# The Archdruid Report

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society

## Wednesday, October 12, 2016

### An Afternoon in Early Autumn

I think it was the late science writer Stephen Jay Gould who coined the term “deep time” for the vast panorama opened up to human eyes by the last three hundred years or so of discoveries in geology and astronomy. It’s a useful label for an even more useful concept. In our lives, we deal with time in days, seasons, years, decades at most; decades, centuries and millennia provide the yardsticks by which the life cycles of human societies—that is to say, history, in the usual sense of that word—are traced.
Both these, the time frame of individual lives and the time frame of societies, are anthropocentric, as indeed they should be; lives and societies are human things and require a human measure. When that old bamboozler Protagoras insisted that “man is the measure of all things,” though, he uttered a subtle truth wrapped in a bald-faced lie.* The subtle truth is that since we are what we are—that is to say, social primates whow have learned a few interesting tricks—our capacity to understand the cosmos is strictly limited by the perceptions that human nervous systems are capable of processing and the notions that human minds are capable of thinking. The bald-faced lie is the claim that everything in the cosmos must fit inside the perceptions human beings can process and the notions they can think.
(*No, none of this has to do with gender politics. The Greek language, unlike modern English, had a common gender-nonspecific noun for “human being,” anthropos, which was distinct from andros, “man,” and gyne, “woman.” The word Protagoras used was anthropos.)
It took the birth of modern geology to tear through the veil of human time and reveal the stunningly inhuman scale of time that measures the great cycles of the planet on which we live. Last week’s post sketched out part of the process by which people in Europe and the European diaspora, once they got around to noticing that the Book of Genesis is about the Rock of Ages rather than the age of rocks, struggled to come to terms with the immensities that geological strata revealed. To my mind, that was the single most important discovery our civilization has made—a discovery with which we’re still trying to come to terms, with limited success so far, and one that I hope we can somehow manage to hand down to our descendants in the far future.
The thing that makes deep time difficult for many people to cope with is that it makes self-evident nonsense out of any claim that human beings have any uniquely important place in the history of the cosmos. That wouldn’t be a difficulty at all, except that the religious beliefs most commonly held in Europe and the European diaspora make exactly that claim.
That last point deserves some expansion here, not least because a minority among the current crop of “angry atheists” have made a great deal of rhetorical hay by insisting that all religions, across the board, point for point, are identical to whichever specific religion they themselves hate the most—usually, though not always, whatever Christian denomination they rebelled against in their adolescent years. That insistence is a fertile source of nonsense, and never so much as when it turns to the religious implications of time.
The conflict between science and religion over the age of the Earth is a purely Western phenomenon. Had the great geological discoveries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries taken place in Japan, say, or India, the local religious authorities wouldn’t have turned a hair. On the one hand, most Asian religious traditions juggle million-year intervals as effortlessly as any modern cosmologist; on the other, Asian religious traditions have by and large avoided the dubious conviction, enshrined in most (though not all) versions of Christianity, that the Earth and everything upon it exists solely as a stage on which the drama of humanity’s fall and redemption plays out over a human-scaled interval of time. The expansive Hindu cosmos with its vast ever-repeating cycles of time, the Shinto concept of Great Nature as a continuum within which every category of being has its rightful place, and other non-Western worldviews offer plenty of room for modern geology to find a home.
Ironically, though, the ongoing decline of mainstream Christianity as a cultural influence in the Western world hasn’t done much to lessen the difficulty most people in the industrial world feel when faced with the abysses of deep time. The reason here is simply that the ersatz religion that’s taken the place of Christianity in the Western imagination also tries to impose a rigid ideological scheme not only on the ebb and flow of human history, but on the great cycles of the nonhuman cosmos as well. Yes, that would be the religion of progress—the faith-based conviction that human history is, or at least ought to be, a straight line extending onward and upward from the caves to the stars.
You might think, dear reader, that a belief system whose followers like to wallow in self-praise for their rejection of the seven-day creation scheme of the Book of Genesis and their embrace of deep time in the past would have a bit of a hard time evading its implications for the future. Let me assure you that this seems to give most of them no trouble at all. From Ray Kurzweil’s pop-culture mythology of the Singularity—a straightforward rewrite of Christian faith in the Second Coming dolled up in science-fiction drag—straight through to the earnest space-travel advocates who insist that we’ve got to be ready to abandon the solar system when the sun turns into a red giant four billion years from now, a near-total aversion to thinking about the realities deep time ahead of us is astonishingly prevalent among those who think they’ve grasped the vastness of Earth’s history.
I’ve come to think that one of the things that feeds this curious quirk of collective thinking is a bit of trivia to be found in a great many books on geology and the like—the metaphor that turns the Earth’s entire history into a single year, starting on January 1 with the planet’s formation out of clouds of interstellar dust and ending at midnight on December 31, which is always right now.
That metaphor has been rehashed more often than the average sitcom plot. A quick check of the books in the study where I’m writing this essay finds three different versions, one written in the 1960s, one in the 1980s, and one a little more than a decade ago. The dates of various events dance around the calendar a bit as new discoveries rewrite this or that detail of the planet’s history, to be sure; when I was a dinosaur-crazed seven-year-old, the Earth was only three and a half billion years old and the dinosaurs died out seventy million years ago, while the latest research I know of revises those dates to 4.6 billion years and 65 million years respectively, moving the date of the end-Cretaceous extinction from December 24 to December 26—in either case, a wretched Christmas present for small boys. Such details aside, the basic metaphor remains all but unchanged.
There’s only one problem with it, but it’s a whopper. Ask yourself this: what has gotten left out of that otherwise helpful metaphor? The answer, of course, is the future.
Let’s imagine, by contrast, a metaphor that maps the entire history of life on earth, from the first living thing on this planet to the last, onto a single year. We don’t know exactly when life will go extinct on this planet, but then we don’t know exactly when it emerged, either; the most recent estimate I know of puts the origin of terrestrial life somewhere a little more than 3.7 billion years ago, and the point at which the sun’s increasing heat will finally sterilize the planet somewhere a little more than 1.2 billion years from now. Adding in a bit of rounding error, we can set the lifespan of our planetary biosphere at a nice round five billion years. On that scale, a month of thirty days is 411 million years, a single day is 13.7 million years, an hour is around 571,000 years, a minute is around 9514 years, and a second is 158 years and change. Our genus, Homo,* evolved maybe two hours ago, and all of recorded human history so far has taken up a little less than 32 seconds.
(*Another gender-nonspecific word for “human being,” this one comes from Latin, and is equally distinct from vir, “man,” and femina, “woman.” English really does need to get its act together.)
That all corresponds closely to the standard metaphor. The difference comes in when you glance at the calendar and find out that the present moment in time falls not on December 31 or any other similarly momentous date, but on an ordinary, undistinguished day—by my back-of-the-envelope calculation, it would be September 26.
I like to imagine our time, along these lines, as an instant during an early autumn afternoon in the great year of Earth’s biosphere. Like many another late September day, it’s becoming uncomfortably hot, and billowing dark clouds stand on the horizon, heralds of an oncoming storm. We human mayflies, with a lifespan averaging maybe half a second, dart here and there, busy with our momentary occupations; a few of us now and then lift our gaze from our own affairs and try to imagine the cold bare fields of early spring, the sultry air of summer evenings, or the rigors of a late autumn none of us will ever see.
With that in mind, let’s put some other dates onto the calendar. While life began on January 1, multicellular life didn’t get started until sometime in the middle of August—for almost two-thirds of the history of life, Earth was a planet of bacteria and blue-green algae, and in terms of total biomass, it arguably still is. The first primitive plants and invertebrate animals ventured onto the land around August 25; the terrible end-Permian extinction crisis, the worst the planet has yet experienced, hit on September 8; the dinosaurs perished in the small hours of September 22, and the last ice age ended just over a minute ago, having taken place over some twelve and a half minutes.
Now let’s turn and look in the other direction. The last ice age was part of a glacial era that began a little less than two hours ago and can be expected to continue through the morning of the 27th—on our time scale, they happen every two and a half weeks or so, and the intervals between them are warm periods when the Earth is a jungle planet and glaciers don’t exist. Our current idiotic habit of treating the atmosphere as a gaseous sewer will disrupt that cycle for only a very short time; our ability to dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will end in less than a second as readily accessible fossil fuel reserves are exhausted, and it will take rather less than a minute thereafter for natural processes to scrub the excess CO2 from the atmosphere and return the planet’s climate to its normal instability.
Certain other consequences of our brief moment of absurd extravagance will last longer. On our timescale, the process of radioactive decay will take around half an hour (that is to say, a quarter million years or so) to reduce high-level nuclear waste all the way to harmlessness. It will take an interval of something like the same order of magnitude before all the dead satellites in high orbits have succumbed to the complex processes that will send them to a fiery fate in Earth’s atmosphere, and quite possibly longer for the constant rain of small meteorites onto the lunar surface to pound the Apollo landers and other space junk there to unrecognizable fragments. Given a few hours of the biosphere’s great year, though, everything we are and everything we’ve done will be long gone.
Beyond that, the great timekeeper of Earth’s biosphere is the Sun. Stars increase in their output of heat over most of their life cycle, and the Sun is no exception. The single-celled chemosynthetic organisms that crept out of undersea hot springs in February or March of the great year encountered a frozen world, lit by a pale white Sun whose rays gave far less heat than today; the oldest currently known ice age, the Cryogenian glaciation of the late Precambrian period, was apparently cold enough to freeze the oceans solid and wrap most of the planet in ice. By contrast, toward the middle of November in the distant Neozoic Era, the Sun will be warmer and yellower than it is today, and glacial eras will likely involve little more than the appearance of snow on a few high mountains normally covered in jungle.
Thus the Earth will gradually warm through October and November. Temperatures will cycle up and down with the normal cycles of planetary climate, but each warm period will tend to be a little warmer than the last, and each cold period a little less frigid. Come December, most of a billion years from now, as the heat climbs past one threshold after another, more and more of the Earth’s water will evaporate and, as dissociated oxygen and hydrogen atoms, boil off into space; the Earth will become a desert world, with life clinging to existence at the poles and in fissures deep underground, until finally the last salt-crusted seas run dry and the last living things die out.
And humanity? The average large vertebrate genus lasts something like ten million years—in our scale, something over seventeen hours. As already noted, our genus has only been around for about two hours so far, so it’s statistically likely that we still have a good long run ahead of us. I’ve discussed in these essays several times already the hard physical facts that argue that we aren’t going to go to the stars, or even settle other planets in this solar system, but that’s nothing we have to worry about. Even if we have an improbably long period of human existence ahead of us—say, the fifty million years that bats of the modern type have been around, some three and a half days in our scale, or ten thousand times the length of all recorded human history to date—the Earth will be burgeoning with living things, and perfectly capable of supporting not only intelligent life but rich, complex, unimaginably diverse civilizations, long after we’ve all settled down to our new careers as fossils.
This does not mean, of course, that the Earth will be capable of supporting the kind of civilization we have today. It’s arguably not capable of supporting that kind of civilization now. Certainly the direct and indirect consequences of trying to maintain the civilization we’ve got, even for the short time we’ve made that attempt so far, are setting off chains of consequences that don’t seem likely to leave much of it standing for long. That doesn’t mean we’re headed back to the caves, or for that matter, back to the Middle Ages—these being the two bogeymen that believers in progress like to use when they’re trying to insist that we have no alternative but to keep on stumbling blindly ahead on our current trajectory, no matter what.
What it means, instead, is that we’re headed toward something that’s different—genuinely, thoroughly, drastically different. It won’t just be different from what we have now; it’ll also be different from the rigidly straight-line extrapolations and deus ex machina fauxpocalypses that people in industrial society like to use to keep from thinking about the future we’re making for ourselves. Off beyond the dreary Star Trek fantasy of metastasizing across the galaxy, and the equally hackneyed Mad Max fantasy of pseudomedieval savagery, lies the astonishing diversity of the future before us: a future potentially many orders of magnitude longer than all of recorded history to date, in which human beings will live their lives and understand the world in ways we can’t even imagine today.
It’s tolerably common, when points like the one I’ve tried to make here get raised at all, for people to insist that paying attention to the ultimate fate of the Earth and of our species is a recipe for suicidal depression or the like. With all due respect, that claim seems silly to me. Each one of us, as we get out of bed in the morning, realizes at some level that the day just beginning will bring us one step closer to old age and death, and yet most of us deal with that reality without too much angst.
In the same way, I’d like to suggest that it’s past time for the inmates of modern industrial civilization to grow up, sprout some gonads—either kind, take your pick—and deal with the simple, necessary, and healthy realization that our species is not going to be around forever. Just as maturity in the individual arrives when it sinks in that human life is finite, collective maturity may just wait for a similar realization concerning the life of the species. That kind of maturity would be a valuable asset just now, not least because it might help us grasp some of the extraordinary possibilities that will open up as industrial civilization finishes its one-way trip down the chute marked “decline and fall” and the deindustrial future ahead of us begins to take shape.

#### 234 comments:

«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 234 of 234

John Roth said...

  @MawKernewek
  You said: “One interesting idea is that some believe that it would have been possible for life to have evolved on Venus, even complex life and it could have spread to Earth via meteoritic ejecta.”
  I looked at the paper. Unless it’s a deliberate hoax (see Sokol Affair), I can’t imagine it being accepted by any reputable journal.
  As far as I’m aware, none of the questions that she’s attempting to answer are currently considered as so difficult that they require a really radical hypothesis. Radiations after an ecological collapse happen simply because there are a huge number of ecological niches to fill.
  The big problem that this version of “panspermia” needs to answer involves the genetic coherence of all living beings that have been studied - and that’s a lot of them. They all appear to have a common biochemical basis, which is highly unlikely if there were two different origins of life, one on each planet. Another interesting question that this paper brushes by is the unlikelihood of any highly complex (that is, multi-cellular) life-form surviving the size of impact needed to blast chunks of a planetary surface into space, and then the similarly stressful impact on Earth.
  Comment to JMG: it’s interesting that occultists have been claiming that intelligent life came from Venus a very long time ago. (I’m emphasizing the word intelligent here.) You may find it amusing that the Michael Teaching says we came from Sirius, which is implausible for other reasons. If we take both “Venus” and “Sirius” as placeholders, though, the scenario fits within the general framework of the MT, and doesn’t involve any of the biological or physical implausibilities that “panspermia” involves.
  The astronomical charts of stellar evolution are all very pretty, and I have no doubt that they’re in the right ball park, but it seems like every few months there’s a discovery that means pieces have to be rethought. Right now, the big problem is the “dim young Sun” issue. If we take the standard 10% per billion years number for how much the Sun should have been brightening, and then project it backwards, the Sun at the time Earth formed should have been at least 40% dimmer, which means that Earth and Venus would have been iceballs. This is not what geology tells us. So far, all attempts to solve this have come up short.

  10/16/16, 3:46 PM
Varun Bhaskar said...

  Archdruid,
  Well you can't be the life of the party all the time, especially when you're always the only one there! ;)

  10/16/16, 4:25 PM
donalfagan said...

  I spent the weekend in Altoona. We saw a few dozen TrumpPence signs, one Clinton sign - near the local PSU campus - and one *rum* sticker among Halloween decor. At the farmer's market, the male partner at the organic produce vendor was wearing a long sleeve Trump shirt.
  Back in Baltimore I still only see stickers for local pols.

  10/16/16, 4:40 PM
Shane W said...

  https://www.yahoo.com/news/north-carolina-police-gop-office-damaged-fire-graffiti-202714519.html
  Here we go...

  10/16/16, 5:31 PM
onething said...

  JMG,
  "Onething, intelligent design always struck me as Creationism Lite -- the same notion but very carefully stripped of anything that would allow it to be disproved."
  Stripped? Of what?
  More like heavy than lite...ID deals with data and its interpretation, and while the inference that an intelligence had to be involved certainly could have metaphysical implications, it doesn't deal in faith or philosophy. All it says is, given the complex and specified information in the cell/DNA, could that have arisen by chance? Or is it mathematically plausible for random mutations to give rise to irreducible complexity? What are the differences between the kinds of complexity that natural forces can give rise to and the ones that minds like ours can?
  It's difficult to do the topic justice without some actual study. Not to say that it is boring or over an intelligent layperson's head but because when you look, really look, at the details of how biological processes work, Darwinian mechanisms don't look adequate.
  What exactly is going on with the accusation of “creationism”? If a creationist is not necessarily a Christian religious person but anyone who thinks there is a divine or eternal consciousness that has anything to do with us or this universe, well, then that just shows what this whole argument from the Darwinian side is really about – atheism. The sticking point is not that earth and then life unfolded slowly over great time, but that it did so utterly by accident through chemical molecular forces.
  To state that life unfolds without mind or purpose is a speculation that has strong metaphysical implications. That should be understood. It isn't neutral.
  Although many religious people (think they) have made peace with Darwinian evolution (other evolutionary understandings are possible!) they are required to think that we live in a divinely originated universe but that its entire existence and unfolding and life forms (with souls) had no input from the divine and arose just the same as if She weren't there. Quite odd.
  Some people are going to cry foul no matter what if there is any hint from any kind of research that we live in a universe that has a spiritual aspect. But we either live in a purely materialist universe or we don't. And if we don't then clues to that fact may be found. But one side wants to discredit the other if they ever state that there are indeed such clues. Which means that they limit the discoveries of science to that which they have already decided it will be limited to, and reality can take the hinder most.
  I recommend Darwin's Doubt or this essay:
  http://www.discovery.org/a/2177

  10/16/16, 8:28 PM
Golocyte Golo said...

  It was a particularly beautifully written and striking post this week. I'd like to point out that the West actually does have an ancient intellectual tradition of deep time, though it certainly never wove its way into the West's mythological foundations.
  There is the Platonic Year, the great cycle of humanity and nature. The planets cycle, maddeningly, in both regular and irregular patterns. Plato says that unimaginably far in the past, when everything was new, the stars and human society were in perfect regular order, but as with Human society the stars, in steps, lost their ancient alignments. They are mathematically destined to cycle back to regular patterning in the unimaginably far future.
  I read Aristotle's theory of the Unmoved Mover similarly. God and objective reality both existed forever, and may once have perfectly coincided, but must have been static. Motion or change is impossible without a motive force, and this force the Mover exerted on material reality was something like magnetic attraction, or the force the beloved exerts on the beloved to make him move hither. The action of the universe and the bubbling all around is ultimately the expression of love... of the consciousness-less material world for the pure consciousness of the the self-thinking thinking.
  One might also read Thomas Aquinas on the nature of infinity, and his critique on Anselm in this matter. I have found the sophistication to be impressive.

  10/16/16, 9:19 PM
Golocyte Golo said...

  Again compliments on your beautiful essay. For what it's worth, as a tiny criticism, myself I wouldn't say deep time was the West's most significant discovery. I'd give that honor to the germ theory of disease, which affects every person's daily life to an unimaginable extent. Deep time may have been envisioned by several cultures, but I think you'd find that the germ theory of disease was undreamt of by anybody anywhere before the development of the microscope.

  10/16/16, 9:30 PM
Thomas Yelton said...

  John, No redefinition -- just clarification, expansion. Searched the archives, hoped for more, must respectfully disagree. But there is a place for optimism. Thanks for the link to Udo Bardi. Peace.

  10/17/16, 6:15 AM
patriciaormsby said...

  I must note I was able to share this post widely, and my broader family got a lot of joy out of it. Only one reported feeling depressed by it, and he was the one with the most realistic sense of what a societal collapse would entail, and therefore doesn't want to contemplate such stuff.
  I was completely away from nearly all viewable forms of screens for the past week, attending the big annual festival of the Kompira Shrine in Shikoku. When I came back home, all sorts of mayhem was happening, but would have been regardless of my viewership or lack thereof. Some things of note: during Prime Minister Abe's recent visit to presumed winner Ms. Clinton in the US, the Japanese TV put forward sob stories about Aleppo, but once he'd returned, they abruptly ceased that, and none of the disinformation I hear from the US press is being broadcasted here. They haven't mentioned the Middle East at all recently when I or my husband have been watching. There has been a certain amount of talk about negotiating with Russia regarding matters between the two countries, including return of islands Japan claims and possibly extending train service via Sakhalin. About two weeks ago during Sunday night prime time, I forget the details, but they provided an honest picture of events in Aleppo and on a subsequent weekday morning declared that the American press was heavily biased against Trump and he wasn't quite the ogre that people had been led to believe. Twice now panelists on an Osaka-based political discussion program expressed a surprising degree of support for Trump versus Clinton. This distancing from the US shadow elite has been much much quieter and gentler than that of Philippines' President Duterte.
  Oh, and the second meeting of the Kanto Green Wizards went really well, with University of Tokyo scholar Avery Morrow attending as well as Murray Gilbert, who came to the first. The Kompira picnic we are sort of hijacking had been straggling along I am told, but has suddenly blossomed, and we had folks with guitars, and Priestess Ikeda and I put together an impromptu Shinto ceremony. So I will continue to invite anyone in the area who wants to join us, and am thinking of adding a short show-and-tell style Green Wizardry lecture series. My translation of highlights of your explanation of the Green Wizardry concept was useful.
  Quin Arbeitman, who also attended the big festival in Shikoku (I'm encouraging him to set up a Kansai Green Wizards Group, but getting a suitable venue may be hard), says his wife thinks "Midori no Mahotsukai" is the best translation. There is the alliteration, and the image of "mahotsukai" is similar to the modern western image of "wizard." Cuteness goes over well.

  10/17/16, 7:19 AM
Henry Wischusen III said...

  Based on my experience as a human,we as a society believe that which we teach ourselves. The fictions and fantasies of our modern disposable/consumer culture are our societal truths. Our sense of time and the value of time is influenced by our sense of time and value relative our material possessions. It is as if we can throw away time and just get some fresh, new, improved time in a shiny shrinkwrapped package. In fact I am the recipient of fresh new time from one perspective. At the age of 64 I have 2 successful hip replacements. I have new improved time on this planet. It is the process of unlearning that I find so challenging. The process of re-imaging the fictions and fantasies of our culture that might bring up closer to some sort of truth.

  10/17/16, 7:29 AM
Anthony Romano said...

  I had another stray thought about this post. I think one reason thinking and comprehending deep time is so existentially daunting to many people is because of our species propensity for story telling.
  Humans are the story teller species, and the notion of our collective story ending is terrifying. Does the universe even exist if there is no one there to tell its stories?
  If a future intelligent and self-conscious species were to arise that was not as prone to story telling, would they accept the realities of deep time more amicably?

  10/17/16, 8:55 AM
Peter VE said...

  I was discussing the effect of lead with a couple of Egyptology scholars, and how their future colleagues would be able to date a certain period by the layer of lead spread over a 50 year time zone by leaded gasoline.
  Future geologists, who might be descendants of current raccoons, will be arguing about the sources of this lead layer, concentrated by some unknown event in certain areas. Some will argue that it is proof of some previous intelligent life form. Others will scoff, in that no intelligent life form would so willingly poison itself.

  10/17/16, 8:58 AM
Chris Larkin said...

  JMG- I agree that Elon’s keeping SpaceX private so he can control how its money is spent. The difference is that I believe the game he’s playing is an earnest attempt at Mars. If he just wanted money, there’s better ways SpaceX could do that. Charging more and under-delivery would be the obvious route instead of extreme undercutting and competent delivery. My point was that if SpaceX was public like his other companies (including the one that made his fortune, Paypal), there’s no way he could fund the clear moneysink that a Mars colony would be. Elon’s said as much when asked about this very topic and his other actions make me think he’s telling the truth. This doesn’t mean he’ll succeed. After all, history is littered with ambitious failed colonies despite sincere backers.
  Cherokee Organics- Thank you for your response. Civility is important and is one of the many reasons I’ve enjoyed this site even as a long-time lurker. The radiation risks both to and on Mars are a concern though often overstated. They’re generally on the order of increased risk of cancer over a lifetime (though even at worst better than smoking), than immediate painful death. As for why people would want to live on Mars, I’ve discovered lots of people who live in ways I couldn’t imagine myself living even when they have options. In addition with Mars, romanticism is a powerful force, and there’s always been people who’ll suffer hardship to leave home for truly new lands. They often go bust, but there’s always been more.

  10/17/16, 10:00 AM
Bill Pulliam said...

  Cherokee Chris - All low pressure systems at all latitudes are cyclones. The word just means a low pressure system. The wind circles around all of then, clockwise in the south, counterclockwise in the north unless they are very small. The tiny dust devil a few meters across is a cyclone.
  Was that system a bona fide tropical cyclone? This means that it has warm air and strong convection (thunderstorms) at its center, and has no cold or warm fronts attached to it. Temperat cyclones are extremely abundant at the higher latitudes, and can be larger and more powerful than many hurricanes. They can look very similar in a satellite image too, to the casual,observer. And tropical cyclones often wander away from the equator and evolve into non-tropical cyclones, losing the warm core and growing a set of fronts.
  You'd also need to check the records as to how unprecedented such a system is. Wth increasingly saturated media coverage of the weather, many events are presented as extreme and unusual when in fact they are pretty normal things t happen maybe once every decade or so

  10/17/16, 11:08 AM
lordberia3@gmail.com said...

  The idea that an ancient civilization burned up the planet 55 million years ago absolutely fascinates me. The tv series Terra Nova (sadly only 1 series was done) indirectly covered that possibility (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_(TV_series).
  Regarding the US elections, I went to dinner last weekend with a group of friends and the subject of Donald Trump came up. I know that my friend is a shy Trump supporter but what was fascinating was that it become very clear that our mutual friend's girlfriend was also clearly a shy supporter of the Donald, despite the fact that her boyfriend was very hostile. Every time his name was mentioned she got very excited and when I said that I thought he could still win this election, she could hardly suppress her excitement! I do wonder how many woman are attracted to the alpha male persona of Trump and whether he enjoys significant support from woman who secretly find him rather attractive in a rogueish, bad boy kind of way but feel that politically correct liberal culture means that this is a socially "toxic" thing to think.
  Of course, one of the beauties of the ballot box is that it is anonymous. In Britain, we have seen a similar thing with "shy Tory" and shy Brexit" voters in previous elections which have led to unexpected results on election night. I do have a sense that something similar may happen in America (though I could be totally wrong!).

  10/17/16, 12:31 PM
Cherokee Organics said...

  Hi Unknown,
  Is this Eagle Eye that I am conversing with?
  An explanation of the South Australian weather event can be found here: South Australia weather: 'Cyclone' expected to hit state.
  It was technically "a [mid-latitude] cyclone" whatever that is...
  It sure did look like a cyclone on the satellite photos and also the weather radar.
  Mate, it has been a very wet winter. I'm not sure the tomato seedlings appreciated the most recent bout of rain. Still I just keep planting them until they all take.
  Cheers
  Chris

  10/17/16, 1:55 PM
MawKernewek said...

  @John Roth - you are probably right. The author's website lists it as having been submitted to Science, but I can't see them publishing it somehow. I don't think it is well written enough to be a deliberate hoax, and I am not sure to be honest why someone with a fairly diverse publication record (though not a biologist) would put their name to this.
  There is another paper here Was Venus the First Habitable World of our Solar System? simply arguing that Venus could have been habitable for a substantial period.

  10/17/16, 4:25 PM
Graeme Bushell said...

  Mustard, given the uncertainty in the date estimates at both ends of the year, "now" is pretty close to the equinox. Might be a nice thing to add into the seasonal celebrations...

  10/17/16, 8:16 PM
onething said...

  Hi John roth,
  "I haven’t taken a good look at Intelligent Design because I expect it’l be a waste of time, unless they’ve discarded (with extreme prejudice) the notion of Irreducible Complexity..."
  Goodness, maybe you know something I don't. What has caused you extreme prejudice against what I would consider a hard problem of irreducible complexity?
  "and are actually grappling with the very hard question of how one would detect the traces of an outside intelligence influencing the flow of evolution."
  I'd say that is exactly what they are doing. The focus is on information, the kind of information that cells and body plans contain is not the kind of information that can arise by random processes without mind. They call it CSI, complex specified information. Like language. But I am not sure it is outside intelligence. It could be endogenous.
  "As I and other people have said before, Darwin is part of the history of science. The only relevance he has to current evolutionary biology is that he’s a good read. As it is said: “We honor the pioneers because they were first, not because they were right.” Darwin was wrong in a lot of ways, and trying to take anything he said as typical of current thought in evolutionary biology is simply attacking a straw man."
  I suppose the correct phrase is neo-Darwinism. Of course there is more knowledge now than he had. But the basic premise is that life forms can arise on their own via random mutations, which include a few add-ons like gene duplication.

  10/17/16, 9:29 PM
Unknown said...

  Chris/Cherokee
  Yes, it eagle eye.
  At least you have got tomatoe seedlings in. Our cattle are growing webbed feet.
  Thanks for the link.
  Cheers
  eagle eye

  10/17/16, 11:07 PM
Shane W said...

  I'm swearing off presidential election coverage and discussion. It's simply gotten too bizarre and toxic for me to handle. Won't mean I won't fall off the bandwagon, but it is my intention to disengage, to do the dirty deed come early Nov., and to prepare for the results.
  Regarding deep time, that is one of the prime reasons I find comfort in nature. When I'm in nature, it's like I can take in all aspects of time at once. I can look at rock layers laid down over millions of years, see fossils, then turn my eyes and look at plants that will live only one season, then trees that may live over 100 years, then look at insects that may not even live a whole season. It's like I'm able to take in the whole of time just by being in nature and observing.

  10/17/16, 11:12 PM
Bill Pulliam said...

  Chris: "It's a clockwise rotating system and in its own right it's a powerful system, and not to be confused with tropical cyclones." Emphasising and pushing the scary word "cyclone" is pure media weather hype. It is nothing but a strong storm of a perfectly ordinary type. There are dozens and dozens of mid-latitude cyclones in the southern hemisphere every year. This is the same as when the North American media went berzerk a few years back about the "Polar Vortex" as if it were an unusual event. The Polar Vortex is a permanent feature of the atmosphere, in fact there are two, one in the north, one in the south.

  10/18/16, 7:33 AM
RetrovationSociety said...

  Part four of the Ireland sort-of-utopia. The girls go for a wander and discover how childcare and property taxes work.
  http://retrovationsociety.blogspot.ie/2016/10/work-shy.html
  Mallow.

  10/18/16, 9:13 AM
John Roth said...

  @onething
  You may not be aware of what the term “with extreme prejudice” means. In context, it means taking it out into the back 40, killing it and burying it.
  As far as I can tell, the only definition of why something is “irreducibly complex” I can find is “because I said so.” That’s not science. That’s pure b-s, using that term in its technical meaning of “something said for the impact on the audience without regard of its truth or falsity.”
  Nobody I know of contests the fact that IF (and notice the big word there) some form of intelligence exists that’s capable of affecting life here on Earth, it could have affected the flow of evolution. It obviously can be done because we are doing it all the time. The question is not could it, it is did it. You’re going to need a stronger framework for discovering evidence that it happened than “because I said so,” which is what “irreducible complexity” reduces to.
  By the way, there is a set of channeling in the MT that says the human ancestor was modified several times, and will be again in the near future. I would dearly love to have a workable framework for detecting those modifications. “Irreducible complexity” isn’t it, for rather obvious reasons.

  10/18/16, 10:12 AM
Varun Bhaskar said...

  Shane,
  I was wondering how long it would take you to get sick of the circus, you have a far stronger stomach than I.

  10/18/16, 12:01 PM
onething said...

  John Roth,
  Yes, I know the expression. I was trying to figure out why you spoke as you did. I'm not too sure how to answer the rest, though, because you've said you have not looked into it as you're afraid it would be a waste of time, yet the topic of irreducible complexity is dealt with in some detail, and of course it does not amount to "because I said so." As I have read entire books by, for example Behe, on the topic and also watched him extensively on live video and read his testimony about it, I find him highly intelligent and an excellent explainer. For you to accuse him of dishonesty seems quite premature.
  Sigh. This is how it goes or so it seems to me. The anger coming through your posts is palpable, and why? Why can't human beings discuss interesting topics of inquiry with an attitude of wanting to discover truth together, rather than one of winning at all costs or sticking with what one already believes no matter what?
  I can give a few generalities, try to clear up a few misconceptions but if you want to know more, I think you simply have to put in some time. If you are indeed interested. Few people are.
  What does the Michael teachings mean about the human having been modified? That is, in what way or by whom? I am not sure that irreducible complexity would be the right framework for detecting that. IC refers to particular systems, I would say the cell is one, in which there really isn't a conceivable way for it to evolve in slow, incremental steps. A modification of an organism would be different. ID focuses more on information than IC, but again, that applies to all organisms and their DNA. One item in the human genome that may be of interest is that one of our chromosomes appears to have been spliced, and that whereas we have 23 pairs of chromosomes, the apes have 24.
  I enjoy discussing this with you and am interested in how evolutionary theory fits with your particular theology. If you care to answer, perhaps it should be at the other blog, so as not to annoy our host at this late hour.

  10/18/16, 5:10 PM
Urban Harvester said...

  JMG, "Let's see if he can come up with some urim, thummim, and Martian golden plates..."
  Or we can watch for amphibious fire-totem, salamander-like creatures showing up somewhere on the sidelines with messages about where to find said 'Martian plates'... :) Old Joe made it out to be that it was the angel Moroni who told him where to find the loot, but that may have been just to cover up the fact that people either didn't know what on earth a salamander was, or (if they did) viewed the alchemical fire critters with counterfeiting disdain. So my money would be on the caudata as mythic indicator.

  10/18/16, 5:23 PM
Fred said...

  Was just going through previous posts of yours and re-read Down the Rathole of the Future with the predictions for 2016.
  My husband was just in San Francisco for a tech conference and he said it was the filthiest city he's every been in. Couldn't believe the dirt and trash everywhere and it looking like something from the 1970's inner city. So I'm going to count that towards tech collapse coming soon if they can't even clean their own place.
  Despite the trashing of Trump in the media the past two weeks, the yard signs for him have increased ten fold where I live. Seems like the 80% not profiting from the economy as it is are making their voice heard. They also seem to not believe a word of the media. Hillary signs have started appearing but on public roads (ordinances don't allow that signage until a few weeks prior to election to prevent them getting dislodged and clogging up the storm drains). Still no Hillary signs spotted in front yards. Polls of people will land lines - aka people over 55 - show Hillary winning and the rest of the electorate isn't even polled.
  The Saudi regime is looking worse by the week. This morning I see a headline of the execution of one of the royal family and a few days ago the announcement of a bond sale. Eek!
  I did have a case of popcorn delivered to the house last week. It's going to be a long winter.

  10/19/16, 6:02 AM
Fred said...

  I love your analysis, John and keep up the good work. But I have a couple of criticisms of his week’s analysis.
  Hitler was well aware of the threat that the U.S. industrial capacity posed for German European/global hegemony. I believe that good evidence exists to support the argument that this calculation played a significant role regarding the timing of Operation Barbarosa. Hitler was well aware of the need to capture, control and utilize the resources of the eastern Soviet Union (food, crude oil and strategic minerals). He regarded this as crucial, primarily to be able to ramp up Germany’s industrial capacity to the level of a global power equal to that of Great Britain and the United States in order to be able to compete against and prevail against those powers in the immediately upcoming continuation of conflict.
  In other words, Operation Barbarosa was not just an end in and of itself. It was also the critically necessary prep for successful prosecution of “phase two”; conflict with the U.S.
  Second point, for sure you are correct that Russia and China understand the mortal threat that the U.S. dollar/global reserve currency hegemony posses to their continued sovereignty. And this is a powerful driver for their cooperation and mutual military interests. But over a twenty year time frame, it is difficult to see the U.S. dollar being replaced by any alternative particularly in light of the trillions of dollars now extant in global debt. No question, this WILL end, perhaps spectacularly, but it appears to me (although I HOPE I’m wrong) that the global reserve banks have the capability to keep this game rolling onward for at least another ten years and probably another twenty.
  I liked your comments regarding warbands. I think it might be worthwhile to point out that at least one warband culture has already emerged right here in the U.S. right now. I am referring, of course to the inner city black, drug mafia/black market/”No Snitch” economy and culture that is already well established as the accepted social structure in many large U.S. cities. This is a pretty clear rejection of the “official”, mainstream, white economy, social and legal structure.

  10/20/16, 5:37 AM
Mr. Bystander said...

  JMG - Another great post. Happy to be a regular reader of yours. Keep making magic for us.
  I recently read an article by Damon Linker titled "After Trump loses: An ominous American future imagined" which left out a good many important points. The one I thought was most blaringly obvious though, was his mistake of thinking a president Hillary Clinton could impose martial law or have any success with effective command of the military at home or abroad. Your first point in the JOE-35 revision speaks directly to this. Every veteran that I have met in the last 10 years, including the 20 or so that I currently work with, all lean heavily republican, own guns, come from meager beginnings, and many whole-heartedly support the views of Trump. I'm speaking from Massachusetts, which everyone still thinks is solidly blue. The Kennedy Catholic Democrats in this state are getting old and the air is changing everywhere. It would not take much to ignite the powder keg that you describe.
  I'm so glad you touched on this. It validates that I'm not crazy or the only one thinking about it. All it would take is one respected general to disaffect for things to change dramatically. I have often wondered what the breaking point is for our servicemen and women when it comes to issues in the homeland. This is something I like to bring up to the conspiracy theorists when they talk about the U.S. turning into a police state and forcing citizens into containment camps and things of that nature. Our country has never been more divided. Our presidential candidates have never been so equally loathed by both sides respectively. At what point does some faction of the country say enough is enough and refuse to be ruled by the president elect? I think Trump might be hitting on this deliberately by keeping us "in suspense" about whether he will support Hillary or not. It's very telling that many newspapers in this country ran this as a headline today over anything else in the last debate.

  10/20/16, 8:26 AM
Jamie Mason said...

  It is interesting to see you comment on military planning documents. I often think about the disparity between what I read in your (and other collapse related) posts and official planning scenarios used by DoD. At one time I wondered whether high level officials knew the truth and were just hiding it so I've poked around a little and asked flag/general level officers about things like fossils fuel reliance and climate change (lightly to test the waters) and as far as I can tell, they are truely clueless about the empirical decline we are going through.
  On the other hand, most of the acquisition program managers I've spoken to have assumptions that their budgets will only shrink and that that adversaries will take advantage of asymmetric tactics that limit the return on investment on expensive and complex systems (that was actually one of the reasons that motivated the LCS concept --cheap, modular, flexible, and extremely rapid acquisition process). Also you should be aware that all the unclassified planning documents ( especially those cleared for public release) are intentionally vague and limited in scope since we don't want our adversaries to know what our assumptions are. Even the broad, high-level guidance DoD puts out to the services to guide their program and budget requests (Defense Planning Guidance) is classified at the secret level.
  So, from my perspective, society at large including military leadership is clueless about the decline of America and does not even think about the possibility of a domestic insurgency or revolution (maybe they leave that to DHS??). But they do have an awareness of the vulnerabilities caused by complexity.

  10/20/16, 5:29 PM
koen said...

  We are never going to colonize the universe.
  As a species, we humans have 7-8 million years left. If we were to leave in a rocket today at the speed of light, the last human might set foot upon a planet 8 million light years away. That is less than one ten thousandth part of the diameter of the universe.
  You could imagine the places humanity might conceivably visit as a sphere centered upon earth; rand a radius of eight million light years. And every second that sphere shrinks 300.000 km (180.000 miles).

  10/21/16, 10:04 AM
Ivan Lukic said...

  I stronly suggest to the readers of this blog to see 8 part BBC series "Earth Story" by Aubrey Manning (on 2 DVD's). It was cheap when I bought it from Amazon. It is just "must see" material, not only enlightening about the way geological history of our planet is linked with life, but it is also very beautiful visually.

  10/21/16, 10:52 AM
Raymond Duckling said...

  Dear JMG,
  Not sure if you are already into "radio silence" mode, but if this helps...
  I suspect the problems you have with Google may be related to you not having enabled two-factor-authentication. This requires a mobile phone, albeit not a so-called smart one, any dumb phone that can do all fashioned SMS (aka text) messages will do.
  I assume you wont be happy to get a mobile plan just to keep your blogs going, but if your wife or some very reliable friend already has one that you can borrow, this may help you to set up your google account in such a way that you can access your blog from elsewhere. The usual way two-factor authentication works is that a confirmation code is sent to your mobile when you sign in from a new computer, but up to 10 emergency codes can be generated beforehand and be kept in a paper notebook that you can carry around with your person while travelling. This way you don't even have to bother the owner of the phone to give you the codes.
  Please be sure to test this option before it is actually needed. I have used it with no troubles for many years, but some non-technical people whom I have recomended it have run into issues in the past, so it is not a trivial setting.

  10/25/16, 9:58 AM

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