A variety of sources (See "SOURCES" below) have led me to think a bit more about three questions:
1. What do we know about the risk that ocean stratification will lead to a huge buildup of H2S poison
deep in the oceans of the earth, enough to kill us all?
2. What do we know about the risk that such poison, once formed, will be released to the surface,
actually killing us (perhaps first by radiation, as it affects the ozone layer, but inexorably pressing further)?
3. What do we really know about the risks from the Black Sea, which is already stratified, and where the "chemocline" --
the barrier between the poisoned water and the surface -- has risen from about 200 meter depth to less than 100 meters in
recent time?
There is a HUGE amount of uncertainty here, and gross ignorance about what is going on, in every source I have found.
I don't claim to know the answers, but someone really needs to follow up somehow.
I am NOT speaking for NSF on this. In fact, I wonder what different people in our geosciences directorate would say about this; however,
they were the ones who invited me to a presentation by Peter Ward a couple of years ago, and urged us to pay attention. I disagree with many of things that Ward says, based on sheer logic and independent thinking, but it seems very clear that he is right that there has been a huge disconnect between
folks like him studying the history of the earth before about 2-3 million years ago (Rod tells me that the formation of Panama was the key dividing time)
and folks studying "thermohaline" currents in the modern ocean:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation
The more I look at this, the less reason I see for complacency. (Though to be honest, I also see more reason to think about
issues like afterlife, which is beyond the scope of these lists. Santorum seems to be saying it is antiChristian and
antiBiblical to be worried about fire and brimstone, but I personally disagree... but again, this is not the place to elaborate.)
One reason I worry is that shifts in things like water currents have certain analogies to shifts in things like electrical currents, which
I tend to take for granted in my own thinking. Things can change quite abruptly when someone throws a switch.
Our society is particularly incompetent when it comes to threats which become tangible and direct very quickly. Whatever we may say about global warming, it is a RELATIVELY gradual process. But current can change quite quickly. And, in the Black Sea, the rise
of the chemocline to the surface would be a very discrete event... "discrete" as in abrupt, not as in diplomatic.
(It would not surprise me if the first big news would be a sudden death of Russian Navy people among others. They
have had small outbreaks and deaths due to occasional upwelling already, but if the chemocline reaches the surface,
it will be worse. I have no idea how MUCH worse, but much worse.)
Another reason I worry... is... though I am not an expert in ocean currents, I can read. I know that the direction of differences
in water temperature and salt content drive which way the currents flow. From Ward, I know that if they change directions
(to what they were for most of the history of the earth), we pass step one -- we get stratified oceans and poison.
The Arctic is clearly warming, and the gradients are changing. Will we know where the switching point is, before it is too late?
Currents can change quickly as certain thresholds are reached....
But how does this relate to the "good news" that we might be seeing cooling in Europe rather than warming, due to changes in the Gulf Stream?
A few years ago, the Economist had a cover story something like "Will England freeze over?" due to preliminary measurements
from the few bouys collecting relevant data, suggesting that the warming currents of the Gulf Stream (crucial to the climate of all of northern Europe
and even northeast US) had suddenly started to slow down. New bouys were installed, and the debunkers worked overtime... and I haven't heard much about that issue lately... but it is not off the table.
If you look to the wiki URL above...
it seems clear that the warm Gulf Stream current brings warmth to northeast US and Europe AT THE SURFACE (the red lines).
Because we are not increasing the height of the ocean in the north (???), there is an exactly counterbalancing DEEP current
(the blue lines) carrying cool oxygenated water to the south. That is exactly the kind of NEW circulation pattern which Ward discusses --
in emphasizing how different it is from most of earth's history.
So of course, there is a direct link between the "cooling" news of a reduced northern surface Gulf stream, and a reduction
in the corresponding deep current which keeps the North Atlantic oxygenated and prevents the stratification which was most of
the earth's history. The bottom line which could poison us is the stratification, and it's not clear how far away it is. Maybe quite far...
but maybe closer than we think.
On the reassuring side, what of the possibility that the poison will just stay locked up in deep water, and the memory that the warming current
has weakened before?
In fact, the major intellectual novelty in Ward's book (beyond the Penn State work he cites, and the nice popularization) is his
discussion of question 2 -- what triggers the actual release of H2S from deep ocean to above? He proposes a very rapid rise
on the chemocline (such as we may be seeing right now in the Black Sea), somehow caused by the rate of increase of CO2.
On that I disagree. (See sources below). More precisely... it is caused by the degree of anoxia, which in turn
CAN be caused by many possible combinations of factors. In our times, it seems that simple agfricultural runoff, essentially unavoidable
with today's world population, may well be enough...
But must run.
======================================================
SOURCES:
======================================================
The best primary starting point is Ward's book Under a Green Sky, $7 in paperback from amazon.
Having read a bit beyond that, I have my own views, initially stated in:
http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2012/01/risk-of-mass-death-like-pt-repeating.html
I also have a condensed "cliff notes" summary of the relevant technical content of the book:
http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2012/01/condensed-summary-of-under-green-sky.html
========== ADDED LATER:
The chemocline of the Black Sea has risen from 200 meters to less than 100. One book on the Black Sea describes it as the greatest reservoir of poison
on the earth, with H2S "filling 90% of the water," from its 2000 meter depth to 200 meters. But recent data has shown much less depth
of the chemocline.
I have done some web search on the Black Sea situation, but it was not really reassuring. There is a big international project
addressing the health of the Black Sea. It has an extensive web page on how wonderful they are,
how many happy diplomats worked really hard, and mow much money they spent on many, many things. But ...
on a reasonable search ... I didn't find anything really relevant to the key uncertainties I have. After they spent all that money, I do hope
someone knows, but they sure weren't advertizing it. I couldn't find a simple time-series on the depth of the chemocline
by region of the Sea, or in total... but common sense says it ought to exist somewhere, if they are spending all that money.
I also tried google scholar search, of course.
There have been a few minor scandals over the past decade or two, but it is sad how such things sometimes just create antibodies
which make people LESS aware of the larger future dangers. (Hey, oil dependency in the US provides some other scary examples
of such psychology.)
I saw a statement by the President of Rumania, who sounded really worried... but, as in Ukraine, I saw stringent efforts by Russia-oriented folks
to get rid of him, and shut him up.
I really don't know, for example, what the implications would be for the ozone layer if the chemocline of the Black Sea reaches the surface,
in the kind of breakout that Peter Ward has discussed. I just don't know. Likewise for the North Atlantic scenario.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Saturday, February 11, 2012
what is the electron?
My recent paper at scribd and vixra are as close as anything on earth to
properly specifying "the next" new unification of physics, and what we really know.
Of the three key steps, rewriting the book on time and letting bosons be bosons (not real particles if fundamental) are objectively clear, and more a matter of empirical
follow-up by others than of things needed from me. Even the new strong nuclear part in section 3 calls out for experiments and appreciation of experiments now,
BUT:
I now see how the electron part requires further theoretical work, beyond what is described in the paper. Also, my new paper corrects one minor labeling problem in the earlier paper on "stability" but a few more or needed. This blog will outline what needs to be added or changed.
The 'tHooft-Polyakov model, extended by an eta term, is a major step TOWARDS a decent first model of the electron, but has some flaws which need to be corrected.
On the positive side... it shows how CHARGE can lead to a kind of zero-radius limiting solution, where the non-charge part of the mass-energy is positive definite and goes to zero, close to provong stability. That replicates some very essential properties of the electron, ala De Broglie, and should not be lost... in a more refined model,
building n what we learn from this "simple" example. Also, it includes three bosonic fields, the A-super-a for a=1, 2, 3, which is the multiplicity we see in electroweak theory. Obviously, I do not agree with every last details of today's quantum electroweak model, but for a next model of the electron it is reasonable to preserve features which have been verified by experiment;
existence of three bosonic fields in the very model of the electron itself is appropriate.
But there are features which disqualify it as well. First, there is a total lack of mechanisms to choose a particular charge in the entire R3 space of possible charges. There is no explanation of why we see just one point in that space, at least in the case of he electron... and we do not see a lot of near-electrons out there. That in turn implies that the stability is just a kind of metastability. Second, there is no explanation for why our A (electromagnetism) is so different from W and Z.
There is then an obvious way to fix the problem.
EWT being a parity-violating model, we use the e-mu-nu=lambda-rho tensor for ordinary covariant vectors (pseudovectors), not spinors.
I also obtained Hobart (1965) yesterday, which shows how very easy it is to get stable "solitons" with second order derivatives in the Lagrangian (though the electron is not a star). It provides encouragement.
We basically need to use teh Lagrangian of electroweak theory as the main starting point, but replace the spinor "Q" fields with vector fields using the e-mu...
tensor to hold it together, using something like the ordinary Higgs term in place of the 'tHooft-Polyakov one (initially), and otherwise replicating as closely as possible the kind of mechanism in my paper on 'tHooft-Polyakov. That's the key next step.
One caveat, of course, is that details of that Higgs term can be changed, and that may be the most important step after that, to meet Macgregor's empirical challenge. Here it should not be so hard, since we do not need to worry about renormalizability.
========
Some important details....
CERNS says they "saw" W and Z in the sense that they saw a kind of four-c hannel interaction which outputs what they predict Z and W decay into. But we also see four channel processes for the "photon." It seems reasonable to believe all three are fundamental fields, not particles or solitons as such. But why not HIggs likewise? It seems we need to re-evaluate more than just the "particlehood" of Higgs. Macgregor's challenge already suggests as much, and suggests a more harmonious posisbility...
recaling that we do nt need HIggs term for mass (that's in charge) but for singularity/stabilization. Maybe simple fourth order aspects can take care of that without a HIggs term at all. But still, the role of A versus Z and W must be in teh second-stage model. (The first stage EWT-like version would srill fit all we know,
which is a big step up... on the path.)
Also... I have a green notebook with the rather elaborate PDE details of the analysis I mention in the paper on "stability". Someday I do need to write those down, though most physics texts these days are annoying in not including such tedious details. Time for a higher standard. But at 5AM, maybe that time is still not instant for me.
A key result in my "stability" paper is that the current 'tHooft ansatz for that model,
even interpreted as the limit as eta goes to zero, is WRONG. We get a decent singular soliton solution, as eta goes to zero, but it isn't the one of Higgs mass they now
assume/get. That one is not the miniumum energy solution, or the limit of the minimum energy solutions. Wrong limit; failure to analyze limits. That kind of problem often screws up people fundamentally naive about mathematics. Fortunately, the correction gets us closer to what we need to explain in empirical reality. But is there a new ansatz... or do we start to need computers? It would be nice to know... but
the Stage One plausible model (starting from EWT) might be a better base anyway.
And there we need invoke only one charge, which may help the analysis.
A strategy for proving stability (which Bogolmony has certainly NOT done, a great myth of the GUT people, almost like a crago cult)...
woould try to START from the "Q stability" which the stability paper cites...
though the energy expression minus the charge term is clearly nonnegative, and indefinite modes must be treated properly. (we have SOME indefinite modes which exist even in a strictlt stable chaoiton, like translation and gauge transformation, but we need to be sure there are none which violate chaoiron status.) To "complete" the stability proof... a bnecessary first step is to consider exactly one new perturbation, (delta C Q, delta C A), where CQ is the derivartive of the scalar C (total charge) with respect to the Q field values...
That's necessary, and ignored by Bogolmonyi etc.
But in the delta squared H "matrix", there are also cross-terms which should be conisdered for a complete proof of stability. That's worth doing for all three models I have discussed here (tHooft-Polyakov plus etz; stage one EWT; moditied EWT).
But Stage one EWT is the most important for now, and proof of the necessary condition involving charge perturbations is the most immediate check needed.
Now: the real problem is how to reconcile this with all my other time opressures,
not just job but "saving the world" stuff. All unique personal responsibilities, it seems, in a world of people having real troubles tying their shoelaces.
I do hope someone else can take over... eventually take over all of it, as I do seem to be a typical aging mortal of 64.
Will anyone on earth EVER understand what an electron is? Even better, while we still have ways to use such knowledge?
====================
Let me emphasize that this post is HIGHLY short-term and tentative, like what I put in my green notebooks, sometimes worked out, but in general groping....
My immediate followup was to reread Taylor's book on Gauge Theories and Weak Interactions, a very nice review of EWT. Perhaps just W and B are enough for the first stage model, with electron as emerging as a soliton of them. No need for the e four tensor at this stage; the simple wedgies in the W basics may be all we need, remembering how we do have electron and positron as well. But extra terms of course..
and care to make sure that charge and handedness of the soliton properties have a link. It does not sound radially symmetric exactly, b ut is even the tHooft Polyakov ansatz so?
Hey... if you can do it, please do so. My only reason for feeling that I should be the one to take this on is that no one else really has. But OK, I also think it's good for my general education.
properly specifying "the next" new unification of physics, and what we really know.
Of the three key steps, rewriting the book on time and letting bosons be bosons (not real particles if fundamental) are objectively clear, and more a matter of empirical
follow-up by others than of things needed from me. Even the new strong nuclear part in section 3 calls out for experiments and appreciation of experiments now,
BUT:
I now see how the electron part requires further theoretical work, beyond what is described in the paper. Also, my new paper corrects one minor labeling problem in the earlier paper on "stability" but a few more or needed. This blog will outline what needs to be added or changed.
The 'tHooft-Polyakov model, extended by an eta term, is a major step TOWARDS a decent first model of the electron, but has some flaws which need to be corrected.
On the positive side... it shows how CHARGE can lead to a kind of zero-radius limiting solution, where the non-charge part of the mass-energy is positive definite and goes to zero, close to provong stability. That replicates some very essential properties of the electron, ala De Broglie, and should not be lost... in a more refined model,
building n what we learn from this "simple" example. Also, it includes three bosonic fields, the A-super-a for a=1, 2, 3, which is the multiplicity we see in electroweak theory. Obviously, I do not agree with every last details of today's quantum electroweak model, but for a next model of the electron it is reasonable to preserve features which have been verified by experiment;
existence of three bosonic fields in the very model of the electron itself is appropriate.
But there are features which disqualify it as well. First, there is a total lack of mechanisms to choose a particular charge in the entire R3 space of possible charges. There is no explanation of why we see just one point in that space, at least in the case of he electron... and we do not see a lot of near-electrons out there. That in turn implies that the stability is just a kind of metastability. Second, there is no explanation for why our A (electromagnetism) is so different from W and Z.
There is then an obvious way to fix the problem.
EWT being a parity-violating model, we use the e-mu-nu=lambda-rho tensor for ordinary covariant vectors (pseudovectors), not spinors.
I also obtained Hobart (1965) yesterday, which shows how very easy it is to get stable "solitons" with second order derivatives in the Lagrangian (though the electron is not a star). It provides encouragement.
We basically need to use teh Lagrangian of electroweak theory as the main starting point, but replace the spinor "Q" fields with vector fields using the e-mu...
tensor to hold it together, using something like the ordinary Higgs term in place of the 'tHooft-Polyakov one (initially), and otherwise replicating as closely as possible the kind of mechanism in my paper on 'tHooft-Polyakov. That's the key next step.
One caveat, of course, is that details of that Higgs term can be changed, and that may be the most important step after that, to meet Macgregor's empirical challenge. Here it should not be so hard, since we do not need to worry about renormalizability.
========
Some important details....
CERNS says they "saw" W and Z in the sense that they saw a kind of four-c hannel interaction which outputs what they predict Z and W decay into. But we also see four channel processes for the "photon." It seems reasonable to believe all three are fundamental fields, not particles or solitons as such. But why not HIggs likewise? It seems we need to re-evaluate more than just the "particlehood" of Higgs. Macgregor's challenge already suggests as much, and suggests a more harmonious posisbility...
recaling that we do nt need HIggs term for mass (that's in charge) but for singularity/stabilization. Maybe simple fourth order aspects can take care of that without a HIggs term at all. But still, the role of A versus Z and W must be in teh second-stage model. (The first stage EWT-like version would srill fit all we know,
which is a big step up... on the path.)
Also... I have a green notebook with the rather elaborate PDE details of the analysis I mention in the paper on "stability". Someday I do need to write those down, though most physics texts these days are annoying in not including such tedious details. Time for a higher standard. But at 5AM, maybe that time is still not instant for me.
A key result in my "stability" paper is that the current 'tHooft ansatz for that model,
even interpreted as the limit as eta goes to zero, is WRONG. We get a decent singular soliton solution, as eta goes to zero, but it isn't the one of Higgs mass they now
assume/get. That one is not the miniumum energy solution, or the limit of the minimum energy solutions. Wrong limit; failure to analyze limits. That kind of problem often screws up people fundamentally naive about mathematics. Fortunately, the correction gets us closer to what we need to explain in empirical reality. But is there a new ansatz... or do we start to need computers? It would be nice to know... but
the Stage One plausible model (starting from EWT) might be a better base anyway.
And there we need invoke only one charge, which may help the analysis.
A strategy for proving stability (which Bogolmony has certainly NOT done, a great myth of the GUT people, almost like a crago cult)...
woould try to START from the "Q stability" which the stability paper cites...
though the energy expression minus the charge term is clearly nonnegative, and indefinite modes must be treated properly. (we have SOME indefinite modes which exist even in a strictlt stable chaoiton, like translation and gauge transformation, but we need to be sure there are none which violate chaoiron status.) To "complete" the stability proof... a bnecessary first step is to consider exactly one new perturbation, (delta C Q, delta C A), where CQ is the derivartive of the scalar C (total charge) with respect to the Q field values...
That's necessary, and ignored by Bogolmonyi etc.
But in the delta squared H "matrix", there are also cross-terms which should be conisdered for a complete proof of stability. That's worth doing for all three models I have discussed here (tHooft-Polyakov plus etz; stage one EWT; moditied EWT).
But Stage one EWT is the most important for now, and proof of the necessary condition involving charge perturbations is the most immediate check needed.
Now: the real problem is how to reconcile this with all my other time opressures,
not just job but "saving the world" stuff. All unique personal responsibilities, it seems, in a world of people having real troubles tying their shoelaces.
I do hope someone else can take over... eventually take over all of it, as I do seem to be a typical aging mortal of 64.
Will anyone on earth EVER understand what an electron is? Even better, while we still have ways to use such knowledge?
====================
Let me emphasize that this post is HIGHLY short-term and tentative, like what I put in my green notebooks, sometimes worked out, but in general groping....
My immediate followup was to reread Taylor's book on Gauge Theories and Weak Interactions, a very nice review of EWT. Perhaps just W and B are enough for the first stage model, with electron as emerging as a soliton of them. No need for the e four tensor at this stage; the simple wedgies in the W basics may be all we need, remembering how we do have electron and positron as well. But extra terms of course..
and care to make sure that charge and handedness of the soliton properties have a link. It does not sound radially symmetric exactly, b ut is even the tHooft Polyakov ansatz so?
Hey... if you can do it, please do so. My only reason for feeling that I should be the one to take this on is that no one else really has. But OK, I also think it's good for my general education.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
fundamental truth in Buddhism
Fundamental truth in Buddhism
Buddhism, like all the great religions, includes important fundamental truths.
In the study of spirit, as in the study of physics, of biological evolution and of neuroscience, it is possible to make progress in coming closer to the greater objective truth, even though this progress may follow ups and downs and spirals, like those described by Toynbee and by Piaget (or by Joel Whitton, whose book Life Between Life and its new sequel can be seen as an important Buddhist source).
I have learned many things about the strands of Buddhism, after visiting many dozens of Buddhist centers and temples and intellectuals, from the Pamir mountains to the biggest temple of all (near Xian) to Nara to Chicken Dragon Mountain to the suburbs of Washington DC. But here I will focus on a few very central foundations.
First, a story. Fifteen years ago, because of my personal circumstances, I was a very regular member and attender of the Quaker meeting in Adelphi, Maryland. A Zen Buddhist friend asked what Quakers are about. To him, over beer, I said: “It is not a religion with doctrine, really. That is important to me, because I have my own ideas and understanding. It is a practice, not a doctrine. At the core, it is a matter of getting together every week for a kind of silent group meditation. People do speak on rare occasion, when they feel truly moved by the higher inner spirit to do so, but only when they feel it will strengthen the inner nonverbal communication, dialogue and community.” He said: “That is amazing. That is actually what we say we are doing in Zen Buddhism, except that in Zen Buddhism … we say we have no doctrine, but we spend a lot of time arguing doctrine.”
This reminded me of the old history of Nara in Japan, where people talk and laugh to this day about the violent emotional battles between the blue hat monks and the yellow hat monks, all of whom agreed violently that halfway enlightened people do not feel such violent emotions. Some Buddhist tell a rough story of seven circles of existence, to try to put the foibles on such monks in a good context, but Christians should not be too smug about such paradox and apparent hypocrisy.
By analogy, I still remember a meeting on Rhodos, where a high archbishop from Georgia and a high archbishop from Russia started to behave like people in an old black and white comedy movie – two big fat men in black robes throwing pies at each other over some kind of political issue. At the time, I wondered: “What would Jesus say about these people’s ability to advance and manifest the core value of love, what the whole thing was about?” But Christianity also includes Tolstoy, who wrote the Grand Inquisitor, and Buddhists do sometimes rise above doctrinal wars.
But the doctrinal debates are not without content, and real learning does involve content.
In 2011, visiting the local public library with my wife, I saw a little article in Tricycle (the American Buddhist magazine) by Stephen Bodhian, who had been a student of leading Buddhists both of the Tibetan school and of the Zen School. He reported a kind of debate between the two. At the end of the debate, the Tibetan Buddhist leader ended with a one word summary of his goal: “mindfulness.” The Zen Buddhist then had the last word in this debate: “no mind.”
This is a huge gulf, which becomes ever more important as one learns more and needs less approximation on core matters. From what I have learned (some summarized in my 2012 paper in press in Neural Networks), I would say that the TIbetans are 100% right and the Zen 100% wrong on this particular point, as discussed here. The Zen view can be useful to some people in some circumstances, just as even the belief in Adam and Eve can be helpful to some people struggling to make progress and survive in some circumstances, but there is a larger truth, and nihilism is not it. Zen can be very helpful to some people trying to rise above some of the florid fantasies and political aberrations which some Tibetan Buddhists can fall into at times, but it serves mainly as a kind of antidote, as a source of questions, not as a foundation for answers. Nihilism is not a correct or reliable foundation for answers or for the constructive leading of life.
One core concept of Buddhism is that of the boddisatva versus the Buddha. This story is told in many ways, but the most common version is that the state of being a boddisatva is one step below the final state of buddahood. The boddisatva is in a way like a retired person who spends his last few years teaching and telling stories to the grandchildren, before disappearing altogether from this world and its people. In the highest stage, the individual role rises to a higher plane of some kind, never to
visit us troubled people again.
From my experience and my best understanding, I would say: “Not quite.” Even Gautama Buddha, when asked about reincarnation of the individual soul, said that it is like a drop of water returning to the ocean and evaporating as part of the circle of water. The water continues, but as part of that larger ocean.
No matter how much we learn here on earth, we are connected to each other and to the basic spiritual matrix of the earth, just as cells in the body are connected to each other and to the biological matrix (e.g. bones). The natural evolution and growth is not really separable. For so long as the spirit of humanity and of the earth endures, and so long as we physically live in this neighborhood, we grow and we cycle in this world. It is the evolution of the whole, not of the independent personal “Buddha,” which is the path and the highest destiny we have in front of us. Of course, evolution of the whole INCLUDES the greatest realization and development of its components as well, but it is not realistic to imagine we can or should safely escape our basic humanity… even as we develop independent thinking in order to better contribute to that greater whole.
To be honest… I have wondered in recent years: “What happens if the human species really does succeed in going extinct?” If we are honest, and yet human, and pay attention to what is happening today on the earth, we would be foolish and arrogant to imagine we can be certain that this will not happen. I have spent much of my time and effort trying to improve the probability that the human species avoids extinction, but it is clear that success is not even close to being guaranteed. There are multiple possible future paths… and total extinction is very much part of many of them. Not all, but many.
I suppose it is possible that souls which are advanced enough may find a place somewhere else in the galaxy. But as rule, the more people count on that, the LESS likely is it that it will apply to them, if it applies to anyone at all. In this world, when a body dies, the cells do not fare so well.
This idea reminds me of a guy I knew who used to be a major partner in Arthur Anderson, looking for a job elsewhere. Even if one survives… it is not so much fun to be looking for a new job when the previous place ended in bankruptcy – especially when one talks to folks who want results (“by their fruits you will know them”), not excuses. And it’s all a very big “if” anyway.
Buddhism, like all the great religions, includes important fundamental truths.
In the study of spirit, as in the study of physics, of biological evolution and of neuroscience, it is possible to make progress in coming closer to the greater objective truth, even though this progress may follow ups and downs and spirals, like those described by Toynbee and by Piaget (or by Joel Whitton, whose book Life Between Life and its new sequel can be seen as an important Buddhist source).
I have learned many things about the strands of Buddhism, after visiting many dozens of Buddhist centers and temples and intellectuals, from the Pamir mountains to the biggest temple of all (near Xian) to Nara to Chicken Dragon Mountain to the suburbs of Washington DC. But here I will focus on a few very central foundations.
First, a story. Fifteen years ago, because of my personal circumstances, I was a very regular member and attender of the Quaker meeting in Adelphi, Maryland. A Zen Buddhist friend asked what Quakers are about. To him, over beer, I said: “It is not a religion with doctrine, really. That is important to me, because I have my own ideas and understanding. It is a practice, not a doctrine. At the core, it is a matter of getting together every week for a kind of silent group meditation. People do speak on rare occasion, when they feel truly moved by the higher inner spirit to do so, but only when they feel it will strengthen the inner nonverbal communication, dialogue and community.” He said: “That is amazing. That is actually what we say we are doing in Zen Buddhism, except that in Zen Buddhism … we say we have no doctrine, but we spend a lot of time arguing doctrine.”
This reminded me of the old history of Nara in Japan, where people talk and laugh to this day about the violent emotional battles between the blue hat monks and the yellow hat monks, all of whom agreed violently that halfway enlightened people do not feel such violent emotions. Some Buddhist tell a rough story of seven circles of existence, to try to put the foibles on such monks in a good context, but Christians should not be too smug about such paradox and apparent hypocrisy.
By analogy, I still remember a meeting on Rhodos, where a high archbishop from Georgia and a high archbishop from Russia started to behave like people in an old black and white comedy movie – two big fat men in black robes throwing pies at each other over some kind of political issue. At the time, I wondered: “What would Jesus say about these people’s ability to advance and manifest the core value of love, what the whole thing was about?” But Christianity also includes Tolstoy, who wrote the Grand Inquisitor, and Buddhists do sometimes rise above doctrinal wars.
But the doctrinal debates are not without content, and real learning does involve content.
In 2011, visiting the local public library with my wife, I saw a little article in Tricycle (the American Buddhist magazine) by Stephen Bodhian, who had been a student of leading Buddhists both of the Tibetan school and of the Zen School. He reported a kind of debate between the two. At the end of the debate, the Tibetan Buddhist leader ended with a one word summary of his goal: “mindfulness.” The Zen Buddhist then had the last word in this debate: “no mind.”
This is a huge gulf, which becomes ever more important as one learns more and needs less approximation on core matters. From what I have learned (some summarized in my 2012 paper in press in Neural Networks), I would say that the TIbetans are 100% right and the Zen 100% wrong on this particular point, as discussed here. The Zen view can be useful to some people in some circumstances, just as even the belief in Adam and Eve can be helpful to some people struggling to make progress and survive in some circumstances, but there is a larger truth, and nihilism is not it. Zen can be very helpful to some people trying to rise above some of the florid fantasies and political aberrations which some Tibetan Buddhists can fall into at times, but it serves mainly as a kind of antidote, as a source of questions, not as a foundation for answers. Nihilism is not a correct or reliable foundation for answers or for the constructive leading of life.
One core concept of Buddhism is that of the boddisatva versus the Buddha. This story is told in many ways, but the most common version is that the state of being a boddisatva is one step below the final state of buddahood. The boddisatva is in a way like a retired person who spends his last few years teaching and telling stories to the grandchildren, before disappearing altogether from this world and its people. In the highest stage, the individual role rises to a higher plane of some kind, never to
visit us troubled people again.
From my experience and my best understanding, I would say: “Not quite.” Even Gautama Buddha, when asked about reincarnation of the individual soul, said that it is like a drop of water returning to the ocean and evaporating as part of the circle of water. The water continues, but as part of that larger ocean.
No matter how much we learn here on earth, we are connected to each other and to the basic spiritual matrix of the earth, just as cells in the body are connected to each other and to the biological matrix (e.g. bones). The natural evolution and growth is not really separable. For so long as the spirit of humanity and of the earth endures, and so long as we physically live in this neighborhood, we grow and we cycle in this world. It is the evolution of the whole, not of the independent personal “Buddha,” which is the path and the highest destiny we have in front of us. Of course, evolution of the whole INCLUDES the greatest realization and development of its components as well, but it is not realistic to imagine we can or should safely escape our basic humanity… even as we develop independent thinking in order to better contribute to that greater whole.
To be honest… I have wondered in recent years: “What happens if the human species really does succeed in going extinct?” If we are honest, and yet human, and pay attention to what is happening today on the earth, we would be foolish and arrogant to imagine we can be certain that this will not happen. I have spent much of my time and effort trying to improve the probability that the human species avoids extinction, but it is clear that success is not even close to being guaranteed. There are multiple possible future paths… and total extinction is very much part of many of them. Not all, but many.
I suppose it is possible that souls which are advanced enough may find a place somewhere else in the galaxy. But as rule, the more people count on that, the LESS likely is it that it will apply to them, if it applies to anyone at all. In this world, when a body dies, the cells do not fare so well.
This idea reminds me of a guy I knew who used to be a major partner in Arthur Anderson, looking for a job elsewhere. Even if one survives… it is not so much fun to be looking for a new job when the previous place ended in bankruptcy – especially when one talks to folks who want results (“by their fruits you will know them”), not excuses. And it’s all a very big “if” anyway.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
acronyms -- the key to Washington
NSA -- No Such Agency
NSF -- Not Sufficent Funds
NIH -- Not Invented Here
NASA -- Not a Safe Activity
DOE -- Dead on Emergence
PAC -- People Are Crazy
NSF -- Not Sufficent Funds
NIH -- Not Invented Here
NASA -- Not a Safe Activity
DOE -- Dead on Emergence
PAC -- People Are Crazy
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
the risk of mass death like PT repeating itself
"Those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them."
In the history of the past billion years, there was an event ("PT") which killed every living member of most species of life on the surface of the earth, through levels of poison (H2S) and radiation high enough to kill every human. What do you say when the world's most prominent expert on that event says we are firmly on track to repeating what happened then? It's not a simple story, but it is a serious one.
======================================
For me, the story began when the Geosciences Directorate of NSF hosted and promoted a talk by Peter Ward, author of Under a Green Sky, who told this story.
As a first step, I studied and restudied his book; I have posted a condensed summary of what it actually says here:
http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2012/01/condensed-summary-of-under-green-sky.html
But being a very critical and independent scientist myself, I do not take his story at face value.
Ward basically forsees two steps, which he thinks will happen if we
let CO2 to get as high as 1000ppm (which
is consistent with current policies to expand fossil fuels):
1. Due to melting ice and rise of temperature at the poles, we may
shift the pattern of ocean currents to today's
"mixed ocean" to a "stratified ocean." Climate deniers often talk
about how CO2 was much higher at the time of dinosaurs
(really, paleozoic and mesozoic time) than it has been since mammals
started ruling the earth. That is true -- but it
also led to a stratified ocean at those times, and repeated (10 or 12)
mass extinctions due to certain instabilities in that
kind of ocean. Of course, that won't happen immediately, and those who
don't care whether everyone dies even as soon as 10 or 20
years from now would regard it as quite irrelevant to their values.
(But this is a century-off kind of risk.)
2. A "trigger," which he claims is due to the RATE of increase of CO2.
Since CO2 is now increasing at a RATE
a hundred times what it did in the past extinctions (all of which
occurred at peaks of CO2, 10 of 12 at peaks after
rapid increase of CO2), he says that will also follow as the night the
day if we get to a stratified ocean now.
In 2009, I saw his impressive graph of extinctions versus CO2 ... but
was not convinced. He said that the RATE
of CO2 matters because the ocean can buffer slow changes in CO2; rapid
changes lead to acid, a critical trigger.
But CRS said we should worry about pH as low as 7.7 (not so acid) by
2100 in the worst scenarios.
This week, I went back to the actual technical paper which is the real
origin of the kind of theory Ward was proposing:
http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/33/5/397.full
Seminal work from Pennsylvania... I wish I had tracked it down in
2009, when I was working in Specter's office, attached to EPW work. And there is also a paper on the history of acidity in the
oceans which goes with it.
The bottom line: acidity isn't really the trigger here, at least not
in H2S production in the ocean.
The triggers -- once there is a stratified ocean -- are simply further
current changes, supporting anoxia and warmth, the two
triggers for greater H2S production by creatures "under the chemocline."
Anoxia is already the prime suspect in the death of coral reefs, more
than ocean acidity. We are getting lots of it from sources like
agricultural runoff,
in the age of fertilizer. That plus warming and further current
changes could get to an H2S event without waiting for a low pH.
Can we predict THEM? Or change THEM? That is not so clear.
HOWEVER -- the two URLs I cited last time are very important, too, as
I discussion.
One can find Kung's 2005 paper in google scholar (I searched on Kung
PSU, and immediately recognized
which was the relevant one, cited by Ward, whose URL I sent you yesterday).
When I did that -- google scholar lets you see links to all 158 papers
which have cited Kung's paper since then,
many giving hard data confirmation from other avenues, a few
skeptical. I read through all of them yesterday;
for some I only read abstracts because of "$30 per click", but they
seemed unlikely to change the story which emerged from the others.
It seems clear that MOST upwelling regions of the ocean suffered from
the anoxia (and then H2S) problem
Kung discussed. But not all. Kung's original paper discussed this. The
most intense skeptic (who said his model is better than Kung's) said
that that volume of H2S would not be enough to zap the ozone layer (on
top of poisoning everyone); however, he said it would cause an OH-
deficit which would result in methane causing the same effect.
As I think about the implications... if ONLY the north pole became
de-iced and warm, that should logically be enough to
allow a stratified ocean in the northern hemisphere but not the south.
That would still be a rather serious problem.
Ward talked at the end about the need for more understanding of
thermohaline currents, how they can change radically
(e.g. in older earth history)... and that does seem to be the key to
understanding when stratified oceans become mass killers.
=============
Best of luck. We need it.
In the history of the past billion years, there was an event ("PT") which killed every living member of most species of life on the surface of the earth, through levels of poison (H2S) and radiation high enough to kill every human. What do you say when the world's most prominent expert on that event says we are firmly on track to repeating what happened then? It's not a simple story, but it is a serious one.
======================================
For me, the story began when the Geosciences Directorate of NSF hosted and promoted a talk by Peter Ward, author of Under a Green Sky, who told this story.
As a first step, I studied and restudied his book; I have posted a condensed summary of what it actually says here:
http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2012/01/condensed-summary-of-under-green-sky.html
But being a very critical and independent scientist myself, I do not take his story at face value.
Ward basically forsees two steps, which he thinks will happen if we
let CO2 to get as high as 1000ppm (which
is consistent with current policies to expand fossil fuels):
1. Due to melting ice and rise of temperature at the poles, we may
shift the pattern of ocean currents to today's
"mixed ocean" to a "stratified ocean." Climate deniers often talk
about how CO2 was much higher at the time of dinosaurs
(really, paleozoic and mesozoic time) than it has been since mammals
started ruling the earth. That is true -- but it
also led to a stratified ocean at those times, and repeated (10 or 12)
mass extinctions due to certain instabilities in that
kind of ocean. Of course, that won't happen immediately, and those who
don't care whether everyone dies even as soon as 10 or 20
years from now would regard it as quite irrelevant to their values.
(But this is a century-off kind of risk.)
2. A "trigger," which he claims is due to the RATE of increase of CO2.
Since CO2 is now increasing at a RATE
a hundred times what it did in the past extinctions (all of which
occurred at peaks of CO2, 10 of 12 at peaks after
rapid increase of CO2), he says that will also follow as the night the
day if we get to a stratified ocean now.
In 2009, I saw his impressive graph of extinctions versus CO2 ... but
was not convinced. He said that the RATE
of CO2 matters because the ocean can buffer slow changes in CO2; rapid
changes lead to acid, a critical trigger.
But CRS said we should worry about pH as low as 7.7 (not so acid) by
2100 in the worst scenarios.
This week, I went back to the actual technical paper which is the real
origin of the kind of theory Ward was proposing:
http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/33/5/397.full
Seminal work from Pennsylvania... I wish I had tracked it down in
2009, when I was working in Specter's office, attached to EPW work. And there is also a paper on the history of acidity in the
oceans which goes with it.
The bottom line: acidity isn't really the trigger here, at least not
in H2S production in the ocean.
The triggers -- once there is a stratified ocean -- are simply further
current changes, supporting anoxia and warmth, the two
triggers for greater H2S production by creatures "under the chemocline."
Anoxia is already the prime suspect in the death of coral reefs, more
than ocean acidity. We are getting lots of it from sources like
agricultural runoff,
in the age of fertilizer. That plus warming and further current
changes could get to an H2S event without waiting for a low pH.
Can we predict THEM? Or change THEM? That is not so clear.
HOWEVER -- the two URLs I cited last time are very important, too, as
I discussion.
One can find Kung's 2005 paper in google scholar (I searched on Kung
PSU, and immediately recognized
which was the relevant one, cited by Ward, whose URL I sent you yesterday).
When I did that -- google scholar lets you see links to all 158 papers
which have cited Kung's paper since then,
many giving hard data confirmation from other avenues, a few
skeptical. I read through all of them yesterday;
for some I only read abstracts because of "$30 per click", but they
seemed unlikely to change the story which emerged from the others.
It seems clear that MOST upwelling regions of the ocean suffered from
the anoxia (and then H2S) problem
Kung discussed. But not all. Kung's original paper discussed this. The
most intense skeptic (who said his model is better than Kung's) said
that that volume of H2S would not be enough to zap the ozone layer (on
top of poisoning everyone); however, he said it would cause an OH-
deficit which would result in methane causing the same effect.
As I think about the implications... if ONLY the north pole became
de-iced and warm, that should logically be enough to
allow a stratified ocean in the northern hemisphere but not the south.
That would still be a rather serious problem.
Ward talked at the end about the need for more understanding of
thermohaline currents, how they can change radically
(e.g. in older earth history)... and that does seem to be the key to
understanding when stratified oceans become mass killers.
=============
Best of luck. We need it.
condensed summary of "Under A Green Sky"
UNDER A GREEN SKY BY PETER WARD: TECHNICAL SUMMARY NOTES
Notes by P.J.Werbos, Jan 8, 2012. Book costs $7 from Amazon.
The book begins with extensive discussion of Ward’s personal role and prior history of the field. Detailed citations by chapter are on pages 205-224.
The first four chapters discuss what led up to Ward’s theory – how we know that the PT dieoff was the worst dieoff in the history of earth, what other major dieoffs were like, and what the earlier inadequate theories were like.
Chapter 1:
Page 18 gives a graph from Norman Neville showing how many families of life were
killed off by various extinctions. PT, at the start of the Mesozoic era, was the biggest. Ward was part of the group which verified the Alavarez theory that the end-of-mesozoic dieoff (KT) was caused by an asteroid impact, but gives extensive evidence explaining the new consensus that none of the other big extinctions were caused that way.
Pages 24-25: C12/C13 isotope ratios tell us when there are big dieoffs of plant life on earth. At KT it shows a massive death of plants, but a total recovery in less than 100,000 years – a”single dip depression.”
Page 27: big “flood basalts” indicate when and where huge outbreaks of volcanoes have occurred. The big outbreaks of volcanoes match the big extinctions. The biggest of all was the “Siberian traps” (volcanoes) leading to PT. Next biggest was TJ,
the extinction which marks the boundary between the Triassic and the Jurassic, the first two of the three eras in the Mesozoic.
Page 29: Two big shelled organisms, cousins of clams, teemed in the oceans for most of its history: ammonites and nautiloids. Ward visited Zumaya, Spain, and showed the ammonites went extinct at KT, but nautiloids survived.
Chapter 2: The Overlooked Extinction:
Even after the dieoff of dinosaurs, there was a big dieoff of mammals, eliminating many basic types, at the Paleocene/Eocene boundary (P/E), and also a dieoff in the middle of the Cretaceous (late Mesozoic), which are instructive examples.
Page 43: Just as C12/C13 isotope ratios give us an historic measure of plant dieoffs, O16/O18 ratios give us an historic measure of the temperature of earth.
Page 45: Kennett/Stott report new data on P/E (Nature 1991): deep ocean warms suddenly and big dieoff of plants in deep ocean
Page 46: Kunio Kaiho 1991 says that the P/E dieoff was due to low O2 in the water. Why? Warm bottom had come from warm tropical surface waters where evaporation makes surface saltier, denser; then transported worldwide along bottom like a conveyer belt. (Not like today where cold O2 water flows to bottom at poles, from there worldwide.)
Page 49: Gingerich shows that at P/E land mammals experienced mass extinction at same time. Lots of amazing families of mammals were lost.
Page 51: At P/E, sudden increase in volcanic activity (ash) – volcanism and deep sea hydrothermal, aridity; winds reduced by factor of three, due to a lower difference in termperature between the poles and the equator, due to warming of the poles.
Page 53: SUMMARY OF what caused the dieoffs at P/E: first volcanoes and hydrothermal vents in the ocean, emitting greenhouse gasses; then warming; then warmth and resulting reduction of O2 in water O2 kills deep sea life, and some land mammals, but less than in the big 5 extinctions. Then the volcanoes slowed, and a slow return to normal.
Page 56: mid-Cretaceous: flowers blossom, ammonites mostly plentiful with clams and snails
Page 57-58: but in the geological beds of ammonites etc from that time, there is a six foot black bed of dieoff, the Cenomanian-Turonian ; Schlanger/Jenkyns showed 3 dieoffs over 20m years: ocean currents stopped, organic material rained down causing low O2 , anoxia ever higher .
Cbapter 3: Mother of all Extinctions (PT).
Page 62: South Africa, fossils dwindle gradually a million years up to PT, not sudden like KT. Towards the end, two land species survived -- Dicynodon, gorgon.
Page 64: alternation of red and olive layers right at PT boundary in the geological strata; just past that boundary of death, there were lots more fossils (recovery of life), all one species, Lystrosaurus a piggy reptile.
Page 67: At PT as many as 90% of species on earth disappeared.
Page 68 Erwin: PT took 165,000 years or less to happen, much slower than KT which was maybe only decades. O2 has been measured to be low both in shallow and in deep waters leading into the event. The low O2 killed many ocean organisms as quickly as red tides do today. Global warming and Siberian volcanoes happened at the same time.
Page 69: Erwin discussed several possible theories. Besides asteroids (now discredited unless you think they caused volcanoes), CO2 and methane from volcanoes may have caused climate change and acid rain, causing the dieoffs, as suggested by Paul Renne.
Pages 78-79: Krull/Retallack: coal formation stopped at PT, methane in air ‘way up. Temperature and sedimentation up; they say the sedimentation was due to runoff from deforrested land.
Page 79 Buick (an expert on the preCambrian extinction) proposed that PT was due to repeated insults, like maybe pulses of melting of methane hydrates, overturns of stratified oceans, volcanoes
Pages 81-82 Knoll (another preCambrian expert) proposes a theory: low O2 in LOWER ocean only, then something (volcanoes?) changes pattern, CO2 and dissolved biostuff bubbles up. Killer CO2. But models have problems with that; some shellfish die from CO2, but land animals wouldn’t be killed so easily by it.
Page 84: Ward’s data show not one extinction but several; one very big thousands of years, but several before and soon after., spread over several million years.
Page85: e.g. C12/C13 showed multiple dieoff, return, dieoff in photosynthesis levels.
Chapter 4: The Misinterpreted Extinction (refuting dumb asteroids)
Page 104: approaching Triassic/Jurassic, ammonites dwindle to zero. Clams too; a new clam, Monotis, apparently adapted to low-O2 bottoms, emerged but also disappeared in the final stage. All is dead in the Rhaetian, the last period within the Triassic, showing geological beds striped gray/black. Death in the seas and perhaps on land as well.
Page 105: Rhaetian 12 million years world dead except for oceanic plankton. (?)
Chapter 5: A New Paradigm for Mass Extinction
Page 109: Ward visits Palau (Micronesia) to study: why did ammonites outdo nautiloids at PT and TJ, but reverse and die off 100% at KT?
Page 111: he tracked nautiloids: they live at 1500 feet in day, 400-500 night to eat, stay deep and dark, versus ammonoids in more shallow. water PT and TJ were hard on deep guys, KT while killed shallow.
Page 112: Ward visited freshwater lake in island. Thin O2 rich layer at surface full of life, but below that -- no animals, no O2, purple color. Purple and green bacteria needed sunlight and sulfur. Third type(s) of life too small to see produced H2s as waste; only O2 kept them from surface.
Page 113: Lake was like Canfield ocean. (Don Canfield and Berner of Yale did classic research). Before the modern era (after preCambrian), oceans were highly toxic due to H2S saturation, vs O2-rich today top to bottom.
Page 114: Near Palau after Ward left: warm low-O2 water rose to surface, killed Palau corals, coral bleaching. Greenhouse gasses?
Page 115: We now rely on a recent breakthrough, “molecular fossils” or “biomarkers”: certain molecules like types of lipids left behind by certain types of microbes.
Page 116: We use new instruments -- gas chromatographic mass spectrometers -- to detect molecules left by bacteria which live in high H2S. Like photosynthetic purple bacerterium, today in Black Sea and Palau, which oxidize H2S and the like. They are one of the two kinds of bacteria which live in water low in O2, but high in light and H2S.
Page 117 Bombshell: Lee Kump and Mike Arthur (PSU) and Pavlov(UC) in 2005: lots of these bacteria near end of Permian, implicated in extinctions. In waters like Black Sea, purple and green live in “chemocline,” stable interface between O2 above and H2S below. But when H2S gets to the surface: “Kump hypothesis” for extinction.
Page 118: Kump shows H2S in late Permian from this source would be 2000 times more than what comes from today’s volcanoes. It is also enough to zap the ozone layer. PT fossil spores from Greenland show UV damage, verifying the ozone hole effect. Modern ocean plant biomass “rapidly decreases” under ozone holes. Also, CO2 and methane would be in the bubbles along with H2S.
Page 119: Kump used a global circulation model (GCM) to model what happened at PT. At end of Permian, sea level DROPPED, freeing phosphorus, fertilizing these bacteria in ocean from runoff. In 2006, Roger Summons of MIT showed biomarkers for H2S production at the PT boundary in nine sites.
Page 120: In March 2006, NASA hosts the world’s main meeting on astrobiology in DC astrobiology. At the extinction session, Kump model’s shows a series of burps, like actual data on extinctions, & enough H2S to kill most land life, and push shallow water life over due to H2S and acid from CO2 combined. Ward spoke too. Oceans did it, but why did they change state?
Page 123: Since the Eocene (one full period after the dinosaurs died off), O2 has been high evefrywhere in the ocean, shallow and deep, due to conveyer belt of currents driven by big temperature differences between poles and tropics. But this “mixed ocean” (like a well-stirred aquarium) is basically new in earth history.
Page 124: older oceans all had low O2 at bottom. They left lots of pyrite – fool’s gold, formed where there is high sulfur but low oxygen. Ocean was stratified by temperature, salinity, dissolved O and reduced carbon. (Like CO2..) Most of earth history was like this. O2 above, not below. This also caused formation of black shales on the ocean bottom, going back 3.5 billion years. When life in shallow water sinks to that kind of low oxygen bottom, it yields nice well-preserved fossils.
Page 125: There are wo varieties of stratified ocean – low O2 bottom, vs. almost no O2 in the bottom layers. No animals live in the deep layers either way, but really low O2 encourages more sulfur producing microbes; that’s a Canfield ocean. Before Cambrian, the microbes producing H2S also inhibited nitrogen fixation, a double killer.
Page 126. Kliti Grice et al, Science 2005, showed Canfield ocean by biomarkers at PT. TJ maybe, now (2007) being checked.
Page 127: what causes ocean to switch between mixed versus stratified versus Canfield? CHANGE between the three causes extinctions, and is driven by conveyer system. 2005: Jeffrey Kiehl and Christine Shields of NCAR used GCM, to show global warming would move the conveyer belt..
Page 128: by end of Permian, Earth had lost its ice caps. That already gives low O2 stratified ocean. WARD’S THEORY: At PT and P/E, GHG from volcanoes (1st Siberia, 2nd Atlantic Ocean) gave huge greenhouse gas emission, the trigger which changed the oceans.
Page 129: PT was bigger because there was burping of noxious gas from virtually all shallow water on earth; unlike Paleocene, rich in CO2 and CH4, the latter accelerating warming. Anthony Hallam and Paul Wignall’s book Mass Extinctions… showed that 12 of 14 included low O2 oceans.
Chapter : The Driver of Extinction (atmosphere as trigger to low O2 ocean and change in conveyer belt).
Page 133: Two ways to estimate past CO2: best a program by Berner of Yale, GEOCARB and GEOCARBSULF (for O2?) using isotope data, second measure fossil leaves. Of course, GHG explain climate changes.
Page 135-136: FIGURE: CO2 by year… all extinctions have also been CO2 peaks. Rapid rise preceded all but one or two extinctions. Rate important, not just level.
Page 136: confirmed by leaf approach. Before industry, earth was on course to C locked up, low CO2 problem.
Page 137: SUMMARY OF WARD’S THEORY: step 1, vast increase in CO2 and methane from volcanoes. Step 2: warmer world disrupts conveyer system, more low O2 bottom. Step 3: when chemocline is shallow enough for light to reach it, H2S producing bacteria go nuts. Step 4, H2S destroys ozone layer. Page 138: Wards calls it “conveyer disruption hypothesis.”
Page 139-141: green scary poetry about what it really looks like
Chapter 7: Bridging the Deep and the Near Past
Page 142: There has been remarkably little cooperation between people studying modern climate change (since the pliocene) and people like Ward studying older earth history. The most viable connection would be between the study of oceanic thermohaline conveyer currents and the study of extinctions.
Page 143: A quick swipe at the movie “Day After Tomorrow” (“ a mockery”)
Pages 144-146: Very rapid climate change has been the norm for the past 200,000 years full of unusual ice ages. See the work of Minze Stuiver, U Washington, using Greenland Ice cores. Been But the last 10,000 years have relatively calm. Average temperature would change as much as 18 degrees F in a few decades, 10 in one decade. The calm starts human civilization?
Page 147: But there wasn’t such change in the southern hemisphere (we think, but need to check more). Ward shows a poorly labelled figure on “temperature variation”. Most now believe fluctuations in the past 200,000 years are largely
due to orbital variations found by Malutin Milankovich.
Page 148: The study of orbits suggests we would normally remain calm another 10,000 years or so.
Page 149: For recent years (past 2.5 million years), people say the conveyer belt has turned on and off, not changed type. (Just in the north?) Willi Dansgaard
first, then Hans Oeschger reported this. Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles are cycles within a larger pattern, discussed by Gerard Bond. The pattern includes Heinrich events, severe icing of the north Atlantic, which happened six times in the past 100,000 years.
Page 152: turning the currents on and off cause warm periods, or v ice-versa? We don’t know, but we do know that cold fresh water melting off from Greenland has scary implications for the Gulf Stream, with some early measurements justifying (PJW: but not yet proving) worry.
Page 159: East Anglia model predicts BIGGER ice age 50K years hence, rebound from our warming, when fossil fuel is used up.
Page 160: Ruddiman has an interesting book suggesting humans have contributed to warming (and calmer climate) since 8000BC. Not just CO2; methane.
Page 164 Vostok ice cores measure CO2 and CH4 back 2 million years. 500 to 600 ppm would be equivalent to times with little or no ice.
Page 166: for most of geologic time CO2 was much higher g than today, yet acidity was mostly not so different. That’s because oceans can buffer the acidity caused by higher CO2, but BUFFERING TAKES TIME, therefore rate matters. CO2 is now rising about 100 times fast as it ever did, creating a huge risk of acidity (PJW: as was decisive in some periods of earth history)
Page 174-175 heat causes drug use and malaria
FINALE:
Interview with Battisti of U Wash.. imagine future conveyer and story…
195: clouds (recall NASA fast story)
Notes by P.J.Werbos, Jan 8, 2012. Book costs $7 from Amazon.
The book begins with extensive discussion of Ward’s personal role and prior history of the field. Detailed citations by chapter are on pages 205-224.
The first four chapters discuss what led up to Ward’s theory – how we know that the PT dieoff was the worst dieoff in the history of earth, what other major dieoffs were like, and what the earlier inadequate theories were like.
Chapter 1:
Page 18 gives a graph from Norman Neville showing how many families of life were
killed off by various extinctions. PT, at the start of the Mesozoic era, was the biggest. Ward was part of the group which verified the Alavarez theory that the end-of-mesozoic dieoff (KT) was caused by an asteroid impact, but gives extensive evidence explaining the new consensus that none of the other big extinctions were caused that way.
Pages 24-25: C12/C13 isotope ratios tell us when there are big dieoffs of plant life on earth. At KT it shows a massive death of plants, but a total recovery in less than 100,000 years – a”single dip depression.”
Page 27: big “flood basalts” indicate when and where huge outbreaks of volcanoes have occurred. The big outbreaks of volcanoes match the big extinctions. The biggest of all was the “Siberian traps” (volcanoes) leading to PT. Next biggest was TJ,
the extinction which marks the boundary between the Triassic and the Jurassic, the first two of the three eras in the Mesozoic.
Page 29: Two big shelled organisms, cousins of clams, teemed in the oceans for most of its history: ammonites and nautiloids. Ward visited Zumaya, Spain, and showed the ammonites went extinct at KT, but nautiloids survived.
Chapter 2: The Overlooked Extinction:
Even after the dieoff of dinosaurs, there was a big dieoff of mammals, eliminating many basic types, at the Paleocene/Eocene boundary (P/E), and also a dieoff in the middle of the Cretaceous (late Mesozoic), which are instructive examples.
Page 43: Just as C12/C13 isotope ratios give us an historic measure of plant dieoffs, O16/O18 ratios give us an historic measure of the temperature of earth.
Page 45: Kennett/Stott report new data on P/E (Nature 1991): deep ocean warms suddenly and big dieoff of plants in deep ocean
Page 46: Kunio Kaiho 1991 says that the P/E dieoff was due to low O2 in the water. Why? Warm bottom had come from warm tropical surface waters where evaporation makes surface saltier, denser; then transported worldwide along bottom like a conveyer belt. (Not like today where cold O2 water flows to bottom at poles, from there worldwide.)
Page 49: Gingerich shows that at P/E land mammals experienced mass extinction at same time. Lots of amazing families of mammals were lost.
Page 51: At P/E, sudden increase in volcanic activity (ash) – volcanism and deep sea hydrothermal, aridity; winds reduced by factor of three, due to a lower difference in termperature between the poles and the equator, due to warming of the poles.
Page 53: SUMMARY OF what caused the dieoffs at P/E: first volcanoes and hydrothermal vents in the ocean, emitting greenhouse gasses; then warming; then warmth and resulting reduction of O2 in water O2 kills deep sea life, and some land mammals, but less than in the big 5 extinctions. Then the volcanoes slowed, and a slow return to normal.
Page 56: mid-Cretaceous: flowers blossom, ammonites mostly plentiful with clams and snails
Page 57-58: but in the geological beds of ammonites etc from that time, there is a six foot black bed of dieoff, the Cenomanian-Turonian ; Schlanger/Jenkyns showed 3 dieoffs over 20m years: ocean currents stopped, organic material rained down causing low O2 , anoxia ever higher .
Cbapter 3: Mother of all Extinctions (PT).
Page 62: South Africa, fossils dwindle gradually a million years up to PT, not sudden like KT. Towards the end, two land species survived -- Dicynodon, gorgon.
Page 64: alternation of red and olive layers right at PT boundary in the geological strata; just past that boundary of death, there were lots more fossils (recovery of life), all one species, Lystrosaurus a piggy reptile.
Page 67: At PT as many as 90% of species on earth disappeared.
Page 68 Erwin: PT took 165,000 years or less to happen, much slower than KT which was maybe only decades. O2 has been measured to be low both in shallow and in deep waters leading into the event. The low O2 killed many ocean organisms as quickly as red tides do today. Global warming and Siberian volcanoes happened at the same time.
Page 69: Erwin discussed several possible theories. Besides asteroids (now discredited unless you think they caused volcanoes), CO2 and methane from volcanoes may have caused climate change and acid rain, causing the dieoffs, as suggested by Paul Renne.
Pages 78-79: Krull/Retallack: coal formation stopped at PT, methane in air ‘way up. Temperature and sedimentation up; they say the sedimentation was due to runoff from deforrested land.
Page 79 Buick (an expert on the preCambrian extinction) proposed that PT was due to repeated insults, like maybe pulses of melting of methane hydrates, overturns of stratified oceans, volcanoes
Pages 81-82 Knoll (another preCambrian expert) proposes a theory: low O2 in LOWER ocean only, then something (volcanoes?) changes pattern, CO2 and dissolved biostuff bubbles up. Killer CO2. But models have problems with that; some shellfish die from CO2, but land animals wouldn’t be killed so easily by it.
Page 84: Ward’s data show not one extinction but several; one very big thousands of years, but several before and soon after., spread over several million years.
Page85: e.g. C12/C13 showed multiple dieoff, return, dieoff in photosynthesis levels.
Chapter 4: The Misinterpreted Extinction (refuting dumb asteroids)
Page 104: approaching Triassic/Jurassic, ammonites dwindle to zero. Clams too; a new clam, Monotis, apparently adapted to low-O2 bottoms, emerged but also disappeared in the final stage. All is dead in the Rhaetian, the last period within the Triassic, showing geological beds striped gray/black. Death in the seas and perhaps on land as well.
Page 105: Rhaetian 12 million years world dead except for oceanic plankton. (?)
Chapter 5: A New Paradigm for Mass Extinction
Page 109: Ward visits Palau (Micronesia) to study: why did ammonites outdo nautiloids at PT and TJ, but reverse and die off 100% at KT?
Page 111: he tracked nautiloids: they live at 1500 feet in day, 400-500 night to eat, stay deep and dark, versus ammonoids in more shallow. water PT and TJ were hard on deep guys, KT while killed shallow.
Page 112: Ward visited freshwater lake in island. Thin O2 rich layer at surface full of life, but below that -- no animals, no O2, purple color. Purple and green bacteria needed sunlight and sulfur. Third type(s) of life too small to see produced H2s as waste; only O2 kept them from surface.
Page 113: Lake was like Canfield ocean. (Don Canfield and Berner of Yale did classic research). Before the modern era (after preCambrian), oceans were highly toxic due to H2S saturation, vs O2-rich today top to bottom.
Page 114: Near Palau after Ward left: warm low-O2 water rose to surface, killed Palau corals, coral bleaching. Greenhouse gasses?
Page 115: We now rely on a recent breakthrough, “molecular fossils” or “biomarkers”: certain molecules like types of lipids left behind by certain types of microbes.
Page 116: We use new instruments -- gas chromatographic mass spectrometers -- to detect molecules left by bacteria which live in high H2S. Like photosynthetic purple bacerterium, today in Black Sea and Palau, which oxidize H2S and the like. They are one of the two kinds of bacteria which live in water low in O2, but high in light and H2S.
Page 117 Bombshell: Lee Kump and Mike Arthur (PSU) and Pavlov(UC) in 2005: lots of these bacteria near end of Permian, implicated in extinctions. In waters like Black Sea, purple and green live in “chemocline,” stable interface between O2 above and H2S below. But when H2S gets to the surface: “Kump hypothesis” for extinction.
Page 118: Kump shows H2S in late Permian from this source would be 2000 times more than what comes from today’s volcanoes. It is also enough to zap the ozone layer. PT fossil spores from Greenland show UV damage, verifying the ozone hole effect. Modern ocean plant biomass “rapidly decreases” under ozone holes. Also, CO2 and methane would be in the bubbles along with H2S.
Page 119: Kump used a global circulation model (GCM) to model what happened at PT. At end of Permian, sea level DROPPED, freeing phosphorus, fertilizing these bacteria in ocean from runoff. In 2006, Roger Summons of MIT showed biomarkers for H2S production at the PT boundary in nine sites.
Page 120: In March 2006, NASA hosts the world’s main meeting on astrobiology in DC astrobiology. At the extinction session, Kump model’s shows a series of burps, like actual data on extinctions, & enough H2S to kill most land life, and push shallow water life over due to H2S and acid from CO2 combined. Ward spoke too. Oceans did it, but why did they change state?
Page 123: Since the Eocene (one full period after the dinosaurs died off), O2 has been high evefrywhere in the ocean, shallow and deep, due to conveyer belt of currents driven by big temperature differences between poles and tropics. But this “mixed ocean” (like a well-stirred aquarium) is basically new in earth history.
Page 124: older oceans all had low O2 at bottom. They left lots of pyrite – fool’s gold, formed where there is high sulfur but low oxygen. Ocean was stratified by temperature, salinity, dissolved O and reduced carbon. (Like CO2..) Most of earth history was like this. O2 above, not below. This also caused formation of black shales on the ocean bottom, going back 3.5 billion years. When life in shallow water sinks to that kind of low oxygen bottom, it yields nice well-preserved fossils.
Page 125: There are wo varieties of stratified ocean – low O2 bottom, vs. almost no O2 in the bottom layers. No animals live in the deep layers either way, but really low O2 encourages more sulfur producing microbes; that’s a Canfield ocean. Before Cambrian, the microbes producing H2S also inhibited nitrogen fixation, a double killer.
Page 126. Kliti Grice et al, Science 2005, showed Canfield ocean by biomarkers at PT. TJ maybe, now (2007) being checked.
Page 127: what causes ocean to switch between mixed versus stratified versus Canfield? CHANGE between the three causes extinctions, and is driven by conveyer system. 2005: Jeffrey Kiehl and Christine Shields of NCAR used GCM, to show global warming would move the conveyer belt..
Page 128: by end of Permian, Earth had lost its ice caps. That already gives low O2 stratified ocean. WARD’S THEORY: At PT and P/E, GHG from volcanoes (1st Siberia, 2nd Atlantic Ocean) gave huge greenhouse gas emission, the trigger which changed the oceans.
Page 129: PT was bigger because there was burping of noxious gas from virtually all shallow water on earth; unlike Paleocene, rich in CO2 and CH4, the latter accelerating warming. Anthony Hallam and Paul Wignall’s book Mass Extinctions… showed that 12 of 14 included low O2 oceans.
Chapter : The Driver of Extinction (atmosphere as trigger to low O2 ocean and change in conveyer belt).
Page 133: Two ways to estimate past CO2: best a program by Berner of Yale, GEOCARB and GEOCARBSULF (for O2?) using isotope data, second measure fossil leaves. Of course, GHG explain climate changes.
Page 135-136: FIGURE: CO2 by year… all extinctions have also been CO2 peaks. Rapid rise preceded all but one or two extinctions. Rate important, not just level.
Page 136: confirmed by leaf approach. Before industry, earth was on course to C locked up, low CO2 problem.
Page 137: SUMMARY OF WARD’S THEORY: step 1, vast increase in CO2 and methane from volcanoes. Step 2: warmer world disrupts conveyer system, more low O2 bottom. Step 3: when chemocline is shallow enough for light to reach it, H2S producing bacteria go nuts. Step 4, H2S destroys ozone layer. Page 138: Wards calls it “conveyer disruption hypothesis.”
Page 139-141: green scary poetry about what it really looks like
Chapter 7: Bridging the Deep and the Near Past
Page 142: There has been remarkably little cooperation between people studying modern climate change (since the pliocene) and people like Ward studying older earth history. The most viable connection would be between the study of oceanic thermohaline conveyer currents and the study of extinctions.
Page 143: A quick swipe at the movie “Day After Tomorrow” (“ a mockery”)
Pages 144-146: Very rapid climate change has been the norm for the past 200,000 years full of unusual ice ages. See the work of Minze Stuiver, U Washington, using Greenland Ice cores. Been But the last 10,000 years have relatively calm. Average temperature would change as much as 18 degrees F in a few decades, 10 in one decade. The calm starts human civilization?
Page 147: But there wasn’t such change in the southern hemisphere (we think, but need to check more). Ward shows a poorly labelled figure on “temperature variation”. Most now believe fluctuations in the past 200,000 years are largely
due to orbital variations found by Malutin Milankovich.
Page 148: The study of orbits suggests we would normally remain calm another 10,000 years or so.
Page 149: For recent years (past 2.5 million years), people say the conveyer belt has turned on and off, not changed type. (Just in the north?) Willi Dansgaard
first, then Hans Oeschger reported this. Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles are cycles within a larger pattern, discussed by Gerard Bond. The pattern includes Heinrich events, severe icing of the north Atlantic, which happened six times in the past 100,000 years.
Page 152: turning the currents on and off cause warm periods, or v ice-versa? We don’t know, but we do know that cold fresh water melting off from Greenland has scary implications for the Gulf Stream, with some early measurements justifying (PJW: but not yet proving) worry.
Page 159: East Anglia model predicts BIGGER ice age 50K years hence, rebound from our warming, when fossil fuel is used up.
Page 160: Ruddiman has an interesting book suggesting humans have contributed to warming (and calmer climate) since 8000BC. Not just CO2; methane.
Page 164 Vostok ice cores measure CO2 and CH4 back 2 million years. 500 to 600 ppm would be equivalent to times with little or no ice.
Page 166: for most of geologic time CO2 was much higher g than today, yet acidity was mostly not so different. That’s because oceans can buffer the acidity caused by higher CO2, but BUFFERING TAKES TIME, therefore rate matters. CO2 is now rising about 100 times fast as it ever did, creating a huge risk of acidity (PJW: as was decisive in some periods of earth history)
Page 174-175 heat causes drug use and malaria
FINALE:
Interview with Battisti of U Wash.. imagine future conveyer and story…
195: clouds (recall NASA fast story)
Saturday, January 7, 2012
An old dream about science fiction writers and Jesus
An old dream about science fiction writers and Jesus
A few months ago, I found myself eating beef brisket and drinking beer
in a barbecue place in Memphis, with one of the world’s top cognitive neuroscientists who happened to be a Christian as well. After a bit, I ‘fessed up and told an old story… and they said I had a duty to jot it down somewhere. OK. Here it is.
‘Way back in the 1970’s (1972 to 1978), I had a habit of experimenting with things
like “out of body travel” (which I concluded is quite real but quite different from what most people imagine it is). Some friends had pointed out a book called “Sanctum Celeste” in French, which proposed a particular meeting place “in the astral plane” where, they said, one could learn more about these things. if only one could get there. So one day I decide “OK, why not? I’ll try.” It involved visualizing a place a bit like a cathedral in appearance…
And so… it seemed I was floating through a kind of space, and entered
a vast unearthly cathedral. But no… not exactly what I had imagined.
As I drifted forwards, I mainly looked at the big guys moving in the opposite direction (towards the entrance to the cathedral), about twice my size, who
had warped themselves (flattened and stretched) to where they almost looked like
walking crosses with relatively small appendages for feet, hands at head,
and expressions on the face like some of those paintings of Jesus with a void
look on his face… stigmata and all that.
This wasn’t the kind of place I had intended to go to, but I kept moving forwards.
As I did so, and approached the area where one expects an altar in a Catholic cathedral… I noticed a funny little door to the left, in a wood paneled wall.
Out of some kind of curiosity… or light feeling… I decided to check it out,
open it and look to see what it was. As I opened it, a friendly voice spoke:
“Hi! I’m Jesus. I’m happy to see you. I don’t get a whole lot of visitors here these days. All those big guys out there are really too interested in themselves and their own thoughts to pay much attention to me, so I’m really glad when someone stops by.
“So let me see… how can I help you? I see you read a lot of science fiction. OK, I have some recommendations for you. Four authors… let me show you… and try to remember…
“OK, have a nice day..”
Of the four, I am most certain two were Dan Simmons and R.A. MacAvoy. I’m pretty sure Orson Scott Card was one, too… but I totally forget who was fourth.
The funny thing is… when I checked…. There were no books at all by R.A. MacAvoy
or Simmons which looked like what he showed me. That was disconcerting to me, since it seemed so real. But in fact, those books did come out in the coming years.
And they were worth reading. (For MacAvoy, it was the Damiano series; for Simmons
it was the entire Hyperion series, though I would view his Muse of Fire as
inspired too.)
I also felt a shiver up m spine when I heard the Crosby, Stills and Nash song “The Cathedral,” which sounded like the same kind of experience. I played that album a number of times when I was going to bed for awhile after I heard it.
Card’s series “Song of Earth” reminds me a bit of the major tome giving policy
for the Mehlevi Order of Sufis, which I received as a gift in the one time I went to
Istanbul a year or two ago. Among other things, it mentioned the age-old belief that certain kinds of abilities seem to run in families… to have a genetic component.
That kind of belief is easily (even routinely) abused. (I think of some of the well-meant work of Katherine Neville.) Western traditions have stressed how anyone can develop any capabilities, given the right time, motivation, preparation and effort – and that, after all, we all have souls, not only us humans but other mammals at least.
Yet at that time in Istanbul, I had been revisiting that assumption, in part because of discussions with Kurweil people. I had asked… suppose I build a computer which not only had mouse-like intelligence plus the mirror neuron kind of capabilities we see in humans… but also add second-generation quantum computing abilities… would such systems really “have soul,” really interface with what we call “spiritual reality”? It seemed unlikely… which suggested that the good old physical plant we use does have something to it… not unlike Card’s description… and not unlike those old folk beliefs we do seem to see at work.
The Mehlevi Order position now is that those who inherit such things simply do not need their training and support, because “they already have it,” while others do.
But I think this is a mistake, like the belief that those with natural talents in mathematics “will do fine anyway, so we don’t need to bother about them.” In actuality, there are cases I think of… where there WILL be an impact, yes, because of people’s inheritance, whatever that be… but the SIGN of the impact depends a lot on the environment.
I am reminded of this today, because of a guy in his 40’s who is complaining about what my generation (baby boomers) have done to the world, and is gloating about what his generation will do.
But in fact… yes… baby boomers and their thoughts have had decreasing influence since a peak somewhere between Kennedy and Clinton… but it never was 100%..
and the 40’s guys are very much on their way out too.
We made a hell of a lot of mistakes… yet in the larger history of the world, I can think of only two periods of 40 years or so of comparable peace and prosperity –
the famous “Pax Augusta” period (when Jesus was alive) and the latter nineteenth century maybe 1870-1910 or so.
What happens now?
With the new generation… the teenagers… I am reminded of the part where Jesus says something like: “When you see a lowly person or beggar, beware! It may be me
in that guise, testing you. Ask yourself how you would treat them if you knew it was me, and if you knew you were supposed to treat them as you would treat me.”
The recent Republican primaries do give some feeling for the lack of determinism,
and the groping… of the same generation which chose Obama over Hilary Clinton…
And it is coming to their turn.
Best of luck to us all…
==============================================
===============================================
Added later:
I can imagine some folks asking "Hey, what was Jesus like in this dream?
Why did you tell us about the books and not about Him?"
Fair enough.
I talked mainly about the books because that is where he was directing my attention.
He wasn't sitting there saying"worship me, worship me." In fact, he was standing pretty much the whole time, after I came in the room.
Yet... I do have something of a primary memory of him, still, even after more
than thirty years.
He was a very normal guy. In fact, he was so normal than most of the fancy folks
in Washington or on the boards of big corporations probably would filter him out, and not remember. In fact, he was so normal that it's almost strange... most people have some kind of visible abnormality, like worries or defense mechanisms. Maybe it's my own filters speaking... but he seemed unusually sane (a topic discussed at great length in my 2012 paper in Neural Networks). No weird expression of
self-flagellation (as in some of the imaginary paintings) or suffering or even distraction, nor the opposite kind of unhealthy fuzzy pleasure. Unusually clear eyes,
colored by a clear kind of benevolence and benign sense of humor. And focus on
how he could be helpful.
He was certainly friendly and inviting... but he did not have the kind of probing forceful expression of warmth that I have seen at times in the eyes of Karl Pribram.
(I remember going to a restaurant with Karl Pribram and Sam Leven and others...
and Sam later saying with great glee "There he is, this 70-year-old man, not misbehaving in any way.. and when he just LOOKS at the females in the room, they just melt all over him...the intense projection of love from his eye..." Well, that isn't
what I saw here, under these conditions... though I sense that he could have done that if he felt it would be helpful... )
In a way, he reminded me of some engineers and designers I have known, who are not ego driven but driven to try to produce things really useful to people... or to keep their companies productive despite the best efforts of some upper management to drive them into bankruptcy.
That reminds me of the question: "What WAS the fourth book he recommended?" But I don't remember...
A few months ago, I found myself eating beef brisket and drinking beer
in a barbecue place in Memphis, with one of the world’s top cognitive neuroscientists who happened to be a Christian as well. After a bit, I ‘fessed up and told an old story… and they said I had a duty to jot it down somewhere. OK. Here it is.
‘Way back in the 1970’s (1972 to 1978), I had a habit of experimenting with things
like “out of body travel” (which I concluded is quite real but quite different from what most people imagine it is). Some friends had pointed out a book called “Sanctum Celeste” in French, which proposed a particular meeting place “in the astral plane” where, they said, one could learn more about these things. if only one could get there. So one day I decide “OK, why not? I’ll try.” It involved visualizing a place a bit like a cathedral in appearance…
And so… it seemed I was floating through a kind of space, and entered
a vast unearthly cathedral. But no… not exactly what I had imagined.
As I drifted forwards, I mainly looked at the big guys moving in the opposite direction (towards the entrance to the cathedral), about twice my size, who
had warped themselves (flattened and stretched) to where they almost looked like
walking crosses with relatively small appendages for feet, hands at head,
and expressions on the face like some of those paintings of Jesus with a void
look on his face… stigmata and all that.
This wasn’t the kind of place I had intended to go to, but I kept moving forwards.
As I did so, and approached the area where one expects an altar in a Catholic cathedral… I noticed a funny little door to the left, in a wood paneled wall.
Out of some kind of curiosity… or light feeling… I decided to check it out,
open it and look to see what it was. As I opened it, a friendly voice spoke:
“Hi! I’m Jesus. I’m happy to see you. I don’t get a whole lot of visitors here these days. All those big guys out there are really too interested in themselves and their own thoughts to pay much attention to me, so I’m really glad when someone stops by.
“So let me see… how can I help you? I see you read a lot of science fiction. OK, I have some recommendations for you. Four authors… let me show you… and try to remember…
“OK, have a nice day..”
Of the four, I am most certain two were Dan Simmons and R.A. MacAvoy. I’m pretty sure Orson Scott Card was one, too… but I totally forget who was fourth.
The funny thing is… when I checked…. There were no books at all by R.A. MacAvoy
or Simmons which looked like what he showed me. That was disconcerting to me, since it seemed so real. But in fact, those books did come out in the coming years.
And they were worth reading. (For MacAvoy, it was the Damiano series; for Simmons
it was the entire Hyperion series, though I would view his Muse of Fire as
inspired too.)
I also felt a shiver up m spine when I heard the Crosby, Stills and Nash song “The Cathedral,” which sounded like the same kind of experience. I played that album a number of times when I was going to bed for awhile after I heard it.
Card’s series “Song of Earth” reminds me a bit of the major tome giving policy
for the Mehlevi Order of Sufis, which I received as a gift in the one time I went to
Istanbul a year or two ago. Among other things, it mentioned the age-old belief that certain kinds of abilities seem to run in families… to have a genetic component.
That kind of belief is easily (even routinely) abused. (I think of some of the well-meant work of Katherine Neville.) Western traditions have stressed how anyone can develop any capabilities, given the right time, motivation, preparation and effort – and that, after all, we all have souls, not only us humans but other mammals at least.
Yet at that time in Istanbul, I had been revisiting that assumption, in part because of discussions with Kurweil people. I had asked… suppose I build a computer which not only had mouse-like intelligence plus the mirror neuron kind of capabilities we see in humans… but also add second-generation quantum computing abilities… would such systems really “have soul,” really interface with what we call “spiritual reality”? It seemed unlikely… which suggested that the good old physical plant we use does have something to it… not unlike Card’s description… and not unlike those old folk beliefs we do seem to see at work.
The Mehlevi Order position now is that those who inherit such things simply do not need their training and support, because “they already have it,” while others do.
But I think this is a mistake, like the belief that those with natural talents in mathematics “will do fine anyway, so we don’t need to bother about them.” In actuality, there are cases I think of… where there WILL be an impact, yes, because of people’s inheritance, whatever that be… but the SIGN of the impact depends a lot on the environment.
I am reminded of this today, because of a guy in his 40’s who is complaining about what my generation (baby boomers) have done to the world, and is gloating about what his generation will do.
But in fact… yes… baby boomers and their thoughts have had decreasing influence since a peak somewhere between Kennedy and Clinton… but it never was 100%..
and the 40’s guys are very much on their way out too.
We made a hell of a lot of mistakes… yet in the larger history of the world, I can think of only two periods of 40 years or so of comparable peace and prosperity –
the famous “Pax Augusta” period (when Jesus was alive) and the latter nineteenth century maybe 1870-1910 or so.
What happens now?
With the new generation… the teenagers… I am reminded of the part where Jesus says something like: “When you see a lowly person or beggar, beware! It may be me
in that guise, testing you. Ask yourself how you would treat them if you knew it was me, and if you knew you were supposed to treat them as you would treat me.”
The recent Republican primaries do give some feeling for the lack of determinism,
and the groping… of the same generation which chose Obama over Hilary Clinton…
And it is coming to their turn.
Best of luck to us all…
==============================================
===============================================
Added later:
I can imagine some folks asking "Hey, what was Jesus like in this dream?
Why did you tell us about the books and not about Him?"
Fair enough.
I talked mainly about the books because that is where he was directing my attention.
He wasn't sitting there saying"worship me, worship me." In fact, he was standing pretty much the whole time, after I came in the room.
Yet... I do have something of a primary memory of him, still, even after more
than thirty years.
He was a very normal guy. In fact, he was so normal than most of the fancy folks
in Washington or on the boards of big corporations probably would filter him out, and not remember. In fact, he was so normal that it's almost strange... most people have some kind of visible abnormality, like worries or defense mechanisms. Maybe it's my own filters speaking... but he seemed unusually sane (a topic discussed at great length in my 2012 paper in Neural Networks). No weird expression of
self-flagellation (as in some of the imaginary paintings) or suffering or even distraction, nor the opposite kind of unhealthy fuzzy pleasure. Unusually clear eyes,
colored by a clear kind of benevolence and benign sense of humor. And focus on
how he could be helpful.
He was certainly friendly and inviting... but he did not have the kind of probing forceful expression of warmth that I have seen at times in the eyes of Karl Pribram.
(I remember going to a restaurant with Karl Pribram and Sam Leven and others...
and Sam later saying with great glee "There he is, this 70-year-old man, not misbehaving in any way.. and when he just LOOKS at the females in the room, they just melt all over him...the intense projection of love from his eye..." Well, that isn't
what I saw here, under these conditions... though I sense that he could have done that if he felt it would be helpful... )
In a way, he reminded me of some engineers and designers I have known, who are not ego driven but driven to try to produce things really useful to people... or to keep their companies productive despite the best efforts of some upper management to drive them into bankruptcy.
That reminds me of the question: "What WAS the fourth book he recommended?" But I don't remember...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)