Running Rings Around Big Science

I don't know if this comes through in my musings here, but I'm one of those people who looks in the opposite direction if someone calling themselves an "authority" tells me to look in a certain direction.  I'm not a complete contrarian, in that I think "authorities" usually include some truth in their pronouncements in order to buy credibility.

For that reason, when I was told that "all credible scientists" agree on Global Warming and anyone who goes against the pronouncement ought to be strung up, I figured there was some kind of significant climate event coming, but that it wasn't warming.  Sure enough, years of research on solar cycles, weather patterns and the like have led me to conclude that we are heading straight into a Mini Ice Age, not unlike the various solar minima that have come and gone just in recorded history.

When the "authorities" told us that a "lone gunman" killed JFK, I immediately figured there was more to see.  A lot of smart people have come to that conclusion, as well, as they did a far more thorough job of investigating than the Warren Commission did.

When the "authorities" told me that 19 Arabs hi-jacked four planes and flew them into buildings, and that those buildings could be reduced to rubble by the event, I was more than a bit skeptical.  Most certainly, the Building 7 collapse should have clued in most conscious people, though I certainly know some otherwise smart people who just can't bring themselves to see that fact.

So when "authorities" tell me that evolution is true and a stable Universe is the norm, I immediately start looking into the matters myself.  Of course, evolution is quite easy to disprove, but not many people try.  Instead, they repeat it as if gospel truth without even scratching the surface for themselves.

And speaking of gospels, I don't have much time for religion, either.

So it was that I began investigating the Asteroid Belt.  I'll assume this audience is smart enough to at least know what and where the Asteroid Belt is, but it may not know some of the fascinating theories out there, nor the compelling proofs for its origin.

The Standard Model says that the Solar System congealed out of a thin disk of dust and gas, much like Saturn's Rings, but much larger and orbiting the Sun.  Over time, the dust and gas clumped together to form planets, the same way snow balls grow larger as they roll downhill.  Naturally, the "authorities" hide the fact that they can't make the model work, even with the largest supercomputers because, for one thing, there hasn't been enough time in the hypothetical 4,5 billion years to form the outermost planets.  Nor do they tell us that there are piles of data that don't fit the model and are just dismissed as "anomalies."  Anomaly is a code word for, "Oops, that doesn't fit our preconceived ideas."

The Standard Model says that the asteroids are bits of debris that never formed a planet because Jupiter's gravity kept mixing them up.  The "authorities" expect that you won't look too closely at this pronouncement, and do something stupid like calculate Jupiter's gravitational pull at the asteroid belt, since gravity drops off rather quickly as a function of the distance from an object, making the planet's effect on the asteroids rather negligible.  Hell, if it were that great, Jupiter would have vacuumed up the Asteroid Belt a long time ago.

Anyway, a fellow by the name of Thomas van Flandern many years ago came up with the Exploded Planet Hypothesis (EPH).  The idea of an exploded planet wasn't new.  It had been proposed before, but van Flandern did an amazing amount of calculating and found that if you roll back the orbits of the asteroids and several of the short-period comets, they all converged on a single point at 3.2 million years ago, and again at 65 million years ago.  Coincidentally, those two dates line up nicely with two mass extinctions on Earth.

That's just the beginning.

There are four basic types of asteroids, according to the Tholen Taxonomy, based on their compositions as determined from their light spectra: C, S, X and M, with a number of sub-types depending on amounts of various minerals.  One can think of these four groups simply as coal, rock, ice, and "not sure" respectively.  In other words, chunks of all the stuff that make up the four inner rocky planets, just in small, discrete packages rather than a big ball.  Pretty much what you'd expect if you blew up a planet - chunks of carbon, chunks of rock, chunks of ice, and some mixed up pieces.

The reason they all had to come from a planet already formed is that the chunks (i.e. asteroids) are differentiated.  If they were all left-overs that never formed a planet, thanks to Jupiter, we wouldn't expect to find nice balls of separated minerals, but rather a mish-mash of stuff that never quite formed up.

Next, the asteroids aren't scattered evenly around their orbital plane.  Instead, they are primarily clumped together on one side, with a somewhat smaller scattering of pieces on the other side.

The asteroids form four distinct "rings," separated by the so-called Kirkwood Gaps, with larger pieces closer in and smaller ones further out.  This leads some researchers to speculate that there might have been two, even three planets that exploded, with the largest - sometimes called Planet V/5 - being closest to Mars.  Just so you know, the second one is called Planet K (Krypton).

All of this only includes what is known as the Main Belt of asteroids.  There are several others, like the Centaurs and the Kuipers that spread out across the entire Solar System.

Anyway, back to the EPH.  If a planet exploded, we would expect to find evidence of a shock wave in the Solar System, right?  Well, we do.

Our Moon's far side looks like it was hit by a shotgun blast.  One hemisphere of Mars is rough and cratered and 2 kilometers higher than the other (splatter effect).  Saturn's moon Iapetus is black as coal on one side and white as snow on the other.  In fact, many Solar System objects show hemispheric dichotomy that can easily be explained by a shock wave spreading rocks and carbon from a central point.

There are also the Early (EHB) and Late Heavy Bombardments (LHB).  These theories propose a cataclysmic events that caused the heavy cratering seen on the Moon's far side, among other things.  The LHB is thought to have occurred around 4.1 million years ago to 3.8 million years ago.  This corresponds fairly well with van Falndern's Planet V explosion around 3.2 million years ago.  This event aligns fairly well with the Pliocene–Pleistocene mass extinction.

So what's the point of this exercise?

Authoritative Science tells us we have it all figured out.  We understand how life arose, we know how the Solar System evolved.  We know how long our Sun has been around and how long it will live.  We even know how long ago the entire Universe started, though how it will end is still up for debate.  In other words, there is little more to understand and learn.  The frontiers are closing and humans have nothing more than some minor details to iron out.

Not only are these pronouncements patently false, they make for a very boring Universe in which there is nothing left to learn.

In fact, all Authoritative Science has done is take Biblical scripts and modernized them, with some fancy frilly stuff to make it all look very modern and high-techy.  The truth is we know nothing, especially for certain, and that the Universe is still wide open for discovery.  The Standard Model and Evolution Theories are full of irreparable holes that are constantly being patched with black holes, multi-dimensional strings and dark energy/matter, not to mention that evolution cannot get past Irreducible Complexity.

The Universe is far more mysterious and interesting when we toss out the mythological rewrites of ancient texts and look with fresh eyes at the space around us.  It is high time to realize that Authoritative Science is doing little more than spinning comforting tales that make us feel like we are still the center of the Universe and can control our environment.

When we tame our egos and our childish need for bedtime stories, suddenly the Universe opens again to curiosity and our innate desire to learn.

Wish Upon A Star

A topic that has fascinated me since childhood is astronomy.  As a young teen, living on the farm, I had a pretty nice telescope that I spent many hours in the thick darkness of central Texas nights staring into infinity.

When stories such as the recent discovery of a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, now called Proxima b, is announced, I immediately start clicking away.

For those who aren't as geeky as I am, the reason this is big news is that Proxima Centauri is the closest star to the Sun, at only a little over 4 light years away.  With chemical rockets, such as are popular in public acknowledged space programs, it would take a probe about 25,000 years to get there.  Makes you wanna jump in the family wagon and head out, don't it?

It's often difficult for most folks to imagine just how incredibly vast the Universe is.  The fastest moving craft ever publicly announced is the New Horizons probe that recently made headlines as it barreled headlong past Pluto on its way to oblivion.  That little sucker took nine years just to get to the edge of the solar system.  Proxima b is a few trillion miles beyond that.  You'd have to run back and forth from the Earth to the Sun 270,000 times to equal a one-way trip to Proxima Centauri.

Don't make your holiday plans just yet.

Proxima Centauri is a rather...um, alien star.  It is a little bit bigger than Jupiter, is a deep red color, and is part of a 3-star system called alpha-Centauri.  The other two stars are a bit more like our Sun.  The new planet orbits closer to Proxima than Mercury does to the Sun, yet the cooler temperature of that star puts the planet in a relatively comfortable position.

Just to be clear, since you would never know this from reading the mainstream "science" reporting, is that the planet has not been seen directly, so any talk of being "Earth-like" or rocky is complete conjecture.  All we really know is that the star wobbles a bit, implying a planet about a third bigger than the Earth is pulling on the star as it orbits...assuming the planet is roughly the same density as Earth.

In other words, everything we think we know about this planet is inferred from secondary evidence.  That is to say, we heard what sounded like a gun shot several blocks away and assumed that a robbery was in progress at the local Stop-n-Gobble because the sound came from that direction.  That's in effect all we know at this time.

What all of this is getting to, in my characteristic round-about way, is that no matter how many amazing discoveries they crow at us in the media, in reality we know next to nothing as fact.  Most of it is piles of calculations based on inferences and conjectures.  Even if we wanted to verify the facts with our current technology (at least publicly admitted), it would take two or three times the history of civilization to get there and look around, and four and a half years to report the data by radio waves.

Ultimately, for all the reported "discoveries," we really know little more than we did 100 years ago.  Based on gravitational theory and some observed light curves from a distant object, "scientists" have announced a new exoplanet.  Frankly, that kind of evidence wouldn't hold up in court.  It is generally labelled hear-say and circumstantial.

This leads us to two possible conclusions: (1) some "scientists" are looking to pad their grant portfolio by announcing a newly "discovered" planet, aided and abetted by know-nothing "science" media; or (2) this information is coming from first-hand data using a technology that is completely off the books, and the information is being "seeded" into our culture as a way to slowly reveal the tech.

The arguments for the first conclusion are well established.  We are well aware of how the media are nothing more than press-release editors and do precious little questioning of official pronouncements.  The unquestioning reporting of black holes, gravity waves and other fantasies shows this quite well.

On the other side, folks like Richard Dolan and Joseph Farrell have made strong arguments for hidden technologies and break-away civilizations living at a level of knowledge, and thus culture, far above the rest of us.  Certainly, being able to get to Proxima Centauri in a matter of hours or days would help quite a bit, and add quite a bit of credence to the always-anonymous "scientists'" pronouncements.

In either case, we are staring at a massive, steaming pile of horse puckies.  One way of the other, a bunch of folks are hiding either a great deal of ignorance, or a great deal of information.  It's difficult to say which is worse, since both involve a massive deception, although I suppose hiding real information is slightly worse than making it up, since it implies that someone knows more than the rest of us and can make better decisions based on it.

At any rate, just some thoughts on this fine Augustian Friday in the Year of Our Deception 2016.

And by the way, what ever happened to those mysterious lights on Ceres?  For some reason, the "science" media went completely dead on the subject, just as the Dawn probe reached optimum mapping orbit.  According to the NASA website, we seem to know an awful lot about what's inside the "dwarf" planet, but golly-gee-whiz, we just can't figure out what's sitting on the surface.

And the pile gets deeper.

2,000 Planets And The House Of Leo

A recent scientific paper was submitted by Michael Lund of Vanderbilt University.  Even if you are not much for astrology (not astronomy), this short paper bears reading.

The premise is that IF we take astrology seriously as a form of degraded ancient science, and look at the way astrology has adjusted to the discovery of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, then how might it deal with the discovery of over 2,000 new exoplanets and what could it all mean for humanity?

Now, I don't know about you, but when I see real, paid professor types saying something that sounds an awful lot like Joseph Farrell's speculations, I tend to sit up just a bit, adjust my aluminum beanie and dig in.

The good professor beings by examining some basic precept  of astrology: how meaning is ascribed to objects, how they are laid out on the sky, etc.  He then maps out the known exoplanets, and finally assigns the new planets astrological values according to accepted rules.

Now, this might seem like a pointless and antiquated exercise with no value, until you get to his conclusions.

"We have looked at the distribution of known exoplanets along the constellations of the zodiac, and examined how this correlates with observed sociological trends in the last 2 decades. As additional exoplanets are found, astrological interpretations would suggest that these global trends should continue to shift. This would further suggest that astronomy is in a unique position to improve humanity through targeted exoplanet searches."

This is a remarkable and interesting proposition.  If you read the entire paper, he draws a connection between the influence of the cosmos on human events (astrology) using quantum mechanics.  He then shows how society and culture have changed in the past two decades in parallel with predicted outcomes from the discoveries of exoplanets when assigned astrological meaning and values.

His conclusion is that and experiment can be done to test this hypothesis.  By targeting discoveries of exoplanets in specific constellations, science could positively affect society and human development by focusing on discoveries in constellations that astrology claims benefit humanity on the whole.

Professor Lund goes on to say:

"In particular, the greatest opportunity for establishing more cooperation and a

more civil society would be to focus on searching Libra for additional planets. The globular cluster NGC 5897 would present one large population of stars that could provide a source of planets to alter our fate."

This is a remarkable idea, especially coming from a mainstream university.  Not only does Mr. Lund propose a connection between astrology, astronomy and quantum mechanics, but he proposes a specific test by searching the zodiac constellation of Libra.  Finding more exoplanets in Libra should produce a calming effect on human history if the connection is valid.

Earlier in the paper, he plots out the distribution of known exoplanets in the zodiac and finds a preponderance of new planets in fire signs with more than half being fixed or mutable.  The temperaments and characteristics associated with these are self-centeredness, moodiness, depression, and criticism, all which appear to have increased as the number of exoplanets have increased.  On the other hand, Libra has the fewest exoplanets so far, which is a sign that indicates manners and social graces.

If, in fact, these correlations are accurate and we are molding our fate with our own discoveries, this would have a profound impact on science, and humanity at large.

First, we could prove that astrology and perhaps alchemy are actually degraded forms of ancient advanced science.  This alone would revolutionize the nature of anthropology, political and social sciences, and even the fine arts, among others.

Second, it would prove that humanity has a direct and profound control over our destiny.  This is at once an exciting and terrifying thought.  It implies that we could create a Golden Age by simply observing the Universe.  On the other side, we could increase our destructive ability, or our own destruction by means of the same process.

Taken to absurd lengths, one can envision politicians, athletes and artists employing personal astronomers to make discoveries in constellations that would benefit their personal ambitions.  Even warring factions might deploy legions of telescopes and observers to observe each to a victory.  Could make for an interesting plot in a story.  Rember though, I own it and I'm staking my intellectual property rights here and now, and I will deploy my battalion of observers to ensure my enrichment from it.

In any event, this hypothesis and the proposed test for it would have massive implications for both the past and the future of humankind.  It would serve as a proof of hyperdimensional physics and a vindication of occult practices throughout the Ages.  It also means that each of us is empowered to guide our own future and that of our species by doing nothing more than directing our conscious activities, something religion and noetics have been positing since the dawn of civilization.

The implied power here, though, also makes sense of why this kind of information has been relegated to the occult and mystery schools.  The ability to have power over the Universe by simply observing things would need to be reserved only for those with the proper training, or risk great harm to everything we know.

If this hypothesis is true, then it places a great burden on each of us to control our conscious pursuits and contain our ambitions, as one wrong discovery could bring all we are to a crashing halt.

Interesting, is it not, how a four-page paper could have so much packed into it.

Death By Rote

The list of mass extinctions on Earth is sobering if not fascinating.  Many laypeople are not aware of how often and how drastic the global die-offs have been.  Nor are people generally aware that mass extinctions occur in a rough pattern of 26-27 million years.  Lest you get overly concerned, the last event was about 13 million years ago, so we are about mid-way until the next postulated event.

When I was studying Astrophysics at the University of Houston back in the mid-1980s, the favored theory to account for these periodic extinctions was a proposed brown dwarf or rogue star called Nemesis.  Other competing theories proposed a Planet X (ten - before Pluto was slimed by the bumbleheads at the IAU.  The Planet X theory is currently being subsumed into the proposed Planet IX (nine).

In any case, the theories propose a large body in the far reaches of the (non-existent) Oort Cloud that swings in towards the Sun every 26 million years or so, dragging a bunch of comets with it that pummel the inner Solar System - including Earth - and surround the Sun with a cloud of dust that temporarily dims the light.  Thus, a one-two punch of heavy bombardment and reduced sunlight causes nearly every living thing on Earth to die off every once in a while.

Despite the fact that any number of probes, such as WISE, MASS-2, IBEX, and many others, have failed to find this killer star/planet, astronomers desperately cling to this idea, because for it to fail would drag down the entire framework of solar system formation, comet theory and even gravitation.

The Thunderbolts Project recently released a new video that explains this all quite well.  The video does a good job of showing why the current sweetheart theories would collapse, but it glosses over some of the most interesting research - that of Thomas van Flandern.

Van Flandern was no lightweight in the heavenly realm.  He was employed at the US Naval Observatory and is considered one of the greats in the field of orbital dynamics.  The reason he is often top-shelved where no one can find his work is that he challenged almost everything held dear by the mainstream Einsteinian beanie caps.

Van Flandern calculated the orbits of thousands of short-term comets and asteroids and ran them back in time.  What he found is that the vast majority of them converged at a single point between Mars and Jupiter at 3.2 million years ago and 65 million years ago.  He theorized that the comets and asteroids were the result of one, maybe two, planets exploding (called Planet V/five and Planet K/Krypton).

Several things should be apparent at this point: 1) the location of these exploded planets is the current asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and 2) the proposed explosions roughly correspond with the Pliocene and Cretaceous extinction events, respectively.

That these two points should just fall out of the data pushes the definition of coincidence, but it's not all the data available.

Van Flandern then took his data and began looking for other correlations across the Solar System.  What he noticed was that a great number of planets and moons showed evidence of heavy bombardment and/or ash/dust/smoke.  Earth's Moon has one hemisphere (Far Side - ahem) that is far more cratered than the other.  Mars has one hemisphere that is more than 2km higher than the other, and the higher one is much more heavily cratered.  The Saturnian moon Iapetus is coal black on one side and snow white on the other.  The list goes on, but these are the most obvious and well-known observations.  The one failing of Van Flandern's theory was that he could not propose a mechanism that would cause a planet to explode, though all the pieces fit quite well.  This theory has come to be known as the Exploded Planet Hypothesis, or EPH.

Combined with the work of Immanuel Velikovsky, and researchers like Joseph Farrell and Richard C. Hoagland, the EPH has been fleshed out with anthropological and astrophysical evidence for such events.  A thorough reading of these sources along with Van Flandern form a solid, multidisciplinary framework for the EPH.

The primary reason the EPH has been discounted and basically hidden is that the theory replaces the favored theory of planet formation, which sees comets as dirty snowballs/icy dirtballs left over from the formation of the Solar System.  The idea is that when the Sun ignited, water was blown into the outer reaches of the Solar System, meaning that water should become increasingly prevalent as one moves away from the Sun.  This collapses one of the major fairy tales in current "science," and starts a domino effect taking down many of the sacred cows in physics.

Even without all of the preceding, the search for Planet X has been a rather clouded one.  It was first proposed to explain errors in the orbit of Neptune.  When Pluto was discovered as part of the search for Planet X, it was quickly realized that the mass was not enough to cause the noted effects.  It was later discovered that the errors were observational, and not real, and Planet X died out for a while.  It was resurrected by Zecharia Sitchin in his somewhat questionable translations of Sumerian texts, and most recently was given a big shot in the arm by Mike Brown and his team, though now called Planet IX, which the Thunderbolts Project video linked above does a fine job of handling.

Astronomy and cosmology are rich grounds for personal education.  The history of astronomy alone, what with Newton's occult practices and Tycho Brahe's silver nose, make for some great character studies.

More importantly, real science, based on observation and experimentation and not formulae and computer models, is far more interesting and challenging.  It is also the part most closely guarded and hidden from public view, which makes any inquisitive mind perk up.  It is usually the things that are denigrated, ridiculed and dismissed that hold the inconvenient truths.

How many more school kids would wake up and dive in if science was presented as something wide open to new ideas and discoveries, rather than rote required to be pounded in and regurgitated on command?

How many minds have we stifled with antiquated theories presented as stale facts?