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There May Be More To Things Than We Have Surmised

by

Ian Beardsley

© March 04, 2016

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An Unlikely Event.

Extraordinarily, I did the unlikely, when I strolled into an unlikely used bookstore, at an unlikely time 25 years ago or so, and went to an unlikely section where I stumbled across an unlikely used book, by an unlikely astronomer, bought it, and found it 25 years later or so, decided to read it, and stumbled upon an unlikely idea. It was the idea of Sir Fred Hoyle, renowned British astronomer, in his book Of Men and Galaxies. It is a collection of transcribed lectures given by him at The University of Washington in the Northwest, the last lecture titled “Extrapolations into the Future. In it he likens Humans to be going down a raging river, with no idea what lay at the next turn, not knowing what to do to navigate it safely, and, suggests, if we could only access what must exist, a galactic encyclopedia that surely exists somewhere in the Universe, that chronicles the data of everything older, more advanced civilizations know, after having already navigated the same river. An galactic encyclopedia that has what we need to know. Indeed, he says, surely we are all going down the same river because, for example, a planet that is, for it to be stable enough to harbor life, it can not have much more oil beneath its surface than we do, because without enough solid, beneath, to hold up the outer crust, the planet would eventually collapse. Because of this, Hoyle says we have been provided, by Natural Forces unbeknownst to us, enough oil to provide us with an amount of oil that will supply us with the time to figure out how to develop nuclear energy as a source of energy. He says this is evidenced by the fact that as we are running out of oil we are figuring out nuclear energy. It would seem now, as I look at the idea some thirty years after the lecture, I realize we are now on the verge of developing nuclear fusion as nuclear energy, which is more important than the nuclear fission that we already know how to do, because it is a clean process, the same one done by the Sun.

Now years later, humans are suffering from global warming due to burning that same oil, but it dawns on me that we are also running out of oil. So, I figure the same Unknown Natural Forces that Hoyle spoke of, gave us yes, enough oil to buy us the time to figure out how to do fusion for our energy needs, and enough oil to start global warming, but not enough to keep it going, because these natural forces knew some humans would be stupid enough to keep burning it, even as the planet warms. So I am thinking, once we run out of oil, we won’t be able to burn it and put any more heat retaining CO2 into the atmosphere than is already there causing problems, and nature will begin cleaning what we have already put there. And then, after that, we won’t be able to burn any more of it. In other words, These unknown natural forces have safe guarded us against extinction! It is just a theory, but it also seems obvious we still have to work hard and try to figure out how, nonetheless, to protect this planet, which is our only support system until we can develop a more sophisticated technology allowing us to make space habitable for us.

Now 25 years later I have taken it upon myself to learn the rudiments of climate science and computer programming. The result has been my paper “planetary science” and source code in three different languages that model climate for any planet. In the course of this undertaking, I learned while we can model climate to a certain degree, there are some things in the history of the earth climate we do not understand, like 5 billion years ago the sun was 30% cooler than it is now and by everything we know about physics, the planet should have been, due to that, a ball of ice, yet we know from geologic record that, at that time, water existed on earth in its liquid form, which was quite necessary for life to exist! This is commonly referred to as: “The Faint Young Star Paradox”. I ask, in light of this, if its explanation is in Hoyle’s Unknown Natural Force. We sure further look at while CO2 causes global warming, there are actually other forces that can regardless cast us into an ice age. For the past three million years,

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perturbations in the earth’s orbit have caused ice ages on a period of 20,000 to 100,000 years. The end of the last one was about 18,000 years ago, around the time when we invented agriculture. Some scientists say coming out of this glacial was responsible for humans forming civilizations with agriculture, math, and government. That warm weather allowed us to stop wandering and hunting, and to settle down and do agriculture.

Just as unlikely as the day that I discovered the book by Hoyle, my younger brother Kurt stumbled upon an old Science Fiction book by Isaac Asimov, that was written in the 50’s called “The Currents of Space”. Upon reading it I learned of why humans do stupid things that can result in their extinction:

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Alas, while I am learning climate science and making computer simulations of climate, I am reading a book my older brother, Erik, gave me. As he is an agricultural scientist, it is called “Western Fertilizer Handbook”. I highly recommend it, and find it goes hand in hand with my paper “Planetary Science”.