WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I finished The Secret Life of Groceries recently, and would like to comment on it a little. It took the author five years to research and write the book. It had chapters on Trader Joe’s (with interviews of Joe), Whole Foods (before Amazon bought them out), the lives of American truck drivers, which I wrote about already, how a specialty food (Slawsa) rose to prominence, and the terrible lives of the people, particularly in Third World nations, who provide food to the USA’s supermarkets. A chapter was on shrimp from Thailand, in which literal slaves did the work, in deadly conditions that were horrific to read about.

The supermarket is an American invention, and on my Avalon thread and elsewhere you can find the reactions of people from other nations who experienced supermarkets for the first time: crying, fainting, and the like. Khrushchev saw an American supermarket and was amazed. The Secret Life of Groceries ended with some astute observations, such as that since Upton Sinclair, every time that the American food supply is looked at closely, what is uncovered is disgusting. The author, however, stated at the book’s end that what he uncovered in the American food supply, from the sea to the supermarket, was only symptomatic of larger issues, and the solutions will not come from within the food industry. The real change will happen within a larger framework. I think that without knowing it, he is questing for the Fifth Epoch.

The sad fact is that any interactions between First and Third World nations, particularly for anything that comes to industrial nations from agrarian ones, will be full of exploitation and evil that takes the breath away for anybody who honestly looks at it. But this is nothing new. It began with the rise of Europe, when Portugal began a new era of the slaving business, which led to the triangular trade. The first thing that Columbus did in the Americas was kidnap natives and search for gold, which led to his genocidal practices on Española. In one form or another, those practices last to this day.

If I had to enumerate all of the monumental aspects of Noam’s and Ed’s work over the years, I think that their exposure of the USA’s imperial behavior, and the complicity of the media, ranks near or at the top. The American imperial apparatus, which largely just took over from the weakened European powers in the wake of World War II, is largely responsible for keeping this evil state of affairs alive and well. Our repeated and ongoing genocides in Oil Country are just more of the same, but just try to engage the average American on these subjects, or especially the educated class, who are the most brainwashed of all, as Orwell noted long ago. Wikipedia’s propaganda is just more of the same.

I doubt that I can overemphasize that humanity’s power imbalances, from Portugal’s first slave runs down the African coast to today, have always been rooted in energy imbalances. In the Fifth Epoch, when each person can command abundant levels of energy for the first time, only then will humanity’s power imbalances end. That is where scientific literacy can help people understand that key issue, and is largely the point of my big essay.

I want to comment a little more on Serg’s brilliant post. That is one bright lad. What has been called “post-scarcity” societies has been on the rise in fiction and rhetoric for a long time, and Marx indeed was the most important early visionary of it. However, Marx wrote before the rise of the science of energy, so he did not understand the energetic basis of economics, and he understandably labored under the delusions of Young Warriors. But Marx brilliantly understood the unsavory aspects of our economic systems that last to this day. Maybe one of those recent post-scarcity visionaries has done it, but I have not seen one of them talk in terms of free energy yet. Energy is somewhere in their rhetoric, but nothing like what free energy would catalyze. It is mostly about AI and robotics, with energy taking a back seat. I agree that the reproduction of intelligence is in its infancy, and we have not seen anything yet, but it all rides atop the energy issue.

My wife and I recently watched the TV series The Expanse, and it was like Dickens in space; nothing like what the Fifth Epoch will look like. Until the Fifth Epoch arrives, which I doubt I will live to see, I will keep referring to that future Earth that Roads glimpsed, as an example of what the Fifth Epoch can look like. Even Star Trek is not all that visionary, but it beats nearly everything else that has been done so far.

I have had to constantly live with the surreal fact that the technologies to usher in the Fifth Epoch are likely older than I am. Few people can handle that, and they usually react to the idea of free energy with denial, fear, greed, and the like. Almost nobody on Earth has proven willing and able to do the work that it takes to hit the notes, and that is normal.

Materialism is the predominant religion of the Fourth Epoch and, as Serg noted, is the greatest limitation of the radical left in even imagining the Fifth Epoch, which also results in their scientism, structuralism, and conspiracy-phobia, which is “balanced,” in a strange way, by the right’s crazed conspiracy-philia. One of the wackiest manifestations of that in recent years has been the Trump the Hero meme, as he takes on the Deep State with his 5-D chessmanship. The right is far more deluded, but the left has blindness of a more sophisticated sort.

As Serg noted, investigative journalists have been an endangered species for many years, and The Secret Life of Groceries is one of the rare recent efforts.

And yes, Serg, those stuck in the retail politics mindset, which is mainly the political class, are of no use to an effort like mine. Heck, Ed and Noam were/are there, to a great degree, and I stopped beating my head against the left’s walls long ago. They will begin to understand when the Fifth Epoch arrives, just like nearly everybody else. I had to relinquish judgment of all of that long ago, and just keep on going, sailing where I see daylight, hunting for those needles in haystacks.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

2020 is a year that nobody over the age of five today will ever forget. This year was significant in my life in a number of ways, on the writing front and others. I probably wrote my last Ed essay, had quite a time writing about the NAZA Nazis, gave a tribute for Ralph, finally exposed one of Dennis’s key libelers (and his enablers), wrote about Brian at length, summarized the cast of characters on my journey, revisited many memories, and for the first time, documented some of my life. I just wrote about the three millionth view of my Avalon thread (mostly bots, but many thousands of humans, too), and summarized my approach and what I am trying to accomplish. It might seem like I am getting my affairs in order. I have to admit that my mortality has been on my mind a bit this year, as I officially became a senior citizen when I qualified for Social Security, and with the other mayhem of this year.

What may be the final shoe of this year dropped yesterday, when my position was eliminated at my company, primarily as a reaction to the pandemic, which hit my company hard. Looking for work at age 62 may not seem like fun, but at least there is one positive to the craziness in Seattle: the economy is booming. I was planning to work another ten years, and we will see how it goes.

But losing my job definitely meant one thing: it is time to slow way down with the forum posts, get my essay updated, and likely follow it with a book. So, I am definitely going quiet, other than the stray post and putting up drafts of the revised sections of my big essay.

Time to bear down.

Best,

Wade

[Mike]

Good luck with your creative projects Wade! I'll selfishly miss your postings here but I'm excited about your essay and particularly your book.

Losing the job is a major bummer, but maybe a blessing in disguise. I realize how glib and cliche sounding that is, but in this instance it feels appropriate to say somehow. Call it intuition.

Best of luck with everything.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am going to do my best and focus my public writings on my essay update, until I finish it. I spent the past couple of “post-employment” days doing overdue house chores, turning in my work computer and other formalities at my former job, and getting my computer and office ready to work on the essay update. I still had not completely recovered from my recent hard drive failure and what it led to on my home computer, and I just finished that recovery this morning. I also took the opportunity to get rid of old software CDs, and I threw out ones over 20 years old. I kept my Windows 95 disc, for its nostalgia value, but nearly everything else that was obsolete went. I literally use software that is 20 years old to make my site. Getting it to keep working was part of this morning’s chores.

My office is now cleaner than it has been since I moved to this house nearly nine years ago. I was able to get some stacks off my office floor and put them into a bookshelf, attached, which will be a lot of the material that I will use to write the first update to my big essay, which will be on human evolution and warfare. Picture attached. I cited some of those in my big essay already, but most of those were from my last five-to-six years of study. As with almost all of this coming essay update, these are subjects that are covered in the big essay already, but the update will go deeper and broader on the topics, and I don’t know that any of my updates with change the essay’s thrust, or even the points a whole lot. It will largely put more meat on the bones.

In short, there is an academic battle between the “hawks” and the “doves” on how ancient warfare is. IMO, the hawks win, as warfare goes way back, and human-style warfare goes back to chimps. I have not been impressed with the work of the “doves,” which even Noam has endorsed, that makes the case that warfare only arose with the rise of civilization. Not only have the doves not impressed me, they seem to argue against the evolutionary aspects of warfare. IMO, humans are not hardwired genetically for warfare, nor are they hardwired for peace. They have the capacity to do both, and, IMO, it is almost completely dependent on their energy situation. Where there is plenty, there is peace, and when the easy energy runs out, I don’t care if they are chimps/bonobos, hunter-gatherers, farmers and agrarian empires, or declining industrial empires such as the USA, it gets violent. The same dynamics run through all of them. If there is a point to the last half of my big essay, that might be it. Of course, the final point is that with abundant and harmless energy, something that looks like heaven on Earth becomes feasible, and the technology is already here for it. That is my final upshot, as well as my plan to help manifest it in the public sphere. We can’t forget that.

OK, off to my writings.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Oh God, I just drafted this, and putting much of it in my essay will not be easy. What a crazy dance.

Best,

Wade

I have chosen this place in this essay to briefly review my adventures in orthodoxy and the fringes, and how they inform my perspective today. Those experiences have influenced my work, including this essay. I have briefly mentioned that I was in training to be a scientist from a young age. That is because my father was an engineer that NASA recruited during the Space Race, and he had an Einsteinian IQ. My mother’s IQ was about half of my father’s, in a situation that is surely rare in the West today, and they played genetic roulette with their children. I am the middle child of three, IQ-wise, on the low end of the genius range, while my youngest brother’s IQ is about half of mine. That situation led to peculiar family dynamics.

I was a bookworm from the time I could walk, was always at the top of my classes since I began school, was raised around rocket scientists (1, 2) and world-class minds, but with no other frame of reference, it all seemed normal to me. At age 12, I would soon stop reading the tabloids that my mother brought home from the grocery store each week, but my career as a scientist began a subtle derailment that year. My father had artery disease, and his father soon had a series of heart attacks that forced him into retirement. At that time, orthodox Western medicine stated that my father’s condition was “normal,” and all that “medicine” could provide for my father was some pills and hope for the best. Seeking a second opinion, my father obtained a booklet from a family member that summarized scientific research that presented the idea that his continually rising blood pressure was not normal, that “civilized” food was the cause of artery disease, and that unprocessed food was the cure. I read the booklet, was impressed, our family changed our diet to save my father’s life, and it worked in spectacular fashion. In the next decade, that booklet was banned in the USA by the postal service, for offering advice that was “contrary to the weight of informed medical and scientific opinion.” The crux of the issue was that the booklet offered a treatment that people could self-administer and not incur medical bills. A couple of decades later, Western medicine began to admit that its “informed medical and scientific opinion” on the issue of heart disease was false. When I first wrote my medical racket essay in the late 1990s, the only treatments for artery disease that Western medicine offered were drugs and surgeries. In 2014, as I revised my site’s other essays to align with this one, I discovered that not only had Western medicine completely reversed its stance on the “normality” of artery disease, but the advice in that banned booklet became Western medicine’s first line of defense against artery disease! It took more than 40 years to go from the banned fringes to the mainstream.

I had a similar experience with fasting. I began a fasting regimen when I was 17, the medical establishment regarded fasting as a bizarre fad, and I put up with incomprehension and ridicule for many years. The cleansing properties of fasting were obvious to anybody who did it, but medical science was united in its disapproval of it, or advocating it only in extreme circumstances under a doctor’s supervision. I never thought that I would live to see it, but fasting has gone from bizarre to mainstream, and a Nobel Prize was recently won for scientific research on autophagy, which fasting triggers. The Bible mentions fasting dozens of times, so in this instance, it took millennia for science to catch up.

The year before I began my fasting regimen, however, I had my biggest moment of awakening past the assumptions of orthodox science, when I took a meditation class and witnessed and performed what are today called remote viewings. That experience was so spectacular that I knew that the materialistic models of consciousness are false. I did not know it at the time, but I was ruined as a mainstream scientist then, with my mystical awakening. Five years later, my astronaut colleague performed the same remote viewing exercise in a human potential class, had a similarly spectacular outcome, and he was ruined as a mainstream scientist from that moment onward, although it took several more years to finally leave the orthodox fold.

That same year of my mystical awakening, during the USA’s energy crisis that ended humanity’s greatest period of prosperity, my first professional mentor’s engine began making big waves in the government and media, and my energy dreams began then. Three years later, a desperate prayer, brought on by my first existential crisis, was answered in spectacular fashion, and I changed my studies from science to business. Eight years of idealism and disillusionment later, after I began my career, I once again prayed for guidance, was again answered (I have only done that twice in my lifetime, and don’t plan to do it again) and it landed me in the middle of the greatest effort ever made to bring alternative energy to the American marketplace, as the world’s best heating system was put on people’s homes for free, in the most benevolent and brilliant business strategy that I ever saw or heard of. That effort was wiped out by the energy oligarchy in my natal city, who saw that effort as a threat to their market dominance. One person died as a result of their efforts, and many lives were ruined. Less than a year later, I was partners with the owner of that company, and before that year was out, we were building a prototype to marry the energy-collecting component of that heating system with my mentor’s engine, to produce free energy. Even though the USA’s Attorney General at the time knew my partner by name and called him “squeaky clean,” our effort was again targeted and wiped out, after the CIA delivered an offer of $1 billion, for us to cease our efforts. My partner was lucky to survive the experience, and my life was ruined by those events, which happened in my home town.

For those whom the foregoing is hard to believe, they have my sympathy; I lived through those events, and they are still hard to believe, even for me. But that odyssey woke me up, I began the study that resulted in my public writings, and this essay forms its capstone. The year after I staggered from my home town, to never return, I met my astronaut colleague, who was just beginning his free energy investigations. The next year, he nearly lost his life and had his life shortened after an encounter with high-ranking military officials who tried to recruit him into a classified UFO project. He was afraid to go public with that encounter, thinking that the military might finish the job if he did, and the closest that he ever came to writing about it was in the prologue of his final book.

Not long after those events, a close colleague was kidnapped and given an underground technology show, in which free energy, antigravity, and a host of mind-boggling technologies were demonstrated. I believe that demonstration was mounted by a dissident faction of the global controlling organization, who do not want their power games to turn Earth into a cinder, and my friend was shown those technologies to encourage his efforts. I had long known of independent efforts to develop such technologies, even putting aside our efforts, but once my friend described his underground demonstration to me, I had no doubt that those technologies had been developed to a commercial level long ago. In subsequent years, particularly when I worked with my astronaut colleague and became his biographer, I became aware of that milieu in ways that I previously was not aware, and people in my circles can top my stories in these subjects.

Suffice it to state that the principles behind the operation of those technologies render the corpus of modern physics something akin to cave drawings. So, why am I writing an essay that contains a great deal of orthodox science and scholarship in it, which does not even hint at the reality that I just described? Because it has its place. None of the above is relevant to the extinction of dinosaurs, for instance, and for all of its great limitations, orthodoxy has its place, and it can be an important place. I do not take anything from orthodoxy or the fringes on faith. It can all be subjected to the toolset of science, the methods of scholarship, and the like, at least if the evidence is not being sequestered, and people do not have to risk their lives to adduce it. Even then, as the greatest scientists knew, the scientific process has limitations that will always prevent it from truly describing the big picture of reality. We can only grope forward, rather blindly, as we try to figure it out. But the groping is a worthwhile exercise.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have been driven to write a little on current events. I am working hard on the essay update, and I could spend all-day, every day, on current events, but I have to get my work done. But it has been hard to ignore both the deranged conspiracist emails that I receive, as well as the media’s attacks on “conspiracy theories.” Both camps miss the boat.

For starters, I have been hearing “Trump versus the deep state” stuff since he was elected, and QAnon is the standard conspiracist disinformation that the conspiracy crowd laps up with their morning coffee. Virtually none of it is valid, IMO, and the valid bits are overwhelmed by the fantasy and outright lies. The sitting president is too far down the food chain of power on Earth to make a dent, and making an obvious megalomaniac into some kind of white knight on a steed is bizarre. The so-called deep state is a national issue, not a global one, so the deep state, even in history’s most powerful nation, is not really dealing with the big issues. Caitlin Johnstone, as usual, has one of the more level-headed takes on the issue.

That stated, the mainstream media itself can’t seem to wrap its head around the idea that its blatant lying has helped fuel this sad state of affairs. I am a vocal vaccination skeptic, for good reason, and the Western medical paradigm is largely fraudulent, foisted on the public, with fluoridation, orthodox cancer treatment, bypass surgery, and other fraudulent practices foisted on the American public, up there with asbestos cigarette filters. I think that the germ theory of disease can be challenged, and the medicine of the Fifth Epoch will look nothing like what organized medicine is today, but there is also crazed conspiracism on the COVID-19 issue, up there with the Trump the Hero meme in its validity.

The media lumps insane and paranoid conspiracism with the very real “conspiracies” that the media has long swept under the carpet, such as JFK’s murder, the UFO/ET issue, the organized suppression and reality of free energy technology, etc. This “scientific” article from 2008 lumps them all together, and I was spurred to write this because of these two articles (1, 2) that I saw in recent days. I could comment at great length on those articles, but I’ll just say that the crazed conspiracism that we see today is a key reason why I state that scientific literacy is a choir requirement. Without the deep thinking and discriminating thought process that scientific work entails, people tend to go off the deep end, into paranoid fantasy, jumping at the nearest bright shiny object, and the like. I chronicled the stunning lack of discernment within the free energy field recently, and all fringe areas suffer from that lack of integrity and discernment, but the mainstream does, too. Hunting for needles…

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

This is too rich to not comment on. Earlier this month, I got a letter from the IRS, stating that they have to verify my identity before they process my income tax return. The return I filed does not ask for a refund, so it is mysterious why they need to establish my identity in the first place. They gave me three options to establish my identity:

1. Appear in person at their office, with the proper documents;
2. Use their website, to establish my identity;
3. Phone in to establish my identity.

So, I tried online, but their records don’t reflect my current phone number, so they don’t allow me to verify my identity online. I just phoned in, got the usual robot, which said that the IRS is overwhelmed right now, so to call at a later time. I went online to set up an appointment in Seattle, which I hate driving in to, and their site says that their office is closed for weeks. So, they literally gave me no avenue to reply to their letter that demands that I establish my identity. To make this “funnier,” I had to jump through several identity hoops at the website that I filed my return through. But, that was not good enough for the IRS.

We live in truly insane times.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

The essay update is going well. As I began the process, I decided that I needed to overhaul some beginning chapters, first, to kind of set the foundation for the rest. I am only tweaking these chapters (1, 2), and the changes may not be significant enough to put up drafts of them before I publish the updated essay. Maybe I’ll put up snippets. The magnitude of this essay update, however, is becoming clearer to me, and it will be a big job. I see my forum posting slowing way down until the essay update is finished.

But I am also constantly reading, and I want to call attention to a journalist who deserves more. Helen Buyniski has been raking Wikipedia over the coals for years, and here is her latest, which explored the Wikimedia Foundation’s conflicts of interest. She used to publish at medium.com, but she was recently wiped out there (all of her articles there were erased), after probably stepping on powerful toes. People like us have to have our own sites, so that our work is not completely wiped out like that. Here is an interview of her with Chris Hedges. It is on RT, and it brings up an issue near and dear to me. Here is Hedges interviewing Noam on RT. An American professor interviewing another American professor, but they have to do it on Russian TV, because there are not any venues in the USA for them to do that. Wow! There are few starker confirmations of Ed and Noam’s Propaganda Model than that.

Well, it looks like the Trump the Hero meme, who really won the election, may finally be dying down, although I still get daily emails on the issue. One thing that became clear to me is that Robert David Steele has no credibility. I just looked at his blog posts, and it is the usual conspiracist suspects, with a lot of it at the tabloid level. He is at the other end of the spectrum from Ralph, and seems like those “New Age” military officials that Brian had his life-shortening run-in with. I keep a very wary eye toward officials and former officials from the military and spook world who have the New Age/conspiracist jargon down, and seem to have seen the light. They are very likely not who they appear to be.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Here is an example of what I am currently doing. I just drafted this this morning, under a section heading titled, “The schism of modern physics.”

Best,

Wade

Newton’s Principia guided physics for two centuries, until Einstein burst onto the scene with relativity, which rejected Newton’s assumptions of absolute time and space. Einstein did not dream of where his idea of light “quanta” would lead to in 20 years, when Werner Heisenberg developed matrix mechanics, for which Einstein nominated him for a Nobel Prize. The primary upshot of quantum mechanics, particularly its Copenhagen interpretation, primarily authored by Niels Bohr, was that the strange paradox of quantum mechanics, in which light (or electrons) can be seen as waves or particles, depending on how they are observed, means that science can never really know the underlying reality of measured phenomena; all that scientists can do is measure what is detectable, and base their theories on that.

Einstein violently disagreed with the Copenhagen interpretation, and assailed quantum mechanics for the rest of his life, believing it to be an incomplete theory. Those events created a schism in physics that lasts to this day. Relativity is considered the last major theory of the classical physics era, and quantum physics, with its paradoxes, discontinuities, superposition, “spooky action at a distance,” and other features, is considered the first theory of modern physics. Big Bang cosmology, with its unobserved dark energy and dark matter, and the standard model of particle physics form the other the pillars of orthodox physics today. But they can’t all be right. Something is awry.

Relativity and quantum theory form the foundation of 21^st-century physics, but they are incompatible theories. Einstein spent the rest of his life in a futile quest for the unified field theory, which would weld relativity and quantum mechanics into one theory (“quantum gravity” is one such idea). The latest attempt to unite the two is string theory, and its related M-theory, which is not really a theory at all, but only a vague hunch. Stephen Hawking was notorious for making grand statements about ideas that did not even make it to the hypothesis stage, treating such wild ideas as facts, and he declared that M-theory was Einstein’s elusive unified field. That body of theory necessitated ideas such as the multiverse and “many worlds” ideas. The problem with all of that post-quantum-theory body of work is that there is literally no empirical support for them. Those hypotheses and “theories” have been derisively called “fairy-tale physics,” as they have yet to provide anything that can be tested.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I finished drafting some new sections of this chapter of my big essay, presented below. These drafts posted in forums will not have the footnotes or links to my site, which will be in the published version, but I left in external links. This was on the birth of the universe and origin of the solar system and Earth. I only surveyed the Big Bang to the birth of the solar system, as those times are not too relevant to my essay’s thrust. Similarly, the next section I am working on covers from the origin of life on Earth to the Last Universal Common Ancestor. I doubt that today’s type of science will ever convincingly describe how life on Earth arose from inanimate chemicals, so I will only survey the various hypotheses, and my essay’s narrative really begins in detail with that Last Universal Common Ancestor, which all life on Earth is descended from.

Best,

Wade

In the tables above, some dates have ranges, as such old dates often have relatively thin evidence supporting them, which can be interpreted in various ways. Those dates will be adjusted as the scientific evidence and theories further develop, and radical changes will undoubtedly happen. Over the past generation of my studies in scientific efforts on the ancient past, whether it is cosmology (the study of the origins of the universe), geology (the study of the solid Earth and its past), paleontology (the study of fossils), or the newer field of paleobiology (the combination of paleontology with biology, which has spawned numerous subdisciplines), the dates of events are continually being revised and debated, as new evidence is adduced. In the area of paleobiology, a noticeable trend has been that the dates of events are regularly revised to have them happening earlier. I am not aware of anybody in the scientific community credibly challenging the Sun’s or Earth’s age, but events regarding the formation of the solar system are continually challenged, and a new consensus can form, which is always provisional, depending on what new evidence might support.

The basic cosmology of a Big Bang and a constantly expanding universe has been challenged from the beginning, and is still challenged in unorthodox corners. Similar to the origin of life issue, I am going to put the Big Bang and the idea of a constantly expanding universe aside, as it is not very relevant to this essay. The mystical literature I have read is also not united on the issue. The idea of a Big Bang, in which the entire universe came from literally nothing, something smaller than a pinhead, is as fantastic as anything in the Bible or other religious literature. Einstein introduced his cosmological constant, which he always regretted doing, as it was a kind of fudge factor to make his general theory of relativity work, and has been called his “biggest blunder.” Many scientists have argued that the universe came into being in a less “bangy” way. A key event in Big Bang cosmology, called “cosmic inflation,” in which the universe expanded, faster than the speed of light, for less than a second after the Big Bang, has been challenged by physicists since it was developed in the 1980s, including by one of the idea’s authors. Those issues will likely not be resolved in my lifetime.

The Big Bang and expanding universe aside, astronomers have studied millions of star systems, have been able to see the births and deaths of star systems, recently photographed a black hole, and achieved other mind-boggling technological feats. Orthodoxy’s theories of star system and planet formation, and how stars die and give rise to new stars, is on far firmer footing, as they have observed some of those events, unlike the Big Bang. So, this essay’s narrative will begin with the formation of this solar system and its planets.

The standard cosmological story today is that earlier in the universe’s history (which began 13.7 bya, in the orthodox models), virtually all mass in the observable universe was contained in hydrogen atoms, with traces of the next two lightest elements: helium and lithium. According to the Standard Model, atoms have no mass by themselves, but the field that gives rise to the Higgs Boson provides the mass. Gravity attracted hydrogen atoms to each other and, where “clumps” of hydrogen became large enough, the pressure in the clump’s center (a star’s core) became great enough so that the mutual repulsion of the protons in hydrogen nuclei was overcome (like charges repel each other, while opposite charges attract), and the protons fused together. That fusion released vast amounts of energy, and fusion powers stars.

Depending on the star’s size and the resulting temperatures and pressures, various larger elemental nuclei can be produced. Iron is the heaviest element created during a large star’s primary fusion process. Nuclei larger than the simplest hydrogen nucleus contain neutrons as well as protons. As the name implies, neutrons have no net electric charge, but have about the same mass as a proton (an electron has less than a thousandth the mass of a proton, so virtually all the mass in atoms is provided by its protons and neutrons). Radioactive decay into daughter isotopes is mediated by the weak nuclear force.

In the smaller stars that eventually become white dwarfs, the primary fusion process creates oxygen as its heaviest element. Even though the Sun is larger than about 95% of the Milky Way Galaxy’s stars, it is destined to become a white dwarf in about six or seven billion years.

Several different fusion processes have been identified, and stars from about half the size of the Sun to about nine times larger can undergo a process known as s-process fusion late in their lives, and that process has created about half of the elements heavier than iron; bismuth is the heaviest element created by the process. Those heavier elements are eventually blown from the star by its stellar wind as it becomes a white dwarf. Stars with more than nine times the mass of the Sun undergo a different process at the end of their lives. When the hydrogen and helium fuel is used up and the fusion processes in those stars’ cores are reduced low enough, gravity will cause those stars to collapse in on themselves. That collapse creates the pressures needed to fuse atoms heavier than iron. In an instant, r-process fusion occurs. Depending on a collapsing star’s composition, it can collapse into a black hole or neutron star or explode into a supernova. The heaviest naturally occurring elements on Earth, such as gold, are thought to have been primarily created by colliding neutron stars.

When a star becomes a supernova, those heavy elements are sprayed into the galactic neighborhood by a cataclysmic release of fusion energy. Plutonium is the heaviest naturally produced element on Earth, but uranium is Earth’s heaviest element of significance. Over the subsequent eons, gravity will cause the remnants of stars, and hydrogen that had not yet become a star or did not fuse within a star, to coalesce into an accretion disk, and a new star with its attendant planets will form, although some scientists today believe that 95% of the star formation in our universe is completed. The Sun will take more than ten billion years to live its life cycle before becoming a white dwarf. Large stars burn much more quickly and can become supernovas after as little as ten million years of main-sequence burning. The rule is: the larger the star, the shorter its life.

The accretion disk from which the Sun and its planets were formed are currently argued to have appeared in a relatively short time, perhaps as little as 200,000 years, and the disk was originally a molecular cloud that may have been disturbed by a supernova. A "local" exploding star likely provided the bulk of our solar system's matter, and the entire mess gravitationally collapsed into the disk. In a mere 50 million years after formation, the Sun became compressed enough to initiate the sustained fusion that still powers it and will for several billion more years. Our solar system’s planets initially formed from clumps of heavier atoms, and the rocky planets formed in a region too hot for lighter elements and compounds to condense. Oxygen and iron, those two largest products of main-sequence burning, comprise nearly two-thirds of Earth’s mass.

Earth’s age is estimated to be about 4.6 billion years, formed fewer than 100 million years after the Sun did, and Earth’s formation has been the subject of a great deal of research and speculation. An estimate of Earth’s formation, published in 2020, has it happening in five million years. The paper presenting that estimate also challenged a long-standing hypothesis regarding how Earth got its water. Its hypotheses is based on studying elemental isotopes, predominantly iron’s. The most accepted hypothesis for many years has been that Earth was initially too hot to retain any “volatiles” such as water, and that it received its water via the bombardment of comets and “planetesimals” rich in water. That paper, however, presented the idea that water would have been part of Earth’s formation, and that Earth was outside of the Sun’s original “frost line,” so that it retained its original volatiles, while Venus wasn’t, and lost its original water. Also, that paper presented the idea that the impact that formed the Moon would have come from a planetesimal from a similar orbit, not one from farther out in the solar system.

In contrast, in 2019, a paper was published based on isotopic evidence of molybdenum, which concluded that Earth got its water from the impactor that formed the Moon, and that it came from the outer early solar system. In recent years, the hypotheses for the Moon’s formation have been challenged. The simplest hypothesis seems to be that the impactor was from a close neighbor, not a body from the outer solar system. Moon rocks obtained by NASA’s Apollo missions show that the oldest parts of the Moon’s surface are about the same age as Earth, although scientists are eager for more Moon rocks, selected from different parts of the Moon, as they suspect that their sample is biased, perhaps by the same event that rained rocks across the Moon’s face. Similarly, a hypothesized prominent event of early solar system formation was called the Late Heavy Bombardment. The reality of that event has been challenged in recent years. Instead of a Late Heavy Bombardment, it is now proposed that after “only” 100 million years or so, the solar system was largely cleared of the accretion disk’s debris, a recent finding supports the idea that by 4.4 bya, Earth had attained the water planet status that it has today, and there is evidence that the continents began forming then.

If the Hadean Eon ended 4.4 bya instead of the 4.0 bya that has been previously hypothesized, it gave life more time to perform its greatest feat ever: coming into existence.

Those ongoing controversies are fair examples of how today’s science works, with ongoing research with science’s constantly improving toolset, and competing hypotheses arise, to be subjected to more testing of new evidence, and I will be surprised if those issues are resolved in my lifetime, and if consensus is reached on how Earth got its water and how the Moon formed, will it be an accurate consensus?

NASA plans to send a probe in 2022 to 16 Psyche, an asteroid made almost entirely out of metal. It is thought to be the remnant of a planetesimal that was destroyed in the early solar system. Scientists have discovered meteorites that have magnetic fields, and a recent paper presents the argument that those magnetic meteorites came from a destroyed planetesimal that had a magnetic core, similar to Earth’s. It is more evidence of the early solar system’s prodigious violence.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have been working on the early life on Earth chapter. It is getting a pretty big overhaul – one of the most significant in my essay update – and I see this taking another week or so. Because of my mystical awakening, I know that the materialistic models of consciousness are false. But, my work is decidedly not some Creationist tract that argues for an Earth that is 6,000 years old, or that it is flat, or that the Moon landings were faked, or that Trump is a secret hero who will spring the trap on the Deep State any day now! When Trump finally leaves office, without a peep about the Deep State, I am going to have a lot to say about these Deep State fantasies and those who promoted them. I hope that an entire wing of New Age conspiracism has its credibility permanently removed. It really has been a tawdry spectacle, and I keep getting bombarded with it. But maybe they just count on an endless stream of new dupes to arrive.

I am not going to provide much on that chapter for now, but I will reproduce one statement, buried deeply in that chapter, below.

Best,

Wade


The diagrams used in this chapter are only intended to provide a glimpse of the incredible complexity of structure and chemistry that takes place at the microscopic level in organisms, and people can be forgiven for doubting that it is all a miraculous accident. I doubt it, too, as did Einstein.

Because I know that the materialistic models of consciousness are false, I have a hard time believing in the randomness and “blind watchmaker” explanations for the origin of life and subsequent evolution. While “intelligent design” arguments and evidence can be worth investigation and challenge, the theory of evolution has been misused to support materialism and its variants (such as atheism). In my opinion, the role that consciousness plays in the journey of life on Earth is far too subtle for most methods of today’s science to productively engage. That scientific exploration largely lies in the future, and will not resemble today’s science very much. For me, describing the blueprint (DNA) for proteins falls far short of accounting for how the products of catalyzed reactions are used to build and maintain cells and organisms. It would be like finding the directions for building nails and finished lumber, and thinking it explains how a house is built, from the planning to building the foundation to pounding the nails to installing the windows, and then concluding that the house built itself, in some kind of miraculous accident.

Even if today’s version of science can unravel all of that, to conclude that consciousness was not involved with that house’s construction will be nothing more than a belief, and a shaky one at that. But I will largely lay aside the issue of consciousness and evolution in this essay, other than to note that more developed brains allow for more sophisticated levels of thought to manifest. Following Knoll’s lead, this narrative, at least until this essay reaches the human journey, will be far more about process and history than it will intent. I consider evolution to be a fact of existence, although there is plenty of important debate and research on the mechanics of it, and I suspect that life on Earth came into existence in a naturalistic way, so that abiogenesis will be the prevailing hypothesis one day, even though scientists today can only make educated guesses on the subject, but I also believe that consciousness was there from the beginning.


Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am barreling along, and as usual, I am jumping around right now, revising and adding material, when the issues come up. It is like a house under construction, with quite a mess on the floor, and I am even just throwing links in sections at times, as placeholders for what I need to write about. I just drafted the below, which will come early in the essay.

Best,

Wade


This essay deals at length with evolutionary data and hypotheses, and I will briefly discuss my views on the subject. There is a school of thought that relegates all investigations of the past as exercises in history, not science. The so-called Big Bang is not an event that can be reproduced and studied, and its causes explored. The origin of life on Earth is similar to the Big Bang in that it is not observable, and even if life was created in the laboratory, it would not prove that life really began that way. Not only that, but the entire idea of continual descent with modification, leading from something microscopic to me, in four billion years or so of evolution, is a matter of history. That history can be investigated with the toolset of science, but like a murder verdict in court, the best that an investigation of the past can yield is certainty beyond a reasonable doubt, and it is debatable that evolutionary theory has reached that threshold.

Critics of evolutionary theory claim that evolutionary theory makes many unproven and unwarranted inferences, such as arguing that one set of fossils representing a species is intermediate between two other fossils, as an evolutionary link between them. All that can be made are inferences.

However, those inferences can be highly persuasive. I will present an example in geology, first. In 1900, humanity had not adduced much evidence yet, and the theory had yet to be posited that the continents could “drift.” The dismissed idea was revived generations later with the rise of plate tectonics, and ocean floors have since been mapped. The Hawaiian Islands are the terminus of an underwater mountain range that runs for more than 6,000 kilometers, which was discovered when the ocean floor was mapped. That trail of underwater mountains on the Pacific Ocean’s floor, the movement of the Pacific Plate that can be measured today, and the radioactive datings of the mountains all neatly align with the “inference” that the Hawaiian Islands are only the most recent mountains created by that “hotspot” as the Pacific Plate travels over it, and the hotspot is about 85 million years old, according to that interlocking data. The greater erosion of the older mountains is only more evidence to pile onto the inference. It is merely an inference that the hotspot created those mountains, but I do not know of anybody who disputes it, even though Young Earth advocates have tried to explain the calculated age of the chain away by challenging the consistency of radioactive decay and plate movements, but they are grasping at straws, in my opinion, much like I have seen Flat Earth advocates make their arguments, or those arguing for faked Moon landings and other conspiracist topics.

On the issue of evolution, much like that hotspot, scientists can measure DNA mutations (changes in the sequence), which are happening today, know how they happen, and the mutations in DNA are thought to be a key aspect of how species change. The first chapter of Darwin’s The Origin of Species is devoted to evolution due to domestication. In my lifetime, through selective breeding, the silver fox was domesticated. Darwin’s inference on domestication has been proven far beyond any reasonable doubt. In recent years, the most vexing problem of evolutionary theory – how novelty is generated, – has been a subject of intense investigation, and while DNA mutations are important, they may be more to “set” the change than initiate it. Similar to the moving hotspot, the key processes of evolutionary novelty are established fairly convincingly, and the only difference I can see between “macro” (the appearance of new species) and “micro” (variation with a species) evolution is how long the process is measured. Given enough time, it is not hard to see how microevolution becomes macroevolution, even though it has never been observed, as it takes thousands of years to happen, according to the prevailing theories. That scientists were able to greatly accelerate the hypothesized process, so that it could be seen in action, puts any reasonable doubt to rest on that evolutionary mechanism. Sure, it is only an inference that evolution works in those ways (mutation, sexual reproduction), but I am persuaded of its validity.

When scientists have three fossils, reliably dated, and the transition of features between them is evident, I am convinced that those three fossils depict evolutionary changes. In my studies of evolution, I have encountered many examples like that, and I am persuaded that evolution is a reality on Earth. I do not have much doubt on the general validity of the so-called tree of life, which depicts evolutionary descent relationships, on the way from the Last Universal Common Ancestor to all cellular life on Earth today. I can also accept that the first life arose from “lifeless” molecules, although the concept is mind-boggling and there is no evidence for that event and probably never will be. That can be called faith, but I do not consider it a great leap to get there. However, I also know that the materialistic models of consciousness are false; I believe that consciousness was there from the beginning, and likely guided the process somehow. I am also ready to accept that extraterrestrials planted the first life on Earth. I just need to see evidence that convinces me.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

This will be a brief post on a subject that I have written about plenty, and I wanted to put them under one roof. More posts are coming under this new thread, but they will be scattered over the coming months, as I work on the essay revision in earnest. A great deal of what I write about, as far as what the Fifth Epoch portends, relates to technologies that already exist, practices that already exist, and ideas that are well-known, at least in unorthodox corners. But they have not had fair hearings, and that is the point of this coming thread.

Without having a fair hearing, there is no way that orthodoxy can even have informed opinions on the issues, but this is a rampant condition. Long ago, I wrote an essay that touched on the subject, and I’ll provide some examples to start it off:

• As Noam stated long ago, the Propaganda Model predicts that it won’t even be discussable in the media, Ed and Noam have been libeled for their entire careers as media analysts, and it has even followed Ed beyond the grave;
• I have watched media attacks on Dennis since I met him, and even the talking heads in the free energy field libel him;
• The “skeptics” cannot string two logical thoughts together, when they are not being criminally dishonest;
• Vaccination and fluoridation are two examples of violent medical interventions that have never had fair hearings as to their safety and efficacy;
• It took more than 40 years for the information in the booklet that saved my father’s life to get a fair hearing, after that booklet was banned; similarly, fasting has come in from the lunatic fringe, and I constantly see articles today, from mainstream sources, on its miraculous effects, such as this one just the other day; what I have seen in the medical establishment is reminiscent of that totalitarian trope: “That which is not forbidden is compulsory.”
• Those “impossible” microscopes of Rife and Naessens are older than I am, and neither has ever had a fair hearing in orthodoxy, except when Rife’s microscope was new and a scientific sensation, before the medical racket’s sledgehammer came down on it, the same establishment that promoted asbestos cigarette filters.

I could easily make that list ten times as long, but that is a good start. As I see it, the reason for it all is scarcity and fear. My journey’s primary lesson on the integrity issue and Brian’s query on whether humanity is really a sentient species are the central issues of this situation. In our world of scarcity, fear, greed, and rampant evil, these are typical outcomes, and why humanity races to its self-destruction these days. In the Fifth Epoch, what we see today, in all directions, will seem like a bad dream. Fair hearings will be the order of the day in the Fifth Epoch, as nobody is protecting their turf, inflicting their self-serving ways, etc. Almost nothing of today’s world will survive in the Fifth Epoch, and nobody is going to miss it, except maybe the dark pathers, who will no longer have such fertile fields to plow.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

The latest former-official admission of the ET presence is an interesting one. As I have stated plenty, the most important aspect of the acknowledged ET presence will be the technologies that they came here with, as they will change how we live. Acknowledging the ET presence, by itself, “only” changes our story. What my work is really all about is helping ensure a harmless transition into the Fifth Epoch. That was the essence of our proposal to the DOE, and my work will become more relevant than ever, if there is open official acknowledgement of the ET presence. That Israeli official’s admission is likely not some loose-cannon report, but part of a plan. I know that the technologies are real, and the rest is noise, IMO.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Well, updating this chapter is taking longer than I thought, but for good reason. It is going to be the meat of the essay on the chemistry of life. Nearly all of the scientifically interesting innovations in biochemistry happened before the Cambrian Explosion. The rise of complex life was really not all that interesting, from a chemistry/physics perspective. I decided that with this essay update, the science would get a makeover, to make it broader, deeper, and actually easier to understand for laypeople. It is quite a challenge, but the kind that I love.

The last chapters of my big essay, beginning here, really won’t get changed that much, as they are matters of personal history, both mine and that of my fellow travelers, and my vision of the Fifth Epoch has not changed much at all, nor will my ideas on how to help us get there harmlessly. There will be some tweaks, but nothing will fundamentally change.

The chapters on the human Epochs will receive significant revisions, but the thrust of those chapters won’t change much. This is exciting work for me to do, when I get to be creative. It is possible that I will be able to devote the next few months to this, and if so, then I will largely finish the revision. If not, then I likely will not finish it until 2022, in my “spare” time. We’ll see how it goes. If I had to guess, the current version of my big essay is about 70% of the way to what I envision the next revision to be.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Here is an example of what I am working on. My graphic artist skills are a little short of professional ( ), but adequate for the points I am making. I use Visio to make my diagrams, and generally rob images from Wikimedia Commons. One of the key themes of that early life chapter will be what an energy dynamo a living cell is. That theme is already clear, but it will be far more explicit in the essay update. Attached are three image drafts that will go into the essay update.

Briefly, cell membranes are made of lipids (fat), which are great insulators. The same dynamic happens in prokaryotes (simple cell organisms such as bacteria) and eukaryotes (which have complex cells, such as all plants and animals). Electrons are stripped from “donor” molecules and sent through an electron transport chain. In a mitochondrion, which is the energy center of complex cells, and our bodies, by weight, are 10% mitochondria, electrons are stripped from food and sent through the electric transport chain toward an oxygen atom, which is the biggest electron hog next to fluorine (which is why aerobic respiration is what nearly all complex life uses). That oxygen “suction” sends electrons racing through the electron transport chain. Ultimately, those free electrons came from stripping them from hydrogen atoms, and once the electron is stripped off, what is left is a proton.

As the electrons race toward the oxygen atoms, the energy of their movement pushes protons across the inner membrane. There are two basic outcomes to pushing the protons across that membrane. The first is that the proton concentration is now greater on the far side of that membrane, so simple diffusion would compel the protons to migrate back to the original side, if there was a hole in the inner membrane for them to return by. The second and most important outcome is that pushing those protons across the membrane creates an electric potential across the membrane, in which the charges will equalize if given the chance. At the scale it happens in cells, that electric potential is the equivalent to that which drives lightning. The inner membrane hosts cellular machinery, such as the electron transport chain, which pushes those protons outside of the inner membrane.

Other cellular machinery allows the protons back in, and those rushing lightning bolts of protons flowing back inside the inner membrane power the “shaft” of a turbine, turning it just like a waterwheel or a crankshaft in a car’s engine. Bacteria have flagella, which are tails that propel them through the water of their environments, like the propeller on a boat. A flagellum is powered by that proton-driven shaft. That same turbine structure also makes ATP in both simple and complex cells. That ATP-making turbine spins at hundreds of times a second, and the human body has hundreds of quintillions of them (about 200,000,000,000,000,000,000) churning out ATP molecules, which provides all energy used in all cellular life on Earth. A human body produces more than its own weight in ATP each day.

Pound-for-pound, a complex cell consumes energy 100,000 times as fast as the Sun produces it. Life is an incredibly energy-intensive process. This is one of the several makeovers that that chapter is receiving. As with all of my writings like this, the tale grows with the telling. We’ll see how big that chapter gets, and whether I will need to split it in two. If I do, I will likely split it into simple and complex life.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

At this time, I plan to take 2021 off and finish my essay update, and follow it with a book, which will only be an abridged version of my big essay. I had pressure to finish my big essay the first time that I wrote it, in 2014. This time, I think that I won’t have that pressure, so I expect it to be a polished effort, more so than my work has been in the past. I am going at it now, and don’t plan to let up until I get it done. I may not have another stint like this in my lifetime, but we’ll see. When Manufacturing Consent came out, Ed was 63, only a little older than I am now, and his next decade was his most productive as a public writer. Ed is one of my writing models, and if I can do it until I am 92, like Ed did, it will be a very good run indeed, and maybe the dent I make will be big enough to help humanity turn the corner.

Best,

Wade

[Reinhard]

Posted by Wade Frazier (here)
Hi:
....... and maybe the dent I make will be big enough to help humanity turn the corner.

Best,

Wade

..... I'm SURE you will !!!!............you already have made a noticable dent so far

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Writing comprehensively like I do is quite a process. It is often like throwing a bunch of spaghetti against the wall, and then rearranging it to make the picture I want to draw. In the past couple of weeks, I have been writing on various ideas that I want to get across, each one kind of independently. When I finish a process like that, I then take the ideas and meld them together. That is where my Artisan nature comes to the fore, as I reorganize and interweave the topics, to get across a comprehensive view. The final version will likely look a bit different from the below, but it is what I patched together this morning, and I like how it looks. What you can’t see in these forum posts of section drafts are the references and links to other areas of my site, and the big essay in particular. Also, I am inserting quite a few visual aids, some of which I attached to a recent post.

As I recently stated, nearly all of the essential chemical processes of biology were invented by bacteria and archaea. What has happened in the eon of complex life has been relatively uninteresting, from a chemistry perspective. Oxygenic photosynthesis and aerobic respiration is about all that complex life does today, and anaerobic environments are nearly all buried beneath the soil or sediments. Bacteria and archaea invented DNA, ATP, respiration, photosynthesis, reproduction, nitrogen-fixing, and carbon-fixing, and complex life inherited all of that from that simple-celled life that invented all of that over billions of years. Complex life is just Johnny-come-lately, as we have our ephemeral day in the sun.

Because I decided to take the next year off, I am going to be going at it all in a breadth and depth that I have only fantasized about. This is going to be fun. So, the below are the first sections of the reworked early life on earth chapter. There is a lot more to come in that chapter, and I suspect that I will break the chapter into two pieces: simple life and complex life. We’ll see how it turns out.

Best,

Wade


The fossil record unearthed so far is too rich, in aggregate, to provide creationists much opportunity to challenge the idea of evolution. But creationists can credibly challenge mainstream science’s story of the origin of life on Earth, which has been called “by far the weakest strut of the chassis of modern biology.” As I write this in 2020, the hypotheses regarding the origin of life on Earth are little more than inspired guesses. Nick Lane has argued that alkaline oceanic volcanic vents (AKA white smokers) are where life on Earth may have first appeared. Others have suggested freshwater hydrothermal vents, which is close to Darwin’s conception. Others have proposed that life may have first evolved on Mars and was transported to Earth by meteorite. I strongly doubt that today’s approach to science will ever conclusively describe how life on Earth began, but it is also not very relevant to this essay, and I will put the issue aside, as I did with the Big Bang and the idea of an expanding universe.

When life first appeared on Earth, the evolutionary process that led to humanity began. The USA's population has more doubt about evolution than any other Western nation, and that seems to be because Biblical literalism is still strong here. In all other Western nations, there is virtually no controversy over evolution as a fact of existence, and those nations view the controversy over evolution in the USA with befuddlement.

There are two primary characteristics of life, and what can be observed in human civilizations are often only more complex iterations of them, which are:

• Life harnessed energy so that it could manipulate matter to create itself;
• Life created information so that it could reproduce itself.

One aspect manipulated matter and energy, and the other was the “program” for manipulating it. Matter and energy could be manipulated to either build a living structure or operate it (or disassemble it), and the organism always made the “decision.”

All cellular life on Earth has these characteristics:

• A constant supply of carbon, for creating organic molecules;
• Energy to drive all necessary chemical reactions, including those that form huge molecules such as proteins and DNA;
• Catalysts to accelerate and control chemical reactions;
• Waste removal, which entropy necessitates, and which allows the reactions to proceed;
• A means of isolation, to segregate the cell from the surrounding environment;
• Information that can be inherited, such as that coded in RNA and DNA.

For viable cells to form, many problems had to be resolved, such as concentrating the necessary molecules, linkages to form the huge molecules of life, membranes that are selectively permeable, and the interdependency of DNA, RNA, and proteins. Some scientists argue that those problems would have been so difficult to solve that the likelihood that such events were random is nil, which supports arguments for some kind of intelligence behind the process. Andrew Knoll sensibly stated that the story that modern science tells of the journey of life on Earth is one of history and process, not intent.

Because I know that the materialistic models of consciousness are false, I have a hard time believing in the randomness and “blind watchmaker” explanations for the origin of life and subsequent evolution. While “intelligent design” arguments and evidence can be worth investigation and challenge, the theory of evolution has been misused to support materialism and its variants (such as atheism). I believe that the role that consciousness plays in the journey of life on Earth is far too subtle for most methods of today’s science to productively engage. That scientific exploration largely lies in the future, and will not resemble today’s science very much. Describing the blueprint (DNA) for proteins does not account for how the products of catalyzed reactions are used to build and maintain cells and organisms. It would be like finding the directions for producing nails and finished lumber, and thinking that it explains how a house is built, from the planning to building the foundation to pounding the nails to installing the windows, and then concluding that the house built itself, in some kind of miraculous accident.

Even if today’s version of science can unravel all of that, to conclude that consciousness was not involved with that house’s construction will be nothing more than a belief. But I will largely lay aside the issue of consciousness and evolution in this essay, other than to note that more developed brains allow for more sophisticated levels of thought to manifest. Following Knoll’s lead, this narrative, at least until this essay reaches the human journey, will be far more about process and history than it will intent. I accept evolution to be a fact of existence, although there is plenty of important debate and research on the mechanics of it, and I suspect that life on Earth came into existence in a naturalistic way, so that abiogenesis (the idea that life first arose from non-living matter) will be the prevailing hypothesis one day, even though scientists today can only make educated guesses on the subject, but I also believe that consciousness was there from the beginning. One of the oldest philosophical ideas, which scientists still pursue, is that consciousness is an aspect of all matter.

While there is no consensus among scientists regarding how life first appeared, it is currently thought that all life on Earth today descended from one organism, a creature known today as the Last Universal Common Ancestor (“LUCA”). The reasoning is partly that all life has a preference for using certain types of molecules. Many molecules with the same atomic structure can form mirror images of themselves. That mirror-image phenomenon is called chirality. In nature, such mirror images occur randomly, but life prefers one mirror image over the other. In all life on Earth, proteins are virtually without exception left-handed, while sugars are right-handed. If there was more than one line of descent, life with different “handedness” would be expected, but it has never been found, which has led scientists to think that LUCA is the only survivor that is ancestral to all life on Earth today. All other lineages died out (the likely answer, I believe, and there was probably hundreds of millions of years of evolution on Earth before LUCA lived). As this essay will explore, this is far from the only instance when such seminal events are suspected to have happened only once. Also, the unique structure of DNA and many enzymes are common to all life, and they did not have to form the way that they did. That they came through different ancestral lines is extremely unlikely.

In 2018, scientists published a paper on their molecular clock evidence to date the appearance of LUCA between 4.5 bya and 3.5 bya. With recent estimates of the end of the Hadean Eon at 4.4 bya, that gives life at most “only” 400-to-900 million years to come into being and evolve to LUCA. The oldest fossils discovered so far date to perhaps 4.2 bya, and others to about 3.5 bya. The most impressive early fossils are the remains of bacterial colonies, and such colonies exist today, in extreme environments where they cannot be eaten. The evidence for them is dated to about 3.4 bya. If those bacterial colonies existed 3.4 bya, then the first life considerably predated that, as the first life was chemosynthetic, and the did not split water like cyanobacteria do, which almost certainly performed the initial energy capture for those colonies, called stromatolites. With the nature of the evidence and debate today, dating LUCA’s appearance to around 4.0 bya seems reasonable.

Above all else, life is an energy acquisition process. All life exploits the potential energy in various atomic and molecular arrangements, or captures energy directly, as in photosynthesis. Over the journey of life on Earth, organisms developed two broad strategies for getting their energy: from non-living sources (autotrophy), or from life (heterotrophy).

Autotrophy:

• Chemosynthesis – Exploiting the potential energy in inorganic molecules;
• Photosynthesis – Capturing the Sun’s photon energy.

Heterotrophy:

• Grazing – Heterotrophs feed on autotrophs, which does not necessarily kill the prey;
• Predation – One species feeds on another, usually killing the prey;
• Parasitism – One species feeds on another, but does not necessarily kill the prey;
• Mutualism – Both species benefit from the relationship;
• Commensalism – One species benefits from the relationship, while the other is unharmed;
• Detrivory – One species eats dead life, as well as life byproducts such as excrement.

Those are general categories, with many subcategories and overlaps. For example, the greatest symbiosis of plant and animal ever was the appearance of flowering plants on the evolutionary scene. Instead of trying to protect themselves from hungry animals, plants devised the strategy of feeding them instead, and fruit is designed to be eaten, as it spreads the seeds and reduces the energetic cost of reproduction for plants. But not all fruit-eating animals help spread viable seeds, such animals are called “fruit predators,” and there are also seed predators. Scientists are not always sure what feeding categories a species belongs to, or whether they belong in multiple categories, such as the oxpecker, as it not only eats parasites on African megafauna, but also makes and enlarges wounds and drinks the blood of their hosts, so it engages in both mutualism and parasitism. Cannibalism can be either predatory or an act of detrivory.

Entropy is another important concept for this essay. Entropy is, in its essence, the tendency of hot things to cool off. The concept is now introduced to students as energy dispersal. Even though science really does not know what energy is, it can measure its effect. At the molecular level, entropy is the tendency of mass to become disordered over time, as the random motion of molecules spreads in collisions with other molecules, until the interacting molecules have the same temperature. Life had to overcome entropy in order to exist, as it brought order out of disorder and maintained it while alive, and it takes energy to do that. The prevailing theory is that net entropy can only increase, and life has to create more entropy in its surroundings so that it can reduce entropy internally and produce and maintain the order that sustains itself. Life is called a negentropic phenomenon, in which it uses energy to reverse entropy to make the order of its organism’s structures, and it is continually using energy to reverse the natural entropy that is called decay.

In all cases, captured electrons are the basis for life. The discoverer of Vitamin C, Albert Szent-Györgyi, won his Nobel Prize for his research into how life generates its energy, particularly through the citric acid cycle, and famously stated: “Life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest.” In his seminal What is Life?, Schrödinger initially downplayed the role of energy in life, to later write a mea culpa, after his colleagues protested his depiction. That electron necessary for life is stripped from a “donor” molecule. The most important electron donor is hydrogen, because after the electron is donated, a lone proton is left, and that proton is used for other key life processes. In a sense, life is largely about breaking hydrogen atoms apart and reconstituting them when the necessary reactions are finished. Sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium are also important electron donors, and the positively charged ions, after the electron has been donated, are also important to key life processes. But they cannot donate protons; only hydrogen can.

Early life was chemosynthetic, as it exploited the potential energy of chemicals. The chemosynthetic ideal is capturing chemicals fresh to new environments that have yet to react with other chemicals, which supports the hypothesis that has life’s first appearance on Earth in volcanic vents on the ocean floor or in freshwater environments, although the oceanic hypothesis is more popular. The earliest life forms took advantage of fresh chemicals introduced to watery environments. Life had to be opportunistic and quick in order to capture that energy before other molecules did. Exploiting the potential energy in the disequilibrium between energy states is how life works.

The critical feature of earliest life had to be a way to reproduce itself, and DNA is common to all cellular life today. The DNA that exists today was unlikely to be a feature of the first life, unless intelligent design is invoked or the introduction of life from an extraterrestrial source (but how would that life have originated?). The most popular hypothesis is that RNA is DNA’s ancestor. The mechanism today is that DNA makes RNA, and RNA makes proteins. DNA, RNA, proteins, sugars, and fats are the most important molecules in organisms, and very early on, protein “learned” the most important trick of all, which was an energy innovation: facilitate biological reactions. If we think about activation energy at the molecular level, it is the energy that crashes molecules into each other, and if they are crashed into each other fast enough and hard enough, the reaction becomes more likely. But that is an incredibly inefficient way to do it. It is like putting a key in a room with a lock in a door and shaking up the room in the hope that the key will insert itself into the lock during one of its collisions with the room’s walls. Proteins make the process far easier, and those proteins are called enzymes.

Enzymes speed up chemical reactions and they do it as in the above analogy, but as if a person entered that room, picked up the key, and inserted it into the lock. That took far less effort than shaking up the room a million times. Enzymes are like hands that grab two molecules and bring them into alignment so that the key inserts into the lock. The lock-and-key analogy is the standard way to explain enzymes to non-scientists. Enzymes make chemical reactions happen millions and even billions of times faster than they would occur in the enzymes’ absence. Life would never have grown beyond some microscopic curiosities, if life would have survived at all, without the assistance that enzymes provide. Almost all enzymes are proteins, which are generally huge molecules with intricate folds. The animation of human glyoxalase below depicts a standard enzyme. (Source: Wikimedia Commons; the zinc ions that make it work are the purple balls)

Enzymes look like Rube Goldberg-ish contraptions when their function is considered: huge molecules are used to make small ones interact. Proteins have a four-level structure, and the second level is held in place by hydrogen bonds. Below is a diagram of the kinds of bonds in the third level. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The enzyme’s pair of “hands” is like that of a robot on an assembly line, putting two parts together and passing the assembly to the next stage. An enzyme can catalyze millions of reactions per second. All of today’s life on Earth would cease to exist in the absence of enzymes. Other than the ability to reproduce itself and produce proteins, speeding up reactions by millions of times is life’s most important “trick” and its greatest energy innovation. Adenosine triphosphate ("ATP") is a coenzyme used to fuel all known cellular processes. Poisons and drugs generally disable enzymes by plugging or wrecking the “lock” so that the intended “key” will not fit. Cyanide kills by disabling a key enzyme that produces ATP, which induces an energy shortage at the cellular level. Enzymes can also tear molecules apart, similar in concept to laying out an animal on a butcher’s table and cleaving it at key junctions to make the selected cut.

One argument by intelligent design advocates is that proteins are incredibly complex, and that if the four levels did not work perfectly, the protein would not work properly. Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s theory of evolution was developed before the rise of genetics. When genetics became a science in the early 20^th century, the “modern synthesis” was developed to marry genetics to evolutionary theory. When DNA’s structure was finally determined in the 1950s, DNA’s mutations updated an old idea about mutations in evolution, which finally led to specific mechanisms. All that today’s science can say about DNA is that it provides the code to make proteins and RNA, and its structure helps determine when those proteins are made (called regulation of gene expression). A prominent hypothesis today is that RNA initially had the role that proteins do today, and more than three bya, proteins replaced key RNA functions.

When results were announced on the project to map human DNA, which unexpectedly stated that nearly all human DNA seemed to have some kind of function (not only making proteins, but regulating gene expression), a blistering attack was published on the findings. One observer thought that the attack’s viciousness was partly due to the ammunition that it would give intelligent design advocates, if all of DNA was functional, without the “junk” that was thought to be in it. Since that event, scientists now look at DNA as far less “junky” than they used to. A new field of science has arisen, called epigenetics, which studies inherited traits that are not coded in DNA.

Another vital invention of life is creating the “room” in which those reactions can take place. The “rooms” of the first life forms were created by membranes, which are comprised of proteins and fats. As with the first RNA, DNA, and proteins, the first membranes may not have resembled today’s very much. Membranes define life, keeping it separate from other molecules in Earth’s brew.

One tenet of evolutionary theory is that a biological novelty had to provide immediate benefit (or, at least, no harm), or else it would not have survived. A related idea is that the history of life on Earth is filled with instances when a biological feature evolved for one purpose (and that some features were initially purposeless but harmless, and eventually found a use) was used for another purpose, when the opportunity arose, and is called exaptation, and Darwin originated the idea. Each mutation of a section of DNA that codes for proteins (called a gene) changes the RNA or protein that is made from it. While it might seem like any change can ruin a protein, researchers have discovered many ways that genes can change and not compromise the function of the protein built from it. The process may be far more flexible and robust than it might initially appear.

Of those key elements necessary for life as we know it, the most diverse is carbon, with that half-filled outer electron shell. Carbon provides the “backbone” for life’s chemistry, and is the foundational element of DNA, RNA, sugars, proteins, fats, and virtually all other components of life. Carbon can form one, two, three, and four bonds with itself and so forms the most diverse bonds with itself of all elements, and an entire branch of chemistry is devoted to carbon, called organic chemistry. Organic molecules are by far the largest known to science. During my first day of organic chemistry class, the professor observed that because the primary use of hydrocarbons was burning them to fuel the industrial age, we were living in “the age of waste,” as hydrocarbons are a treasure trove of raw materials. In the eyes of an organic chemist, burning fossil hydrocarbons to fuel our industrial world is like making Einstein dig ditches or making Pavarotti wash dishes for a living.

Nitrogen and phosphorus are the most vital elements for life after carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. In its pure state in nature, nitrogen, like hydrogen and oxygen, is a diatomic molecule. Hydrogen in nature is single-bonded to itself, oxygen is double-bonded, and nitrogen is triple-bonded. Because of that triple bond, nitrogen will not significantly react with other substances unless the temperature (activation energy) is very high. Most nitrogen compounds in nature are created when the nitrogen and oxygen that comprise more than 99% of Earth’s atmosphere react under lightning’s influence to create nitric oxide, which then reacts with oxygen to form nitrogen dioxide, and atmospheric water combines with that to make nitrous and nitric acids, which then fall to Earth’s surface in precipitation. Certain kinds of bacteria “fix” the nitrogen from the acidic rain into biological systems. Also, some bacteria can fix nitrogen directly from atmospheric nitrogen, but it is an energy-intensive operation that uses the energy in eight ATP molecules to fix each atom of nitrogen, which uses enzymes to reduce the necessary activation energy. For the earliest life on Earth, nitrogen would have been essential, and some nitrogen is fixed at volcanic vents, where life may have first appeared.

The nitrogen cycle is one of life’s most important, in which some bacteria fix nitrogen for biological use and others release nitrogen back to the atmosphere. Nitrogen’s relatively inert nature and preference for being bonded to itself is why it is the dominant atmospheric gas, at 78% of the atmosphere’s volume. It has held that dominant status for billions of years.

Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, has been generally decreasing as an atmospheric gas for billions of years, and has consistently declined for the past 100-150 million years. The geochemical process is like nitrogen's in that atmospheric water combines with carbon dioxide to form a weak acid, which then falls to Earth in precipitation. But carbon is in the same elemental family as an abundant crustal element: silicon. Carbon replaces the silicon in crustal compounds and turns silicates into carbonates in a process called silicate weathering. Most of Earth’s primordial carbon dioxide was probably removed by this process, although the exact mechanisms are in dispute. In all paleoclimate studies, carbon dioxide is a prominent variable, if not the prominent variable, for determining Earth’s surface temperature. But perhaps as early as three bya, life became a significant source of carbon removal from the atmosphere, as life forms died and sank to the ocean floor, were subsequently buried by sedimentation, and tectonic plate movements further buried them into Earth’s crust and mantle.

More carbon dioxide was removed from the atmosphere by those processes than was reintroduced to the atmosphere by volcanism and other processes. That removal and reintroduction of carbon to Earth’s surface is called the carbon cycle. As carbon dioxide continues to be removed from the atmosphere, life will have a harder time surviving, to eventually go extinct, as first plants, then animals decline and go extinct, and it will be back to microbes ruling the Earth until the Sun’s expansion into a red giant destroys Earth. The earthly end of complex life’s reign may be a billion years away, but might come much sooner.

When life first appeared, it was single-celled and simple, and such organisms are called prokaryotes today. Below is a diagram of a typical prokaryotic cell. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

This chapter’s diagrams only provide a glimpse of the incredible complexity of structure and chemistry that takes place at the microscopic level in organisms, and people can be forgiven for doubting that it is all a miraculous accident. I doubt it, too, as did Einstein, as did the cofounder of evolutionary theory, Wallace.

The key processes in all life are energetic, as without that, all life quickly comes to a halt. The manipulation of electrons and protons are central to energy generation and use in all life, and in all cellular life, generating energy in and across membranes are the key energetic processes. Hydrogen atoms stripped of their electrons yield the protons necessary for essential life processes, and below is a diagram of the basic dynamic.

Here is a narrative of those vital processes. Electrons stripped from donor molecules are sent down electron transport chains toward a molecule that needs an electron. The electron’s motion down the electron transport chain provides the energy to power proteins embedded in the membranes to push protons outside of the membrane. Membranes are primarily made of fat, which is a great insulator. When protons are pushed outside of the membrane like that, two dynamics arise. One is that the protons are more numerous outside of the membrane than inside it, and the process of diffusion will tend to push those protons back across the membrane (they create pressure on the membrane), to equalize their concentrations on both side of the membrane. But far more importantly, as a proton has a net electric charge, pushing the proton outside of the membrane creates an electric potential between both sides of the membrane, so that space inside the membrane has a net negative charge, and the space outside the membrane has a net positive charge. Like a thundercloud and a mountaintop, that charge will equalize if it can, which is how lightning is produced. At the microscopic scale, that electric potential across that membrane has the equivalent electric potential that lightning possesses, which is a thousand times the capacity of household wiring.

Other machinery in the membranes accepts those protons, as they stream back into the space inside the membrane like little lightning bolts, which equalizes both the proton concentration and electric potential across the membrane. In bacteria, those streaming protons drive two pieces of cellular machinery in particular. The most important is when those protons enter a “turbine” in the membrane called ATP Synthase, and like a waterwheel, that stream of protons through the “turbine” spins ATP Synthase, which takes ADP (two phosphates) and makes ATP (three phosphates). That ATP-making turbine spins at hundreds of times a second, and a human body has hundreds of quintillions of them (about 200,000,000,000,000,000,000) churning out ATP molecules, which provides all energy used in all cellular life on Earth. A human body produces more than its own weight in ATP each day. Below is a diagram of that process in a mitochondrion, which is the primary energy production process in eukaryotes (which have complex cells, such as all plants and animals), and it essentially works the same in prokaryotes (which have simple cells, such as bacteria).

In bacteria that can actively move, for instance, there is another proton “turbine” in the membrane, which drives the flagellum that powers their movement, as can be seen in the below diagram.

Briefly, cell membranes are made of lipids (fat), which are great insulators. The same dynamic happens in prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Electrons are stripped from “donor” molecules and sent through an electron transport chain. In a mitochondrion, which is the energy center of complex cells, electrons are stripped from food and sent through the electric transport chain toward an oxygen atom, which is the biggest electron hog next to fluorine (which is why aerobic respiration is what nearly all complex life uses). That oxygen “suction” sends electrons racing through the electron transport chain. Ultimately, those free electrons came from stripping them from hydrogen atoms, and once the electron is stripped off, what is left is a proton.

As the electrons race toward the oxygen atoms, the energy of their movement pushes protons across the inner membrane. There are two basic outcomes to pushing the protons across that membrane. The first is that the proton concentration is now greater on the far side of that membrane, so simple diffusion would compel the protons to migrate back to the original side, if there was a hole in the inner membrane for them to return by. The second and most important outcome is that pushing those protons across the membrane creates an electric potential across the membrane, in which the charges will equalize if given the chance. At the scale it happens in cells, that electric potential is the equivalent to that which drives lightning. The inner membrane hosts cellular machinery, such as the electron transport chain, which pushes those protons outside of the inner membrane.

Other cellular machinery allows the protons back in, and those rushing lightning bolts of protons flowing back inside the inner membrane power the “shaft” of a turbine, turning it just like a waterwheel or a crankshaft in a car’s engine. Bacteria have flagella, which are tails that propel them through the water of their environments, like the propeller on a boat. A flagellum is powered by that proton-driven shaft. That same turbine structure also makes ATP in both simple and complex cells.

Prokaryotes do not have organelles such as mitochondria, chloroplasts, and nuclei, but even the simplest cell is a marvel of complexity. If we could shrink ourselves so that we could stand inside an average bacterium, we would be astounded at its complexity, as molecules move here and there, are brought inside the bacterium’s membrane, used to generate energy and build structures, and waste products are ejected from the organism. Cellular division would be an amazing sight.

The most significant branch of evolution’s tree of life may have been the first, when bacteria split into two branches; one branch is called Bacteria and the other is Archaea. Darwin’s notion of slowly accumulating differences through descending organisms gradually leading to new species is confounded at the single-celled level in particular, as microbes swap DNA with abandon. The so-called tree of life at the microbe level better resembles a web. The classifications in the evolutionary tree of life are by no means settled, with constant disputes and changes, but most scientists still think that it is a tree, which gets webbier toward the roots.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

With my announced intention to take 2021 off and write, it takes a lot of time pressure off of me, and I’ll “reward” myself when finishing drafts like yesterday’s with forum posts on other topics. I am constantly reading, and want to comment on current events a little. Yesterday, I read this from RFK, Jr.’s latest book. I have written before on how he endorsed JFK and the Unspeakable, and his latest book leaves no doubt on his views on his father’s and uncle’s murders: they were related.

RFK, Jr. wrote perceptively on the right-wing version of the Deep State, which is largely a paranoid fantasy, and I am still bombarded with stuff like Trump the Hero is going the spring the trap on the Deep State any day now, such as here. I am sure that this charade will last until the inauguration, and even after that, those conspiracists will concoct more fantasies about the issue. After the inauguration, I will have something to say about this issue, and I hope that huge swath of conspiracy-mongers is permanently discredited in the aftermath. But people can believe anything, no matter the evidence, but all of that QAnon and similar fantasies should soon go the way of the dinosaurs.

That said, there were certainly limitations in his work, such as the notion that the USA was once some kind of republic without imperial pretensions, as he quoted John Quincy Adams, when Adams was an arch-imperialist, and the USA was born, in George Washington’s words, as an “infant empire.”

The so-called “Deep State” that RFK, Jr. wrote about is closer to the truth, but does not even touch on the GCs, and I doubt that David Rockefeller was one.

RFK, Jr. has strong stands on vaccination, and particularly goes after Bill Gates, for good reason. But I want to draw attention to Richard Moskowitz’s masterpiece, which I have written on before. Here is a brief YouTube video interview of him, which is essentially a summary of parts of his book, and here is a good summary by him, here. The end of his essay is ominous, in that it was written before the pandemic. The pandemic is a great opportunity for the vaccination racketeers to further embed themselves, sucking the body politic.

Best,

Wade