The Radian of the Galactic Cycle

Cyclic phenomena include an electron orbiting a nucleus, a light wave undulating along at the speed of light, a bee orbiting a hive or flower, a moon orbiting a planet or a planet orbiting a star, or a star orbiting a galaxy.

A RADIAN is an event, the passage of a relativistic distance ds along the circumferential periphery, when the path traversed has become just as long as the radius of the path. At that place and time, the sense of length is confounded into another dimension, orthogonal to the motion, and the length traversed becomes fundamentally, not merely perceptually, confused with the radius of the motion. That distance is called the radian. It is the cycle distance or time divided by 2pi. The radian of a year is 58 days, just under two months.

A thirty five million year radian is associated with the orbit of the Sun and solar system around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. That puts serious constraints on our ability to reconstruct history, and to foresee, forecast, predict, prophesy or dream of the future. To make matters worse, you might be able to deal with history accurately in some ways back that far, but using the whole current radian for only the past severely weakens the sense of the future, and vice versa. It is more reasonable to expect good estimates up to one million years in the past and one million in the future. That is why attempting to estimate the expected lifetime of the high, heavy passive satellites like LAGEOS and ETALON is limited to 1,000,000 years, even though designers know it's possible they will remain aloft - well, forever.

Radians of many different cycles kinds are passing continually, especially since attainment of spaceflight including flight to the Moon, which all began a whole new kind of totally ordered set and thus, destiny.

Among long-term radians are those of the Sun's orbit around the Milky Way Galaxy, and planets of the Solar System from outside in: Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. Neptune, most distant of those, has a 165-year orbit, often thought of as an ideal for longevity. Yet the radian of Neptune's orbit is only 26.26 years. After 26 years, baby, you're on the stars-not on Saturn. By then you should be living in the four-year, 1461-day leap year cycle when the daily rotation comes into phase with the equinox. It should not be necessary to mention the number of letters in the English alphabet, or the atomic number of iron.

To be in on it, you have to be good, honest, clean, smart, well dressed, ordered, walk on water, be a saint, pray a lot, be careful, and have a whole bunch of other virtues that can seem like too, too much. Or you might be among the currently indulged special prognosticators, the current nouveau vogue such as computer programmers. If that sounds complicated, it is. Responsibility for the planet is a planetary concept, not an individual vice or virtue.

Complexity is one of the forms of balance between order and chaos. It is not a desirable attribute and it is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that it is tolerable. This is particularly true of commercial products and human inventions of all kinds. At some point in design, the extent and intensity of complexity must be determined by the designer.

Complexity is a form of the action. Solid objects are also forms of the action, and complexity occurs in all forms of the action. Action accompanies complexity, and apparently, vice versa. Action is fundamental throughout the universe on all magnitudes from galaxies through stars to planets and moons, through lands and oceans down to plants, animals and human beings, down to cells, molecules and atoms.

The action is far more complicated that can be comprehended in merely one lifetime. It is more complicated than is understood yet by human beings. It also ranges over a much greater range of sizes small and large, brief and enduring. individual and shared.

The world, and particularly the action, contains danger.

Developing embryos are protected if possible, at all cost against danger, disorder, chaos, disease, injury, failure and death. It is prepared, if possible, to face all the factors which the mother faces.

Children spend the first ten years of their lives comprehending the world as well as possible, and this means they can often graduate from the first few and most important elements such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen - of atomic numbers six, seven and eight. These form comfortable stages at ages six, seven and eight. Later, in their teens, they will pass the atomic weights, which are in these elements typically just twice the atomic numbers.
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At any rate, childhood consists of a considerable amount of familiarization with the elements, of which there are around one hundred. That is why the first few years are called elementary school.

It is often said to young people that this or that age ahead of them is some kind of important event after which they will know all they need to know. Fat chance.

One good way of looking at it, though not the only, is with the planets Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter's orbit of ten years and Saturn's of thirty form such important periods of time that they are among the premises for housing. Ten and thirty year mortgages are prevalent in taking on home ownership.

The word "mortgage" comes from the word mort, Latin for death. Mortgages are designed to handle the entire life cycle of the family, and so are designed to intrinsically be legal relationships that comprehend the births and deaths of persons inhabiting the home. This helps simplify a world which is already complex. Mortgages are complex, yet as simple as they can be made. In times of change they are more complicated. In stable times, they are more simple.

Cold turkey, the word times may be taken to mean centuries.

More to the point, the time domain is a little easier to comprehend if it is understood that time has both logarithmic and exponential attributes as well as linear. Second, time is fundamentally relative to, associated with, conjugate to and tangled up with energy. Energy is similarly involved with time. Because of that, understanding is improving about the way time affects civilizations and the individuals living within them. It is so much better now with what was once the primitive World being resolved into a Planet, that human beings now are beginning to consider the destiny of planet Earth as one destiny. Of course, that comprehends the destinies of billions of individual persons and their families.

Prior to the attainments of the past four hundred years, the world was close to absolutely and utterly ignorant of its own nature, of the nature of the earth and sky, sun and moon, and planets and stars. Glimpses, some strong enough to shape empires and encourage the ancient evolution and struggle to reach the Moon, were occasionally attained-many through wars and the honored sacrifices of countless souls in war, as well as the labors of countless persons who lived in peace. The future is far beyond what can be estimated except with such satellites as LAGEOS, Russia's ETALON, Japanese AJISAI, and the French STARLETTE satellites, many of which are in potentially million year orbits.

Until multi-celled organisms, metazoa evolved in the oceans half a billion years ago, nothing lived that compared the earth and sky, sun and moon, or tide-washed shores between the oceans and the land. Until dinosaurs emerged on land, nothing walked up hills or climbed mountains.

Until flowers, birds and electric eels emerged half a galactic cycle ago, nothing that lived packed things in double hulls or flew or wielded electrons and nothing knew of the Sun and Moon in an elect sense.

Until the Pyramids were built, no sign existed from previous generations that any thought or understanding had been attained in previous generations.

No language of any sophistication or recordable complex meaning existed with which the concept of life could be discussed and with which human beings could be resolved as distinct from plants and animals.

Until, with language, human beings could discuss storms, rain, sunshine, clouds, atmosphere, wind, air, atmosphere, scents, smells, odors aromas, rank and fragrance or stench, no concept of the spiritual world existed.

Until the spiritual world was resolved into mortal and immortal, no distinction was made between human beings and gods.

Until rulers like Cheops and other Pharaohs emerged, no concept existed that Man was among the gods, or that Man had any distinct relationship with gods or a God.

Until several millennia of dynasties had passed, man had no concept that there might exist One god, one God, One God and even then it faltered, then slowly returned and returned at great intervals.

Until the Greek philosophers, no concept of the Republic, no logic, and little counting with numbers, no geometry or distinction between order and chaos, and no concept of the atom or of stars existed.

Until Rome, no estimate of the size of the Earth or the distance to the Moon existed; no understanding of the atom or stars was of such order and stability that futures could be planned, and no concept that the Moon would inevitably be attained by human beings existed even if it took thousands of years.

Enlightenment from the future attainment of the Knowledge of the World, of the Earth and Sun and Moon, was from that time far beyond the concepts of the children, grandchildren and foreseeable descendants of human beings.

Until 1,000 A.D. no concept of God had stably spanned a thousand years of ten centuries and still counting with the future enlightenment still ahead of all mortal descent.

Until 1600, no concept of the spectrum, or the origin of the rainbow, or perspective, or lenses existed and no way existed to see minute organisms that lived and moved, no way existed to see mountains on the Moon or moons around Jupiter.

In all that time since Man began constructing large works, many new developments took taken place, that are too numerous to mention here, and they happened all over the world. In the recent past of course, the attainment of space flight, both unmanned and manned, orbits around the Earth, journeys to the Moon, and machines to other planets suddenly changed the entire world forever.

So greatly are the changes now taking place, that the previous billion years of evolution is in a process of change that is beyond recognition. The improvement in understanding is surpasses anything in history, and is so deep in the relation of large and small that it is to be a holistic metamorphosis.

This sounds potentially dangerous and it is. Yet the truth that was sought was sought well and it is so truly recorded that the World, which may be taken as planet Earth with its Solar System, appear to be a sufficiently well ordered basis for understanding that a thousand years and more of peace may be possible. With care, great care, the coming decades may make that more clear.

It is not possible to put the world into "Cloud Computing" without serious danger of war, possibly global thermonuclear war, unless commensurate, high order clarity exists about the most essential specific and general details of the new world. If these are imposed by violence, there will be war. If they are presented peacefully and they are just, there will be peace blessed from the beginning, and enduring for such a time that the world will recover from the massive, intense wars which have already taken place in the centuries and millennia prior to attainment of space flight. Cloud Computing is perilously close to Cloud-Cuckoo Land. Of course not all can be so naive as the author.

After all, the last ten thousand years was the time during which human constructions dedicated the entire evolution of the Earth, with all its history, to that great effort. That the flights to orbit and to the moon resulted more from careful detailed study, work, research, and craftsmanship, and not from brutal thuggish monstrous destructive violence is the fault of carnivorous predation and zero sum one-on-one kill or be killed evolutionary forms of competition in the half billion years of primitive life.

All this reiteration of history was to show that the problem of order and chaos is an issue that still affects human destiny. As long as those city-annihilating weapons exist, a vast choice must be continually made between peace and war. Yet that is so mainly because it was not known, when they were built, whether the Moon or anything sufficiently equivalent to that like orbital flight, would actually be attained. In other words, the nuclear weapons were manufactured, in case flight to the Moon failed.

If flight to the Moon had failed (or as in the opinions of some, if flights to the Moon fail) then the cities will be annihilated.

In the aftermath of attainment of Knowledge of the Nature of the World, it will be determined by human beings how they shall plan and live upon the Earth, whether and to what extent cities are to exist, what the human population shall be, how many plants and animals are permitted, and other conditions of existence, that will be Earth's fate and destiny for a billion years in the future. This will not happen all at once. No matter how lovably pristine each new generation is to be, there will be major change for centuries, and persistent change for thousands of years until the whole period of attainment of what Arthur C. Clarke called "Childhood's End" passes into one smooth serpentine of evolutionary time.

Ten thousand years from now, the world will be stable. Until the, expect chaos and order to be only one of the many dimensions in which change is to take place. Each new generation will be faced with children who say, "we and only we have the final, ultimate order". After times of that magnitude, Earth will begin to found its millions of years of destiny, and prepare for its first Radian of the Galactic Cycle.

The world planet Earth has a better concept of itself, than the individual has of the world, its people and its individuals. After all, Earth has billions of years practicing being a sphere.