Monday, March 21, 2011

Planetary Health

The health of the world rightly is and should be of high priority, and the standard of health raised to include transcending time and space. Health is a concept distinct from, for instance, ambition, magnificence, or industrial transformation. The Earth-Moon system was photographed from Mars by the HiRise orbiter and from Saturn by the Cassini orbiter, as well as from space by other probes on their way from Earth to some destination. These photos give Earth a distinct identity and something of a self-concept. It's time to capitalize on that with the highest standards of morality and justice possible.

In particular, war among human beings must be regarded as a pathological condition in which behavior otherwise characteristic of organisms is limited to the insects. While competition for food and other resources may result in one species dominating another, and can even lead to the extinction of a loser, war itself does not take place. Yet war does occur among insects.

It is true that the practice of war has led to refinements of its goals. In no other species does war intent to preserve democracy and the removal of a tyrannical leader. This does not necessarily justify war.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Forward Thinking is a Death Trap

The emerging idea that "Forward Thinking" is the way to go, is little short of the launch sequence for Hitler style Nazi Fascism. Forward thinking is inevitably commandeered by mechanized vehicles, aircraft and bullets. Those are the premises of inhuman, inanimate, untrammeled, cold, heartless logic.

The kind Hitler's SS used. It comes from uncomprehending, barbaric and savage assumptions that the killer, because he lives, is correct; and the victims-those who were killed-were in error, wrong, stupid or weak, valueless and of no consequence. That's one side of a certain kind of African death's head mask that appeared in a movie about the United Nations, "The Interpreter" (2005).

Forward thinking is the original way of becoming a machine-whether by a soldier, regiment, marching band, military establishment, or nation. Forward thinking is what sharks do, as predators racing for their prey.

The United States is changing, and possibly being manipulated. One of manipulations happens by monarchical halving with nobility. That's not necessarily bad. Leadership is better shared. The United States is cognizant of all these issues and accepts good leadership when it presented by other nations. The opinions of others are not to be taken up lightly, of course. Fortunately the United States keeps its head well almost all of the time.

Wikipedia has, "Currently, 44 nations in the world have monarchs as heads of state, 16 of which are Commonwealth realms that recognize Queen Elizabeth II as their head of state. .."

That global encyclopedia also lists

77 monarchies in antiquity, dating back to 3500 BC. to 926 AD

69 monarchies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance from 8th Century to 1752

57 monarchies from Kingdom of England (c. 1630 - 1707 to the 44 monarchies throughout the world at the present time.

Monarchies are not going away anytime soon. They have been among the principle forms of government during the more than five thousand years that spanned the constructions and records which accompanied the attainment of space flight and the determination of the nature of the planets. That nature includes no space aliens, no places to live, and the only two places a human being can walk on and live have no significant air supply. Earth is the only home for human beings for all the forever that matters during the next thousand, probably ten thousand years and more.

Monarchies have a balance of power and the means to attain and enforce it. The future looks best when monarchies and democracies are integral parts of a well designed win-win relationship. Each should cultivate its relation with the others. That's where the phrase "enemies in war, in peace, friends" poses difficulty in the Declaration of Independence. It is why the United States is under increasing pressure to at least be more compliant with the English monarchy, and not assume that all which is suggested by that government is both fail-safe and directs the United States to remain in continual war with somebody, somewhere. Even so, I would not know how to be of value in the best resolution, because I only see the danger from dark asphalt-filled places where decent civil people rarely go.

The future of Earth now is suddenly real. It contains no imagination-driven competition with space monsters, and no felicitous flights to the stars - possibly not ever. For a while, a joke went around that God made the universe exceedingly large and put the stars far away from each other in order that the inhabitants would not collude lightly or, more likely, ever. It may be we won't go flying to the stars anytime in the next million years, or ever. Time of course will tell, and Junior is shouting, "I've got the answer already!"

Constitutional monarchies are only a hairsbreadth from the Constitutional Republic that exists in the United States. Numerous citizens on both sides of the border between the United States and Canada are fostering unification of the two nations. The same is true of the border with Mexico. These movements are also in a context of a more broadly defined United North America. The author does not know much about these ideas and won't go into them here. Suffice it to say, modern genealogical research in the human genome has returned proven results even if there is a little more caffeine in the wool than one would expect. Democracy and monarchy might get along famously someday, even before flying to the stars. Look: the Russians are patching their own noble character back together after something dark in their character made them murder their royal family and dump them down a mine shaft. Now, they are finding their favorite families again.

It's enough to say that U.S.-Mexico unification turns up 1,290,000 hits on Google, U.S.-Canada unification shows 238,000, and United North America returns 131,000,000 results. That's 131 million.

One of the things that makes this seriously possible is that the cosmology is now understood to be the same for every person on the entire planet, no matter what their favorite parts are. Space flight gave the Earth a future concept that just does not stop. In fact, on thinking a few hundred years into the future, it takes off and racks of hundreds of thousands, and then millions and hundreds of millions of years. Two hundred twenty million years and Andromeda and the Galactic Center are again just 121 degrees apart.

That's one of the reasons the economy is wondering what to do. The future in economic terms spans aeons that are just simply mind-boggling. Little definite action to change the world's constructions can be taken until there is a better sense of agreement on what, in that long future, was

a. Invented and used in the past and is worth keeping forever, such as agriculture;

b. Was of primitive origin or recent invention that was more trouble and grief than good.

c. What new things need to be invented, and maybe

d. What new things should not be invented. After all, there are infinite possibilities, and the right of choice as well.

Several generations will be spend putting these things into new perspectives. Few major changes in the historical development of technology became obvious quickly in the past. Now, in media made possible by that very technology, the most astonishing thing is the emergence of new technology. Silicon is in the wild.

Forward thinking is just a way of deceiving the gullible into jumping into a future so long that it cannot be predicted, just because one can move forward rapidly in a spaceship, airplane, car or boat or on foot. Forward thinking was what the German gunners thought when they moved mechanized cannot, and what they thought when they shipped human beings into speeding cattle cars. Forward thinking is a way of carrying the head so much faster than the legislative powers that it becomes indifferent to the value of life. Life is then reduced to road kill, and made into some kind of gunk on the asphalt, like happens to the wildlife. Forward thinking is a way of crossing too many railroad tracks on a bike at a narrow angle. The machine driven decisions can make people do bad things like kill.

Forward thinking was not pretty then and it is not pretty now. It will be worse if it is taken seriously by the American people, or by any large population in the world. It should not drive the economic takeover.

If you must think carefully, do it in privacy, speak of your thoughts rarely, and weigh your decisions carefully in a motionless chair. Please, be very certain and very careful if you institute "forward thinking" as national policy. It would be used to drive database searches in discriminatory classification. Those drove Hitler's decisions when he used data from the machines to choose populations for his pogroms. Machine decisions led him to plan to exterminate the entire Jewish population. Then when you communicate you can say things you have already thought through.

This question has been in front of amateurs and professionals alike always, but especially after the first small computers became available in the 1970's and 1980's. A sort of poem was circulated then, about how different groups of people started disappearing. "First they came for the idiots. Then they came for the..." The groups began to consist of increasingly familiar people, but up to a point, there were others who remained in existence. Yet finally, the narrator says "Now they're coming for me." Several events have taken place since then, that have obscured that precaution and it is worth remembering again.

Please, DON'T buy into forward thinking, even if it is a favorite slogan in car companies.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Most Habitable Place Doctrine

The gradient between order and chaos is fundamental throughout the universe, and its distribution appears to be locally determined in locally distinct ways. The order and chaos distribution in each star system is relatively (though not perfectly) isolated from other star systems. Some regions of stars in any galaxy such as the Milky Way would be more ordered, others less.

This is like the fact that in a house, warmth is closer to the furnace and kitchen heat. It is why there is more business to be had nearer the center of the galaxy than on its outskirts. It is just like London.

Order and chaos gradients are inevitable and chance is continual and implacable. These are like conservation of angular or rotational momentum laws that cause Uranus and Venus to be retrograde. Where things are very cold, entropy (a measure of disorder) is very low because of low temperature, and little of the randomizing thermal energy. Where things are of more moderate temperature, entropy kept low by the formation of chemical molecules of flexible form and action that deals with thermal disorder by such activities as sweating, swimming and manufacturing air conditioners.

Entropy is relatively low in most places in one way or another because the average entropy of the universe is extremely low. It is high only in the relatively small (compared with the vast expanses of space-time between stars) and extremely hot objects like stars.

Where temperatures are at neither extreme, entropy gradient activity is inevitable. Competition emerges, and lower entropy objects which are hard (for instance as measured on the Mohs scale) slowly or quickly crash through lower entropy objects that are soft. In short, they compete. It is even more inhuman than the nasty, brutish and short, or the terrible carnivorous, zero-sum predator-prey relationships of wild planets and animals. Hard crystals simply grow through soft crystals, and totally displace the constituent particles of the softer substances. They always do that wherever both find the nutrient molecules of which each is composed. One can purchase crystal growing kits that demonstrate this activity from science warehouses like Edmund Scientific. If you have not understood this, you should make that purchase. The kits are not expensive.

In any dynamic environment things are constantly in stir, and so they evolve. A fluid environment may or may not be absolutely necessary, yet it certainly seems to increase the probability of life forming. Some crystal forming life-like or living molecules result in soft, not hard crystals. Others are not terribly choosy about what kind of molecules they use, as long as they are in a similar pattern; DNA is composed of remarkably caffeine-like molecules. People may drink beverages other than coffee on other worlds or at other star systems.

Adaptive molecules are virus-like molecules. One of the events that shed great light on this was the synthesis of the tobacco mosaic molecule. Molecules that become highly ordered gradually (aka through millions of years) and eventually form cells. They do this by accumulating a peripheral garden of molecules valuable to themselves and keeping it clear of offensive molecules. The boundary of the garden is at a half wavelength of the most abundant light from the parent star. Most cells on Earth are spherical or nearly so, and about the same diameter as one wavelength of the brightest wavelength of light of the Sun. That brightest wavelength is half of one micron. Hold a meter stick and look at the millimeters. Imagine one millimeter is similarly divided into a thousand equal parts. Half of one of those parts is the diameter of one cell. One human cell, one dog or fish, bat or skunk, whale or mouse cell. The only cells very much different are nerve and sex cells.

That is why the cell membrane is about half a wavelength of light

In a double star system, cells would have double hulls. Jupiter is a really small star and its brightest radiation is about five microns. Cells may be found on Earth which have an exterior membrane 2.5 microns from the nucleus. Cells typically reproduce by mitosis, cleaving into halves. Some cells in very ancient (Archaean) times billions of years ago flunked mitosis and failed to separate completely.

One would think such mutations would all die, but no. A few of those peculiar creatures survived to form dimeric cells that actually gathered food and lived. At first those lived only short lives struggling to live full lives and cleave in mitosis. Eventually some of those succeeded, cleaved and reproduced to form two dimers. Perhaps at first those reverted to monera. Some of their descendants failed dimer reproduction and had three cells. Eventually some trimera managed reproduction. The situation is simple enough that one can imagine several ways of succeeding as mitosis gradually evolved into sex. When quatromeres and pentameres emerged, successful multicelled reproduction was probably so sophisticated that early organ differentiation was beginning. One cell would be the boss, and eat. Other cells were not the boss.

As mistakes continue, the frequency of survivors increases and just as one might figure, some of the critters reproduced into two dimers that in turn, cleaved successfully themselves. A species of viable, persistent two-celled creatures had come into being. We grope our way along with many or few mistakes and many or few errors. Those who survive inherit the Earth. Those who comprehend not are occasionally heard to say that those who avoid making mistakes are cheating, and it is why those who avoid making mistakes are sometimes caught by surprise by the hardness of those who inevitably err and live in a darkness composed of not only the absence of light, but to a great extent, the absence of order.

From the very start, individual organisms survive in part because they keep, care for and cultivate their environment. At first that was just the part of population which, at random, happened to take better care even of the other part of the population that did not. Those that cared for their environments in ways that led to longer survival and greater chances of reproducing successfully to produce surviving offspring were those which determined the concept of "better". As organisms learned to say, "Some people have all the luck" they also began to wonder just what luck was. Asked, the successful almost invariably said it was too complicated to explain. Reflecting on it themselves, they at some point realized that life is very complex and they could not possibly know all about. Whatever the whole was, it had to have a simple name.

That is like asking a successful person how it is that he is successful. When he explains, it becomes clear that success is caused by many factors, only some of which each person knows of himself personally. If he or she is competent, he may say "I inherited this from a particular grandparent", "That is from my father" and "this ability is from mother". Talking about the Good, one soon understands there is so much of it that it cannot be described in detail in every conversation. The word 'good' needs an abbreviation. The word god is that. Understood well, people capitalize on the concept, and it is capitalized as "God".

The word God means very, very much.

The word God means approximately "All the good that can be made of everything that is." To a human beings, God is at least anthropomorphic, yet at the same time represents all the good of existence throughout the world, especially this beautiful, fertile and living planet Earth, and with quite reasonable extension, everywhere in the Universe. A reasonable limitation is "all inhabited worlds".

These are differently resolved, but the best meaning is relatively consistent among all people. Nihilists do little but degrade conversation and do not succeed in eliminating God's existence.

Symmetry helps in understanding such things. Bilateral symmetry is as ancient as fishes. That is why prayer is a particular form of activity. Each attribute of the environment is a small part of the great whole of existence. The smallness and often delicate fragility of those parts of that realm of phenomena which constitute God, things Holy and oneself, requires humility. One does not learn from small flowers or other tiny organisms that have nonetheless survived for millions of years in a huge, dangerous world without humility.

Writing about such things is like being in a candy shop. There are so many good and valuable things one can say. At the same time, so many terrible events are unfolding in the world that eventually one must leave off, perhaps to submit the form to the public. What will become of Northern Africa now that the planet's form is proved and the nature of light is unfolding?






they begin predation, trade and war, and eventually learn to use the internet to purchase things at home.

The theory is, order-chaos gradients of entropy and confusion in any star system always emerge in a ubiquitous pattern that is the same throughout the universe. In this pattern, the probability of life is closest to 0, Zero in the least habitable places and is 1, Unity in the most habitable places in that star system.

This provides justification for those who believe that life is so frequent in the universe that one can hardly look at the stars without going into a bargain contract with the extraterrestrials. These, of course, are not God. They are just critters. It's fortunate they are far away.

If they are.

I can't say for certain this is the way it is. It's just one end of the range of possibilities

Monday, March 7, 2011

EARTH PEOPLE ATTAIN MOON, ECONOMIES MASSIVELY DEVOLVE

The five thousand year Hand of Millennia project by Earth to reach its Moon finally attained success yesterday when Neil Armstrong placed his foot on the old visible satellite. The event signaled a new willingness to find more ways to work through peace than continue the tragic struggles to accomplish anything significant and new through war.

Unfortunately, Terran economies are collapsing almost to the idiocy of rural life everywhere. Almost every technology including architecture since millions of years earlier had been developed with the goal of flying to the Moon in mind. As a result, most industrial development was massively overconstructed and highly energetic, which places a premium on fast forward.

The collapse was not unexpected although because of its magnitude it will require extensive redesign of prevailing economic forms. Earth people are busy as cats on a tin roof trying to balance old, obviously valuable forms and mercifully exorcise the erroneous. One pattern, the form of government, consists of two parts-monarchy and community. Monarchs see the community as hordes and swarms of individuals. Communities often produce outspoken people who accuse monarchies of being selfish, greedy pigs.

Just what comes of this old familiar struggle for Earth remains to be seen.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Unanticipated Future Implications

Assume housing shelter and clothing, and food and water will be irreplaceably essential factors throughout the next million years

Then in the long run, what kinds of ideas will be gathered by the whole population in determining an optimum broad, tolerant gradient between essential and inessential economic activities? These are conditions that will eventually exist for a very long time, tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. How extensive can inessential activity be during a hundred millennia?

Five thousand years of development has successfully attained the Moon and returned the long sought understanding of the Sun, Moon, other planets and Earth itself, Those five millennia were the hand of millions of years of human evolution, including sweeping the bones out of the cave door and migrating to avoid the waste

Recently, years a massive garbage glut are sweeping Southern Italy. Attempts have been made to ship the garbage north.

Instead, the collapse itself, of waste disposal systems, itself is likely to move north. It occurs when the industrial market technology and infrastructure, created for the final struggle to reach the Moon, itself collapses into garbage.

With that all clear, one most likely catastrophe appears to be failure of the waste disposal systems to keep up with the trashed industrial market refuse and the collapsing infrastructure

Instinct and evolution have little or no remaining interest in the Moon, Sun, or other planets, because none of them appear suitable as habitations for life. Life does not exist on any of them, and no living beings, plants or animals exist which might constitute threats to Earth.

That simple, huge, crude scenario is obscured by intrigues, strategies, plots, and doomsday and other scenarios in case of conflict. Worse, unresolved tension over the collapse and garbage problems may be aggravating international tensions.

If industrial collapse of that sort takes place, it will likely cause massive unemployment which is possibly already under way and that is likely to obscure the need to increase simple food and shelter supplies, distribution and availability and prevent the design of economic systems capable of handling these areas

Fundamental, pragmatic economic and human psychology and character studies would have to concentrate on what human beings can or should be doing if sophisticated industrial production and the research that supports it collapses.

A response among the common people about the results of space flight was a recognition of these factor

There exists no breathable air, no significant water, no beings, animals or plants, no threats except asteroids, and no place to live except on Earth

Existing and rapidly growing massive human populations do not see significant importance in advanced forms of research and production and aggressively new artificial technology since only Earth remains to populate

A subterranean implication is that human reproduction is considering going back to seasonal fertility instead of fertility all year round

The evolved, natural, unavoidable and aggressive human need to eat living organisms and the urge to reproduce of course remains and predominates,

The populations do see that construction of houses and agricultural production of food has importance. They are eager, even longing, for some kind of roles related to the traditional patterns found in rural life where jobs were not only simple but largely self- evident, in both the construction and maintenance of houses and farms, in animal husbandry and the raising of crops. But the problem is so primitive that even irrigation will have to be introduced anew to populations that have lived several generations in the urban constructions

This whole problem is similar to the issues of removing hydroelectric dams, of re-establishing carnivores such as wolves, and of curtailing the massive slaughter of oceanic animals and other aquatic wildlife

These issues are compelling yet they are not often recognized in rational terms yet, at least not in so many words. In any case, the present situation appears to be one of incipient emerging potential for massive collapse of CERTAIN COMPONENTS of the entire technological infrastructure dating all the way back to the start of pyramid constructions and irrigation. Other components are almost self- evident, and consist primarily of food and shelter. Some important new developments are likely to be found very much worth continuing and propagating, such as insurance and other forms of collective preparation.

This author cannot be more specific, as the issue is extraordinarily vague even though it is important although it is well resolved in the specific agencies responsible for essentials, agriculture and food, and shelter and housing. Clothing would be another essential, transportation and communications are highly important, though both need to be trimmed down. NOT to bare essentials because that is much too austere and alarming. They need to be trimmed of extravagance, though not of celebration and more moderate, less deceptive advertising. Corporations design new and more expensive, more costly cars and appliances like birds flap their wings

Many new designs, and the jobs in which people are employed doing them, have little or nothing to do with broadening the base of important essential factors and increasing the way in which massive populations of otherwise unemployed people can contribute to its maintenance.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Man Hath Fallen

So one understands. It looks like this is equivalent to what Neanderthals would have said had they known. Neanderthals did not have, most likely, any spiritualism as competent as that which evolved during the last six thousand years.

On the other hand, of course, the modern Church is just becoming comfortable with modern paleontology and evolution theory. That is not a fault. The Church is exceedingly conservative as it should be. In no other way could it have existed for two thousand years straight.

The older I get the more comfortable I am with the idea that religion and science are much more like cooperative partners in human development, not antagonistically rejecting each other at all.

Most people probably know of one or another professor, or one or another priest, who adamantly rejects their equivalents in the opposite camp. The obligation to communicate civilly with the other seems to be easily as much a problem for some scientists, who will not bother to learn to speak in religious terms, than for many priests, who are willing to take the trouble to do that.

This is something of a relief. Clearly, Neanderthals did not disappear in their heyday, suddenly. Many thousands of years, perhaps much more, passed after the emergence of some new factor that made them obsolete, before the new hominids that displaced them predominated and Neanderthals began to dwindle in number. Confrontations of any significant numbers of either or both were probably very rare, perhaps nonexistent. After all, neither the old nor the new orders had any written records or rapid or long distance communications techniques. Moreover, it is not certain that any Neanderthal ever saw a the difference between Neanderthals and the new order; the changes within one generation were small, and very likely unobservable without modern techniques.

Now it is easy. The new order is wearing earbuds and toying with his celphone.

Monday, January 31, 2011

The Order of Action in Light

Hubble distance redshift is moving to a new location

Light is necessary for complex systems to work properly. Yet intricate systems that are not designed in the light rarely function smoothly, reliably or at all. This is not a popular idea with some persons, and it won't be proven here. It will be described, though.

The way material, massive things such as flowing water, air, molten rock, or falling objects move varies greatly depending. In some of these flows diverge and converge, often unpredictably. In others such as falling objects, say rocks, the motion is of such low dimensionality and inevitably doomed to reach the end of its path at the end of its fall; falling cannot form a stable model for system functioning. Moreover, falling is not always the motion of any dynamic form of the action itself. Simply massive material objects are only rudimentary, usually stable forms of the action. Exceptions inevitably remain peculiar.

See this.

Complex systems such as cars, clocks, radios, television, ships and airplanes depend on a flow of action that does not diverge unexpectedly. It appears to be true that the only reliable flow of action in the universe is the motion of light. The flow of light throughout the universe appears to be similar everywhere. It is highly predictable. Light can be created at will in a stunning new variety of illumination sources. The motion of light can be described and predicted and calculated with high accuracy. It does surprising things but not at random or unexpected times except where probability appears, almost always in very predictable ways under quite definite
circumstances.

Thus light forms the fundamental, primal model of the action path. If you want a complex system to work properly, you must plan the flow of action in its processes, and ensure that the flow of action is linear. A good way to do this is to draw the pattern of flow of action in your system on a long piece of paper. The flow of action may consist of flows of air and fuel into a carburetor. The mixture then moves into an engine of some sort, where it is ignited. The action then changes form to a process of burning, then to increasing temperature, then to increasing force against a piston or turbine blades, then to the turning of a shaft, and motion to gears. Meanwhile the communications systems are describing the details of the vehicle's position, orientation, direction of motion and a host of other events. Other communications may take place between the operator and a controller or dispatcher. Wheels may be turned, or brakes may be applied. Lifting surfaces may be moved. Almost all of the events involve the transfer of energy from one place to another, or from one time to another as in the storage of energy in batteries or capacitors.

From the position of fundamental physics, the flow of energy is a good starting point. Energy is a time derivative of the action. It is only necessary to integrate the flow of energy along the paths from its source (fuel, batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, height and descent or other sources) to produce a map of the flows of action. If the flows can be mapped alongside a light path, such as a floodlight or laser (lasers are particularly good for this purpose) then plans for the path of the action can be designed with careful attention to their relation to the flow of the fundamental origin of order everywhere in the universe.

If it is insisted that action paths be designed in darkness, without any reference to light, then the errors that result are incalculable. Systems that can be designed that way are limited to rudimentary responses, or other very simple events.

If it is necessary to design a complex system that works in darkness, that is quite possible by designing it in well lit circumstances. A good example of that kind of manufacture is in robotic spacecraft which are sent to other planets such as Mars, Jupiter or Saturn. Astonishing missions to the planets such as HiRise at Mars, Cassini-Huygens at Saturn, and the New Horizons probe now approaching Pluto are excellent examples of systems designed to work in some of the worst lighting, dimmest and darkest circumstances ever reached by human works. They were designed in the light to work in the dark or very close to it. HiRise and Cassini-Huygens were essentially perfect and their missions were completed with historical results. New Horizons might well do the same.

Light is not only not to be feared, it is vital and essential, the ultimate sine qua non of modern industrial market development. Make friends with the light.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Securing the World after Aeons of Struggle

What seems to be economic malaise might only be the absence of millions of years of struggle to reach the Moon. Much of it was zero sum carnivorous predation.

That does not mean coming to terms with the newly understood solar system will automatically be a piece of cake and without any problems. Some of the struggle to reach the Moon consisted of international war, and securing arms after war is an intense for of protocol. War is thousands of years old, so it is not merely a few years from which the world is securing its arms. There were entirely separate approaches with each branch having its own theology, and every other part of culture in each was commensurately different and suspicious of the others.

It's late, though, and one cannot write of that much darkness at this hour.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

WORLD PEACE IS A TERRIBLY DIFFICULT PROBLEM

Here is why.

THE MOON WAS AN ANCIENT GOAL

For a huge long time - ever since the world began billions of years ago, there was no knowledge of the nature of the World. The Moon was always a goal, because living organisms were moved back and forth, toward the Moon and away from the Moon, in the seas by the Moon's gravity.


THE MOON IS NO LONGER A FUNDAMENTAL GOAL, NOT NOW.



TWO ANCIENT EFFORTS

The several thousand years of constructions involved several different approaches. Two stand out as by far the most significant. Others exist which have economic importance but essentially resigned their own form of adaptation.


ONE: NATURE MIGHT REACH THE MOON

Birds must have tried. Sensing the rising Moon's gravity for the first time and mistaking it for a distant mountain range, young and inexperienced birds could easily have chosen on occasion to fly that way. Maybe some animals have long necks or hop a lot in nature's dim-witted attempts to conquer by reproduction.

Among human efforts leading toward success, one was an attempt to progress toward the Moon by generally adhering to nature and studying the world more carefully and systematically by using recorded information and a particular, stable procedure for minimizing statistical variance through the use of random selection from written works.

That place was China, and the tools were written works and the casting of lots to identify selections among a work called the Book of Changes. India's polytheism attempted to solve something too, possibly the multiplicity of species, but that is less clear.

China was surprisingly advanced in mathematics and the 64 hexagrams of I Ching much to do with binary logic and the modern computer-especially the 64-bit processor. International Business Machines was persuaded to sell its entire small computer line to China, possibly as a result of China's historical preeminence in that logic.

USE COMPREHENSION

All three of the Sun's 200 million year orbit around the Milky Way Galaxy, planet Earth's annual orbit around the Sun, and the world's daily 24-hour turning on its axis must be in correct order to comprehend history well. That includes the highly stable exterior galaxies, which easily comprise theology's sophisticated concept of the 'firmament'.

Ancient literary works and much of philosophy seem to take on new meaning if one has the temporal order in good ephemeral and celestial order. Ancient ideas seem much less dangerous and more like the early, exploratory thought they are.


TWO: BUILD STRUCTURES DURABLE TO LAST

Reaching the point where living organisms could begin construction for the purpose may continued until early mound builders began and their work had culminated in stone pyramids. These markers were clearly beyond nature's instincts alone, and they endured, lasting through many generations.

The other of the two began in several places around the world with earth mounds, and emerged most clearly in the Nile Delta region of what is now known as Egypt. Because of its importance, it is very well known. After the first enduring, visible pyramids were constructed, patterns of rule began to emerge that were increasingly recognized as having much in common with previous patterns that had existed, yet collapsed.


REMEMBER THE GOAL

The Moon and Sun were quickly recorded as goals through many paintings of bird-headed men standing in winged boats sailing across waters toward a disk in the sky. These images quickly recalled to those in each new dynasty, at least one of the purposes which the great pyramids and other structures were dedicated.

Later, with experience, both goals and their representations improved in clarity and quality. The Moon and Sun were recorded as goals of voyages and journeys through many paintings of bird-headed men standing in winged boats sailing across waters toward a disk in the sky.


TRANSCEND

Existence of the pyramids began to transcend all time. By three thousand years they had existed longer than any known living organism, and mankind was clearly on its own in new territory.

Designed architecture, art, implements, memorials, and many other antiques from previous dynasties essentially welcomed each new civilization into an inheritance not only of power, but of knowledge, purpose and direction.


CREATE RENEWABLE LEADERSHIP

The patterns of rule turned out to be through the leadership of most powerful families. They were not necessarily enduring themselves, particularly in the Old Kingdom. Rule by the most powerful family is now known as dynastic.

Even powerful concurrent families were known to be of only temporal endurance, but in each case the re-emergence of the resurrected lineage took place in the presence of the durable and highly visible pyramids.


ATTAINMENT OF THE MOON

Attainment of the Moon then became only a matter of time, and it was on the order of thousands of years before the grand attainment that spanned only a century, most of which was unnecessary war since the only thing the wars did was practice designing rockets. The entire project took only ten years to prepare, and the several flights, each lasting only a few days, spanned only five years.


THE FUTURE IS DIFFERENT IN KIND

The future of human destiny is no longer a struggle to reach the Moon. Now the Moon has footprints on it in several places. The image of the Earth from the Moon and other places in space was recognizable everywhere in the world instantly. The entire population of the world knows what the Earth is.


THE FUTURE IS LONG

Conceptual changes in which adaptation accommodates the new and clearer understanding of the world will naturally span thousands of years and cannot be foreseen.


THE FUTURE IS BETTER

The increasing times of peace will be much happier than the preceding strife. THE CONFLICT OF THE PAST MUST BE ABANDONED. Communications shows a capacity for rational thought and self-government in every country in the world.

THE WORLD IS CONNECTED

Transportation and communication suddenly made the world a very much smaller place, and most people most everywhere are busy making the peace, healing wounds, reconstructing or designing anew habitations, cultivating and gardening the planet, and conserving its resources and other living beings including whole species.


THE ATTAINMENT IS NOW

The Moon was attained only fifty years ago and by now the entire planet is connected with transportation and communications systems of many kinds. It will never go back to totally isolated regions or peoples again, and the communication will never be through arduous foot or animal transport.

Machine driven transportation and electric communication are recognizably of such fundamental nature and vital importance that their total loss for any time at all cannot be even faintly foreseen, although it seems clear the world will become much quieter and more moderate with time, self-knowledge, seasoning and experience.


THERE ARE PROBLEMS IN BELIEVING IT

Distinct though few, problems remain, particularly dynastic or imperial aggression. Those institutions were so successful in the past exactly because they were slow, strong, patient, did not back down, forget their goals, and were not quick to be intimidated or deceived. It requires thirty years, the orbital period of the slowest visible planet Saturn, to catch the attention of a dynasty or an empire.


DYNASTIES AND EMPIRES: TOUGH, SLOW AND THICK

Dynastic and imperial institutions are a bit thick about niceties. The Apollo project to the Moon was a nicety. Spanning only ten years in the preparation and five years in the attainment, it hardly exceeded the ten year periods of menarche and Jupiter. to the Moon.

In short, traditional forms of dynasty and empire and some other less well defined forms of human groups have not really comprehended yet that the Moon was attained, that the Moon has footsteps on it, and in clear principle the Moon can be attained again if there is any good reason to go there. There are not very many good reasons to send human beings to the Moon right now.


THE MOON WAS NOT INVITING

No compelling reason to return to the Moon exists, because the Moon has no air, no water, no ice, no campfires, no plants, no trees, no animals, no birds, no fish, no people, no temperate locations, and is too far to go without idiotically great expenditures. Cost is an object in these times when so many important factors on Earth are in distressed need for attention.

Plague, starvation, brutal random violence, organized war, sectarian conflicts over religion, grossly extravagant human population, pollution, rapacious overkill of earth's wildlife, mechanized slaughter harvests of sentient beings on the land and in the waters of the sea as if they are so much dirt, and digitized but vague tendencies to create a tyrannical world holocaust seem hopelessly dangerous in the face of the pitifully small funding that international cooperation is given.


THE MOON IS STILL NOT INVITING

Even though a return to the Moon is inevitable, it is not likely to happen in time to be figurative in forming an enduring worldwide, global peace unless China plays a strong hand in that, and it looks like that is not happening because China is playing a defensive role. Pity. There are some ancient reasons for China's delay.

China's history was a much more timid approach to the Moon, and hardly began that kind of progress. It was loathe to violate any engendered patterns of nature, a pattern that was enforced by Taoist principles which still exist even in the post-Apollo era.

That timidity is why China's first astronaut, justifiably happy and exuberant at his triumphant return alive, was feeling bruised. China's people were playing ping pong for exercise in space flight, which Americans were playing football, Canadians were playing ice hockey, and Europeans were playing soccer.


WORLD PEACE IS STILL A TERRIBLY DIFFICULT PROBLEM

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Having coffee while naming this one

Time is, as was recently discovered, not invariant. It changes slightly with altitude, and with latitude as well. Different time zones mean that time is relative throughout the world. With the absolute offset from time zones and the good-grief RATE offset with altitude and latitude (the earth is an ellipsoid) it is a wonder we can talk at all.

The Eurasian land mass has taken the larger mass of that which determines what time it is in the progressions of history. This is not surprising. America was like a great caterpillar in preparing the world's first flights to the Moon. (Interestingly, Russians used the image of a slug, the mollusc without any shell.)

Suddenly, something a billion years old was over. Much of the rapidly developed infrastructure, technology and other factors was obsolete. Only new generations can determine which is which. It is too late for anybody as old as this writer to determine that for the future. I spent all my determination in the projects to reach the Moon-in Project Mercury, specifically.

All the enthusiasm we had for the Apollo flights made us feel determined to go out and conquer and colonize the planets, take worlds away from the space monsters, and overpopulate the Galaxy. That was not to happen. What's more, it seems likely that younger and more logical people probably feel that way too, though at a different time and rate of progression.

Asia may find it propitious to go to the Moon. While the rationality of the Roman traditions so deep in our laws (a good thing) makes that relatively unnecessary, and our militarist egos would like to think so as well because then our land would be the only part of the world that did walk on the Moon, the real fact is that as far as that half billion years of evolving instinctive curiosity is concerned, there's no point in it. There is no air, water, food, people, animals, plants or space aliens on the Moon. Yet ancient determination and contest by immense numbers of animals and other sentient beings has left us with energy to spare for just that -more flights to the Moon until true satiety and exhaustion temper the world's sheer lust for action.

But if China does not immerse itself in THAT struggle, there is a dreadful danger that all those millions of years of pent-up zero sum struggle to conquer (the essential ingredient in predator-prey survival) will appear in international relations, ambitions, conflicts and worse.

The result is not only emotional detachment from the realities of nuclear energy. It is a sense that the aggressive powers with human beings that were groomed through thousands of years of military heroism and adventurist exuberance will be tempted to play dice in the aggressive world of national dominance. These issues are deeper than mere wood and concrete foundations in the earth. They are challenged with good but slight effect by major constructions-tunnels through mountain ranges, tunnels under the sea, bridges across formally impassible or erosive valleys, and other titanic ventures that serve to divert our natures to more civilized goals worthy of the real destiny of this lovely planet Earth.

America was chosen for the flights to the Moon by God, by the Mandate of Heaven, by Allah, the Earth, the birds, instinct from long ago-it does not matter what we call it. If that had not been decided long ago the choice to go to the Moon would probably not have occurred by now and the flights might not have occurred yet at all.

It was destiny that the Old World began moving the Conquest of Light to the New World with the inventions of the lens, the prism, and the telescope 1500's. That was the beginning of the fourth quarter of two thousand years that had been foreseen in the light of Pliny's Moon when the Sun appeared in the Moon during the moment of truth of Pompeii. It was four hands of centuries that played out.

Had we not attained the Moon, there would probably have been nuclear war on a massive scale already. That is a good sign. It only wants those negotiating the disarmament to have faith the Moon was actually reached. Yet if the world does not believe quite enough in America's Apollo flights, and if the Old World does not turn itself to the eventual flights from Eurasia, that too could cause nuclear war.

It is very important to understand this. The Old World must busy itself with its own Moon projects visibly, with increasing money, news, economic activity, publicity and widespread agreements. Otherwise it risks bumbling into nuclear war. America, highly respected, can play a key role even in just in being an enthusiastic audience and source of encouragement.

It is fortunate that much preparation existed and that few of the most vexing and egregious difficulties of history remained. The terrible practice of slavery, too long upheld because of its ancient origin, remained to reject. It was the only great war in the United States before the Moon flights, and the moon was attained not by slaves.

Neither was it important what color the skin was in the shoes of the persons who first walked on the Moon's surface. The race and color of the persons who made those footprints will be forgotten long before the footprints themselves disappear.

What does remain is to look to the day when the Old World Sun rises in Moon as it comes up over the Atlantic seaboard, and look to it with good will and cooperation, for it is more inevitable than America's dominance, opulent prosperity, and chaos.

America must now turn itself to patiently abiding the Old World's progress toward the Old World's Moon. After that it will be decided what the World and Moon are. In all the Old World's land mass, eliminating whatever practices that remain in its slowly gathering preparations for its own flights to the Moon constitutes a persistent, inevitable flow of its activities.

It was not given this writer to say more about the Old World's preparations for its own flights to the Moon. Those events are unfolding there. Each will bring surprises.

China recently launched an astronaut into orbit, and though it was a triumphant and happy return, the flight was found surprisingly bruising. It is good to know what the consequences were; the problem will be solved with, say, football instead of table tennis. It was only that, and does not need flogging the ocean waves to defeat the tides, or many other things in history that would have condemned future attainments of the Moon to bloodshed and war.

It is probably better not to attempt to be or cause perfection in the real world by force. The Old World was committed to attaining the Moon too, long before the Americas were settled by Europeans. Neither do the people of Asia and Europe have the choice any more than the people of the Americas. The destiny is already upon those lands and their people are already groping toward the goal to the greatest extent they find possible.

It cannot be safely said that the United States will have no role in that, even if it is only Amici Americi. Americans we would be wise to make our opinions opinions and policies toward Europe in the East and toward Asia to the West distinctly similar. It would do great good at little cost.

One suspects we should regard the extent to which the inhabitants of the North American continent dictate to the rest of the world as something it is desirable to greatly perfect. We should minimize capitalist marketing and military aggression and permit more than England to dictate to the United States what Europe and Asia are.

We should cultivate greater expertise in being responsive to their progress, without attempting to change its course. It was not Asia's choice and Europe's choice to be undertaking the next flights to the Moon any more than it was America's choice. Nobody in the old world can avoid yielding to the necessity of that destiny. They may not see it as the first thing they wake up to yet, but the day is approaching when they do.

America, after all, cannot choose to be the only part of the world that attains the Moon. The option is already gone; it disappeared with the manufacture of off-the-shelf robots and avatars. The real attainment again, this time by the Old World, is a destiny on the Moon already devolving even now.

We might choose to perfect something like an absolutely essential dainty, like coffee that makes life just nicer until long after Europe has its size nines on the celestial orb. America as Philioses Paleos Cosmos.

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Attainment of the Moon and Global Metamorphosis

It was through ignorance that war was used in the final stages of Earth's process of struggle to reach the Moon. That was possibly the only reason war was ever used at all. Had there not been that almost unknown, supernal goal, it is possible few wars would ever have been fought.

The question boils down now to whether to use war as an instrument of planetary self-government in the future, or not.

The past half-billion years of dinosaur-filled primitive evolution eventually was ended by human constructions-that first and suddenly attained the Moon only decades ago; during billions of years of future, life on Earth will never be the same.

The magnitude of changes now taking place are beyond estimation. Almost nothing is known except that, as many are fond of saying, "Enough war". Earth is tired of war. Scarred and polluted with war, still frantic from it, people all over the world wonder what impels the almost desperate ambitions to justify life as if life needs justification. Building great projects is a neurotic, unfeeling ritual, a rut of habit based on the ancient goal unremembered because of its then-mysterious nature. Whole cities, industries, nations and militaries are still constructed out of monotonous habit.

In each new generation, millions of young people are taught to have the ambitions of pre-Apollo goal-seeking, Spartan regimentation and the European merchant class. Nations are still, again, preparing for totally unecessary future war in numb ritual even as they celebrate new organizations and agreements which they fully intend and hope to honor, even as the no longer existing ancient formless compulsive goal of first attaining the Moon has already dissipated in the sudden, quick, brief success of the Apollo project like smoke on the water.

It's too bad that so many stubbornly, out of sheer pernicious envy or surprise, perhaps because they wanted to be the one's to go to the Moon, refuse to accept the fact of its success. Often they do not seem to accept the fact that, even if the "stories" about the Moon were fiction, they are awesomely close to the half-guessed truth known since primordial times, and the new 'stories' fit all of nature perfectly.

In that light the parallel is visible between two great streams in history. Chinese Taoist civilization was largely sedentary in that it remained in China, adhered from the first to the natural world, and interpreted it slowly and with great care through probability and changes. Technological progress was slow, at a natural rate and no attempt was made to hurry it.

It is a common, stupidly aggressive and monstrously irresponsible Romanesque military habit to invariably cast China's history as inferior or slow. China's role was cautious continuation of the prehistoric patience from proven evolutionary progress, nothing else; it was the conservative branch.

The common, beer-laden Western military mind, on seeing the timelines of China and the Egyptian-Mediterranean-European branch compared, to aggressively gesture with its weapons and say, "Yeah, we got there first, and we get to beat the s*** out of them". That is like a muscle-headed farm kid going out to climb a mountain, kill a bear, or defeat an enemy and on success, returning to the farm, and saying, "You didn't go out to climb and kill and defeat, so we get to beat you out of the world." The common, sheer idiot error is to forget completely that it was planet Earth that went to the Moon, that the Moon does not merely orbit the United States, America, Europe, the Mediterranean, Italy, Rome or Egypt.

Egyptian constructionist dynasties were ambitious in raising masses up through heights to the form famous, durable pyramids, and first estimated the energy of lifting a ship to the Moon. Egypt made from the start a very large mistake which would not be discovered until recently: it knew nothing of the mass-energy equivalence. But it eventually spread out through the Middle East and Mediterranean to Europe, bringing unnecessary war with it wherever it went.

Trade existed between the two realms, and inventions in each were carried to the other. From the same prehistoric origin, two different phases in different orders of progress by different means led to the same goal, the same Moon. You take the one road and I'll take the other road and we'll meet on the Moon together.

Eventually the Moon was reached, with immense losses of life and property. Wars were fought, almost certainly unnecessary wars in the light of whole-world judgement, until the very last. War had been used as a cruel instrument of research. At the very last, the world began reaching hurriedly toward ancient dreams of world-wide peace, communications, transportation and agreement, even automatic translation devices, like the Google Translate on this page, were sought and attained.

The sudden success is breathtaking. No reason now exists to pursue blindly any course toward any imaginable future goal. Yet even now, people in the rut of war are building their private, profit-seeking empires of war machines, hoping for more war, insisting that it must occur despite the facts of history and the hopes of billions of persons. Most of the population of the Earth just wants peace and time to figure out what's true and make it better. They want neighborhood gardens throughout every city, not bombs. They want a chance to tend their own lives, and gardens are at the very heart of the issue, not capricious jobs for capricious factories.

Resolving the balance between gardens and employment cannot be accomplished by one person, particularly not this starry-eyed writer. Yet one thing is clear; if governments do not permit individual persons and families, and small groups of these to form something closer to the nature of homes they can keep and gardens that provide them significant amounts of food, the problems will continue in the same monotonous, unnecessary (except for the Moon) way as they have in the past. Already success is being attained in those domestic factors; people just want freedom to cultivate the family and village scale of habitation in the loveliness of this planet and world.

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Return to Normal Stability

I started this search looking for what the initials URS symbolizes. Consider, for instance, the existence of UPS and its military green trucks. Consider the United States a military and construction area for the ancient evolutionary goal of flights to the Moon.

It won, and brought the news that there are no truly deep surprises on or in the Moon. Not for human beings and their institutions, not even for crocodiles or the other ancient animals. The Moon is not heaven, neither is it hell.

On the success of those flights, global assimilation of the entire, ancient planetary project began, and is under way through, primarily, national, corporate, financial, military and other gigantic entities throughout the world. It's not clear whether anybody is acting in any higher capacity to coordinate the assimilation, although clearly the United Nations is regarded with considerable respect by most or all of them, and is now regarded as a sort of ad hoc clearing house and central reference standard body by many.

It turns out things are looking better, not worse.

The approach most visible to Americans is that of the corporations, which are well known, as well as state governments, educational institutions and military.

In other countries it is not so obvious. It seems clear enough though that all are, in one way or another, taking stock of the situation in which they and the rest of the world have come to in the light of that success.

The primary character of the results of attaining space flight to the Moon and survey of the solar system is that there are few great surprises.

As is well known in the entertainment industry, there could have been, aliens all over the place, gods and monsters, and lush gardens in the other worlds, to which human beings would hurriedly flock in hurriedly designed space ships. Instead, no real point exists in building many space ships, and orbital space around the Earth has proved to be the only space locale so far that has turned any sort of profit. It is entirely possible that it will be hundreds or thousands of years before much is made of the other planets in the solar system, if ever.

Meanwhile, acting on instinct, life itself began energizing the most advanced human institutions - religion, military, government, corporation and all - to take action in responding to the results. That's all that is happening: human organization, poised for thousands of years, is suddenly busy putting the world back into the proper order. After all, getting to the Moon involved wars, population increase beyond instinct intentions, destruction of habitat, the extinction of many species and decimation of many others, and the despoiling of considerable quantities of the Earth's surface.

Nonetheless, it is a time for optimism. Ahead lay some additional coordination realms, such as agreements to tolerate each other where the entities doing the assimilation, coordination and return to normalcy are different. One good example is the contrast between China and the West, although China is quite in agreement on the main goal of returning to certain traditional, instinctive, ancient or even prehistoric order, and as that takes place in both regions of the planet, it becomes easier for both to cooperate. They have, for instance, much new modern truth to share, and as well, their own traditions and stability to recover.

Another example is Burma. It is hard to imagine anybody civilized in the western sense tolerating the regime in Burma, but that's what Burma is doing. On the other hand, it could be time to announce to the entire Burmese population that even their prehistoric dreams of tjavascript:void(0)he Moon have been resolved by actual photographs from several nations, several visits by human beings, carrying large bags of Moon rocks. True, they were not gold, jewels, diamonds and precious carvings, but hey, what the heck? Just the fact they are rocks might catch their attention.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Who Came First? Life or God

In secular likelihood, it is worth cultivating the concept of God because it appears to be an inevitable activity of human beings anyway, Those familiar with wildlife say the animals live close to prayer all the time, and the nearest more substantial concept is vigilance. Just where one draws the line between God and vigilance is often a matter of opinion, but seems to be close to the distinction between probabilities and molecular structures made of atoms.

Probabilities such as those of chance, gambling, gamboling, hazarding and others are intrinsically risky business. Even so, probability has paid off in insurance, which pools resources on the basis of probability of risk, and pays moneys to those who suffer loss as a result of unpredictable (or unpredicted) catastrophes. Because of that, it is difficult to protect insurance from evil gamblers, but important to do so because nervous angels profit much more by having good insurance.

In nature the distinctions had to be between self and others such as enemies, prey, predators, friends, tribe, herd and family - all difficult to distinguish in nature, although any skill at divination was helpful in survival.

Early life forms on Earth were little more than sludge or slime consisting of extensive molecular and cellular masses without much organization. Such masses did create environments, mainly smelly and tainted with refuse, offal and excreta. Even so, if a place smelled more of droppings from one's own species, it was probably more likely to be a safer than more dangerous place to be. As with procreation in any organism, the beginning of God was a smelly business. God, at first tentative, primitive, and only sporadically accessible, was with life perhaps billions of years ago.

Later, by inventing houses which could be closed against pests, marauding beasts, enemies and disease, they learned to cultivate godlike qualities that gave the household protection previously unattainable in trees and caves. Life became holy, at least for those who took care to cultivate holiness.

The cultivation of the spirit became important. Those who were good at it were quickly drawn into serving the entire group, which led to modern organization.
However much organization changes as a result of attaining the ancient goal of the Moon, human civilization will not abandon its most successful institutions. At the same time, liberty and freedom have taken on more extensive dimensions - consider the driving range of a new automobile or modern passenger airplane or ship.

In the same way, human civilization will not abandon all of religion, families,
democracy, communications, transportation, government, medicine or education - probably not ever. On the other hand, all are going through extensive changes for the simple but slow long-term reason that the past several thousand years were dedicated intensively to reaching the Moon. Nobody knew exactly what would be discovered. It might have been anticipated that what would be discovered had been familiar for hundreds of millions of years already.

But it was not, and toward the end of the race, advanced speculation seemed to indicate the world would be inundated by hungry space aliens bent on consuming human beings as food; OR, human beings would begin to engage in mass migrations to the stars where they would form colonies: OR there would be monstrous wars with each nation raining sophisticated weapons of mass destruction from space on each other's sacred cities and houses; or other highly imaginative prognostications. Few were content with the tranquil concept which was so close to the truth that was observed by astronauts and astrobots to the other planets of the solar system.

Almost more surprising is the vast utility of earth orbit. Communications, space tourism, weather surveillance, soil, mineral and crop surveys, temperature maps, wildlife observation, space astronomy and many other new, valuable purposes have emerged for putting specially designed equipment into orbit.

It's not worth spending much time on the question of which came first, life or god. The question is exactly like father's question of which came first, the chicken or the egg? Far more productive is the time spent on comprehending and understanding what has been attained, what were the successes of the past five or six or ten thousand years which led to designs and practices that will be perpetuated, and what were the errors that require careful, patient correction of the kind that should have
been taken long ago.

The early pyramid builders did construct manifest displays of the attainment of lifting heavy objects high above the Earth, and the total gravitational energy, as one measures it in, say, foot-pounds, is approximately equivalent to the energy that was eventually required to lift a man to the Moon. The energy required was supplied by human beings, their numbers not remembered, but they ate food. So much food was required to lift a block a certain distance. Similarly, other amounts of food were required to lift the same size block other distances. The food was fish and grains. Fish had the advantage that catching a live fish meant fighting with the fish's energy. Fish could jump so far above the water. People could jump above the Earth. A concept of biological energy existed. Construction of the pyramids allowed a visible manifestation of that kind of energy to be manifest during the
passage of such time as would be required for human beings to jump to the Moon.

Even so, an error exists. It is now known that a certain physical relationship exists between mass and energy. According to the Einstein equation, energy and mass have a relationship mathematically describable as Energy = Mass * c *c, where c is the speed of light. Earth pyramid builders had no rational idea of the speed of light, or that it was not infinite.

It is worth pausing now, having attained the Moon, to survey history for the existence of errors such as these, and inquire whether they are causing difficult in the present day or anticipated future. The sciences, mathematics, agriculture, medicine and many other fields are rich with powerful laws for the Judgment, but it does not require war any more. Pausing, perhaps, for centuries. Sometimes the dynasties of Egypt went into hiatus for such long periods of time. Earth could afford to let frantically compulsive, high-powered profit-driven industrial market design and manufacturing to lapse to the essentials of food, shelter and other vital productions. Just what those will be would be determined when, as the superfluous production is allowed to collapse, the essential necessities begin to show the core toughness of the will to live of the people, only this time, taking care to guard against making conflict of it.

Instead, the blessings of liberty must be allowed to flourish, and those of grace and justice as well. It is time to take somewhat more risk in extending trust to other nations and peoples, than was the custom during the centuries before footsteps on the Moon became real. Taking time to wade through years of negotiation to reach a point recognizable to both sides is possible now. Centuries lie before humankind as more or less determinable futures in the millions of years of unknown destiny. By now, it is known that enough air is likely to remain on Earth for, not mere millions of years, but probably hundreds of millions of years.

We might even get some sleep without worrying about imaginary futures, and cultivate our faith in real futures.

Monday, November 1, 2010

Chaos and Order in the Ten Thousand Years

Creating global financial competence through multifarious economic defiles is the problem facing the monetary world.

Several fortunately identifiable errors in the conception of the natural world existed when the first massive constructions of geometrically designed architecture were completed and remained durable on the prehistorically established path to the Moon and Sun which recently became successful.

In other words, the ancient goals of reaching the Moon and at least understanding why we cannot stand on the Sun were completed, after six or eight thousand years of struggle which began with what is now obviously inadequate information.

The success was almost uneventful because the Moon and Sun had been exactly what they seemed to be throughout all the history of life on Earth. The reports from the several expeditions in the Apollo project were so accurate and anticipated, so deeply pre-acceptable, pre-understood and pre-comprehended, and although recently so predicted, that they almost seemed too pat, too easy, and thus in some sense potentially nothing more than predictions.

Yet they are true. The Moon is an airless, waterless small world orbiting the Earth, made of rock and covered with rock dust, too hot in the two week long day and too cold in the two week long night to survive.

The real problems lay in the immense chaos that exists in the preternatural constructions which we call civilization in the precursors of industrial market economies.

It is vital to scale the magnitude of the planet's entire situation, identify the realm of life throughout the Earth, distinguish it from the complex and emerging realm of constructionist civilization, and identify those parts of the whole which were misconstructions from those parts of the whole which are, in post-Apollo terms, likely to be stable and enduring factors in future economics.

At the outset, a best guess at the state of civilization is that it is half right, half wrong, a field day for both optimist and pessimist. As a starting point, it would fuel improvements for centuries. That means the Yin and Yang duality, fairly well practiced, is at least an acceptable part of reconstruction now that the great Understanding is attained. The world is not half bad, and has a great deal of good. Better yet, with modern concepts of statistical, informational and thermodynamic entropy, it is desirable to consider the possibility that civilization is half order, half chaos.

Nature is likely to be included for all future time among the goals of civilization, because however fragile it is, through its persistence it constitutes the origins of life on Earth, even civilized life. Nature cannot constitute the foundation of civilization; it is not strong enough, and is too delicate, too fragile. Nature is the origin of civilization. Just the same, civilization is not the origin of nature. Civilization already does create events to which nature adapts. Therefore it can be said that civilization changes nature. So far the changes which civilization introduces to nature are not predictable. They consist often of death by pollution; life which survives by surviving pollution is likely to be competitive in subtle ways not easy to anticipate.

For instance, even the question of whether nature will now proceed to evolve more sophisticated silicon life forms, beyond siliceous Diatoms, Hexannelid sponges and Equisetum weed plant into organisms that actually use silicon in dynamically active organic processes such as thought, is often posed. Yet it is not known whether nature or civilization will create the breakthrough adaptation, and in the end, whether that will matter at all.

The outcome may be a fifty million year period of intense competition between exclusively carbon based life forms and life forms using both elements in its dynamics. Considering what silicon carbide is like, the silicon-carbon organisms which emerge in the extremely distant future will be hard as nails and tough as rawhide.

The half chaos, half order situation can always, we now know, be bettered within the walls and protections of human constructions, yet it will always be an exogenous factor, within which the better interpretations of the universe must be within the walls of the cities and their houses. That means sheer chaos will always be an outer limit to economic theory, and the way money behaves when it does, will be within the protection of accounting and finance and the walls of banks and households.

Friday, October 22, 2010

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.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

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.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

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.