Are We in the "End Times"? (Revelations)

[bodhimind]

The monetary system is a deadly cancer that will destroy humanity one day, if this goes on. If global warming doesn't, then I wouldn't be surprised that nuclear warheads will. It is saddening...

[Alexander]

I agree, bodhimind, the issue I am most worried about is wealth distribution. In our time, inequality is going to be aggravated by technological developments in computers and robotics. Not even the part-time work people can get now will be available, as businesses find more ways to cut costs. Ultimately, I think everyone will need a guaranteed minimum income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income

Unfortunately, at least in the United States, something like this seems far off from happening.

The French economist Thomas Piketty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty

[Jhanananda]

I agree with both of you.  The point of this thread is for people to look at impermanence in another way.  And, as said on another thread, this is not about instilling fear, but learning to develop survival skills, and learning to let go at ever deeper levels.

[Zack]

I was once an avid reader of articles on peak oil and all sorts of doom and gloom, and I support all those out there working to make a difference on those fronts, but it seems time and energy are just as well spent stopping, living a simple life, and working to undo human compulsion and blindness, in ourselves if nothing else.

A description I've always liked:

In wonderful savageness live the nation of the Fenni, and in beastly poverty, destitute of arms, of horses, and of homes; their food, the common herbs; their apparel, skins; their bed, the earth; their only hope in their arrows, which for want of iron they point with bones. Their common support they have from the chase, women as well as men; for with these the former wander up and down, and crave a portion of the prey. Nor other shelter have they even for their babes, against the violence of tempests and ravening beasts, than to cover them with the branches of trees twisted together; this a reception for the old men, and hither resort the young. Such a condition they judge more happy than the painful occupation of cultivating the ground, than the labour of rearing houses, than the agitations of hope and fear attending the defense of their own property or the seizing that of others. Secure against the designs of men, secure against the malignity of the Gods, they have accomplished a thing of infinite difficulty; that to them nothing remains even to be wished.

[Cal]

I agree with both of you.  The point of this thread is for people to look at impermanence in another way.  And, as said on another thread, this is not about instilling fear, but learning to develop survival skills, and learning to let go at ever deeper levels.

4 Noble truths? Wheres Michel??

[Jhanananda]

I was once an avid reader of articles on peak oil and all sorts of doom and gloom, and I support all those out there working to make a difference on those fronts, but it seems time and energy are just as well spent stopping, living a simple life, and working to undo human compulsion and blindness, in ourselves if nothing else.

I completely agree.

A description I've always liked:

In wonderful savageness live the nation of the Fenni, and in beastly poverty, destitute of arms, of horses, and of homes; their food, the common herbs; their apparel, skins; their bed, the earth; their only hope in their arrows, which for want of iron they point with bones. Their common support they have from the chase, women as well as men; for with these the former wander up and down, and crave a portion of the prey. Nor other shelter have they even for their babes, against the violence of tempests and ravening beasts, than to cover them with the branches of trees twisted together; this a reception for the old men, and hither resort the young. Such a condition they judge more happy than the painful occupation of cultivating the ground, than the labour of rearing houses, than the agitations of hope and fear attending the defense of their own property or the seizing that of others. Secure against the designs of men, secure against the malignity of the Gods, they have accomplished a thing of infinite difficulty; that to them nothing remains even to be wished.

This is a good description of the hunter-gather, which is the lifestyle that is most sustainable, and is our true ecological niche.  It is what the mystic often ends up living, if he or she is not martyred first.

4 Noble truths? Wheres Michel??

Let us hope that he is well.  I have read Michel state that he prefers not to spend much time on the web, so that he can spend more time meditating and keeping his mind still.

[Jhanananda]

This article, The Carolina Bays and the Destruction of North America, is an excellent article that does the necessary research to demonstrate the Younger Dryas impact occurred and what its geological effect was.

Impact craters, which are known as the The Carolina Bays.

The Carolina Bays point to the site of the major impact, for which the Carolina Bays were secondary impacts.

[Cal]

This was an interesting read. A meteor shovels out a large amount of ice, throws it into the atmosphere, it melts and creates a literal rain of death. It makes sense though. Like throwing a ball very hard into a water puddle, the shape in which the droplets land would indicate the trajectory they followed. I wonder if scientists might find evidence of such a meteor in the area of the great lakes?

[Jhanananda]

Well, the secondary impacts, which the Carolina Bays represent need not be caused by ejected ice, but by ejected soil and rock.  Regarding your question about a primary impact point in the great lakes, apparently it has not yet been identified, but after this article, I am quite sure will inspre geologists to be looking in the direction of the Great Lakes for such a primary impactor.

This discussion brought my attention to Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.

The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, also known as the Clovis comet hypothesis, is one of the competing scientific explanations for the onset of the Younger Dryas cold period after the last glacial period. The hypothesis, which scientists continue to debate, proposes that the climate of that time was cooled by the impact or air burst of one or more comets.[1][2][3]

The general hypothesis states that about 12,900 BP calibrated (10,900 14C uncalibrated) years ago, air burst(s) or impact(s) from a near-Earth object(s) set areas of the North American continent on fire, disrupted climate and caused the Quaternary extinction event in North America. This resulted in the extinction of most of the megafauna, and the rapid demise of the North American Clovis culture.[4] The Younger Dryas ice age lasted for about 1,200 years before the climate warmed again. These events are also seen as part of the Holocene extinction phenomenon.

One or more big explosions may have occurred above or possibly on the Laurentide Ice Sheet in the region of the Great Lakes. Though no major impact crater has been identified, the proponents suggest that it would be physically possible for such an air burst to have been similar to but orders of magnitude larger than the Tunguska event of 1908.[5][6] The hypothesis proposed that animal and human life in North America not directly killed by the blast or the resulting wildfires would have suffered due to the disrupted ecologic relationships affecting the continent.

The impact of this postulated event (or series of events) goes beyond the Americas. A number of studies document this impact around the world. For example, James Wittke et al. document deposition of impact spherules 12,800 years ago across four continents, including Europe and the Middle East.[7]

Another excellent page on impacts is found in a National Geographic article Asteroid Impacts: 10 Biggest Known Hits.

The asteroid known as 2012 DA14 will narrowly miss Earth this Friday, the closest asteroid flyby on record. But the planet has not always been so lucky.

The Chelyabinsk meteor occurred on the same day as 2012 DA14 narrowly miss Earth.

A bolide (French from the Greek βολίς bolis, "missile" or "to flash"[2][3]) is an extremely bright meteor that explodes in the atmosphere. In astronomy, it refers to a fireball approximately as bright as the full moon, and it is generally considered a synonym of a fireball. In geology a bolide is a very large impactor.

[Jhanananda]

The Small Agency Trying to Prevent Catastrophic Solar Storms
Written by Rachel Pick
November 23, 2015 // 02:16 PM EST

In case you weren’t worried about enough things already, there’s a lurking threat to the stability of modern civilization that you may have never even considered: solar storms, which can disrupt the Earth’s geomagnetic field and cause massive power outages...

A geomagnetic storm, or a disruption of the Earth’s magnetic field, is caused by coronal mass ejections from the Sun’s surface. Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are a release of charged gas plasma, usually caused by solar flares.

In order to affect electrical systems on Earth, a coronal mass ejection has to be A) pointed at the Earth and B) enormously powerful, but it’s happened before. Hypothetically, a large enough CME could cause a geomagnetic storm large enough to knock out power for months or more.

The last time a massive geomagnetic storm hit Earth was in 1859. Called the Carrington Event, it damaged the growing telegraph network and started fires. A similar storm in the present day would be infinitely more disastrous, because of our complete dependence on electricity. Storms in 1989 and 2003 damaged power grids in Quebec, South Africa, Sweden, and Scotland—these storms being much smaller than the one that hit in 1859.

So although it might sound a little out there on paper, it’s not at all absurd that the government would want to look into possible methods of monitoring and controlling the threat posed by geomagnetic storms. In fact, some experts on the subject think we’re not doing nearly enough as it stands: A truly devastating solar storm could cause damage that would take 10 years to repair at a cost of $10 trillion, Aviation Week reported...

The problem is, the scientific community does not know what causes the solar flares.  It is my hypothesis that they solar flares are caused by impacts of small objects on the sun, such as asteroids and comets.  This means we need to increase the resolution and frequency of our observation platforms of the sun.

There is an additional problem, and that is the SOHO observatory only sees oxygen, which means it is very good at observing comets, but not asteroids, which do not have volatiles. While LASCO can see asteroids, it is too low resolution to see objects smaller than several kilometers in diameter.  It is part of my hypothesis that the objects that are causing solar flares might very well be smaller than 1 kilometer in diameter.

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Files re: Risks of Geomagnetic Storms to the Nation, 2012-2015

Coronal Mass Ejections (NASA)

Major Solar Event Could Devastate Power Grid

[Cal]

A prolonged power outage would be a big hit to the US for sure. This has me wondering about nuclear power plants. I spent some years working for the government in the tear-down and buttoning up of the Hanford site. I had to take like 6 months of training before we were ever allowed into the field. In this training they talked about processes and criticalities of Nulcear facilities. Part of the process is the heating and cooling of uranium rods. If a place like this was to lose power, there could be some major problems to deal with. These could vary from explosions, meltdowns, but most importantly radiological release. A radiological release would be one of the worst ways to go, imho.

I might add that Energy Northwest, the closest nuclear power plant to me (like 10 miles away) has a circuit of generators. I rebuilt one during an outage a few years back. So I guess Id be curious what a CME is capable of? Would the damage be to the actual power stations themselves, or to the distribution. I would probably guess it would be to the power lines etc, if the outcome would take so long to fix.

[Jhanananda]

You make good points, Cal.  Yes, a massive CME has in the past brought down the grid, and yes, most, if not all, reactors, have a bank of generators on hand to keep the reactor running safely under various disaster situations.

However, I was just pondering this issue a few days ago.  What occurred to me is nuclear reactor fuel is highly electromagnetically active, which requires nuclear workers to have to ware conductive clothing to protect themselves from the massive EMF fields inside the nuclear reactor.  It occurred to me that a massive CME might just over-stimulate the fuel rods, and possibly cause them to go critical, or melt-down.

[Jhanananda]

A series of articles have been published in the last 10 years that provide proof, as well as a causal agent, for catastrophic global extinctions and disruptions.  It comes from finding Fe60, an isotope of iron, both in sea floor cores, and soil samples from the moon, which both date to about 2.6 million years ago.

It is understood by scientists that Fe60 is produced during the super nova of a massive Star.  It just so happens that the massive star that went super nova and deposited Fe60 on our ocean floors and the moon's surface about 2.6 million years ago has been identified.  It produced a superbubble of galactic star dust, which our solar system is within.  This suggests that at some point in the past there would have been a great deal of debris from this super nova even, which would have overtaken us, and heavily bombarded this planet, as well as the entire solar system.

Below is a photo of the remnant super nova, and below that are links to articles on the event, as well as the Fe60 isotope.

Isotopes of iron
Naturally occurring iron (Fe) consists of four isotopes: 5.845% of 54Fe (possibly radioactive with a half-life over 3.1×1022 years), 91.754% of 56Fe, 2.119% of 57Fe and 0.282% of 58Fe. There are 24 known radioactive isotopes and their half-lives are shown below. See Brookhaven National Laboratory Interactive Table of Nuclides for a more accurate reading.

Much of the past work on measuring the isotopic composition of Fe has centered on determining 60Fe variations due to processes accompanying nucleosynthesis (i.e., meteorite studies) and ore formation. In the last decade however, advances in mass spectrometry technology have allowed the detection and quantification of minute, naturally occurring variations in the ratios of the stable isotopes of iron. Much of this work has been driven by the Earth and planetary science communities, although applications to biological and industrial systems are beginning to emerge.[1]

Relative atomic mass: 55.845(2).

Iron-60

Iron-60 is an iron isotope with a half-life of 2.6 million years,[4][5] but was thought until 2009 to have a half-life of 1.5 million years. It undergoes beta decay to cobalt-60. Traces of Iron 60 have been found in Lunar samples.

In phases of the meteorites Semarkona and Chervony Kut a correlation between the concentration of 60Ni, the granddaughter isotope of 60Fe, and the abundance of the stable iron isotopes could be found, which is evidence for the existence of 60Fe at the time of formation of the solar system. Possibly the energy released by the decay of 60Fe contributed, together with the energy released by decay of the radionuclide 26Al, to the remelting and differentiation of asteroids after their formation 4.6 billion years ago. The abundance of 60Ni present in extraterrestrial material may also provide further insight into the origin of the solar system and its early history.

The stuff of stars found in lunar soil from Apollo missions

"Supernova iron discovered on Earth’s Moon - The Hindu"

Radioactive Al26 and Fe60 in the Milky Way: implications of the RHESSI detection of Fe60

Supernova left its mark in ancient bacteria

This supernova blast was so close, it littered the ocean floor with radioactive dust

Giant Space 'Superbubble' Spawned by Exploding Stars

Huge "Superbubble" of Gas Blowing Out of Milky Way

Nearby Supernova Explosions May Have Affected Human Evolution

[Naman]

I have come across this group of people who have predicted ww3. Here is the link :

http://www.spiritualresearchfoundation.org/spiritual-research/global-issues/world-war-3-predictions/

I have even met them personally, they seem authentic.

[Jhanananda]

So far most "predictions" of global disasters, like WW3, or an extinction level impact, have been wrong every time.  As a scientist with an astronomy background I find it reasonable to consider that there has to be an astronomical explanation for the cyclic nature of the extinction level impact.  For instance there is growing evidence that the end of the last ice age was due to an impact event.  With recent observations of long-period, sub-planetary objects that are on the size of large moons, with orbital periods of about 13000 years, suggests to me a causal relationship to the cyclic nature of the extinction.