Zircon Quotes

He remembered meeting her in the park, and how he had thought her conversation seemed like a careless spray of diamonds on the green felt of a billiard table. Since yesterday afternoon it had seemed more like the glitter of zircons, near-perfect pastes that were, after all, only pastes.

zircon necklace of his mothers as they caught the light. "If

The upshot of it, however, was that the machine, by bombarding a sample of rock with streams of charged atoms, is able to detect subtle differences in the amounts of lead and uranium in the zircon samples, by which means the age of rocks can be accurately adduced.

The name of the book was The Big Board. He got a few paragraphs into it, and then he realized that he had read it before—years ago, in the veterans’ hospital. It was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212.

What treasures they left behind! A gorgeous set of yellow topaz crystals on a gray matrix. A great pink hunk of beryl like a crystallized brain. A violet column of tourmaline from Madagascar that looks so rich he cannot resist the urge to stroke it. Bournonite; apatite on muscovite; natural zircon in a spray of colors; dozens more minerals he cannot name.

Perhaps we are all living inside a giant computer simulation, Matrix-style. That would contradict all our national, religious and ideological stories. But our mental experiences would still be real. If it turns out that human history is an elaborate simulation run on a super-computer by rat scientists from the planet Zircon, that would be rather embarrassing for Karl Marx and the Islamic State. But these rat scientists would still have to answer for the Armenian genocide and for Auschwitz. How did they get that one past the Zircon University’s ethics committee? Even if the gas chambers were just electric signals in silicon chips, the experiences of pain, fear and despair were not one iota less excruciating for that. Pain is pain, fear is fear, and love is love – even in the matrix. It doesn’t matter if the fear you feel is inspired by a collection of atoms in the outside world or by electrical signals manipulated by a computer. The fear is still real. So if you want to explore the reality of your mind, you can do that inside the matrix as well as outside it.

He smiled vaguely. Her wit seemed forced this morning, as it had all yesterday afternoon. He remembered meeting her in the park, and how he had thought her conversation seemed like a careless spray of diamonds on the green felt of a billiard table. Since yesterday afternoon it had seemed more like the glitter of zircons, near-perfect pastes that were, after all, only pastes.

The number of victims of robbers, highwaymen, rapers, gangsters and other criminals at any period of history is negligible compared to the massive numbers of those cheerfully slain in the name of the true religion, just policy, or correct ideology. Heretics were tortured and burnt not in anger but in sorrow , for the good of their immortal souls. Tribal warfare was waged in the purported interest of the tribe, not of the individual. Wars of religion were fought to decide some fine point in theology or semantics. Wars of succession, dynastic wars, national wars, civil wars, were fought to decide issues equally remote from the personal self-interest of the combatants. The Communist purges, as the word 'purge' indicates, were understood as operations of social hygiene, to prepare mankind for the golden age of the classless society. The gas chambers and crematoria worked for the advent of a different version of the millennium. Heinrich Eichmann (as Hannah Ahrendt, reporting on his trial, has pointed out) was not a monster or a sadist, but a conscientious bureaucrat, who considered it his duty to carry out his orders and believed in obedience as the supreme virtue; far from being a sadist, he felt physically sick on the only occasion when he watched the Zircon gas at work.

One find in Western Australia turned up zircon crystals dated to 4.4 billion years ago, just a couple of hundred million years after the earth and the solar system formed. By analyzing their detailed composition, researchers have suggested that ancient conditions may have been far more agreeable than previously thought. Early earth may have been a relatively calm water world, with small landmasses dotting a surface mostly covered by ocean.15 That’s not to say that earth’s history didn’t have its moments of flaming drama. Roughly fifty to one hundred million years after its birth, earth likely collided with a Mars-sized planet called Theia, which would have vaporized the earth’s crust, obliterated Theia, and blown a cloud of dust and gas thousands of kilometers into space. In time, that cloud would have clumped up gravitationally to form the moon, one of the larger planetary satellites in the solar system and a nightly reminder of that violent encounter. Another reminder is provided by the seasons. We experience hot summers and cold winters because earth’s tilted axis affects the angle of incoming sunlight, with summer being a period of direct rays and winter being a period of oblique ones. The smashup with Theia is the likely cause of earth’s cant. And though less sensational than a planetary collision, both the earth and the moon endured periods of significant pummelings by smaller meteors. The moon’s lack of eroding winds and its static crust have preserved the scars but earth’s thrashing, less visible now, was just as severe. Some early impacts may have partially or even fully vaporized all water on earth’s surface. Despite that, the zircon archives provide evidence that within a few hundred million years of its formation, earth may have cooled sufficiently for atmospheric steam to rain down, fill the oceans, and yield a terrain not all that dissimilar from the earth we now know. At least, that’s one conclusion reached by reading the crystals.

Granite is composed of feldspar and quartz, along with a collection of other minor accessory minerals: zircon, apatite, magnetite, ilmenite, and sphene.

Based on radiometric dating of zircon crystal found in Western Australia scientists put the age of the earth at 4.4 billion years, give or take a few million years. Knowing man, Homo sapiens came on earth sometime between 100 to 250 thousand years ago (give or take a few tens of thousands of years)! This fact is brought home with amazing resonance by psychologist Robert Ornstein and his co-author Paul Ehrlich in their book New World New Mind: “Suppose the earth’s history was charted on a single calendar year, with Jan. 1 representing the origin of the Earth and midnight December 31 the present. Then each day of the earths ‘year’ would represent 12 million years of actual history. On that scale the first form of life, a simple bacterium, would arise sometime in February. More complex forms, however, come much later; the first fishes appear around November 20. The dinosaurs arrive around December 10 and disappear on Christmas Day. The first of our ancestors recognizable as human would not show up until the afternoon of December 31. Homo sapiens—our species—would emerge around 11:45 P.M. All that has occurred in recorded history would occur in the final minute of the year.” As

the revelations about this actual (sort of) Lemuria are a reminder of how much wonder there is left in the natural world, how much we’re still discovering about our planet, and how much mystery remains in the actual landscape and soil. For many of us, this is enough: the wonders of the natural world fascinate and inspire in a myriad of ways. Many more, though, will look and turn away disappointed, finding no proof of utopia or God in fragments of zircon. The main and central difference hinges on the question of what you expect out of the natural world: do you see it as a wondrous and strange thing unto itself, or do you expect it to reveal humanity back to itself? The problem with geologic samples is that the place revealed by them has no direct symbolic value. The crime of mainstream science, for too many, is the revelation that the world owes us nothing. The need for imagined marginal worlds populated with monsters and enlightened humans is a deep-seated one that’s going to persist, but it’s at odds with the world of strange wonder that’s all around us. Like Atlantis, the geologic underpinnings of Lemuria have always been beside the point. Lemuria is a perpetual edgeworld—a place to exist in the mind and on the map but never to be glimpsed or realized. It’s a vast unknown onto which you can project your own theories, biases, beliefs, anxieties, and hopes—all without fear that you’ll ever have to provide evidence one way or another. Lemuria, if it exists at all, exists now in my pocket, in a small triangle of wood polished with belief.

There was the Amber line. Those whose power resonated closest with the sun and land. They were gentle and nourishing people, whose healing abilities were unparalleled. The Charoite were the seers. Wise men and women who saw more than most eyes could ever see, and warned of a great divide. Despite their wisdom, they were laughed at and their musings disregarded. The Garnet line had imaginations unlike any other. They used their ability to manifest anything and everything they could imagine into real objects that could be touched, tasted, and wielded, making them the wealthiest of the eight. Kunzite were a line of lovers, not fighters, but were also one of the most dangerous. As they could make even the most hated of enemies, drop to their knees and beg for the affection of those they’d sworn to destroy. Their power over the heart, both revered and feared. Malachite were the sworn protectors of all. They had physical strengths unmatched by any others and a drive that ensured they always had a hand in any decision. Their greatest flaw was that they grew vain and unsatisfied with having the same status as everyone else. They wanted complete sovereignty. The Mookaites could be found howling under a full moon or diving deep within the waters, their bodies adapting gills easily, while Quartz could manipulate the emotions of those around them, causing even the most headstrong to succumb to their whims. And the eighth family, the Zircon line, was said to be the weakest; their only strength that of bolstering the energy of those around them. Something the land already did tenfold.