- ANCIENT ABUNDANCE: Dinosaurs or elephants?

Laughably unscientific speculations and outlandish hypotheses for your fireworks entertainment.

MAIN PAGE PRINCIPALE : WWW.WWCOVIDGM.ORG

Le pire imbécile se croit le plus sage- apprentimarcv
Ne traitez personne d'imbécile – Jésus

The greatest fool thinks himself wisest - learnermarkv
Call no man a fool. Jesus

Chapters

• 0:08 ancient plant species may have offered a much richer nutritional content than our current, inbred domestic varieties
• 6:16 human overpopulation threatens civilization itself
• 7:55 vertebrate photosynthesis
• 11:07 past, present and future experiences
• 18:14 In addition to the Seven Wonders of the World

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

 
- ANCIENT ABUNDANCE & LITTLE GREEN MEN -
 

Paradoxically, the Earth is energy-starved these days, compared to the epochs of its youth. Three million potassium molecules may snap, crackle, and pop in the human body every minute. We, the best-fed third of humanity, may turn excess food into fat every day. But this energy regime is paltry compared to the fierce ergs one human-body-mass could radiate during the Hadean Era four billion years ago. Back then, sentiency may have occupied regional firestorms instead of today's isolated hundredweights of decomposing flesh.

Besides, the human species is probably the latest of a series of sentient ecologies (esoteric, electric, caloric, mineral, cellular, vegetal and animal) that prevailed on earth for some time then snuffed out, either through dumb multiplication and drowning in its waste (as we are doing so stupidly today) or after some cosmic hiccup. Indeed, successive kingdoms likely feasted off the waste products of preceding ones, as microscopic oxygen users did with their anoxic predecessors.

Here at the bottom of our sunlit gravity well, we wage ceaseless war against entropy. By the way, what is gravity, really? Its tireless distortion of space-time mocks our energy conservation laws. Gravity reigns supreme over most manifestations we can observe of entropy reversed, apparently resulting from the distortion of time by bulk mass in space. This force is puny compared to the two or three electromagnetic and atomic forces we have identified. A small magnet can counteract the gravitational attraction between a needle and the entire planet.

Let’s face it, “high tech” civilization carrion-feeds off accretions of minerals and decaying organic matter. One whiff of diesel fuel betrays its origin as natural bilge water. Petroleum probably serves some hidden geomorphic function. Like starving mosquitoes, we refuse to pay attention as we suck it dry. We may well get slapped flat as an unintended consequence of our gluttony. 

Ancient plant species may have offered a much richer nutritional content than our current, inbred domestic varieties. Long ago, more nutritious plants probably developed a co-dependency with consumer species and died off when their consumers did. Or some epidemic or disaster wiped them out. 

Recent mutations of mildew are threatening to wipe out the world’s banana crop. Other edible plants are vulnerable to disease or genetic extinction in the wild. Those include pomegranates, pistachios, watermelons, apples, pineapples, mangos, sweet potatoes, garlic, peanuts, soybeans, tomatoes, coffee, hard wheat and grapes; and no doubt many more not tabulated here: enough to starve out humanity.

Industrial agriculture is not sustainable. Its more and more costly use of chemical and petroleum products poisons the environment and reduces nutrient productivity; it converts once-fertile plains into new deserts. It uses up clean geological water at irreplaceable and unsustainable rates. 

Better schemes will have to replace the ones we rely on today.

Microbes may not be the worst threat to edible crops and rare animals; man is the more likely candidate. The Romans harvested to extinction the aromatic cooking herb and sexual stimulant silphium from Cyrene in North Africa. They exterminated almost every whale in the Mediterranean Sea and drove several large animal species to extinction for their murderous Coliseum games. A whole succession of empires and nations can claim some responsibility for extinctions, those most recent and most populous the most guilty. Books are no doubt written on this topic alone, that confirm this verdict for every ethnicity and nation. Without tremendous advances in Learning and wisdom, the human race may wind up as a static display of lethal planetary infection in a galactic natural history museum. We have even forgotten how to brew soma, probably from some superior dandelion species, as tasty as its brother stinks.

Antediluvian mastodons grew to twice the weight of modern elephants; dinosaurs, six times heavier. How? As yet, no plausible nutrition physiology has been proposed for them. 

Horsetails? Benjamin-burger.com

Ancient Beringia, the land bridge now submerged between Siberia and Alaska, is said to have harbored mega-fauna, mammoths and such-like critters. Human pioneers are thought to have crossed it from Asia. No one has modeled an ecology that would sustain such ravenous wildlife across a wind-scoured arctic wilderness rimmed with mile thick glaciers. You’d need those massive glaciers to lower sea levels and expose the land bridge. Imagine those super beasts trooping across modern Antarctica, and man crossing it afoot from Africa to South America. Get real.

A possibility? More vigorous plants than ours fed these ravenous animals, plants resistant to high wind, intense cold and low precipitation. Pollen of a unique genotype may confirm this hypothesis. A nutritional revolution may lie unrecognized in the fossil record. Could it be concealed among our weeds and aquatic plants? 

Some bearers of the spark of life, perhaps even entire ecologies of them, may have survived the glaciation of the entire planet after one of perhaps many cosmic impacts or episodes of continental volcanism. All-pervading cold beyond enduring: the slow, patient, life-sucking cold of final, welcome sleep that searched out survivors for millennia and froze them to death without mercy or letup. Likewise, firestorms of glowing cosmic debris and deadly volcanic gasses smothered the entire planet. Earth, wind, fire and ice; each in turn far enough out of balance to snuff out life. What survived? Underwater volcanic vent ecologies, no doubt, and deep strata bacteria; but what else and how much more evolved? Preserved by someone's science rather than by random chance? Life all by itself takes quite a while to evolve from bacteria to apes to philosophers a bit less hairy. 

Could it have been a special type of Ginkgo Biloba? Since the age of dinosaurs, this plant has subsisted as a living fossil that survived every planetary catastrophe. It boasts its own botanical phylum: Ginkgophyta. Apparently, its embryonic cells form an endosymbiotic bond with green algae and appear to be colonized by one of the most extremophile animals: tardigrade water bears. Fascinating!

In the meantime, human overpopulation threatens civilization itself. 

Economists wait impatiently for the latest industrial growth projections. They resemble quack doctors of the Middle Ages, who expected patients they had bled dry to perk up as their pulse disappeared. Paradoxically, mankind’s progress demands deep population cuts and corresponding reductions of its technological footprint. 

We are nearly eight-billion-strong on Earth today, with another 160 million newborns each year, minus only 50 million dead. To reverse the population growth on Earth at current birth rates, we would have to incur additional deaths equivalent to those of nearly two World War IIs (sic) per year from now on. To avoid that toll of death and suffering, we will need to reduce new births to less than 30 or 40 million per year (about one less child per 20 couples?) The fewer, the better.

Defenders of unrestrained growth act like misers who reluctantly quit their hoard to go out and extort more gold. With unmatched hypocrisy, today’s imperial propagandists equate rational population control with imperialism and thus dismiss it. Others defend with fanatical devotion every fetus’ right to turn into a human being, and then vote billions of dollars more to napalm, cluster-bomb, torture and starve countless hard-up adults they have raised and cut short their life. 

We may soon discover renewable energy sources and fantastic new technologies, but none of them will allow us to remain so numerous and expect to flourish on this planet. Human overpopulation cancels progress, it encourages tyranny and cheapens human life; it renders each child less dear and each injustice more tempting. Psychopaths seek to multiply their cattle drive of sufferers.

Vertebrate photosynthesis could be an attractive new biotechnology. A land animal could grow as large as its bones could support its weight under one gravity, but only with supplemental nutrition. Solar-powered chloroplasts might suffuse its skin cells and complement standard energy-cell mitochondria. This adaptation might have occurred in dinosaurs, since the science community proposes no workable nutrition regime for them. Think of the vertical plates lining the spine of some dinosaurs: solar panels? 

A creature that eats plants nonstop all day long may grow as large as a modern elephant, but not a dinosaur seven times heavier. Otherwise, we’d see heavier elephants. Let me remind you that mammoths were twice as heavy.

The chemistry of plant chlorophyll and that of animal pigmentation (skin and eye) are remarkably similar. Given an infusion of ATP-like substances and organelles, human skin might absorb red light at the 666 millimicron wavelength or thereabouts. Like plants, the human body could draw water, carbon dioxide, trace gasses and minerals from its circulatory system; then dump oxygen and amino acids back into it. It might metabolize fats, vitamins and carbohydrates as well, by means of a plant-mimicking physiology. 

Another nutritional alternative could be the accelerated growth of bacteria within the human digestive system, not only to facilitate digestion but to provide additional proteins and nutrients for direct consumption in a human gut modified to resemble that of termites or the rumen of cattle. Challenging projects!

All this bio-hardware (and a lot more, most likely) may lie dormant in our “junk” DNA. As Learners seek new food sources, these alternatives may offer some promise. Autonomic photosynthetic nutrition (APN) could mitigate many problems of industrial transportation, agro-business, waste recycling and others. 

Problems like these stagger the modern economy. When famine strikes, these days, disaster specialists dispatch tons of food by ship, aircraft and truck. Afterwards, hungry masses swell up again, cripple the ecology, gut the economy and abandon political autonomy to local tyrants. 

Otherwise, rescuers could inoculate disaster victims with APN, such that some of their nourishment came directly to them through their skin from the Sun. If so, local self-sufficiency and bio-habitats could re-establish themselves more dependably, and weapon sectarians, find less opportunity to flourish.

The skin of Adam and Eve may have been suffused with such chlorophyll-like pigments. They could have occupied Eden the way we would visit a park, admiring it but not hunting down its animals for food. Could the Serpent have tempted them with the Apple, the natural antidote of their photosynthetic gift? Could something similar have prompted the Fall?

Contrary to what the book of Genesis implies in the Bible, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge did not let Adam and Eve grasp good and evil. Instead, the forbidden fruit took the most natural form of conversation away from them and left them deaf and dumb to the thoughts and feelings of other beings (like the Serpent, their last natural thought-partner). It permanently deprived them of dependable compassion for other living things. The best among us just fake compassion as best we can, despite our spoiled natural inclination.

An indolent cosmic mammy state must expand slower than its explosive outward wave of pirates. Its bureaucracy owes us royalties for the abuse of planetary DNA at the hands of those scouts and their progeny on Earth. Seasoned by the precedent of thousands of prior planetary victimization claims, it will rubber-stamp minimal compensation: one millionth or less of what would be just. Matthew 15:27, even the dogs catch what falls off the table. This bureaucratic pittance will be enough to make a millionaire of everyone on Earth, regrow Eden, etc. We just have to unite humanity to negotiate that. That's all.

Similarly, Moses’ forty-year Exodus could have been more serene if his followers had orally inoculated themselves with manna falling like dew on the sands. Pure water sufficed for the rest, gushing wherever Moses struck his staff. Thereafter, the cleansing ordeal of the desert inspired the Jewish spirit.

We may draw on more peaceful contentment by shrinking our footprint on the Earth, thus assisting in its self-repair. If Learners develop APN, we may downsize and disperse agro-corporations and food processing industries: a project that will thin many fat wallets. A great deal of thought should go to this project, despite the frenzied opposition of powerful private interests. After all, much of the world economy revolves around feeding hungry mouths — when it’s not too busy shutting them permanently. 

The so-called “Green Revolution” has crippled crop diversity with a few super-inbreds voracious of the soil’s fertility, overly dependent on agrochemical supplements and vulnerable to disease, pests and bad weather. We are gorging on the heritage of our descendants. Agribusiness corporations have set up a dangerous parody of ancient cultivation methods Learner sketches as follows. 

With great efficiency, Neolithic communities harvested all the plant resources in their gathering zone. Crowded communities of farmers aggravated this over-harvest as they took the place of scattered scavengers. In response, local info elites would have prized plant species with special medicinal and culinary virtues and gathered them systematically, rewarding the laity for stripping the countryside bare. Then they’d have raised them in sacred garden plots, much the way we do at modern agricultural research facilities. 

Please note: this scenario need not be limited to hominids. Social reptiles, insects and other organized species may have manipulated the environment in like manner, leaving no recognizable trace of their activities. Multi-species insect communities guard specific plants that feed and house them in return. Some insect communities cultivate fungi and algae in sophisticated ways; some build elaborate structures for self-protection, indoor climate and flood control. Others annihilate and/or domesticate alien species and milk their secretions for food or psychotropic drugs. Ancient beasts, perhaps better fed, may have operated in like manner, perhaps better.

Scientists have already confirmed a lengthy rain of meteors on the Earth, even though they haven’t cataloged a hundredth of them (only 200 major impacts identified to date). The first iron weapons were crafted from retrieved meteorites. Those scientists have just begun to confirm Louis A. Frank’s contention (published in The Big Splash), that ice hydro bolides drop from the heavens to top off our oceans. 

Formerly, the ocean shore ran along continental shelves now submerged, a variance of 100+ meters or 300+ feet. The legends of Atlantis and the Deluge may commemorate much more frequent flood catastrophes. Who can guess what ancient civilizations – human or otherwise – once existed along distant shores? Their cities would have dotted ancient river lines well downstream of current shorelines, like pearls along an underwater string. Unnavigable rapids blocked rivers that flowed at modern, continental elevations and kept upland river dwellers from direct access to the sea. Only pastoral nomads and hunter-gatherers would have bothered to subsist so far upstream from bountiful ocean shores. 

Archaeological treasures we’ve placed under museum glass could have been the sorry remnants of highland outcasts, eclipsed by splendid lowland civilizations now drowned. Did opulent civilizations thrive downstream of the paltry remnants we’ve managed to dig up? Could their cities have dotted ancient coastlines and river deltas drowned since? 

 The likeliest sites for these prehistoric urban civilizations would be far offshore of the mouths of the Earth's great rivers, sunk hundreds of feet underwater and buried under dozens more of alluvial silt. None of those sites have been investigated. Yet we dare deny the existence of urban civilizations from the distant past, based on paltry evidence collected from ancient alpine goat herders. See my poem, Global Atlantis. Central to this discussion is Graham Hancock’s Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization, Crown Publishers, New York, 2002.

Indeed, I was inspired to adopt this premise by Max Estenhofer, Buckminster Fuller, Sir Alister Clavering Hardy (The Living Stream), Elaine Morgan (The Aquatic Ape), Michael Crawford and David Marsh (The Driving Force). They postulated that proto-humans learned how to walk upright along tropical beaches, tidelands and river deltas long before humans gathered in the first upland villages. Our ancestors may have risen up from all fours by foraging through intertidal ecologies, half in and half out of water. After all, those have always been Nature’s best-stocked larders, as well as the least painful ones in which to twist, during hundreds of generations, the horizontal spine of four-legged animals into the vertical one of biped humans. 

Plants with superior nutritional and medicinal content (probably ancient varieties of seaweed difficult to isolate and identify today) would have improved the odds for such societies, human or otherwise. Thus, the disappeared super-foods I postulate. 

Getting back to our prehistoric valley culture: as it spread out along its edges and condensed at its core, its members would have picked clean the most desirable plants. Just before the disappearance of exceptional plants, shamans and witches would have tended them in sacred garden plots and pools. Those plants might have required artificial pollination and depended on civilized ingenuity to propagate. When military or natural disasters overtook these peaceful societies (as would have been inevitable), those fragile crops disappeared under weeds, all record of them gone. 

Indeed, intelligent life may have evolved long before the deposition of the Paleolithic remnants we catalog today. Long before, the hills may have danced to the rhythm of living communities alien to our way of thinking — except, perhaps, for the science fiction of Olaf Stapleton and a few writers equally bold. 

Recent research into prions (preeons, proteins that replicate in some mysterious way without nucleic acid) may confirm the existence of such self-replicating, pre-organic sands. RNA is another possible candidate. 

Tholin, a potential soil for life, forms on all the globes of the solar system whose conditions do not prohibit it. Thus the whole universe could be upholstered with entryways to life.

Does the nearby universe, avid for life, await us as its first pioneers, as our ancestors once were with respect to the Earth? Or are we the latest passengers on a cosmic Tokyo subway at rush hour? Don’t matter. Learners, forward!

Our periodic table of elements is a two-dimensional schema of another that might have extended into strange dimensions unexplored by Mendeleyev. Such trans-dimensional elements may have held properties transcending our scientific prejudices. Those may soon be within the grasp of Learners once again. 

Special ore deposits, sacred sites and holy pools with extraordinary properties: such myths are familiar to us. The most extraordinary of these elements may have commingled with more familiar compounds during their half-life synchronicity. Magical stones, soils and woods may have held exceptional properties for a brief span of time, then become inert long before ours. 

As long as these materials retained their precious energy, they would have been crafted into prized utensils and worship artifacts. Their fading magical properties, however, would have pauperized once-well-to-do owners. Such a value-crash induced economic collapse into all-out war — much as the loss of petroleum reserves may do to us, barring massive Learner intervention. 

As those rare earths lost their potency, they would have formed corrupt potions of less power. Ancient magic formulas prescribed insect or plant body parts and internal organs of specific animals because they concentrated the last traces of these elements, the way fish and birds concentrate our pollutants in their internal organs. Those in turn would have weakened into muddy, indistinguishable contaminants: dust to dust. 

In the end, warlike vandals ransacked venerated stonework, burned sacred wooden carvings and smashed revered pottery. They carved perverse idols for themselves, probably as weapon decorations and personal talismans. Later on, those were smashed as ritual outcomes of combat, buried as funerary regalia or scattered by neglect. 

We have forgotten the best medicinal herbs and food crops, as well as the utility of magical trinkets, amulets, statues and geographic features previously infused with mysterious attributes. Monumental sacred centers built with stone blocks of enormous mass, hoisted into position with miraculous strength, ground (or liquefied?) so flat they need no mortar to fit together; mound-building projects that took generations, giant pyramids planted above ground or below the sea (and perhaps on extraterrestrial plains?); sculpted busts, jars, orbs, stele and menhirs; ancient drawings of exceptional quality and/or enormous size, caved deeply underground or only visible from high above barren plains ... 

Whether humans designed them, with or without alien inspiration, they transcend our understanding and engineering know-how. Their shaping is improbable without technologies we no longer grasp — their purpose, beyond imagining. Neither massed slaves, beasts or machines – the clumsy block and tackle of our murky imagination – offer realistic explanations of their construction. How could they accomplish what we cannot do today, unless we take enormous pains in a clumsy way they could never duplicate?

History throngs with wrecked projects: irrigation gone to salt, topsoil exhausted, overgrazing to the point of desertification, fisheries sterilized and great woods deforested to build battle fleets and massive urban fortifications during century-long arms races only interrupted by burning cities. 

Primitive city construction called for millions of fired mud bricks and quantities beyond counting of wooden building frames, thereby deforesting one by one the well-watered approaches of every ancient city on Earth. Every square meter of Maya cityscape required twenty trees for its lime plaster alone. These enormous construction projects wound up sterilizing the world’s most fertile coastlines and river valleys: the cradles, nurseries and gravesites of civilization’s early advent.

Before the Age of Empires, climax forests like the biblical cedars of Lebanon stretched from Morocco all the way around Mediterranean shores and beyond as far as the Pacific coast of China, also northwards past the Baltic. More forests, lost since, covered the rest of the planet. The weather was milder then and the sea swarmed with monster fish. 

Ecocide through unbridled weapon management is not unique to our age. We have merely mechanized our worst habits and aggravated their ill effects tremendously. Humanity has already destroyed half the tree cover that once stood on Earth, most of it very recently. Mass human activity may even disturb the axial tilt of the planet, send it toppling the way a child would push over a spinning top, perhaps fatally for our civilization.

It will be up to the world’s Learners to restore everything that was lost and more.

In addition to the Seven Wonders of the World, picture seven million smaller, more ephemeral temples, gardens, courtyards and libraries; plus a hundred times as many natural sites of splendid vista, sweet birdsong and tranquility  —  each one more attractive than the last. Ancient civilization grew mighty insofar it fostered many elegant settings of worship, meditation and study. Only incidentally were the “Seven Wonders of the World” constructed. 

As a playful exercise of historical reenactment, Learners may rebuild those Wonders or re-adorn their ruins — natural and artificial, great and small. Imagine the Parthenon, the Sphinx, the Pyramids of Egypt, the palace of Minos, Angkor Watt, and countless other cultural treasures, restored by Learners to their original splendor. Similar monuments might rise up alongside; the whole surrounded by climax forest. 

Now imagine the best Learner site you could construct for yourself and your beloved; that anyone could build just as well. Picture this cosmopolitan exuberance! For once, this would be the real use of wealth and not the militaristic misery we have come to expect. 

Don’t quibble me your quibble: “There will never be enough wealth on Earth to do what you propose.” You would be sadly mistaken. It is only our weapon-based dread and its mass-induced stupidity that condemn us to this collective misery. Once we liberate ourselves from those, we’ll wind up playing with cosmic wealth. 

This said, recall the words of Mencius. Humanity and Duty must always trump mere profit.

…

COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net