Planetary Science Quotes

He will tell you what's wrong in your society, who's to blame, and make you afraid of it, but he won't tell you how to fix it.

Why do we try so hard to destroy all that our planet gave us to enjoy?” ― Anthony Merrydew

CIRCLES OF LIFE Everything Turns, Rotates, Spins, Circles, Loops, Pulsates, Resonates, And Repeats. Circles Of life, Born from Pulses Of light, Vibrate To Breathe, While Spiraling Outwards For Infinity Through The lens Of time, And into A sea Of stars And Lucid Dreams. Poetry by Suzy Kassem

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

  “No, I’m in the supplementary reserve,” Homer pointed out. “As in supplementary to the actual reserve. As in, never call me. Ever.

We are the intelligent elite among animal life on earth and whatever our mistakes, [Earth] needs us. This may seem an odd statement after all that I have said about the way 20th century humans became almost a planetary disease organism. But it has taken [Earth] 2.5 billion years to evolve an animal that can think and communicate its thoughts. If we become extinct she has little chance of evolving another.

We're not responsible, he thought. This planet is a temporary affair. It's whizzing with all kinds of other ones, a whole range of planetary stuff, toward a star in the Milky Way. On that kind of a planet we're not responsible, he thought.

Why do we try so hard to destroy all that our planet gave us to enjoy?

There are two competing trends in the world today: one is to create a planetary civilization that is tolerant, scientific, and prosperous, but the other glorifies anarchy and ignorance that could rip the fabric of our society.

I believe that the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the grasslands of Africa gave us the model for all religions to follow. And when, after long centuries of slow forgetting, migration, and climatic change, the knowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish traded partnership for dominance, traded harmony with nature for rape of nature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science. In short, we traded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare, neurosis, and-if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament-planetary catastrophe.

Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered. Peering, the mind could see nothing sure, nothing in all human experience to be grasped as certain, except uncertainty itself; nothing but obscurity gendered by a thick haze of theories. Man's science was a mere mist of numbers; his philosophy but a fog of words. His very perception of this rocky grain and all its wonders was but a shifting and a lying apparition. Even oneself, that seeming-central fact, was a mere phantom, so deceptive, that the most honest of men must question his own honesty, so insubstantial that he must even doubt his very existence.

Present global culture is a kind of arrogant newcomer. It arrives on the planetary stage following four and a half billion years of other acts, and after looking about for a few thousand years declares itself in possession of eternal truths. But in a world that is changing as fast as ours, this is a prescription for disaster. No nation, no religion, no economic system, no body of knowledge, is likely to have all the answers for our survival. There must be many social systems that would work far better than any now in existence. In the scientific tradition, our task is to find them.

It is quite a big deal. It's so extraordinary that we female humans should be linked to the moon and the tides. It'd sound like science fiction if you made it up – mysterious planetary forces making us bleed.

Science fiction transported me in an almost metaphysical way. I had the feeling that I was part of the great contemporary mystery, a human being, part of a global species, a planetary consciousness facing the stars.

Equality is what happens when the people who decide how to cut the cake (senators, for example) can't rig the division to favor themselves.

The irony is, that a distant relation of mine, once wrote a book which also depicted a monster. Her name was Mary Shelley. That story as I recall, did not end well either.

Hitler the thinker was wrong that politics and science are the same thing. Hitler the politician was right that conflating them creates a rapturous sense of catastrophic time and thus the potential for radical action. When an apocalypse is on the horizon, waiting for scientific solutions seems senseless, struggle seems natural, an demagogues of blood and soil come to the fore. A sound policy for our world, then, would be one that keeps the fear of planetary catastrophe as far away as possible. This means accepting the autonomy of science from politics, and making the political choice to support the pertinent kinds of science that will allow conventional politics to proceed.

His laws changed all of physics and astronomy. His laws made it possible to calculate the mass of the sun and planets. The way it's done is immensely beautiful. If you know the orbital period of any planet, say, Jupiter or the Earth and you know its distance to the Sun; you can calculate the mass of the Sun. Doesn't this sound like magic? We can carry this one step further - if you know the orbital period of one of Jupiter's bright moons, discovered by Galileo in 1609, and you know the distance between Jupiter and that moon, you can calculate the mass of Jupiter. Therefore, if you know the orbital period of the moon around the Earth (it's 27.32 days), and you know the mean distance between the Earth and the moon (it's about 200,039 miles), then you can calculate to a high degree of accuracy the mass of the Earth. … But Newton's laws reach far beyond our solar system. They dictate and explain the motion of stars, binary stars, star clusters, galaxies and even clusters of galaxies. And Newton's laws deserve credit for the 20th century discovery of what we call dark matter. His laws are beautiful. Breathtakingly simple and incredibly powerful at the same time. They explain so much and the range of phenomena they clarify is mind boggling. By bringing together the physics of motion, of interaction between objects and of planetary movements, Newton brought a new kind of order to astronomical measurements, showing how, what had been a jumble of confused observations made through the centuries were all interconnected.

Many scientific disciplines begin by not observing any sort of vital spark or consciousness in material events and proceed to deny that these things exist in living things, including themselves. Because consciousness does not fit into their mechanistic schemes they declare it illusory. Magicians make exactly the reverse argument. Observing consciousness in themselves and animals, they are magnanimous enough to extend it to all things to some degree—trees, amulets, planetary bodies, and all. This is a far more respectful and generous attitude than that of religions, most of whom won't even give animals a soul.

Every few days, Giordano Bruno has his revenge.

Lost somewhere between the eternity of time and immensity of space is our tiny planetary home

Dr. Ashley King, planetary scientist and stardust expert (an enviable job description), states: “It is totally 100 percent true: nearly all the elements in the human body were made in a star and many have come through several supernovas.” Oxygen + carbon + hydrogen + nitrogen + calcium + phosphorous + potassium + sulfur + sodium + chlorine + magnesium = star-human. The stuff of the cosmos is woven into our bone branches and wanders in our blood rivers.

When Sir Isaac Newton discovered the universal law of gravitation he did not say, ‘I have discovered a mechanism that accounts for planetary motion, therefore there is no agent God who designed it.’ Quite the opposite: precisely because he understood how it worked, he was moved to increased admiration for the God who had designed it that way.

The amount of energy actually liberated in the burning of these fossil fuels is tiny by planetary scales – ten terawatts or so a year, not that much more than the nuga-tory contribution made by the tides. But the side effects are huge.

Condon, quick on his feet, replied that the accusation was untrue. He was not a revolutionary in physics. He raised his right hand: “I believe in Archimedes’ Principle, formulated in the third century B.C. I believe in Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, discovered in the seventeenth century. I believe in Newton’s laws.…” And on he went, invoking the illustrious names of Bernoulli, Fourier, Ampère, Boltzmann, and Maxwell.

I believe that a new philosophy will be created by those who were born after Hiroshima which will dramatically change the human condition. It will have these characteristics: (1) It will be scientific in essence and science-fiction in style. (2) It will be based on the expansion of consciousness, understanding and control of the nervous system, producing a quantum leap in intellectual efficiency and emotional equilibrium. (3) Politically it will stress individualism, decentralization of authority, a Iive-and-let-Iive tolerance of difference, local option and a mind-your-own-business libertarianism. (4) It will continue the trend towards open sexual expression and a more honest, realistic acceptance of both the equality of and the magnetic difference between the sexes. The mythic religious symbol will not be a man on a cross but a man-woman pair united in higher love communion. (5) It will seek revelation and Higher Intelligence not in formal rituals addressed to an anthropomorphic deity, but within natural processes, the nervous system, the genetic code, and without, in attempts to effect extra-planetary communication. (6) It will include practical, technical neurological psychological procedures for understanding and managing the intimations of union-immortality implicit in the dying process. (7) The emotional tone of the new philosophy will be hedonic, aesthetic, fearless, optimistic, humorous, practical, skeptical, hip. We are now experiencing a quiescent preparatory waiting period. Everyone knows something is going to happen. The seeds of the Sixties have taken root underground. The blossoming is to come.

A planet might deteriorate even if human beings existed upon it, if the society were itself abnormal and did not understand the importance of preserving the environment." "Surely," said Pelorat, "such a society would quickly be destroyed. I don't think it would be possible for human beings to fail to understand the importance of retaining the very factors that are keeping them alive." Bliss said, "I don't have your pleasant faith in human reason, Pel. It seems to me to be quite conceivable that when a planetary society consists of Isolates, local and even individual concerns might easily by allowed to overcome planetary concerns.

The fact is that we live on a rapidly aging planet, and we will soon have but two choices if our species is to survive: engineer on a planetary scale or get off.

humanity is gravely threatened by superstition and myth, the stubborn refusal to recognize the urgent planetary problems, and generalized tribalism in all its forms.

Some scientific specialists do not believe in parallel worlds; however many do endorse a multi-dimensinal multiverse with no planetary equivalents to Earth.

Superstition is the opium of the ill-informed public. Conspiracy is the opium of the over-informed public.

More praise for The Demon-Haunted World “As I close this eloquent and fascinating book, I recall the final chapter title from one of Carl Sagan’s earlier works, Cosmos. ‘Who Speaks for Earth?’ is a rhetorical question, but I presume to answer it. My candidate for planetary ambassador can be none other than Carl Sagan himself. He is wise, humane, witty, well read, and incapable of composing a dull sentence.… I wish I had written The Demon-Haunted World. Having failed to do so the least I can do is press it upon my friends. Please read this book.” —Richard Dawkins The Times (London)

I find that most people serve practical needs. They have an understanding of the difference between meaning and relevance. And at some level my mind is more interested in meaning than in relevance. That is similar to the mind of an artist. The arts are not life. They are not serving life. The arts are the cuckoo child of life. Because the meaning of life is to eat. You know, life is evolution and evolution is about eating. It's pretty gross if you think about it. Evolution is about getting eaten by monsters. Don't go into the desert and perish there, because it's going to be a waste. If you're lucky the monsters that eat you are your own children. And eventually the search for evolution will, if evolution reaches its global optimum, it will be the perfect devourer. The thing that is able to digest anything and turn it into structure to sustain and perpetuate itself, for long as the local puddle of negentropy is available. And in a way we are yeast. Everything we do, all the complexity that we create, all the structures we build, is to erect some surfaces on which to out compete other kinds of yeast. And if you realize this you can try to get behind this and I think the solution to this is fascism. Fascism is a mode of organization of society in which the individual is a cell in the superorganism and the value of the individual is exactly the contribution to the superorganism. And when the contribution is negative then the superorganism kills it in order to be fitter in the competition against other superorganisms. And it's totally brutal. I don't like fascism because it's going to kill a lot of minds I like. And the arts is slightly different. It's a mutation that is arguably not completely adaptive. It's one where people fall in love with the loss function. Where you think that your mental representation is the intrinsically important thing. That you try to capture a conscious state for its own sake, because you think that matters. The true artist in my view is somebody who captures conscious states and that's the only reason why they eat. So you eat to make art. And another person makes art to eat. And these are of course the ends of a spectrum and the truth is often somewhere in the middle, but in a way there is this fundamental distinction. And there are in some sense the true scientists which are trying to figure out something about the universe. They are trying to reflect it. And it's an artistic process in a way. It's an attempt to be a reflection to this universe. You see there is this amazing vast darkness which is the universe. There's all these iterations of patterns, but mostly there is nothing interesting happening in these patterns. It's a giant fractal and most of it is just boring. And at a brief moment in the evolution of the universe there are planetary surfaces and negentropy gradients that allow for the creation of structure and then there are some brief flashes of consciousness in all this vast darkness. And these brief flashes of consciousness can reflect the universe and maybe even figure out what it is. It's the only chance that we have. Right? This is amazing. Why not do this? Life is short. This is the thing we can do.

To agree with Ingold is no to say that everything must be local first and last, nor to deny that there are environmental problems on a planetary scale. It is to say that they are not the planet’s problems. They are ours.

It is remarkable, however, that at the very lowest point of Kant's depression, when he became perfectly incapable of conversing with any rational meaning on the ordinary affairs of life, he was still able to answer correctly and distinctly, in a degree that was perfectly astonishing, upon any question of philosophy or of science, especially of physical geography, [Footnote: Physical Geography, in opposition to Political.] chemistry, or natural history. He talked satisfactorily, in his very worst state, of the gases, and stated very accurately different propositions of Kepler’s, especially the law of the planetary motions. And I remember in particular, that upon the very last Monday of his life, when the extremity of his weakness moved a circle of his friends to tears, and he sat amongst us insensible to all we could say to him, cowering down, or rather I might say collapsing into a shapeless heap upon his chair, deaf, blind, torpid, motionless,—even then I whispered to the others that I would engage that Kant should take his part in conversation with propriety and animation. This they found it difficult to believe. Upon which I drew close to his ear, and put a question to him about the Moors of Barbary. To the surprise of everybody but myself, he immediately gave us a summary account of their habits and customs; and told us by the way, that in the word Algiers, the g ought to be pronounced hard (as in the English word gear).

We share Hitler's planet and several of his preoccupations; we have changed less than we think. We like our living space, we fantasize about destroying governments, we denigrate science, we dream of catastrophe. if we think that we are the victims of some planetary conspiracy, we edge towards Hitler. If we believe that the Holocaust was a result of the inherent characteristics of Jews, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or anyone else, then we are moving in Hitler's world.

Before history there was science, of a sort. At any moment nature presents us with a variety of puzzling phenomena: fire, thunderstorms, plagues, planetary motion, light, tides, and so on. Observation of the world led to useful generalizations: fires are hot; thunder presages rain; tides are highest when the Moon is full or new, and so on. These became part of the common sense of mankind. But here and there, some people wanted more than just a collection of facts. They wanted to explain the world.

White supremacists boast about white americans being superior. Let's look at it reasonably, shall we - not that you can reason with fanatics! Most of the third world speaks two or three languages, yet you say, white americans are superior! Dreamers from the third world bear ten times more difficulty to achieve their dream, yet you say, white americans are superior! Humankind's earliest scientific achievements came not from the West, but from the East and the Middle East, yet you say, America is superior - a juvenile country whose very existence is rooted in humankind's worst of atrocities. Well done! You really are superior - in cooking up fiction. The fact of the matter is, excellence has no race. And the only inferior people on earth are the ones who think of others as such.

After a duration of a thousand years, the power of astrology broke down when, with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, the progress of astronomy overthrew the false hypothesis upon which the entire structure rested, namely the geocentric system of the universe. The fact that the earth revolves in space intervened to upset the complicated play of planetary influences, and the silent stars, related to the unfathomable depths of the sky, no longer made their prophetic voices audible to mankind. Celestial mechanics and spectrum analysis finally robbed them of their mysterious prestige.

The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity - honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy - to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power. The instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture have compounded these meanings of dis-embodiment. The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit; the eye of any ordinary primate like us can be endlessly enhanced by sonography systems, magnetic resonance imaging, artificial intelligence-linked graphic manipulation systems, scanning electron microscopes, computer-aided tomography scanners, colour enhancement techniques, satellite surveillance systems, home and office VDTs, cameras for every purpose from filming the mucous membrane lining the gut cavity of a marine worm living in the vent gases on a fault between continental plates to mapping a planetary hemisphere elsewhere in the solar system. Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice. And like the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. Zoe Sofoulis (1988) calls this the cannibal-eye of masculinist extra-terrestrial projects for excremental second birthing.

In our brief life, so many roads, so many miracles and blessings and glories, but also so many curses and denials, grief and contempt, continuous waves on the planetary seas that come and go, and they crawl us into the vast heavens, n that quiet rhythm universe listen to your heart beat.

Everything in the universe is connected, a fact long known by astrologers but now being recognized by scientists using quantum mechanics, which suggests that every atom affects other atoms. In quantum physics, everything is made of waves and particles and works according to entanglement theory, which suggests that no particle is entirely independent. In a nutshell, everything in the universe works together and the movements of the cosmic bodies activate energy within us and the natural world. In other words, we are entangled with the entire universe. All the energies intertwine in an intricate dance of planetary magic and science, and the language of astrology interprets that dance.

Investors include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Google cofounder Larry Page. Planetary Resources’ lead was followed in 2013 by a firm called Deep Space Industries. Its website currently looks like a science fiction film setting, with illustrations of CubeSats, scouting vehicles, and huge mining spacecraft assembled in space and never intended to enter a planet’s atmosphere.

The perpetual growth model is simply not built for an era of rapid planetary change. In a world where the richest 85 people in the world own as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion, and the wealthiest 10% produce 49% of all emissions, it’s not individual choices that are driving climate change. When we realize that rich people have stolen our planet’s habitability for themselves, we will demand revolutionary change.

From the beginning, man could look up at a vast universe dotted by innumerable stars to find every evidence that he was nothing. This evidence only grows stronger as science and technology record an expanse of galaxies filled with planetary solar systems beyond any visible end. Man is but a grain of sand lost on an endless seashore, and yet he believes with conviction in his own greatness.  He is either a divine soul intuitively aware of his inherent, limitless potential—or he is a blind fool.

In this sub-species [of science fiction] the author leaps forward into an imagined future when planetary, sidereal, or even galactic travel has become common. Against this huge backcloth he then proceeds to develop an ordinary love-story, spy-story, wreck-story, or crime-story. This seems to me tasteless. Whatever in a work of art is not used is doing harm. The faintly imagined, and sometimes strictly unimagineable, scene and properties, only blur the real theme and distract us from any interest it might have had.

A striking pattern emerged on days with the most intense solar storms, grey whales were 4 times more likely to beach themselves. This correlation doesn't prove that whales have a compass but it strongly hints that they do. More than that, it speaks to the awesome nature of magnetoreception. Here is a sense in which the forces produced by a planetary layer of molten metal collide with those unleashed by a tempestuous star, together swaying the mind of a wandering animal and determining whether it finds its way successfully or loses it for good.

Imagine a nation comprised of California Hawaii Oregon and Washington. Imagine a country that is the most advanced in science and technology, and easily the most prosporous nation in the world. A nation saddled with no debt. A nation possessing all western seaports with regard to economic trade. So imagine a nation of great wealth and prosperity that is dedicated to a higher way for humanity. A way of peace for all humans, planetary protection and healing, advancement of science and technology. That is what we "utopian" types could easily visualize... perhaps we would call it Lemuria.....

Truth and facts are not the same, because facts alone don't make the truth. Truth requires insight, truth requires wisdom. Facts can contribute to that insight and wisdom, but access to facts doesn't necessarily entail access to wisdom. The best example I can think of is that of love. Love is truth, whereas lust is fact. Lust may be a part of love, but it's not the whole of love. In fact, in many cases lust is not even part of the picture. The same goes for truth and facts. Fact is a state of matter, truth is a state of mind. Matter makes the mind - sure - but to fathom the matter behind mind in its fullest intricacies will take us millennia more.

Future Of Humanity - Planetary Civilization In mythology, the gods lived in the divine splendor of heaven, far above the insignificant affairs of mere mortals. The Greek gods frolicked in the heavenly domain of Mount Olympus, while the Norse gods who fought for honor and eternal glory would feast in the hallowed halls of Valhalla with the spirits of fallen warriors. But if our destiny is to attain the power of the gods by the end of the century, what will our civilization look like in 2100? Where is all this technological innovation taking our civilization? All the technological revolutions described here are leading to a single point: the creation of a planetary civilization. This transition is perhaps the greatest in human history. In fact, the people living today are the most important ever to walk the surface of the planet, since they will determine whether we attain this goal or descend into chaos. Perhaps 5,000 generations of humans have walked the surface of the earth since we first emerged in Africa about 100,000 years ago, and of them, the ones living in this century will ultimately determine our fate. Unless there is a natural catastrophe or some calamitous act of folly, it is inevitable that we will enter this phase of our collective history. We can see this most clearly by analyzing the history of energy.

Paganism is one of the first religions that deliberately incorporates new perspectives from science, metaphysics, and mysticism into its spirituality and consciously breaks from the traditional Newtonian view of the world. (These concepts are explored further in chapter 5.) Pagans tend to see all parts of the universe-from the smallest atom to the largest planetary system-as sacred and having some form of consciousness or spark of intelligence. Most Pagans believe that this living universe is able to communicate to all parts of itself on one or more levels, and that these parts can choose to cooperate together for specific ends. Pagans call this cooperation magick. Paganism

Many wish to believe that the odd is not so odd, the bizarre not so bizarre, and there is little changing of minds once they are set. There are only so many ways to understand the strange and disordered. The Greeks imagined gods to explain what they themselves could not. It is human nature to invent reasons for why the mind shatters, hope plummets, or the will to live dies. Scientific explanations are complicated and, for many, less humanly satisfying than visionary or religious ones. They are also less interesting than explanations based on planetary misalignment, toxins, or childhoods gone awry. There is a disturbing gap between what scientists and doctors know about mental illness and what most people believe.

The American system of jurisprudence recognizes a wide range of factors, predispositions, prejudices, and experiences that might cloud our judgment, or affect our objectivity—sometimes even without our knowing it. It goes to great, perhaps even extravagant, lengths to safeguard the process of judgment in a criminal trial from the human weaknesses of those who must decide on innocence or guilt. Even then, of course, the process sometimes fails. Why would we settle for anything less when interrogating the natural world, or when attempting to decide on vital matters of politics, economics, religion, and ethics? — If it is to be applied consistently, science imposes, in exchange for its manifold gifts, a certain onerous burden: We are enjoined, no matter how uncomfortable it might be, to consider ourselves and our cultural institutions scientifically—not to accept uncritically whatever we’re told; to surmount as best we can our hopes, conceits, and unexamined beliefs; to view ourselves as we really are. Can we conscientiously and courageously follow planetary motion or bacterial genetics wherever the search may lead, but declare the origin of matter or human behavior off-limits? Because its explanatory power is so great, once you get the hang of scientific reasoning you’re eager to apply it everywhere. However, in the course of looking deeply within ourselves, we may challenge notions that give comfort before the terrors of the world.

Without world unification the species would destroy itself by the enlarged powers that had come to it. This, said the men of science, is no theory, no political alternative; it is a statement of fact. Men had to pool their political, economic and educational lives. There was no other way for them but a series of degenerative phases leading very plainly to extinction. They could not revert now. They had to go on — up or down. They had gone too far with civilisation and in societies, to sink back into a merely “animal” life again. The hold of the primates on life had always been a precarious one. Except where they were under human protection all the other great apes were extinct. Now plainly man had to go on to a larger life, a planetary existence, or perish in his turn.

The new God is the intelligence of a living, sacred universe. The purpose that guides the evolution of species comes from larger, living wholes. The environment creates organisms for its purposes, as much as organisms alter the environment for theirs. The parts create the whole, and the whole creates the parts. 20 Thirteen years ago when I first began telling people I was a Lamarckian, I was met with eye rolls or blank stares. But last week I confessed it to a biologist I met at a conference and he didn’t bat an eye. “Everyone is a Lamarckian now,” he said. “Lamarck was right.” This is no longer fringe science. I refer the interested or skeptical reader to James Shapiro’s Evolution: A View from the 21st Century, Denis Noble’s Dance to the Tune of Life, and Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire. The Whole has created humans too for its purpose. There is a certain comfort in thinking that the planet will be fine without us, yet there is also a certain fatalism. It is akin to the fatalism that comes in response to disconnection from one’s destiny. It induces a kind of aimlessness. As humanity exits the old Story of Ascent and its triumphant techno-utopian destiny, we are indeed experiencing a collective aimlessness. In that story, our purpose was ourselves. That purpose has been exhausted. We are ready to devote ourselves to something greater. In the Story of Interbeing, entrusted with gifts and bound by love, we realize that our passage through the present initiatory crisis is of planetary moment. Out of the wreckage of what we thought we knew, something else may be born.

...And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes—how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know any more. And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure. A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations.

The biblical account of the origin of the cosmos in Genesis, for example, posits that a god created the physical universe particularly with human beings in mind, and so unsurprisingly placed the Earth at the center of creation. Modern cosmological knowledge has refuted such an account. We are living in the golden age of cosmology: More has been discovered about the large-scale structure and history of the visible cosmos in the last 20 years than in the whole of prior human history. We now have precise knowledge of the distribution of galaxies and know that ours is nowhere near the center of the universe, just as we know that our planetary system has no privileged place among the billions of such systems in our galaxy and that Earth is not even at the center of our planetary system. We also know that the Big Bang, the beginning of our universe, occurred about 13.7 billion years ago, whereas Earth didn’t even exist until about 10 billion years later. No one looking at the vast extent of the universe and the completely random location of homo sapiens within it (in both space and time) could seriously maintain that the whole thing was intentionally created for us. This realization began with Galileo, and has only intensified ever since.

There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be. The obvious is sometimes false; the unexpected is sometimes true. Humans everywhere share the same goals when the context is large enough. And the study of the Cosmos provides the largest possible context. Present global culture is a kind of arrogant newcomer. It arrives on the planetary stage following four and a half billion years of other acts, and after looking about for a few thousand years declares itself in possession of eternal truths. But in a world that is changing as fast as ours, this is a prescription for disaster. No nation, no religion, no economic system, no body of knowledge, is likely to have all the answers for our survival. There must be many social systems that would work far better than any now in existence. In the scientific tradition, our task is to find them.

I suggest that it is simply not possible for a modern Christian, even a fundamentalist, to believe the cosmos to have the exact physical structure that biblical authors believed it to have. By this I mean that it is not really possible, short of severe self-delusion, to believe that the earth is flat, that the sky is not a solid dome beyond the stars with waters of chaos above it, that beneath the ground is the world of the dead, that heaven is literally up, and that the stars are divine beings. I know that many Christians claim that the Bible is scientifically accurate on all matters on which it touches and that they are prepared to reject the findings of mainstream science to hold onto a seven-day creation that took place six to ten tousand years ago, but, as we have seen, this does not go nearly far enough. If fundamentalists really were to have the courage of their convictions then we would see membership of the Flat Earth Society boosted significantly. What happens instead is that this is a bridge too far, even for hard-line fundamentalists, and biblical texts are thus reinterpreted to fit with modern cosmology. For instance, Isaiah's phrase "the circle of the earth" (Isa 40:22) is taken as proof that the Bible authors actually believed in a planetary globe - proof, we are told, of its inerrancy. However, in this tour we have seen that such interpretations are implausible. So I really do not think we can inhabit the biblical cosmos in the same way that ancient Israelites or Second Temple Jews (including the authors of the New Testament) did. The world can never feel the same again after Copernicus. The cosmology of the Bible is ancient and we are not; it's as simple as that.

At the risk of repetitiveness I must once more mention here the Pythagoreans, the chief engineers of that epoch-making change. I have spoken in more detail elsewhere of the inspired methods by which, in their religious order, they transformed the Orphic mystery cult into a religion which considered mathematical and astronomical studies as the main forms of divine worship and prayer. The physical intoxication which had accompanied the Bacchic rites was superseded by the mental intoxication derived from philo-sophia, the love of knowledge. It was one of the many key concepts they coined and which are still basic units in our verbal currency. The cliche' about the 'mysteries of nature' originates in the revolutionary innovation of applying the word referring to the secret rites of the worshippers of Orpheus, to the devotions of stargazing. 'Pure science' is another of their coinages; it signified not merely a contrast to the 'applied' sciences, but also that the contemplation of the new mysteria was regarded as a means of purifying the soul by its immersion in the eternal. Finally, 'theorizing' comes from Theoria, again a word of Orphic origin, meaning a state of fervent contemplation and participation in the sacred rites (thea spectacle, theoris spectator, audience). Contemplation of the 'divine dance of numbers' which held both the secrets of music and of the celestial motions became the link in the mystic union between human thought and the anima mundi. Its perfect symbol was the Harmony of the Spheres-the Pythagorean Scale, whose musical intervals corresponded to the intervals between the planetary orbits; it went on reverberating through 'soft stillness and the night' right into the poetry of the Elizabethans, and into the astronomy of Kepler.

Looking back at the knowledge economies discussed earlier, we can recognize that the dynamic coupling of human societies and the Earth system not only depended on the generation of knowledge, but enhanced, in turn, the significance of that generation. In a process extending over millennia, scientific knowledge eventually became a crucial component of economic growth; it is now becoming no less important in coping with its consequences. Substantial anthropogenic change on a global scale was evidently already characteristic of the Holocene and the late Pleistocene, from the human-induced extinction of great mammals via Neolithization and urbanization to the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. What characterizes the Anthropocene is the need to actively prevent the Earth system from transgressing planetary boundaries. The emergence of this need is closely related to the cascade of evolutionary processes described above. Just as cultural evolution started as a side-show of biological evolution before it became the conditio humana (the essential condition of human life), epistemic evolution, that is, the growing dependence of human societies on knowledge economies producing scientific knowledge, was, for a long time, no more than a tangential aspect of cultural evolution. But with the onset of the Anthropocene, the survival of human culture as we know it hinges on this.

The technosphere is described here as if neither history nor social or political dynamics mattered. It does not take into account collective agency or political, economic, and social structures, let alone the evolution of knowledge with its powerful impact on shaping technological systems. Has human technology now reached a stage (or will it any time soon) at which it attains the autonomy of an organism with its own agency - an autopoietic structure reproducing its own organization? Such generalizations tend to overlook some essential features of human interaction with the global environment. For instance, while the biosphere has proven its resilience over the course of at least 3.5 billion years of evolution, the technosphere may turn out to be a rather fragile scaffolding for human existence. While it is quite conceivable that the sum total of the unintended consequences of our actions has developed its own dynamics, even in the age of the Anthropocene escape routes may still be left to us - an observation, however, that does not imply, vice versa, that there will be a guarantee for the existence of an escape route. It rather appears that the dynamics underlying the Anthropocene might well enhance both the challenges with which we are confronted and our opportunities to react to them, leaving the question open as to whether the latter will always be sufficient to match the former. Is it possible, for instance, that geoengineering can intervene in the planetary system to the point that a new state of the planetary system would be reached in which high carbon dioxide concentration, radioactive pollution, and other unintended consequences of industrialization are no longer challenging problems but can be safely kept under control by novel technologies? Given the fact that macro-scale interventions in the Earth system are beyond anything that human engineering has achieved so far, and given the fact that there are still important gaps in our knowledge about our planetary system, we are certainly on the safer side to prioritize, at least for the time being and to the extent that it is possible at all, the preservation of our existing Earth system and damage control.

While the concept of Tawheed creates an equal basis for humans to use what is bestowed in nature, the concept of Khilafah instils stewardship towards the responsible use of natural and environmental resources without pushing planetary boundaries and causing precious loss of biodiversity.

If we consider ourselves and our societies as integral parts of the Earth system, and we take seriously the new properties that humans bring to the Earth system, then this requires a new kind of Earth system science. It has to integrate elements of the social sciences at least insofar as they help us to understand the role of human agency in planetary functioning. This could change the nature of Earth system models and the ways in which we use them. Instead of making predictions based on some set of assumptions about future human activities—as if we lived outside of the system—human activities and agency could become a more integral part of the models. Equally, Earth system considerations call for some rethinking of economics and a wider social discussion about what kind of future we want, which will engage the arts and the humanities as well as the social sciences.

When we increase a particular wave, such as the surge of theta that accompanies energy healing treatments, we increase our resonance with that planetary information signal. Planet and healer are entrained in an intense energetic union.

Dynamically speaking, a globular cluster is a big many-body problem. The two-body problem is easy. Newton solved it completely. Each body—the earth and the moon, for example—travels in a perfect ellipse around the system’s joint center of gravity. Add just one more gravitational object, however, and everything changes. The three-body problem is hard, and worse than hard. As Poincaré discovered, it is most often impossible. The orbits can be calculated numerically for a while, and with powerful computers they can be tracked for a long while before uncertainties begin to take over. But the equations cannot be solved analytically, which means that long-term questions about a three-body system cannot be answered. Is the solar system stable? It certainly appears to be, in the short term, but even today no one knows for sure that some planetary orbits could not become more and more eccentric until the planets fly off from the system forever.

At a Gates Foundation conference, former US president Barack Obama declared, “If you had to choose one moment in history in which to be born, and you didn’t know in advance whether you were going to be male or female, which country you were going to be from, what your status was, you’d choose right now.” He observes that the world has never been “healthier, or wealthier, or better educated, or in many ways more tolerant, or less violent, than it is today.” As a species, we’re moving far beyond the survival mentality of Caveman Brain. We’re leaving behind the standards of behavior that defined “normal” in the last century. A critical mass of people is using the human superpower—unique in evolutionary history—to reshape the tissue of their own brains. Bliss Brain is a wonderful-feeling state, but when practiced consistently, it leads to trait change, as neural pathways are repatterned in much healthier ways. This isn’t simply helping us feel better as individuals. It’s contributing to Jump Time in collective planetary evolution. Just as the Renaissance of the 1300s changed art, law, education, politics, religion, agriculture, science, and every other facet of human existence, the compassion produced by Bliss Brain transforms the material reality in which we live. This is the most exciting time in all of history to be alive. As we as a species jump to the next level of flourishing, we are unlocking creative potential the world has never known before. From changing our minds to changing our brains to changing our societies to solving global problems, we’re ushering in a completely different future for the planet.

Personally, he had always hoped for a less brutal ending. That humanity would not perish in the fires of war or in a planetary pandemic, but that it would slowly die out, as species have done since the dawn of all life. That it had simply gone downhill at some point and in the end there were simply not enough left to go on. This was probably a hope that would have inevitably been dashed from the very beginning. A hope that could not have come true at all, because even if mankind had taken this path, it would have been its very nature to go for each other's throats in the struggle for resources and survival. It was not without reason that all analysts had assumed at an earlier stage that warlike activity was inevitable.

Maybe — just maybe — the taboo breached by Velikovsky is this: We are not supposed to think about Planetary Catastrophes.

While the Citadel is building more and more nuclear missiles for the Military-Industrial Empire, it is apt to provoke anxiety or guilt or uneasy sensations in general to think about the subject of Planetary Catastrophe. The people who do think about that are likely to resign from the Citadel — or get expelled, like Dr. Oppenheimer — or even to march around with picket signs, making a nuisance of themselves.

Their aim was to speculate together on whether or not humanity was at the edge of a new planetary culture, one where the meaning of the universe would arise out of an interaction between cutting-edge mathematical science and more ancient mystical insights.

It might be a familiar progression, transpiring on many worlds—a planet, newly formed, placidly revolves around its star; life slowly forms; a kaleidoscopic procession of creatures evolves; intelligence emerges which, at least up to a point, confers enormous survival value; and then technology is invented. It dawns on them that there are such things as laws of Nature, that these laws can be revealed by experiment, and that knowledge of these laws can be made both to save and to take lives, both on unprecedented scales. Science, they recognize, grants immense powers. In a flash, they create world-altering contrivances. Some planetary civilizations see their way through, place limits on what may and what must not be done, and safely pass through the time of perils. Others, not so lucky or so prudent, perish.

Using the techniques, perspective, and language of planetary exploration, Sagan, Toon, and Pollack published a paper in Science in 1979, long before climate change became the issue it is now, entitled, “Anthropogenic Albedo Changes and the Earth’s Climate,” in which they discussed how changing land use practices by human societies (starting with fires set by hunter-gatherers, expanding with the Agricultural Revolution, and accelerating with the Industrial Revolution) had likely been influencing our planet’s climate for a very long time. Then,

Over billions of years, the planets exchange quite a bit of material. This is not speculation; this is fact. Planetary scientists have found pieces of Mars and the Moon here on Earth, and may have identified fragments of Venus and Mercury as well. Could life have made the journey from Earth to Mars, or vice versa? This idea has come to be called transpermia, sending life across interplanetary or even interstellar space.

We can now infer that at this initial cooldown of the universe across the critical temperature of 10^15 degrees, a mini planetary system might spontaneously appear in the hot empty space, just as water can form in ice and the Higgs field can form in the vacuum, always liberating energy in the process. I repeat, this is quite compatible with the energy balance. If the laws of nature permitted the existence of mass points, it would be energetically favorable to have two or more of them materializing simultaneously. They would pass from virtual to real existence.

Some unknown process was, it seemed, protecting CO2 from the anticipated destruction. This unexpected and strange stability presented a puzzle, which was solved by Michael McElroy at Harvard and Ron Prinn9 at MIT, two atmospheric scientists whose careers have straddled earth and planetary science. The answer, they found, lay in the highly reactive element chlorine. Even minuscule amounts of chlorine in such an environment wreak outsize havoc on oxygen compounds, catalyzing their destruction and reconstituting CO2. Modeling Venus in the early 1970s, McElroy and Prinn showed that you would not expect ozone to survive in an environment where stray chlorine atoms were running

I consider this tribalism the biggest problem of our time. I think it could undo millennia of movement toward global integration, unravel the social web just when technology has brought the prospect of a cohesive planetary community within reach. Given that the world is still loaded with nuclear weapons and that biotechnology is opening a Pandora’s box of new weaponry, you can imagine our tribalistic impulses ushering in a truly dark age.

I have suffered from exuberance, from being scattered, a lack of focus," he says. Conflicting enthusiasms caused him to switch scientific fields several times, from high-energy astrophysics to space physics, to particles and fields, and finally to planetary science.

Everything contains the spark of intelligence." From the smallest atom to the largest planetary system, each part of the world contains a form of consciousness or spark of intelligence. In the physical realm, consciousness exhibits as awareness, personality, energetic vibrations, or other characteristics that are in keeping with the particular physical form. Science and mysticism both suggest that consciousness is multidimensional, that it folds and unfolds into physical reality from unseen realms, and its expression in the physical world is only a part of its greater reality. This

Yet what is inescapably different about today is that never in the history of human life have so many people been so threatened by the changes our planet is undergoing; never have some of the planetary changes we are witnessing occurred so quickly, with so little time for adaptation; and never before has one species (us) been identified as the primary cause of such rapid, large-scale changes. It is this recognition of our vulnerability and our culpability, along with the fear that things are on the verge of getting much, much worse and there is little we can do about it, that lies behind the despair so prevalent in this age. We increasingly observe the temptation to such despair among scientists, environmentalists, those who work for development and aid agencies, and even portions of the general public. In our own work and ministry—and, indeed, as we did research for the science portions of this book—we have occasionally wrestled with such despair ourselves.

I am your enemy. Your enemy in this world. The whole universe is filled with mankind, and there are many planets out there where men forget they are a part of something larger, greater. And I am only one among many who have come to remind you planetary retrogrades of precisely that. You are not some indigenous species of this world. You are only one outreaching hand of mankind.

Anthropic Principle implies that when we look at the world around us, it would seem, at least at first blush, that the universe was somehow designed to support and nourish human life. This concept, which is very prevalent in the world of secular science and philosophy, didn’t originate with Christian scholars. But the evidence points so overwhelmingly toward this apparent design in the universe that it’s virtually undeniable by experts of every religious and nonreligious stripe. This has sent skeptics scurrying to find some sort of natural explanation for this apparently supernatural phenomenon. Here are a few of the hard facts:         Raise or lower the universe’s rate of expansion by even one part in a million, and it would have ruled out the possibility of life.       If the average distance between stars were any greater, planets like earth would not have been formed; any smaller, the planetary orbits necessary for life would not have occurred.       If the ratio of carbon to oxygen had been slightly different than it is, none of us would have been here to breathe the air.       Change the tilt of the earth’s axis slightly in one direction, and we would freeze. Change it the other direction, and we’d burn up.       Suppose the earth had been a bit closer or further from the sun, or just a little larger or smaller, or if it rotated at a speed any different from the one we’re spinning at right now. Given any of these changes, the resulting temperature variations would be completely fatal.   So the lesson we can draw from the Anthropic Principle is this: someone must have gone to a lot of effort to make things just right so that you and I could be here to enjoy life. In short, modern science points to the fact that we must really matter to God! Being the ever-obedient

As the shape of political geography and the architecture of planetary-scale computation as a whole, The Stack is an accidental megastructure, one that we are building both deliberately and unwittingly and is in turn building us in its own image.

We are made of stardust; why not take a few moments to look up at the family album? “Most of the time, when people walk outside at night and see the stars, it’s a big, pretty background, and it’s not quite real,” said the Caltech planetary scientist Michael Brown. “It doesn’t occur to them that the pattern they see in the sky repeats itself once a year, or to appreciate why that’s true.

In Latin, they run Sunday to Saturday as follows: Solis (sun/Sunday), Lunae (moon/Monday), Martis (Mars/Tuesday), Mercurii (Mercury/Wednesday), Iovis (Jupiter/Thursday), Veneris (Venus/Friday), and Saturni (Saturn/Saturday). As you can probably see, even in English, some of the planetary days remain: Sunday, Monday, and Saturday, still bearing the mark of sun, moon, and Saturn respectively in their names.

We can understand, they say, the necessity for concealing from the herd such secrets as the Vril, or the rock-destroying force, discovered by J. W. Keely, of Philadelphia, but we cannot understand how any danger could arise from the revelation of such a purely philosophical doctrine, for instance, as the evolution of the Planetary Chains. The danger was that such doctrines as the Planetary Chain, or the seven Races, at once give a clue to the seven-fold nature of man, for each principle is correlated to a plane, a planet, and a race, and the human principles are, on every plane, correlated to seven-fold occult forces, those of the higher planes being of tremendous power. So that any septenary division at once gives a clue to tremendous occult powers, the abuse of which would cause incalculable evil to humanity; a clue which is, perhaps, no clue to the present generation—especially to Westerns, protected as they are by their very blindness and ignorant materialistic disbelief in the occult—but a clue which would, nevertheless, have been very real in the early centuries of the Christian era to people fully convinced of the reality of Occultism, and entering a cycle of degradation which made them rife for abuse of occult powers and sorcery of the worst description.

Hometown Human Sonnet Everybody loves Rumi, I learnt his tongue, So I could pick up where he left off. Better than basking in borrowed light, Is to be an original light to the world. Everybody yells, viva la libertad, I learnt el idioma, so I could humanize the paradigm of revolution. Everybody loves Indus valley diversity, Annitiki munde anni shaashtralu nerchkunnanu, So I'm never out of spice for my humanitarianism. Everybody loves boasting about their culture, I spent years making all the cultures my own. Thus my strength was amplified a thousand folds, My sight expanded beyond all norms of vision known. Polyglots have more fun - there is no question. When science, poetry and polyglottery come together, That's the beginning of a paradigm bending revolution.

When science, poetry and polyglottery come together, that's the beginning of a paradigm bending revolution.

Self-diagnosis is a modern day healthcare crisis.

Dictatorships empower leaders, democracy empowers citizens.

Political Wildlife (The Sonnet) Easiest way to study animal behavior without going on safari, is to sit in front of a political debate. Political salesmen are ideal specimen of wildlife in their natural habitat. Listen to all the howling and screaming, Listen to all the brainless twatter. You shall learn a lot about the brutal wild, By watching the cannibals devour each other. In the world of political haftwits, Politics is just "left and right" affair. Where all left and right come to an end, There begins actual human welfare. Partisan world is a loveless world, where popular truth is but a lie. We don't need to lean left or right, it is time, human heart spreads human-wide.

Sonnet of Self-Diagnosis Superstition is the opium of the ill-informed public, Conspiracy is the opium of the over-informed public. With ten minutes of googling every flipping flat-earther feels and behaves like a reputable rocket scientist. Human mind has a prehistoric predisposition of paranoia, To counteract ignorance mind cooks up brilliant fantasies. Thus scientific expertise succumbs to facebook expertise, Facebook groups become authority on medical diagnosis. Self-diagnosis is a modern day healthcare crisis, Where the patient desperately tries to redeem control. In trying to oust the experts from science and medicine, Google certified society only heralds its own funeral. Take people out of healthcare, and healthcare is dead. Take doctors out of healthcare, and healthcare is damage.

To see the world as it is, first we gotta take off our western glasses. Look at the human world with human eyes, only then you'll fathom justice and progress.

We can’t read water in the same way as we can’t read data…Working with it makes us more aware of the distance between ourselves and the matter under consideration: it reminds us that we share this world rather than own it. Knowledge produced through the medium of the shifting surface of a bucket of water is made in cooperation with the world, rather than by conquering it.

Fact is a state of matter, truth is a state of mind. Matter makes the mind - sure - but to fathom the matter behind mind in its fullest intricacies will take us millennia more.

Fact is a state of matter, truth is a state of mind.

A scientist works to preserve life, Politician plays publicity with death.

We Are Turkiye (The Sonnet) Earthquake may shatter our houses, But it can never shatter our hearts. We shall rise from the rubble once again, We shall build back against nature's curse. But this time let us build back better, By putting our faith in science not politics. We could've averted such cataclysmic terror, Had we heeded the warnings of scientists. A scientist works to preserve life, Politician plays publicity with death. Given the choice between the two, Listen to the scientist without wait. Why do people have to die for us to open our eyes! If we still fail to heed reason, nothing will stop the funeral cries.

Why do people have to die for us to open our eyes! If we still fail to heed reason, nothing will stop the funeral cries.

Spiritually inclined rationalists may view this ongoing evolutionary process as one of ‘Theogenesis’... On a long billions-of-years evolutionary journey from the first primordial prokaryote to a Solaris-like planetary mind, we’re merely years away from this cardinal metamorphosis.