WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I gave Mr. Texas’s name in a previous post:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post585787

and I wrote about how he went to prison for a scam where his cronies alleged that they were trustees of a trillion dollar Mormon trust.

http://www.justice.gov/tax/usaopress...27-Kempton.pdf

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/9...am.html?pg=all

http://www.offshorealert.com/forums....age=-1&t=36457

Mr. Texas tried to have his sentence vacated:

http://dockets.justia.com/docket/cir.../ca9/11-56233/

but was denied:

http://www.supremecourt.gov/docketfiles/12-8910.htm

He lives here, at what used to be the most famous Club Fed facility:

http://www.myinmatelocator.com/Feder...s_Complex.html

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/31/us...t-inmates.html

Mr. Texas will get out in 2016 (inmate number 87634-198), according to this:

http://www.bop.gov/iloc2/InmateFinde...Age=&x=72&y=18

when he will be 77 years old, probably too old to get into too much trouble.

The trillion dollar trust was a popular scam for several years, and that sting operation that targeted us in 1996-1997:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/other.htm#sting

had an alleged trillion dollar trust as part of its bait. Again, in operations like that, you don’t seek money from them, but they approach you, offering you huge sums of money to make your dreams come true. I have never seen or heard of a true rich humanitarian. The “humanitarian” game is largely a scam, and as we saw, being approached by “humanitarians” was a big part of the sting operations to entrap people like us. If you ever get involved with true Earth-healing activities such as the FE pursuit, be very wary if you are approached by people offering money to help, as strange as that may seem.

After years of dealing with “humanitarians,” James Gilliland:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/ufo.htm

told the riddle, “If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?”

Dennis said something similar, in that the Big Boys serve humanity all right, by the plateful each night.

This is also an example of when Godzilla uses his agents, they are eventually left to fend for themselves, and the skills they used in attacking Dennis were evident in their later scams. Bill the BPA Hit Man:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/hitman.htm

had a similar “career” after helping take out Dennis in Seattle, and Bill spent years before being sicced on Dennis developing fake alternative energy credentials, similar to how Oswald spent years developing fake communist credentials:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/cover-up.htm#tower

This MO is a common enough one. My relative who was a contract CIA agent:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#cia

was a “good boy” who probably went to his grave believing in his mission, although he drank himself to death, surely to help relieve the cognitive dissonance of murdering his own people and others, for the “cause.” He was furloughed, too, barely scraping by between missions, and dying alone and nearly destitute. The contract agents who work for Godzilla, the CIA, and so forth, are disposable assets, and their immediate afterlives are not pretty.

Again, it is cheaper if the asset believes in the mission, as he gets psychic income from the deal to supplement the cash. Using true psychopaths can be very effective for the right missions, but they are only there for the money, and their "psychic income" is gained from inflicting misery and pain on others. They will gladly turn on their employers if the opportunity presents itself and there is profit to be had. So, while psychopaths (AKA dark pathers) have their uses, they are dangerous tools to use.

Best,

Wade

[Earlybird]

Hi Wade;I am a long time lurker on this thread.I have not posted before as i am attempting to assimilate the information shared.Thank you sincerely for your site and ongoing effort ;it is easily the most rewarding,challenging,demanding and simultaneously refreshing material i have encountered .Sometimes the more i read ,the further down the 'levels' i realize my thinking is :-) What a stretch!
Apologies if this has been asked/answered before, but where will your upcoming essay be published? or rather,will it be 'read-only' for the prospective Choir?
Thanks again for your efforts
Percy Tuschling

[Wade Frazier]

Hi earlybird:

A lot of my writing is especially for the lurkers. You might be surprised at who some of the lurkers are. I hear from them once in a while, usually privately. And yes, Godzilla is watching, but I am not sure what the interest level is. Probably not a lot, but I gave him some interesting days at the office, and he has not forgotten about me.

Boy, it sure would not do much good if I privately published my essay. It will be my biggest public statement ever, and for better or worse, what I may become best known for. Heck, I am putting chapter drafts on this thread, so I am certainly not playing the private game. That essay will actually be my recruiting tool for the choir. I am going to put my mark on the wall, or sing a note, if you will, and whoever can sing similarly is what I will be looking for. It is about hitting the notes, not about the numbers singing or high decibels. When enough can hit the notes and sing in harmony, then we will be getting somewhere.

Privacy and secrecy is antithetical to what I plan to do. This will all be done in broad daylight, in the town square. I will not be trying to recruit the masses at all, but the information will be available to them. The choir will likely come from all walks, not any one particular group, as Dennis, Brian, and I learned after beating on group doors endlessly. I am finished with that strategy; all earthly groups are addicted to scarcity, and I have never seen even one that truly comprehended the idea of abundance.

The essay is designed to be standalone, so it could reside in numerous places on the Internet, but it will likely become the centerpiece of my own site. Again, it is costing me a million dollars or so to write it, so I hope to get “bang for my buck,” so to speak. After I publish it (likely this coming spring), I will probably do some interviews and the like, but I don’t plan to do too much of that. The essay will do most of the talking, and will get my message across about the best I can. Then it will be up to others to do the work. I am meeting everybody far more than halfway, but I can’t do it all myself. Heroes and warriors can’t get it done, which I learned from my journey with Dennis:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#howmany

But a stampede of sentient lambs might make a dent.

Thanks for reading and thinking about this stuff. The more who do the deep thinking, the better off we all are.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

As an FYI, when I thought about this essay over the years, and had a false start or two in beginning it, I wondered how long it would be. I suspected that it would weigh in at hundreds of pages, like my other big essays on my site (American Empire http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm , Medical Racket http://www.ahealedplanet.net/medicine.htm , etc.), but on some days, I thought that I could say it in fifty pages. Well, my initial thought is going to be the right one. It might even be bigger than my American Empire essay, which is my site’s largest, at more than two hundred pages.

I spent nearly a year outlining the essay’s themes:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post516792

and I initially though that I would refer to my outline when I wrote the essay, but it has not worked out that way so far. I am currently writing about the Permian extinction, and am more than a hundred pages into it. This baby will likely top 200 pages when it is finished, not including the notes (250 notes, so far, but not terribly scholarly – I am not writing it for scientists, not really, although plenty will read it). It is going to be very dense, like a textbook. There will be plenty of meat on those bones, and I am writing it so that the non-scientist will not be lost, but that does not mean that it will be easy reading. I will be introducing many scientific concepts and information, and what I hope will be most important stuff will be my original contributions, of which there will be many. Nobody has really dealt with FE on the epochal event scale, not how each began and how each influenced the epoch built on it, and particularly weaving in what the potential of FE is. Many have addressed aspects of it, but nobody went after the whole enchilada yet that I have seen. That is one reason why what I am doing is unique, especially somebody from the FE field. People like Dennis are too busy playing Indiana Jones to do any study or writing, and if FE aspirants never played the Indiana Jones game, they almost never had the radicalization necessary to really see what was happening, on several levels.

Again, my unique journey led me to this juncture, and I did not see anybody else trying what I am about to, or even really qualified to, so I have to do this. Will it cost me my life, as this field has cost so many others? Beats me, but I plan to stay away from the pitfalls that have swallowed so many others. In ways, this has already cost me my life. My fellow travelers always kept going until their dying breaths, and it will likely be that way for me.

I will do my best to keep people away from the Pied Pipers who will inevitably appear, and that is also another reason why I am not reaching for the masses. The masses have formed a semi-sentient herd that is easily stampeded this way and that by the social managers. I am not trying to out-herd the master shepherd, but looking for those who left the herd, at least in their minds, or are looking to.

The song of scarcity is all that humanity has ever known, and every day I have to be vigilant that I am not humming its tune. And if I have to do that, more than twenty-five years after I was radicalized, I have an idea how hard it will be for aspirants for the choir. But I see people like Ilie doing the work, and it gives me hope that the choir is not some Peter Pan fantasy. This is uncharted territory, and there is no telling how it will turn out, but I had to try.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am about to spend the rest of the day playing, and I’ll put up a couple of chapter drafts. For those interested, here is a revised draft of one chapter that I previously posted, and the next post will be a chapter draft that I just finished a few minutes ago. For those who are interested, they will be able to see how the chapter drafts will change on the way to the published essay.

Best,

Wade

Complex Life Colonizes Land

With the extinction that ended the Cambrian period, animal life’s greatest period of innovation was finished, but the next geological period, the Ordovician, still had dramatic changes. The Ordovician would not see any new phyla of note, but the Ordovician was a time of great diversification, as new niches were created and inhabited, which reached modern levels of abundance and diversity. Food chains became complex, and could be called food webs. More so than the Cambrian Explosion, the Ordovician “explosion” was an adaptive radiation.

The continental configuration when the Ordovician began was similar to the Cambrian’s, with shallow hot tropical seas. The Paleo-Tethys Ocean began forming in the Ordovician. The first reefs that would impress modern observers were formed in the Ordovician, with different animals building the corals (1, 2, 3) than Cambrian reef builders; but there were no schools of fish swimming around them, as the Ordovician was before the rise of fish. Fish existed (1, 2, 3), but they were armored, without jaws, and lived on the seafloor. The first sharks may have appeared in the Ordovician, but because they have cartilaginous skeletons, the fossil record is equivocal. Some fish had scales, and an eel-like fish might have even had the first teeth. Planktonic animals became prevalent, which were key aspects of the growing food chains. Trilobites and brachiopods thrived, but the Ordovician’s most spectacular development might have been the rise of the mollusk. Bivalves exploded in number and variety, and nautiloid cephalopods became the apex predator of Ordovician seas, and some were gigantic, with one species reaching more than three meters long, and another reaching six meters or more. The largest trilobite yet found lived in the late Ordovician.

Gigantism is a controversial subject. Islands often produce giant and dwarf species, and result from energy dynamics; in general, on islands, large species tend to get smaller and small species tend to get larger. A landmark study of polar gigantism among modern seafloor crustaceans concluded that the oxygen level was the key variable. Recall that colder water can absorb more oxygen. Size is a key “weapon” used in evolution’s arms race. The bigger the prey, the better it could survive predation, and the bigger the predator, the more likely it would kill a meal. Since the 1930s, there have been continual controversies over size and metabolism, energy efficiency, complexity, structural issues such as skeleton size and strength, and so on. In its final cost/benefit analysis, complex life decided that bigger was better, and the Ordovician saw much larger animals than the Cambrian did. Bigger meant more complex, and more complexity meant more parts, usually more moving parts, and that took energy to run. Whether increasing size was due to more oxygen being available, more food availability, greater metabolic efficiency, reduced risk of predation, or increased predatory success, it was always a cost/benefit analyses whose primary parameter was energy; how to get it, how to preserve it, and how to use it.

Peter Ward has suggested that the superior breathing system of nautiloids led to their dominance. Nautiloids do not appear in the fossil record until the Cambrian’s end. Only one family of nautiloids survived the end-Cambrian extinction, and they quickly diversified in the Ordovician to become dominant predators, replacing arthropods atop the food chain. During the Ordovician, nautiloids developed a sturdy build and they likely began spending time in deep waters, where their superior respiration system enabled them to inhabit environments that would-be competitors could not exploit.

While the Ordovician’s shallow seas were fascinating abodes of biological innovation, of perhaps more interest to humans was the first colonization of our future home: land. Land plants likely evolved from green algae, and while molecular clock studies suggest that plants first appeared on land more than 600 mya, the first fossil evidence of land plants is about 470 mya, in the mid-Ordovician, which would have been moss-like plants, and they seem to have predated land animals by forty million years or so.

The Ordovician was characterized by diversification into new niches, even creating them, but those halcyonic times came to a harsh end in one of the Big Five mass extinctions: the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction. The event transpired about 443 mya, and was really two extinction events that combined to comprise the second greatest extinction event ever for marine animals. Around 85% of all species, nearly 60% of all genera, and about 25% of all families went extinct. The ultimate cause was likely the drifting of Gondwana over the South Pole, triggering a short, severe ice age. As our current ice age demonstrates, ice sheets can advance and retreat in cycles, and they appeared to do so during the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction. There is evidence that the ice age was triggered by the volcanic event that created the Appalachian Mountains. Newly exposed rock from volcanic mountain-building is a carbon sink due to basalt weathering (as contrasted with silicate weathering – volcanoes spew basalt) of that fresh volcanic rock. The combination of Appalachian volcanism ending and subsequent sequestering of atmospheric carbon dioxide may have triggered an ice age. The ice age waxed and waned for thirty million years, but the first event was calamitous.

Two primary dynamics drove the first phase of the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction: the ice age caused the sea level to drop drastically and the oceans to become colder. When sea levels fell at least fifty meters, the cooling shallow seas receded from continental shelves and eliminated entire biomes. Many millions of years of “easy living” in warm, shallow seas were abruptly halted. Several groups were ravaged, beginning with the plankton that formed the food chain’s base. About 50% of brachiopod and trilobite genera went extinct in the first phase, with cool-water species appearing to fill the newly vacant niches. Bivalves were largely found in seashore communities, and were scourged when the seas retreated, losing more than half of their genera. Nautiloids were also hit hard, and about 70% of reef and coral genera went extinct. The retreating seas somehow triggered the extinctions, and whether it was due to simply being exposed to the air, or changing and cooing currents, nutrient dispersal patterns, ocean chemistry, and other dynamics did it, is still debated, and those extinction events are currently subject to intensive research.

After as little as a half-million years of bedraggled survivors adapting to ice age seas, the ice sheets retreated and the oceans rose. The thermohaline circulation of the time also likely changed, and upwelling, anoxia, and other dramatic chemistry and nutrient changes happened. Those dynamics are suspected as being responsible for the second wave of extinctions. There also seem to have been hydrogen sulfide events. Atmospheric oxygen levels may have fallen from around 20% to 15% during the Ordovician, which would have contributed to the mass death. Seafloor anoxia seems to have been particularly lethal to continental-shelf biomes, possibly all the way to shore. While it took the ecosystems millions of years to recover from the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction, basic ecosystem functioning was not significantly altered in the aftermath, which is why a mass extinction during the Carboniferous has been proposed as a more significant extinction event.

The Silurian period, which began 443 mya, is short for the geologic time scale, lasting “only” 24 million years, ending about 419 mya. The Silurian was another hot period with shallow tropical seas, with Gondwana still covering the South Pole, but the ice caps eventually shrank, which played havoc with the sea level and caused minor extinction events (1, 2, 3), the last of which ended the Silurian. Reefs made a big comeback, extending as far as fifty degrees north latitude (further north than where I live in Seattle). According to the GEOCARBSULF model, oxygen levels rose greatly during the Silurian, rebounding from a low in the mid-Ordovician, and may have reached 25% by the early Devonian, which followed the Silurian. Coincident with rising oxygen levels, more giants appeared. The scorpion-like eurypterids were the largest arthropods ever, with its biggest specimen reaching nearly three meters near the Devonian’s oxygen highpoint. The first land-dwelling animals - spiders, centipedes, and scorpions - came ashore in the Silurian between 430 mya and 420 mya, and the first insects appeared about that time. Arthropods became dominant predators once again, although cephalopods patrolled the reefs as apex predators. Brachiopods reached their greatest size ever at that time, although the succeeding Devonian has been called the Golden Age of Brachiopods. As oxygen levels rose, trilobites lost segments and, hence, gill surface area, which may have been an ultimately extinctive gamble. When the Devonian extinction happened during anoxic events, trilobites steeply declined and thereafter only eked out an existence until the Permian extinction finally eliminated them from the fossil record. Fish began developing jaws in the Silurian, which was a great evolutionary leap and arguably the most important innovation in vertebrate history. Jaws, tentacles, claws… prehensile features were advantageous, as animals could more effectively manipulate their environments and acquire energy. On land the colonization began, as mossy “forests” abounded, with the first vascular plants making their appearance, although they were generally less than a hand-width tall when the Silurian ended, with nothing reaching even waist-high in those times.

Oxygen levels appeared to keep rising into the early Devonian and then declined over most of the period, which lasted from about 419 mya to 359 mya. The Devonian marked the dramatic rise of land plants and fish, in what is called the Golden Age of Fishes, and that period saw the first vertebrates that enjoyed a terrestrial existence. Armored fish supplanted arthropods and cephalopods during the Devonian as the new apex predators, weighing up to several tons, and sharks began their rise. The Devonian has been called the Golden Age of Armored Fish. Rising oxygen levels have been proposed as causing the spread of plants and large predatory fish, and a school of thought challenges high-oxygen reasons for many evolutionary events, with Nick Butterfield a prominent challenger.

Bony fish (both ray-finned and lobe-finned) first appeared in the late Silurian and thrived in the Devonian. All bony fish could breathe air in the Devonian, which provided more oxygenated blood to their hearts. Ray-finned fish largely lost that ability and their lungs became swim bladders, which aided buoyancy, similar to gas-filled nautiloid shells. Ray-finned fish can respire while stationary (unlike cartilaginous fish, sharks most famously) and are the high-performance swimmers of aquatic environments, comprising about 99% of all fish species today, although they were not dominant during the Devonian. All fish devote a significant portion of their metabolism to maintain their water concentrations. In salt water, fish have to push out salt, and in fresh water, they have to pull in water, using, on average, about 5% of their resting metabolism to do so. Brine shrimp use about a third of their metabolic energy to manage their water concentration.

Today’s lungfish are living fossils that first appeared at the Devonian’s beginning, demonstrating that the ability to breathe air never went completely out of fashion, which was fortuitous, as one class of lobe-finned fish developed limbs and became our ancestor about 395 mya. The first amphibians appeared about 370 mya. In the late Devonian, lobe-finned and armored fish were in their heyday. The first internally-fertilized fish appeared in the Devonian, for the first mother that gave birth. A lightweight descendent of nautiloids appeared in the Devonian, and ammonoids subsequently enjoyed more than three hundred million years of existence, often playing a prominent role, until they were finally rendered extinct in the Cretaceous extinction. Nautiloids retreated to deep-water ecosystem margins and still exploit that niche today as a living fossil.

Land colonization was perhaps the Devonian’s most interesting event. The adaptations invented by aquatic life to survive in terrestrial environments were many and varied. Most importantly, the organism would no longer be surrounded by water and had to manage desiccation. Nutrient acquisition and reproductive practices would have to change, and the protection that water provided from ultraviolet light was gone, with plants and animals devising methods to protect from the Sun’s radiation. Also, moving on land and in the air became major bioengineering projects for animals. Breathing air instead of water presented challenges. The pioneers who left water likely led both aquatic and terrestrial existences. Amphibians had both lungs and gills, and arthropods, whose exoskeletons readily solved the desiccation and structural support problems, evolved book lungs to replace their gills, which were likely book gills.

All such developments had to happen in water, first, for a successful move to land. The evidence seems to support the idea that life first began to colonize land via freshwater ecosystems, which provided a friendlier environment than seashores do. The first arthropods ashore were largely detritivores, eating dead plant matter, and what followed added live plants and early detritivores to their diets. The land-based ecosystems that plants and arthropods created became nutrient sources that benefitted shoreline and surface communities, but the vertebrate move to land was not initiated by the winners of aquatic life. To successful aquatic animals, the shore was not a new opportunity to exploit but the frontier of existence. What are today called tetrapodomorphs made the vertebrate transition to land as marginal animals eking out a frontier existence. The fins that became limbs originally developed for better swimming, and further muscular-skeletal changes enabled them to exploit opportunities on land. Two key reasons for the migration onto land could have been for basking (absorbing energy) and enhanced survival of young from predation (preserving energy). The five digits common to limbed vertebrates were set in this time; early tetrapodomorphs had six, seven, and eight digits, with the digital losses likely related to using feet on land.

But plants had to migrate before animals did, as they formed the terrestrial food chain’s base. Along with desiccation issues, plants needed structures to raise them above the ground, roots, a circulatory system, and new means of reproduction. Large temperature swings between day and night also accompanied life on land. Plants developed cuticles to conserve moisture, a circulatory system that piped water from the roots up into the plant and transported nutrients where they were needed, and plant photosynthesis needed water to function. Vascular plants pumped water through their tissues in tubes by evaporating water from their surface tissues and pulling up more new water behind the evaporating water via the “chain” of water’s hydrogen bonds. The last common ancestor of plants and animals reproduced sexually, and sexual reproduction is how nearly all eukaryotes reproduce today, although many ways exist to reproduce asexually. The first vascular plants are considered to have attained their height in order to spread their spores. The Rhynie chert in Scotland is the most famous fossil bed that records complex life’s early colonization of land.

The early Devonian was a time of ground-hugging mosses and a strange, lichen-like plant that towered up to eight meters tall. The oldest vascular plant division (“division” in plants is analogous to “phylum” in animals) still existing first appeared about 410 mya, and today’s representatives are mostly mosses. In the late Devonian, horsetails and ferns appeared and still exist. Seed plants also developed in the Devonian, which enabled plants to quickly spread to higher and dryer elevations and cover the landmasses, as seed plants did not need a water medium to reproduce as spore-based systems did (in spore systems a water film was required for the sperm to swim to the ovum). The first trees appeared about 385 mya (1, 2), could be ten meters tall, and formed vast forests, but reproduced with spores, so needed moist environments. The first rainforests appeared in the Devonian and reached their apogee in the Carboniferous. Those rainforests produced Earth’s first thick coal beds. The Devonian was the Cambrian Explosion for plants, and enabled animals to colonize land. The plants that best succeeded in the Devonian were those with the highest energy efficiencies, which involved size, stability, photosynthesis, internal transport, and reproduction. Plants had different dynamics of extinction than animals did, with plants being more vulnerable to climate change and extinction via competition, but being less vulnerable to mass extinction events than animals.

One of the most important plant innovations was lignin, which is a polymer whose original purpose appears to have been creating those tubes for water transport, and was also used to help provide structural support so that trees could grow tall and strong. Without lignin, there would not have been any true forests and probably not much in the way of complex terrestrial ecosystems. That lignin was also responsible for forming the coal beds that powered the early Industrial Revolution, but that coal-bed formation would not happen in earnest until the next geologic period, the aptly-named Carboniferous. It took more than a hundred million years for life forms to appear that could digest lignin. A class of fungus gained the ability to digest lignin about 290 mya, and by that time, most of what became Earth’s coal deposits had already been buried in sediments. And as with other seminal developments in life’s history, the ability to digest lignin seems to have evolved only once. The enzyme that fungi use to digest lignin has also been found in some bacteria, but fungi are the primary lignin-digesters on Earth.

From a biomass perspective, the Devonian’s primary change was the proliferation of land plants. Land plants comprise about half of Earth’s biomass today, with prokaryotes providing the other half. Terrestrial biomass is five hundred times greater than marine biomass, and terrestrial plants have about a thousand times the biomass of terrestrial animals, so animals constitute less than 0.1% of Earth’s biomass. The ecologies of marine and terrestrial environments are radically different. Virtually all primary producers in marine environments are completely eaten, being the food chain’s foundation, while less than 20% of land plant biomass is eaten by animals.

Creating the huge biomass of land-based ecosystems meant that carbon was removed from the atmosphere. Also, root systems were a new phenomenon, with dramatic environmental impact. Before the rise of vascular plants, rain on the continents ran to the ocean in sheets and braided rivers. Every rainfall ran toward the oceans in a flash flood, as happens in deserts today. Plant roots stabilized riverbanks, forming the rivers that we are familiar with today. Also, roots broke up rock, accelerated weathering, created soils, and created a huge “sponge” that absorbed precipitation, which the resultant ecosystems depended on. Vast nutrient runoffs from land into the ocean were stimulated by plants’ colonization of land, which in turn stimulated ocean life. The reefs of the Devonian were the greatest in Earth’s history, reaching about ten time the area of today’s reefs, with a total area about equal to the continental USA, of about five million square kilometers (three million square miles).

Plants and trees created a “boundary layer” of relatively calm air near the ground which became the primary abode of most land animals. Also, forests created a positive feedback where moisture was recycled in the forests, keeping them moister than purely ocean-sourced precipitation would. Today, somewhere between 35% to 50% or more of the rain that falls in the Amazon rainforest is recycled water via transpiration. Rainforest dynamics thus create positive feedbacks that maintain the rainforest. Conversely, the rampant deforestation of Earth’s rainforests in the past century has created negative feedbacks that further destroy the rainforest.

Forests were a radical innovation that has not been seen before or since. Trees were Earth’s first and last truly gigantic organisms, with the largest trees dwarfing the largest animals. Why did trees grow so large? It seems to be because they could. Land life gave plants opportunities that aquatic life could not provide, and plants “leapt” at the chance. Lignin, first developed for vascular transport, became the equivalent of steel girders in skyscrapers. In the final analysis, trees grew tall to give their foliage the most sunlight and to use wind and height to spread their seeds, and in the future that height would help protect the foliage from ground-based animal browsers. The limits of Earth’s tallest trees is an energy issue; the ability to pump water to the treetops. Arid climates are why trees do not grow tall, or even grow at all. Energy availability limits leaf size, too. From an ecosystems perspective, the great biomass of forests was primarily a huge store of energy, with trees allowing for prodigious energy storage per square meter of land.

Revisiting how energy enters ecosystems, primarily via the capture of photon energy by photosynthesis, only so much sunlight hits Earth, and photosynthesis can only capture so much. The energy “budget” available for plants has constraints, and the question is always what to do with it. An organism can break bonds between atoms and release energy or bind atoms together to build biological structures, which uses energy (usually – exothermic reactions release energy, while endothermic reactions use them, and most biochemical reactions follow that pattern of exothermic reactions releasing energy for use, and endothermic reactions being an investment of energy to build structures). Plants faced the same decisions that societies face today: consumption or investment? Only with an energy surplus can there be investments, such as for infrastructure. Plants invested in trunk-and-branch infrastructure to place their energy collecting and seed-spreading equipment in the best possible position. Plants race for the sky, and trees represent the biggest energy investment of any type of organism. On average, today’s plants use a little more than half of the energy they capture via photosynthesis (called gross primary production) for respiration. Growing forests use most of that gross primary production to grow (called net primary production), when the structural limits have been reached, most energy is consumed via respiration to run life processes within the infrastructure. Animal development is similar. When humans began building cities and urban infrastructures, the basis process was the same.

Most marine phyla were unable to manage the transition to land and remain aquatic to this day. Arthropods found a way, with scorpions, spiders, and millipedes being early pioneers. The insect and fish clades comprise the most successful terrestrial animals today, with fish leading to all terrestrial vertebrates. Gastropods made it to land, mainly as snails and slugs, as did several worm phyla, but the rest of aquatic life generally remained water-bound. Also, many animal clades have moved back-and-forth between water and land, usually hugging the shoreline, sometimes in a single organism’s life cycle, which blurred the terrestrial/aquatic divide at times. The first fish to venture past shore seem to have accomplished it in the mid-Devonian, and colonizing land via freshwater environments was a prominent path of development.

Although the first insects appeared in today’s fossil record about 400 mya, they were fairly developed, meaning that they likely have an older lineage, beginning in the Silurian. The first land animals would have been vegetarians, as something had to start the food chain from plants, and early insects were adapted for plant-eating. Plants would have then begun to co-evolve with animals, as they tried to avoid being eaten.

When life colonized land, global weather systems began dramatically impacting life, as land plants and animals would be at the mercy of the elements as never before, with forests and deserts forming. The continents also began coming together and eventually formed Pangaea in the Permian, and converging plates meant subduction and mountain-building. Mountains of the British Isles and Scandinavia were formed in the Devonian, the Appalachians became larger, and the mountains of the USA’s Great Basin also began developing. Colliding tectonic plates can build mountains, and mountain ranges would have great impact on weather systems during terrestrial life’s future, also profoundly influencing oceanic ecosystems.

As with previous critical events, such as saving the oceans and life on Earth itself, life helped terraform Earth. But the late Devonian is an instance when the rise of land plants may have also had Medean effects. Carbon dioxide sequestering, which reduced the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide concentration by up to 80%, may have cooled Earth’s surface enough so that an ice age began and another one of Earth’s mass extinctions began. As with the Ordovician extinction, the primary cause for the Devonian extinctions seems to have been rising and falling sea levels, likely associated with growing and receding ice caps, as Gondwana still covered the South Pole. The Devonian extinction events began happening more than 380 mya, and a major one happened about 375 mya, called the Kellwasser event. The reasons for the Kellwasser event are today generally attributed to the water becoming cold and anoxic. A bolide impact has been invoked in some scientific corners, but the evidence is weak. Mountain-building and volcanic events also happened as continents began colliding to eventually form Pangaea (and the resultant silicate and basaltic weathering removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere), and the dynamics may have been similar to what precipitated the previous major mass extinction. Black shales abounded during and after the Kellwasser event, and they are always evidence of anoxic conditions and how the oil deposits initially formed. However, the Kellwasser event anoxia may have not only been due to low atmospheric oxygen, but was also the result of eroding the newly-exposed land and the detritus of the new forest biomes, which created a vast nutrient runoff into the oceans may have initiated huge algal blooms that caused anoxic events near shore.

Unlike the short, severe Ordovician events, the Devonian extinctions may have stretched for up to 25 million years, with periodic pulses of extinction. The Kellwasser event seem to be comprised of several extinction events, and when they ended, at least 70% of all marine species went extinct, and the greatest reefs in Earth’s history were 99.98% eradicated, and it took 100 million years before major reef systems again appeared. Armored fish and jawless fish lost half of their species, and armored fish were rendered entirely extinct in the extinction event that ended the Devonian.

What was most relevant to humans, however, was the almost-total extinction during the Kellwasser event of the tetrapods that had come ashore. Tetrapods did not reappear in the fossil record until several million years after the Kellwasser event, and has even been referred to as the Fammenian Gap (the Fammenian Age is the Devonian’s last age). The Kellwasser event also appeared to be a period of low atmospheric oxygen content, with some evidence being the lack to charcoal in fossil deposits. Recent research has demonstrated that getting wood to burn at oxygen levels of less than 13-15% may be impossible. Because all periods of complex land life have evidence of forest fires, it is today thought that oxygen levels have not dropped below 13-15% since the Devonian, but during the “charcoal gap” of the late Devonian, when the first landlubbing tetrapods went extinct, oxygen levels reached their lowest levels ever, which must have impacted the first animals trying to breathe air instead of water. During the Kellwasser event, there is no charcoal evidence at all, which leads to the notion that oxygen levels may have even dropped below 13%. This drop may be related to severe climactic stresses on the new mono-species forests, which are probably related to the ice age that the forests helped bring about due to their carbon sequestering. While that is an attractive and explanatory scenario, the controversy and research continues. The first seed plants likely appeared before the Kellwasser event, but it was not until after the Fammenian Gap that seed plants began to proliferate.

The Kellwasser event ended the first invasion of land by vertebrates, and created an evolutionary bottleneck. Some stragglers survived the Kellwasser event, but the fossil record for the next seven million years has been devoid of tetrapod fossils with the exception of one species. After the Fammenian Gap ended about 368 mya, tetrapods renewed their invasion of land, and those tetrapods with many toes appeared in the fossil record with the second invasion, with Ichthyostega being Earth’s largest land animal in those days. The tetrapods of the time may have not yet been true amphibians (the issue is controversial), but they were making the adjustments needed to become true land animals, such as losing their gills and improving their locomotion. No new arthropods appeared on land during that time.

After several million years of adaptation, tetrapods seemed ready to become the dominant land animals, but then came the second major Devonian extinction event, today called the Hangenberg event. While the ice age conditions around the Kellwasser event are debated, there is no uncertainty about the Hangenberg event. There were massive, continental ice sheets, accompanied by falling sea levels and anoxic events, as evidenced by huge black shales. The event’s frigidity was likely a key fatal dynamic, with anoxia the other killing mechanism. The Hangenberg event had devastating consequences; it meant the end of armored fish, the near-extinction of the new ammonoids (perhaps only one genus survived), oceanic eurypterids went extinct, trilobites began to make their exit as seafloor communities were scourged, lobe-finned fish reached their peak influence, and the archaeopteris forests collapsed.

Trees first appeared during a plant diversity crisis, and the arrival of seed plants and ferns ended the dominance of the first trees, so the plant crises may have been more about evolutionary experiments than environmental conditions, although a carbon dioxide crash and ice age conditions would have impacted photosynthesizers. The earliest woody plants that gave rise to trees and seed plants largely went extinct at the Devonian’s end. But what might have been the most dramatic extinction, as far as humans are concerned, was the impact on land vertebrates. During the Devonian extinction about 20% of all families, 50% of all genera, and 70% of all species disappeared forever.

While there seems to have been convergent evolution among the early tetrapods, they were beaten back twice during the late- and end-Devonian extinction events, and what emerged the third time was different than what came before. As with many mass extinction events, evolution’s course was significantly altered in the extinction’s aftermath. As with studies of human history, events are always contingent and not foreordained in Whiggish fashion. While the increase in “intelligence” may well be an inherent purpose of being in physical reality, the evolutionary path to the man writing these words had false starts, “detours,” singular events, expansions, bottlenecks, catastrophes, and the like. Evolutionary experiments on other planets likely had radically-different outcomes. A mystical source that I respect once stated that there are one million sentient species in our galaxy, with a diversity that is mind-boggling, and from what I have been exposed to (and here), I will not challenge it.

[Wade Frazier]

The Carboniferous and Permian Periods

With the second attempt of vertebrates invading land cut short by the Hangenberg event, there was another 14-million-year gap in the fossil record called the Tournaisian Gap, which is part of what is today called Romer’s Gap (which is considered to be about a thirty-million-year gap). After all mass extinctions, it took millions of years for ecosystems to recover, even tens of millions of years, and markedly different ecosystems and plant/animal assemblages often replaced what existed before the extinction. The Devonian spore-forests were destroyed, and outside of the peat swamps, the tallest trees in the Tournaisian Gap were about as tall as I am, and even in the swamps, the tallest trees were about ten meters tall, as they were before the Hangenberg event.

Peter Ward led an effort to catalog the fossil record before and after Romer’s Gap, and they found a dramatic halt in tetrapod and arthropod colonization that did not resume until about 340-330 mya. Romer’s Gap seems to have coincided with low-oxygen levels of the late Devonian and early Carboniferous. If low oxygen coincided with a halt in colonization, just as the adaption to breathing air was beginning, the obvious implication is that low oxygen levels hampered early land animals. Not just the lung had to evolve for the up-and-coming amphibians, but the entire chest cavity had to evolve to expand and contract, while also allowing for a new mode of locomotion. When amphibians and splay-footed reptiles run, they cannot breathe, as their mechanics of locomotion prevent running and breathing at the same time. Even walking and breathing is generally difficult. This means that they cannot perform any endurance locomotion, but have to move in short spurts. This is why today’s predatory amphibians and reptiles are ambush predators. They can only move in short bursts, and then have to stop, breathe, and recover their oxygen deficit. In short, they have no stamina. This limitation is called Carrier’s Constraint. The heart became steadily more complex during complex life’s evolutionary journeys. Fish hearts have one pump and two chambers. Amphibians developed three-chambered hearts, wherein oxygenated and deoxygenated blood are not structurally separated, but mix. That arrangement is obviously not as energy-efficient as separating oxygenated and deoxygenated blood, and some later reptiles evolved four-chambered hearts, which their surviving descendants the crocodilians, birds, and mammals possess.

While oxygen level changes of the GEOCARBSULF model show early fluctuations that the COPSE model does not, both models agree on a huge rise in oxygen levels in the late Devonian and Carboniferous, in tandem with collapsing carbon dioxide levels. And there is virtually universal agreement that that situation is due to rainforest development. Rainforests dominated the Carboniferous period. If the Devonian could be considered land life’s Cambrian Explosion, then the Carboniferous was its Ordovician. In the Devonian, plants developed vascular systems, photosynthetic foliage, seeds, roots, and bark, and true forests first appeared. Those basics remain unchanged to this day, but in the Carboniferous, there was great diversification within those body plans, and Carboniferous plants formed the foundation for the first complex land-based ecosystems. Ever since the Snowball Earth episodes, there has almost always been a continent at or near the South Pole, and the ice ages that have prominently shaped Earth’s eon of complex life probably always began with ice sheets at the South Pole, with the current ice age arguably being the only partial exception, but today’s cold period really began about 35 mya, when the ice sheet at Antarctica began developing.

The first tree forests formed in the late Devonian, and bark is the great innovation that led to forming the Carboniferous’s prodigious coal deposits. Compared to modern trees, Carboniferous trees seemed to go overboard on bark, at least partly to discourage arthropods. Today’s trees generally contain at least four times as much wood as bark. Those early trees had about ten times as much bark as wood, and the bark was about half lignin. Lepidodendron trees dominated the Carboniferous rainforest, and could grow thirty meters tall. Because it took more than a hundred million years for life to learn to break down lignin, that early lignin did not degrade via biological processes. The early Carboniferous was warm, even with a small ice cap at the South Pole, and Earth’s first rainforests appeared in the late Devonian and again thrived in the Carboniferous. The Carboniferous lasted from about 360 mya to 300 mya and was the Golden Age of Amphibians, as the rainforest was largely global in extent and swamps abounded. Amphibians were the Carboniferous’s apex predators on land, some reaching crocodile size and acting like them.

Artists have been depicting Carboniferous swamps for more than a century, with the cliché image including a giant dragonfly. That giant dragonfly represents a key Carboniferous issue and perhaps why the period ended. That giant, and others like it, appeared in the fossil record about 300 mya, when oxygen levels were Earth’s highest ever, somewhere between 25% and 35%. The almost universally-accepted reason for that high oxygen level is that burying all of that lignin for the entire Carboniferous period removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in vast amounts. Today, the estimate is that carbon dioxide fell from about 1,500 PPM at the beginning of the Carboniferous to 350 PPM by the end, which is lower than today’s value. That tandem effect of sequestering carbon and freeing oxygen not only may have led to huge arthropods and amphibians, but also intensified the ice age that ended the Carboniferous in what some scientists have argued should be a Big Five mass extinction. The idea that high oxygen levels led to those giants was first proposed more than a hundred years ago and dismissed, but has recently come back into vogue. Flying insects have the highest metabolisms of all animals, but they do not have diaphragmatic lungs like mammals have, or air sac lungs like birds have, and although they may have some way of actively breathing by contracting their tracheas, it is not the bellows action of vertebrate lungs. The two primary hypotheses for early insect gigantism is that high oxygen, as well as a denser atmosphere (the nitrogen levels would not have fallen, so increased oxygen would have added to the atmosphere’s mass), would have enabled such leviathans to fly, and the other is that flying insects got a head start in the arms race and could grow large until predators that could catch them evolved. The late Permian had an even larger dragonfly, when oxygen levels had crashed back down. The evolution of flight is another area of great controversy, and insects accomplished it long before vertebrates did. The general idea is that flight structures evolved from those used for other purposes. For insects, wings appear to have evolved from aquatic “oars,” and gills became lungs. Reptiles did not develop flight until the Triassic, and only glided in the Permian.

But it was not only flying insects that became huge: giant millipedes, scorpions, and other arthropods also abounded in the Carboniferous, such as mayflies with half-meter wingspans. The giant millipede (more than two meters long) has been featured in popular culture as a nightmare creature. The largest freshwater fish ever lived in the Carboniferous, reaching seven meters long. The high-oxygen hypothesis is challenged for giant insects and giant animals in general, and the controversy will likely last for many more years.

The Carboniferous also marked the rise of reptiles, which first appeared between 340 and 335 mya. The very term reptile has become rather informal with the rise of cladistics, as birds and mammals descended from “reptiles” but are not called that. The term paraphyletic refers to groupings such as reptiles, where part of the clade is not classified in the named group; monophyletic clades are tidier and scientists often prefer them. Although the issue, as usual, is controversial today, it seems that amphibian ancestors and reptile ancestors may have descended from different groups of tetrapods, with some seemingly transitional animals adding to the controversy. But the idea that reptiles are descended from amphibians is still prominent. Most importantly, reptiles were the first amniotes, a clade that also includes birds and mammals, which do not need to lay their eggs in water, which allowed reptiles to become independent of swamps. Reptiles then colonized niches previously unavailable to amphibians. The first reptiles were small and ate insects, and laying eggs in trees may have been a solution to arboreal life. Seed plants and amniotes could reproduce on dry land, and their success greatly expanded terrestrial ecosystems.

Amniotes are primarily classified by the number of holes in their skulls. The earliest reptiles may have had skulls like amphibians, with only holes for eyes and nostrils. In some early reptiles, a hole developed behind the eye, probably for attaching jaw muscles, and animals with such skulls are called synapsids; mammals evolved from that line, and are essentially the only survivors of it. Near the Carboniferous’s end at about 300 mya, skulls with two holes behind the eye developed, probably for anchoring more powerful jaw muscles. Animals with those skulls are called diapsids, and one line of diapsid descendants eventually ruled the Earth as dinosaurs. Dinosaurs had the greatest terrestrial jaws of all time, which is the primary energy acquisition equipment of vertebrates. Complex life’s arms race reached its ultimate expression in dinosaurs, with the fearsome teeth and jaws of the late-Cretaceous’s Tyrannosaurus rex matched against the spear-and-shield arrangement of Triceratops. Jurassic dinosaurs such as Stegosaurus, with its Thagomizer, would not have been easy meals for predators such as Allosaurus. Turtles are today generally considered to be diapsids that lost their skull holes, and would otherwise seem to be anapsids.

In the oceans, the Carboniferous is called the Golden Age of Sharks, and ray-finned fish arose to a ubiquity that they never fully relinquished. Ray-finned fish may have prevailed because of their high energy efficiency. Their skeletons and scales were lighter than those of armored and lobe-finned fish, and their increasingly sophisticated and lightweight fins, their efficient tailfin method of propulsion, changes in their skulls, jaws, and new ways to use their lightweight and versatile equipment accompanied and probably led to the rise and subsequent success of ray-finned fish in the Carboniferous and afterward. Foraminifera, which are amoebic protists, rose to prominence for the first time in the Carboniferous, and reefs began to recover, although they did not recover to pre-Devonian conditions; those vast Devonian reefs would never be seen again. Today’s stony corals would not appear until the Mesozoic Era. Trilobites steadily declined, and nautiloids developed the curled shells familiar today, with straight shells becoming rare. Ammonoids flourished once again, after barely surviving the Devonian Extinction. This essay is only focusing on certain prominent clades, and there are many animal phyla and plant divisions. The early Carboniferous, for example, is called the Golden Age of Crinoids, which are a kind of echinoderm, which is a phylum that includes starfish. The crinoids had their Golden Age when the fish that fed on them disappeared in the end-Devonian extinction. Ecosystems are vastly richer entities than this essay, or any essay, can depict.

In the early Carboniferous, the continents were still somewhat dispersed, but began merging into the supercontinent called Pangaea. The period from the Late Devonian extinction event to the late Permian about 260 mya is also called the Karoo Ice Age, with various stages of ice sheet development. It was the last ice age before the current ice age. In the mid-Carboniferous, around 318 mya, the ice cap once again began to grow and sea levels fell, devastating the ammonoids among others that lived in the shallow seas near shore. That growing ice cap eventually destroyed the Carboniferous rainforest. Cooler oceans will have less evaporation and therefore produce drier climates; that dynamic began to reduce the Carboniferous rainforest, breaking them up into “patches” that kept shrinking, to eventually result in the collapse of the rainforests around 305 mya. Only a few pockets of rainforest survived into the Permian period. The collapse of the rainforest ended the dominance of amphibians, and flora and fauna that adapted to warm, wet environments. The cooler, dryer conditions that ended the Carboniferous led to the dominance of seed plants and amniotes.

When the Carboniferous rainforest collapsed about 305 mya, Earth’s oxygen levels were at their highest ever. About 75% of Earth’s coal deposits were formed in the Carboniferous, with almost all of it laid down in the 25-million-year epoch called the Pennsylvanian. There will never be a coal-forming period like that again on Earth, as organisms developed the ability to decay lignin about 290 mya, and even if humans burned all the fossil fuel deposits, carbon dioxide levels will never again reach the levels the preceded the Carboniferous, at many times today’s concentrations.

The Permian period ran from about 299 mya to 252 mya, ending with the greatest mass extinction in the eon of complex life. The Carboniferous rainforests not only collapsed, but great deserts formed in the interior of the newly-formed supercontinent of Pangaea. Pangaea was a little scattered when it formed, with a huge ice cap at the South Pole, but by the end of the Permian, the ice age was finished and another ice age would not appear for more than two hundred million years. The continent that became North America and Europe collided with Gondwana, and a gigantic mountain range was formed as a result, called the Central Pangaean Mountains. Those mountains created climate effects, and great deserts formed on each side of that range. Remnants of that range include the Appalachians and part of the Atlas Mountains. The Ural mountain range began forming during the creation of Pangaea, and the Tethys Ocean grew during the Permian.

Conifer forests, which I have spent my life happily hiking through, first appeared in the Permian. Devonian forests were ten meters tall, the Carboniferous rainforests were thirty meters tall, and Mesozoic conifer forests reached sixty meters tall. Conifers were one of the early seed plants, and it used pollen to fertilize the seeds, which is a method of fertilization that did not need the water that spores did. As conifers appeared during an ice age, they are well-adapted to cold climates, which is why conifer forests are so prevalent today. As discussed later in this essay, conifers were later displaced by flowering plants, which engaged in an unprecedented symbiosis with animals, and conifers were pushed to the cold margins of Earth. Tree ferns declined after the Carboniferous, but still exist today.

In water environments, there are not diurnal temperature changes as there are on land, so regulating body temperature was not a significant issue. The rise of reptiles created a new kind of animal, and regulating body temperature became a major challenge, particularly in an ice age climate. The early Permian was the Golden Age of Synapsids, as they dominated the land masses, and thermoregulation was a prominent trait, with huge “sails” on the backs of the largest synapsids, with the Dimetrodon being popular with children’s models of ancient animals (I had one in my childhood collection, along with mammoths and stegosaurs). Animals made many adaptions to land’s temperature swings. Today’s mammals and birds are warm-blooded, and controversy has raged whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded. Keeping a body’s temperature within certain ranges can allow for optimal enzyme functioning. Humans, for instance, can only survive within a narrow range of body temperature. High temperatures kill humans because key enzymes begin to fall apart, and key reactions their biochemistry cannot happen. Too low a temperature and activation energies for key biochemical reactions are not reached. But maintaining that equable body-temperature is costly in terms of energy, with mammals and birds consuming about ten-to-fifteen times the energy of today’s reptiles. A snake can live for a month on a good meal, while a mammal must constantly eat or hibernate. As with other life features, those synapsid sails may have had a dual function, and the most popular speculation today is that it was used for “display,” which is a way to attract a mate. Sexual selection has been a major source of evolutionary change (it is likely why men are larger and stronger than women), and those tremendous sails may have been an early example of enhancing a feature to attract a mate. Dimetrodons also had different-sized teeth, which was likely a distant ancestor to mammalian teeth.

During the Permian, synapsids had great radiations, typical of Golden Ages. Synapsids developed many evolutionary novelties, one of them leading to therapsids appearing in the mid-Permian, which were the direct ancestors of mammals. Therapsids began to overcome Carrier’s Constraint by evolving a more upright posture, with their legs more under them, rather than splayed to their sides. This improved their breathing ability, and that it happened during Earth’s most spectacular oxygen crash is likely no coincidence. From a high of 25%-30% at the end of the Carboniferous, oxygen crashed down to around 15% by the Permian’s end. Animals that could adapt to lower oxygen levels could dominate, and therapsids did just that, completely displacing pelycosaur synapsids, which included Dimetrodon, and huge dinocephalians dominated the mid-Permian. The largest amphibian ever also lived in the high oxygen times of the mid-Permian. As oxygen levels crashed in the late Permian, land animals became smaller. In the mid-Permian, synapsids began to develop the secondary palate, which would allow them to breathe and chew at the same time. Therapsid jaws became more powerful, and their teeth became more diverse than synapsid teeth. Such innovations typically improved an animal’s energy efficiency, and thus were favored innovations.

One of Peter Ward’s recent hypotheses is that those animals that adapted to the changing conditions, particularly when oxygen levels crashed, survived the catastrophes to thrive in the post-catastrophic environment. In the late Permian, several therapsid lines developed turbinal bones, which may have been used for respiratory water retention in a world where oxygen levels were crashing. This is a controversial issue, and related to the controversy over when reptiles developed endothermy.

The earliest diapsid appeared in the late Carboniferous, and looked like a modern lizard. It also had non-uniform teeth, with canine-type teeth. Diapsids, however, were marginal animals in the Permian, as they were times of synapsid and therapsid dominance. Diapsids would not rise to prominence until the Triassic.

In the oceans, reefs finally began to make a comeback in the late Permian, and the remnants of those reefs can be seen in Texas today. Tabulate and rugose corals were abundant, as were ammonoids and echinoderms. Articulate brachiopods (with two shells that can open and close, like a clam’s) were also doing fine. Fish (ray-finned fish and sharks), however, were the dominant sea animals. Trilobites were a mere shadow of their former selves, eking out an existence on the seafloor, similar to how nautiloids eked out their existence in deep waters while ammonoids dominated the surface. And then came the Great Dying.

The Permian extinction, like the prior great extinctions, was more than one event and had more than one cause. While the Cretaceous extinction is what most people think about when mass extinctions are mentioned, as it was Hollywood-spectacular and ended one fascinating line of animals and paved the way for mammals to dominate, leading to the existence of humans, the Permian extinction was the Big One. Before the taboo against investigating mass extinctions began lifting in the 1970s and 1980s, specialists generally thought that the Permian extinction only impacted the oceans, with terrestrial ecosystems unaffected. The picture has radically changed since the 1980s, with terrestrial extinctions now acknowledged as being similarly catastrophic. The Permian extinction is Earth’s only mass extinction of insects, and while plants are not normally vulnerable to mass extinctions, probably because they are at the food chain’s bottom and so are not as subject to trophic cascade failures, land plants also barely survived the Permian extinction. But the extinction came in phases, and each may have had different causes, and there is currently great ongoing controversy and research regarding the extinction and its causes.

The ultimate cause of the Permian extinction was likely the formation of a supercontinent. When Pangaea finally formed, new dynamics appeared. One was that there became only one major ocean, the Panthalassic, with the Paleo-Tethys and nascent Tethys oceans being largely landlocked. Those landlocked smaller oceans would have become like lakes, with little current in them (the Black Sea is the favored analogy today), and the Panthalassic (which the Pacific Ocean eventually formed from) did not have continents to divert them during their journey from the equator to the poles, so today’s circuitous thermohaline circulation would not have existed. The Panthalassic’s currents were likely slow and lazy, and the deep-water oxygenation of today’s oceans would have been quite different, perhaps even ceasing to exist. Also, when supercontinents form, the sea level falls as the oceanic basin expands. The many shallow seas of complex life’s earlier periods also disappeared with the formation of Pangaea, which were the abode of most marine life. The merging of continents also results in mountain-building and volcanism. As can be seen in the map of Earth’s landmasses during the late Permian, what became China and Siberia were on the northeast margins of Pangaea, bordering the Paleo-Tethys Ocean, and two volcanic events arising from China and Siberia are currently favored as the immediate causes of the Permian extinctions.

The first death knell sounded about 260 mya, in what is called the mid-Permian or Capitanian extinction, or the end-Guadeloupian event, although a recent study finds only one extinction event, in the mid-Capitanian. The extinction was thought to be the result of falling sea levels in the 1990s. But the first of the two huge volcanic events happened then, in China. There can be several deadly outcomes of huge volcanic events. As with an eruption in the early 1800s, huge volcanic events can block sunlight with the ash and create wintry conditions in the middle of summer. That alone can cause catastrophic conditions for life, but that is only one potential outcome of volcanism. What likely had far greater impact were the gases belched into the air. As oxygen levels crashed in the late Permian, there was also a huge carbon dioxide spike, as shown by GEOCARBSULF, and the late-Permian volcanism is virtually the unanimous choice as the primary reason. That would have helped create super-greenhouse conditions, perhaps coming right on the heels of the volcanic winter. Not only would there have been carbon dioxide vented from the mantle, as with all volcanism, but the late-Permian volcanism occurred beneath Ediacaran and Cambrian hydrocarbon deposits, burning them and spewing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Not only that, great salt deposits from the Cambrian period were also burned via the volcanism, creating hydrochloric acid clouds. Volcanoes also spew sulfur, which reacts with oxygen and water to form sulfurous acid. The oceans around the volcanoes would have become acidic, and that fire-and-brimstone brew would have also showered the land. Not only that, but the warming brought on by the initial carbon dioxide spike could have then warmed up the oceans enough so that methane hydrates could have been liberated and created even more global warming. Such global warming apparently warmed the poles, not only melting away the last ice caps, ending an ice age that had waxed and waned for 100 million years, but deciduous forests are in evidence at high latitudes. Warming the poles would have lessened the heat differential between the equator and poles, further diminishing the lazy Panthalassic currents. The landlocked Paleo-Tethys and Tethys oceans, and perhaps even the Panthalassic Ocean, may have all become superheated and anoxic Canfield Oceans as the currents died, and huge hydrogen sulfide events also happened, which may have damaged the ozone layer, leading to ultraviolet light damage to land plants and animals. That was all on top of the oxygen crash. With the current state of research, all of the above events may have happened, in the greatest confluence of life-hostile conditions during the eon of complex life. In 2001, a bolide event was proposed for the Permian extinction with great fanfare, but it does not appear to be related to the Permian extinction; the other dynamics would have been quite sufficient. The Permian extinction was the greatest catastrophe that Earth’s life experienced since the previous supercontinent existed in the Cryogenian.

Siberian volcanism (which formed what are called the Siberian Traps) is considered to have been the main event, with the Chinese volcanism of ten million years earlier being the warm-up, with other minor events between them, in a series of blows that left virtually all complex life devastated when it finally finished.

While the Chinese eruption was the warm-up, it devastated marine environments, and a brief review of the casualties will make it clear. Tabulate and rugose corals were brought to the brink of extinction, and ammonoids, echinoderms, articulated brachiopods, gastropods, and complex foraminiferans suffered similarly, while fish, bivalves, and small foraminiferans were largely unaffected.

After the mid-Permian extinction, marine life recovered and there were many radiations to fill empty niches, but coral reefs did not recover. Between the two extinction big events, extinction levels were highly elevated, suggesting that some of those aforementioned dynamics were still wreaking havoc, with possible cascade effects. Critics of extinction hypotheses often say: “Correlation is not necessarily causation.” While there can be great merit to that position, it seems to be overused by various critics. When the guns are as smoking as volcanic events were, and they often “correlate” with mass extinctions, they are increasingly hard to deny as being at least immediately causative.

The end-Permian extinction correlated rather precisely with the eruption of the Siberian Traps, which continued for a million years and spewed millions of cubic kilometers of basalt. The end-Permian extinction was the final blow for many ancient organisms. My beloved trilobites made their final exit from Earth during the end-Permian extinction, as did tabulate and rugose corals, spiny sharks, and the last freshwater eurypterids. Articulate brachiopods completely vanished from the fossil record, but reappeared in the Triassic, meaning that some ghost ancestors survived, but brachiopods never recovered their former abundance and have only lived a marginal existence ever since. Glass sponges and bryozoans disappeared along with the reefs, while complex foraminiferans and radiolarians also vanished, with all of them staging comebacks in the Triassic via ghost ancestors. Bivalves suffered relatively modestly (“only” about 60% of bivalve genera went extinct) and quickly recovered, fish were barely affected, and gastropods were devastated but quickly recovered. Ammonoids went through their typical boom-and-bust pattern during the Permian extinctions, while nautiloids kept dwindling but scraping by in their deep-water exile. When it was all over, more than 95% of all marine species went extinct. Not only was the death toll tremendous, but the post-Permian oceans were so different than before that the Permian extinction marks the end of an era, which began with the Cambrian Explosion. The Paleozoic era ended with the Permian extinction, and the Mesozoic era began.

On land, the devastation was similar. Again, insects suffered their only mass extinction, with several orders of insects vanishing from the fossil record after the Permian; those gigantic flying insects of Paleozoic times also vanished forever. Permian conifer forests gave way to deciduous forests in the wake of global warming, and early gymnosperms and seed ferns were largely replaced as lycophytes made a comeback in the early Triassic. The lycophyte radiation in the wake of the Permian extinction is typical of what are called disaster taxa, which are the first organisms to colonize disturbed environments. Reptiles and amphibians lost nearly two-thirds of their families, which translates to more than 90% of all species. All large herbivores and predators went extinct, along with gliding reptiles. In total, the Permian extinctions wiped out about 90-96% of all species, more than 80% of all genera, and nearly 60% of all families. Nothing else in the history of complex life comes close, putting the Permian extinction in a category all its own.

While the overwhelming devastation of the Permian extinction seemed to play no favorites and whatever survived was the luck of the draw, recent research has demonstrated that even with such an overwhelming catastrophe, certain life forms were more resilient than others, related to biological “buffers” in their life processes. In marine environments, the warming, anoxia, and acidification would have wiped out species vulnerable to them, and corals were and still are particularly susceptible to those changes. Those conditions wiped out the corals in the Permian extinction, and they are the first ecosystems being devastated today, with similar conditions of warming, anoxia, and acidification. Whether it was the ability to move to safer environs, or the ability to buffer chemical changes, the more resilient organisms had a better survival rate than others.

[Wade Frazier]

The remaining chapters have this tentative organization:

The Reign of Dinosaurs
The Age of Mammals
The Path to Humanity
Humanity’s First Epochal Events: Growing our Brains and Controlling Fire
Humanity’s Second Epochal Event: The Super-Predator Revolution
Humanity’s Third Epochal Event: The Domestication Revolution
Humanity’s Fourth Epochal Event: The Industrial Revolution
Today’s Global Political Economy
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

We will see what the final result looks like.

Best,

Wade

¤=[Post Update]=¤

What I have drafted so far has this tentative organization:

Dedication
This Essay’s 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
The Formation and Early Development of the Sun and Earth
Early Life on Earth
The Cryogenian Ice Ages and the Rise of Complex Life
Speciation, Extinction, and Mass Extinctions
The Cambrian Explosion
Complex Life Colonizes Land
The Carboniferous and Permian Periods

[Ilie Pandia]

A few hundred billion years from now, if our Sun is still around in some fashion, a future Wade will imprint in the holographic records the following:

"Before sentient life ever appeared on our planet there was a species who has trived on oil, a resource that was, thus far, non-usable. That species was considered somewhat intelligent (Level 0 on today's scale), being able to devise ways to extract oil from the ever dwindling reserves.

The waste product of that life form was plastic and aluminium, usually packed in cilindrical shapes or rectangular shapes. As usual, when a new niche was discovered there followed a Golden Age of Oil when this life form experienced a literally explosion in numbers and dominated the planet it was a blink of an eye on the evolutionary time scale.

That life form's life style is likely what has caused the Sixth and greatest mass extinsion event. It's almost a miracle that life was not whiped out completely and that we are here today documenting this, but the evolution of humans could be looked at as a failed attempt to evolve intelligence.

It look about 300 mya for new life forms to learn to digest plastic and aluminium, but when it did... it thrived!

The fact that plastic and aluminium were not digestible for such a long time may account for the large deposits that we can still find on our planet even today! It's very likely that this was a one time event and the plastic and aluminum deposits will never be formed again."

[Sunny-side-up]

Those of the Human species that survived their so called Evolution got it right by going back! They did so by the finale realisation that!
They were not material beings after all and did not need material substance at all!

Their planet is a keepsake Eden (For lower life forms of inter woven beauty) which orbits a Sun/Star Spirit that will/can never fade!

That was us once I do believe! and or could be!

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Ilie gave me my laugh of the morning. On a side-note, dinosaurs had the first hands, and I grew up hearing how small their brains were, but research has confirmed that they were warm-blooded and engaged in parenting and herd behaviors, so were like mammals and birds (which are the only dinosaur survivors). Dinosaur also had hands (even with opposable thumbs). Maybe their relatively small brains is all that kept them from building cities and burning up all the coal before we could get at it.

Hi Sunny-side-up:

It has been a very interesting journey for me, to go from scientist-in-training to mystical awakening, to chasing FE and being handed my head, to resuming my scientific studies in my old age. Some of my favorite early mystical influences, such as Seth, say stuff such as Earth being trillions of years old, and I have heard about how the Sun is filled with zillions of entities. After resuming my studies, I really wonder about some of that. I think that consciousness is all that ultimately exists, but I also have respect for the physical journey, its limitations, and whatever the purpose might be (to evolve consciousness seems to be the answer). We definitely are going to Cruel School, and can we change it into something different? Does anybody really want to? That is the big question, to me.

Astronomers have been able to see stars be born, live, grow old, and die, and I have little doubt that all stars go through life-cycles, just like people do. Most go out with a whimper, but some go out with a bang. Similarly, the radioactivity that seems to drive plate tectonics eventually runs out, and the Moon and Mars are examples of running out of energy and becoming solid and inert. While fringe people talk up hyper-dimensional physics, genic energy and the like, mainstream science seems to have explained star and planet life-cycles pretty impressively. I know that plenty is being kept from the public, such as how we are not alone in the universe, and I am quite willing to keep an open mind in many fringe issues until our ET pals can come into the open (or Godzilla lets loose his Golden Hoard), and we can be informed of many issues that have been kept quiet.

However, I will be very surprised if it turns out that stars and planets do not have life cycles, of birth, life, and death, just like life on Earth. I believe that the nature of physical reality is limitation, but that does not mean that our consciousness does not live forever, although it seems to go through its own cycles of evolution. The picture that I have seen, with the scientific and mystical sides of the house weighing in, along with some fringe stuff such as remote viewings, psychic healings, UFO encounters, and peeks at Godzilla’s Golden Hoard, makes a lot of sense to me, although there is plenty that is still mysterious. I am into open inquiry above all else, and when the blinders finally come off of humanity, it will be interesting to see where it all goes, and I hope to live to see at least the beginning of it, because it will mean that we will likely turn the corner and not have to find a new planet to continue the evolution of our souls (but probably without opposable thumbs that time ).

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

On a little side note, a relative recently visited Roman ruins such as Pompeii and the Roman Coliseum (I have been there, too), and spoke of wishing that he could have gotten into a time machine and seen them in operation. I replied that he would not have liked it, and he kind of agreed. Going to the Coliseum was the Roman equivalent of going to the movies. Watching people being forced to murder each other was how people got their jollies in ancient Rome, and the crueler the spectacle, the more the audience liked it.

But the gladiator phenomenon was also telling in ways. The masses preferred a little fig leaf of legitimacy, so before the fights began, the gladiators would make a statement that they were about to battle to the death of their own free will. When the “choice” was being worked to death in the mines or fighting to the death, to perhaps survive to the next day, that “choice” was understandable. Also, although virtually nobody ever spoke out against the institution, the Romans were not all that proud of their “entertainment.” All manner of activity was depicted on Roman coinage, but never gladiatorial combat:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#gladiator

Rome drove many animals to extinction wherever the Romans conquered, to feed the arenas and temporarily slake the human bloodlust. Rome still gets extolled in song and legend as the greatest empire ever, with its influence still felt. In ways, the USA is the new Rome, but also, in ways, we can see how far we have come. At least the gratuitous murder usually takes place on the movie screen, not at the local stadium, although American football is not all that far removed from the gladiatorial “games.”

Similarly, the brutality of early civilization is evident in the Code of Hammurabi:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of...i#Laws_covered

the many human sacrifices found in most ancient human civilizations, and other niceties. Seeing how all the great apes except the bonobos abuse the females perhaps gives us a window into our barbaric past, but it does not have to be that way, and a Star Trek future likely awaits us if a tiny fraction of humanity can muster a bit of integrity and sentience. If five thousand people could reach the level of awareness that I hope to help people attain, it would be game over for Godzilla, and he knows it. Probably the main reason why he leaves me alone right now is that he thinks that those people do not exist. Is that a projection on his part, thinking that everybody is as egocentric as he is, or is he right?

I discovered the hard way that the hero’s journey to FE won’t work, because there are not enough heroes:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#howmany

but does that mean that almost nobody is even courageous enough to leave aside their scarcity-based and egocentric teddy bears:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#dominant

for even a minute? That is what I am trying to find out, and we will see how it goes.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

OK, one last post before I get to chores. On this thread, in private correspondence, in most FE documentaries, web sites, and in FE circles, I see people advocating this way and that for making FE happen. Without exception, they have been oriented around FE tinkering, sneaking up on Godzilla, raising money, getting patents, storming the ramparts with a host of heroes, and so on (levels 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11 http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6 ), or people offer to brainstorm with me on solutions.

To put it politely, I have already done the “brainstorming,” and am about to try something that nobody has tried before. My so-called “brainstorming” was many years of study and training, listening to that damned voice in my head, and then getting to try out my bright ideas in the real world and being handed my head. Carrying Brian’s spears was one of my life’s highlights:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm

But Dennis’s spears weighed a hundred times Brian's, and is where I got my radicalization:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#hitting

Nearly forty years after I got my first alternative energy dreams:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy.htm#glimpse

I am about to try out something new. I am not looking for bright ideas and problem-solving. Every “bright idea” that I have yet seen was made by somebody who has not been though the meat grinder and is still stuck in those lower levels of tinkering, business plans, sneaking past Godzilla, and so on.

If I can get that choir formed and trained, eventually it will be time to “do something,” but it will not be along the lines of what I have always seen in the FE field.

As I have stated plenty of times, the technology route to FE only has a prayer if the inventor with the goods gives it to a worthy group. I have never met or heard of an inventor with the goods willing to give it away, and that worthy group has never existed. What I am about to do can be seen as attempting to form that worthy group, or a nucleus that the worthy group can form around, and if it comes time to “do something,” as in a technical project, it will be done in broad daylight, it will be non-profit, and it is not going to play the “sneak up on them” games, the stampede games, and so on. It will not be seeking the attention of the masses, although anybody can look in on what is happening. Again, John Q. Public is only going to begin to wake up to abundance when the means to it are delivered to his door:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#machiavelli

Again, I learned those lessons long ago the hard way, and if newbies just have to go find out for themselves, they are welcome to, but they need to do it on their own time, and it can be life-risking behavior to find out. The choir is not going to be about beating all of those dead horses one more time.

So, in summary, I already know what I am going to do, in the broad strokes. The devil is in the details, but I already have my strategy developed, and it is only a matter of execution and seeing if I can find enough people with the right stuff to execute it with. And as I have stated many times, it will not be a hero’s journey that I plan for the choir to walk, but the lamb’s route.

Time for chores.

Best,

Wade

[Robert J. Niewiadomski]

This might to be relevant in regard of certain FE approaches having or having not "a prayer". Not long ago while browsing Tom Bearden's website I've once again stumbled onto an interesting observation of peculiar property of FE devices. I don't know if it applies to "every type".

For FE device to work, the physical volume of space, the place it is located upon Earth must be first "conditioned" with it's builder intent. Call it wishfull thinking if you want.
http://www.cheniere.org/correspondence/042208.htm

I think this intent must also be filled with the awarenes of the rough idea of the principle of operation. It is not enough to simply wish for it to have COP >1. It must be awareness of tapping directly into The Field. And you must "disobey the Laws of Physics" and believe there is that field. Much to overcome on personal ego level here. Very convenient for sc "sceptics". But it provides a safety lock too. You can't fake the intent. The Field knows it.

And it might be not enough to just build the circuit right of the schematics without first creating "a healthy spiritual atmosphere". Or having "a prayer". This might be further extended. Let me explain. Suppose we somehow managed to survive Godzilla and are ready to sell. Chances are we end up being accused of scam simply because our customers are spiritually unable to provide "mystic component" for our device to work properly. The sad fact is mystic and money don't mix. Some are trying to prove otherwise with unpleasant results.

Wade's approach will greatly improve level of now missing component provided by the recipients' of FE devices in the days that will come. This will help to "condition" the areas of Earth to prepare ground for deployment of long awaiting tech.

I am slowly plowing through essay's drafts posted by Wade so far. It's very different reading type compared to regular "quick read" posts, which require certain amount of quiet self-time. Not to be swallowed on the go for sure. At least not for me Plenty of good stuff in one place

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Robert:

What Bearden is referring to is partly why I repeatedly say that there are mystical and practical issues with the FE conundrum. After long years of being in the FE trenches, and hearing tales from fellow travelers, I began to get the idea that the ZPF is divine in nature. The inventor’s consciousness seems to be very much a part of the dynamic, but that also seems to be true of all great inventors. My early exposure to inventors hinted in that direction:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy.htm#glimpse

But is also became clear on the practical side of it, and I am not just referring to getting a ZPE device working. It began to become clear to me, much to my dismay, that inventors invent primarily to get rich and famous, not to help the world. Many inventors can talk a good game, but when it comes time to make something happen, then the rubber hits the road and you find out what people are made of, and it is almost never pretty. I never met or heard of an altruistic FE inventor with the goods. They all tried to cash in, and Godzilla derails that approach in his sleep. When cashing in is the primary motivation, the effort usually self-destructs before Godzilla even needs to roll out of bed.

Again, it was only after seeing similar dynamics over and over and over that I began to see the issue in broader, even mystical, terms. I think that if a civilization does not have enough collective divine intention, they are not going to get the benefit of FE, or not for long. It will either stop working, or they will destroy themselves with it.

Eventually, you begin to suspect that something bigger is happening than “only” the fifth epochal event. Manifesting FE seems to be a test of our integrity, and in the big picture Godzilla may indeed be doing God’s work by wiping out all FE aspirants so far. It is almost a tautology, in that there has not yet been an effort with sufficient divine intention to overcome Godzilla and humanity’s inertia and deadly sins. That is another reason why the Young Warrior approach is pure foolishness:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/camelot.htm#warriors

thinking that they will vanquish Godzilla and save the day. I believe that if we decide to be coercive, violent, and so on, no matter what the stakes are, we will fail the test of our integrity, and thus not be “worthy” of FE, which is another reason why I advocate the lamb’s path.

On delivering an FE device, heck, probably the first installations will be on the choir’s homes (and they will likely be paying to have them built, but that is a long way down the road). The effort really only needs to worry about Godzilla until one can be put on a home and mass producible. Once that happens, and Joe Average can walk down the street and see it powering a choir-member’s home, it is game over for Godzilla, and he knows it. Then, a stampede will begin. Getting to that stage is the hard part. It will take an industrial process, not a craftsman one, which is a big part of the problem.

On my chapter drafts, glad somebody is reading them ( ), but the final product will have links and references (many of them). Just reading the text and thinking deeply is a man’s way of doing it. But deep thinking is what the essay will be all about – that is the only way to a comprehensive perspective that I know of.

One book that I refer to plenty in my essay is Richard Cowen’s History of Life:

http://www.amazon.com/History-Life-R...istory+of+Life

which is about the best of its kind. The book's last chapter is about the megafauna extinctions. Other than the “loyal opposition” to the idea of human agency in the megafauna extinctions, of which Don Grayson is the grandmaster and still at it:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0506181711.htm

I have yet to see a serious and disinterested scientist fail to agree with the overkill hypothesis for the megafauna extinctions (or variations of it - primarily humans hunting the easy meat to extinction, and it also seemed to have cascade knock-on effects). Even Grayson concedes that the islands extinctions were caused by people, but he is going to go to his grave clinging to the climate hypothesis for the Americas and Australia. That dog simply does not hunt.

After surveying the human-wrought carnage on the world’s megafauna (key Eurasian megafauna were driven to extinction before the Americas were invaded, mammoths in particular), Cowen makes the kinds of comments that I do, about the romantic fantasy that “primitive” peoples lived in harmony with nature, and in the end, he kind of questions whether humans are sentient, in his thinly-veiled disgust and dismay regarding our benighted species (any book like that will end on a similar note, as it is obvious that we are causing the sixth mass extinction, due to short-sighted greed, elite-induced poverty, etc., even leaving aside Godzilla). He ends the book with:

“The anthropologist David Pilbeam wrote that we have only begun to tap the potential of the human brain. He had better be right.”

Back to chores.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

A last thought tonight:

When it comes time to bring FE devices to the world, my ideal is that they would never be sold. Again, the solid-state device that Sparky had:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#sparky

which has been developed to the thirtieth generation in Godzilla’s workshop, would probably be able to be mass-produced for a few bucks each. If it gets to where Joe Average can get it, then the only “buyer” is going to be the world’s governments, who will then give them to the public, or some charity, etc., like maybe The Choir Charity. That will be the beginning of the end of capitalism and market economies, and also the beginning of the end of government as we know it. FE will not be seen as a product, but everybody's birthright.

When FE is out in the open and essentially free for everybody, the fifth epochal event will be here, and none too soon. If FE can get to the world, particularly in that way, it will be the biggest agent of change in human history. It could also happen in other ways, but my point is that for my part, I don’t want to see FE get to the world via capitalistic means, and capitalistic means are a dead-end anyway these days, courtesy of Godzilla and friends. This will be new wine that has never existed before, not even close, and the old skins probably won’t hold it, and I doubt they should.

The world will quickly look nothing like it does now, but that is because it will soon begin to resemble heaven on Earth.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

The action today will probably be over here:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post770041

but answering Ilie’s query brought up another issue that I have had to repeatedly deal with. Focusing on FE and abundance is very hard to do, for many reasons. One thing that I have dealt with zillions of times is when I begin painting the FE and abundance picture, supposedly “deep thinkers” immediately try to derail the thought thread with “devil’s advocate” musings, or “How might this be harmful or misused?” musings, or “Why don’t we skip all of that and become Level 19” (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level19 ) musings, or “We just have to sit in a room and change our perspectives!” “insight,” and so on. What they are really doing is avoiding abundance and its practical ramifications at all costs. It is really Level 5 fear-porn:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level5

dressed up as “reasonable,” “deep-thinking” prudence. If people can really grok abundance and how the tiniest bit of collective integrity and sentience can manifest it, here and now, those fear-based musing take a seat way at the back of the bus, and are only visited after abundance is truly comprehended, because when you truly comprehend abundance, you can scarcely think of anything else.

On the high road to FE like Dennis and Brian trod, the most common response to the idea of abundance is fear and denial, and all of those “reasonable” objections, or “let’s become Level 19” games and so on are really just arguments for the status quo, getting nothing done at all, and going back to their games of scarcity, with the threat of abundance kept at bay once again. Also, when people really comprehend abundance, they will relinquish the many scarcity-based assumptions that undergird their awareness. All the time, I have people say to me that they see the FE light, and then they advocate hemp or bamboo or more “humane” animal farming, etc., which means that they still don’t understand. With FE and the related technologies and material technologies that are under wraps, no life form would ever be exploited again for human benefit (except for food, but that would become symbiotic, as in the world that Roads glimpsed https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post672748 ). With FE and abundance, that would all be seen as incredibly barbaric. But the zero-sum-game is baked deeply, so deeply that almost nobody can shed themselves of its many insidious assumptions. It takes a great deal of work to really examine the scarcity-based assumptions that have become the furniture of our minds, and the founding assumptions of all ideologies:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#dominant

Again, I am looking for the very, very few who are willing and able to do the work. My upcoming essay will be a mark on the wall, but just one. People like Ilie will one day take it further.

Back to chores.

Best,

Wade

[Carmody]

We definitely are going to Cruel School, and can we change it into something different? Does anybody really want to? That is the big question, to me.

Well, it does provide for drama. and drama provides for the colors of the rainbow and thus, rumination on the complexities. Thus, (to cut to the chase) 'cruel school' is probably the game of the day and it may not change, anytime soon. However, the wilder the hands on the wheel, the harder to stop the thing from careening about. Of course, the bigger the scare, the harder the railing on the road is impacted (bouncing off, bits flying everywhere), the greater, the more complex, the move varied and colored the lesson.

But we come to a point that the careening must be brought under control lest the whole thing go beyond repair and general capacity to be useful...and the question is asked: To let the avatar rest, that poor bruised flesh, is it now strong enough, evolved enough... to let it into the wild?

I think the answer is yes.... and the final stages of it begin to roll out.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

All the posts from me lately are because I took a little breather after I got through the Permian extinction, but I am diving back in now, so will be rather quiet.

I would like to make a little post on the nature of prophecy and prediction. I have written about it plenty:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/visions.htm#alternate

Anybody familiar with the fringes is well aware of people, “channels,” “insiders,” and the like who make all manner of predictions, many cock-sure, to only fall by the wayside when their predictions don’t quite manifest, although they usually try to save face and backpedal, etc. We are all very familiar with that, especially now that 2012 is in our rear-view mirrors. I can’t tell you how many predictions I have seen in the past forty years, by all manner of “seer.”

I have made many predictions that came true in one way or another:

http://www.serendipity.li/wot/wade_iraq.htm

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#sunny

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/savings.htm#enron

but it had nothing to do with prophetic powers, but just seeing where things were heading. I’ll make another one right now: the “experiment” that the Federal Reserve is doing today, printing a trillion dollars’ worth of money annually, with Japan and Europe following suit and getting even crazier, will result in a financial catastrophe. That requires no prophetic skill on my part, but just understanding how the world works and having a sense of history. Every single fiat currency was eventually wrecked by the people in charge of the printing press, because of the seduction of the seemingly “easy way out” of economic problems by printing money. Money is only accounting – there is nothing real about it. But when it is abused like it is and has been, it eventually no longer even has accounting reality, and eventually the currency will be devalued and abandoned, while creating great havoc on the way out. It is the equivalent of Rome debasing its coins. This stupid dynamic is literally as old as money, especially money will no intrinsic value. I will be proven right, whether the catastrophe comes to pass in one year or ten, but I am no prophet. That money-printing is a sign of a weak real economy, and wildly printing money is like building a Potemkin Bank.

There is too much Hollywood in Walsch’s Conversations with God work, but there are plenty of nuggets in it, and one of them was observing that if you say you are heading toward San Jose but are really driving toward Montreal, it can be helpful to just take a good look at the signs and see where you are really heading.

Mystics will say that violence breeds violence, and even astute historians and social commentators can see that dynamic:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#primary

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/visions.htm#luther

and it sure did not take a genius to see that the USA could take the world to the brink of World War III by invading Asia once again, grabbing more oil, as usual. We are taking a blowtorch to the powder keg.

Our future is what we make of it, and my future won’t necessarily be yours. When Max (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#hell ) next incarnates, he may end up here:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post672115

but that is between Max and the reality that he co-creates. If I end up incarnating on Earth again after this life is finished, this earthly personality is going to ask for this duty:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...re-Earth/page8

But where will my soul’s next incarnation be, if it incarnates again? Beats me, but I doubt that anybody can predict what I will end up doing, and certainly cannot make a prediction that will set my path. So-called prophets that say exactly what is ahead, as if they have foreordained it, actually play the victim game, as if we don’t make decisions each moment of each day that determines our future. There are certainly big trends that can be discerned, planetary karma, and the like, but each one of us chooses what our future will be, and we largely do it with the actions that we take each day, and what we choose to focus our awareness on.

So, when anybody states what is ahead for us, from some kind of alleged prophetic ability or their keen understanding, I always take it with a grain of salt. The talented may see where things seem to be heading, but nobody knows how it will turn out. That is the “divine surprise” that comes with having free will. I never say what will be, but only what can be. When I see the train is about to go off the cliff, even if the passengers and even the engineer are oblivious, I can predict with some confidence that the ride will get rough, but even then, there is an emergency brake, and some might even jump out of the windows before it all goes sailing off the cliff.

This thread was once the best on the Internet:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...-Energy/page29

and it is still damn good, but it has been wandering in recent months. Ilie is trying to right the ship on that thread right now, and we will see how it goes. The choir will not have conversations that wander like that, not at cross-purposes to the conversation’s intent.

I have already written it plenty, but capitalism will become obsolete with FE and abundance. Greed will simply not make sense anymore. One of the surreal things about my journey is finding out how the world really works versus how the ideologies depict it. Classical economists were flacking for the capitalists from the very beginning, as their ideological foot soldiers. It was actually Marx who called it what it was, with his notions of “primitive accumulation” that the classical economists turned a blind eye to, as that was how their masters made their piles. One of the big lies of capitalism is how efficient it is. In the big picture, it may well be the most inefficient system yet devised. It is only “efficient” when you are at the tail end of the process reaping the profits, but it sure is not very efficient for those being ground in its maw. As I discovered the hard way, Godzilla’s suppression of FE is capitalism on steroids:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#make

Capitalist apologists cannot afford to admit how evil the system is. Almost nobody wants to do that, certainly not its beneficiaries, so my experiences, Dennis’s, Brian’s, and so on are irrationally dismissed as “conspiracy theories” and the like. The suppression of FE is perhaps the key cornerstone of propping up capitalism and Godzilla’s reign, because if abundance was allowed to appear, a greed-based system would simply make no sense.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Oops! I posted it to the wrong thread. The post is over here:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post770487

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am working hard on the Triassic period and the rise of dinosaurs, but I just saw this:

http://world.time.com/2013/12/09/chi...air/?hpt=hp_t3

and had to comment. China is spinning air pollution as a benefit. They did this with concurrently raising the level where smog is considered harmful:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-1...e-system-.html

Americans are laughing at this, but the same thing was done to fluoride:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/fluoride.htm#compulsory

and today most Americans think it is good for them:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/fluoride.htm#tomorrow

Orwell was an optimist.

Best,

Wade