WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Cara:

Thanks. The molecules involved in the enzymes for making ATP are huge:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATP5A1

ATP is the “coin of the realm” of life on Earth. All life runs on ATP. Mitochondria are the turbo-charged ATP producers, using oxygenic respiration (the human body is 10% mitochondria, by weight). The most common enzyme on Earth is called Rubisco,

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

which takes the energy captured by photosynthesis and uses it to combine carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates, which provide the energy that runs life.

When the delicate dance at the molecular level begins to be comprehended, stupefied wonder is often the attendant emotion. And it all happened by accident!

Off to some Sunday work.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Real quickly, before I run off to work…

A useful way to think about energy and enzymes is in terms of flow. It is the flow of energy that makes life happen. Without an energy flow, there is nothing to direct to build carbohydrates, build proteins, build the very building blocks of life, much less get them to move in the coordinated fashion that we call life. Energy flows are the engine that it all runs on. Stop the energy flow, and life stops. It is just about that simple. If a reaction runs millions of times slower than in the presence of a matchmaking catalyst, then that reaction won’t happen, but other reactions will, which makes the desired reaction unlikely if not impossible. Enzymes make reactions possible that otherwise would not happen. Enzymes are highly specific regarding just what reactions they make possible. The most complex factory that humans have ever constructed pales to insignificance when the complexity of the processes in an average cell is considered.

Best,

Wade

[sandy]

Thanks for sharing your hike as I can smell the fresh air and pines from your pic and feel energized by knowing the " Awesome" nature of it all!!

Posted by Wade Frazier (here)
Hi All:

Limor: your analogy is a fine one.

Hi Ernie:

On the White Science front, scientists openly admit that their theories for how life originally began are little more than wild guesses. It is a very far cry from the experiments and hypotheses put forth so far to explaining how a working cell came to be. Any honest scientist is going to say something like, “We have no idea how in the heck it happened.” The same goes for speciation, which is one of the most poorly understood areas of evolutionary theory. So, there is plenty of room for speculation. However, I have never heard of a White Scientist making the case for DNA manipulation in humans. On the Fringe Science front, you see stuff like this:

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vi...especies02.htm

but it is highly speculative. I have seen a great deal of that alternative anthropology over the years. When I have dug into it, it never really seemed to hold up very well. White Science genetics specialists are not coming up with theories like that guy’s to explain the surprises in mapping the human genome. There is an entire cottage industry of people like him, coming up with all sorts of fringe theories, and they almost always fall apart under closer inspection, and then they come up with new ones, which also fall apart, so they keep selling books. And those who come forward, alleging secret ancient finds and special powers, also never quite measure up to their rhetoric and claimed powers.

And then we get to Black Science. There is nothing on the Black Science front that I am aware of that alleges secret genetic manipulation in our past, but that has also not been the thrust of my life’s work on the Fringe Science work. I played the energy game, and the Black Science stuff that I became aware of was because of the particular game that I played.

I am very open to the idea that life was originally seeded here on the planet, and has had a little help at times. But until the ETs come into the open and provide us the story and evidence, then that field is very vulnerable to all sorts of wild speculation, cottage industries forming to spout all manner of wacky theory, and I consider almost all of it a distraction. Until we solve the energy issue, the rest will not matter.

I will try to get up another post today.

Sandy, my dear, thanks for the wishes, and attached is a photo from yesterday’s hike. It was a blessed one. Small glaciers feed that lake, which contributes to that water’s color.

http://www.summitpost.org/colchuck-glacier/162204



Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Cara:

Generating FE in one’s body is what I call Level 19:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level19

I have heard that Level 19s exist on the planet, but I have never met one, and nobody who achieved it is showing the world how to become a Level 19. I believe that humanity is a long, long way from all becoming Level 19s.

None the mainstream gurus that I ever heard of are/were Level 19s, or that guy who can burn paper with his bare hands:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Af1RGVaBQYc

They all had to eat. I have played similar, but less accomplished, energy games with my hands:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post496281

and I know that that is a long way from Level 19.

You get some stray alleged level 19s in India, for instance.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=DMLFLhw3UGs

But they never show people how to do it. Even if they could, it would likely amount to attaining a level of enlightenment that very, very few have ever manifested in history. Even in this probable heavenly world:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/visions.htm#roads1

they are not Level 19s, or if there are any, they are exceedingly rare.

Leaving Level 19 aside for the moment (which may be near the summit of thinking and acting like a creator here), what I have seen is that when people begin to comprehend the free energy conundrum, many unproductive reactions can ensue, and one of them is hoping that some superior beings can save us from ourselves (which is thinking like a victim, which we are all experts at doing ). I highly doubt that that is in the cards. It is time to learn to paddle our own canoes. I regard one of the unproductive reactions to be the many varieties of “magical thinking” that I have seen, where some miracle happens to us and we all float off to our reward without doing the work.

If we are going to solve the energy issue on this planet anytime soon, it will likely be the same way that we got into this mess, via the implementation of technology. Without technology, proto-humans would have never left the trees, if the cooking hypothesis has much validity:

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

And even if fire was mastered later than Wrangham posits, our tools made us. The implementation of technology allowed proto-humans to leave their natural range, led to many biological adaptations to our changed energy paradigm (larger brains, smaller digestive tracts, smaller jaws, and many other changes), and eventually led to time freed from food acquisition so that humans could develop what we call civilization. It all depended on ways to increase the amount of energy available to humans. Today’s industrial era is no different, and rising lifestyles made possible by the exploitation of fossil fuels liberated slaves and women, and led to many changes. Can we raise our collective sentience to the level where we turn the corner, or do we meet our demise by our own hand (with a little help from Godzilla)? That is the important question, I think, and it hinges on the near-term resolution of the energy issue. I know that FE exists, but we don’t get any, primarily due to our collective failings, which have been exploited by the hyper-elites. If enough of us can raise our sentience, we don’t have to become superhuman Level 19s, but mere Level 12s:

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

I think that it might be sufficient if several thousand of us achieved it. But becoming a Level 12 is a lot harder than it may seem. First of all, people have to have their hearts in the right place, and then people have to throw away almost everything that they think that they know, such as all of those scarcity-based ideologies that have been drilled into our heads since the cradle:

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

That is far from the end of the FE road, but almost nobody can even get that far these days. While my goal and vision can seem quixotic, it has a far better chance in the near-term, IMO, than everybody becoming Level 19s.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I don’t have the time this morning for a long post, but I will briefly describe some of the geophysical processes that have shaped life on Earth, and how life has in turn shaped geophysical processes.

The big engine of life on Earth is the sun. Without the energy of sunlight, there would not be any life on Earth, except for perhaps some single-celled extremophiles living far below Earth’s frozen surface, taking advantage of chemical potential.

Because Earth’s rotational axis is somewhat perpendicular to its plane of orbit around the sun, the entire planet gets sunlight during each revolution of the Earth around its axis, except near the poles. Earth’s axis of revolution is tilted from the perpendicular, and that is why Earth has seasons. That tilt is fairly constant, only varying by a little over two degrees over a 41,000-year cycle. The moon mutes that variability. Earth’s tilt would be far more variable, and the climate swings consequently far more extreme, if not for the moon. Mars is that way. The eccentricity of Earth’s orbit varies over a 100,000-year cycle, and the axis of its revolution wobbles over a 22,000-year cycle. The elliptical orbit also shifts around the sun in 450,000-year cycles. The three shorter cycles are thought to have been the critical influence on the ice age that we are currently in. The Serbian scientist Milanković did the early work on those cycles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milutin_Milankovi%C4%87

That is only part of the story for Earth’s climate, however. What is happening on the ground is also vitally important. As I stated previously, the continents are on a 500-million year cycle of breaking apart and coming back together:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post519718

The configuration of the continents has been responsible for mass extinction events, and the reasons are as follows. The sun’s energy hits the equatorial region most directly, so that is the warmest part of Earth’s surface and always has been. The limit of the tropics is defined as the furthest that the tilt of Earth’s orbit brings the sun overhead on the longest day of the year for that hemisphere. Earth’s tilt today is 23.4 degrees, which is about in the middle of its range. As that solar energy hits the equatorial regions, the air, land and oceans in the tropics get heated up, and that heat spreads to the colder regions. Rock can’t transfer heat very well, and the air can’t hold much heat. The oceans are by far the most important medium to transfer heat around the world, and the ocean’s currents comprise the most important variable of Earth’s climate today. In recent years, the importance of the El Niño and La Niña cycles has become appreciated. It is the most important climactic cycle, next to the seasons, on Earth.

Today, because of the configuration of the continents, Earth has a current conveyor belt that encompasses the entire planet.

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post519718

Except that the Arctic Ocean is virtually landlocked, so the warm waters from the equator never reach it. That is a big reason why we are in an ice age. The only current that gets close stops in the North Atlantic. That North Atlantic current makes Europe far warmer than it would otherwise be. But more importantly for life in the oceans, when that current stops in the North Atlantic, the warm waters from the southern oceans give up their heat and sink to the ocean floor. That sinking water is what brings oxygen to the oceans. There is another one of those sinking water shunts to the ocean floor near the other pole at Antarctica. Before hundreds of millions of years of photosynthesis created an oxygen-rich atmosphere, there was no oxygen to bring to the ocean floor, and the oceans were what scientists call anoxic.

But during the past two billion years, when the continents came together, their configuration did not provide physical barriers to the currents, with nothing forcing them downward to the ocean floor. It is now thought that when the continental configuration stopped supporting oceanic circulation, the ocean currents stopped moving and became a calm pond. Oxygen stopped getting circulated to the ocean floor, and the oceans lost their oxygen and became anoxic. Those anoxic oceans could not support the complex animals that lived in them, so there was a mass extinction of ocean life. The scientist who posited the theory is Donald Canfield:

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

And those anoxic oceans are today called Canfield oceans. So, while ocean animals died out, it did not meant that all life died out. All the dead animals sank to the ocean floor, but other animals were not there to eat them, so they just piled up. Today, those anoxic ocean holocausts are suspected to have laid down the carbon-rich corpses that became the oil fields that we are so quickly mining and burning. But not all ocean life went extinct. Some hung in there near the surface, where some oxygen mixing with the atmosphere happened, but perhaps most impactful were bacteria that could thrive in that anoxic environment. One class of bacteria in particular used sulfur in its respiration process, and a recent theory coming out of the Canfield ocean theory is that those respiring bacteria created a cloud of hydrogen sulfide that rose from the anoxic ocean and killed plants and depleted the ozone layer (for the events when there was land life, for the early events, land had not been invaded by life yet). Those mass extinctions that arose due to the continental configurations and resultant hydrogen sulfide asphyxiation are now thought to have been responsible for the large gap of when complex life evolved.

These are all just theories, but there is increasing evidence to back them up. Life has made the Earth friendlier to life, but life has also played a part in wiping out most life. This is behind Peter Ward’s Medea Hypothesis:

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

which is the antithesis of Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis:

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

What is clear, however, is that life has had a large impact on Earth’s environment. The biggest environmental impact of all time by a life form is what humans are currently doing. Nothing else comes close, for the violence of it, happening in the geological blink of an eye. But I have a long ways to go before we get to Earth’s sixth great mass extinction, which we are in the middle of today:

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

as humans wiped out nearly all the large animals, both on land, in the air, and in the oceans, in its quest for energy.


Time to run off to work.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I will not have much time this week to write posts, but briefly:

In his The Medea Hypothesis, Peter Ward defines the three activities essential to life:

1. Metabolism

2. Reproduction

3. Evolution

If life does not do those three things, life does not exist. Metabolism is the first activity, which is about energy. Ward produces Paul Davies’s list of answers to the question, “What is life?” According to Davies, life:

A. Metabolizes (acquires and uses energy)

B. Has complexity and organization

C. Reproduces

D. Develops

E. Is autonomous

F. Evolves

Those are his most fundamental properties of life, and energy makes it all possible. Without sufficient energy, the rest cannot happen. It is the most basic requirement for life.

During my studies over the years, it became obvious that humans are no different, on the biological level, and human civilization is essentially an extension of our biology. The rise and fall of civilizations follows those life attributes fairly closely. First and foremost, civilization needs energy. At its most essential level, it comes in the form of food. In today’s industrialized civilizations, that food is grown in the hinterland and transported to the urban environments. All early urban environments were places on low-energy transportation lanes, usually bodies of water. In the pre-industrial era, goods could move with about 1% of the energy expenditure on water than they did on land. Even better is if the city is on a river, and is supplied by an upland hinterland, so that the goods flow downstream to their destination. Even in our industrial age, with the energy of fossil fuels making it all possible, most cities are still situated on bodies of water.

One of the primary messages of my work and upcoming essay is that the energy situation shapes almost all human activities, in ways that most humans are oblivious to. My goal is to make those dynamics visible. But that is just the start. When people can begin to understand how energy shapes our lives, and the many behaviors and social institutions that adapted to the energy situation, then people will have a far better idea of how abundant, environmentally harmless energy can transform human society. It really can be mind-boggling to begin to think in those directions:

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

but almost nobody on Earth today is able to do so, or they have unproductive reactions to the idea, which I call levels 1 to 11 on the Free Energy Onion scale:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level1

I have spent nearly half of my life witnessing those reactions. My goal is to help enough people get past those pitfalls so that we can form a critical mass that can get something done. As I have stated many times, first people have to care, and almost nobody on Earth today really cares, not enough to let go of their energy-scarcity-based conditioning:

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

Where a person’s heart is is all important. Nothing else really matters that much. But those whose hearts are in the right place need help so that they can see the big picture. Once they do that, they see energy’s central role in life on Earth, human civilization, and the unprecedented opportunity that free energy affords us. They can then stop hacking at branches and aim for the root. Not only can we avoid the abyss that we are rushing towards in our uncaring and unthinking ways, but we can also usher in an era that can look a lot like Heaven on Earth.

That is my dream and goal.

Off to work now.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have a little time this morning. As I mentioned earlier, the Great Oxygenation Event was followed by the first great ice age:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post519314

Until the Great Oxygenation Event, life had many ways to extract energy from the environment. Today, it is thought that complex cells, eukaryotes, appeared somewhere between 2.7 and 1.6 billion years ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eukaryo..._of_eukaryotes

That is a pretty wide range, and reflects the controversies and uncertainties for those distant events. The hydrogen hypothesis is a recent one:

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

and it states that a hydrogen-dependent archaean enveloped a hydrogen-producing bacterium, and the complex cell was born. Similar envelopment, whether through predation or parasitism, is thought to have led to the nucleus and chloroplast. It is also thought that it took those complex organisms hundreds of millions of years of “experiments” to learn how to tolerate and then take advantage of that waste product of photosynthesis, oxygen. But once oxygenic respiration was adopted by a complex cell, complex life became possible. Oxygenic (AKA “aerobic”) respiration generates about fifteen times the energy that anaerobic respiration and fermentation do, which were the energy generating processes of unicellular life to that time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellula...ic_respiration

It was a huge energy advantage, but it took more than a billion years for complex life to dominate the planet. The reasons for that delay are controversial. Some are that constructing complex life forms was a process of trial and error, and the mass extinctions of Canfield oceans and other chemical holocausts wiped out most of the complex life, and it had to start over.

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post522316

After that first ice age after the Great Oxygenation Event, there was not another ice age for more than a billion years. The second ice age began about 800 million years ago, and it is thought that almost all of Earth’s surface froze:

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

It was when that ice age ended, a little more than 600 million years ago, that complex life made its ascendance. The early complex life forms looked nothing like what lives today. There was nearly a hundred million year period before the Cambrian Explosion that is today called the Ediacaran Period:

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

The Ediacaran fauna are so alien to our conceptions of animals that there is a great deal of speculation about how they came to be and what happened to them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendian...nterpretations

One of the leading explanations is that the Ediacaran fauna were early experiments in complex life. In the Darwinian framework, it is thought that the Ediacaran fauna were simply no match for what came after it: the animals of the Cambrian Explosion.

In the big picture, life was first chemosynthetic, then photosynthetic. In the early days, there was plenty of energy to go around for the creatures that could harvest it. The most visible life form for billions of years was a mat of cyanobacteria, forming colonies that grew into reef-like formations called stromatolites:

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

They thrived until complex life forms learned how to eat them over a billion years ago. It was the beginning of what we call grazing. The new grazers ate the stromatolites out of existence. Stromatolites exist today in a few extreme environments where grazers cannot survive.

The Ediacaran life forms were so bizarre in comparison to what came after them that scientists are not sure that they can be called animals. They may be intermediaries between plants and animals. The Ediacaran experiment may have led to some of today’s phyla (basic body plans):

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

but is also surmised that most of the Ediacaran biota were failed experiments in complex life that went extinct with the rise of the animals of the Cambrian Explosion, which began about 540 million year ago:

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

Virtually all of today’s phyla made their appearance in the Cambrian Period:

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

Plants do not need to move to get their food. Sunlight provides the energy, and plants developed roots and other organs to get resources such as carbon and nitrogen. Animals need to move to get their energy, and the Cambrian Period is where predation really took off. The easy days of peaceful photosynthesis and peaceful grazing (at least for the grazers! ) getting energy were over. Predation was not new to the Cambrian, but the Cambrian fossils give vivid evidence of an arms race between early animal life that was unprecedented.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambria...ators_and_prey

It was eat or be eaten, with many of the protective and predatory strategies entering the fossil record during the Cambrian. The Ediacaran Period gave evidence that the Cambrian Explosion was not as “explosive” as people like Darwin thought:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambria...e_explosion.3F

but the fossil record of animals is so rich in the Cambrian that it is the major line of demarcation of life on Earth, with the Cambrian beginning the eon that we are currently in, called the Phanerozoic:

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

Those trilobites that I read so avidly about as a child:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...ogy#post514788

made their appearance in the Cambrian:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilobite#Origins

Until the Ediacaran Period, the mass extinctions did not leave much evidence in the fossil record, but with the beginnings of the Cambrian Period, the mass extinctions leave a vivid fossil record. There have been about fifteen mass extinction events in the fossil record since the Ediacaran period, and each one of them is what early fossil hunters use to identify the geologic periods. Long before radioactive dating made its appearance, the fossil layers had been given relative dates by lining up the changes in the fossils, and how one was on top of another. When radioactive dating made its appearance, then scientists began putting absolute dates on the fossil beds, and our idea of how old the Earth is began to change. It did not change from the biblical six thousand years to today’s 4.5 billion years overnight. In the 19th century, the absolute age of Earth was thought to be somewhere between 20 and 100 million years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_...y_calculations

When those early scientists were making their hypotheses, the very idea of a galaxy was only about a hundred years old:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy#Observation_history

The Enlightenment marked a break from the authority of organized religion:

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

and by the late 19th century, scientists were beginning to become very confident that they were hot on the trail of figuring out all of the universe’s mysteries. Science began acting like a religion itself, with its more established theories given the lofty status of “laws.” There are not really any laws of physics; there are just theories. That there are “laws of physics” is a key indicator of how White Science has painted itself into a corner on many fronts, and why Black Scientists often laugh at White Scientists.

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post501338

But the best of the White Scientists were a bunch of mystics, and about the time that Einstein appeared on the scene, the giants of physics began to realize that White Science was a long way from figuring out the universe, and likely did not even have the tools to do so. Physicists such as Werner Heisenberg wrote very explicitly on that issue:

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

The enlightenment of the Einsteins and Heisenbergs is notably absent from today’s White Science, with arch atheists such as Sagan and Dawkins holding forth, with Hawking recently dispensing with “god” because the “laws of physics” are sufficient to explain the universe. IMO, those are just Young Souls having their materialistic fun.

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

So, while White Science acts like a religion, once in a while an enlightened scientist speaks out:

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

but they are few and far between. However, if White Science stays within its current framework and treats its work on evolution as one of history and process, it has many enlightening things to say. And one of its most important messages is that the life game is the energy game above all else. The acquisition, preservation and use of energy is the central dynamic that virtually all theories of evolution revolve around.

Mass extinctions may have had various causes, but the effect that always made species go extinct was their inability to acquire, preserve or use energy. If they were eaten out of existence, they were not able to preserve their energy as their energy became a meal for another life form. If they died of asphyxiation, drought, or even as a result of bolide impact events, it always came down to there not being enough energy to run the organism, either through poisoning the enzymes that made their lives possible, the lives of those they depended on in the food chain, the lack of sunlight to power the ecosystem, Earth becoming too cold to support their biochemical processes, or the lack of oxygen that they used to combust their caloric fuel, and so on. In the end, all death is a cessation of the energy processes of an organism.

Earlier, I posted about how the human brain is an energy hog. Because of that oxygenic respiration, the nervous system is also an oxygen hog. When people die because of asphyxiation, it is because their nervous system dies from a lack of oxygen to fuel the nerve cells. The brain cannot go without oxygen for more than a few minutes before it dies. It is the first to go, that high performance organ.

Virtually all death is an energy death.

That is all for today. It is off to work, but now I will begin to sketch the period of Earth’s history that most think of when they think of evolution, with its rich fossil record. But that period is only a little over ten percent of Earth’s history, and the current theories posit that complex life is already on the decline, largely from carbon starvation. The Age of Animals may only last for a few hundred million more years. Peter Ward suggests that humans learn to manage Earth’s chemical processes, to extend our day in the sun, but that is near the end of this series of posts, so it is a ways off.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am working the crazy hours at the moment, so I do not have quality writing time available to me, but briefly…

Between the sun’s energy that drives the climate and hydrological cycle, and the radioactivity below Earth’s surface, the key elements that support life are circulated. Water, oxygen, carbon, sulfur, and phosphorus and many trace elements are cycled. Nitrogen and oxygen are the only critical elements that are primarily circulated by life processes:

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

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

The other cycles are primarily driven by geophysical processes. Whether the driver is life or geophysics, the Sun’s or Earth’s energy drives them. A chemist of the nineteenth century formulated a “law” that states that life can only grow at the rate of its most restricted nutrient:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%...of_the_Minimum

So, when a cycle does not deliver a key nutrient at an adequate level to a biological process, the process will slow down or stop.

As I wrote before, Earth is being slowly carbon starved. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere combines with rainwater to turn granite into limestone and sand, in its most elementary sense. Volcanoes vent that sequestered carbon back to the atmosphere, but carbon has been slowly declining in the atmosphere. Life played a big part in that via photosynthesis, removing carbon from the atmosphere.

Some flowering plants, grasses mainly, developed a more efficient way to acquire carbon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation

but the slow starvation of carbon has done two things over the eons: made Earth colder and reduced Earth’s biomass. Today, it is thought that biomass peaked about a billion years ago, and biodiversity peaked during the Eocene Epoch, that ended about the time that the Antarctic icecap began to form:

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

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been steadily declining for almost 200 million years, from being ten times higher during the Triassic Period:

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

carbon dioxide has fallen fairly steadily since then. However, the greatest extinction of complex life ever was the Permian extinction of 250 million years ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian...tinction_event

which has consumed the lives of many scientists in discovering the cause, which may have been a combination of several dynamics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian...tinction_event

http://earthsky.org/earth/great-dyin...h-co2-build-up

But in the end, at the biological level, life could not obtain the required energy, often by having its enzymes poisoned by a variety of chemical means, but the drop in oxygen that accompanied all of those dynamics may have been the crowning blow, as Peter Ward argues in his Out of Thin Air.

Life just did its thing, trying to survive, often fouling its nest, but sometimes it learned to “eat the garbage” of life, such as the “discovery” of oxygenic respiration. What scientists have been learning is that Earth has undergone wild fluctuations in the chemical makeup of its atmosphere and oceans over the eons, which have at times caused life to flourish, and at others have killed off most life, with life itself sometimes driving the primary dynamic that either encouraged or destroyed life. In that sense, humanity has been no different than the phytoplankton that blooms when a flood of nutrients avalanches into the ecosystem (the dead zones in the oceans are an example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology), and in its enthusiastic growth as a critical nutrient was delivered, it ended up killing off the entire ecosystem.

Peter Ward and others are beginning to think that humans must become a whole lot smarter and Big-Picture-oriented, so we stop fouling our nest with about as much awareness being demonstrated as phytoplankton does. To that, I will say “Yea verily,” and note that FE can expedite that process like nothing else.

These people mastered the process of living in harmony with the environment, even making it harmonious:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/visions.htm#roads1

and the loving implementation of FE is obvious throughout their civilization. Ward and friends are almost certainly addicted to the “laws of physics,” so are really no help in overcoming the inertia and organized suppression, and if I got some of his time and helped open his eyes, it would likely risk his life, so I don’t go there. I need to find people who can form the foundation of heart-centered sentience that has always been missing in all FE efforts, but is required for my Level 12 choir idea:

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

A few visible “heroes” are not going to get the job done. It is up to the rest of us “little people” to form the critical mass.

Running off to work now.

Best,

Wade

[Elly]

Hi Wade,

Another element for concern for our oceans under global warming:

The first comprehensive study of changes in the oxygenation of oceans at the end of the last Ice Age (between about 10 to 20,000 years ago) has implications for the future of our oceans under global warming. The study, which was co-authored by Eric Galbraith, of McGill's Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences, looked at marine sediment and found that that the dissolved oxygen concentrations in large parts of the oceans changed dramatically during the relatively slow natural climate changes at the end of the last Ice Age. This was at a time when the temperature of surface water around the globe increased by approximately 2 °C over a period of 10,000 years. A similar rise in temperature will result from human emissions of heat-trapping gases within the next 100 years, if emissions are not curbed, giving cause for concern.

http://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/news/item/?item_id=212872

What is worrying is that, currently, global average temperature is predicted to rise by at least two degrees in the coming century due to climate change. This is of a similar magnitude to the warming the planet has undergone since the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago.

“So we would assume that if, indeed, temperatures are increasing in the next 100 years, these oxygen minimum zones would also increase in volume and that the general oxygen concentration of the ocean will decrease,” Jaccard said.

And what is more: “our analysis has shown that not only was absolute temperature important, but also the rate of change, so the faster the warming, the more expanded these (dead) zones are”.

Oxygen in seawater mainly comes from gas exchange between the water’s surface and the atmosphere. As temperatures at the surface increase, the dissolved oxygen supply below the surface gets used up more quickly. It’s a little like turning down the oxygen pump in a fish tank, says Jaccard.

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/science_...l?cid=32061254

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Cara:

Yes, this is one of many fronts where it is ominous. I am not quite through with Ward’s The Medea Hypothesis, but I think that one of his punchlines is coming, which is that when carbon dioxide levels reach 1,000 PPM (which we could hit, especially if we burn all the coal when the oil runs out), it can create a Canfield Ocean and hydrogen sulfide mass extinction event, or release great amounts of methane from the ocean, triggering other catastrophes like a huge greenhouse event.

It is the same litany of warnings that scientists have been making for many years, once the impact of the venting of carbon dioxide from the industrial age was comprehended. Other events such as the ozone layer destruction have been gentle little wakeup calls compared to what may be coming. The USA’s genocidal invasions of Hydrocarbon Country are other grim specters of what may lie ahead. Massive disease epidemics are also predicted with the global warming. Also, violent climate change could easily cause the starvation of billions of people. The four horsemen could easily ride again in the near future. Any White Scientist with a clue can see these things coming.

And FE can make all of those storm clouds disappear almost overnight, and it can be Heaven on Earth time. I was interacting with somebody recently on the awesome frustration and crazy-making situation that we have today. We are rushing towards the abyss on many fronts, and the solution sits there, ignored by almost everybody, and vehemently denied when broached. This situation is what caused people like Brian O to honestly wonder if humanity is really a sentient species:

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

I understand.

I’ll have a little time this weekend to get back on the horse of tracing the themes of my upcoming essay. Part of it will be on molecular biology. As I wrote earlier, ATP is the “coin of the realm” of all life on Earth, and scientists have been able to decipher some of the mechanisms that happen at the molecular level. The production of ATP is like a factory. Protons (hydrogen nuclei) get pushed across a membrane, creating the energy potential that drives the life process. Movies have been made of the schematic:

http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/life-sci...-synthase.html

The protons push a structure that looks kind of like a windmill, and scientists have computed that it takes something like thirteen protons to get the “windmill” to make one revolution. Each human body contains countless trillions of those windmills that power our cells.

Off to work now.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Last week was the 43rd anniversary of the first moon landing, and next week will be the first anniversary of Brian O’s passing:

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

I miss him. His voice was one of my favorites to listen to, and his message was vital. His last book, The Energy Solution Revolution, really said it. Energy solutions solve virtually all of the big problems that we have, because almost all of our biggest problems are rooted in energy scarcity. I finished Ward’s The Medea Hypothesis recently, and it finished with a call to arms for humanity to intelligently engineer the biosphere. But it takes a lot of energy to make Ward’s vision possible, and the effects of burning fossil fuels are creating the primary pollutant that threatens the stability of Earth’s ecosystems. That conundrum is not lost on people like Ward, but the complete ignorance of radical new ways to produce usable energy is the great blind spot in work like his.

And even though the great energy delivered by burning fossil fuels drove the Industrial Revolution, there has never been enough to go around, so the imperial cultures have actively prevented their subject nations from industrializing. The de-industrialization of Iraq, the siege that Iran finds itself subject to, the immensely corrupt royalty that runs Saudi Arabia, and the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan are all imperial machinations to keep the Euro-American boot on the necks of those people, to keep them down. If they industrialized, they would not have all those hydrocarbons to “sell,” but would use it themselves.

When I read Ward’s “solutions,” or Heinberg’s neo-Malthusian “solutions":

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

or the “let’s ride bikes” answers from the environmentalists:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/purpose...ironmentalists

I want to call their approach, “The Non-Solutions of White Science.” With what I know of FE, their so-called solutions are comprised of a bunch of false choices, rooted in austerity and symptom management, and avoid the root issues. When they make the limiting assumptions of White Science, all that follows is a dreary set of options which usually amount to choosing the lesser of several evils, justifying the exploitation at worst, and at best it comes up with self-flagellating “solutions” that few would have any enthusiasm pursuing, but were coerced to because of austerity, looming environmental collapse, mega-wars, and trying to eke out survival amongst all the grim “choices.” FE makes all of those “choices” seem ludicrous, and the surreal part is that when FE is broached with such people, who say that they seek solutions, they slam the door on the possibility of FE and run the other way as fast as they can, covering their eyes and ears, shrieking. You really have to see it to believe it:

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

If that bubble is ever popped, among “progressives,” then it will be a downhill racer to FE and Heaven on Earth, but popping the bubble of people’s scarcity-based conditioning is the hard part:

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

My upcoming essay is intended to do that, but not very many “progressives” are going to get it. Environmentalists may be among the last to get on the FE train, not the first, as hard as that may be to believe. It is going to be up to very few people, comparatively, to carry that ball to where it can be even seen by the “progressives,” much less the masses. The masses will begin to understand when FE is delivered to their homes:

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

But onward with my life on Earth narrative.

One of the many mysteries of how complex life on Earth came to be is the 1-2 billion year gap between the appearance of complex cells (eukaryotic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eukaryote ) and the appearance of complex life forms. The first snowball Earth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth ) followed on the heels of that Great Oxygenation Event ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_catastrophe ), and that was likely not a coincidence. The collision of the continents, the resultant anoxic oceans and the hydrogen sulfide events may have well knocked the evolution of complex life back on its heels repeatedly:

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

and it was not until another snowball Earth finally receded that the stage was set for complex life to appear. It looks like there was about a hundred million years of complex life in Earth’s oceans before the Cambrian Explosion happened:

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

and almost none of the pre-Cambrian complex life survived the end of their day in the sun. That was not all that anomalous, as the mass extinction of complex life would happen several more times in the coming eon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct...inction_events

From a biochemist’s perspective, while complex life became quite diverse in its shapes and sizes, it completely abandoned the diversity in chemistry that prokaryotic life forms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prokaryote ) exhibited, with their many ways to wring energy from their environments. When life became complex, with multicellular life making its appearance, virtually all complex life engaged in oxygenic respiration:

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

and went “all in” with that method of energy generation. It is by far the most energy efficient form of generation known in Earth’s life forms, and it relies on the oxygen generated by oxygenic photosynthesis. That oxygen primarily generated by cyanobacteria created the ozone layer and likely saved Earth’s oceans from being lost to space.

In recent work on determining the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in Earth’s atmosphere, it turns out that the biggest mass extinctions coincided with oxygen crashes, beginning with the crash that ended the Ediacaran era and preceded the Cambrian Explosion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-Ediacaran_extinction

In his Out of Thin Air, Peter Ward makes the case that those oxygen crashes were responsible for those mass extinctions, and animals that could adapt to lower oxygen conditions thrived in the next era. What seems to have happened, and this has informed evolutionary theory, is that when mass extinctions happened, it spurred evolutionary strategies to adapt to the low oxygen levels. Those that could adapt became new species that then proliferated after the holocausts. When higher oxygen levels reappeared, energy became plentiful and the previously widowed ecosystems filled with new complex life forms, and when oxygen reached its highest levels, the ecosystems became the most complex, although speciation was at its nadir. One of the key tenets of recent evolutionary theory is that energy “funds” complexity. It is the primary thesis of Frank Niele’s Energy: Engine of Evolution, and high oxygen levels (AKA high energy levels) funding the greatest ecosystem diversity (AKA complexity) is one of the hypotheses of Ward’s Out of Thin Air (p. 47).

Ward’s life as a paleobiologist has led him to some Indiana-Jones-ish experiences, and one of his “pet” species is the nautilus, regarding which he is recognized as a world authority. The nautilus has been around since the Cambrian Era:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus#Evolution

and is considered a “living fossil” because almost all of its cousins are extinct.

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

Ward believes that the nautilus survived because of its dual-purpose “water jets” that both propel it in the water and force water through its gills, making it a high-performance oxygen extractor. That ability allowed it to survive when almost everything else in the oceans went extinct. The nautilus certainly does not dominate ocean ecosystems, but it is able to exploit a niche along the deep end of coral reefs. They sneak up to the surface at night during new moons when the light is dim, and thereby avoid the many predators that would make short work of them. Living fossils have survived by carving out niches that potential competitors/predators cannot survive in, such as the deep oceanic caves that the coelacanth calls home:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coelaca...l_distribution

They also sneak up to the upper waters at night to feed, while spending their days deep in fringe territory. Similarly, the colonies of cyanobacteria called stromatolites only survive where animals that would graze them cannot survive:

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

Living fossils all found a trick that allowed them to survive over the long years:

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

while their cousins died off, leaving them virtually alone on their evolutionary tree. They all either found a way to generate energy when little else could, or found ways to avoid becoming an energy source for another creature, or both. Successful ways of acquiring or preserving their energy is what set them apart.

The Cambrian Explosion has been called an arms race, as grazers developed armor and other ways of surviving the predators. Today it is thought that the primary producers had long years of peace and plenty, as they had little competition for energy and nutrients. As energy and (energy-delivered) nutrients became scarce, then grazing animals were born. Then there was a Golden Age of grazers, until they too began to use up the available resources as they ate the stromatolites out of existence. Then some grazers learned how to eat other grazers, and predation was born. In all cases, it is thought that population pressures, as the energy supply was strained, by either events such as oxygen crashes or crowding, that spurred the evolutionary changes that resulted in the diversity that we see today in the animal kingdom. Those that could adapt survived, and those that could not went extinct. Virtually all of the species that ever existed are extinct today, with less than 0.1% of all species that ever existed being alive today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction#Causes

The Cambrian Explosion all happened in the oceans. Most of today’s phyla, or body plans, were established in the Cambrian Era. Bilateral symmetry, eyes, legs, claws, and other aspects of complex life appeared then.

Life had yet to invade land, other than bacterial mats and similar outposts of life along seashores. Before life invaded the continents, they were comprised of rocky granitic sheets that shed rain in braided rivers. The rivers that we are familiar with were created by the roots of plants. Before plants invaded land, the continental rivers were the braided rivers that exist today in the arctic tundra and other extreme environments:

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

The Cambrian Era happened exclusively in the oceans, and ended with mass extinction events nearly 500 million years ago,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambria...inction_events

which are thought to be due to an ice age and plunging oxygen levels:

http://park.org/Canada/Museum/extinction/camcause.html

The dip in oxygen was not as great as what lied ahead, but it dipped from today’s 21% to about 17%, which was enough to wipe out most trilobites. The oxygen levels quickly rebounded, and the resulting Ordovician Period:

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

is when large animals appear in the fossil record.

The Ordovician Period ended about 440 million years ago, with the second greatest mass extinction of complex life yet discovered:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordovic...ossible_causes

which coincided with the biggest oxygen crash yet, from about 20% to maybe 14%.

The earliest land plants appeared around 470 million years ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_pl...ascular_plants

and were very similar to the green algae that they evolved from:

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

vascular plants appeared about 440 million years ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryop...ascular_plants

just as the oxygen levels rebounded from the Ordovician Period’s mass extinction. It is thought that vascular plants originally grew upward in order to spread their spores, with photosynthetic competition coming much later. Plants had the land to themselves, spreading across the continents, for tens of millions of years, before animals followed them.

The first land animals were direct descendants of their ocean-dwelling ancestors, and small spiders and scorpions are the earliest land animals that have been found so far in the fossil record, appearing between 420 and 410 million years ago. The earliest land animals coincide with the greatest increase of atmospheric oxygen yet experienced, with oxygen rising to about 25% in the atmosphere a little more than 400 million years ago. Breathing air was a great innovation, but leaving the oceans required radical adaptation by plants and animals. Lungs and tough skin that conserved water were required adaptations, and plants developed tough “hides,” too, to preserve their water.

Ward argues that without the high oxygen levels, complex animals would not have been able to move onto land. Just as land animals were making big strides in establishing themselves on land, the biggest oxygen crash yet, from 25% to about half that,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordovic...ossible_causes

ended that migration. The following Devonian Period was characterized by low oxygen levels:

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

Ward argues that the crash in oxygen levels ended the first wave of migration onto land, which could not begin again until oxygen levels recovered. Low oxygen levels were when complex life had it hard, and innovation in respiration and other survival strategies were their greatest.

There is a gap in the fossil record known as Romer’s Gap:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romer%27s_gap

that Ward places at about 370-335 million year ago (see Out of Thin Air, p. 107), which Ward believes was due to the low oxygen levels of the time. Amphibians did not make their first appearance until about 355 million years ago, but it was not until about 340-330 million years ago that amphibians began to spread, and large animals established a beachhead on land that continues to this day. That successful migration onto land coincided with rapidly rising oxygen levels, which matched today’s 21% at around 340 million years ago, but kept skyrocketing, attaining a level of perhaps 35% around 280 million years ago.

That led to one of the most fascinating periods of land life, and events that have critical importance to today’s world, because that is when the coal beds were laid down. But it is off to work now. It will be a busy next couple of weeks, but I hope to keep this narrative going until we get to the appearance of an ape that left the trees. Then things get really interesting.

Best,

Wade

[Melinda]

Posted by Wade Frazier (here)
...next week will be the first anniversary of Brian O’s passing:

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

I miss him. His voice was one of my favorites to listen to...

Mine too. Rest in Peace Brian O. You changed the world with a loving heart, and one day the text books will recognise you as the brave and graceful warrior you were. Thank you for what you did. We were honoured to have you walk among us.

Free energy for all, and for the good of our home planet.

[sandy]

Brian may be gone in body but his spirit and mission lives on thanks to people such as yourself Wade.

Memories of those we love and have lost are wonderful. As we remember times together, I believe passed spirit energy comes into the PRESENT and we once again experience the love and meaningfulness of our relationship. Oh how gentle and soothing LOVE truly is

Yes a year has gone by and it is hard to believe, and I think that time is speeding up as this age comes to an end. Or is it just because I soon will be a certified Senior Citizen

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Sandy:

I’ll be 55 next year, which will entitle me to some gray-haired perks, too.

Soon after Brian passed, a message was delivered to me, from a source I respect, that said it was from Brian. The message was “Be careful!” I can conjure up several scenarios that the message may have been referring to, and I have stayed out of trouble in the past year, so maybe I heeded him. And giving me a warning was just what I would expect Brian to do, keeping an eye on things.

I still have some stuff to do with Brian’s legacy, which will take a little while. I won’t patch things up with NASA and Brian, but I am going to see if NASA is interested in making his “last word” on the moon landings more visible:

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

Then I need to do battle with people at Wikipedia who have muddied his biography. He was not into “alternative beliefs,” but advocated scientific testing of paranormal phenomenon. That is one of the subtle ways that people have been sullying his legacy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_O...native_beliefs

Hi AWP:

If we turn the corner and do FE, history will be kind to his memory, if I have anything to do with it.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I don’t want to sound too much like a broken record, but lately I have been getting hit with questions like,

“Let’s build an FE machine in our garage.”

“My community is having energy problems. What can we do locally to solve our energy problems?”

“I saw a documentary on how the electric car was suppressed. How can they do that?”

And this is not from forums like Avalon, but people in my daily life. It seems to be my fate to constantly field such questions. At this time, there are no local FE solutions feasible on Earth. The forces arrayed against FE appearing on the scene, Godzilla by no means the only obstacle, ensure that no local effort can succeed. There is no place on the planet to hide and do it. If a hundred saints and a thousand almost-saints got together someplace with unity of purpose, then yes, it might have a prayer, but I have never heard of such a gathering. Stuff like TED is show business for the elites, not even remotely close to having the right stuff to begin such an effort.

Those are all square one questions. My goal, when I get the conversation going, is to take it far above those introductory questions. We will see how it goes.

Best,

Wade

[Ilie Pandia]

Wade, that's not really square one, more like 1.5 perhaps ?

At least people are waking up to the fact that there IS a problem and FE energy can fix it.

I've recently watched a Stan Deyo interview talking about Free Energy and "electro-gravitics" and all kinds of tech kept under wraps. This goes along the line of knowing that technology is not a problem any more... and it has not been for a long time...

But where the interview gets really annoying is when Stan Deyo presents that "White Hats" justification of why we don't have free energy today. In his view, the only problem is how to let people know without creating havoc and causing economy to collapse. And in case we did not get it, he even has an example: the petroleum industry! Once Free Energy gets out, that particular industry branch (and connected branches) would collapse! Just imagine the disaster, the economical problems we would face with so many unemployed people, that need to retrain themselves to work in some other industrial branch. So then, until there is a way to smooth things out, FE will be kept secret. One way to do it is to force one world government, (via an external threat, possible ET false invasion), and that one world government (created from a fear response) will have the power to slowly roll out the new energy sources w/o major disruptions in the system...

This kind of logic drives me crazy. At least he got one thing right: Free Energy is a very disruptive piece of technology!

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Ilie:

Yes, those 1.5 questions at least see energy as an issue, and it gives me great patience training! Last night I watched that Batman Dark Knight movie. I don’t even want to comment on the mass murder that accompanied a showing of it last week, other than to say that I live in a very sick nation. That movie’s theme was turning a new energy source (OK, nuclear fusion is not so new ) into a bomb. This is becoming a common enough theme anymore. I wonder if there is more to it than meets the eye, and not necessarily in a good way, kind of like portraying ETs as a menace to Earth.

Back in my early days with Dennis, when I was his junior partner, it was quite a heady time before they dropped the sledgehammer on us. We had talks about those kinds of “White Hat” justifications that are really suave Black Hat justifications. It is always easier to sell self-interest when it is couched in just trying to make everything better for everybody. In Washington State, they actually “gave” forests to school districts, so that their funding comes from raping the forests, to “help” the children. They sold the lottery in California long ago the same way, saying that the proceeds go to schools. Evil stuff.

People like Deyo drank the Kool-Aid, and he probably believes that kind of “reasoning” – I saw it with scientists and engineers all the time, with their extremely blinkered view of political-economic dynamics:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/radleft.htm#nerd

For how “smart” they supposedly are, they sure have a narrow view of how the world works and can work. It is like their emotional maturity and understanding of the human condition is stunted. The “skeptics” are like that, with the emotional maturity of adolescent boys seeming to be on the high end of their functioning spectrum, when they aren’t being actively dishonest:

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

This is all part of the conundrum. The most common reaction from the “smart” when they first hear about FE is to do the Level 3 “it is impossible, and a conspiracy theory,”

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level3

and if they quickly feign considering whether FE was real, they immediately do a Level 5, “We would wreck the planet with FE” (or collapse the economy, etc.)

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

and then they run away as fast as they can. To protect their conscience, they usually retreat back to Level 3, and they surround themselves with their “rational” armor against abundance and hunker down, and they don’t want to hear about FE again, and can have very violent reactions to the idea of FE. Bizarre. It took me many years to begin to understand those kinds of reactions:

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

All of those “reasonable” reactions have fear at their root. It is another aspect of love being the answer.

Going to bed now.

Best,

Wade

[Elly]

Hi Wade,

When I was in college learning about history and political systems (imperialism, communism, fascism, etc.), I ended up thinking that the capitalist one, with its improvements but still its nonsense (inequalities, abuses, power struggles, etc.) might not be the best and ultimate system. Within a system which provides many perks, it is very hard to see otherwise, that something totally different could exist. And you are right, fear (of loosing, of being alone) is at the base of this. I believe that to accept something transformative for humanity, the mind has to be open to the idea that we are not defined by the recognized rules within our system, that alternatives are acceptable, inevitable. A system that has to tie with our core universal human values. This yearning has to be stronger than the fear.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Cara:

I agree. For about the past ten years, I have been saying that my primary goal is making FE thinkable:

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

Dennis named his heat pump “The Alternative.”

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#new

The capitalist conceit is letting customers choose whatever is on the menu. It is just that the menu only has one item on it. That is called a “free market.” It is like having two hand-picked candidates for president being called a "democracy." There has never been a democracy or a free market. They are useful herd-management fictions, however, providing the illusion of freedom.

In a world of scarcity, people are governed by fear. All of the dominant ideologies are scarcity-based:

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

and there is always a stick that comes with the carrot. The sticks can be subtle, but they are always there. Calling capitalism the “free” system is a huge lie.

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

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

Capitalism acts like it is all carrot, but it uses more sticks than any of the others. It is just that its sticks are dismissed as “conspiracy theories” and other epithets (or called bringing "freedom" to Iraq - all that we liberated was their oil). The American propaganda system is the world’s subtlest:

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

with most of its chumps believing that it produces the “truth.” They are not that fooled, however:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/07/...g-the-obvious/

Yes, we have to want the positive future; it certainly is not going to fall in our laps, and if we pursue it from fear, it will turn out badly.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have been too busy lately to write much, but I am getting back to that life narrative. Briefly this morning….

Enlightened scientists will say that the story that their investigations tell is about process and history, not intent:

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

The mystical student generally learns that all the various life forms that have inhabited Earth had a purpose of existence, and it was the development of consciousness. Mystical sources say that there are not human souls, nor dog souls, nor frog souls, but souls that choose to express themselves as those species. Michael says that even atoms have personalities.

While there is a bigger picture of the intent that is supposedly behind the thrust of life on Earth, it is also true that everything that lives tries to stay alive. That is part of the deal. We all need to eat, and we do. We all die when our bodies’ processes fail. Scientists have documented about fifteen mass extinction episodes during the eon of complex life. They all had physical causes. The play of consciousness continues, no matter the life form. But when a mass extinction happened, it was because Earth became hostile to the existing life forms. Those that could adapt to the changing conditions survived the extinction episodes, and often ended up dominating the next phase of life on Earth.

As Peter Ward made the case in his Out of Thin Air, the biggest mass extinctions usually happened when oxygen levels crashed. In the era of complex life, which is all based on oxygenic respiration because of its superior energy generation capabilities, those that could adapt to the low oxygen conditions the best survived. It was not always low oxygen, as with the Cretaceous extinction which ended the reign of the dinosaurs, setting the stage for mammals, but it was still an extinction that came from low energy availability, as the bolide event caused a “nuclear winter” that wiped out most life. And if it was a hydrogen sulfide event, which was precipitated because of low-oxygen (anoxic) oceans, at the animal level, it was still an energy death, as the hydrogen sulfide poisons the process of cellular respiration:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide#Toxicity

Cut off the energy supply, and life dies. Similar to what the neo-Malthusians advocate:

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

After those mass extinctions, there could be low-oxygen eras following. As Ward made the case:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post526024

the crashing oxygen levels of about 400 million years ago essentially ended the first attempt of animals to migrate to land. The Devonian Period was largely devoid of land-based vertebrates, after some success when oxygen levels peaked. The Devonian oxygen crash bottomed about 370 million years ago, coinciding with one of the Big Five mass extinctions.

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

Anoxic oceans accompanied that mass extinction. When there is a mass extinction in the oceans from anoxia, the sea floor is covered with dead life that does not decay, and the Devonian extinction formed some of the key oil deposits that are burned in the USA today:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_sha..._United_States

The end of the Devonian began Romer’s Gap, which coincided with low oxygen levels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romer%27s_gap

Ward argues that Romer’s Gap was due to the low oxygen levels, which terminated the first migration to land. Only when oxygen levels rose again could animals resume their conquest of land. At the end of the Devonian, oxygen levels were about 12-14% - about half of what they were about 420 million years ago, when the first animal migrations to land began.

The other key atmospheric gas whose concentrations had direct impact on life was carbon dioxide, which was the key greenhouse gas. Over the past 500 million years, carbon dioxide levels have been largely inversely-correlated with oxygen levels, and when oxygen levels began to rise 360 million years ago after the Devonian extinction, carbon dioxide levels crashed, which initiated one of the great ice ages:

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

At the same time, and not coincidentally, plants developed the polymer lignin. Lignin is what allows trees to grow tall. Before lignin appeared, plants could not grow tall, relying on water pressure to keep them upright. Lignin created an “arms race” among plants, and whoever grew the tallest got the most light. Lignin is what makes plants “woody.” Also, it is today thought that lignin outran the ability of other creatures to digest it. When trees died for tens of millions of years, they did not decay, because nothing could eat them. There was a mass of trees on top of trees, forming great piles of dead, non-decaying trees. That period is what formed Earth’s coal deposits:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboni...Rocks_and_coal

Earth’s coal deposits forming during ice ages, and its oil deposits forming during extinction events, is kind of ironic. Those events are what ended up fueling the industrial age hundreds of millions of years later. Those oil and coal deposits are non-renewable resources in their strongest sense. The conditions that formed the coal beds will likely never happen again, and there has not been much oil bed formation lately. Some oil beds began forming 500 million years ago, and have been forming as recently as 20 million years ago, but the geological processes that create the oil that we burn with such abandon today happen over many millions of years. We will run out of oil in my lifetime, and anybody wanting to wait until Earth serves up more needs to have millions of years of patience.

I have to run off to work, but I plan to get this narrative going again. It will form the rough outline of my upcoming essay.

Best,

Wade