27-10-2014, 02:29 PM
Energy and the Human Journey: Where We Have Been; Where We Can Go
By Wade Frazier
Version 1.0, published September 2014
Note to Readers: This essay is more easily navigated with a browser other than Internet Explorer, such as Firefox. This essay has internal links to this essay and to other essays on my website, with external links largely to Wikipedia and scientific papers. I have published this essay in other formats: .pdf format (10.7 megabytes) and .pdf format without visible links (the closest experience to reading a book), to honor different methods of digesting this essay, but this html version comprises the online textbook that I intended this essay to be
Dedication
Acronyms Used in This Essay
Summary and Purpose
This Essay's Tables and Timelines
Energy and the Industrialized World
The Toolset of Mainstream Science
The Orthodox Framework and its Limitations
Energy and Chemistry
Timelines of Energy, Geology, and Early Life
The Formation and Early Development of the Sun and Earth
Early Life on Earth
The Cryogenian Ice Age and the Rise of Complex Life
Speciation, Extinction, and Mass Extinctions
The Cambrian Explosion
Complex Life Colonizes Land
Making Coal, the Rise of Reptiles, and the Greatest Extinction Ever
The Reign of Dinosaurs
The Age of Mammals
Mid-Essay Reflection
The Path to Humanity
Tables of Key Events in the Human Journey
Humanity's First Epochal Event(s?): Growing our Brains and Controlling Fire
Humanity's Second Epochal Event: The Super-Predator Revolution
Humanity's Third Epochal Event: The Domestication Revolution
Epochal Event 3.5 The Rise of Europe
Humanity's Fourth Epochal Event: The Industrial Revolution
Epochal Event 4.5 The Rise of Oil and Electricity
The Postwar Boom, Peak Oil, and the Decline of Industrial Civilization
What Running out of Energy Looks Like
My Adventures and Those of My Fellow Travelers
Humanity's Fifth Epochal Event: Free Energy and an Abundance-Based Political Economy
The Sixth Mass Extinction or the Fifth Epochal Event?
What Has Not Worked So Far, and What Might
Footnotes
Dedication
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Mr. Professor and Brian, two great men whom it was an immense privilege to know and who spent their lives in a quest for healing this world. I miss them.
Acronyms Used in This Essay
A number of acronyms in this essay are not commonly used and at least one is unique to my work.
They are:
BYA Billion Years Ago
MYA Million Years Ago
KYA Thousand Years Ago
PPM Parts Per Million
FE Free Energy
GC Global Controller
EROI Energy Return on Investment
UP The Universal People
LUCA Last Universal Common Ancestor
ATP - Adenosine Triphosphate
GOE Great Oxygenation Event
BIF Banded Iron Formation
ROS Reactive Oxygen Species
PETM - Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
Summary and Purpose
Chapter summary:
The day after I arrived in Boston, we began to pursue what is today called free energy, or new energy, which is abundant and harmlessly produced energy generated with almost no operating cost. Today's so-called free energy is usually generated by harnessing the zero-point field, but not always, and our original effort was not trying to harness it. We attracted the interest of a legendary and shadowy group while we were in Boston, and they offered $10 million for the rights to our fledgling technology. I have called that group the Global Controllers, and others have different terms for them. However, they are not the focus of my writings and efforts. I regard them as a symptom of our collective malaise, not a cause. Our fate is in our hands, not theirs. Our efforts also caused great commotion within New England's electric industry and attracted attempts by the local authorities to destroy our business. They were probably trying to protect their economic turf and were not consciously acting on the Global Controllers' behalf, which was probably also the case in Seattle.
In 1987, we moved our business to Ventura, California, where I had been raised, before the sledgehammer in Boston could fall on us. We moved because I had connected us with technologies and talent that made our free energy ideas potentially feasible. Our public awareness efforts became highly successful and we were building free energy prototypes. In early 1988, our efforts were targeted by the local authorities, again at the behest of energy interests, both local and global. In a surprise raid in which the authorities blatantly stole our technical materials, mere weeks after those same authorities assured us that we were not doing anything illegal, my radicalization began. A few months later, my partner was offered about $1 billion to cease our operations by that shadowy global group; the CIA delivered that offer. Soon after my partner refused their offer, he was arrested with a million dollar bail and our nightmare began. The turning point of my life was when I became the defense's key witness and the prosecution made faces at me while I was on the witness stand, as they tried to intimidate me. It helped inspire me to sacrifice my life in an attempt to free my partner, and it incredibly worked, in the greatest miracle that I ever witnessed. I helped free my partner, but my life had been ruined by the events of 1988, and in 1990 I left Ventura and never returned. I had been radicalized ("awakened"), and I then spent the next several years seeking understanding of what I had lived through and why the world worked starkly differently than how I was taught that it did. I began the study and writing that culminated in publishing my first website in 1996, which was also when I briefly rejoined my former partner after he was released from prison, after the courts fraudulently placed him there and prison officials repeatedly put him in position to be murdered. The Global Controllers then raised their game to new, sophisticated levels, and I nearly went to prison.
As I discovered the hard way, contrary to my business school indoctrination, there is little that resembles a free market in the USA, particularly in its energy industry, and there has never been a truly free market, a real democracy, a free press, an objective history, a purely pursued scientific method, or any other imaginary constructs that our dominant institutions promote. They may all be worthy ideals, but none has existed in the real world. Regarding free markets in the energy industry, reality has effectively been inverted, with the world's greatest effort of organized suppression preventing alternative energy technology of any significance from public awareness and use.
Soon after I moved from Ventura, I met a former astronaut who was hired by NASA with a Mars mission in mind and was investigating the free energy field. We eventually became colleagues and co-founded a non-profit organization intended to raise public awareness of new energy. A few days after we began planning the organization's first conference in 2004, the first speaker that we recruited for our conference was murdered, and my astronaut colleague immediately and understandably moved to South America, where he spent the rest of his life. In the spring of 2013, I spent a few days with my former free energy partner and, like my astronaut colleague, he had also been run out of the USA after mounting an effort around high-MPG carburetor technology. The federal government attacked soon after a legendary figure in the oil industry contacted my partner, who also attracted the attention of the sitting USA's president. Every American president since Ronald Reagan knew my partner by name, but they proved to be rather low-ranking in the global power structure.
My astronaut colleague investigated the UFO phenomenon early in his adventures on the frontiers of science and nearly lost his life at the American military's hands. It became evident that the UFO and free energy issues were conjoined. A global elite faction demonstrated some of their exotic and sequestered technologies to a close fellow traveler, which included free energy and antigravity technologies. My astronaut colleague was involved with the same free energy inventor that some around me were, who invented a solid-state free energy prototype that not only produced a million times the energy that went into it, but it also produced antigravity effects. I eventually understood the larger context of our efforts and encountered numerous fellow travelers; they reported similar experiences, of having their technologies seized or otherwise suppressed, of being incarcerated and/or surviving murder attempts, and other outrages inflicted by global elites as they maintained their tyrannical grip over the world economy and, hence, humanity. It was no conspiracy theory, but what my fellow travelers and I learned at great personal cost, which was regularly fatal.
I continued to study and write and became my astronaut colleague's biographer. My former partner is the Indiana Jones of the free energy field, but I eventually realized that while it was awe-inspiring to witness his efforts, one man with a whip and fedora cannot save humanity from itself. I eventually took a different path from both my partner and astronaut colleague, and one fruit of that direction is this essay. Not only was the public largely indifferent to what we were attempting, but those attracted to our efforts usually either came for the spectacle or were opportunists who betrayed us at the first opportunity. As we weathered attacks from the local, state, national, or global power structures, such treacherous opportunities abounded. I witnessed dozens of attempts by my partner's associates to steal his companies from him (1, 2, 3, 4), and my astronaut colleague was twice ejected from organizations that he founded, by the very people that he invited to help him. During my radicalizing years with my partner, I learned that personal integrity is the world's scarcest commodity, and it is the primary reason why humanity is in this predicament. The antics of the global elites are of minor importance; the enemy is us.
I eventually realized that there were not enough heroes on Earth to get free energy over the hump of humanity's inertia and organized suppression. Soon after I completed my present website in 2002, one of R. Buckminster Fuller's pupils called my writings "comprehensivist" and I did not know what he meant. I then read some of Fuller's work and saw the point. My writings since then have been more consciously comprehensivist (also called "generalist") in nature.
This essay is intended to draw a comprehensive picture of life on Earth, the human journey, and energy's role. The references that support this essay are usually to works written for non-scientists or those of only modest academic achievement, so that non-scientists can study the same works without needing specialized scientific training. I am trying to help form a comprehensive awareness in a tiny fraction of the global population. Between 5,000 and 7,000 people is my goal. My hope is that the energy issue can become that tiny fraction's focus. Properly educated, that group might be able to help catalyze an energy effort that can overcome the obstacles. That envisioned group may help humanity in many ways, but my primary goal is manifesting those technologies in the public sphere in a way that nobody risks life or livelihood. I have seen too many wrecked and prematurely ended lives (1, 2) and plan to avoid those fates, for both myself and the group's members.
Here is a brief summary of this essay. Ever since life first appeared more than three billion years ago and about a billion years after the Sun and Earth formed, organisms have continually invented more effective methods to acquire, preserve, and use energy. Complex life appeared after three billion years of evolution and, pound-for-pound, it used energy 100,000 times as fast as the Sun produced it. The story of life on Earth has been one of evolutionary events impacted by geophysical and geochemical processes, and in turn influencing them. During the eon of complex life that began more than 500 million years ago, there have been many brief golden ages of relative energy abundance for some fortunate species, soon followed by increased energy competition, a relatively stable struggle for energy, and mass extinction events cleared biomes for another golden age by organisms adapted to the new environments. That pattern has characterized the journey of complex life over the past several hundred million years. Intelligence began increasing among some animals, which provided them with a competitive advantage.
About 2.6 million years ago, when our current ice age began, our ancestors learned how to make stone tools, which was soon followed by the control of fire, and the human journey's First Epochal Event(s?) transpired. The human evolutionary line's brain then grew dramatically. About two million years later, the human line evolved to the point where behaviorally modern humans appeared, left Africa, and conquered all inhabitable continents. Their expansion was fueled by driving most of Earth's large animals to extinction. That Second Epochal Event was also the beginning of the Sixth Mass Extinction. After all the easy meat was extinct and the brief Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer ended, population pressures led to the Third Epochal Event: domesticating plants and animals. That event led to civilization, and many features of the human journey often argued to be human nature, such as slavery and the subjugation of women, were merely artifacts of the energy regime and societal structure of agriculturally based civilizations. Early civilizations were never stable; their energy practices were largely based on deforestation and agriculture, usually on the deforested soils, and such civilizations primarily collapsed due to their unsustainable energy production methods.
As the Old World's civilizations continually rose and fell, Europe's peoples rediscovered ancient teachings that contained the first stirrings of a scientific approach. Europeans used energy technologies from that ancient period, borrowed novel energy practices from other Old World civilizations, and achieved the technological feat of turning the world's oceans into a low-energy transportation lane. Europeans thereby began conquering the world. During that conquest, one imperial contender turned to fossil fuels after their woodlands were depleted by early industrialization. England soon industrialized by using coal and initiated humanity's Fourth Epochal Event. England quickly became Earth's dominant imperial power. As Europeans conquered Earth, elites, who first appeared with the first civilizations, could begin thinking in global terms for the first time, and a global power structure began developing. As we learned the hard way, that power structure is very real, but almost nobody on Earth has a balanced and mature perspective regarding it, as people either deny its existence or obsess about it, seeing it as the root of our problems, when it is really only a side-effect of humanity's current stage of political-economic evolution, which has always been based on its level of energy usage.
Today, industrialized humanity is almost wholly dependent on the energy provided by hydrocarbon fuels that were created by geological processes operating on the remains of organisms, and humanity is mining and burning those hydrocarbon deposits about a million times as fast as they were created. We are reaching peak extraction rates but, more importantly, we have already discovered all of the easily acquired hydrocarbons. We are currently seeking and mining Earth's remaining hydrocarbon deposits, which are of poor energetic quality. It is merely the latest instance of humanity's depleting its energy resources, in which the dregs were mined after the easily acquired energy was consumed. The megafauna extinctions created the energy crisis that led to domestication and civilization, and the energy crisis of early industrialization led to using hydrocarbon energy, and the energy crisis of 1973-1974 attracted my fellow travelers and me to alternative energy. However, far more often over the course of the human journey, depleting energy resources led to population collapses and even local extinctions of humans in remote locations. Expanding and collapsing populations have characterized rising and falling polities during the past several thousand years, ever since the first civilizations appeared.
Today, humanity dominates Earth and is not only depleting its primary energy resources at prodigious rates, but it is also driving species to extinction at a rate that rivals the greatest mass extinctions in Earth's history. Humans may cause Earth's greatest mass extinction, which may take humanity with it. Today, humanity stands on the brink of the abyss, and almost nobody seems to know or care. Humanity is a tunnel-visioned, egocentric species, with almost all people only concerned about their immediate self-interest and oblivious of what lies ahead. Not all humans are so blind, and biologists and climate scientists, among others intimately familiar with the impacts of global civilization, are terrified by what humanity is inflicting onto Earth. Also, those who realize that we are quickly coming to the Hydrocarbon Age's end are beating the drums of doom, and I cannot blame them. We are in a "race of the catastrophes" scenario, with several manmade trends threatening our future existence.
Even the ultra-elites who run Earth from the shadows readily see how their game of chicken with Earth may turn out. Their more extreme members advocate terraforming Mars as their ultimate survival enclave if their games of power and control make Earth uninhabitable. But the saner members, who apparently are now a majority of that global cabal, favor the dissemination of those sequestered technologies. I am nearly certain that members of that disenchanted faction are those who gave my close friend an underground technology demonstration and who would quietly cheer our efforts when I worked with my former partner. They may also be subtly supporting my current efforts, of which this essay comprises a key component, but I have not heard from them and am not counting on them to save the day or help my efforts garner success. It is time for humanity to reach the level of collective sentience and integrity required to manifest humanity's Fifth Epochal Event, which will initiate the Free Energy Epoch. Humanity can then live, for the first time, in an epoch of true and sustainable abundance. It could also halt the Sixth Mass Extinction and humanity could turn Earth into something resembling heaven. With the Fifth Epochal Event, humanity will become a space-faring species, and a future will beckon that nobody on Earth today can truly imagine, just as nobody on Earth could predict how the previous Epochal Events transformed the human journey (1, 2, 3, 4).
Also, each Epochal Event was initiated by a small group of people, perhaps even by one person for the earliest events, and even the Industrial Revolution and its attendant Scientific Revolution had few fathers. However, I came to realize that there is probably nobody else on Earth like my former partner, and even Indiana Jones cannot save the world by himself. With the strategy that I finally developed, I do not look for heroes because I know that there are not enough currently walking Earth. I am attempting something far more modest. The greatest triumph of the ultra-elites running Earth today is making free energy technology and the resulting epoch of abundance unimaginable, and all of today's dominant ideologies assume scarcity in the foundation of their frameworks, which is largely why my former partner and my astronaut colleague were voices in the wilderness and like ducks in a shooting gallery that did not know where the next shot would come from. The most damaging shots were usually fired by their "allies," right into their backs, which nobody could have convinced me of in 1985. But after watching similar scenarios play out dozens of times, I finally had to admit the obvious, and my partner admitted it to me in 2013.
I noticed several crippling weaknesses in all alternative energy efforts that I was involved with or witnessed. Most importantly, when my partner mounted his efforts, people participated primarily to serve their self-interest. While the pursuit of mutual self-interest is the very definition of politics, self-interested people were easily defeated by organized suppression, although the efforts usually self-destructed before suppression efforts became intense. Another deficiency in all mass free energy efforts was that most participants were scientifically illiterate and did not see much beyond the possibility of reducing their energy bills or becoming rich and famous. Once the effort was destroyed (and they always are, if they have any promise), the participants left the alternative energy field. Also, many lives were wrecked as each effort was defeated, so almost nobody was able or willing to try again. Every time that my partner rebuilt his efforts, it was primarily with new people; few individuals lasted for more than one attempt.
I realize that almost nobody on Earth today can pass the integrity tests that my fellow travelers were subjected to, and I do not ask that of anybody whom I will attempt to recruit into my upcoming effort. It will be a non-heroic approach, of "merely" achieving enough heart-centered sentience and awareness to where a world of free energy and abundance is only imagined by a sizeable group who will not stay quiet about it, but who will also not be proselytizing. If they can truly understand this essay's message, they will probably not know anybody else in their daily lives that can.
Those recruits will simply be singing a song of practical abundance that will attract those who have been listening for that song for their entire lives. Once enough people know the song by heart and can sing it, and have attracted a large enough audience that can approach the free energy issue in a way that risks nobody's life and will not be easy for the provocateurs and the effort's "allies" to wreck, then it will be time to take action, but in a way never tried before.
That is my plan, and this essay is intended to form the foundation of my efforts to educate and amass the "choir" that will sing the abundance song. I am looking for singers, not soldiers, and the choir will primarily sing here. My approach takes the lamb's path, not the warrior's. That "choir" may only help a little, it may help a lot, but it will not harm anybody. This effort could be called trying the enlightenment path to free energy, an abundance-based global political economy, and a healed humanity and planet. I believe that the key is approaching the issue as creators instead of victims; from a place of love instead of fear. Those goals may seem grandiose to the uninitiated, and people in this field regularly succumb to a messiah complex and harbor other delusions of grandeur, but I also know that they are attainable if only a tiny fraction of humanity can help initiate that Fifth Epochal Event, just like the previous Epochal Events. This essay is designed to begin the training process. Learning this material will be a formidable undertaking. This material is not designed for those looking for quick and easy answers, but is intended to help my readers attain the levels of understanding that I think are necessary for assisting with this epochal undertaking.
This Essay's Tables and Timelines
In order to make this essay easier to understand, I created some tables and timelines, and they are:
Timeline of Significant Energy Events in Earth's and Life's History
Abbreviated Geologic Time Scale
Timeline of Earth's Major Ice Ages
Timeline of Earth's Major and Minor Mass Extinction Events
Early Earth Timeline before the Eon of Complex Life
Timeline of Key Biological Innovations in the Eon of Complex Life
Timeline of Humanity's Evolutionary Heritage
Human Event Timeline Until Europe Began Conquering Humanity
Human Event Timeline Since Europe Began Conquering Humanity
Table of Humanity's Epochs
Energy and the Industrialized World
There are greater contrasts in humanity's collective standard of living than ever before. As of 2014, Bill Gates topped the list of the world's richest people for nearly all years of the previous twenty. In 2000, his net worth was about $100 billion, or about the same as the collective wealth of the poorest hundred million Americans or the poorest half of humanity. Although Gates and other high-technology billionaires can live surprisingly egalitarian lifestyles, for one person to possess the same level of wealth as billions of people collectively is a recent phenomenon. In 2014, about 30 thousand children died each day because of their impoverished conditions.
Ever since I was thrust into an urban hell soon after graduating from college, I became a student of wealth, poverty, and humanity's problems. My teenage dreams of changing humanity's energy paradigm have had a lifelong impact. It took me many years to gain a comprehensive understanding of how energy literally runs the world and always has. A good demonstration of that fact is to consider the average day of an average American professional, who is a member of history's most privileged large demographic group and lives in Earth's most industrialized nation. A typical day in my life during the winter before I wrote this essay can serve as an example.
When I worked twelve-hour days and longer during that winter, which was the busiest time of my year, I often fasted and needed less sleep, so I often awoke before 5:00 A.M. In 2014 as I write this, I live in a fairly large house. When I fast, my body generates less heat, so I feel cold rather easily; I wear thermal underwear under my work attire and have other strategies for staying warm, especially in the winter. I programmed our furnace to begin operation soon before I awakened, so that my day started in a warm environment. I also have a space heater in my home office, so that the rest of the house can stay cold while I work in warmth.
That winter, my first tasks when arising were turning on my computer and drinking a glass of orange juice, which raised my blood sugar. After some hours of reading about world events, answering emails, and working on my writings, I took a hot shower, dressed, and walked to a bus stop. I read a book while awaiting the bus that took me to downtown Bellevue, where I worked in a high-rise office building for an Internet company.
When I arrived at my office, I turned on my lights and computer. When I was eating, I put the food that I brought to work in a refrigerator under my desk. During my work day, I interacted with many people in my air-conditioned, high-technology office environment. My cellular telephone was never far away. The view from my office window of the Cascade Mountains was pleasant. My computer interfaced with our distant data centers and the world at large via the Internet. When my workday was finished, I rode the bus home. In the winter, the furnace is programmed to stop functioning when my wife and I leave for work, and comes on soon before we arrive home, so we never experienced a cold house. In the evening, we might watch a movie on a DVD on our wide-screen plasma TV. When I am not fasting, I usually eat dinner, with the food in my refrigerator usually purchased at a cooperative grocery store that has an enormous produce section, with food grown locally and imported from as far away as New Zealand, China, and Israel.[1] We have a high-tech kitchen, with a "smart" stove, refrigerator, and other appliances.
When I resumed my career in 2003, I became an early riser and consequently went to bed by 9:00 PM on most nights, and often read fantasy literature before I turned out the lights and snuggled into bed (with two comforters in the winter to keep us warm as we sleep).
That was a typical winter's day in early 2013. During that day, around 80 times the calories that fueled my body were burned to support my activities. Those dying children often succumbed to hunger and diseases of poverty, and the daily energy that supported their lives was less than 1% of what I enjoyed that day. How did energy serve my daily activities? How did that disparity between the dying children and me come to be? This essay will address those questions.
The Toolset of Mainstream Science
Humanity is Earth's leading tool-using species, and our tools made us. Twigs, sticks, bones, and other organic materials were undoubtedly used as tools by our protohuman ancestors, but the only tools to survive for millions of years to be studied today are made of stone; the oldest discovered so far are about 2.6-2.5 million years old.[2] Humanity's tools have become increasingly sophisticated since then. The Industrial Revolution was accompanied by the Scientific Revolution, and the synergy between scientific and technological advances has been essential and impressive, even leaving aside the many technologies and related theories that have been developed and sequestered in the above-top-secret world.
The history of science is deeply entwined with the state of technology. Improving technology allowed for increasingly sophisticated experiments, and advances in science spurred technological innovation. While many scientific practices and outcomes have been evil, such as vivisection and nuclear weapons, many others have not been destructive to humans or other organisms. The 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century saw great leaps in technological and scientific advancement. My grandfather lived in a sod hut as a child, his son helped send men to the moon, and his grandson pursued world-changing energy technologies and still does. Relativity and quantum theory ended the era of classical physics and, with their increasingly sophisticated toolset, scientists began to investigate phenomena at the galactic and subatomic scales. Space-based telescopes, electron microscopes, mass spectrometers, atomic clocks, supercolliders, computers, robots that land on distant moons and planets, and other tools allowed for explorations and experiments that were not possible in earlier times.
Intense organized suppression has existed where scientific and technological advances can threaten economic empires, but many areas of science are not seen as threatening, and reconstructing Earth's distant past and the journey of life on Earth is one of those nonthreatening areas. I have never heard of a classified fossil site or a Precambrian specialist being threatened or bought out in order to keep him/her silent. There is more controversy with human remains and artifacts, but I am skeptical of popular works that argue for technologically advanced ancient civilizations and related notions. Something closer to "pure science" can be practiced regarding those ancient events without the threat of repercussions or the enticements of riches and Nobel Prizes. Much of this essay's subject matter deals with areas where the distortions of political-economic racketeering have been muted, and the theory and tools have been relatively unrestricted.
Mass spectrometers assess the mass of atoms and molecules, and have become increasingly refined since they were first invented in the 19[SUP]th[/SUP] century. Today, samples that can only be seen with microscopes can be tested, and measured down to a billionth of a gram.[3] Elements have different numbers of protons and neutrons in the nuclei of their atoms, and each nuclear variation of an element is called an isotope. Unstable isotopes decay into smaller elements (also called "daughter isotopes"). Scientific investigations have determined that radioactive decay rates are quite stable and are primarily governed by the dynamics in a decaying atom. The dates determined by radioactive dating have been correlated to other observed processes, with the data becoming increasingly robust over the years.[4]
The ability to weigh various isotopes, at increasing levels of precision, with mass spectrometers has provided a gold mine of data. Scientists are continually inventing new methods and ways to use them, new questions are asked and answered, and some examples of methods and findings follow.
Carbon has two primary stable isotopes: carbon-12 and carbon-13. Carbon-14 is the famous unstable isotope used for dating recently deceased life forms, but testing carbon's stable isotopes has yielded invaluable information. Carbon is the backbone of all of life's structures, and life processes often have a preference for using carbon-12, which is lighter than carbon-13 and hence take less energy to manipulate. Scientists have been able to test rocks in which the "fossils" are nothing more than smears, and determine that those smears were the result of life processes, as there is more carbon-12 in the smear than carbon-13 than would be the case if life was not involved.[5] This has also helped date the earliest life forms. Life's preference for lighter isotopes is evident for other key elements such as sulfur and nitrogen, and scientists regularly make use of that preference in their investigations.[6]
The hydrological cycle circulates water through Earth's oceans, atmosphere, and land. The energy of sunlight drives it, and that sunlight is primarily captured at the surface of water bodies, and the oceans in particular. The hydrological cycle's patterns have changed over the eons as Earth's surface has changed its continental configurations and temperature. Today's global weather system generally begins with sunlight hitting the atmosphere, with the equator's air receiving the most direct radiation and becoming warmest. That air rises and cools, which reduces the water vapor that it can hold, so it falls as rain. That is why tropical rainforests are near the equator. The rising equatorial air creates high-pressure dry air that pushes toward the poles, and at about 30[SUP]o [/SUP]latitude that air cools and sinks to the ground. That dry air not only does not bring precipitation, it absorbs moisture from the land it hits and forms the world's great deserts. That high pressure at the ground at 30[SUP]o [/SUP]latitude pushes air back toward the tropics, and Earth's rotation creates a distinctive bend in the northern and southern hemispheres that create trade winds that pick up moisture as they approach the equator. The pole-ward sides of the mid-latitudes' dry temperate regions also have low pressures and wet climates, and dry high-pressure zones exist at the poles. As clouds pass over land, mountains force them upward and they lose their moisture in precipitation.[7] As that water makes its way back to the oceans to start the cycle again, it provides the freshwater for all land-based ecosystems. Below is a diagram of those dynamics. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
![[Image: globalweather.jpg]](http://www.ahealedplanet.net/globalweather.jpg)
A water molecule containing oxygen-16 (the most common oxygen isotope) will be lighter than a water molecule containing oxygen-18 (both are stable isotopes), so it takes less energy to liberate an oxygen-16 water molecule than an oxygen-18 water molecule. Also, after evaporation, oxygen-18 water will tend to fall back to Earth more quickly than oxygen-16 water will, because it is heavier. As a consequence, air over Earth's poles will be enriched in oxygen-16 the colder Earth's surface temperature, the less oxygen-18 will evaporate and be carried to the poles and scientists have used this enrichment to reconstruct a record of ocean temperatures. Also, the oxygen-isotope ratio in fossil shellfish (as their life processes prefer the lighter oxygen isotope) has been used to help determine ancient temperatures. During an ice age, because proportionally more oxygen-16 is retained in ice sheets and does not flow back to the oceans, the ocean's surface becomes enriched in oxygen-18 and that difference can be discerned in fossil shells. Sediments are usually laid down in annual layers, and in some places, such as the Cariaco Basin off the coast of Venezuela, undisturbed sediments have been retrieved and analyzed, which has helped determine when ice sheets advanced and retreated during the present ice age.[8]
Mass spectrometers have been invaluable for assigning dates to various rocks and sedimentary layers, as radioactive isotopes and their daughter isotopes are tested, including uranium-lead, potassium-argon, carbon-14, and many other tests.[9] Also, the ratios of elements in a sample can be determined, which can tell where it originated. Many hypotheses and theories have arisen, fallen, and been called into question or modified with the data derived from those increasingly sophisticated methods, and a few examples should suffice to give an idea of what is being discovered.
The moon rocks retrieved by Apollo astronauts are still being tested, as new experiments and hypotheses are devised. In 2012, a study was published which resulted from testing moon rocks for the titanium-50 and titanium-47 ratios (both are stable isotopes), and it has brought into question the hypothesis that the Moon was formed by a planetary collision more than four billion years ago. The titanium ratio was so much like Earth's that a collision with Earth forming the Moon has been questioned (as very little of the hypothesized colliding body became part of the Moon). The collision hypothesis will probably survive, but it may be significantly different from today's hypothesis. Meteorites have been dated, as well as moon rocks, and their ages confirm Earth's age that geologists have derived, and meteorite dates provide more evidence that the solar system probably developed from an accretion disk.
In the Western Hemisphere, the Anasazi and Mayan civilization collapses of around a thousand years ago, or the Mississippian civilization collapse of 500 years ago, have elicited a great deal of investigation. From New Age ideas that the Anasazi and Mayan peoples "ascended" to the Eurocentric conceit that the Mississippian culture was European in origin, many speculations arose that have been disproven by the evidence. It is now known that the Anasazi and Mayan culture collapses were influenced by epic droughts, but that was only the proximate cause. The ultimate cause was that those civilizations were not energetically sustainable. The Anasazi used logs to build their dwellings that today are famous ruins, and scientists have used strontium ratios in the wood to determine where they came from, as well as date the wood using tree-ring analysis and analyzing pack rat middens, and a sobering picture emerged. The region was already arid, but agriculture and deforestation desertified the region around Chaco Canyon, which was the heart of Anasazi civilization. When Anasazi civilization collapsed, at Chaco Canyon they were hauling in timber from mountains more than 70 kilometers away (the strontium ratios could trace each log from the particular mountain that it came from). When the epic droughts delivered their final blows, Anasazi civilization collapsed into a morass of starvation, warfare, and cannibalism, and the forest has yet to begin to recover, nearly a thousand years later.[10]
Another major advance happened in the late 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century: the ability to analyze DNA. DNA's double-helical structure was discovered in 1953. In 1973, the first amino acid sequence for a gene was determined. In 2003, the entire human genome was sequenced. Sequencing the chimpanzee genome was accomplished in 2005, for orangutans in 2011, and for gorillas in 2012. The comparisons of human and great ape DNA have yielded many insights, but the science of DNA analysis is still young. What has yielded far more immediately relevant information has been studying human DNA. The genetic bases of many diseases have been identified. Hundreds of falsely convicted Americans have been released from prison, and nearly twenty from death row, due to DNA evidence's proving their innocence. Human DNA testing has provided startling new insights into the human past. For instance, in Europe it appears that after the ice sheets receded 16,000 to 13,000 years ago, humans repopulated Europe, and for all the bloody history of Europe over the millennia since then, there have not really been mass population replacements in Europe by invasion, migration, genocide, and the like. Europeans just endlessly fought each other and honed the talents that would help them conquer humanity. There were some migrations of Fertile Crescent agriculturalists into Europe, but mostly the "indigenous" populations adopted the energetically superior practices of the agriculturalists and did not migrate, nor were they displaced. DNA testing has demonstrated that all of today's humans are descended from a founder population of about five thousand people, of whom a few hundred left Africa around 60-50 thousand years ago and conquered Earth. The Neanderthal genome has been sequenced, as well as genomes of other extinct species, and for a brief, exuberant moment, some scientists thought that they could recover dinosaur DNA, Jurassic-Park-style. Although dinosaur DNA is unrecoverable, organic dinosaur remains have been recovered, and even some proteins have been sequenced, which probably no scientist believed possible in the 1980s.[11]
Since 1992, scientists have been discovering planets in other star systems by using a variety of methods that reflect the improving toolset that scientists can use, especially space-based telescopes. Before those discoveries, there was controversy whether planets were rare phenomena, but scientists now admit that planets are typical members of star systems. Extraterrestrial civilizations are probably visiting Earth, so planets hosting intelligent life may not be all that rare.
Those interrelated and often mutually reinforcing lines of evidence have made many scientific findings difficult to deny. The ever-advancing scientific toolset, and the ingenuity of scientists developing and using them, and particularly the multidisciplinary approach that scientists and scholars are increasingly using, have been making for radical changes in how we view the past. Those radical changes will not end any time soon, and what follows will certainly be modified by new discoveries and interpretations, but I have tried to stay largely within the prevailing findings, hypotheses, and theories, while also poking into the fringes and leading edges somewhat. Any mistakes in fact or interpretation in what follows are mine.
The Orthodox Framework and its Limitations
Chapter summary:
By Wade Frazier
Version 1.0, published September 2014
Note to Readers: This essay is more easily navigated with a browser other than Internet Explorer, such as Firefox. This essay has internal links to this essay and to other essays on my website, with external links largely to Wikipedia and scientific papers. I have published this essay in other formats: .pdf format (10.7 megabytes) and .pdf format without visible links (the closest experience to reading a book), to honor different methods of digesting this essay, but this html version comprises the online textbook that I intended this essay to be
Dedication
Acronyms Used in This Essay
Summary and Purpose
This Essay's Tables and Timelines
Energy and the Industrialized World
The Toolset of Mainstream Science
The Orthodox Framework and its Limitations
Energy and Chemistry
Timelines of Energy, Geology, and Early Life
The Formation and Early Development of the Sun and Earth
Early Life on Earth
The Cryogenian Ice Age and the Rise of Complex Life
Speciation, Extinction, and Mass Extinctions
The Cambrian Explosion
Complex Life Colonizes Land
Making Coal, the Rise of Reptiles, and the Greatest Extinction Ever
The Reign of Dinosaurs
The Age of Mammals
Mid-Essay Reflection
The Path to Humanity
Tables of Key Events in the Human Journey
Humanity's First Epochal Event(s?): Growing our Brains and Controlling Fire
Humanity's Second Epochal Event: The Super-Predator Revolution
Humanity's Third Epochal Event: The Domestication Revolution
Epochal Event 3.5 The Rise of Europe
Humanity's Fourth Epochal Event: The Industrial Revolution
Epochal Event 4.5 The Rise of Oil and Electricity
The Postwar Boom, Peak Oil, and the Decline of Industrial Civilization
What Running out of Energy Looks Like
My Adventures and Those of My Fellow Travelers
Humanity's Fifth Epochal Event: Free Energy and an Abundance-Based Political Economy
The Sixth Mass Extinction or the Fifth Epochal Event?
What Has Not Worked So Far, and What Might
Footnotes
Dedication
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Mr. Professor and Brian, two great men whom it was an immense privilege to know and who spent their lives in a quest for healing this world. I miss them.
Acronyms Used in This Essay
A number of acronyms in this essay are not commonly used and at least one is unique to my work.
They are:
BYA Billion Years Ago
MYA Million Years Ago
KYA Thousand Years Ago
PPM Parts Per Million
FE Free Energy
GC Global Controller
EROI Energy Return on Investment
UP The Universal People
LUCA Last Universal Common Ancestor
ATP - Adenosine Triphosphate
GOE Great Oxygenation Event
BIF Banded Iron Formation
ROS Reactive Oxygen Species
PETM - Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
Summary and Purpose
Chapter summary:
- My background
- Essay summary, including:
- Journey of life on Earth
- Epochal energy events in human journey
- Potential of abundant, environmentally harmless energy technology, which already exists
- Journey of life on Earth
- My strategy for manifesting that energy event for humanity's and the planet's benefit.
The day after I arrived in Boston, we began to pursue what is today called free energy, or new energy, which is abundant and harmlessly produced energy generated with almost no operating cost. Today's so-called free energy is usually generated by harnessing the zero-point field, but not always, and our original effort was not trying to harness it. We attracted the interest of a legendary and shadowy group while we were in Boston, and they offered $10 million for the rights to our fledgling technology. I have called that group the Global Controllers, and others have different terms for them. However, they are not the focus of my writings and efforts. I regard them as a symptom of our collective malaise, not a cause. Our fate is in our hands, not theirs. Our efforts also caused great commotion within New England's electric industry and attracted attempts by the local authorities to destroy our business. They were probably trying to protect their economic turf and were not consciously acting on the Global Controllers' behalf, which was probably also the case in Seattle.
In 1987, we moved our business to Ventura, California, where I had been raised, before the sledgehammer in Boston could fall on us. We moved because I had connected us with technologies and talent that made our free energy ideas potentially feasible. Our public awareness efforts became highly successful and we were building free energy prototypes. In early 1988, our efforts were targeted by the local authorities, again at the behest of energy interests, both local and global. In a surprise raid in which the authorities blatantly stole our technical materials, mere weeks after those same authorities assured us that we were not doing anything illegal, my radicalization began. A few months later, my partner was offered about $1 billion to cease our operations by that shadowy global group; the CIA delivered that offer. Soon after my partner refused their offer, he was arrested with a million dollar bail and our nightmare began. The turning point of my life was when I became the defense's key witness and the prosecution made faces at me while I was on the witness stand, as they tried to intimidate me. It helped inspire me to sacrifice my life in an attempt to free my partner, and it incredibly worked, in the greatest miracle that I ever witnessed. I helped free my partner, but my life had been ruined by the events of 1988, and in 1990 I left Ventura and never returned. I had been radicalized ("awakened"), and I then spent the next several years seeking understanding of what I had lived through and why the world worked starkly differently than how I was taught that it did. I began the study and writing that culminated in publishing my first website in 1996, which was also when I briefly rejoined my former partner after he was released from prison, after the courts fraudulently placed him there and prison officials repeatedly put him in position to be murdered. The Global Controllers then raised their game to new, sophisticated levels, and I nearly went to prison.
As I discovered the hard way, contrary to my business school indoctrination, there is little that resembles a free market in the USA, particularly in its energy industry, and there has never been a truly free market, a real democracy, a free press, an objective history, a purely pursued scientific method, or any other imaginary constructs that our dominant institutions promote. They may all be worthy ideals, but none has existed in the real world. Regarding free markets in the energy industry, reality has effectively been inverted, with the world's greatest effort of organized suppression preventing alternative energy technology of any significance from public awareness and use.
Soon after I moved from Ventura, I met a former astronaut who was hired by NASA with a Mars mission in mind and was investigating the free energy field. We eventually became colleagues and co-founded a non-profit organization intended to raise public awareness of new energy. A few days after we began planning the organization's first conference in 2004, the first speaker that we recruited for our conference was murdered, and my astronaut colleague immediately and understandably moved to South America, where he spent the rest of his life. In the spring of 2013, I spent a few days with my former free energy partner and, like my astronaut colleague, he had also been run out of the USA after mounting an effort around high-MPG carburetor technology. The federal government attacked soon after a legendary figure in the oil industry contacted my partner, who also attracted the attention of the sitting USA's president. Every American president since Ronald Reagan knew my partner by name, but they proved to be rather low-ranking in the global power structure.
My astronaut colleague investigated the UFO phenomenon early in his adventures on the frontiers of science and nearly lost his life at the American military's hands. It became evident that the UFO and free energy issues were conjoined. A global elite faction demonstrated some of their exotic and sequestered technologies to a close fellow traveler, which included free energy and antigravity technologies. My astronaut colleague was involved with the same free energy inventor that some around me were, who invented a solid-state free energy prototype that not only produced a million times the energy that went into it, but it also produced antigravity effects. I eventually understood the larger context of our efforts and encountered numerous fellow travelers; they reported similar experiences, of having their technologies seized or otherwise suppressed, of being incarcerated and/or surviving murder attempts, and other outrages inflicted by global elites as they maintained their tyrannical grip over the world economy and, hence, humanity. It was no conspiracy theory, but what my fellow travelers and I learned at great personal cost, which was regularly fatal.
I continued to study and write and became my astronaut colleague's biographer. My former partner is the Indiana Jones of the free energy field, but I eventually realized that while it was awe-inspiring to witness his efforts, one man with a whip and fedora cannot save humanity from itself. I eventually took a different path from both my partner and astronaut colleague, and one fruit of that direction is this essay. Not only was the public largely indifferent to what we were attempting, but those attracted to our efforts usually either came for the spectacle or were opportunists who betrayed us at the first opportunity. As we weathered attacks from the local, state, national, or global power structures, such treacherous opportunities abounded. I witnessed dozens of attempts by my partner's associates to steal his companies from him (1, 2, 3, 4), and my astronaut colleague was twice ejected from organizations that he founded, by the very people that he invited to help him. During my radicalizing years with my partner, I learned that personal integrity is the world's scarcest commodity, and it is the primary reason why humanity is in this predicament. The antics of the global elites are of minor importance; the enemy is us.
I eventually realized that there were not enough heroes on Earth to get free energy over the hump of humanity's inertia and organized suppression. Soon after I completed my present website in 2002, one of R. Buckminster Fuller's pupils called my writings "comprehensivist" and I did not know what he meant. I then read some of Fuller's work and saw the point. My writings since then have been more consciously comprehensivist (also called "generalist") in nature.
This essay is intended to draw a comprehensive picture of life on Earth, the human journey, and energy's role. The references that support this essay are usually to works written for non-scientists or those of only modest academic achievement, so that non-scientists can study the same works without needing specialized scientific training. I am trying to help form a comprehensive awareness in a tiny fraction of the global population. Between 5,000 and 7,000 people is my goal. My hope is that the energy issue can become that tiny fraction's focus. Properly educated, that group might be able to help catalyze an energy effort that can overcome the obstacles. That envisioned group may help humanity in many ways, but my primary goal is manifesting those technologies in the public sphere in a way that nobody risks life or livelihood. I have seen too many wrecked and prematurely ended lives (1, 2) and plan to avoid those fates, for both myself and the group's members.
Here is a brief summary of this essay. Ever since life first appeared more than three billion years ago and about a billion years after the Sun and Earth formed, organisms have continually invented more effective methods to acquire, preserve, and use energy. Complex life appeared after three billion years of evolution and, pound-for-pound, it used energy 100,000 times as fast as the Sun produced it. The story of life on Earth has been one of evolutionary events impacted by geophysical and geochemical processes, and in turn influencing them. During the eon of complex life that began more than 500 million years ago, there have been many brief golden ages of relative energy abundance for some fortunate species, soon followed by increased energy competition, a relatively stable struggle for energy, and mass extinction events cleared biomes for another golden age by organisms adapted to the new environments. That pattern has characterized the journey of complex life over the past several hundred million years. Intelligence began increasing among some animals, which provided them with a competitive advantage.
About 2.6 million years ago, when our current ice age began, our ancestors learned how to make stone tools, which was soon followed by the control of fire, and the human journey's First Epochal Event(s?) transpired. The human evolutionary line's brain then grew dramatically. About two million years later, the human line evolved to the point where behaviorally modern humans appeared, left Africa, and conquered all inhabitable continents. Their expansion was fueled by driving most of Earth's large animals to extinction. That Second Epochal Event was also the beginning of the Sixth Mass Extinction. After all the easy meat was extinct and the brief Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer ended, population pressures led to the Third Epochal Event: domesticating plants and animals. That event led to civilization, and many features of the human journey often argued to be human nature, such as slavery and the subjugation of women, were merely artifacts of the energy regime and societal structure of agriculturally based civilizations. Early civilizations were never stable; their energy practices were largely based on deforestation and agriculture, usually on the deforested soils, and such civilizations primarily collapsed due to their unsustainable energy production methods.
As the Old World's civilizations continually rose and fell, Europe's peoples rediscovered ancient teachings that contained the first stirrings of a scientific approach. Europeans used energy technologies from that ancient period, borrowed novel energy practices from other Old World civilizations, and achieved the technological feat of turning the world's oceans into a low-energy transportation lane. Europeans thereby began conquering the world. During that conquest, one imperial contender turned to fossil fuels after their woodlands were depleted by early industrialization. England soon industrialized by using coal and initiated humanity's Fourth Epochal Event. England quickly became Earth's dominant imperial power. As Europeans conquered Earth, elites, who first appeared with the first civilizations, could begin thinking in global terms for the first time, and a global power structure began developing. As we learned the hard way, that power structure is very real, but almost nobody on Earth has a balanced and mature perspective regarding it, as people either deny its existence or obsess about it, seeing it as the root of our problems, when it is really only a side-effect of humanity's current stage of political-economic evolution, which has always been based on its level of energy usage.
Today, industrialized humanity is almost wholly dependent on the energy provided by hydrocarbon fuels that were created by geological processes operating on the remains of organisms, and humanity is mining and burning those hydrocarbon deposits about a million times as fast as they were created. We are reaching peak extraction rates but, more importantly, we have already discovered all of the easily acquired hydrocarbons. We are currently seeking and mining Earth's remaining hydrocarbon deposits, which are of poor energetic quality. It is merely the latest instance of humanity's depleting its energy resources, in which the dregs were mined after the easily acquired energy was consumed. The megafauna extinctions created the energy crisis that led to domestication and civilization, and the energy crisis of early industrialization led to using hydrocarbon energy, and the energy crisis of 1973-1974 attracted my fellow travelers and me to alternative energy. However, far more often over the course of the human journey, depleting energy resources led to population collapses and even local extinctions of humans in remote locations. Expanding and collapsing populations have characterized rising and falling polities during the past several thousand years, ever since the first civilizations appeared.
Today, humanity dominates Earth and is not only depleting its primary energy resources at prodigious rates, but it is also driving species to extinction at a rate that rivals the greatest mass extinctions in Earth's history. Humans may cause Earth's greatest mass extinction, which may take humanity with it. Today, humanity stands on the brink of the abyss, and almost nobody seems to know or care. Humanity is a tunnel-visioned, egocentric species, with almost all people only concerned about their immediate self-interest and oblivious of what lies ahead. Not all humans are so blind, and biologists and climate scientists, among others intimately familiar with the impacts of global civilization, are terrified by what humanity is inflicting onto Earth. Also, those who realize that we are quickly coming to the Hydrocarbon Age's end are beating the drums of doom, and I cannot blame them. We are in a "race of the catastrophes" scenario, with several manmade trends threatening our future existence.
Even the ultra-elites who run Earth from the shadows readily see how their game of chicken with Earth may turn out. Their more extreme members advocate terraforming Mars as their ultimate survival enclave if their games of power and control make Earth uninhabitable. But the saner members, who apparently are now a majority of that global cabal, favor the dissemination of those sequestered technologies. I am nearly certain that members of that disenchanted faction are those who gave my close friend an underground technology demonstration and who would quietly cheer our efforts when I worked with my former partner. They may also be subtly supporting my current efforts, of which this essay comprises a key component, but I have not heard from them and am not counting on them to save the day or help my efforts garner success. It is time for humanity to reach the level of collective sentience and integrity required to manifest humanity's Fifth Epochal Event, which will initiate the Free Energy Epoch. Humanity can then live, for the first time, in an epoch of true and sustainable abundance. It could also halt the Sixth Mass Extinction and humanity could turn Earth into something resembling heaven. With the Fifth Epochal Event, humanity will become a space-faring species, and a future will beckon that nobody on Earth today can truly imagine, just as nobody on Earth could predict how the previous Epochal Events transformed the human journey (1, 2, 3, 4).
Also, each Epochal Event was initiated by a small group of people, perhaps even by one person for the earliest events, and even the Industrial Revolution and its attendant Scientific Revolution had few fathers. However, I came to realize that there is probably nobody else on Earth like my former partner, and even Indiana Jones cannot save the world by himself. With the strategy that I finally developed, I do not look for heroes because I know that there are not enough currently walking Earth. I am attempting something far more modest. The greatest triumph of the ultra-elites running Earth today is making free energy technology and the resulting epoch of abundance unimaginable, and all of today's dominant ideologies assume scarcity in the foundation of their frameworks, which is largely why my former partner and my astronaut colleague were voices in the wilderness and like ducks in a shooting gallery that did not know where the next shot would come from. The most damaging shots were usually fired by their "allies," right into their backs, which nobody could have convinced me of in 1985. But after watching similar scenarios play out dozens of times, I finally had to admit the obvious, and my partner admitted it to me in 2013.
I noticed several crippling weaknesses in all alternative energy efforts that I was involved with or witnessed. Most importantly, when my partner mounted his efforts, people participated primarily to serve their self-interest. While the pursuit of mutual self-interest is the very definition of politics, self-interested people were easily defeated by organized suppression, although the efforts usually self-destructed before suppression efforts became intense. Another deficiency in all mass free energy efforts was that most participants were scientifically illiterate and did not see much beyond the possibility of reducing their energy bills or becoming rich and famous. Once the effort was destroyed (and they always are, if they have any promise), the participants left the alternative energy field. Also, many lives were wrecked as each effort was defeated, so almost nobody was able or willing to try again. Every time that my partner rebuilt his efforts, it was primarily with new people; few individuals lasted for more than one attempt.
I realize that almost nobody on Earth today can pass the integrity tests that my fellow travelers were subjected to, and I do not ask that of anybody whom I will attempt to recruit into my upcoming effort. It will be a non-heroic approach, of "merely" achieving enough heart-centered sentience and awareness to where a world of free energy and abundance is only imagined by a sizeable group who will not stay quiet about it, but who will also not be proselytizing. If they can truly understand this essay's message, they will probably not know anybody else in their daily lives that can.
Those recruits will simply be singing a song of practical abundance that will attract those who have been listening for that song for their entire lives. Once enough people know the song by heart and can sing it, and have attracted a large enough audience that can approach the free energy issue in a way that risks nobody's life and will not be easy for the provocateurs and the effort's "allies" to wreck, then it will be time to take action, but in a way never tried before.
That is my plan, and this essay is intended to form the foundation of my efforts to educate and amass the "choir" that will sing the abundance song. I am looking for singers, not soldiers, and the choir will primarily sing here. My approach takes the lamb's path, not the warrior's. That "choir" may only help a little, it may help a lot, but it will not harm anybody. This effort could be called trying the enlightenment path to free energy, an abundance-based global political economy, and a healed humanity and planet. I believe that the key is approaching the issue as creators instead of victims; from a place of love instead of fear. Those goals may seem grandiose to the uninitiated, and people in this field regularly succumb to a messiah complex and harbor other delusions of grandeur, but I also know that they are attainable if only a tiny fraction of humanity can help initiate that Fifth Epochal Event, just like the previous Epochal Events. This essay is designed to begin the training process. Learning this material will be a formidable undertaking. This material is not designed for those looking for quick and easy answers, but is intended to help my readers attain the levels of understanding that I think are necessary for assisting with this epochal undertaking.
This Essay's Tables and Timelines
In order to make this essay easier to understand, I created some tables and timelines, and they are:
Timeline of Significant Energy Events in Earth's and Life's History
Abbreviated Geologic Time Scale
Timeline of Earth's Major Ice Ages
Timeline of Earth's Major and Minor Mass Extinction Events
Early Earth Timeline before the Eon of Complex Life
Timeline of Key Biological Innovations in the Eon of Complex Life
Timeline of Humanity's Evolutionary Heritage
Human Event Timeline Until Europe Began Conquering Humanity
Human Event Timeline Since Europe Began Conquering Humanity
Table of Humanity's Epochs
Energy and the Industrialized World
There are greater contrasts in humanity's collective standard of living than ever before. As of 2014, Bill Gates topped the list of the world's richest people for nearly all years of the previous twenty. In 2000, his net worth was about $100 billion, or about the same as the collective wealth of the poorest hundred million Americans or the poorest half of humanity. Although Gates and other high-technology billionaires can live surprisingly egalitarian lifestyles, for one person to possess the same level of wealth as billions of people collectively is a recent phenomenon. In 2014, about 30 thousand children died each day because of their impoverished conditions.
Ever since I was thrust into an urban hell soon after graduating from college, I became a student of wealth, poverty, and humanity's problems. My teenage dreams of changing humanity's energy paradigm have had a lifelong impact. It took me many years to gain a comprehensive understanding of how energy literally runs the world and always has. A good demonstration of that fact is to consider the average day of an average American professional, who is a member of history's most privileged large demographic group and lives in Earth's most industrialized nation. A typical day in my life during the winter before I wrote this essay can serve as an example.
When I worked twelve-hour days and longer during that winter, which was the busiest time of my year, I often fasted and needed less sleep, so I often awoke before 5:00 A.M. In 2014 as I write this, I live in a fairly large house. When I fast, my body generates less heat, so I feel cold rather easily; I wear thermal underwear under my work attire and have other strategies for staying warm, especially in the winter. I programmed our furnace to begin operation soon before I awakened, so that my day started in a warm environment. I also have a space heater in my home office, so that the rest of the house can stay cold while I work in warmth.
That winter, my first tasks when arising were turning on my computer and drinking a glass of orange juice, which raised my blood sugar. After some hours of reading about world events, answering emails, and working on my writings, I took a hot shower, dressed, and walked to a bus stop. I read a book while awaiting the bus that took me to downtown Bellevue, where I worked in a high-rise office building for an Internet company.
When I arrived at my office, I turned on my lights and computer. When I was eating, I put the food that I brought to work in a refrigerator under my desk. During my work day, I interacted with many people in my air-conditioned, high-technology office environment. My cellular telephone was never far away. The view from my office window of the Cascade Mountains was pleasant. My computer interfaced with our distant data centers and the world at large via the Internet. When my workday was finished, I rode the bus home. In the winter, the furnace is programmed to stop functioning when my wife and I leave for work, and comes on soon before we arrive home, so we never experienced a cold house. In the evening, we might watch a movie on a DVD on our wide-screen plasma TV. When I am not fasting, I usually eat dinner, with the food in my refrigerator usually purchased at a cooperative grocery store that has an enormous produce section, with food grown locally and imported from as far away as New Zealand, China, and Israel.[1] We have a high-tech kitchen, with a "smart" stove, refrigerator, and other appliances.
When I resumed my career in 2003, I became an early riser and consequently went to bed by 9:00 PM on most nights, and often read fantasy literature before I turned out the lights and snuggled into bed (with two comforters in the winter to keep us warm as we sleep).
That was a typical winter's day in early 2013. During that day, around 80 times the calories that fueled my body were burned to support my activities. Those dying children often succumbed to hunger and diseases of poverty, and the daily energy that supported their lives was less than 1% of what I enjoyed that day. How did energy serve my daily activities? How did that disparity between the dying children and me come to be? This essay will address those questions.
The Toolset of Mainstream Science
Humanity is Earth's leading tool-using species, and our tools made us. Twigs, sticks, bones, and other organic materials were undoubtedly used as tools by our protohuman ancestors, but the only tools to survive for millions of years to be studied today are made of stone; the oldest discovered so far are about 2.6-2.5 million years old.[2] Humanity's tools have become increasingly sophisticated since then. The Industrial Revolution was accompanied by the Scientific Revolution, and the synergy between scientific and technological advances has been essential and impressive, even leaving aside the many technologies and related theories that have been developed and sequestered in the above-top-secret world.
The history of science is deeply entwined with the state of technology. Improving technology allowed for increasingly sophisticated experiments, and advances in science spurred technological innovation. While many scientific practices and outcomes have been evil, such as vivisection and nuclear weapons, many others have not been destructive to humans or other organisms. The 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century saw great leaps in technological and scientific advancement. My grandfather lived in a sod hut as a child, his son helped send men to the moon, and his grandson pursued world-changing energy technologies and still does. Relativity and quantum theory ended the era of classical physics and, with their increasingly sophisticated toolset, scientists began to investigate phenomena at the galactic and subatomic scales. Space-based telescopes, electron microscopes, mass spectrometers, atomic clocks, supercolliders, computers, robots that land on distant moons and planets, and other tools allowed for explorations and experiments that were not possible in earlier times.
Intense organized suppression has existed where scientific and technological advances can threaten economic empires, but many areas of science are not seen as threatening, and reconstructing Earth's distant past and the journey of life on Earth is one of those nonthreatening areas. I have never heard of a classified fossil site or a Precambrian specialist being threatened or bought out in order to keep him/her silent. There is more controversy with human remains and artifacts, but I am skeptical of popular works that argue for technologically advanced ancient civilizations and related notions. Something closer to "pure science" can be practiced regarding those ancient events without the threat of repercussions or the enticements of riches and Nobel Prizes. Much of this essay's subject matter deals with areas where the distortions of political-economic racketeering have been muted, and the theory and tools have been relatively unrestricted.
Mass spectrometers assess the mass of atoms and molecules, and have become increasingly refined since they were first invented in the 19[SUP]th[/SUP] century. Today, samples that can only be seen with microscopes can be tested, and measured down to a billionth of a gram.[3] Elements have different numbers of protons and neutrons in the nuclei of their atoms, and each nuclear variation of an element is called an isotope. Unstable isotopes decay into smaller elements (also called "daughter isotopes"). Scientific investigations have determined that radioactive decay rates are quite stable and are primarily governed by the dynamics in a decaying atom. The dates determined by radioactive dating have been correlated to other observed processes, with the data becoming increasingly robust over the years.[4]
The ability to weigh various isotopes, at increasing levels of precision, with mass spectrometers has provided a gold mine of data. Scientists are continually inventing new methods and ways to use them, new questions are asked and answered, and some examples of methods and findings follow.
Carbon has two primary stable isotopes: carbon-12 and carbon-13. Carbon-14 is the famous unstable isotope used for dating recently deceased life forms, but testing carbon's stable isotopes has yielded invaluable information. Carbon is the backbone of all of life's structures, and life processes often have a preference for using carbon-12, which is lighter than carbon-13 and hence take less energy to manipulate. Scientists have been able to test rocks in which the "fossils" are nothing more than smears, and determine that those smears were the result of life processes, as there is more carbon-12 in the smear than carbon-13 than would be the case if life was not involved.[5] This has also helped date the earliest life forms. Life's preference for lighter isotopes is evident for other key elements such as sulfur and nitrogen, and scientists regularly make use of that preference in their investigations.[6]
The hydrological cycle circulates water through Earth's oceans, atmosphere, and land. The energy of sunlight drives it, and that sunlight is primarily captured at the surface of water bodies, and the oceans in particular. The hydrological cycle's patterns have changed over the eons as Earth's surface has changed its continental configurations and temperature. Today's global weather system generally begins with sunlight hitting the atmosphere, with the equator's air receiving the most direct radiation and becoming warmest. That air rises and cools, which reduces the water vapor that it can hold, so it falls as rain. That is why tropical rainforests are near the equator. The rising equatorial air creates high-pressure dry air that pushes toward the poles, and at about 30[SUP]o [/SUP]latitude that air cools and sinks to the ground. That dry air not only does not bring precipitation, it absorbs moisture from the land it hits and forms the world's great deserts. That high pressure at the ground at 30[SUP]o [/SUP]latitude pushes air back toward the tropics, and Earth's rotation creates a distinctive bend in the northern and southern hemispheres that create trade winds that pick up moisture as they approach the equator. The pole-ward sides of the mid-latitudes' dry temperate regions also have low pressures and wet climates, and dry high-pressure zones exist at the poles. As clouds pass over land, mountains force them upward and they lose their moisture in precipitation.[7] As that water makes its way back to the oceans to start the cycle again, it provides the freshwater for all land-based ecosystems. Below is a diagram of those dynamics. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
A water molecule containing oxygen-16 (the most common oxygen isotope) will be lighter than a water molecule containing oxygen-18 (both are stable isotopes), so it takes less energy to liberate an oxygen-16 water molecule than an oxygen-18 water molecule. Also, after evaporation, oxygen-18 water will tend to fall back to Earth more quickly than oxygen-16 water will, because it is heavier. As a consequence, air over Earth's poles will be enriched in oxygen-16 the colder Earth's surface temperature, the less oxygen-18 will evaporate and be carried to the poles and scientists have used this enrichment to reconstruct a record of ocean temperatures. Also, the oxygen-isotope ratio in fossil shellfish (as their life processes prefer the lighter oxygen isotope) has been used to help determine ancient temperatures. During an ice age, because proportionally more oxygen-16 is retained in ice sheets and does not flow back to the oceans, the ocean's surface becomes enriched in oxygen-18 and that difference can be discerned in fossil shells. Sediments are usually laid down in annual layers, and in some places, such as the Cariaco Basin off the coast of Venezuela, undisturbed sediments have been retrieved and analyzed, which has helped determine when ice sheets advanced and retreated during the present ice age.[8]
Mass spectrometers have been invaluable for assigning dates to various rocks and sedimentary layers, as radioactive isotopes and their daughter isotopes are tested, including uranium-lead, potassium-argon, carbon-14, and many other tests.[9] Also, the ratios of elements in a sample can be determined, which can tell where it originated. Many hypotheses and theories have arisen, fallen, and been called into question or modified with the data derived from those increasingly sophisticated methods, and a few examples should suffice to give an idea of what is being discovered.
The moon rocks retrieved by Apollo astronauts are still being tested, as new experiments and hypotheses are devised. In 2012, a study was published which resulted from testing moon rocks for the titanium-50 and titanium-47 ratios (both are stable isotopes), and it has brought into question the hypothesis that the Moon was formed by a planetary collision more than four billion years ago. The titanium ratio was so much like Earth's that a collision with Earth forming the Moon has been questioned (as very little of the hypothesized colliding body became part of the Moon). The collision hypothesis will probably survive, but it may be significantly different from today's hypothesis. Meteorites have been dated, as well as moon rocks, and their ages confirm Earth's age that geologists have derived, and meteorite dates provide more evidence that the solar system probably developed from an accretion disk.
In the Western Hemisphere, the Anasazi and Mayan civilization collapses of around a thousand years ago, or the Mississippian civilization collapse of 500 years ago, have elicited a great deal of investigation. From New Age ideas that the Anasazi and Mayan peoples "ascended" to the Eurocentric conceit that the Mississippian culture was European in origin, many speculations arose that have been disproven by the evidence. It is now known that the Anasazi and Mayan culture collapses were influenced by epic droughts, but that was only the proximate cause. The ultimate cause was that those civilizations were not energetically sustainable. The Anasazi used logs to build their dwellings that today are famous ruins, and scientists have used strontium ratios in the wood to determine where they came from, as well as date the wood using tree-ring analysis and analyzing pack rat middens, and a sobering picture emerged. The region was already arid, but agriculture and deforestation desertified the region around Chaco Canyon, which was the heart of Anasazi civilization. When Anasazi civilization collapsed, at Chaco Canyon they were hauling in timber from mountains more than 70 kilometers away (the strontium ratios could trace each log from the particular mountain that it came from). When the epic droughts delivered their final blows, Anasazi civilization collapsed into a morass of starvation, warfare, and cannibalism, and the forest has yet to begin to recover, nearly a thousand years later.[10]
Another major advance happened in the late 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century: the ability to analyze DNA. DNA's double-helical structure was discovered in 1953. In 1973, the first amino acid sequence for a gene was determined. In 2003, the entire human genome was sequenced. Sequencing the chimpanzee genome was accomplished in 2005, for orangutans in 2011, and for gorillas in 2012. The comparisons of human and great ape DNA have yielded many insights, but the science of DNA analysis is still young. What has yielded far more immediately relevant information has been studying human DNA. The genetic bases of many diseases have been identified. Hundreds of falsely convicted Americans have been released from prison, and nearly twenty from death row, due to DNA evidence's proving their innocence. Human DNA testing has provided startling new insights into the human past. For instance, in Europe it appears that after the ice sheets receded 16,000 to 13,000 years ago, humans repopulated Europe, and for all the bloody history of Europe over the millennia since then, there have not really been mass population replacements in Europe by invasion, migration, genocide, and the like. Europeans just endlessly fought each other and honed the talents that would help them conquer humanity. There were some migrations of Fertile Crescent agriculturalists into Europe, but mostly the "indigenous" populations adopted the energetically superior practices of the agriculturalists and did not migrate, nor were they displaced. DNA testing has demonstrated that all of today's humans are descended from a founder population of about five thousand people, of whom a few hundred left Africa around 60-50 thousand years ago and conquered Earth. The Neanderthal genome has been sequenced, as well as genomes of other extinct species, and for a brief, exuberant moment, some scientists thought that they could recover dinosaur DNA, Jurassic-Park-style. Although dinosaur DNA is unrecoverable, organic dinosaur remains have been recovered, and even some proteins have been sequenced, which probably no scientist believed possible in the 1980s.[11]
Since 1992, scientists have been discovering planets in other star systems by using a variety of methods that reflect the improving toolset that scientists can use, especially space-based telescopes. Before those discoveries, there was controversy whether planets were rare phenomena, but scientists now admit that planets are typical members of star systems. Extraterrestrial civilizations are probably visiting Earth, so planets hosting intelligent life may not be all that rare.
Those interrelated and often mutually reinforcing lines of evidence have made many scientific findings difficult to deny. The ever-advancing scientific toolset, and the ingenuity of scientists developing and using them, and particularly the multidisciplinary approach that scientists and scholars are increasingly using, have been making for radical changes in how we view the past. Those radical changes will not end any time soon, and what follows will certainly be modified by new discoveries and interpretations, but I have tried to stay largely within the prevailing findings, hypotheses, and theories, while also poking into the fringes and leading edges somewhat. Any mistakes in fact or interpretation in what follows are mine.
The Orthodox Framework and its Limitations
Chapter summary:
- Early views in the West
- The scientific ideal
- Suffering of scientific pioneers at the hands of their peers
- [url=http://www.ahealedplanet.net/humanity.h
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.