SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
The Earth is paradoxically
energy-starved, today, compared to the distant past. Three million potassium molecules may explode
in each human body every minute; and we, the best-fed third of humanity, may
convert excess food into fat every day.
But this energy regime is paltry, compared to the fierce ergs one
human-body-mass radiated 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.
Here, at the bottom of our sunlit gravity well, we wage ceaseless
battle against entropy. By the way, what
IS gravity? Its tireless distortion of
space-time mocks our energy conservation laws.
And this force is puny compared to the electromagnetic and strong
and weak forces we recognize. A small
magnet can counteract the gravitational attraction between a sewing needle and
the entire planet.
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 sewage. Petroleum probably serves some hidden geomorphic function. Like starving mosquitoes, we refuse to pay attention as we suck it dry. We may well be slapped flat as an unintended consequence of our gluttony.
Until humanity cruises outer space with full poise,
gravitational entropy traps us in a semi-closed energy system. For elaboration of this idea, see Entropy by Jeremy Rifkin with Ted Howard.
Ancient plants may have offered a much higher nutritional content than that of our super-inbred domestic varieties. Long ago, the most nutritious plants probably developed co-dependencies with consumer species and died off when their consumers did. Or some disaster wiped them out. An equivalent modern virus is threatening to wipe out the world’s entire banana crop. Other edible plants threatened by disease or genetic extinction in the wild include pomegranates, pistachios, watermelons, apples, pineapples, mangos, sweet potatoes, garlic, peanuts, soybeans, tomatoes, coffee, hard wheat and grapes; and no doubt many more not yet tabulated: enough to starve all humanity.
Microbes may not be the worst destroyer of edible crops and rare animals; it was probably man. The Romans harvested to extinction the aromatic cooking herb silphium, from Cyrene in North Africa; they drove several large animals to extinction for their murderous Coliseum games. The Chinese empire and others must have wrought equivalent damage, since China is now responsible for exterminating the African rhinoceros, Asian tigers, and the ocean’s sharks, for trivial medicinal and culinary purposes; Japan, for Red Tuna and other oceanic species. I could write a book on this topic alone, including every race and nation on the guilty list. Short of titanic reeducation and wisdom seizure, we are the ultimate, fatal virus.
Antediluvian
mastodons grew to twice the size of modern elephants; dinosaurs grew seven
times as large. As yet, no adequate
physio-nutritional economy has been proposed for them.
Ancient Berengia,
the land bridge now submerged between Siberia and Alaska, is said to have
harbored mega-fauna: mammoths and such-like critters, and human pioneers are
thought to have crossed it from Asia. No
one can model an ecology that would sustain such voracious wildlife
across a wind-scoured arctic wilderness rimmed with mile deep glaciers. You’d need those massive glaciers to lower
sea levels and reveal the land bridge.
Imagine those super beasts trooping across modern Antarctica, and man
using it to cross from Africa to South America, afoot.
A possible solution? More vigorous plants than ours fed these animals, plants resistant to high winds, intense cold and low precipitation. Pollen of unique genotypes may confirm this hypothesis. A nutritional revolution may lie unrecognized in the fossil record. Could it be hidden among our weeds and aquatic plants?
Some bearer of the spark of life, or ecology of such, survived the glaciation of the entire planet, perhaps numerous times: a cold beyond enduring; the slow, patient, life-sucking cold of final, welcome sleep; omnipresent; that sought out survivors for millennia and froze them to death without mercy. Likewise, firestorms of cosmic debris and deadly toxic volcanic gasses that smothered the entire planet. Earth, wind, water and fire, each in perfect proportion, from time to time, to snuff out all life. What would have survived?
Underwater volcanic vent ecologies, no doubt, and deeper
strata bacteria; but what else and how much more evolved? Takes a while to evolve a cow or a
philosopher from a bacteria.
Might it have
been a special type of Ginkgo Biloba?
Since the age of the dinosaurs, this lone plant has remained a living
fossil that survived every planetary catastrophe. It boasts its own plant phylum: Ginkgophyta. Apparently, its embryonic cells form
endosymbiotic bonds with green algae. It
also appears to be colonized by one of the most extreme-tolerant animals: water
bears. Fascinating!
In the meantime,
human overpopulation threatens to drown out civilization itself.
Economists
await with baited breath the latest industrial growth projections. They’re like quack doctors during the Middle
Ages, who expected their blood-drained patients to revive as their pulse
disappeared. Paradoxically, mankind’s
further progress demands deep population cuts and a corresponding shrinkage of
our technological footprint.
Defenders of
unrestrained growth, act like misers who quit their hoard reluctantly to go out
and extort more gold. Showing unmatched
hypocrisy, today’s empire builders equate rational population control with
imperialism and thus dismiss it.
Others defend with fanatical devotion every fetus’ right to turn into a
human being, then allocate many billions more to napalm, cluster bomb, torture
countless hard-up adults and cut short their life.
We may soon
discover renewable energy sources and fantastic new technologies. Nevertheless, we can’t remain so numerous and
expect to flourish on this planet. Human overpopulation
cancels progress; it encourages tyranny and cheapens human life―each
child less dear to us and each injustice more tempting.
An attractive new
biotechnology suggests itself: vertebrate photosynthesis. Land animals could grow as large as their
bones could support them under the tug of one gravity, but only with
supplemental nutrition. Their skin
cells might have been suffused with solar-powered chloroplasts in addition to
standard energy cell mitochondria. This
adaptation may have occurred in dinosaurs, since no other workable nutrition
regime has been proposed 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 heavy as a modern elephant, but
not a dinosaur seven times heavier.
Otherwise we’d see bigger elephants.
Let me remind you that mammoths were twice as heavy.
The chemistries
of plant chlorophyll and 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 might draw water, carbon dioxide, trace
gasses and minerals from its circulatory system, then dump oxygen and amino
acids back into it. Perhaps it’d
metabolize fats, vitamins and carbohydrates as well, by means of a plant-like
physiology.
All this
bio-hardware (and a lot more) may lie dormant in our ‘junk’ DNA. As Learners seek new food resources, this
alternative may offer some promise.
Autonomic photosynthetic nutrition (APN) could mitigate many
problems involved with transportation, agro-business, waste disposal and other
industrial processes.
Problems like
these stagger modern economies. When
famine strikes, these days, disaster specialist send in tons of food by ship,
aircraft and truck. Afterwards, they
witness hungry masses swell once again, cripple their ecology, gut local
economies and abandon their political autonomy to local tyrants. Instead, rescuers might inoculate disaster
victims with APN such that some of their nourishment would come to them
directly from the Sun through their skin.
If so, local self-sufficiency and bio-habitats could renew themselves
more dependably and weapon sectarians would have fewer opportunities to
flourish.
Adam and Eve’s
skin may have been suffused with chlorophyll-like pigments. Perhaps they occupied Eden the way we
would visit a park, admiring it but not needing to kill its animal life for
food. Could the Serpent have tempted
them with the Apple: a natural antidote to their photosynthetic gift? Could this have prompted the Fall?
Similarly,
wouldn't Moses’ forty-year Exodus have been more relaxed if his
followers had been orally inoculated with chlorophyll manna falling like dew on
the sands? Pure water would have
sufficed for the rest, gushing everywhere Moses struck his staff. Thereafter, the cleansing ordeal of the
desert could have infused the Jewish spirit.
We might find
more contentment and peace by reducing our impact on the Earth and assisting in
its self-repair. If Learners develop
APN, we may downsize and decentralize agro-corporations and food
processing industries: a project that could empty some fat wallets. Much thought should go into it, despite
frenzied opposition by powerful private interests. After all, the world economy revolves around
feeding hungry mouths—when it’s not too busy shutting them for good.
The so-called
‘Green Revolution’ has crippled crop diversity with a few super-inbreds overly dependent on agrochemical supplements,
voracious of the soil’s fertility and vulnerable to disease, pests and
bad weather. We are gorging
unsustainably on our children’s heritage.
Agribusiness corporations conduct a dangerous parody of ancient
cultivation methods that Learners outlines below.
With enormous
efficiency, Neolithic communities harvested every plant resource within
their gathering zones. Denser
communities of farmers worsened this problem as they replaced 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 in modern agricultural
research facilities.
Please note. We need not limit this scenario to
hominids. Social reptiles, insects and
other organized species may have manipulated their environment in like manner,
without leaving any recognizable traces 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; others build elaborate structures for self-protection,
internal climate and flood control.
Others annihilate and/or domesticate alien species and milk their
secretions for food and psychotropic drugs.
Ancient beasts, perhaps better fed, may have behaved even more wisely.
Scientists
have already confirmed the fact that there has been a lengthy global history of
meteor impacts, even though we haven’t cataloged one hundredth of them
yet. The first iron weapons were crafted
from retrieved meteorites. Those
scientists have just begun to verify Louis A. Frank’s contention (that he
published in The Big Splash), that
ice hydro bolides drop in
periodically from the heavens to top off our oceans.
In ancient times,
sea level was along continental shelves now submerged; that’s a sea-level variance
of a mere 100 meters or 300 feet. The
legends of Atlantis and the Deluge may commemorate much more frequent flood
catastrophes. Who knows what ancient
civilizations – human or otherwise – once existed along distant shores? Their cities would have dotted ancient river
lines like beads along a string,
well below current shorelines.
Unnavigable rapids would have blocked rivers flowing at modern
continental altitudes and blocked these river dwellers from direct exploitation
of the sea. Only pastoral nomads and
hunter-gatherers would have bothered to live so far upstream and remote from
the ocean’s bounty.
The
archaeological treasures locked in our museums could be the sorry remnants of
highland outcasts, totally eclipsed by splendid lowland civilizations now
drowned. Did opulent civilizations
thrive downstream of the paltry remnants we’ve dug up? Could their cities have dotted ancient
coastlines and river deltas, drowned since?
The likeliest
sites for these prehistoric urban civilizations would have been miles offshore
of the mouths of the Earth's great rivers, hundreds of feet underwater and
under at least dozens more of alluvial silt. None of those sites has been
investigated. Yet we dare deny the
existence of urban civilizations from the distant past, based on a body of
evidence from paltry, mountain goat herders.
See my poem, Global Atlantis.
Indeed, I was inspired in 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 had postulated that proto-humans achieved upright, bipedal locomotion along tropical beaches, tidelands and river deltas, long before human cities existed.
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 larder, and that watery medium may have been the least painful one
in which to twist, over hundreds of generations, the horizontal spine of
animals into the vertical one of humankind.
Plants with
superior nutritional and medicinal content (probably ancient seaweed
extremely difficult to isolate and identify today) may have improved the odds
for such societies, human or otherwise.
Thus, the disappeared super-foods I postulate.
Turning 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. Priests would have tended
exceptional plants in sacred garden plots and pools. Those might have required artificial
pollination and depended on civilized ingenuity to propagate. When inevitable military or natural disasters
overtook these peaceful societies, such fragile crops would have disappeared
under weeds; all record of them lost.
Indeed,
intelligent life may have evolved long before the deposition of the Paleolithic
remnants catalogued today. Long before,
the hills may have danced with living communities that could have thrived by
means alien to our way of thinking—except, perhaps, for the science fiction of Olaf Stapleton and one or two just as bold.
Recent research
into prions (preeons, proteins that
replicate some mysterious way without nucleic acid) may confirm the existence
of such self-replicating, pre-organic sands.
RNA is another likely candidate.
The periodic table of elements is a meager, two-dimensional schema of another that extends outwards in strange dimensions unexplored by Mendeleyev. Such trans-dimensional elements may have had properties transcending our scientific prejudices, but soon within the grasp of future Learners.
Special minerals, sacred sites and holy pools with
extraordinary properties: those myths are familiar to us. They may have incorporated such special
elements, comingling with more familiar compounds during their half-life
synchronicity. Magical stones, soils and
woods may have held exceptional chemical properties for brief spans of time, then become inert before our time.
As long as these
materials remained energetic, they would have been crafted into prized
utensils and worship artifacts. Fading
magical properties, however, would have pauperized their once-well-to-do
owners. This value-crash would have
induced a military collapse—much the way the evaporation of our petroleum
reserves will. In the end, militant
vandals ransacked venerated stones, burned wooden carvings and smashed sacred
pottery. They may have carved perverse
idols for themselves, probably as weapon decorations and personal
talismans. Later on, these would have
been smashed as ritual outcomes of combat, buried as funerary regalia or
scattered through neglect.
As those rare
earths grew weaker, they would have formed corrupt potions of lesser
potency. Ancient magic formulas would
have listed insect body parts and internal organs of specific animals
because they might have concentrated the remnants of these elements, the way
birds concentrated DDT in their internal organs. These reduced in turn to muddy,
indistinguishable contaminants: dust to dust.
We may have forgotten the best medicinal herbs and food crops, as well as the purpose of magical trinkets, amulets, statues and geographic features infused with mysterious attributes. Monumental sacred centers built with microscopically polished stone blocks of enormous mass, ground so flat they needed no mortar to fit together; Cyclopean walls at ancient city sites, mound-building projects that took generations, giant pyramids planted above ground or below the sea (and perhaps even on Mars?); sculpted busts, jars, orbs, stele and menhirs; ancient drawings of exceptional quality and/or enormous size, tucked deep underground or only visible from high above barren desert plains ... (Ooparts
).But recall the words of Mencius.
Humanity and Duty must always trump mere profit.