did attain a discovery that energy, which had to do with jumping and climbing, had also to do with the carrying of loads of earth, rocks, and later, blocks of carved and shaped sandstone, limestone or other soft stone.

That the common denominator was gravitational potential energy, and it took more of the same kind of energy to carry a stone up a hill, as it took to carry one's person.

That the energy was found to be proportional to the weight and height, even back then, as it was a linear product and related also to one's weight and the height one climbed. In addition, this energy is familiar in the circulation of blood.

That, once certain principles of geometry were realized, the construction of carved stone pyramids began in an earnest, architecturally progressive and record development process evolving to reach the Moon and Sun.

That because of the inadequate chosen principles, gravitational potential energy and few others, and the absence of modern research administration, much conflict was inevitable and many wars were fought.

That each failing civilization was subsequently diverged from, and if necessary fought against, by those human groups finding new principles.

That this process continued through many important discoveries (these are not necessarily in order and in some cases new discoveries are still refining the order):

Fired clays for pottery, porcelain and ceramics.
Smelted metals like copper, silver and bronze.
Arithmetic, geometry and mensuration.
Irrigation.
Domestication of animals
Fishing nets.
Fishhooks
Musical instruments
Agriculture
........
Pictographic languages.
Alphabetical phonetic languages.
Barter trade
Money trade.
Cottage industries.
and many other ancient and new developments.

That after the discoveries of fire, pottery, and irrigation, construction development slowed greatly in a conservative move in China, and contemplative ideas based on the resolution of opposites (a highest form if thought in natural wildlife) was worked into the Confucian or Taoist Yin and Yang.

Because this involved primarily organic evolution, Chinese culture was not as violent as construction of architectural settlements in other civilizations. On the other hand of course, by other standards, Chinese civilization remained relatively backward and was thought stagnant, an assumption frequently made of conservative development.

(This contrast is familiar on all temporal scales, even in the modern, almost continual arguments between conservatives and progressives. In this document, that model is simply extended over possibly millions of years of determined development toward the Moon.

That in contrast, civilization in the Middle East, emerging out of Africa, took to more aggressive constructions which competed with others, and, because these constructions involved great commitment which later caused severe differences, more war existed in that and the Mediterranean region.

That the discovery of money was early in some cultures, such as Jewish, which learned trade much earlier than most other peoples.

That the discovery by the Babylonian Chaldeans under Nebuchadnezzar of the difference between mammals (Aurochs) and reptiles (Dragons) and later found to be between cold-blooded poikiothermous and warm-blooded homoiothermous organisms was an important and decisive step toward attaining the Moon. There was nothing magical about the Chaldeans; they simply discovered the differences between dinosaurs and mammals was real and important.

That the situation in China remained at the distinction between Dragons (reptiles all the way back to dinosaurs) and Confucian dialectic of the Yin and Yang, which were essentially based on the light and dark periods of the Moon.

That the Auroch and Dragon difference, about 600 bc, was destined to cause resolutions to reach the chemical depth of carbon. That it was because of the atomic number six of carbon that just six centuries later, the Christian calendar began during a triumphant period of Rome.

That Roman and other civilizations proceeded in various ways to set out on courses they defined, toward attainment of the Moon.

That during all these times before and since Rome, and because of the absence of well resolved (in modern terms) principles appropriate to attainment of the Moon, very great mistakes, errors, miscalculations, and inadequate or just plain bad judgment resulted in wars, plagues, famines and other important catastrophes what were often thought to be even in essence, unpredictable and impossible to avoid.

That the Great War to End All Wars, and the Second World War, were essentially one big war, in the pattern of a hurricane, with a quiet eye or lull in the center of the storm, and that the great period of war was the emergence of the consequences of devolving the Milky Way Galaxy, a spiral galaxy, onto the Earth.

That the consequences included the development of atomic and nuclear energy as well as vastly more sophisticated forms of electricity.

That the consequences also finally attained flight to the Moon, and the return of samples and rocks therefrom, accompanied by highly accurate and as far as nature is concerned, perfect gauge and measure of the solar system and all its planet.

That because of these things it is truly certain that war is no longer necessary, absolutely not in order to reach the Moon again if that should prove desirable.

Because of the vast knowledge of the Earth, Sun, Moon, planets, galaxy and universe, it is not likely that Earth will ever be far away from what it wants to do in the optimum, apart from whatever vestigial errors exist today.

For instance, a grossly overproduced military factor may result in unnecessary and tragic wars in the future even though the overproduction could just as well be deconstructed and recycled as peacetime raw materials.

That because of the vestigial errors remaining from thousands of years of warlike struggle for the Moon, certain manufactures ARE grossly overproduced in comparison with the expected magnitudes in times of prolonged stable tranquility in the future.

That among the overproduced or wrongly distributed factors are automobiles, ships, airplanes, highways; aggressively manufacture and sold consumer goods; vast quantities of substances such as iron are made into fundamental forms and shapes of the action; the ambition to produce immense magnitudes of energy seems pathologically intensive;

That because of related vestigial errors, other manufactures are inadequately produced; necessary policies are not formulated; vitally needed forms of governmental forms are inadequately protected.

That quiet, long-term peaceful, stable forms of civilization are not properly visualized or understood, and instead, people are left to grope for such forms as holistic society.

That proper sanctions for individual choice in seeking and establishing stable quiet civilization are not provided.

That careful design of necessary and sufficient peacetime activities is not adequately attempted.

That proper and immediate reduction of large scale industrial slaughter of wildlife, which should be of the highest priority now in the understanding of the Earth, is not being adequately funded and protected. Ships are plundering the seas of wildlife yearly by millions of tons like it is so much dirt. The same is true of land mammals, being slaughtered wildly for food by irresponsibly reproducing human beings who cannot afford to keep their children fed. The plagues of frogs, locusts, rats and other creatures were the result of creating falsehood in the visions of leadership; they have resulted in plagues of human beings.

That the potential for failing to these immediate and vital planetary needs is almost certain to be a period of increasing darkness followed by wholesale unnecessary war.

It cannot be the opinions of one person, or only one nation, which decides what is to be preserved and renewed, and what is to be scrapped or deconstructed. Some things may be revived. Others yet only dreams may be abandoned.

It is a time for serious reconsideration of tens of thousands of years of future time.

To neglect these emergent factors and fail to attend to them is criminal nigh unto war

Cool Air for Chilean Miners

Cold air should be pumped down to the miners. As much as possible, even though it won't be much.

Even if it is too little to cool an entire chamber much, or more than a few miners at one time, the temperature reference will provide them valuable sense-information for metabolism, activity rate and other matters of health.

They would have to spend only a few minutes on rotation at first to give all the miners an initial break from the heat.

It will be difficult because properly, it needs an insulated air flow, must be pumped fresh and very cold, and must be pumped rather rapidly to prevent its warming up on the long journey down through the hot rock.

All those variables will have to be worked out by engineers.

It's probably worth another hole.

You Don't Want to Go to the Moon

A great deal of ego is invested in hoping to prove who can go to the Moon. Yet in fact, billions of people have no desire to go to the Moon in the foreseeable future, and no desire to spend the money to send anybody else either.

Knowledge of the nature of the Moon was a figurative goal for all Earth from long before the time of King Tut. The Moon haunted prehistoric human beings, and possibly earlier precursors of Man as well. Ever since the first use of flaked stone tools and weapons, ever since the atlatl hurled a spear point farther than any man could with his bare hand, people have dreamed of throwing it to the Moon.

That knowledge was slowly emerging in the time of ancient Greece and Rome, rapidly increased with the discovery of optics four hundred years ago, and finally attained with certainty during the Apollo manned project and by several unmanned instrumented missions as well. The information returned within the last fifty years includes actual samples of the Moon's surface rocks, and specimens were distributed to every nation on Earth.

Physical objects-corner reflecting mirrors-were left on the Moon so that they could be used with lasers to determine the exact distance to that point on the surface of the Moon. Those reflectors will be useful for centuries, perhaps thousands of years, as positive evidence of human artifacts on the Moon.

The information returned by the missions confirmed the best of the thought from ancient civilization, and as well, the visual understanding gathered by telescopes since the 16th century. The Moon is KNOWN, baby, and you don't want to waste your stuff on it.

Fiction in theater and literature about Moon Men and other living organisms was never proved out, yet it created a sinister, gloomy and haunting concern that the Moon might be found to harbor some kind of concealed life - a concern that even now drives some to propose immediately returning to the Moon to find the desired creature. Relax. There is no air. no water, no life, no farmland, no oceans, no seas, no space aliens, and no people on the Moon. It's only rock, dust and vacuum, sterilized every two week day by so lethal heat and radiation from the Sun and chilled beyond dry ice in the long night - conditions that were survived only with special protective equipment, for only a few days by the astronauts, before they had to return to safety.

Nobody wants to go to the Moon that badly yet. It's not impossible. It's just a frightfully, tyrannically costly, expensive and wasteful thing to do now. Later, like, say, 2400 A.D. It is not worth the money yet. Someday enough substantial questions will arise which are retained for when Moon missions are worth affording. Until then, we stand to gain much more by dedicating the knowledge and organization to solving the problems which plague mankind and the Earth as well - war, disease, crime, reckless reproduction, loss of habitat, defoliation, and many other problems remain which are a result of errors that were made thousands of years ago and had cumulative effect since then.

Returning to the Moon should wait until the whole cost of the journey can be afforded by the top of the market, as an amusing luxury, rather than dragged by tooth and claw out of helpless indigenous and poor human beings at the cost of frantic, clumsy exploitation of the planet's natural resources.

Untrammeled imagination needs better governance

The most significant single detail about the U.S. economy is probably that it is quiet. It is quiet in an important way: it is so quiet that it can be described in terms of things like the Boltzmann constant, the noise figure, the thermal noise and other technical terms. The quiet means that something noisy, energetic and chaotic has become silent and inactive.

Moreover, this change is one of those permanent kinds of change from which can emerge many solid, clear distinctions between

I. millions of years of ancient history

and

II. millions of years of future.

The big change was attainment of the Moon, and the related, top gravy icing-on- the-cake orbital space flight around the Earth, plus instrumented probes of the planets. Those things changed everything. From personal memory alone, I recall being with my parents and grandparents in the West Seattle Alki beach area one summer evening in 1948. As it was becoming dark, we went outside and looked at the full moon. We had a pair of binoculars. My parents asked several times if I could see "the man in the Moon" It never occurred to me to imagine a person actually standing there; I could only see the well known shapes of light and shadow that were called a face. It was okay, though.

Our grandfather told us of China, and how it was far away across the ocean. He described different people and added some anecdotes. Mostly, I could see that the world was dark and, it seemed then, flat. I could only contrast that later, more like now, with the modern sense of its being round like a ball, and of the Moon being round in the same way. The world was dark and flat and local; Issaquah was far away. Everyplace else was unknown, even if I'd been there, whether it was on the Earth or not. That was then, of course.

Since Sputnik, Apollo, Skylab, Soyuz and the International Space Station everything has changed. The world's millions of years, once all in the past and full of dinosaurs, is now entirely distinct from emerging concepts of the future. The future stretches, not endlessly so much as in detail before us, yet there is no limit to the horizons of time in the future, for those go on, and on forever. It is merely true that the future's familiar, predictable scales are becoming true, clear, and increasingly certain, while unknowns about the commensurate time are becoming smaller in magnitude. Instinct and nature are becoming more confident of the future and the future is all on Earth, for a considerable time to come.

That's not bad, but like a small town in an untroubled country, it is either already neat as a pin. You better stay out of the way of the business of putting things in order, for that is the business of the entire world now. Earth is a conscious entity with its own instincts for its health, confidence, certainty, and a large range of values that were until recently concepts only in the views of individual human beings, families or sometimes nations. Oh, the nation-but not the entire Earth? Earth is gaining a globally collective sense of its own existence, its value to itself and in the universe, and its ability to fend for itself against both external and internal threats.

These senses come from the primitive organism's ability to fend both interior and exterior threats. Those are threats such as disease pathogens (viruses, germs and parasites) and predators (lions, tigers and bears). Human society of course invented new kinds of threats, and these are fortunately, diminishing in magnitude; their appearance was mostly in the form of wars.

We have imagined some kinds of threat (space aliens) that seem to be increasingly unlikely, and not anticipatable in any sensible way. Our concern about them has resulted in a vast theater that probably in some obscure movie depicted more closely than we know, what eventually will happen, yet for a long time to come, it appears that no space aliens will be encountered, discovered or detected.

Eventually, the most recent gleaning indicates, a gradually improving concept of extraterrestrial life will emerge from increasingly detailed understanding of the atomic, molecular, and chemical activity between and in other star systems. The concept comes into better focus through a time of several centuries or more. Just how long is not clear. Even the conclusions are not clear, for the vision trailed off with ONLY an indication that the concept of extraterrestrial life is, someday, becoming increasingly clear. And ET is not here, not soon, not yet. Earth is the only life among the stars for a good long time yet.

This would be similar to the way in which Native American prophesy resulted in an assortment of stories that made it possible for them to say to some of the European settlers, "Our ancestors told us that you would come." Prophesy has always been useful that way, since human beings were first living in tents and thinking about, considering, what would come snooping around tomorrow. And what it would be looking for - a place, food, mate, competitor?

For now, apparently for several centuries, there won't be any visitors. We won't find any places within reach have life on them, although we already recognize the atomic and molecular basic constituents of life do exist in other places both in the solar system and at other star systems. Budgets and interest permitting, or urgency requiring, we are destined to explore the solar system, and it may be found possible to start life on Mars - that's still up in the air. It will have to be very tough and, and whether simple and primitive, or intricate and complex, it will have to be of very sophisticated adaptation before it is successful.

One can conclude almost nothing more: so?

"So?" is about all one can say. The future is becoming more explicable. At the present time, security precautions in the industrial market world, particularly the United States, are heavily invested in the possibility of threats coming from impossible-to-predict-even-in-principle unknown sources, because the idea of human terrorists native to planet Earth, and space aliens from unknown stars, are all mixed up together. Meanwhile, one is a fact and real possibility, and the other only haunts our imaginations. That's why whenever anything suspicious appears that is noticed by security forces in the United States, the whole top of the stadium blows off and the world is suddenly exposed to the moral vacuum of outer space without any particular concern for common sense.

Scientists were always equated with imaginary space aliens and vice versa. There are no space aliens.

Space aliens only exist in the vacuum of outer space and the reaches therein of imagination untrammeled by common sense. Imagination untrammeled needs better government.

Ideas of criminals, terrorists or more hypothetical space aliens are images always on file, which resulted from centuries of literature and cinematic speculation and an interest in being frightened or terrified.

Why would anyone want to know anything of terror? Because it is one of the most easily anticipatable events of tomorrow. We learned millions of years ago that while it was not possible to predict a predator sneaking up on the camp, it was always relatively easy to predict whether one's concept of terror was best exemplified by memore of the last time, or anticipation of the next time. Just as with earthquakes, when memory of the dreaded becomes anticipation, it's time to start moving to more solid ground.

It's a triple layer of precautions. Ancient instinct says you want to be familiar with your sense of fear. That's among the origins of "Know Thyself."

You want to be very certain of the difference between the past and the future. Even slowly.

You want to keep one eye on your ability to be afraid, sense terror, panic or fear. You want to be certain whether a discerned fear is a memory, or a sense perception right now, or neither. Not to eliminate fear from instincts; it is an idiot light of primal importance.

When it is not a memory, is a threat actually existing in the present moment? When it is neither a memory nor in the present moment, is it in a future sense? The future is dominated by one particular fact: many of its details are unknown at all times. If a fear is not a memory, of some event in the past, and it is not something occurring at the present time, then either one is missing something about the situation now, or it has future aspects, or both. What kind of perceptions have illuminated or revealed the fear? Are there any continuous paths from right now to anticipation of fear?

Consider sharks, which try to equate the terror they cause with their teeth, because if they can do that, then if you detect them at all, it's too late: their teeth are upon you.

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.