God Created the World ?

God Created the World ?

Surrounding the blue-white star in its equatorial plane was a vast ring of orbiting debris – rocks and ice, metals and organics – reddish at the periphery and bluish closer to the star. The world-sized polyhedron plummeted through a gap in the rings and emerged out the other side. In the ring plane, it had been intermittently shadowed by icy boulders and tumbling mountains.

But now, carried along its trajectory toward a point above the opposite pole of the star, the sunlight gleamed off its millions of bowl-shaped appendages. If you looked very carefully you might have seen one of them make a slight pointing adjustment. You would not have seen the burst of radio waves washing out from it into the depths of space.

There is a way on high, conspicuous in the clear heavens, called the Milky Way, brilliant with its own brightness. By it the gods go to the dwelling of the great Thunderer and his royal abode… Here the mighty and famous inhabitants of heaven have their homes. This is the region which I might make bold to call the Palatine Way of the Great Sky (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Rome, first century).

If God created the world, where was She before the creation?… The Mahuparana (The Great Legend), Jinasena (India, ninth century). Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Some foolish men declare that a Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected.

If God created the world, where was He before the creation?…

How could God have made the world without any row material? If you say He made this first and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression…

Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end. An it is based on the principles.

Fossil Fuels

Fossil Fuels

There are mighty weather systems on the Earth – and in the high atmosphere of Venus and on Jupiter. There are sandstorms on the Earth and on Mars, lightning on Jupiter and Venus and Earth. Volcanoes inject debris into the atmospheres of the Earth and Io. Internal geological processes slowly deform the surfaces of Venus, Mars, Ganymede and Europe, as well as Earth. Glaciers, proverbial for their slowness, produce major reworkings of landscapes on the Earth and probably also on Mars. These processes need not be constant in time. Most of Europe was once covered with ice. A few millions years ago, the present site of the city of Chicago was buried under three kilometers of frost. On Mars and elsewhere in the Solar system, we see features that could not be produced today, landscapes carved hundreds of millions or billions of years ago when the planetary climate was probably very different.

There is an additional factor that can alter the landscape and the climate of Earth: intelligent life, able to make major environmental changes. Like Venus, the Earth also has a greenhouse effect due to its carbon dioxide and water vapor. The global temperature would be below the freezing point of water.

There is an additional factor that can alter the landscape and the climate of Earth: intelligent life. Image: © Elena

The principal energy sources of our present industrial civilization are the so-called fossil fuels. We burn wood and oil, coal and natural gas, and, in the process, release waste gases, principally CO2, into the air. Consequently, the carbon dioxide content of the Earth ‘s atmosphere is increasing dramatically. The possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect suggests that we have to be careful: Even a one- or two- degree rise in the global temperature can have catastrophic consequences. In the burning of coal and oil and gasoline, we are also putting acid into the atmosphere. Like Venus, our stratosphere even now has a substantial mist of tiny sulfuric acid droplets. Our major cities are polluted with noxious molecules. We do not understand the long-term effects of our course of action.

But we have also been perturbing the climate in the opposite sense. For hundreds of thousands of years human beings have been burning and cutting down forests and encouraging domestic animals to graze on and destroy grasslands. Slash-and-burn agriculture, industrial tropical deforestation and overgrazing are rampant today. But forests are darker than grasslands, and grasslands are darker than deserts. As a consequence, the amount of sunlight that is absorbed by the ground has been declining, and by changes in the land use are lowering the surface temperature of our planet.

We, People of Venus…

We, People of Venus…

It now seems reasonably clear that the high surface temperature on Venus comes about through a massive greenhouse effect. Sunlight passes through the atmosphere and clouds of Venus, which are semi-transparent to visible light, and reaches the surface. The surface being heated endeavors to radiate back into space. But because Venus is much cooler than the Sun, it emits radiation chiefly in the infrared rather than the visible region of the spectrum. However, the carbon dioxide and water vapor in the Venus atmosphere are almost perfectly opaque to infrared radiation, the heat of the Sun is efficiently trapped, and the surface temperature rises – until the little amount of infrared radiation that trickles out of this massive atmosphere just balances the sunlight absorbed in the lower atmosphere and surface.

In the stifling landscape of Venus, there is not likely to be anything alive, even creatures very different from us. Organic and other conceivable biological molecules would simply fall to pieces. But, as an indulgence, let us imagine that intelligent life once evolved on such a planet. Would it then invent science? The development of science on Earth was spurred fundamentally by observations of the regularities of the stars and planets. But Venus is completely cloud covered. The night is pleasingly long – about 59 Earth days long – but nothing of the astronomical universe would be visible if you looked up into the night sky of Venus. Even the Sun would be invisible in the daytime; its light would be scattered and diffused over the whole sky – just as scuba divers see only a uniform enveloping radiance beneath the sea. If a radio telescope were built on Venus, it could detect the Sun, the Earth and other distant objects. If astrophysics developed, the existence of stars could eventually be deduced from the principles of physics, but they would be theoretical constructs only.

I sometimes wonder what their reaction would be if intelligent beings on Venus one day learned to fly, to sail in the dense air, to penetrate the mysterious cloud veil 45 kilometers above them and eventually to emerge out the top of the clouds, to look up and for the first time witness that glorious universe of Sun, and planets, and stars. Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

At the present time there is still a little uncertainty about the abundance of water vapor on Venus. The gas chromatograph on the Pioneer Venus entry probes gave an abundance of water in the lower atmosphere of a few tenths of a percent. On the other hand, infrared measurements by the Soviet entry vehicles, Venera 11 and 12, gave an abundance of about a hundredth of a percent. If the former value applies, then carbon dioxide and water vapor alone are adequate to seal inn almost all the heat radiation from the surface and keep the Venus ground temperature at about 480C. If the latter number applies – and my guess is that it is the more reliable estimate – then carbon dioxide and water vapor alone are adequate to keep the surface temperature only at about 380C, and some other atmospheric constituent is necessary to close the remaining infrared frequency windows in the atmospheric greenhouse. However, the small quantities of SO2, CO and HCl, all of which have been detected in the Venus atmosphere, seem adequate for this purpose. Thus recent American and Soviet missions to Venus seem to have provided verification that the greenhouse effect is indeed the reason for the high surface temperature.

Heavens and National Flags

Heavens and National Flags

There is something curious about the national flags of the planet Earth. Almost half of our national flags exhibit astronomical symbols. The phenomenon is transcultural, non-sectarian, worldwide. It is also not restricted to our time: Sumerian cylinder seals from the third millennium B.C. and Taoist flags in pre-revolutionary Chine displayed constellations.

The flag of the United States has fifty stars; the Soviet Union had one and Israel has one as well. Burma has fourteen, Grenada and Venezuela, seven; Chine, five; Iraq, three; Sao Tome e Principe, two; aJapan, Uruguay, Malawi, Bangladesh and Taiwan, the Sun; Brazin, a celestiall sphere; Australia, Western Samoa, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, the Constellation of the Southern Cross; Bhutan, the dragon pearl, symbol of the Earth; Cambodia, the Angkor Wat astronomical observatory; India, South Korea and the Mongolian Peoples’ Republic, cosmological symbols. Many socialist countries displayed stars and many Islamic countries display crescent symbols.

We are connected to the Earth and to the Cosmos inn the deepest ways, involving destiny of the human species. Photo by Elena

Nation wish thus to embrace something of the power and credibility of the heavens. We seek a connection with the Cosmos. We want to count in the grand scale of things. And it turns out we are connected – not in the personal, small-scale unimaginative fashion that the astrologers pretend, but in the deepest ways, involving the origin of matter, the habitability of the Earth, the evolution and destiny of the human species, themes to which we currently return in our life.

Demon on the Earth

Demon on the Earth

Many of the American and European émigré scientists who developed the first nuclear weapons were profoundly distressed about the demon they had let loose on the world. They pleaded for the global abolition of nuclear weapons, but their pleas went unheeded; the prospect of a national strategic advantage galvanized both the U.S.S.R. and the United States and the nuclear arms race began.

In the same period, there was a burgeoning international trade in the devastating non-nuclear weapons coyly called “conventional”. The good statistics are available. In the past twenty-five years, in dollars corrected for inflation, the annual international arms trade has gone from $300 million to much more than $ billion. In the years between 1950 and 1968, for example, there were, on the average, worldwide several accidents involving nuclear weapons per year, although perhaps no more than one or two accidental nuclear explosions.

The weapons establishments in the Soviet Union, the United States and other nations were large and powerful. In the United States they included major corporations famous for their homey domestic manufactures. According to one estimate, the corporate profits in military weapons procurement are 30 to 50 percent higher than in an equally technological but competitive civilian market. Cost overruns in military weapons systems are permitted on a scale that would be considered unacceptable in the civilian sphere. In the Soviet Union the resources, quality, attention and care given to military production is in striking contrast to the little left for consumer goods.

The demon the scientists had let loose on the world will destroy us all one day… Or never. Credit photo: Elena

According to some estimates, almost half the scientists and high technologists on Earth are employed full or part-time on military matters. Those engaged in the development and manufacture of weapons of mass destruction are given salaries, perquisites of power and, where possible, public honors at the highest levels available in their respective societies. The secrecy of weapons development, carried to especially extravagant lengths in the Soviet Union, implied that individuals so employed needed almost never accepted responsibility for their actions. They were protected and anonymous.

Military secrecy made the military the most difficult sector of any society for the citizens to monitor. If we do not know what they do, it is very hard for us to stop them. And with the rewards so substantial, with the hostile military establishments beholden to each other in some ghastly mutual embrace, the world discovers itself drifting toward the ultimate undoing of the human enterprise.