Little Blue Marble

Egomania is a term used to describe one who is totally absorbed with oneself.

For this blog post I have invented “anthromania,” a term using the Greek word for mankind, to describe our often illogical insistence that we humans can insure our existence by totally controlling our environment. Does anyone with a brain believe we can survive for the next hundred years without burning some hydrocarbons ... even if we have to melt our frozen poles in doing so? You too AOC and Greta ...

This notion that humans are the masters of the universe is biblical in its origin and continually reinforced by our remarkable scientific discoveries. However, Mother Nature allows us to persist in this anthromania until she decides to destroy an island with a hurricane unleashing the energy of a hundred hydrogen bombs ... just to remind us who is boss.

I know people like Elon Musk have imagined us inhabiting other planets before we destroy our own spaceship Earth. (I, myself, do not think this outcome is that pressing.) But, when one realizes the quality of life that would exist on these alien planets ... like a fish out of water ... the appeal seems only to be one of survival. For myself, I am just as happy to (hopefully) spend my remaining time on our little blue marble.

Mars

I read recently that the atmosphere of Mars is 95% carbon dioxide ... see: Atmosphere of Mars. This surprised me since the atmosphere here on Earth is only 0.04% CO2. Now I understand that the Martian atmosphere is much thinner (1%) than it is on our planet, but it is still revealing and prompts the following observations:

- Mars obviously has no fossil fuels since it is questionable if it ever supported any life that left a legacy of hydrocarbons ... nor does it have any internal combustion engines. So where did this CO2 come from? The answer must be that there is a natural out-gassing from volcanoes and vents occurring there and, not having any plant life to convert this carbon dioxide to sugar and oxygen over the eons, this gas has kept building up. This also strongly suggest that this process must have happened, and probably still does occur, here on Earth.

- Being that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and given its huge percentage there, the temperature on Mars must be extraordinarily high. But no, it is cold enough there to freeze this CO2 into dry ice around it’s polar regions ... see picture above. Huh?

- Elon Musk is pointing to Mars as being the refuge that we must inhabit to escape from our Earth that is destroying itself with CO2-produced global warming. Why would we seek to flee to a planet that has many thousands of times more percentage of atmospheric carbon dioxide than we have here at home? Do government subsidies for electric cars and rocket ships have anything to do with this?

Afterward: Thinking more about Earthlings settling Mars — Mars obviously has no ozone layer like we do on Earth that protects us from the sun’s lethal cosmic rays. This would complicate the habitation process there enormously ... possibly too enormously.

Gravity and Climate

If gravitational waves are bathing the Earth and our solar system from all directions of the universe over the billions of years of our existence ... adding subtle changes in all our gravity profiles ... and therefore causing subtle changes in the tilts and orbits of the Earth (and the rest of the solar system) ... see: Pterosaurs (Updated); one can conclude that this has caused “signal” changes in our climate ... ice ages and warming periods ... all independent of the other smaller “noise” factors that also affect our climate.

The above image is NASA’s related depiction of the gravity map or “geoid” of our current Earth. Its topology is caused by differences in rock densities, sea levels and many other things ... see: NASA Earthdata Entry. But is it also caused, to a much smaller degree, by orphan gravity ... in the form of gravitons, bathing our Earth from outer space through gravitational waves? These changes would be so small and random that they might go unnoticed from month to month ... but, over the millennia or centuries or, possibly, even decades, have a significant impact ... not just on Earth, but on our entire solar system.

And, if such exogenous changes in our gravity alters, ever so slightly, the tilt of our planet ... or shifts, ever so slightly, our orbital path around the sun ... or maybe even changes in the sun itself ... these effects on our climate might well be quite significant. Have we been ignoring these possible gravitational factors in our current carbon-based hysteria about our planet having a fever? Dear reader, I would like to suggest so.

Pterosaurs (Updated)

Because pterosaurs were so much larger than today's flying animals, one must conclude that our atmosphere was much denser then. And  how could this be? One explanation is that our atmosphere is getting thinner. But the opposite seems true ... see Science Magazine Article.

Thus, our atmosphere then must have been infused with many more carbon dioxide and other complex (heavier) molecules such as methane and water vapor.

Therefore, if life flourished then, we must have far more latitude for changes to our current atmospheric mix than climate scientists, like Al Gore, give us credit for.

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The above was written to try to explain why flying animals were so much bigger hundreds of millions of years ago. I concluded the the density of our atmosphere was much greater back then ... which helped to support more weight. The case I made was rather strained but I am not dismissing it here. But, upon further research and thought, it might (also) be that gravity on our Earth was so much weaker back then ... allowing for easier flight ... see: More on Gravity. Could be both, but I am now more persuaded by less gravity.

I also have some further thoughts on gravity ... starting with the question: what happens to its gravity when matter is destroyed? Clearly, nuclear weapons destroy matter, albeit a small amount turned into enormous amounts of energy (E = MC2). However, when celestial events occur, such as the merging of two black holes, enormous amounts of matter is destroyed. Such events, it has been recently discovered, send out “gravitational waves.” Although it has not yet been proven that gravitational waves carry away this orphaned gravity (see: Wikipedia Entry) ... I will so speculate.

These gravitational waves, if they distributed this orphaned gravity throughout the universe, would likely do so uniformly ... which seems a requirement for not upsetting the current celestial relationships (as I have previously been concerned with). Also, of course, even though this gravitational wave might possibly distribute an enormous amount of its orphaned gravity throughout the universe, the share that the Earth might receive would be very, very small.

But again, millions of years of these gravitational waves striking the Earth might accumulate to a meaningful number ... or, there might have been one or more super gigantic celestial events that provided the Earth with a large enough dose to goose our gravity to the point where pterosaurs could no longer get airborne ... and dinosaurs to became extinct over a short time span.

My speculations here may or may not make scientific sense ... but they sure make common sense.

Living Life

The Earth is unique among all the planets we know in that it has evolved a way of capturing and storing the energy from the sun through a magical process called photosynthesis ... the basis of all life. And photosynthesis totally depends on one extremely scarce ingredient to start everything off ... CO2. And now, our most highly evolved life form, man, has decreed CO2 to be a pollutant ... and is trying to eliminate it from our atmosphere.  Are we f**king crazy?!

Gambit

With 7.6 billion Homo sapiens on our planet Earth, it is almost impossible to imagine all the nuance of behaviors that we humans exhibit. They run the gambit of gifted, guileful, gluttonous, ghoulish, greedy, generous, gleeful, grumpy, gracious, gregarious and gratuitous conducts ... and then some. Next time we'll work on "h".

Jabba Dabba Do

There was an Aussie from Perth

T'was the fattest man on Earth

At eighty stone five

He was barely alive

They never could measure his girth

ET Sheriff

I have analyzed the probability that we will be able to communicate with alien life that most certainly exists elsewhere in the universe. My estimate is, at best, one in a million ... see: Sapient Window (Update). And the chances that such aliens might visit us here on Earth are quite a substantial  bit smaller. However, does this cause big government to account for this minuscule possibility? Of course not. We now will be spending six figures to hire someone at NASA to protect us from this will-o-the-wisp ... see: The Independent Article. And, once this charlatan has fleshed out this bureaucracy, we taxpayers will be shelling out millions ... with these ET sheriffs sitting around, releasing an occasional press release to gullible dreamers, while waiting for Godot.

Prescience

"Logic is logic, that's all I say." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Earthquakes that are associated with the pull of the sun's and moon's gravity have made a lot of sense to me in the past. If these orbs can affect the rise and fall of water ... the ocean tides ... why can't they affect the Earth's crust in a similar way? I have speculated on this in the past ... particularly during supermoons ... see: Supermoon. Now, it appears that I was onto something. This phenomenon apparently has been repeatedly detected in the San Andreas fault in California ... see: LA Times Story.

It would seem to me that those living in earthquake zones should pay close attention to the relative positions of the Earth, the sun and the moon. Just a thought ...

Supermoon

The moon is coming much closer than usual to the Earth. This is called a "supermoon" ... see:CBS News Story. I have in the past associated such events with large earthquakes ... see: Quaking in Our Boots and Copy Cat. So it is no surprise (to me) that there was just a large 8.3 magnitude earthquake of the coast of Chili ... see: The Guardian Story.

This current supermoon won't actually reach its closest approach to us until September 27th. The fact that the sun will then also be in alignment ... a solar eclipse will occurs also on that very same day ... may make for even more dramatic tides in the Earth's crust.. Therefore, I think that it is only logical that our planet should soon experience some more of these large Earth shakers.

Be prepared.

Sapient Window

I have previously coined the term "sapient window" when discussing the possibility of communicating with life elsewhere in our universe ... see: Cosmic Silence. This term is meant to define the period when life on a planet has progressed far enough scientifically to understand its uniqueness in the continuum of space and time. In other words, without superstition, being able to define enough of the essential realities of the universe to fathom that there is other life elsewhere out there ... is the essence of a sapient window.

It is difficult to say when the sapient window opened here on Earth, but a good guess would be with the publication of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity in 1916. Thus our sapient window seems at most to be about 100 years old. This is a vanishing small percentage of our Earth's 1.3 billion years of age which is about 10% of the age of our universe. The more difficult task is estimating how long our sapient window will remain open ... may I be optimistic and propose another 10,000 years? (I think Charles Krauthammer is more pessimistic in the article above-referenced.) What will cause this window to close is anyone's guess ... a pandemic, a natural disaster, another Dark Age, self-annulation, etc.

Even with this, the Earth's sapient window would still be but a snap of the fingers compared to the age of our planet ... and just a blink of the eye relative to the age of the universe ... as, I assume, it would be for other exo-planets.Therefore, assuming a meaningful concurrence of the sapient windows between any of the billions of possible life-supporting exo-planets is a bit of a stretch ... even ignoring the unfathomable distances involved.

Relative Things

An astrophysicist was speaking to a woman's club about the future of our sun and how, in about two billion years, it would become a red giant star and burn our Earth to a crisp. After his talk was finished a woman of a certain age frantically accosted him and asked him if he had said two million years or two billion years. He replied, "two billion years," to which she sighed and responded, "thank goodness!"

Which brings us to a similar news story about the Catalina Island off of California's shores near Los Angeles. Apparently this island is eventually going to sink under the ocean causing a tsunami which could wipe out L.A. ... but this could probably take up to three million years ... see: Breitbart Article.

I don't think that anyone other than the matron at that woman's club and Al Gore should be lying awake nights worrying about such a possibility.

Geocentric View

A Saudi Arabian cleric is now arguing that the sun revolves around the Earth and that the Earth does not rotate because otherwise how could airplanes get from here to there with the Earth moving against them underneath ... see: Breitbart Story. And like [too] many American youths, he also believes that the NASA moon landings were staged in a Hollywood studio.

And I'll wager a few riyals that he also is a big proponent of global warming.

Science Dunces

Is it any wonder that the climate-change crowd gets away with their silly suppositions?  We are obviously a nation of science dunces … viz: a recent National Science Foundation survey found that one-quarter of all Americans believe that the sun revolves around the Earth … see: CNET Piece. And roughly half don’t seem to understand the notion of evolution.

This latter ignorance is a little forgivable given contradictory Biblical teachings.  But this former scientific lapse seems nothing more than an indictment of our educational system.  Witness the fact that our Environmental Protection Agency … and by proxy our President … can label carbon dioxide a “pollutant gas” when it is the basis of our Earth’s capturing and storage of the sun’s energy … and thus the nexus of all living things on our planet.  This is equally stunning in my mind.

I wonder sometimes if we are not on the verge of slipping back into the equivalent of the Dark Ages.

Afterward: To this point, I think that too many people equate smoke with carbon dioxide.  No, CO2 is but a small part of smoke ... mostly consisting of soot, water vapor, carbon monoxide, sulfur oxides, etc. as well as carbon dioxide (aka, essential plant food).

Come on Carbon!

Instead of the Earth having a fever … as Al Gore has so dramatically proclaimed … we may be entering another mini ice age … see: Daily Mail Article (a very interesting read). Yes, that very country, England, which started the mass hysteria about our increasing levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) causing the Earth to come to a boil, now is warning that the sun has entered a solar lull … which then might cause excessively low temperatures around the globe.

If this were to occur, would the charlatans who have extracted billions of dollars from our world’s chicken little’s then be forced to give back all this pelf?  Perhaps we can undo things and start offering “carbon debits” to the world’s polluters in order to keep us from freezing?  Or perhaps now many climatologists will blame this solar lull on increasing CO2 levels here on Earth?

To me, this revelation says nothing but that the original models of our Earth’s changing climate were seriously flawed in that they were single-variant and not multi-variant.  They focused on the only variable, CO2, which was (partially) man-made and therefore (partially) man-controlled.  In doing so they conveniently ignored many other variables (such as solar cycles) of which man is at their mercy … and therefore, to these silly "climatologists," could be of no consequence … see one of my previously blogs (from 2006!) making this very point …  Junkier Science Blog.

Perhaps now we can get down to the serious scientific business of trying to build multi-variant models that try to predict our Earth’s climate future?  This will be an extremely difficult scientific task and will take possibly generations of true unbiased effort to achieve even somewhat accurate results.

In the meantime … come on carbon!