WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

Hi:

Back to the human journey. In food chains, the amount of energy converted to flesh at each stage is around 10%. So, in a food chain that has five levels (let’s say a marine ecosystem that has photosynthesizers (plankton), grazers, small fish that eat the grazers, larger fish eat them, and then the largest predator in the ecosystem eats them), the apex predator gets 0.01% of the energy provided by the plants, but plants only convert about 1% of the sunlight into energy, so the apex predator is getting 0.0001% of the ecosystem’s available energy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_levels

With that energy efficiency, the apex predator must have a large area to patrol to get its energy. Territorialism is largely an energy game, whereby an animal protects its energy supply by fighting off competitors, usually other members of its species.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territory_(animal)

The higher on the food chain, the more likely that an animal will be territorial, and since birds and mammals dominate the land-based ecosystems, they are the ones that engage in most territorial behavior. The political boundaries on maps today is merely ape territorialism writ large. The elites are the apex predators of those polities, and reaping the energy of its human-dominated food chain is its primary predilection.

In hunter-gatherer societies of 30K years ago in Europe, it took around 10 square kilometers (4 square miles) to feed a family, or about one square mile per person. A pure hunter instead of a gatherer society needs ten times the land, as it moves up the food chain. When the use of agricultural animals and farming developed during the Bronze Age, it took about 1% of the land to feed a family that hunter-gathers needed, so the energy efficiency, as far as human consumption went, rose by 100 times or 10,000%. A medieval farmer needed only 10% of the land that a Bronze Age farmer needed, for another 1,000% improvement in energy efficiency. In the 19th century, an Asian rice farmer was another 500% more efficient than the medieval farmer. Today’s Japanese rice farmer is another 50% more efficient than that 19th century farmer, and is ten thousand times as efficient at wrenching energy from the land as those Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherers (see Lunine’s Earth, p. 299). Far more than any other factor, that dynamic has defined the human journey.

That Japanese society is not only getting ten thousand times the energy from a piece of land as hunter-gatherers did, but they are also getting a huge boost from the energy supplied by fossil fuels. Because Japan is no longer able to plunder its neighbors for its energy, such as when Japan invaded Manchuria, it uses its energy about 50% more efficiently than the USA does for generating a dollar of GNP, as you can see in the chart attached to this post:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post546922

Americans are the champions of Earthly energy consumption, consuming about eighty times the energy that fuels their bodies. The energy surplus is what all civilizations have always ridden on. As you can see from the above, gains in energy efficiency kept declining as humans more intensively worked the land to extract energy. As you can see in this table:

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

the gains in energy efficiency for each stage of the human existence kept shrinking. It is just another representation of that trend. It is currently estimated that about 40% of the planet’s primary production, meaning the solar energy captured by photosynthesis, has been commandeered by humanity, as it dominates virtually all ecosystems. About 90% of the world’s large, predatory fish at the apex of the marine ecosystems have been killed off by human fishing operations since 1950 (see Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down, p. 145). After the apex predators were all killed off (many sharks are currently endangered species), humanity has been working its way down the food chain. Like Peak Oil, humanity is quickly burning through Earth’s marine ecosystems. These are the kinds of dynamics of why we have been living during Earth’s sixth mass extinction event for the past 50K years or so:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/upcoming.htm#_edn5

But let’s go back to the beginning of civilization. As I have stated, all the great apes except for bonobos are male-dominated, and they use violence to maintain their dominance, as well as Machiavellian plotting:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...bos#post537104

What I call the Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer, when humans invaded “virgin” ecosystems and quickly killed off all the easy meat, was far from idyllic on the human relations front. As the blitzkrieg advanced across the frontiers, territoriality would not have been an issue, as a band only had to move on to the next valley and plunder it. Because the only possessions that humans had were those that they could carry, material greed was not yet as concept. But the relations between the sexes were anything but idyllic. The clues that we have partly come from modern-day hunter-gatherers. In the Inuit culture, stealing women from neighboring bands was so prevalent that killing a strange male before even asking questions was normal (see Wrangham’s Catching Fire, pp. 168-169). The primary reason was not for the sex the women could provide, but food preparation and domestic services. A man could not hunt and run a household. Sex was a “bonus.”

In New Guinea, stealing women from neighboring tribes, also for the domestic duties they could perform, was normal. This dynamic is so widespread among “primitive” peoples that researchers have stated that in all small-scale societies, all men have a “strictly economic need for a wife and a hearth” (See Wrangham’s Catching Fire, p. 168). The social organization was not much different than chimpanzees, as far as male violence dominating the social organization. Only when relative economic abundance came to chimpanzees did the bonobo appear and end male dominance:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post537104

Similarly, the village stage of primitive agriculture is when women were most equal to men, at least until the industrial age. As I have written, people have tended to idealize those times. They were not so wonderful, for many reasons. When primitive villages appeared at the beginning of the Domestication Revolution, humans shrank by several inches from their hunter-gatherer ancestors. While more people could exist on a square mile (early agriculture was around ten times as energy efficient as hunting-gathering), they also did not get as much energy per person as a hunter-gatherer did, which stunted their growth. Those were Stone Age peoples who had not yet learned to smelt metal. They could not easily deforest the land. Their agricultural methods were girdling trees to kill them, planting crops on what was formerly a shaded forest floor, and in not too many years their efforts depleted the soils of their nutrients, as well as burned up all the firewood, so the village had to move. Not much of the food procured in primitive agriculture could be eaten raw, but had to be cooked. Also, the village had to be near a body of water. That body of water also often provided a transportation lane that was usually around 100 times as energy efficient as carrying goods.

The primitive village was built around a briefly deforested patch near water, where the firewood and soil fertility was depleted in about a generation, so the people had to move to a virgin patch of woods, near water, where the cycle could be repeated. In essence, the village thoroughly depleted its energy supply, and when it was used up they moved where they could plunder more. It was the same dynamic that the hunter-gatherers did with the megafauna, just at a more sophisticated level of technology and social organization.

Territorialism reared its head with a vengeance in the waning days of the hunter-gather era, as all the easy meat was rendered extinct, and hunters killed each other with regularity as their territories shrank, both from the growth in the human population and the lack of meat. Turning to domesticating plants and animals is now thought to have been brought on by population pressures, and it is now thought that domestication did not take long, in as little as a human lifetime for rapidly reproducing life forms. The fox was domesticated in 35 generations (with pronounced effects seen by 10) by modern scientists:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox

The likely scenario for learning how to smelt metal was some perceptive people noticed that some hearth stones melted and produced metal. Copper, gold, and silver are all in the same elemental family, and because of their non-reactive properties could be found in nuggets. Copper was the first “industrial” metal worked (other than iron meteorites that people might find), and the melting point of copper is within the temperatures that can be found in a hearth. Other metals like tin also had relatively low melting points, and the Bronze Age was born in the Fertile Crescent a little more than five thousand years ago, which was after thousands of years of primarily village life:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age#Near_East

Smelting metals became a huge advantage for humans. Before metals were smelted, humans used digging sticks for planting crops. About the same time that metals were smelted, the ox was domesticated, and plow agriculture then began:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plow#Ard

Plowing had huge short-term energy advantages. It broke up the soil so that crop roots could easily grow, and plowing would mix the soil so that the deeper, as-yet undepleted soil, could be brought to the surface, and plowing also killed “weeds” that grew, making room for plants to grow that humans could digest. The problem with plow agriculture is that it ultimately wrecks the soils. Those exposed soils eventually wash and blow away to the oceans. About a quarter of the world’s topsoil has been lost since World War II, in a prodigious orgy of deforestation and plow agriculture, as humans have shoved aside all other species in their desperation and greed. Milpa farming has been sustainable for thousands of years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milpa

engaged in by Stone Age peoples, in swidden style, so some primitive agriculture has been sustainable, but only when it was practiced at the Stone Age level. Pasturing animals on fallow ground, where their droppings could fertilize the soil, is an ancient practice. But in the end, Bronze Age deforestation and plow agriculture, as well as grazing animals, turned the forest that once ran from Morocco to Afghanistan into semi-desert in many places, as well as real deserts, in a process known today as desertification. Where deforestation was followed by herders, the herds ate any attempts for the forests to regenerate. The entire Mediterranean region was eventually deforested, long after the Fertile Crescent and vicinity was deforested:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post543474

The Bronze Age led to Western civilization, built on the increasing energy yields afforded by deforestation and plow agriculture. When civilization appeared, women’s status universally declined. They gave birth to the work force, so they were a prized asset in those increasingly patriarchal times. Stone Age peoples could also form civilization as they did in the New World, but they did not have nearly the energy efficiency as those Bronze Age civilizations had. But whether it was the Fertile Crescent, Mesoamerica, or China, the pattern was the same. The people who became elites saw their opportunity to take advantage of the situation (villages also had elites, but it was relative - the energy-concentration opportunities for self-aggrandizement was not very achievable under the village economy), and they commandeered the situation to form social hierarchies with them at the top. Anthropologists call those times the transition from egalitarianism to kleptocracy.

The universal dynamic is that men fought their way to the top, with organized violence and Machiavellian plotting, and then established religions that portrayed themselves as the representatives of divinity on Earth, and they then commandeered the labor to build monumental architecture that aggrandized themselves. The monumental architecture invariably had a religious theme, to further inspire the workers. Those early potentates all had harems. Evolutionary anthropologists see that becoming a member of a harem was usually a “win” for the women, as they were guaranteed to produce elite offspring. The most beautiful women became concubines. The big losers in that situation were the non-elite men, whose breeding opportunities were thus limited. A prime directive of life on Earth is reproducing, so large numbers of men became reproductively frustrated. Even village life had concubines at times, but it became a sacred institution with the rise of civilization. Anthropologists cannot find an exception to that dynamic in world history.

You can see echoes of that past today in how women are attracted to powerful, rich men. The high tech revolution has been one long episode of The Revenge of the Nerds, as attractive women chase after rich nerds. Where I live and work, I constantly see babes with their strollers in the elite malls and elsewhere, with their “I bagged a Microsoft millionaire” look to them. LA had a similar dynamic, as the world’s most beautiful women flocked there.

As I think that the above narrative is making clear, the early days of human civilization were all about energy, as it has always been. The entire era of human civilization was made possible by an interglacial interval, where more energy was made available.

There are many dynamics of early civilization that deserve to be explored, and I will do so in coming posts. I will be out of town next week, but I might make another post or two this weekend. We’ll see how it goes.

Best,

Wade

Hi everyone, I've started a thread on abundance, which is inextricably woven in with what's being discussed here. I'd like to invite you all to contribute, should you so wish !!!

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...759#post547759

Thanks Wade for the last post - these are all issues which so many people seem not to take into account when thinking about "heaven on Earth". The societal dynamic and our relationship with our environment are clearly very complex, our future evolution won't be without growing pains !

Can we evolve to the point where there is no pecking order, no apex group or race ?

Hi:

I’ll try to make one more human journey post before I am gone for about a week, but briefly, I am surprised that this made the news in the USA:

http://news.yahoo.com/tutu-bush-blai...094855285.html

Go Desmond. This is an area of special interest of mine…

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

Not that much will happen. Imperial overlords never have to worry about things like war crimes trials. Those are for losers. What is funny is Blair’s “bizarre” response. The “We are invading to overthrow a dictator” rationale was only invoked when all the “he has WMD” fantasies were disproven, as if any sane person believed them in the first place. The crime for which the Nazis answered at Nuremburg is the same one that Bush and Blair committed: waging a war of aggression. All the evil of what happened and what is still happening is the exact “supreme international crime” that the Chief of Counsel for the United States at Nuremberg said that the Nazis committed, the acts of aggression that started the war in the first place. Uncle Noam has been talking about this for a long time:

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/201105--.htm

http://www.walkingbutterfly.com/2012...-s-presidents/

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20080123.htm

Best,

Wade

Quote:

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Posted by Wade Frazier

http://news.yahoo.com/tutu-bush-blai...094855285.html

Go Desmond.

---

I agree.

Maybe nothing will happen. But the more people call out Bush and Blair (and the agendas they represent) the better, as far as I'm concerned.

Hi:

Yes, the more who have the courage to state the obvious, the likelier that we will turn the corner. Bush and Blair were merely agents of the imperial agenda, as usual. You have to sell your soul to play at those levels, and those boys certainly did. Their immediate afterlives will not be pretty. Bush was our Caligula, but every US president is an emperor, but nobody in the empire likes to admit it. Those who suffer from our actions are not so willingly blind. They can see that tattoo on the emperor’s backside that few imperial citizens are willing to admit that they can see. A five-year-old can easily see through the imperial rhetoric:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/intro.htm#forgetting

It takes the hard work of an adult mind to cultivate the level of willing stupidity that turns evil deeds into tales of glory, but that has been a specialty in the USA for many years:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/intro.htm#forgetting

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lies.htm#more

but I suspect that that dynamic is as old as humanity, in one way or another. That is how we can rack up huge karmic debts! :)

I’ll try to make that last post before I go in the morning, but it is off to bed now.

Best,

Wade

Hi:

I overslept, and will not get that post done. But here is a little summary of the subjects that I plan to cover.

Why were cities formed? What sustained them, and why did they collapse? The history of civilization is how they rose and fell. They always ultimately collapsed because they ran out of energy.

Ideology and indoctrination came with early civilization, and literalism was ascendant. The elites became experts at getting people to replace reality with symbols, and manipulating the symbols was how the elites controlled the masses’ minds. Because food was always scarce in pre-industrial societies, those who played along get fed. The consequences of being “right” or “wrong,” especially of thinking “right” or “wrong” could be severe.

In those early days of civilization, the following innovations appeared:

1. The wheel

2. Writing

3. Money

4. Mathematics

5. Professions – priests, soldiers, craftsmen – and, yes, prostitutes

6. Royalty

7. Slavery

8. Advanced agriculture, including plows and irrigation

9. Warring states with professional armies

10. Large-scale genocide

11. Infrastructure such as roads, sewers, water mains

12. Stone and other “permanent” architecture, including monuments to the elites

13. Cultural identity, education and indoctrination

14. Institutions

15. Government taxation and planning

16. Large devices such as boats

17. Manufacturing operations

18. Mining operations

19. Advanced metallurgy

20. Plantation operations

21. Forestry operations

A lot of what civilizations invented were just bigger versions of what existed in village life, but a great deal was new, made necessary by urban life, and much of it made urban life possible. Life was far different in cities than in the hinterland. There was much that was attractive about cities, which brought in people from the countryside, so there was the “attractive” aspect that brought people in. There was also the exploitative aspect, where cities were big energy-concentration devices that elites could more easily skim the economic surplus from. The elites were largely parasites that exploited the situation. There is plenty about how civilizations operate that are due to our herd animal past, how humans have adapted to energy scarcity, how a division of labor can create new kinds of skills and efficiencies, and how humans excel at playing the victim.

When I get back next week, I will begin to explore those topics.

Best,

Wade

Wade, thanks for your great history lesson. I visited your thread due to my interest in over-unity energy systems, but haven't researched your background and was pleasantly surprised by your extensive post.
Best regards,
Latti

Dear Wade - I post only occasionally on this thread but I read it all avidly, at latest every few days. Its not that I don't want to post in between times - quiet the contrary in fact. I don't post too much out of respect to you, your intellect and your message.

To other more casual readers of this thread I would say do come back and dip into this thread from time to time. My experience teaches me to entreat others to be patient and return to this thread from time to time - it takes a few times at least for Wade's remarks not to seem obtuse and irrelevant.

Thanks Wade for all you are doing here - my only concern is that I am sure my credentials don't fully qualify me to fully enmesh with you: I fear I might not have the right mystical qualifications - I don't meditate every day or anything close to that. I am spiritually minded but have had not had any mystical experiences worth expressing worst luck. My only claim to qualification in that regard is my wife is a 24 carrot spooky girl and somehow she tolerates me so ....???

My resounding message to all new readers of this thread is please please come back and read again.

Who knows, like me, you may find your efforts richly rewarded!

Quote on Bush and Blair "Their immediate afterlives will not be pretty."
I often pondered how JP MORGAN'S immediate afterlife was doing after he shunned Nikola Tesla and The Future For Pure Energy Possibilities for this great planet?

I'd say this old WW2 propaganda piece says as much about America now, as it did then. Except presently our dear uncle is faced with multiple targets in "defending" the security of the homeland.

Attachment 18106

War bonds anyone?

Hi:

Thanks for the posts, and when I see them, I know that I could spend days responding, but briefly:

Hi Latti:

Thanks for reading. As is probably obvious, I am taking a different approach to “over-unity” and other FE ideas. It is a comprehensivist approach, and we will see how it goes.

Hi Ixopoborn:

Thanks for being here. Yes, my posts may seem to wander at times, but there is a method to my madness. This comprehensivist stuff covers a lot of territory, and not all in a linear fashion, so it can seem to jump around or fly off into tangents. A mystical perspective is not all that important, really. It is important to realize the limits of White Science and materialism. And it is what is in your heart, not your head, that will make you mesh with my work or not.

The greatest physicists were a bunch of mystics, to one degree or another:

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

and they had flashes of insight to thank for their breakthroughs, not cold logic:

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

A materialist perspective tends to justify a host of evils in the name of “progress.” The mystics can tend to float off into irrelevant tangents. It was very sobering to see all the New Age hucksterism out there when I was young:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/opinions.htm#mystical

All the same, incorporating the mystical into the practical is a key. Take this recent article by Adam, for instance:

http://universalspectrum.org/forum/s...ull=1#post5638

The article above it by my friend Jeane is worth reading:

http://universalspectrum.org/forum/s...ull=1#post2865

and seques into White Feather’s comment. J.P Morgan was into investigating his past lives, late in his life. He must have had some idea of what was in store for him. His immediate afterlife could not have been pretty. The same goes for the other robber barons. We all balance the karma eventually, and souls like Morgan’s will be working it off for a long time. For all the people who wrecked our efforts with their evil deeds:

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

they will be working it off for a long time. If what I have been told, that I helped melt down Atlantis and spent a hundred lives or so in penance, has any validity, I guess that I can relate to working it off, and maybe that is what this lifetime of mine is all about: getting it right this time. We’ll see.

Hi Fred:

At first, I wondered if it was genuine, although it would not surprise me:

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

but I have never seen one like that before. I did a little search, and found that it was kind of tame compared to some others:

http://www.authentichistory.com/1939...jap/index.html

I read about this picture in Stannard's American Holocaust, but just now saw it for the first time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LI..._Jap_Skull.jpg

which was tame compared to other uses of Japanese corpses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America...anese_war_dead

My grandfather saw that practice when he was in the Pacific "Theater."

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

Ah, those Golden Years of WWII! :)

Back to the human journey posts this weekend.

Best,

Wade

Quote:

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Posted by Wade Frazier

Hi:
Hi Fred:

At first, I wondered if it was genuine, although it would not surprise me:

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

but I have never seen one like that before. I did a little search, and found that it was kind of tame compared to some others:

http://www.authentichistory.com/1939...jap/index.html

Ah, those Golden Years of WWII! :)

---

Yes it is Wade. It was one of the one of the ra ra posters that stuck out to me in the American Museum of Science/Energy near the Oak Ridge nuclear facility a couple of weeks ago. Interestingly, they display American propaganda and German Propaganda not too far apart. I couldn't help but wonder what % of people would see it as an atrocity, if dear old Uncle Sam were depicted as sporting a swastika, and proclaiming after destroying England: "Yank, You're Next!"

The German and American propaganda was so much alike it was striking, but then not many people know that Joseph Goebbels learned his trade from the American Edward Bernays do they?

Glad to see you back.
Fred

P.S. You're right, the poster was quite tame in comparison to what you found.

Quote:

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The universal dynamic is that men fought their way to the top, with organized violence and Machiavellian plotting, and then established religions that portrayed themselves as the representatives of divinity on Earth, and they then commandeered the labor to build monumental architecture that aggrandized themselves. The monumental architecture invariably had a religious theme, to further inspire the workers. Those early potentates all had harems. Evolutionary anthropologists see that becoming a member of a harem was usually a “win” for the women, as they were guaranteed to produce elite offspring. The most beautiful women became concubines. The big losers in that situation were the non-elite men, whose breeding opportunities were thus limited. A prime directive of life on Earth is reproducing, so large numbers of men became reproductively frustrated. Even village life had concubines at times, but it became a sacred institution with the rise of civilization. Anthropologists cannot find an exception to that dynamic in world history.

You can see echoes of that past today in how women are attracted to powerful, rich men. The high tech revolution has been one long episode of The Revenge of the Nerds, as attractive women chase after rich nerds. Where I live and work, I constantly see babes with their strollers in the elite malls and elsewhere, with their “I bagged a Microsoft millionaire” look to them. LA had a similar dynamic, as the world’s most beautiful women flocked there.

---

Non-elite men suffering under the oppressive systems that have prevailed throughout most of civilization is something that gets ignored at times. Male domination is real, but it's a small group of men that dominate both men AND women. Even in industrialized societies mate selection based on scarcity consciousness is still very much in evidence. PUA (pick up artist) material for instance places a strong focus on teaching men who don't have naturally "alpha" personalities to mimic alpha behavior via body language and verbal communication techniques, some of which are mild while others basically entail creating the image of being an "alpha jerk". The basic trick is to work to create the image of having higher social status while being simultaneously hard to get, thus setting off internal scarcity-based responses in women.

My hope is that in a society of abundance and radiant health such behavior on the part of both sexes will become a thing of the past. However, I worry that part of it is indeed wired into our genetics, and some form of genetic alteration will be necessary to complete the shift.

Hi:

This will be a slight detour from the human journey posts. Last year, we had Thrive, which turned out to be a major disappointment for many, including most of the people interviewed on Thrive.

http://projectearth.com/founder-essa...ity-and-sanity

That does not mean that sites like this one have any merit:

http://thrivedebunked.wordpress.com/

I can only stand to read that one in small snatches, because it frequently makes uninformed and irrational statements that parade as logical, as with almost all “skeptics” and debunkers:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/dennis.htm#friends

Now, a year later, here comes Greer’s documentary:

http://www.sirius.neverendinglight.com/

I have higher hopes for it. I had heard that it was in the making years ago, and a pal sent me this recent article from Greer on Armstrong’s lunar experiences:

http://drgreersblog.disclosureproject.org/?cat=1

I have seen many variations on this theme for many years, which can also play into moon hoax scenarios. I have been in and out of the milieu since the 1980s, but I am doing something else these days. What has been painful to watch over the years is to see people who should be joining their efforts, if they want to have a prayer of getting over the FE finish line, at odds with each other. I have seen Mitchell fall out with Greer, Adam and Greer are not close buddies, Bearden has had shifting alliances over the years, and people close to me don’t know about Bearden’s motivation. Adam and the inventor who had his lab confiscated by the Feds had their falling out (the inventor’s ire seems highly misplaced, which is normal for FE-inventor types).

I have regularly seen Dennis attacked, almost always dishonestly, by members of the FE community. Brian O felt betrayed by the very people that he recruited into his organizations (Dennis knows that one, in spades, I am sorry to say). Brian wrote the forward to one of Greer’s books:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianbio.htm#_edn24

and Greer would write blurbs for Brian’s. But Greer, Dennis, Brian, and Adam all survived murder attempts for their work, sometimes multiple attempts and other outrages. The “skeptics” scoff, but they are either dishonest or not familiar with the rudiments of logic and fact-finding. The UFO and FE cover-ups are joined at the hip, as all of the big name FE players eventually discovered. All the while, the masses either snore or have all manner of unproductive reaction (those Levels 1-11 http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level1). It can really challenge a person’s sanity to get involved in this milieu, not the least of which is when Godzilla finally has to lift a claw to restore “order.”

While I wish Greer the best, I have been finished with Level 10 efforts since my days with NEM:

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

and am trying to do something different. Maybe Greer’s approach has a prayer, but only people risking their lives like he does have any business even trying. I have already witnessed too much carnage in that milieu:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/journey.htm#adamiak

and don’t want to see any more, or lead anybody anywhere close to where they are risking their lives. If FE makes its appearance, joined at the hip with the ET situation, there will be a greater need for comprehensive thinkers than ever, which is what I am trying to help along in my own way.

Best,

Wade

P.S. Hi Enishi:

I saw your post as I was readying this one for publication. Yes, the dynamic that you cite is part and parcel of humanity’s many dysfunctional reactions to scarcity. Yes, part of that likely is baked into our DNA to some degree. Big subject. One of the recent theories is that humans domesticated themselves during Domestication Revolution, and that making humans more docile (to herd them more easily) was one of the genetic outcomes of our journey. That dynamic can find parallels in Michael’s soul age concept:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#michael

The idea that humans were genetically crippled by ET and/or inter-dimensional interventions is a big one in New Age and related circles. I don’t know what the answer is, but I keep my mind open about it. These two future Earths that Roads visited:

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

had genetic engineering in their bag of tricks – the difference was if it was implemented lovingly or not. I’ll buy the idea that a little genetic reordering will come with the transition, but only a loving reordering is what should be done, not one performed under the auspices of greed-based capitalism. Much of that reordering could well be “natural,” as the constant hum of fear in our current, scarcity-based world disappears. Again, big subject, and thanks for bringing it up. I was about to cover that domestication of our genes theory in my posts, so your post is timely. As people like Greer have discovered, Godzilla has been playing diabolical genetic games for many years, engineering the perfect soldier and other nightmares.

With all this talk about evolution, I discussed it with someone with a biological and health scientific background. He shared very interesting thoughts bringing the conversation back to your mystical posts.

He said that, yes, evolution is an observable reality. Nevertheless, there is intelligent design to life as we know it. Evolution and intelligent design co-exist. For example, DNA is the code that codes for each living being. You can't have a human, a turtle, a tree without it. The cells follow that blueprint. So there is intelligent design behind the coding of the blueprint. Who designed it?

Hi:

Back to the human journey. I’ll get to many of the attributes of what we call civilization soon, but in this post I want to broach the subject that comes up often when studying them: their collapses. The world is filled with evidence of civilizations that once existed but have since disappeared. Some that collapsed were well-known to their successors. The Aztec emperor, for instance, made an annual pilgrimage to the ruins of Teotihuacan as a reminder of how ephemeral civilizations could be. When the Spaniards came a conquering, that evidence of that lost civilization was there for all to see. The classic Mayan phase collapsed over a thousand years ago. Its lowland cities were lost to the jungle, and deciphering the Mayan script was one of the greatest archeological triumphs of modern times. The Indus Valley Civilization was the world’s largest ancient civilization, but its ruins were not discovered until less than a hundred years ago, and its script remains undeciphered:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script

The water and sewage systems of the Indus civilization were actually more advanced than what is in the same region today, several thousand years later:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_V...ization#Cities

The Indus civilization appears to be about the least stratified ancient civilization,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehrgarh#Human_Figurines

although that is relative. That civilization collapsed nearly 4,000 years ago, apparently from an epic drought as the monsoon pattern changed, and it appears that the remnants of that civilization migrated onto the Indian Subcontinent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_V..._Late_Harappan

The same drought likely collapsed Egypt’s Old Kingdom, the Mesopotamian and Akkadian empires, as well as causing havoc in China:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4.2_kiloyear_event

Basically, no water means no food, or what can be called human-digestible caloric energy. All pre-industrial civilizations were vulnerable to the weather, where a bad harvest meant starvation. The means did not exist to move food from regions where it was to where it wasn’t, particularly across political boundaries, and the surplus was never very large anywhere. Early trade was usually in elite prestige goods or useful tool-making substances, not food. The earliest trade that can be detected was in obsidian and flint in the Stone Age, and lapis lazuli in the Bronze Age.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade#Ancient_history

Copper, gold, and silver were the first worked metals, which could all be found in nuggets, as they are all in the same elemental family and comparatively non-reactive.

Sumer was the site of a classic environmental problem. They were about the first culture to practice crop irrigation, and the poorly-drained soils in an arid climate led to salination. They shifted their crop from wheat to the more salt-resistant barley, but the southern lands of Mesopotamia were largely abandoned, and there was a 60% population decline in the region over several hundred years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer#Decline

which contributed to their conquest by their neighboring Akkadians.

The earliest city in the region was first settled more than 7,000 years ago, on the Persian Gulf. Upland deforestation and agriculture, and its resultant siltation, along with the increasing salination, turned that earliest city into an abandoned wasteland:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eridu

Until relatively recently, the impact of pre-industrial peoples on the environment was considered to be minor at most. This view has been changing, on several fronts. The overkill hypothesis of the megafaunal extinctions is less than fifty years old, and while it has been fiercely attacked from many quarters, it is now generally accepted:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/upcoming.htm#_edn5

In Ruddiman’s Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plows,_..._and_Petroleum

he makes the case that humans have been altering the atmospheric gases, making Earth warmer than it would otherwise be, beginning about 8,000 years ago, as carbon dioxide levels increased. This likely relates to the massive deforestation which began with burning the land in the Stone Age, to make way for primitive agriculture. Methane levels began rising 5,000 years ago, and Ruddiman argues that farming activities were responsible. Ruddiman even traces the Little Ice Age to the carbon sequestration that coincided with mass deaths in the Old World in the 1300s plagues, and in the New World in the 1500s as the Europeans wiped out the Native Americans. These are new claims and the debate has been and will certainly continue to be fierce, but there is increasing evidence that humans have impacted not only the ecosystems but the climate with their activities, long before the industrial era. Ruddiman is far from alone:

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2011...5411301441367/

Industrialization is only accelerating ancient trends. Scientists now suspect that humans reduced the African rainforest three thousand years ago by deforestation and agriculture:

http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0209-h..._savannah.html

There is even evidence that when humans began wiping out the megafauna in the Northern Hemisphere, beginning around 15,000 years ago, that they put the dynamics for global warming into motion:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0630162353.htm

The interaction of humans and the environment, including the climate, is increasingly being studied.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0113082627.htm

In a 1979 study, it was estimated that 50% of the rainfall in the Amazon rainforest was recycled from plant respiration (see p. 17 of this presentation):

http://amazonpire.org/documents/Grou...rology_000.pdf

Others have estimated 35% of the Amazon rainforest’s rain was recycled by the rainforest:

http://www.mit.edu/~eltahir/Publicat...0QJRMetSoc.pdf

It is now known that twice as much rain falls when the air passes over dense vegetation:

http://www.celsias.com/article/tropi...ycle-rainfall/

as sparse vegetation, and deforesting the Amazon could decrease the rainfall by 20%, which most of South America’s GDP relies on:

http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0905-e...-rainfall.html

It is increasingly being considered that the climate change that collapsed civilizations was in some measure brought on by the civilizations themselves, as they engaged in deforestation, plow agriculture, and ungulate grazers. These climate dynamics have been clearly seen in the historical era, as the Spanish turned forest and fertile farmland into semi-desert in less than a century, in a valley just north of the Valley of Mexico:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#_edn83

and Europeans did the same thing to the first parts of Australia that they invaded.

Civilizations and empires rose and fell in the Fertile Crescent and vicinity for several thousand years.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=MiGdF...eature=related

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jpD01...eature=related

This issue of environmental change, especially human-influenced, and civilization collapses has been the subject of fierce debate recently, with Joseph Tainter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter

and Jared Diamond:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaps...ail_or_Succeed

representing two schools of thought on the issue. Here is Tainter’s response to Diamond’s Collapse:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/52922148/A...t-and-Collapse

Heinberg has chimed in with his Peak Oil arguments:

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/4182

I discovered Tainter through Heinberg’s work:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/hooked.htm#tainter

and I have been studying these issues, on and off, for about the past decade. I have seen some really hack efforts to discredit Diamond’s arguments (Questioning Collapse, for instance, was compiled in response to Diamond’s Collapse, but was so poor in places that it verged on being libelous (such as claiming that Diamond denied that the Australian aborigines had anything to do with the megafauna extinctions, where Diamond made his position clear in Guns, Germs, and Steel that the aborigines were the prime suspects in the Australian megafauna extinctions)), but I think that a lot is getting lost in all the Sturm und Drang around the issue.

I have not gotten to the Western Roman collapse yet. The city of Rome declined from at least a million people at its height around the time of Jesus, to a few percent of that for about a millennium, after its precipitous collapse in little more than a hundred years:

http://davidgalbraith.org/trivia/gra...-history/2189/

for one of the most dramatic urban collapses in world history. The Roman Republic and Empire ran through the Mediterranean and Western Europe like an unending buzz saw, deforesting everything in sight, clear up to England:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defores...e_Roman_period

What collapse theorists have in common is that they generally acknowledge that the increasing expansion of the Roman Empire, to widen the areas of energy-sourced plunder, overextended itself, as it kept reaching out to commandeer the region’s resources, is what led to its collapse. In a word, Rome ran out of energy. When complex societies collapsed, it was usually a relief to the peasants whose backs those civilizations were built on. Roman taxation, for instance, became increasingly ruthless as the peasants were squeezed. It was nothing short of slavery to assign land to peasants, with a taxation quota to meet, under penalty of death and other niceties if the tax was not forthcoming. Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down explores some of that territory.

What I hope begins to become clear is that the collapse of civilizations and Earth’s mass extinction events have plenty in common. They were all energy crises.

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post527620

I will make the connection clearer in my upcoming essay. To separate the energy crisis brought on by deforestation and environmental deterioration from economic collapse is to make misleading distinctions, IMO. The ability to wrench energy from the environment is what has powered all civilizations for all time. Massive deforestation and plow agriculture are dramatic events that greatly increase the energy yield, but only so much sunlight hits Earth and can be captured by ecosystems. Those energy-extraction activities not only rob the environments (AKA all other life forms) of their energy, but it also disrupts nature’s energy systems and can completely wreck them, turning forests into deserts, as happened all over that part of the world, from Morocco to Afghanistan. It took thousands of years of continual deforestation, agriculture, and grazing herds, so it was usually imperceptible to the inhabitants, but the trends have been clearly determined, especially with the increasing tools of today’s science.

Time for some chores. More later.

Best,

Wade

Brilliant, Wade, just brilliant. I'm lucky to have a front row seat at your lecture.

Dennis

Hi Cara:

Your pal’s perspective is unusual in scientific circles. Random changes in DNA are thought to be the engine of evolution.

Hi Dennis:

Thanks. I hope that this becomes a dialogue instead of a lecture. I am learning this stuff, too. I have been at it for a while, and there is a long way to go. One of my primary messages is that ecosystems take a long time to develop. Studying the development of life on Earth (I began this series of posts two months ago):

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post518761

makes it clear that what we call ecosystems are life-based energy systems. They did not start out being food chains, but when available energy became scarcer, grazing and predation developed, as organisms learned how to eat other. Plants and animals came from the same “root stock,” if you will.

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post523407

How they get their energy is Job Number One for all life forms. Whether the materialist anarchist framework is accepted, or one that is more cooperative, the life forms in an ecosystem interact and coevolve. When life forms are removed from ecosystems, because a newly appeared, weapon-bearing ape ate them out of existence, let us say, the ecosystems are forced to adapt. That missing life form was part of an energy chain, and the energy chain has to adapt or collapse, and there can be dramatic ecosystem changes where members of the energy chain interact and one ends up missing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_cascade

In Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down, he discussed the idea of ecosystem resilience, which was pioneered by Crawford Holling. That definition of resilience was framed within a dynamic of adaptive cycles, where resilience, connectedness, and potential are its three dimensions. All cycles are driven by energy, and when ecosystems are disrupted, those that are resilient will use the disruption to find new ways of working, called “novelty” in ecological terms.

As I do, Homer-Dixon makes the connection between ecosystems and economic systems explicit, and the example that he keeps coming back to is Rome. As Rome expanded, its EROI, or Energy Return On Investment, kept declining. It is directly related to the fact that the energy returns from ecosystems continually decline when forests are razed, the soils are plowed, crops are grown, and grazers are imported onto the remnants. There is an initial windfall bounty as the ecosystem is first plundered, but the returns keep diminishing, as more energy has been wrenched out of the ecosystem than is replenished (or energy-furnished nutrients are removed and not replenished – AKA soil exhaustion). That is how forests are turned into deserts.

A la Tainter, the increasing complexity needed to manage the expanding empire was paid for by the coin of energy. Because the means of production - deforestation and agriculture - were a constant (Rome did not invent new energy technologies, but appropriated what existed and took it to new scales), and the energy used was solar-based, the only way that Rome could expand its energy consumption was at the expense of its neighbors, as with virtually all empires. Turning forest into farmland provided a short-term energy subsidy, but the decline inevitably ensues, which meant finding more land and peoples to plunder, but at further distance from Rome and the low-energy transportation lane that the Mediterranean Sea afforded. Transporting goods by waterway is about a hundred times as energy efficient as transporting them overland. That is why all preindustrial cities were situated near navigable bodies of water.

As I have written, complex life had the same dynamic; the great increase in energy generation derived by oxygenic respiration is what made complex life possible:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post523407

and the dynamics discovered by Béchamp, Rife, Naessens, and others (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/medicine.htm#paradigm) were that when complex life can no longer provide the energy and nutrients needed, complex life will collapse into “anarchy” like disrupted ecosystems or economic systems will.

In summary, the collapse of complex life, ecosystems, and civilizations all follow the same basic dynamic, where energy funds the increasing complexity, and running out of energy leads to collapse. This is one of the primary messages of my work. I have yet to see anybody else make this connection, especially in the context of what the potential of FE is. Humanity can unhook from the ecosystem exploitation dynamic that is literally older than humanity, which began about when our distant ancestors learned how to control fire.

When the energy runs out, the organism, ecosystem, or civilization will revert to simpler organization. It is also called “primitive” in many circles, but the level of energy generation/consumption is what really defines it.

All of the above, however, is not the big one, as far as life on Earth goes. The ability of enzymes to increase reaction rates by millions of times is what made life possible in the first place:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post521326

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post521838

As I have written, pound-for-pound, complex life uses energy 100,000 times faster than the sun produces it:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post506945

Life is an incredible energy hog. :)

The human brain is the greatest energy hog in the human body, and we need to work ours to their limits to attain levels of understanding where enough of us can develop comprehensive perspectives and get to Level 12:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level12

That is really the entire point of my work, but it always begins in the heart, as love is the energy of Creation, and creators create with love. People who feel and think like victims are no help in making FE happen, and will wreck such efforts, as they are the weak links. But the victim game is humanity’s oldest, so the habit is very hard to break.

OK, the next post will be back to the development of civilization.

Best,

Wade

Well then,

FE would be quite an unique event in the planet's history. Since obviously our "growth and evolution" is based on the ability to wrench energy out of our environment, with Free Energy we would break out of this cycle (and quite possibly allow other life forms on Earth to do the same).

The implications of such an event are so "BIG" that it is even hard to think about them. I really wonder if this has already happened some place else in our Universe (or Multiverse). With my current understanding, FE would set our development (in all areas) on an exponential curve and we can only glimpse or imagine only the very beginning of that curve. But clearly it would be something never experienced before.

With proper use of Free Energy civilizations will no longer collapse and most likely our bodies would be disease free. Since the current name of the game on Earth is "how can I extract more energy to sustain myself", one has to wonder what would be the new game once energy availability becomes limitless... perhaps something along the lines: "What do You want to create today?"

It really is fascinating to read your posts, and follow the "Energy Scarcity games" until the final levels, when one species gets to choose between self annihilation or changing the game completely to "Energy Abundance".

It's also easier to understand the huge inertia we notice around the idea of Free Energy. It seems that "energy scarcity" is deeply backed in our bones! It's the game being played even by our own body cells.