Subject: Re: IMPACT OROGENY ON EARTH
From: "Robert D. Brown"
Date: 13 Sep 1996 23:13:49 GMT
William E. Todd wrote in article
<3238219E.69FA@usit.net>...
> p> This article was posted to Usenet via the Posting Service at Deja
> News:
> > http://www.dejanews.com/ [Search, Post, and Read Usenet News!]
>
>
> I'm just an amateur, but I don't think that you are covering all of the
> bases.
> I'm just an amateur, but I don't think that you are covering all of the
> bases.
Dear Bill: I'm not a professional geologist, either. I am a medical
doctor who practices internal medicine and neurology. I like this type of
work because it involves problem solving, the pay is good, and our society
is structured in a way such that I have a whole bunch of college-educated
science majors who do free literature searches for me on any subject I want
to study if I occasionally listen to their stories about new medicines that
their employers are marketing.
These are some of the benefits of being a medical doctor, but they aren't
the reasons I chose to be a physician. I was a philosophy major (symbolic
logic) as an undergraduate who worked full time as a Fortran programmer in
the department of physics at Columbia University. My boss in those days
was/is one of the world's most celebrated mathematicians. His group
designed and built positron detector systems for military satellites that
were/are used to detect nuclear warheads buried under the ground in Russian
silos. I was just a teenager at the time and really liked having access to
several of the world's largest computer systems at a time when few others
did. The laboratory was Columbia U's last "defense-industry" lab and was
originally established as Columbia's contribution to the design and
fabrication of the first atomic weapons. Because it was a "secret" lab, it
was hidden on the university's medical college campus, physically
positioned between the outpatient departments of obstetrics and pediatrics.
People who made decisions in the 1940's about these things thought the
babies and kiddies surrounding the lab would prevent Hitler from blowing up
the lab.
It was this situation that first exposed me to medicine. Its sort of
funny, Bill, but the mathematics of particle physics aren't all that
different from the mathematics used to characterize biostatistical
problems. In those days PC's hadn't been invented, so I did all kinds of
statistical work for medical doctors at Columbia who needed help with their
research publications. After I graduated from college, this background
allowed me to step right into a position as a biostatistician for the
American Cancer Society. My work there involved the characterization of
lung cancers in uranium miners and the first determination of the
usefulness of mammography in breast cancer screening. My analytical role
in this work made me appreciate that I really needed to understand the
workings of the human body better than I did, so when Cornell offered me a
full scholarship to go to medical school, I took it.
While in medical school I became interested in the ways that cells generate
and utilize energy at the sub-molecular level. My study of this subject
made me something of an admiring "groupie" of Peter Mitchell, who
subsequently won a Nobel Prize (1978) for his development of the
"chemiosmotic theory of membrane energetics". Peter was recognized as a
"bad boy" of biophysics because he liked to poke fun at his contemporaries
who couldn't comprehend the value of his theoretical models. There were a
lot of other reasons why Mitchell didn't get along with his contemporaries,
but this isn't the place to discuss his personal life history (which I do
in my forthcoming book "Babel Rebuilt: The Biological Derivation of
Planck's Constant").
I don't know what you do, Bill, besides contribute your readings to this
Internet news group, but from what I've already seen, you appear to have a
genuine interest in our solar system. I do, too, and that's why you'll
find some of my comments here. It doesn't bother me that you are an
"amateur", like me, because I know that the history of scientific progress
is characterized by the appearance of many of the very best ideas in any
specific subdiscipline from individuals who work outside of those same
subdisciplines. This is because people who work inside any specific
discipline have to deal with all types of pressures, influences, and
realities (in their professional lives) in a way that preserves their
membership within their chosen group. This is not a criticism, just an
observation about which others have written volumes. Richard Feynman, who
you'll learn more about if you ever take up readings in quantum
electrodynamics, summarized this whole subject when he said: "The best
science is always subversive". He made this comment in an effort to
explain to his students why "revolutionary" science theories are so
frequently met by the contempt of the disciplinarians, e.g. the
"professionals", of those fields of investigation undergoing change.
So, Bill, now that this has been said, let's get on to some of your other
comments.
For instance, the volcanic peaks of Hawaii are formed by the
> Pacific plate moving across a hot spot on the mantle boundary that has a
> large magma reservoir (in fact, the newest Hawaiian Island is forming
> now as an underwater and VERY active volcano that should breech the
> surface of the ocean in a relatively short {geologically speaking}
> time).
All of what you say here is true, and I know first hand because I spent
most of the past decade living in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii immediately downwind
from the volcanic vent that dumps 100,000 tons of sulfur emissions into the
Hawaiian sunset every 24 hours. I had moved to Hawaii from New York City
to help in the effort to block geothermal development on the Big Island.
There were some mercenary politicians and geologists who wanted to develop
a 500,000 kilowatt geothermal power plant over the magma chamber, running
undersea cables from Hawaii to Oahu and Maui. I'd been doing a lot of
reading about Hawaii because the volcano plays an important role in this
model I have for adjusting the use and interpretation of radiometric rock
dates. Anyway, these geologists were so focused on energy production that
they didn't realize that they had figured out just about the only way human
activity might combine with magnitude 7 earthquakes to deshield the magma
chamber, converting the island into a Krakatoa-style disaster for our
planet.
So, Bill, I moved to Hawaii, set up an office in town, and got a part time
unpaid job writing regular sci-med articles for the most widely read
newspaper in the area. Shortly thereafter, the editor asked me to write an
article about the health consequences of breathing volcanic emissions of a
daily basis for the newspaper's Earth Day edition, so I did. Wow, did that
ever piss off the Hawaii Department of Health officials who couldn't ever
see any of the vog (volcanic fog) from Honolulu. Worse than that, I had
slipped in a few comments about the way the new geothermal venture would
make a Pompeii-class problem once the cold waters of a 500,000 kilowatt
geothermal well converted massive quantities of plastically-solid
peri-chamber rocks into millions of hard, highly fractured rocks. You see,
Bill, that's how geothermal power plants achieve their design purpose. In
my article I noted that large earthquakes routinely roll through that part
of the globe and, as every geologist knows, earthquake shock energy passes
right through solid rocks but gets released in fractured rocks. Since the
geothermal well was located on a steep slope, I felt that it wouldn't take
too many millions of kilowatts before a package that would impress the
Unabomber had been designed and charged. I'm not really sure how it
happened, Bill, because so many people got involved in the thing after that
that I really didn't have to say much more. Somehow environmental groups
went into federal court with this new idea and the judge, an amateur
geologist like yourself, decided that it probably wasn't a good idea to do
anything that might blow off the lid of the world's largest volcano.
Over-night they pulled the plug on that one. Whew, Bill, that was a close
one!
After that, some friends of mine invited me to help work on a futuristic
report designed to help guide the development of very long-range planning
for the federal government. No, Bill, it wasn't work on Hillary's Health
Plan. Hawaii had Michael Dukakis working in Hilo on that one. I was asked
to write out the most compelling reasons that humankind should develop
systems that might someday be used to deflect Earth-heading asteroids and
comets. You might not recognize the connections here, Bill, so let me
expand on the details for a moment. You recall that I was a philosophy
major. Plato was my very favorite philosopher, and I had read his Timaeus
when I was in junior high school. The Timaeus was the "handbook" of
"cosmology" and "medicine" in Plato's Academy at the beginning of our
cultural history. Isn't it strange how Plato linked those two subjects
together, Bill. Did you know, Bill, that Plato was that fellow who thought
the most perfect thing that humans can appreciate is the "circle". Think
maybe Plato was an idiot, Bill?
I don't think Plato was an idiot, Bill, but do you know what else he
thought--and taught--in the Timaeus? Plato said that his own civilization
prided itself for its accomplishments, and had good reasons to do so, but
that its citizens really didn't comprehend their own heritage, their
origins. Because they didn't comprehend their past or that they actually
had one, most Greeks thought humans were something "new" on this planet
called Earth. Lacking an indisputable record of the true past, but needing
a sentient sense of self, his fellow citizens maintained a mythical
tradition that provided some sense of their past. I hope you read the book
itself, Bill, because it really is quite remarkable how Plato spells out an
understanding of the past that is only becoming obvious to many of us
living today. You can find a copy of the Timaeus right here on the
Internet: just do a search and you'll discover where to find the Loeb
translation of the text. It is sort of long and complicated, the
relationship between medicine and cosmology that Plato outlines, so I'll
just continue to summarize some of the more important principles of human
existence on Earth that Plato describes in his handbook for Academicians.
Still with me, Bill? Don't worry, I'm sure we can cover many details in
later posts.
Plato liked to make his points with parable-like stories. He was playful
of knowledge this way, but he also knew when to get right down to the point
of a matter. In the Timaeus Plato describes some of the mythical
explanations for human existence popular in his day and then he goes on to
explain that the true fact of the matter is that the intelligent creature
idealized in the form of humans beings has an ancestry that goes back to
times as old as the planet itself. Plato recognized this understanding as
the single most important insight we can have about our extended selves,
considered this notion the most important teaching of his philosophy, and
embedded the realization at the core of the handbook, just to see if any
new students skipped central chapters. Plato, you see, linked his
discussion of the nature of the hard ground beneath our feet (in the first
half of the book) to his discussion of medicine (a characterization of the
human form) in the second half of the book, via the summary conclusion that
the intelligent human specie is nearly as old as the planet itself, and was
formed from it.
No, Bill, Plato doesn't get lost in a discussion of evolution in the
Timaeus. He may have been too smart to do that, but we can't really say
that he took change for granted, either, because so much of his philosophy
is devoted to the analysis of transitional forms and the way we have to use
these mirage-like impressions of reality to comprehend ourselves and the
true nature of existence. An ancient age for our lineage, fleeting and
highly transitional glimpses of lasting truth, and perfect circles were
really important things to Plato, who I read in my youth, before I became
involved in ways to protect our planet from asteroids and comets.
Anyway, Bill, Plato said that the reason his civilization had such a fuzzy
understanding of itself was really fairly easy to understand. The true
fact of the matter, he said, was that big rocks fell from the skies on an
episodic basis, wiping from the surface of the planet any record of what
humans past had endured. He was very specific about this, too, noting that
these events occurred in two different forms. When cosmic rocks
episodically fell into the seas, civilizations were washed away by the
deluge of a tsunami wave hundreds and thousands of meters in height
sweeping across the surface of the land. Only uneducated shepherds living
high up in the mountains would survive these types of disasters. In
contrast, when one of these cosmic rocks hit on land, great atmospheric
fires destroyed all but those few people who resided near and along
mountain basal streams and rivers. In either event, Plato said, these
cosmic disasters were the true cause of most change on Earth and the
contents of the human mind. These events changed the structure of the
Earth he said, and told the story of Atlantis (the only ancient record of
the place) to illustrate his point. These catastrophe's changed the
essence of human contemplative existence as well, he thought, because the
human survivors of large planetary impacts were (by virtue of their
existence as mountain shepherds and backwater stream-dwellers) untrained
and uneducated people who knew little about science or history. All of
those understandings that pass between the generations become lost when
rocks fall from the heavens, he said, and only the dull-witted are left to
carry on our specie. Plato knew that it requires centuries of genetic
learning to make any scientific knowledge "hoary with age", sufficiently
wise to comprehend the critical fact that the human being is as old as
mother Earth.
I remembered Plato's Timaeus, Bill, when I was asked to help lay out a
plan, a reason, and a way to protect ourselves from cosmic hazards falling
on our heads, changing our planet's structure and our knowledge of
ourselves and our past. At first, Bill, I thought it was a ridiculous
idea, the notion that humans might determine their own fate and truly shape
their destiny in and over time. Now I'm not much of a religious scholar,
Bill, but one thing I did get from my up-bringing was a sense that man was
placed on Earth to function as its protector. I know that some people
think this is a silly and simple idea, Bill, but I think it a noble sense
of purpose in life no matter what else may also be true. Egotistic,
perhaps, but not when we realize that there are a thousand different ways
that each of us can lead lives that help protect Earth and its inhabitants.
As a lifestyle. As an assumption of existence here now.
So I got over my skeptic's reticence, quit my life in Hawaii, and moved
back to the mainland to write my invited thesis about Hawaii, mountains
falling from the sky, and perfect circles written in the rocks.
So, Bill, its OK if you're just an amateur in this business. We all are.
Now what were you saying about Hawaii?
Back to Bill's question:
This volcano is forming from the bottom up and I don't see how a giant
> impactor could have caused this. Granted, an impactor many kilometers
> across could fracture the crust and cause an upwelling of magma and
> molten debris (as on the moon), but I do not think that Hawaii is this
> case and know of none active today.
Aren't you sort of contradicting yourself here, Bill. You have made an
observation in your first sentence, explained its cause in the second.
Then, you say you don't believe your eyes. Hawaii is very active today.
Believe me Bill, I've lived there.
Back to Bill:
>
> Also, I believe that the experts have pretty well established that at
> least a major reason for the extinct of the dinosaurs was because of a
> giant impact.
That's right, Bill, I've heard that rumor, too. Why do they think that
sort of thing?
Bill goes on:
I believe that they have found an iridium isotope from the
> bolide that was ejected into the atmosphere and settled in a peculiar
> clay layer over virtually the whole world.
That's what I heard, too. Do you think its true? Just yesterday, Bill,
one of those experts told me that wasn't really true, that the calculations
of iridium are way off the mark. There is that clay layer at the KT
boundary, though. Does it really matter how much iridium is in it? Not
really, I think.
Bill says:
I also believe that they have
> found the impact crater, through means of satellite photos,
> magnetometry, radar imagery, core samples, and seismic wave analysis.
> This crater is almost impossible to see by any one of the above methods,
> because as you said, erosion by various means has almost erased it. I
> believe the crater measures hundreds of miles in diameter and is partly
> on (under) the Yucatan Peninsula and partly underwater in the Gulf. I
> also believe that they have pretty much confirmed the existence of about
> a half dozen other such craters around the world by the same means, some
> of them older, and some younger. The only location that I can remember
> right off hand is one in the US midwest, maybe verging into Canada. I
> also think that this huge crater has accompanying smaller craters, as if
> the impactor broke up before impact like Shoemaker-Levy did at Jupiter.
Wow, Bill! That must have been some fireworks show. I've wondered
sometimes about that Hawaii Emperor Chain stretching across the Pacific in
a similar way. A tidally-fragmented impactor generates a slew of
individual fragments that splay out in a mass-dependent manner, heaviest
fragment at the end of a series of impacts. Do you think that maybe each
one of those volcanic islands forming the Hawaiian Emperor Chain might have
been punched in the seafloor by an individual fragment, each one created a
volcanic degassing site in the Pacific Ocean? I don't, but it is a
thought, isn't it?
Bill says:
>
> I have also read something about the craters on the moon, Mars, and
> other bodies seem to fit a picture of several imact-rich eras in the
> past history of the solar system, and that the last age of 'big hits'
> was several billion years ago.
Don't you think that's a bit of good-spirited wishful thinking, Bill? Sort
of like whistling in the dark? "Billions of years ago" is a really long
time. I'm fairly certain there's been a really big flood more recently
than that, look at all the glaciations that have occurred more recently
than that. That's another part of the flood business, Bill. A lot of that
oceanic water that gets thrown about after an oceanic impact gets
vaporized, cools up in space, and comes down as snow. Things get pretty
cold after that happens, practically overnight from water the ice core
studies show.
Bill:
If so, then a crater on Earth from that
> time would have had to squash half a hemisphere to be readily detectable
> today.
Oh, come on Bill, you're just pulling my leg, aren't you? I thought every
young scientist understood that the last time that happened was when a
Mars-sized planet ran into proto-Earth, creating the Moon from the
impactor's mantle and Earth's continental plates from the precipitated
plasma that was confined by Earth's deshielded core magnetic field.
Bill:
Even on Mars, there has been enough erosion to erase most of its
> craters. On the Moon, not only does it not have an atmosphere to shield
> it, but I would suspect that it has not the gravitational tidal forces
> that Earth has to partially pulverise structurally weak asteroids/comets
> before they hit.
So you were just kidding me before. I'm glad you clarified things for me.
I was beginning to think you were a bit confused.
Bill:
>
> This is just my opinion, I'm not qualified to critisize.
Don't be so modest, Bill. Most modest people deserve to be so, and you're
a very clever fellow.
Bill:
I will,
> however, try to read some of the books you mentioned. Have a great day.
Thanks, Bill, I will have a good day today. See ya, round. You have a
good day, too.
Robert D. Brown, M.D.
Pelorus Research Laboratory
Note: Future posts will come under the title of "Theory of Land and Life"
and will be found on the Internet almost everywhere.
"The Keyboard is Mightier Than the Sword"
Subject: Re: IMPACT OROGENY ON EARTH
From: "Robert D. Brown"
Date: 13 Sep 1996 23:09:05 GMT
William E. Todd wrote in article
<3238219E.69FA@usit.net>...
> p> This article was posted to Usenet via the Posting Service at Deja
> News:
> > http://www.dejanews.com/ [Search, Post, and Read Usenet News!]
> > I'm just an amateur, but I don't think that you are covering all of the
> bases.
Dear Bill: I'm not a professional geologist, either. I am a medical
doctor who practices internal medicine and neurology. I like this type of
work because it involves problem solving, the pay is good, and our society
is structured in a way such that I have a whole bunch of college-educated
science majors who do free literature searches for me on any subject I want
to study if I occasionally listen to their stories about new medicines that
their employers are marketing.
These are some of the benefits of being a medical doctor, but they aren't
the reasons I chose to be a physician. I was a philosophy major (symbolic
logic) as an undergraduate who worked full time as a Fortran programmer in
the department of physics at Columbia University. My boss in those days
was/is one of the world's most celebrated mathematicians. His group
designed and built positron detector systems for military satellites that
were/are used to detect nuclear warheads buried under the ground in Russian
silos. I was just a teenager at the time and really liked having access to
several of the world's largest computer systems at a time when few others
did. The laboratory was Columbia U's last "defense-industry" lab and was
originally established as Columbia's contribution to the design and
fabrication of the first atomic weapons. Because it was a "secret" lab, it
was hidden on the university's medical college campus, physically
positioned between the outpatient departments of obstetrics and pediatrics.
People who made decisions in the 1940's about these things thought the
babies and kiddies surrounding the lab would prevent Hitler from blowing up
the lab.
It was this situation that first exposed me to medicine. Its sort of
funny, Bill, but the mathematics of particle physics aren't all that
different from the mathematics used to characterize biostatistical
problems. In those days PC's hadn't been invented, so I did all kinds of
statistical work for medical doctors at Columbia who needed help with their
research publications. After I graduated from college, this background
allowed me to step right into a position as a biostatistician for the
American Cancer Society. My work there involved the characterization of
lung cancers in uranium miners and the first determination of the
usefulness of mammography in breast cancer screening. My analytical role
in this work made me appreciate that I really needed to understand the
workings of the human body better than I did, so when Cornell offered me a
full scholarship to go to medical school, I took it.
While in medical school I became interested in the ways that cells generate
and utilize energy at the sub-molecular level. My study of this subject
made me something of an admiring "groupie" of Peter Mitchell, who
subsequently won a Nobel Prize (1978) for his development of the
"chemiosmotic theory of membrane energetics". Peter was recognized as a
"bad boy" of biophysics because he liked to poke fun at his contemporaries
who couldn't comprehend the value of his theoretical models. There were a
lot of other reasons why Mitchell didn't get along with his contemporaries,
but this isn't the place to discuss his personal life history (which I do
in my forthcoming book "Babel Rebuilt: The Biological Derivation of
Planck's Constant").
I don't know what you do, Bill, besides contribute your readings to this
Internet news group, but from what I've already seen, you appear to have a
genuine interest in our solar system. I do, too, and that's why you'll
find some of my comments here. It doesn't bother me that you are an
"amateur", like me, because I know that the history of scientific progress
is characterized by the appearance of many of the very best ideas in any
specific subdiscipline from individuals who work outside of those same
subdisciplines. This is because people who work inside any specific
discipline have to deal with all types of pressures, influences, and
realities (in their professional lives) in a way that preserves their
membership within their chosen group. This is not a criticism, just an
observation about which others have written volumes. Richard Feynman, who
you'll learn more about if you ever take up readings in quantum
electrodynamics, summarized this whole subject when he said: "The best
science is always subversive". He made this comment in an effort to
explain to his students why "revolutionary" science theories are so
frequently met by the contempt of the disciplinarians, e.g. the
"professionals", of those fields of investigation undergoing change.
So, Bill, now that this has been said, let's get on to some of your other
comments.
For instance, the volcanic peaks of Hawaii are formed by the
> Pacific plate moving across a hot spot on the mantle boundary that has a
> large magma reservoir (in fact, the newest Hawaiian Island is forming
> now as an underwater and VERY active volcano that should breech the
> surface of the ocean in a relatively short {geologically speaking}
> time).
All of what you say here is true, and I know first hand because I spent
most of the past decade living in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii immediately downwind
from the volcanic vent that dumps 100,000 tons of sulfur emissions into the
Hawaiian sunset every 24 hours. I had moved to Hawaii from New York City
to help in the effort to block geothermal development on the Big Island.
There were some mercenary politicians and geologists who wanted to develop
a 500,000 kilowatt geothermal power plant over the magma chamber, running
undersea cables from Hawaii to Oahu and Maui. I'd been doing a lot of
reading about Hawaii because the volcano plays an important role in this
model I have for adjusting the use and interpretation of radiometric rock
dates. Anyway, these geologists were so focused on energy production that
they didn't realize that they had figured out just about the only way human
activity might combine with magnitude 7 earthquakes to deshield the magma
chamber, converting the island into a Krakatoa-style disaster for our
planet.
So, Bill, I moved to Hawaii, set up an office in town, and got a part time
unpaid job writing regular sci-med articles for the most widely read
newspaper in the area. Shortly thereafter, the editor asked me to write an
article about the health consequences of breathing volcanic emissions of a
daily basis for the newspaper's Earth Day edition, so I did. Wow, did that
ever piss off the Hawaii Department of Health officials who couldn't ever
see any of the vog (volcanic fog) from Honolulu. Worse than that, I had
slipped in a few comments about the way the new geothermal venture would
make a Pompeii-class problem once the cold waters of a 500,000 kilowatt
geothermal well converted massive quantities of plastically-solid
peri-chamber rocks into millions of hard, highly fractured rocks. You see,
Bill, that's how geothermal power plants achieve their design purpose. In
my article I noted that large earthquakes routinely roll through that part
of the globe and, as every geologist knows, earthquake shock energy passes
right through solid rocks but gets released in fractured rocks. Since the
geothermal well was located on a steep slope, I felt that it wouldn't take
too many millions of kilowatts before a package that would impress the
Unabomber had been designed and charged. I'm not really sure how it
happened, Bill, because so many people got involved in the thing after that
that I really didn't have to say much more. Somehow environmental groups
went into federal court with this new idea and the judge, an amateur
geologist like yourself, decided that it probably wasn't a good idea to do
anything that might blow off the lid of the world's largest volcano.
Over-night they pulled the plug on that one. Whew, Bill, that was a close
one!
After that, some friends of mine invited me to help work on a futuristic
report designed to help guide the development of very long-range planning
for the federal government. No, Bill, it wasn't work on Hillary's Health
Plan. Hawaii had Michael Dukakis working in Hilo on that one. I was asked
to write out the most compelling reasons that humankind should develop
systems that might someday be used to deflect Earth-heading asteroids and
comets. You might not recognize the connections here, Bill, so let me
expand on the details for a moment. You recall that I was a philosophy
major. Plato was my very favorite philosopher, and I had read his Timaeus
when I was in junior high school. The Timaeus was the "handbook" of
"cosmology" and "medicine" in Plato's Academy at the beginning of our
cultural history. Isn't it strange how Plato linked those two subjects
together, Bill. Did you know, Bill, that Plato was that fellow who thought
the most perfect thing that humans can appreciate is the "circle". Think
maybe Plato was an idiot, Bill?
I don't think Plato was an idiot, Bill, but do you know what else he
thought--and taught--in the Timaeus? Plato said that his own civilization
prided itself for its accomplishments, and had good reasons to do so, but
that its citizens really didn't comprehend their own heritage, their
origins. Because they didn't comprehend their past or that they actually
had one, most Greeks thought humans were something "new" on this planet
called Earth. Lacking an indisputable record of the true past, but needing
a sentient sense of self, his fellow citizens maintained a mythical
tradition that provided some sense of their past. I hope you read the book
itself, Bill, because it really is quite remarkable how Plato spells out an
understanding of the past that is only becoming obvious to many of us
living today. You can find a copy of the Timaeus right here on the
Internet: just do a search and you'll discover where to find the Loeb
translation of the text. It is sort of long and complicated, the
relationship between medicine and cosmology that Plato outlines, so I'll
just continue to summarize some of the more important principles of human
existence on Earth that Plato describes in his handbook for Academicians.
Still with me, Bill? Don't worry, I'm sure we can cover many details in
later posts.
Plato liked to make his points with parable-like stories. He was playful
of knowledge this way, but he also knew when to get right down to the point
of a matter. In the Timaeus Plato describes some of the mythical
explanations for human existence popular in his day and then he goes on to
explain that the true fact of the matter is that the intelligent creature
idealized in the form of humans beings has an ancestry that goes back to
times as old as the planet itself. Plato recognized this understanding as
the single most important insight we can have about our extended selves,
considered this notion the most important teaching of his philosophy, and
embedded the realization at the core of the handbook, just to see if any
new students skipped central chapters. Plato, you see, linked his
discussion of the nature of the hard ground beneath our feet (in the first
half of the book) to his discussion of medicine (a characterization of the
human form) in the second half of the book, via the summary conclusion that
the intelligent human specie is nearly as old as the planet itself, and was
formed from it.
No, Bill, Plato doesn't get lost in a discussion of evolution in the
Timaeus. He may have been too smart to do that, but we can't really say
that he took change for granted, either, because so much of his philosophy
is devoted to the analysis of transitional forms and the way we have to use
these mirage-like impressions of reality to comprehend ourselves and the
true nature of existence. An ancient age for our lineage, fleeting and
highly transitional glimpses of lasting truth, and perfect circles were
really important things to Plato, who I read in my youth, before I became
involved in ways to protect our planet from asteroids and comets.
Anyway, Bill, Plato said that the reason his civilization had such a fuzzy
understanding of itself was really fairly easy to understand. The true
fact of the matter, he said, was that big rocks fell from the skies on an
episodic basis, wiping from the surface of the planet any record of what
humans past had endured. He was very specific about this, too, noting that
these events occurred in two different forms. When cosmic rocks
episodically fell into the seas, civilizations were washed away by the
deluge of a tsunami wave hundreds and thousands of meters in height
sweeping across the surface of the land. Only uneducated shepherds living
high up in the mountains would survive these types of disasters. In
contrast, when one of these cosmic rocks hit on land, great atmospheric
fires destroyed all but those few people who resided near and along
mountain basal streams and rivers. In either event, Plato said, these
cosmic disasters were the true cause of most change on Earth and the
contents of the human mind. These events changed the structure of the
Earth he said, and told the story of Atlantis (the only ancient record of
the place) to illustrate his point. These catastrophe's changed the
essence of human contemplative existence as well, he thought, because the
human survivors of large planetary impacts were (by virtue of their
existence as mountain shepherds and backwater stream-dwellers) untrained
and uneducated people who knew little about science or history. All of
those understandings that pass between the generations become lost when
rocks fall from the heavens, he said, and only the dull-witted are left to
carry on our specie. Plato knew that it requires centuries of genetic
learning to make any scientific knowledge "hoary with age", sufficiently
wise to comprehend the critical fact that the human being is as old as
mother Earth.
I remembered Plato's Timaeus, Bill, when I was asked to help lay out a
plan, a reason, and a way to protect ourselves from cosmic hazards falling
on our heads, changing our planet's structure and our knowledge of
ourselves and our past. At first, Bill, I thought it was a ridiculous
idea, the notion that humans might determine their own fate and truly shape
their destiny in and over time. Now I'm not much of a religious scholar,
Bill, but one thing I did get from my up-bringing was a sense that man was
placed on Earth to function as its protector. I know that some people
think this is a silly and simple idea, Bill, but I think it a noble sense
of purpose in life no matter what else may also be true. Egotistic,
perhaps, but not when we realize that there are a thousand different ways
that each of us can lead lives that help protect Earth and its inhabitants.
As a lifestyle. As an assumption of existence here now.
So I got over my skeptic's reticence, quit my life in Hawaii, and moved
back to the mainland to write my invited thesis about Hawaii, mountains
falling from the sky, and perfect circles written in the rocks.
So, Bill, its OK if you're just an amateur in this business. We all are.
Now what were you saying about Hawaii?
Back to Bill's question:
This volcano is forming from the bottom up and I don't see how a giant
> impactor could have caused this. Granted, an impactor many kilometers
> across could fracture the crust and cause an upwelling of magma and
> molten debris (as on the moon), but I do not think that Hawaii is this
> case and know of none active today.
Aren't you sort of contradicting yourself here, Bill. You have made an
observation in your first sentence, explained its cause in the second.
Then, you say you don't believe your eyes. Hawaii is very active today.
Believe me Bill, I've lived there.
Back to Bill:
>
> Also, I believe that the experts have pretty well established that at
> least a major reason for the extinct of the dinosaurs was because of a
> giant impact.
That's right, Bill, I've heard that rumor, too. Why do they think that
sort of thing?
Bill goes on:
I believe that they have found an iridium isotope from the
> bolide that was ejected into the atmosphere and settled in a peculiar
> clay layer over virtually the whole world.
That's what I heard, too. Do you think its true? Just yesterday, Bill,
one of those experts told me that wasn't really true, that the calculations
of iridium are way off the mark. There is that clay layer at the KT
boundary, though. Does it really matter how much iridium is in it? Not
really, I think.
Bill says:
I also believe that they have
> found the impact crater, through means of satellite photos,
> magnetometer, radar imagery, core samples, and seismic wave analysis.
> This crater is almost impossible to see by any one of the above methods,
> because as you said, erosion by various means has almost erased it. I
> believe the crater measures hundreds of miles in diameter and is partly
> on (under) the Yucatan Peninsula and partly underwater in the Gulf. I
> also believe that they have pretty much confirmed the existence of about
> a half dozen other such craters around the world by the same means, some
> of them older, and some younger. The only location that I can remember
> right off hand is one in the US Midwest, maybe verging into Canada. I
> also think that this huge crater has accompanying smaller craters, as if
> the impactor broke up before impact like Shoemaker-Levy did at Jupiter.
Wow, Bill! That must have been some fireworks show. I've wondered
sometimes about that Hawaii Emperor Chain stretching across the Pacific in
a similar way. A tidally-fragmented impactor generates a slew of
individual fragments that splay out in a mass-dependent manner, heaviest
fragment at the end of a series of impacts. Do you think that maybe each
one of those volcanic islands forming the Hawaiian Emperor Chain might have
been punched in the seafloor by an individual fragment, each one created a
volcanic degassing site in the Pacific Ocean? I don't, but it is a
thought, isn't it?
Bill says:
>
> I have also read something about the craters on the moon, Mars, and
> other bodies seem to fit a picture of several imact-rich eras in the
> past history of the solar system, and that the last age of 'big hits'
> was several billion years ago.
Don't you think that's a bit of good-spirited wishful thinking, Bill? Sort
of like whistling in the dark? "Billions of years ago" is a really long
time. I'm fairly certain there's been a really big flood more recently
than that, look at all the glaciations that have occurred more recently
than that. That's another part of the flood business, Bill. A lot of that
oceanic water that gets thrown about after an oceanic impact gets
vaporized, cools up in space, and comes down as snow. Things get pretty
cold after that happens, practically overnight from water the ice core
studies show.
Bill:
If so, then a crater on Earth from that
> time would have had to squash half a hemisphere to be readily detectable
> today.
Oh, come on Bill, you're just pulling my leg, aren't you? I thought every
young scientist understood that the last time that happened was when a
Mars-sized planet ran into proto-Earth, creating the Moon from the
impactor's mantle and Earth's continental plates from the precipitated
plasma that was confined by Earth's deshielded core magnetic field.
Bill:
Even on Mars, there has been enough erosion to erase most of its
> craters. On the Moon, not only does it not have an atmosphere to shield
> it, but I would suspect that it has not the gravitational tidal forces
> that Earth has to partially pulverise structurally weak asteroids/comets
> before they hit.
So you were just kidding me before. I'm glad you clarified things for me.
I was beginning to think you were a bit confused.
Bill:
>
> This is just my opinion, I'm not qualified to critisize.
Don't be so modest, Bill. Most modest people deserve to be so, and you're
a very clever fellow.
Bill:
I will,
> however, try to read some of the books you mentioned. Have a great day.
Thanks, Bill, I will have a good day today. See ya, round. You have a
good day, too.
Robert D. Brown, M.D.
Pelorus Research Laboratory
Note: Future posts will come under the title of "Theory of Land and Life"
and will be found on the Internet almost everywhere.
"The Keyboard is Mightier Than the Sword"
Subject: Re: IMPACT OROGENY ON EARTH
From: "Robert D. Brown"
Date: 13 Sep 1996 23:21:15 GMT
William E. Todd wrote in article
<3238219E.69FA@usit.net>...
> p> This article was posted to Usenet via the Posting Service at Deja
> News:
> > http://www.dejanews.com/ [Search, Post, and Read Usenet News!]
>
>
> I'm just an amateur, but I don't think that you are covering all of the
> bases.
Dear Bill: I'm not a professional geologist, either. I am a medical
doctor who practices internal medicine and neurology. I like this type of
work because it involves problem solving, the pay is good, and our society
is structured in a way such that I have a whole bunch of college-educated
science majors who do free literature searches for me on any subject I want
to study if I occasionally listen to their stories about new medicines that
their employers are marketing.
These are some of the benefits of being a medical doctor, but they aren't
the reasons I chose to be a physician. I was a philosophy major (symbolic
logic) as an undergraduate who worked full time as a Fortran programmer in
the department of physics at Columbia University. My boss in those days
was/is one of the world's most celebrated mathematicians. His group
designed and built positron detector systems for military satellites that
were/are used to detect nuclear warheads buried under the ground in Russian
silos. I was just a teenager at the time and really liked having access to
several of the world's largest computer systems at a time when few others
did. The laboratory was Columbia U's last "defense-industry" lab and was
originally established as Columbia's contribution to the design and
fabrication of the first atomic weapons. Because it was a "secret" lab, it
was hidden on the university's medical college campus, physically
positioned between the outpatient departments of obstetrics and pediatrics.
People who made decisions in the 1940's about these things thought the
babies and kiddies surrounding the lab would prevent Hitler from blowing up
the lab.
It was this situation that first exposed me to medicine. Its sort of
funny, Bill, but the mathematics of particle physics aren't all that
different from the mathematics used to characterize biostatistical
problems. In those days PC's hadn't been invented, so I did all kinds of
statistical work for medical doctors at Columbia who needed help with their
research publications. After I graduated from college, this background
allowed me to step right into a position as a biostatistician for the
American Cancer Society. My work there involved the characterization of
lung cancers in uranium miners and the first determination of the
usefulness of mammography in breast cancer screening. My analytical role
in this work made me appreciate that I really needed to understand the
workings of the human body better than I did, so when Cornell offered me a
full scholarship to go to medical school, I took it.
While in medical school I became interested in the ways that cells generate
and utilize energy at the sub-molecular level. My study of this subject
made me something of an admiring "groupie" of Peter Mitchell, who
subsequently won a Nobel Prize (1978) for his development of the
"chemiosmotic theory of membrane energetics". Peter was recognized as a
"bad boy" of biophysics because he liked to poke fun at his contemporaries
who couldn't comprehend the value of his theoretical models. There were a
lot of other reasons why Mitchell didn't get along with his contemporaries,
but this isn't the place to discuss his personal life history (which I do
in my forthcoming book "Babel Rebuilt: The Biological Derivation of
Planck's Constant").
I don't know what you do, Bill, besides contribute your readings to this
Internet news group, but from what I've already seen, you appear to have a
genuine interest in our solar system. I do, too, and that's why you'll
find some of my comments here. It doesn't bother me that you are an
"amateur", like me, because I know that the history of scientific progress
is characterized by the appearance of many of the very best ideas in any
specific subdiscipline from individuals who work outside of those same
subdisciplines. This is because people who work inside any specific
discipline have to deal with all types of pressures, influences, and
realities (in their professional lives) in a way that preserves their
membership within their chosen group. This is not a criticism, just an
observation about which others have written volumes. Richard Feynman, who
you'll learn more about if you ever take up readings in quantum
electrodynamics, summarized this whole subject when he said: "The best
science is always subversive". He made this comment in an effort to
explain to his students why "revolutionary" science theories are so
frequently met by the contempt of the disciplinarians, e.g. the
"professionals", of those fields of investigation undergoing change.
So, Bill, now that this has been said, let's get on to some of your other
comments.
For instance, the volcanic peaks of Hawaii are formed by the
> Pacific plate moving across a hot spot on the mantle boundary that has a
> large magma reservoir (in fact, the newest Hawaiian Island is forming
> now as an underwater and VERY active volcano that should breech the
> surface of the ocean in a relatively short {geologically speaking}
> time).
All of what you say here is true, and I know first hand because I spent
most of the past decade living in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii immediately downwind
from the volcanic vent that dumps 100,000 tons of sulfur emissions into the
Hawaiian sunset every 24 hours. I had moved to Hawaii from New York City
to help in the effort to block geothermal development on the Big Island.
There were some mercenary politicians and geologists who wanted to develop
a 500,000 kilowatt geothermal power plant over the magma chamber, running
undersea cables from Hawaii to Oahu and Maui. I'd been doing a lot of
reading about Hawaii because the volcano plays an important role in this
model I have for adjusting the use and interpretation of radiometric rock
dates. Anyway, these geologists were so focused on energy production that
they didn't realize that they had figured out just about the only way human
activity might combine with magnitude 7 earthquakes to deshield the magma
chamber, converting the island into a Krakatoa-style disaster for our
planet.
So, Bill, I moved to Hawaii, set up an office in town, and got a part time
unpaid job writing regular sci-med articles for the most widely read
newspaper in the area. Shortly thereafter, the editor asked me to write an
article about the health consequences of breathing volcanic emissions of a
daily basis for the newspaper's Earth Day edition, so I did. Wow, did that
ever piss off the Hawaii Department of Health officials who couldn't ever
see any of the vog (volcanic fog) from Honolulu. Worse than that, I had
slipped in a few comments about the way the new geothermal venture would
make a Pompeii-class problem once the cold waters of a 500,000 kilowatt
geothermal well converted massive quantities of plastically-solid
peri-chamber rocks into millions of hard, highly fractured rocks. You see,
Bill, that's how geothermal power plants achieve their design purpose. In
my article I noted that large earthquakes routinely roll through that part
of the globe and, as every geologist knows, earthquake shock energy passes
right through solid rocks but gets released in fractured rocks. Since the
geothermal well was located on a steep slope, I felt that it wouldn't take
too many millions of kilowatts before a package that would impress the
Unabomber had been designed and charged. I'm not really sure how it
happened, Bill, because so many people got involved in the thing after that
that I really didn't have to say much more. Somehow environmental groups
went into federal court with this new idea and the judge, an amateur
geologist like yourself, decided that it probably wasn't a good idea to do
anything that might blow off the lid of the world's largest volcano.
Over-night they pulled the plug on that one. Whew, Bill, that was a close
one!
After that, some friends of mine invited me to help work on a futuristic
report designed to help guide the development of very long-range planning
for the federal government. No, Bill, it wasn't work on Hillary's Health
Plan. Hawaii had Michael Dukakis working in Hilo on that one. I was asked
to write out the most compelling reasons that humankind should develop
systems that might someday be used to deflect Earth-heading asteroids and
comets. You might not recognize the connections here, Bill, so let me
expand on the details for a moment. You recall that I was a philosophy
major. Plato was my very favorite philosopher, and I had read his Timaeus
when I was in junior high school. The Timaeus was the "handbook" of
"cosmology" and "medicine" in Plato's Academy at the beginning of our
cultural history. Isn't it strange how Plato linked those two subjects
together, Bill. Did you know, Bill, that Plato was that fellow who thought
the most perfect thing that humans can appreciate is the "circle". Think
maybe Plato was an idiot, Bill?
I don't think Plato was an idiot, Bill, but do you know what else he
thought--and taught--in the Timaeus? Plato said that his own civilization
prided itself for its accomplishments, and had good reasons to do so, but
that its citizens really didn't comprehend their own heritage, their
origins. Because they didn't comprehend their past or that they actually
had one, most Greeks thought humans were something "new" on this planet
called Earth. Lacking an indisputable record of the true past, but needing
a sentient sense of self, his fellow citizens maintained a mythical
tradition that provided some sense of their past. I hope you read the book
itself, Bill, because it really is quite remarkable how Plato spells out an
understanding of the past that is only becoming obvious to many of us
living today. You can find a copy of the Timaeus right here on the
Internet: just do a search and you'll discover where to find the Loeb
translation of the text. It is sort of long and complicated, the
relationship between medicine and cosmology that Plato outlines, so I'll
just continue to summarize some of the more important principles of human
existence on Earth that Plato describes in his handbook for Academicians.
Still with me, Bill? Don't worry, I'm sure we can cover many details in
later posts.
Plato liked to make his points with parable-like stories. He was playful
of knowledge this way, but he also knew when to get right down to the point
of a matter. In the Timaeus Plato describes some of the mythical
explanations for human existence popular in his day and then he goes on to
explain that the true fact of the matter is that the intelligent creature
idealized in the form of humans beings has an ancestry that goes back to
times as old as the planet itself. Plato recognized this understanding as
the single most important insight we can have about our extended selves,
considered this notion the most important teaching of his philosophy, and
embedded the realization at the core of the handbook, just to see if any
new students skipped central chapters. Plato, you see, linked his
discussion of the nature of the hard ground beneath our feet (in the first
half of the book) to his discussion of medicine (a characterization of the
human form) in the second half of the book, via the summary conclusion that
the intelligent human specie is nearly as old as the planet itself, and was
formed from it.
No, Bill, Plato doesn't get lost in a discussion of evolution in the
Timaeus. He may have been too smart to do that, but we can't really say
that he took change for granted, either, because so much of his philosophy
is devoted to the analysis of transitional forms and the way we have to use
these mirage-like impressions of reality to comprehend ourselves and the
true nature of existence. An ancient age for our lineage, fleeting and
highly transitional glimpses of lasting truth, and perfect circles were
really important things to Plato, who I read in my youth, before I became
involved in ways to protect our planet from asteroids and comets.
Anyway, Bill, Plato said that the reason his civilization had such a fuzzy
understanding of itself was really fairly easy to understand. The true
fact of the matter, he said, was that big rocks fell from the skies on an
episodic basis, wiping from the surface of the planet any record of what
humans past had endured. He was very specific about this, too, noting that
these events occurred in two different forms. When cosmic rocks
episodically fell into the seas, civilizations were washed away by the
deluge of a tsunami wave hundreds and thousands of meters in height
sweeping across the surface of the land. Only uneducated shepherds living
high up in the mountains would survive these types of disasters. In
contrast, when one of these cosmic rocks hit on land, great atmospheric
fires destroyed all but those few people who resided near and along
mountain basal streams and rivers. In either event, Plato said, these
cosmic disasters were the true cause of most change on Earth and the
contents of the human mind. These events changed the structure of the
Earth he said, and told the story of Atlantis (the only ancient record of
the place) to illustrate his point. These catastrophe's changed the
essence of human contemplative existence as well, he thought, because the
human survivors of large planetary impacts were (by virtue of their
existence as mountain shepherds and backwater stream-dwellers) untrained
and uneducated people who knew little about science or history. All of
those understandings that pass between the generations become lost when
rocks fall from the heavens, he said, and only the dull-witted are left to
carry on our specie. Plato knew that it requires centuries of genetic
learning to make any scientific knowledge "hoary with age", sufficiently
wise to comprehend the critical fact that the human being is as old as
mother Earth.
I remembered Plato's Timaeus, Bill, when I was asked to help lay out a
plan, a reason, and a way to protect ourselves from cosmic hazards falling
on our heads, changing our planet's structure and our knowledge of
ourselves and our past. At first, Bill, I thought it was a ridiculous
idea, the notion that humans might determine their own fate and truly shape
their destiny in and over time. Now I'm not much of a religious scholar,
Bill, but one thing I did get from my up-bringing was a sense that man was
placed on Earth to function as its protector. I know that some people
think this is a silly and simple idea, Bill, but I think it a noble sense
of purpose in life no matter what else may also be true. Egotistic,
perhaps, but not when we realize that there are a thousand different ways
that each of us can lead lives that help protect Earth and its inhabitants.
As a lifestyle. As an assumption of existence here now.
So I got over my skeptic's reticence, quit my life in Hawaii, and moved
back to the mainland to write my invited thesis about Hawaii, mountains
falling from the sky, and perfect circles written in the rocks.
So, Bill, its OK if you're just an amateur in this business. We all are.
Now what were you saying about Hawaii?
Back to Bill's question:
This volcano is forming from the bottom up and I don't see how a giant
> impactor could have caused this. Granted, an impactor many kilometers
> across could fracture the crust and cause an upwelling of magma and
> molten debris (as on the moon), but I do not think that Hawaii is this
> case and know of none active today.
Aren't you sort of contradicting yourself here, Bill. You have made an
observation in your first sentence, explained its cause in the second.
Then, you say you don't believe your eyes. Hawaii is very active today.
Believe me Bill, I've lived there.
Back to Bill:
>
> Also, I believe that the experts have pretty well established that at
> least a major reason for the extinct of the dinosaurs was because of a
> giant impact.
That's right, Bill, I've heard that rumor, too. Why do they think that
sort of thing?
Bill goes on:
I believe that they have found an iridium isotope from the
> bolide that was ejected into the atmosphere and settled in a peculiar
> clay layer over virtually the whole world.
That's what I heard, too. Do you think its true? Just yesterday, Bill,
one of those experts told me that wasn't really true, that the calculations
of iridium are way off the mark. There is that clay layer at the KT
boundary, though. Does it really matter how much iridium is in it? Not
really, I think.
Bill says:
I also believe that they have
> found the impact crater, through means of satellite photos,
> magnetometry, radar imagery, core samples, and seismic wave analysis.
> This crater is almost impossible to see by any one of the above methods,
> because as you said, erosion by various means has almost erased it. I
> believe the crater measures hundreds of miles in diameter and is partly
> on (under) the Yucatan Peninsula and partly underwater in the Gulf. I
> also believe that they have pretty much confirmed the existence of about
> a half dozen other such craters around the world by the same means, some
> of them older, and some younger. The only location that I can remember
> right off hand is one in the US midwest, maybe verging into Canada. I
> also think that this huge crater has accompanying smaller craters, as if
> the impactor broke up before impact like Shoemaker-Levy did at Jupiter.
Wow, Bill! That must have been some fireworks show. I've wondered
sometimes about that Hawaii Emperor Chain stretching across the Pacific in
a similar way. A tidally-fragmented impactor generates a slew of
individual fragments that splay out in a mass-dependent manner, heaviest
fragment at the end of a series of impacts. Do you think that maybe each
one of those volcanic islands forming the Hawaiian Emperor Chain might have
been punched in the seafloor by an individual fragment, each one created a
volcanic degassing site in the Pacific Ocean? I don't, but it is a
thought, isn't it?
Bill says:
>
> I have also read something about the craters on the moon, Mars, and
> other bodies seem to fit a picture of several imact-rich eras in the
> past history of the solar system, and that the last age of 'big hits'
> was several billion years ago.
Don't you think that's a bit of good-spirited wishful thinking, Bill? Sort
of like whistling in the dark? "Billions of years ago" is a really long
time. I'm fairly certain there's been a really big flood more recently
than that, look at all the glaciations that have occurred more recently
than that. That's another part of the flood business, Bill. A lot of that
oceanic water that gets thrown about after an oceanic impact gets
vaporized, cools up in space, and comes down as snow. Things get pretty
cold after that happens, practically overnight from water the ice core
studies show.
Bill:
If so, then a crater on Earth from that
> time would have had to squash half a hemisphere to be readily detectable
> today.
Oh, come on Bill, you're just pulling my leg, aren't you? I thought every
young scientist understood that the last time that happened was when a
Mars-sized planet ran into proto-Earth, creating the Moon from the
impactor's mantle and Earth's continental plates from the precipitated
plasma that was confined by Earth's deshielded core magnetic field.
Bill:
Even on Mars, there has been enough erosion to erase most of its
> craters. On the Moon, not only does it not have an atmosphere to shield
> it, but I would suspect that it has not the gravitational tidal forces
> that Earth has to partially pulverise structurally weak asteroids/comets
> before they hit.
So you were just kidding me before. I'm glad you clarified things for me.
I was beginning to think you were a bit confused.
Bill:
>
> This is just my opinion, I'm not qualified to critisize.
Don't be so modest, Bill. Most modest people deserve to be so, and you're
a very clever fellow.
Bill:
I will,
> however, try to read some of the books you mentioned. Have a great day.
Thanks, Bill, I will have a good day today. See ya, round. You have a
good day, too.
Robert D. Brown, M.D.
Pelorus Research Laboratory
Note: Future posts will come under the title of "Theory of Land and Life"
and will be found on the Internet almost everywhere.
"The Keyboard is Mightier Than the Sword"
Subject: Re: IMPACT OROGENY ON EARTH
From: "Robert D. Brown"
Date: 13 Sep 1996 23:25:52 GMT
William E. Todd wrote in article
<3238219E.69FA@usit.net>...
> p> This article was posted to Usenet via the Posting Service at Deja
> News:
> > http://www.dejanews.com/ [Search, Post, and Read Usenet News!]
>
> > I'm just an amateur, but I don't think that you are covering all of the
> bases.
Dear Bill: I'm not a professional geologist, either. I am a medical
doctor who practices internal medicine and neurology. I like this type of
work because it involves problem solving, the pay is good, and our society
is structured in a way such that I have a whole bunch of college-educated
science majors who do free literature searches for me on any subject I want
to study if I occasionally listen to their stories about new medicines that
their employers are marketing.
These are some of the benefits of being a medical doctor, but they aren't
the reasons I chose to be a physician. I was a philosophy major (symbolic
logic) as an undergraduate who worked full time as a Fortran programmer in
the department of physics at Columbia University. My boss in those days
was/is one of the world's most celebrated mathematicians. His group
designed and built positron detector systems for military satellites that
were/are used to detect nuclear warheads buried under the ground in Russian
silos. I was just a teenager at the time and really liked having access to
several of the world's largest computer systems at a time when few others
did. The laboratory was Columbia U's last "defense-industry" lab and was
originally established as Columbia's contribution to the design and
fabrication of the first atomic weapons. Because it was a "secret" lab, it
was hidden on the university's medical college campus, physically
positioned between the outpatient departments of obstetrics and pediatrics.
People who made decisions in the 1940's about these things thought the
babies and kiddies surrounding the lab would prevent Hitler from blowing up
the lab.
It was this situation that first exposed me to medicine. Its sort of
funny, Bill, but the mathematics of particle physics aren't all that
different from the mathematics used to characterize biostatistical
problems. In those days PC's hadn't been invented, so I did all kinds of
statistical work for medical doctors at Columbia who needed help with their
research publications. After I graduated from college, this background
allowed me to step right into a position as a biostatistician for the
American Cancer Society. My work there involved the characterization of
lung cancers in uranium miners and the first determination of the
usefulness of mammography in breast cancer screening. My analytical role
in this work made me appreciate that I really needed to understand the
workings of the human body better than I did, so when Cornell offered me a
full scholarship to go to medical school, I took it.
While in medical school I became interested in the ways that cells generate
and utilize energy at the sub-molecular level. My study of this subject
made me something of an admiring "groupie" of Peter Mitchell, who
subsequently won a Nobel Prize (1978) for his development of the
"chemiosmotic theory of membrane energetics". Peter was recognized as a
"bad boy" of biophysics because he liked to poke fun at his contemporaries
who couldn't comprehend the value of his theoretical models. There were a
lot of other reasons why Mitchell didn't get along with his contemporaries,
but this isn't the place to discuss his personal life history (which I do
in my forthcoming book "Babel Rebuilt: The Biological Derivation of
Planck's Constant").
I don't know what you do, Bill, besides contribute your readings to this
Internet news group, but from what I've already seen, you appear to have a
genuine interest in our solar system. I do, too, and that's why you'll
find some of my comments here. It doesn't bother me that you are an
"amateur", like me, because I know that the history of scientific progress
is characterized by the appearance of many of the very best ideas in any
specific subdiscipline from individuals who work outside of those same
subdisciplines. This is because people who work inside any specific
discipline have to deal with all types of pressures, influences, and
realities (in their professional lives) in a way that preserves their
membership within their chosen group. This is not a criticism, just an
observation about which others have written volumes. Richard Feynman, who
you'll learn more about if you ever take up readings in quantum
electrodynamics, summarized this whole subject when he said: "The best
science is always subversive". He made this comment in an effort to
explain to his students why "revolutionary" science theories are so
frequently met by the contempt of the disciplinarians, e.g. the
"professionals", of those fields of investigation undergoing change.
So, Bill, now that this has been said, let's get on to some of your other
comments.
For instance, the volcanic peaks of Hawaii are formed by the
> Pacific plate moving across a hot spot on the mantle boundary that has a
> large magma reservoir (in fact, the newest Hawaiian Island is forming
> now as an underwater and VERY active volcano that should breech the
> surface of the ocean in a relatively short {geologically speaking}
> time).
All of what you say here is true, and I know first hand because I spent
most of the past decade living in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii immediately downwind
from the volcanic vent that dumps 100,000 tons of sulfur emissions into the
Hawaiian sunset every 24 hours. I had moved to Hawaii from New York City
to help in the effort to block geothermal development on the Big Island.
There were some mercenary politicians and geologists who wanted to develop
a 500,000 kilowatt geothermal power plant over the magma chamber, running
undersea cables from Hawaii to Oahu and Maui. I'd been doing a lot of
reading about Hawaii because the volcano plays an important role in this
model I have for adjusting the use and interpretation of radiometric rock
dates. Anyway, these geologists were so focused on energy production that
they didn't realize that they had figured out just about the only way human
activity might combine with magnitude 7 earthquakes to deshield the magma
chamber, converting the island into a Krakatoa-style disaster for our
planet.
So, Bill, I moved to Hawaii, set up an office in town, and got a part time
unpaid job writing regular sci-med articles for the most widely read
newspaper in the area. Shortly thereafter, the editor asked me to write an
article about the health consequences of breathing volcanic emissions of a
daily basis for the newspaper's Earth Day edition, so I did. Wow, did that
ever piss off the Hawaii Department of Health officials who couldn't ever
see any of the vog (volcanic fog) from Honolulu. Worse than that, I had
slipped in a few comments about the way the new geothermal venture would
make a Pompeii-class problem once the cold waters of a 500,000 kilowatt
geothermal well converted massive quantities of plastically-solid
peri-chamber rocks into millions of hard, highly fractured rocks. You see,
Bill, that's how geothermal power plants achieve their design purpose. In
my article I noted that large earthquakes routinely roll through that part
of the globe and, as every geologist knows, earthquake shock energy passes
right through solid rocks but gets released in fractured rocks. Since the
geothermal well was located on a steep slope, I felt that it wouldn't take
too many millions of kilowatts before a package that would impress the
Unabomber had been designed and charged. I'm not really sure how it
happened, Bill, because so many people got involved in the thing after that
that I really didn't have to say much more. Somehow environmental groups
went into federal court with this new idea and the judge, an amateur
geologist like yourself, decided that it probably wasn't a good idea to do
anything that might blow off the lid of the world's largest volcano.
Over-night they pulled the plug on that one. Whew, Bill, that was a close
one!
After that, some friends of mine invited me to help work on a futuristic
report designed to help guide the development of very long-range planning
for the federal government. No, Bill, it wasn't work on Hillary's Health
Plan. Hawaii had Michael Dukakis working in Hilo on that one. I was asked
to write out the most compelling reasons that humankind should develop
systems that might someday be used to deflect Earth-heading asteroids and
comets. You might not recognize the connections here, Bill, so let me
expand on the details for a moment. You recall that I was a philosophy
major. Plato was my very favorite philosopher, and I had read his Timaeus
when I was in junior high school. The Timaeus was the "handbook" of
"cosmology" and "medicine" in Plato's Academy at the beginning of our
cultural history. Isn't it strange how Plato linked those two subjects
together, Bill. Did you know, Bill, that Plato was that fellow who thought
the most perfect thing that humans can appreciate is the "circle". Think
maybe Plato was an idiot, Bill?
I don't think Plato was an idiot, Bill, but do you know what else he
thought--and taught--in the Timaeus? Plato said that his own civilization
prided itself for its accomplishments, and had good reasons to do so, but
that its citizens really didn't comprehend their own heritage, their
origins. Because they didn't comprehend their past or that they actually
had one, most Greeks thought humans were something "new" on this planet
called Earth. Lacking an indisputable record of the true past, but needing
a sentient sense of self, his fellow citizens maintained a mythical
tradition that provided some sense of their past. I hope you read the book
itself, Bill, because it really is quite remarkable how Plato spells out an
understanding of the past that is only becoming obvious to many of us
living today. You can find a copy of the Timaeus right here on the
Internet: just do a search and you'll discover where to find the Loeb
translation of the text. It is sort of long and complicated, the
relationship between medicine and cosmology that Plato outlines, so I'll
just continue to summarize some of the more important principles of human
existence on Earth that Plato describes in his handbook for Academicians.
Still with me, Bill? Don't worry, I'm sure we can cover many details in
later posts.
Plato liked to make his points with parable-like stories. He was playful
of knowledge this way, but he also knew when to get right down to the point
of a matter. In the Timaeus Plato describes some of the mythical
explanations for human existence popular in his day and then he goes on to
explain that the true fact of the matter is that the intelligent creature
idealized in the form of humans beings has an ancestry that goes back to
times as old as the planet itself. Plato recognized this understanding as
the single most important insight we can have about our extended selves,
considered this notion the most important teaching of his philosophy, and
embedded the realization at the core of the handbook, just to see if any
new students skipped central chapters. Plato, you see, linked his
discussion of the nature of the hard ground beneath our feet (in the first
half of the book) to his discussion of medicine (a characterization of the
human form) in the second half of the book, via the summary conclusion that
the intelligent human specie is nearly as old as the planet itself, and was
formed from it.
No, Bill, Plato doesn't get lost in a discussion of evolution in the
Timaeus. He may have been too smart to do that, but we can't really say
that he took change for granted, either, because so much of his philosophy
is devoted to the analysis of transitional forms and the way we have to use
these mirage-like impressions of reality to comprehend ourselves and the
true nature of existence. An ancient age for our lineage, fleeting and
highly transitional glimpses of lasting truth, and perfect circles were
really important things to Plato, who I read in my youth, before I became
involved in ways to protect our planet from asteroids and comets.
Anyway, Bill, Plato said that the reason his civilization had such a fuzzy
understanding of itself was really fairly easy to understand. The true
fact of the matter, he said, was that big rocks fell from the skies on an
episodic basis, wiping from the surface of the planet any record of what
humans past had endured. He was very specific about this, too, noting that
these events occurred in two different forms. When cosmic rocks
episodically fell into the seas, civilizations were washed away by the
deluge of a tsunami wave hundreds and thousands of meters in height
sweeping across the surface of the land. Only uneducated shepherds living
high up in the mountains would survive these types of disasters. In
contrast, when one of these cosmic rocks hit on land, great atmospheric
fires destroyed all but those few people who resided near and along
mountain basal streams and rivers. In either event, Plato said, these
cosmic disasters were the true cause of most change on Earth and the
contents of the human mind. These events changed the structure of the
Earth he said, and told the story of Atlantis (the only ancient record of
the place) to illustrate his point. These catastrophe's changed the
essence of human contemplative existence as well, he thought, because the
human survivors of large planetary impacts were (by virtue of their
existence as mountain shepherds and backwater stream-dwellers) untrained
and uneducated people who knew little about science or history. All of
those understandings that pass between the generations become lost when
rocks fall from the heavens, he said, and only the dull-witted are left to
carry on our specie. Plato knew that it requires centuries of genetic
learning to make any scientific knowledge "hoary with age", sufficiently
wise to comprehend the critical fact that the human being is as old as
mother Earth.
I remembered Plato's Timaeus, Bill, when I was asked to help lay out a
plan, a reason, and a way to protect ourselves from cosmic hazards falling
on our heads, changing our planet's structure and our knowledge of
ourselves and our past. At first, Bill, I thought it was a ridiculous
idea, the notion that humans might determine their own fate and truly shape
their destiny in and over time. Now I'm not much of a religious scholar,
Bill, but one thing I did get from my up-bringing was a sense that man was
placed on Earth to function as its protector. I know that some people
think this is a silly and simple idea, Bill, but I think it a noble sense
of purpose in life no matter what else may also be true. Egotistic,
perhaps, but not when we realize that there are a thousand different ways
that each of us can lead lives that help protect Earth and its inhabitants