Energy and the Human Journey: Where We Have Been; Where We Can Go

By Wade Frazier

Version 1.2, published May 2015. Version 1.0 published September 2014.

Note to Readers: This essay is more easily navigated with a browser other than Internet Explorer, such as Firefox. This essay has internal links to this essay and to other essays on my website, with external links largely to Wikipedia and scientific papers. I have published this essay in other formats: .pdf format (10.7 megabytes) and .pdf format without visible links (the closest experience to reading a book), to honor different methods of digesting this essay, but this html version comprises the online textbook that I intended this essay to be.

Dedication

Acronyms Used in This Essay

Summary and Purpose

This Essay’s Tables and Timelines

Energy and the Industrialized World

The Toolset of Mainstream Science

The Orthodox Framework and its Limitations

Energy and Chemistry

Timelines of Energy, Geology, and Early Life

The Formation and Early Development of the Sun and Earth

Early Life on Earth

The Cryogenian Ice Age and the Rise of Complex Life

Speciation, Extinction, and Mass Extinctions

The Cambrian Explosion

Complex Life Colonizes Land

Making Coal, the Rise of Reptiles, and the Greatest Extinction Ever

The Reign of Dinosaurs

The Age of Mammals

Mid-Essay Reflection

The Path to Humanity

Tables of Key Events in the Human Journey

Humanity’s First Epochal Event(s?): Growing our Brains and Controlling Fire

Humanity’s Second Epochal Event: The Super-Predator Revolution

Humanity’s Third Epochal Event: The Domestication Revolution

Epochal Event 3.5 – The Rise of Europe

Humanity’s Fourth Epochal Event: The Industrial Revolution

Epochal Event 4.5 – The Rise of Oil and Electricity

The Postwar Boom, Peak Oil, and the Decline of Industrial Civilization

What Running out of Energy Looks Like

My Adventures and Those of My Fellow Travelers

Humanity’s Fifth Epochal Event: Free Energy and an Abundance-Based Political Economy

The Sixth Mass Extinction or the Fifth Epochal Event?

What Has Not Worked So Far, and What Might

Footnotes

Dedication

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Mr. Professor and Brian, two great men whom it was an immense privilege to know and who spent their lives in a quest for healing this world. I miss them.

Acronyms Used in This Essay

A number of acronyms in this essay are not commonly used and at least one is unique to my work.

They are:

BYA – Billion Years Ago

MYA – Million Years Ago

KYA – Thousand Years Ago

PPM – Parts Per Million

FE – Free Energy

GC – Global Controller

EROI – Energy Return on Investment

UP – The Universal People

LUCA – Last Universal Common Ancestor

ATP - Adenosine Triphosphate

GOE – Great Oxygenation Event

BIF – Banded Iron Formation

ROS – Reactive Oxygen Species

PETM - Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

Summary and Purpose

Chapter summary:

I was born in 1958. NASA recruited my father to work in Mission Control during the Space Race, and I was trained from childhood to be a scientist. My first professional mentor invented as Nikola Tesla did, and among his many inventions was an engine hailed by a federal study as the world’s most promising alternative to the internal combustion engine. In 1974, as that engine created a stir in the USA’s federal government, I began dreaming of changing the energy industry. In that same year, I had my cultural and mystical awakenings. During my second year of college, I had my first existential crisis and a paranormal event changed my studies from science to business. I still held my energy dreams, however, and in 1986, eight years after that first paranormal event, I had a second one that suddenly caused me to move up the coast from Los Angeles to Seattle, where I landed in the middle of what is arguably the greatest attempt yet made to bring alternative energy to the American marketplace. The company sold the best heating system that has ever been on the world market and it placed that system for free on customers’ homes by using the most ingenious marketing plan that I ever saw. That effort was killed by the local electric industry, which saw our technology as a threat to its revenues and profits, and my wild ride began. The owner of the Seattle business left the state to rebuild his effort. I followed him to Boston and soon became his partner. My partner's experiences in Seattle radicalized him. My use of "radical" intends to convey the original "going to the root" meaning. Radicals seek a fundamental understanding of events (so they aim for the root and do not hack at branches), but more economically than politically in my partner's instance. He would never see the energy industry the same way again after his radicalization (also called "awakening") in Seattle, but he had more radicalization ahead of him.

The day after I arrived in Boston, we began to pursue what is today called free energy, or new energy, which is abundant and harmlessly produced energy generated with almost no operating cost. Today's so-called free energy is usually generated by harnessing the zero-point field, but not always, and our original effort was not trying to harness it. We attracted the interest of a legendary and shadowy group while we were in Boston. They offered $10 million for the rights to our fledgling technology. I have called that group the Global Controllers and others have different terms for them. However, they are not the focus of my writings and efforts. I regard them as a symptom of our collective malaise, not a cause. Our fate is in our hands, not theirs. Our efforts also caused great commotion within New England’s electric industry and attracted attempts by the local authorities to destroy our business. They were probably trying to protect their economic turf and were not consciously acting on the Global Controllers’ behalf, which was probably also the case in Seattle.

In 1987, we moved our business to Ventura, California, where I had been raised, before the sledgehammer in Boston could fall on us. We moved because I had connected us with technologies and talent that made our free energy ideas potentially feasible. Our public awareness efforts became highly successful and we were building free energy prototypes. In early 1988, our efforts were targeted by the local authorities, again at the behest of energy interests, both local and global. In a surprise raid in which the authorities blatantly stole our technical materials, mere weeks after those same authorities assured us that we were not doing anything illegal, my radicalization began. A few months later, my partner was offered about $1 billion to cease our operations by that shadowy global group; the CIA delivered that offer. Soon after my partner refused their offer, he was arrested with a million dollar bail and our nightmare began. The turning point of my life was when I became the defense’s key witness and the prosecution made faces at me while I was on the witness stand as they tried to intimidate me. It helped inspire me to sacrifice my life in an attempt to free my partner. My gesture incredibly worked, in the greatest miracle that I ever witnessed. I helped free my partner, but my life had been ruined by the events of 1988, and in 1990 I left Ventura and never returned. I had been radicalized ("awakened"), and I then spent the next several years seeking understanding of what I had lived through and why the world worked starkly differently from how I was taught that it did. I began the study and writing that culminated in publishing my first website in 1996, which was also when I briefly rejoined my former partner after he was released from prison, after the courts fraudulently placed him there and prison officials repeatedly put him in position to be murdered. The Global Controllers then raised their game to new, sophisticated levels and I nearly went to prison.

As I discovered the hard way, contrary to my business school indoctrination, there is little that resembles a free market in the USA, particularly in its energy industry, and there has never been a truly free market, a real democracy, a free press, an objective history, a purely pursued scientific method, or any other imaginary constructs that our dominant institutions promote. They may all be worthy ideals, but none has existed in the real world. Regarding free markets in the energy industry, reality has effectively been inverted, as the world’s greatest effort of organized suppression prevents alternative energy technology of any significance from public awareness and use.

Soon after I moved from Ventura, I met a former astronaut who was hired by NASA with a Mars mission in mind and was investigating the free energy field. We eventually became colleagues and co-founded a non-profit organization intended to raise public awareness of new energy. A few days after we began planning the organization’s first conference in 2004, the first speaker that we recruited for our conference was murdered and my astronaut colleague immediately and understandably moved to South America, where he spent the rest of his life. In the spring of 2013, I spent a few days with my former free energy partner and, like my astronaut colleague, he had also been run out of the USA after mounting an effort around high-MPG carburetor technology. The federal government attacked soon after a legendary figure in the oil industry contacted my partner, who also attracted the attention of the sitting USA’s president. Every American president since Ronald Reagan knew my partner by name, but they proved to be rather low-ranking in the global power structure.

My astronaut colleague investigated the UFO phenomenon early in his adventures on the frontiers of science and nearly lost his life immediately after refusing an "offer" to perform classified UFO research for the American military. It became evident that the UFO and free energy issues were conjoined. A faction of the global elite demonstrated some of their exotic and sequestered technologies to a close fellow traveler, which included free energy and antigravity technologies. My astronaut colleague was involved with the same free energy inventor that some around me were, who invented a solid-state free energy prototype that not only produced a million times the energy that went into it, but it also produced antigravity effects. I eventually understood the larger context of our efforts and encountered numerous fellow travelers; they reported similar experiences, of having their technologies seized or otherwise suppressed, of being incarcerated and/or surviving murder attempts, and other outrages inflicted by global elites as they maintained their tyrannical grip over the world economy and, hence, humanity. It was no conspiracy theory, but what my fellow travelers and I learned at great personal cost, which was regularly fatal.

I continued to study and write and became my astronaut colleague’s biographer. My former partner is the Indiana Jones of the free energy field, but I eventually realized that while it was awe-inspiring to witness his efforts, one man with a whip and fedora cannot save humanity from itself. I eventually took a different path from both my partner and astronaut colleague, and one fruit of that direction is this essay. Not only was the public largely indifferent to what we were attempting, but those attracted to our efforts usually either came for the spectacle or were opportunists who betrayed us at the first opportunity. As we weathered attacks from the local, state, national, and global power structures, such treacherous opportunities abounded. I witnessed dozens of attempts by my partner’s associates to steal his companies from him (1, 2, 3, 4), and my astronaut colleague was twice ejected from organizations that he founded, by the very people that he invited to help him. During my radicalizing years with my partner, I learned that personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity, and it is the primary reason why humanity is in this predicament. The antics of the global elites are of minor importance; the enemy is us.

I eventually realized that there were not enough heroes on Earth to get free energy over the hump of humanity’s inertia and organized suppression. Soon after I completed my present website in 2002, one of R. Buckminster Fuller’s pupils called my writings “comprehensivist” and I did not know what he meant. I then read some of Fuller’s work and saw the point. My writings since then have been more consciously comprehensivist (also called “generalist”) in nature.

This essay is intended to draw a comprehensive picture of life on Earth, the human journey, and energy's role. The references that support this essay are usually to works written for non-scientists or those of modest academic achievement so that non-scientists can study the same works without needing specialized scientific training. I am trying to help form a comprehensive awareness in a tiny fraction of the global population. Between 5,000 and 7,000 people is my goal. My hope is that the energy issue can become that tiny fraction's focus. Properly educated, that group might be able to help catalyze an energy effort that can overcome the obstacles. That envisioned group may help humanity in many ways, but my primary goal is manifesting those technologies in the public sphere in a way that nobody risks life or livelihood. I have seen too many wrecked and prematurely ended lives (1, 2) and plan to avoid those fates, for both myself and the group’s members.

Here is a brief summary of this essay. Ever since life first appeared more than three billion years ago and about a billion years after the Sun and Earth formed, organisms have continually invented more effective methods to acquire, preserve, and use energy. Complex life appeared after three billion years of evolution and, pound-for-pound, it used energy 100,000 times as fast as the Sun produced it. The story of life on Earth has been one of evolutionary events impacted by geophysical and geochemical processes, and in turn influencing them. During the eon of complex life that began more than 500 million years ago, there have been many brief golden ages of relative energy abundance for some fortunate species, soon followed by increased energy competition, a relatively stable struggle for energy, and then mass extinction events cleared biomes and set the stage for another golden age by organisms adapted to the new environments. Those newly dominant organisms were often marginal or unremarkable members of their ecosystems before the mass extinction. That pattern has characterized the journey of complex life over the past several hundred million years. Intelligence began increasing among some animals, which provided them with a competitive advantage.

The oldest stone tools yet discovered are about 3.3-3.4 million years old, likely made by australopiths, which may have led to the appearance of the Homo genus. About 2.6 million years ago, when our current ice age began, our ancestors began making Oldowan culture stone tools, which was soon followed by the control of fire, and the human journey’s First Epochal Event(s?) transpired. The human evolutionary line’s brain then grew dramatically. About two million years later, the human line evolved to the point where behaviorally modern humans appeared, left Africa, and conquered all inhabitable continents. Their expansion was fueled by driving most of Earth’s large animals to extinction. That Second Epochal Event was also the beginning of the Sixth Mass Extinction. After all the easy meat was extinct and the brief Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer ended, population pressures led to the Third Epochal Event: domesticating plants and animals. That event led to civilization, and many features of the human journey often argued to be human nature, such as slavery and the subjugation of women, were merely artifacts of the energy regime and societal structure of agrarian civilizations. Early civilizations were never stable; their energy practices were largely based on deforestation and agriculture, usually on the deforested soils, and such civilizations primarily collapsed due to their unsustainable energy production methods.

As the Old World’s civilizations continually rose and fell, Europe's peoples rediscovered ancient teachings that contained the first stirrings of a scientific approach. Europeans used energy technologies from that ancient period, borrowed novel energy practices from other Old World civilizations, and achieved the technological feat of turning the world’s oceans into a low-energy transportation lane. Europeans thereby began conquering the world. During that conquest, one imperial contender turned to fossil fuels after its woodlands were depleted by early industrialization. England soon industrialized by using coal and initiated humanity’s Fourth Epochal Event. England quickly became Earth’s dominant imperial power, riding on the power of coal. As Europeans conquered Earth, elites, who first appeared with the first civilizations, could begin thinking in global terms for the first time, and a global power structure began developing. As we learned the hard way, that power structure is very real, but almost nobody on Earth has a balanced and mature perspective regarding it, as people either deny its existence or obsess about it, seeing it as the root of our problems when it is really only a side-effect of humanity’s current stage of political-economic evolution, which has always been based on its level of energy usage.

Today, industrialized humanity is almost wholly dependent on the energy provided by hydrocarbon fuels that were created by geological processes operating on the remains of organisms, and humanity is mining and burning those hydrocarbon deposits about a million times as fast as they were created. We are reaching peak extraction rates but, more importantly, we have already discovered all of the easily acquired hydrocarbons. We are currently seeking and mining Earth’s remaining hydrocarbon deposits, which are of poor energetic quality. It is merely the latest instance of humanity's depleting its energy resources, in which the dregs were mined after the easily acquired energy was consumed. The megafauna extinctions created the energy crisis that led to domestication and civilization, and the energy crisis of early industrialization led to using hydrocarbon energy, and the energy crisis of 1973-1974 attracted my fellow travelers and me to alternative energy. However, far more often over the course of the human journey, depleting energy resources led to population collapses and even local extinctions of humans in remote locations. Expanding and collapsing populations have characterized rising and falling polities during the past several thousand years, ever since the first civilizations appeared.

Today, humanity dominates Earth and is not only depleting its primary energy resources at prodigious rates, but it is also driving species to extinction at a rate that rivals the greatest mass extinctions in Earth’s history. Humans may cause Earth’s greatest mass extinction, which may take humanity with it. Today, humanity stands on the brink of the abyss, and almost nobody seems to know or care. Humanity is a tunnel-visioned, egocentric species, and almost all people are only concerned about their immediate self-interest and are oblivious of what lies ahead. Not all humans are so blind, and biologists and climate scientists, among others intimately familiar with the impacts of global civilization, are terrified by what humanity is inflicting onto Earth. Also, those who realize that we are quickly coming to the Hydrocarbon Age’s end are beating the drums of doom and I cannot blame them. We are in a “race of the catastrophes” scenario, and several manmade trends threaten our future existence.

Even the ultra-elites who run Earth from the shadows readily see how their game of chicken with Earth may turn out. Their more extreme members advocate terraforming Mars as their ultimate survival enclave if their games of power and control make Earth uninhabitable. But the saner members, who may now be a majority of that global cabal, favor the dissemination of those sequestered technologies. I am nearly certain that members of that disenchanted faction are those who gave my close friend an underground technology demonstration and who would quietly cheer our efforts when I worked with my former partner. They may also be subtly supporting my current efforts, of which this essay comprises a key component, but I have not heard from them and am not counting on them to save the day or help my efforts garner success. It is time for humanity to reach the level of collective sentience and integrity required to manifest humanity’s Fifth Epochal Event, which will initiate the Free Energy Epoch. Humanity can then live, for the first time, in an epoch of true and sustainable abundance. It could also halt the Sixth Mass Extinction and humanity could turn Earth into something resembling heaven. With the Fifth Epochal Event, humanity will become a space-faring species, and a future will beckon that nobody on Earth today can truly imagine, just as nobody on Earth could predict how the previous Epochal Events transformed the human journey (1, 2, 3, 4).

Also, each Epochal Event was initiated by a small group of people, perhaps even by one person for the earliest events, and even the Industrial Revolution and its attendant Scientific Revolution had few fathers. However, I came to realize that there is probably nobody else on Earth like my former partner, and even Indiana Jones cannot save the world by himself. With the strategy that I finally developed, I do not look for heroes because I know that there are not enough currently walking Earth. I am attempting something far more modest. The greatest triumph of the ultra-elites running Earth today is making free energy technology and the resulting epoch of abundance unimaginable, and all of today’s dominant ideologies assume scarcity in the foundation of their frameworks, which is largely why my former partner and my astronaut colleague were voices in the wilderness and like ducks in a shooting gallery that did not know where the next shot would come from. The most damaging shots were usually fired by their “allies,” right into their backs, which nobody could have convinced me of in 1985. But after watching similar scenarios play out dozens of times, I finally had to admit the obvious, and my partner admitted it to me in 2013.

I noticed several crippling weaknesses in all alternative energy efforts that I was involved with or witnessed. Most importantly, when my partner mounted his efforts, people participated primarily to serve their self-interest. While the pursuit of mutual self-interest is the very definition of politics, self-interested people were easily defeated by organized suppression, although the efforts usually self-destructed before suppression efforts became intense. Another deficiency in all mass free energy efforts was that most participants were scientifically illiterate and did not see much beyond the possibility of reducing their energy bills or becoming rich and famous. Once the effort was destroyed (and they always are, if they have any promise), the participants left the alternative energy field. Also, many lives were wrecked as each effort was defeated, so almost nobody was able or willing to try again. Every time that my partner rebuilt his efforts, it was primarily with new people; few individuals lasted for more than one attempt.

I realize that almost nobody on Earth today can pass the integrity tests that my fellow travelers were subjected to, and I do not ask that of anybody whom I will attempt to recruit into my upcoming effort. It will be a non-heroic approach, of “merely” achieving enough heart-centered sentience and awareness to where a world of free energy and abundance is only imagined by a sizeable group who will not stay quiet about it, but who will also not be proselytizing. If they can truly understand this essay’s message, they will probably not know anybody else in their daily lives that can.

Those recruits will simply be singing a song of practical abundance that will attract those who have been listening for that song for their entire lives. Once enough people know the song by heart and can sing it, and have attracted a large enough audience that can approach the free energy issue in a way that risks nobody’s life and will not be easy for the provocateurs and the effort’s “allies” to wreck, then it will be time to take action, but in a way never tried before.

That is my plan, and this essay is intended to form the foundation of my efforts to educate and amass the “choir” that will sing the abundance song. I am looking for singers, not soldiers, and the choir will primarily sing here. My approach takes the lamb’s path, not the warrior’s. That “choir” may only help a little, it may help a lot, but it will not harm anybody. This effort could be called trying the enlightenment path to free energy, an abundance-based global political economy, and a healed humanity and planet. I believe that the key is approaching the issue as creators instead of victims, from a place of love instead of fear. Those goals may seem grandiose to the uninitiated, and people in this field regularly succumb to a messiah complex and harbor other delusions of grandeur, but I also know that those aspirations are attainable if only a tiny fraction of humanity can help initiate that Fifth Epochal Event, just like the previous Epochal Events. This essay is designed to begin the training process. Learning this material will be a formidable undertaking. This material is not designed for those looking for quick and easy answers, but is intended to help my readers attain the levels of understanding that I think are necessary for assisting with this epochal undertaking.

This Essay’s Tables and Timelines

In order to make this essay easier to understand, I created some tables and timelines, and they are:

Timeline of Significant Energy Events in Earth's and Life's History

Abbreviated Geologic Time Scale

Human Event Timeline Since Europe Began Conquering Humanity

Table of Humanity’s Epochs

Energy and the Industrialized World

There are greater contrasts in humanity’s collective standard of living than ever before. As of 2014, Bill Gates topped the list of the world’s richest people for nearly all years of the previous 20. In 2000, his net worth was about $100 billion, or about the same as the collective wealth of the poorest hundred million Americans or the poorest half of humanity. Although Gates and other high-technology billionaires can live surprisingly egalitarian lifestyles, for one person to possess the same level of wealth as billions of people collectively is a recent phenomenon. In 2014, about 30 thousand children died each day because of their impoverished conditions.

Ever since I was thrust into an urban hell soon after graduating from college, I became a student of wealth, poverty, and humanity’s problems. My teenage dreams of changing humanity’s energy paradigm have had a lifelong impact. It took me many years to gain a comprehensive understanding of how energy literally runs the world and always has. A good demonstration of that fact is to consider the average day of an average American professional, who is a member of history’s most privileged large demographic group and lives in Earth’s most industrialized nation. A typical day in my life during the winter before I wrote this essay can serve as an example.

When I worked 12-hour days and longer during that winter, which was the busiest time of my year, I often fasted and needed less sleep, so I often awoke before 5:00 A.M. In 2014 as I write this, I live in a fairly large house. When I fast, my body generates less heat, so I feel cold rather easily; I wear thermal underwear under my work attire and have other strategies for staying warm, especially in the winter. I programmed our furnace to begin operation soon before I awakened, so that my day started in a warm environment. I also have a space heater in my home office, so that the rest of the house can stay cold while I work in warmth.

That winter, my first tasks when arising were turning on my computer and drinking a glass of orange juice, which raised my blood sugar. After some hours of reading about world events, answering emails, and working on my writings, I took a hot shower, dressed, and walked to a bus stop. I read a book while awaiting the bus that took me to downtown Bellevue, where I worked in a high-rise office building for an Internet company.

When I arrived at my office, I turned on my lights and computer. When I was eating, I put the food that I brought to work in a refrigerator under my desk. During my work day, I interacted with many people in my air-conditioned, high-technology office environment. My cellular telephone was never far away. The view from my office window of the Cascade Mountains was pleasant. My computer interfaced with our distant data centers and the world at large via the Internet. When my workday was finished, I rode the bus home. In the winter, the furnace is programmed to stop functioning when my wife and I leave for work, and comes on soon before we arrive home, so we never experienced a cold house. In the evening, we might watch a movie on a DVD on our wide-screen plasma TV. When I am not fasting, I usually eat dinner, with the food in my refrigerator usually purchased at a cooperative grocery store that has an enormous produce section, with food grown locally and imported from as far away as New Zealand, China, and Israel.[1] We have a high-tech kitchen, with a “smart” stove, refrigerator, and other appliances.

When I resumed my career in 2003, I became an early riser and consequently went to bed by 9:00 PM on most nights, and often read fantasy literature before I turned out the lights and snuggled into bed (with two comforters in the winter to keep us warm as we sleep).

That was a typical winter’s day in early 2013. During that day, around 80 times the calories that fueled my body were burned to support my activities. Those dying children often succumbed to hunger and diseases of poverty, and the daily energy that supported their lives was less than 1% of what I enjoyed that day. How did energy serve my daily activities? How did that disparity between the dying children and me come to be? This essay will address those questions.

The Toolset of Mainstream Science

Humanity is Earth's leading tool-using species, and our tools made us. Twigs, sticks, bones, and other organic materials were undoubtedly used as tools by our protohuman ancestors, but the only tools to survive for millions of years to be studied today are made of stone; the oldest discovered so far are about 3.4-to-3.3 million years old.[2] Humanity’s tools have become increasingly sophisticated since then. The Industrial Revolution was accompanied by the Scientific Revolution, and the synergy between scientific and technological advances has been essential and impressive, even leaving aside the many technologies and related theories that have been developed and sequestered in the above-top-secret world.

The history of science is deeply entwined with the state of technology. Improving technology allowed for increasingly sophisticated experiments, and advances in science spurred technological innovation. While many scientific practices and outcomes have been evil, such as vivisection and nuclear weapons, many others have not been destructive to humans or other organisms. The 20th century saw great leaps in technological and scientific advancement. My grandfather lived in a sod hut as a child, his son helped send men to the moon, and his grandson pursued world-changing energy technologies and still does. Relativity and quantum theory ended the era of classical physics and, with their increasingly sophisticated toolset, scientists began to investigate phenomena at galactic and subatomic scales. Space-based telescopes, electron microscopes, mass spectrometers, atomic clocks, supercolliders, computers, robots that land on distant moons and planets, and other tools allowed for explorations and experiments that were not possible in earlier times.

Intense organized suppression has existed in situations in which scientific and technological advances can threaten economic empires, but many areas of science are not seen as threatening, and reconstructing Earth’s distant past and the journey of life on Earth is one of those nonthreatening areas. I have never heard of a classified fossil site or a Precambrian specialist being threatened or bought out in order to keep him/her silent. There is more controversy with human remains and artifacts, but I am skeptical of popular works that argue for technologically advanced ancient civilizations and related notions. Something closer to “pure science” can be practiced regarding those ancient events without the threat of repercussions or the enticements of riches and Nobel Prizes. Much of this essay’s subject matter deals with areas in which the distortions of political-economic racketeering have been muted and the theories and tools have been relatively unrestricted.

Mass spectrometers measure the mass of atoms and molecules, and have become increasingly refined since they were first invented in the 19th century. Today, samples that can only be seen with microscopes can be tested and measured down to a billionth of a gram.[3] Elements have different numbers of protons and neutrons in the nuclei of their atoms, and each nuclear variation of an element is called an isotope. Unstable isotopes decay into smaller elements (also called “daughter isotopes”). Scientific investigations have determined that radioactive decay rates are quite stable and are primarily governed by the dynamics in a decaying atom. The dates determined by radioactive dating have been correlated to other observed processes and the data has become increasingly robust over the years.[4]

The ability to weigh various isotopes, at increasing levels of precision, with mass spectrometers has provided a gold mine of data. Scientists are continually inventing new methods and ways to use them, new questions are asked and answered, and some examples of methods and findings follow.

Carbon has two primary stable isotopes: carbon-12 and carbon-13. Carbon-14 is the famous unstable isotope used for dating recently deceased life forms, but testing carbon’s stable isotopes has yielded invaluable information. Carbon is the backbone of all of life’s structures, and life processes often have a preference for using carbon-12, which is lighter than carbon-13 and hence take less energy to manipulate. Scientists have been able to test rocks in which the “fossils” are nothing more than smears and determine that those smears resulted from life processes, as there is more carbon-12 in the smear than carbon-13 than would be the case if life was not involved.[5] This has also helped date the earliest life forms. Life’s preference for lighter isotopes is evident for other key elements such as sulfur and nitrogen, and scientists regularly make use of that preference in their investigations.[6]

The hydrological cycle circulates water through Earth’s oceans, atmosphere, and land. The energy of sunlight drives it, and that sunlight is primarily captured at the surface of water bodies and the oceans in particular. The hydrological cycle’s patterns have changed over the eons as Earth’s surface has changed its continental configurations and temperature. Today’s global weather system generally begins with sunlight hitting the atmosphere, and the equator’s air receives the most direct radiation and becomes warmest. That air rises and cools, which reduces the water vapor that it can hold, so it falls as rain. That is why tropical rainforests are near the equator. The rising equatorial air creates high-pressure dry air that pushes toward the poles, and at about 30o latitude that air cools and sinks to the ground. That dry air not only does not bring precipitation, but it absorbs moisture from the land it hits and forms the world’s great deserts. That high pressure at the ground at 30o latitude pushes air back toward the tropics, and Earth’s rotation creates a distinctive bend in the northern and southern hemispheres that create trade winds that pick up moisture as they approach the equator. The pole-ward sides of the mid-latitudes’ dry temperate regions also have low pressures and wet climates, and dry high-pressure zones exist at the poles. As clouds pass over land, mountains force them upward and they lose their moisture in precipitation.[7] As that water makes its way back to the oceans to start the cycle again, it provides the freshwater for all land-based ecosystems. Below is a diagram of those dynamics. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

A water molecule containing oxygen-16 (the most common oxygen isotope) will be lighter than a water molecule containing oxygen-18 (both are stable isotopes), so it takes less energy to evaporate an oxygen-16 water molecule than an oxygen-18 water molecule. Also, after evaporation, oxygen-18 water will tend to fall back to Earth more quickly than oxygen-16 water will, because it is heavier. As a consequence, air over Earth’s poles will be enriched in oxygen-16 – the colder Earth’s surface temperature, the less oxygen-18 will evaporate and be carried to the poles – and scientists have used this enrichment to reconstruct a record of ocean temperatures. Also, the oxygen-isotope ratio in fossil shellfish (as their life processes prefer the lighter oxygen isotope) has been used to help determine ancient temperatures. During an ice age, because proportionally more oxygen-16 is retained in ice sheets and does not flow back to the oceans, the ocean’s surface becomes enriched in oxygen-18 and that difference can be discerned in fossil shells. Sediments are usually laid down in annual layers, and in some places, such as the Cariaco Basin off of Venezuela's coast, undisturbed sediments have been retrieved and analyzed, which has helped determine when ice sheets advanced and retreated during the present ice age.[8]

Mass spectrometers have been invaluable for assigning dates to various rocks and sedimentary layers, as radioactive isotopes and their daughter isotopes are tested, including uranium-lead, potassium-argon, carbon-14, and many other tests.[9] Also, the ratios of elements in a sample can be determined, which can tell where it originated. Many hypotheses and theories have arisen, fallen, and been called into question or modified by the data derived from those increasingly sophisticated methods, and a few examples should suffice to give an idea of what is being discovered.

The moon rocks retrieved by Apollo astronauts are still being tested, as new experiments and hypotheses are devised. In 2012, a study was published which resulted from testing moon rocks for the titanium-50 and titanium-47 ratios (both are stable isotopes), and it has brought into question the hypothesis that the Moon was formed by a planetary collision more than four billion years ago. The titanium ratio was so much like Earth’s that a collision with Earth forming the Moon has been questioned (as very little of the hypothesized colliding body became part of the Moon). The collision hypothesis will probably survive, but it may be significantly different from today’s hypothesis. Meteorites have been dated, as well as moon rocks, and their ages confirm Earth’s age that geologists have derived, and meteorite dates provide more evidence that our solar system probably developed from an accretion disk.

In the Western Hemisphere, the Anasazi and Mayan civilization collapses of around a thousand years ago, or the Mississippian civilization collapse of 500 years ago, have elicited a great deal of investigation. From New Age ideas that the Anasazi and Mayan peoples “ascended” to the Eurocentric conceit that the Mississippian culture was European in origin, many speculations arose that have been disproven by the evidence. It is now known that the Anasazi and Mayan culture collapses were influenced by epic droughts, but that was only the proximate cause. The ultimate cause was that those civilizations were not energetically sustainable, and the unsustainable Mississippian culture was in decline long before Europeans invaded North America. The Anasazi used logs to build their dwellings that today are famous ruins. Scientists have used strontium ratios in the wood to determine where the logs came from, as well as dating the wood with tree-ring analysis and analyzing pack rat middens, and a sobering picture emerged. The region was already arid, but agriculture and deforestation desertified the region around Chaco Canyon, which was the heart of Anasazi civilization. When Anasazi civilization collapsed, at Chaco Canyon they were hauling in timber from mountains more than 70 kilometers away (the strontium ratios could trace each log from the particular mountain that it came from). When the epic droughts delivered their final blows, Anasazi civilization collapsed into a morass of starvation, warfare, and cannibalism, and the forest has yet to begin to recover, nearly a millennium later.[10]

Another major advance happened in the late 20th century: the ability to analyze DNA. DNA’s double-helical structure was discovered in 1953. In 1973, the first amino acid sequence for a gene was determined. In 2003, the entire human genome was sequenced. Sequencing the chimpanzee genome was accomplished in 2005, for orangutans in 2011, and for gorillas in 2012. The comparisons of human and great ape DNA have yielded many insights, but the science of DNA analysis is still young. What has yielded far more immediately relevant information has been studying human DNA. The genetic bases of many diseases have been identified. Hundreds of falsely convicted Americans have been released from prison, and nearly 20 from death row, due to DNA evidence's proving their innocence. Human DNA testing has provided startling insights into humanity's past. For instance, in Europe it appears that after the ice sheets receded 16,000 to 13,000 years ago, humans repopulated Europe, and for all the bloody history of Europe over the millennia since then, there have not really been mass population replacements in Europe by invasion, migration, genocide, and the like. Europeans just endlessly fought each other and honed the talents that helped them conquer humanity. There were some migrations of Fertile Crescent agriculturalists into Europe, but other than hunter-gatherers being displaced or absorbed by the more numerous agriculturalists, there do not appear to be many population replacements. In 2010, a study suggested that male farmers from the Fertile Crescent founded the paternal line for most European men as they mated with the local women. DNA testing has demonstrated that all of today’s humans are descended from a founder population of about five-to-ten thousand people, of whom a few hundred left Africa around 60-50 thousand years ago and conquered Earth. The Neanderthal genome has been sequenced, as well as genomes of other extinct species, and for a brief, exuberant moment, some scientists thought that they could recover dinosaur DNA, Jurassic-Park-style. Although dinosaur DNA is unrecoverable, organic dinosaur remains have been recovered, and even some proteins have been sequenced, which probably no scientist believed possible in the 1980s.[11]

Since 1992, scientists have discovered planets in other star systems by using a variety of methods that reflect the improving toolset that scientists can use, especially space-based telescopes. Before those discoveries, there was controversy whether planets were rare phenomena, but scientists now admit that planets are typical members of star systems. Extraterrestrial civilizations are probably visiting Earth, so planets hosting intelligent life may not be all that rare.

Those interrelated and often mutually reinforcing lines of evidence have made many scientific findings difficult to deny. The ever-advancing scientific toolset, and the ingenuity of scientists developing and using them, and particularly the multidisciplinary approach that scientists and scholars are increasingly using, have made for radical changes in how we view the past. Those radical changes will not end any time soon, and what follows will certainly be modified by new discoveries and interpretations, but I have tried to stay largely within the prevailing findings, hypotheses, and theories, while also poking into the fringes and leading edges somewhat. Any mistakes in fact or interpretation in what follows are mine.

The Orthodox Framework and its Limitations

Chapter summary:

In the West, the conception of the physical universe and humanity’s ability to manipulate it has remarkably changed in the past few thousand years, which has been a tiny fraction of humanity‘s journey on Earth. Thousands of years ago, the Greek philosophers Democritus and Leucippus argued that the universe was comprised of atoms and the void, and Pythagoras taught that Earth orbited the Sun.[12] Greeks also invented the watermill during the same era. Hundreds of years later, a Greek mathematician and engineer, Heron of Alexandria, described the first steam engine and windmill and is typically credited as the inventor, but the actual inventors are lost to history. Western science and technology did not significantly advance for the next millennium, however, until ancient Greek writings were reintroduced to the West via captured Islamic libraries. The reintroduction of Greek teachings, and the pursuit of their energy technologies, ultimately led to the Industrial and Scientific revolutions.

Scientific practice is ideally a process of theory and experimentation that can lead to new theories. There are three general aspects of today's scientific process, and it developed from a method proposed by John Hershel, which Charles Darwin used to formulate his theory of evolution.[13] First, facts are adduced. Facts are phenomena that everybody can agree on, ideally produced under controlled experimental conditions that can be reproduced by other experimenters. Hypotheses are then proposed to account for the facts by using inductive (also called abductive) logic. The hypotheses are usually concerned with how the universe works, whether it is star formation or evolution. If a hypothesis survives the fact-gathering process – often by predicting facts that later experiments verify – then the hypothesis may graduate to the status of a theory.[14] Scientific theories ideally can be falsified, which means that they can be proven erroneous. The principle of hypothesis and falsification is primarily what distinguishes science from other modes of inquiry.

The relegation of hypotheses and theories to oblivion, without getting a fair hearing, as the pioneer dies in obscurity or is martyred, only to be vindicated many years later, has been a typical dynamic. The man who first explained the dynamics behind the aurora borealis, Kristian Birkeland, died in obscurity in 1917, with his work attacked and dismissed. It was not until Hannes Alfvén won the 1970 Nobel Prize that Birkeland’s work was finally vindicated. Endosymbiotic theory, the widely accepted theory of how mitochondria, chloroplasts, and other organelles came to be, was first proposed in 1905, quickly dismissed, and not revived until the late 1960s.

When a new hypothesis appears, particularly a radical one, even if it is not a lone pioneer suffering martyrdom, the old guard usually attacks the new hypothesis and the situation turns into bitter feuds and armed camps all too often, such as the rise of the asteroid impact hypothesis regarding the dinosaurs’ demise.[15] To a degree, those withering attacks are supposed to be how science works. Doubt instead of faith is the guiding principle of science.[16] Until a scientist’s bright idea is tested against the real world, it is just a bright idea. Only hypotheses that have survived numerous attempts to falsify them graduate to becoming theories. It can be argued that the “attack mode” that science has adopted toward new hypotheses has formed a structural bias so that all scientific pioneers will be attacked by their peers; it is simply the nature of the profession. Only scientists who can weather the attacks from their peers will survive long enough to see their hypotheses receive a fair hearing. That “shark tank” environment, particularly with lucrative prizes and tenured academic berths awaiting the winners, has arguably set back science’s progress considerably.

With what I know has been suppressed by private interests, often with governmental assistance, mainstream science is largely irrelevant regarding many important issues that could theoretically be within its purview. Paradoxically, scientists can also fall for fashionable theories and get on bandwagons.[17] Scientific practice is subject to human foibles, just as all human endeavors are. There can be self-reinforcing bias in that the prevailing hypotheses can determine what facts are adduced, and potential facts thus escape inquiry, particularly when entire lines of inquiry are forbidden by organized suppression and the excesses of the national security state, as well as the indoctrination that scientists are subject to, as all people are.

Early in the 20th century, radical theories were proposed that remade scientists’ view of the universe. Along with relativity and quantum theory, a primary pillar of today’s physics is the notion that everything in the universe is a form of energy, as summarized by Einstein’s equation: E = MC2. Although the notion is still challenged in unorthodox corners, today’s prevailing hypothesis is that the universe came into existence in an instant called the Big Bang, stars are the energy centers in the observable universe, and nuclear fusion powers them. When the Big Bang supposedly happened, there was no matter, but only energy. Only when the universe had sufficiently expanded and cooled, less than a second after the Big Bang, did matter begin to appear, which is considered to be comprised of relatively low energy states.[18] This essay hews fairly closely to today’s orthodox perspective for much of it. However, there will be limitations, and some of them follow.

In the early days of science, it had a quasi-religious stature among its practitioners, and 19th-century scientists were prone to calling their hypotheses and theories “laws,” often appending their names to the “laws” as soon as possible, like imperialist “explorers” of the era appending European names to landmarks that they encountered during their conquests. Brian O’Leary, one of two whom this essay is dedicated to the memory of, was a former astronaut, Ivy League professor, and political activist who explored the frontiers of science and stated that there are no “laws” of physics, only theories, but the term “law” is lodged deeply in the scientific lexicon, although by the 20th century scientists stopped calling new hypotheses and theories laws. Modest scientists readily admit that the so-called “laws” of science are not the “laws” of the universe, but rather human ideas about what those laws might be, if there are any laws at all. As Einstein and his colleagues readily admitted, the corpus of scientific fact and theory barely says anything at all about how the universe works. Sometimes, paradigms shift and scientists see the universe with fresh eyes. The ideals and realities of scientific practice are often at odds. Ironically, when scientists reach virtual unanimity on a theory, it can be a sign that the theory is about to radically change, and many if not most scientists will go to their graves believing the theory that they were originally taught, no matter how much evidence weighs against it.

A key tension in mainstream science has long been the conflict between specialists and the generalists and multidisciplinarians. The specialist’s motto might be, “The devil is in the details.” Deductive reasoning is their specialty and reductionist principles often guide their investigations, in which breaking down phenomena into their most basic components is the goal. The generalist’s motto might be, “I seem to see a pattern here.” Generalists often use inductive reasoning and tend to think holistically, usually in terms of systems, and they recognize emergent properties arising from higher levels of systems complexity, which can be something new and not necessarily inherent in lower levels of complexity or predictable by analyzing those lower levels. New hypotheses often come from generalists and their inductive reasoning, and the best of them usually have some flash of insight that leads them to their breakthroughs, which is called intuition or the Creative Moment. I found that it is a close cousin to psychic ability, if not the same thing.

Specialists are often those on the ground, getting their hands dirty and doing the detailed work that forms the bedrock of scientific practice. Without their efforts, science as we know it would not exist. However, mainstream science has long suffered from the tunnel vision that overspecialization encourages, and R. Buckminster Fuller thought that the epidemic overspecialization and naïveté of mainstream scientists in his time was a ruling class tactic to keep scientists controlled and unable to see the forest for the trees.[19] That has been slowly changing in my lifetime, so that collaborative efforts are drawing from multiple disciplines and achieving synthetic views that were not feasible in earlier times, and patterns are newly recognized that were invisible in a scientific world filled with isolated specialists. Many paradigmatic breakthroughs in science and technology were made by non-professionals, specialists working outside of their field of professional expertise, and generalists traversing disciplinary boundaries.[20] Scientific training today attempts to prevent that overspecialized tunnel vision, and today’s practicing scientists ideally get deep into the details and then pull back and try to see context, connections, and patterns. A comprehensivist tries to understand the details well enough to refrain from making unwarranted generalizations while also striving for that big-picture awareness. There are also top-down and bottom-up ways to approach analyses; each can provide critical insight, and scientists and other analysts often try to use both.[21]

Another key set of tensions are those between theorists, empiricists, and inventors. Theorists attempt to account for scientific data and ideally predict data yet to be adduced, which tests the validity of their hypotheses and theories. Empiricists often produce that scientific data. Inventors create new technologies and techniques. Albert Einstein is the quintessential example of a theorist, who never performed experiments relating to his theories but accounted for experimental results and predicted them. Michelson and Morley, who performed the experiment that produced results that various scientists wrestled with for a generation before Einstein proposed his special theory of relativity, never suspected that their experiment would lead to the theories that it did. The most important experiments in science’s history were often those producing unexpected results and were usually called failures. Einstein’s general theory of relativity had no experimental evidence when he proposed it (it explained Mercury’s orbit, but that was the only evidence for it when the theory was proposed), but it has been confirmed numerous times since then. Einstein expected that his theories would eventually be falsified by experimental evidence, but that the best parts of his theories would survive in the new theories.

The Wright brothers were typical inventors. Before they flew, theorists said that man-powered flight was “impossible,” mainstream science ignored or ridiculed them for five years after they first flew, and the Smithsonian Institution tried to deny the Wright brothers their rightful precedence for generations. The theorists were spectacularly wrong, the empiricists had abandoned their primary principle of observation, and it was up to inventors to finally open their eyes and minds, years after the public witnessed the new technologies working. Brian O’Leary told me that the scientific establishment’s collective blindness and denial is worse in the early 21st century than in the Wright brothers’ time.

I have encountered numerous technologies that theorists denounce as “impossible,” empiricists ignore as if they did not exist, while the inventors are not exactly sure why their inventions work, but only know that they do. Such inventions often threaten to upend the very foundations of scientific disciplines, which is primarily why they have been ignored as they have, if they are not actively suppressed.[22] When their breakthroughs threatened the dominance of the industrial/professional rackets, then the risks could become deadly.

The findings of mainstream science can be particularly persuasive when lines of evidence from numerous disciplines independently converge, which has become increasingly common as scientific investigations have become more interdisciplinary. DNA testing is clearly showing descent relationships and ghost ancestors are being reconstructed via genetic testing. Numerous dating methods are used today, and more are regularly invented. Typically, a new technique will emerge from obscurity, often pioneered by a lonely scientist. For instance, dendrochronology, the reading of tree rings, was developed as a dating science by the dogged efforts of an astronomer who labored in obscurity for many years. He was a fortunate pioneer; when he died after nearly 70 years of effort, he had lived to see dendrochronology become a widely accepted dating method. Eventually, the new method can break past the inertia and active suppression, and sometimes even if the breakthrough threatens powerful interests. Then the newly accepted method can be seen as a panacea for all manner of seemingly insoluble problems, in the euphoric, bandwagon phase. Yesterday’s heresy can become tomorrow's dogma. Then early victories may not seem as triumphant as previously hailed, and a “morning after” period of sobering up arrives. The history of science is filled with fads that faded to oblivion, sometimes quickly, while advances that survived the withering attacks are eventually seen in a more mature light, in which its utility is acknowledged as well as its limitations. DNA and molecular clock analyses have largely passed through those phases in recent years. In the 1980s, the idea of room-temperature superconductors had its brief, frenzied day in the sun when high-temperature superconductors were discovered. Cold fusion had a similar trajectory, although the effect seems real and MIT manipulated their data to try to make the effect vanish. A scientist who spoke out against MIT’s apparent fraud was murdered years later at the same time as a series of events that I was close to that may have been related. After the bolide impact hypothesis broke through a taboo that lasted for more than a century, some scientists tried explaining all mass extinctions with bolide impacts. Today, the bolide event that ended the dinosaurs’ reign is the only impact event widely accepted as responsible for a mass extinction, and even that event is still under siege by scientists who propose other dynamics for the dinosaurs’ extinction.

In the dating sciences, the tests have all had their issues and refinements. The equipment has become more sophisticated, problems have been resolved, and precision has been enhanced. While there are continuing controversies, dating techniques have advanced just like many other processes over the history of science and technology. In 2014, dates determined for fossils and artifacts are generally only accepted with confidence when several different samples are independently tested and by different kinds of tests, if possible. If thermoluminescence, carbon-14, and other tests produce similar dates, as well as stratigraphic evidence, paleomagnetic evidence, current measurements of hotspot migration rates across tectonic plates, along with genetic and other evidence introduced in the past generation, those converging lines of evidence have produced an increasingly robust picture of not only what happened, but when.

In the 1990s, I found the dating issue enthralling and saw it assailed by fringe theorists and by catastrophists in particular. A couple of decades later, I reached the understanding that, like all sciences, dating has its limitations and the enthusiasm for a new technique can become a little too exuberant, but dating techniques and technologies have greatly improved in my lifetime. Dating the Cambrian Period’s beginning to 541 million years ago, and using 100,000-year increments to place the dates, may seem a conceit, thinking that scientists can place that event with that precision, but over the years my doubts have diminished. When moon rocks and meteorites can be tested, and the findings support not only Earth’s age previously determined by myriad methods, but also support the prevailing theories for the solar system’s and Moon’s formation, call me impressed. Controversies will persist over various finds and methods used, and scientific fraud certainly occurs, but taken as a whole, those converging lines of independently tested evidence make it increasingly unlikely that the entire enterprise is a mass farce, delusion, or even a conspiracy, as many from the fringes continue to argue. There is still a Flat Earth Society, and it is not a parody. I have looked into fringe claims for many years and few of them have proven valid; even if many were, their potential importance to the human journey was often minor to trifling. As the story that this essay tells comes closer to today’s humanity, orthodox controversies become more heated and fringe claims proliferate.

Quite often, the pioneers of science and technology receive no credit at all, not even posthumous vindication, as others steal their work and become rich and famous. But if private and governmental interests do not suppress the data and theory, as is regularly achieved regarding alternative energy and other disruptive technologies, usually the data will eventually win. But the data does not always win. The expedient but misleading tale of Louis Pasteur’s triumph in explaining the origins of life, which microbiology students are still taught in college, is an example of the phenomenon of false credit attributed to a figure who may have also marched the discipline off in the wrong direction, from which it has yet to recover. Another problem has been fabricated “discoveries” that become uncritically accepted by the mainstream, and that ideal “skepticism” of science completely disappeared, as powerful interests promote industrial waste as “medicine,” for instance, as was done with fluoridation. It was also done with tobacco smoking, and medical authorities even promoted asbestos cigarette filters, in one of many “believe it or not” episodes in the history of science and medicine. Mercury was sold as “medicine” until my lifetime, and is still found in vaccines, for which the very theoretical and empirical foundation seems pretty shaky. Lead received a similar clean bill of health by industrially funded laboratories as the conflicts of interest were surreal, and the public was completely unaware of who was really managing such public health issues and why. Similar situations exist today.

Perhaps the most significant challenge to mainstream science is the fact that numerous advanced technologies already exist on Earth, including free energy and antigravity technologies, but they are actively kept from public awareness and use. They and other exotic technologies developed in the above-top-secret world operate on principles that make the physics textbooks resemble cave drawings.

Although some scientists have challenged Carnot’s Second Law of Thermodynamics and even the First, tapping the zero-point field, as some fellow travelers did, does not violate the “laws of physics” at all; it is merely harnessing an energy source that mainstream science does not recognize, even though its greatest minds have posited its existence. For that reason, my astronaut colleague called such energy “New Energy,” and we co-founded an organization in 2003 with that name. However, when my partner and I began to mount a business in 1987 around “New Energy,” he called it “free electricity” in ads, and we used the term “free energy” before we knew anything about the field or our professional ancestors. I used the term “free energy” for many years before I heard the term “new energy,” and I will probably always use “free energy” (“FE”), largely because I grew up with it and it is still commonly used in the field. My partner's shared savings programs were also the closest thing to truly “free” energy that has ever been on the world market.

Thousands of scientists and inventors have independently pursued FE technologies, but all such efforts, if they had promise or garnered any success, have been suppressed by a clandestine and well-funded effort of global magnitude. However, this essay will lay most of that aside until near the essay’s end, other than to note that one of Einstein’s protégés, David Bohm, theorized that space is anything but empty.[23] Einstein also stated that his general theory of relativity resurrected the idea of an ether that his special theory of relativity supposedly rendered obsolete.[24] According to Bohm’s computation, the energy existing in “empty space” is unimaginably vast, as one cubic centimeter of it contains more energy than is contained in all the mass of the known universe. One of Fuller’s pupils not only subscribed to the notion that “empty” space is not empty, but he helped build technologies that harnessed that energy source, and his life’s story, like my former partner’s, is hard to believe, but has impressive evidence for its validity. According to him, the recently discovered Higgs boson is part of an effort to “rebrand” what has been called the zero-point field and other names over the years, which is the field that FE technology often harnesses.[25] I have encountered dozens of instances of scientists with theories that challenge the Standard Model of particle physics, and their primary upshot is a “new” energy source, which is often called zero-point energy.[26] But, black projects[27] and “leading edge” theory aside (theory that is far older than I am), technologies have been publicly available for many years whose operation upends some of science’s oldest theories.[28] “White science” (AKA "Establishment" or "mainstream" science) has great defects, especially when its pursuit conflicts with deeply entrenched economic and political interests.

Although the greatest physicists were arguably mystical in their orientation, they rarely explored the nature of consciousness in the way that modern human potential efforts have. When I was 16 years old, it was demonstrated to me, very dramatically, that everybody inherently possesses psychic abilities, which falsifies today's materialistic theories of consciousness. Millions of people had similar experiences during the last decades of the 20th century when performing such exercises. They are usually life-changing events and available to nearly anybody who devotes the time to experiencing them, but a politically active arm of mainstream science, known as organized “skepticism,” has waged a holy war against such evidence for longer than I have been alive. The scientific establishment’s warriors often denigrate such phenomena as “pseudoscience,” which is a term that they greatly abuse when attacking ideas and phenomena outside of their ability to investigate or that conflict with their materialistic assumptions. Far too often, when scientists discuss materialism, they compare it to organized religion, particularly its fundamentalist strains, as if those are the only two alternatives, when they are on opposite ends of a spectrum in one way and two sides of the same coin in others. Ironically, organized skepticism is largely comprised of anti-scientists who try to deny that such abilities of consciousness are even worthy of scientific investigation. That they defend materialism with flawed logic, dishonesty, and dirty tricks is one thing, but all too often, as I performed the studies that led to this essay, I saw mainstream scientists trust the “skeptics” for their pronouncements on the validity of “paranormal” phenomena. That would be like asking a Wall Street executive in the 1950s what his opinion of communism was.

I was also regularly dismayed by orthodox scientific and academic works that dealt with the human brain, consciousness, human nature, UFOs, FE technology, and the like, in which the authors accepted declassified government documents at face value (as in not wondering what else remained classified, for starters) or looked no further than 19th-century investigations.[29] Direct personal experience is far more valuable than all of the experimental evidence that can be amassed; there is no substitute for it, as that is where knowledge comes from. Armchair scientists who accept the skeptics' word for it have taken the easy way out and rely on highly unreliable "investigators" to tell them about the nature of reality. They consequently do not have informed opinions, or perhaps more accurately, they have disinformed opinions. The holy warriors’ efforts aside, the scientific data is impressive regarding what has been called “psi” and other terms, which clearly demonstrated abilities of consciousness that are still denied and neglected by mainstream science.[30] Brian O'Leary advocated scientific testing of paranormal phenomena, but he was a voice in the wilderness.

Not all mainstream scientists relegate consciousness to a mere byproduct of chemistry. John von Neumann’s interpretation of quantum mechanics is that consciousness is required for the wavefunctions that describe fields at the subatomic level to collapse into observable particles.[31] He was not the only scientist whose theories required consciousness to exist in order for the physical universe to become observable. The greatest physicists knew that materialism was a doctrine built on unprovable assumptions, which amounts to a faith.[32] It can be quite revealing when mainstream scientists deal with phenomena that challenge the tenets of their faith. Forthcoming quantum physicists regard the controversy over the implications of quantum theory as “our skeleton in the closet.”[33] To the end of his life, Einstein was very uncomfortable with the implications of quantum theory, and his disquiet was ahead of its time.[34] French physicist Alain Aspect performed a state-of-the-art test of Bell’s inequality, which helped establish the reality of quantum entanglement, which Einstein derided to his grave as “spooky action at a distance.” When they met and Aspect proposed the experiment, John Bell’s first question was, “Do you have tenure?”[35] That paradox at the heart of quantum physics was avoided by the Copenhagen interpretation, which focuses on getting the right answers for quantum predictions and avoids the implications for reality that the quantum enigma presents.[36] Einstein and Schrödinger were not satisfied with a framework that made accurate predictions but avoided grappling with what was really happening.

White science still has almost nothing to say about the nature of consciousness. However, Black Science (covert, largely privatized, and the same province where that advanced technology is sequestered) is somewhat familiar with the nature of consciousness and considers it to be far more than a byproduct of chemistry. The assumption that the entire universe is a manifestation of consciousness is not only unassailable by White Science, but is probably a foundational assumption of Black Science and mystics.

The battle between materialists and religious orders over the years, in which materialist evolutionists grapple with creationists and intelligent design proponents, seems to be a feud between two fundamentalist camps. Nowhere in such battles are the abilities or wisdom of accomplished mystics found. The nature and role of consciousness, both in this dimension and beyond it, are likely far too subtle to be profitably engaged by the level of debate that predominates today. Scientists such as Einstein were awestruck by the evident intelligence behind the universe’s design, but that did not mean that they believed in a God with a flowing beard. As this essay will explore later, those issues are not merely fodder for idle philosophical pursuit, but at their root lies the crux of the current conundrum that humanity finds itself in, as we race toward our self-destruction.

White Science does not really know what energy is; it can only describe its measurable effects.[37] At its root, there are two primary components of our universe: energy and consciousness. Our universe may have begun as pure energy (and even if it did not, all matter appears to be comprised of energy), and consciousness may be required for our universe to exist at all, which may be part of the quantum paradox. Energy and matter may be manifestations of consciousness, and large brains could be simply more refined “transducers” for more complex consciousness to manifest in physical reality. In summary, everything physical is made of energy and our consciousness is all that we know, but the greatest physicists admitted that the nature of consciousness is not something that today’s science is equipped to study. There is evidence that evolution is not purely the province of chance mutations, but that organisms can affect their evolution at the genetic level.[38]

The greatest scientists readily admitted that the theories and data of physics, that hardest of the hard sciences, drew highly limited descriptions of reality, and those scientists were usually, to one extent or another, mystics. If textbook science falls far short of explaining reality, what can be said within its framework that is useful? Plenty. Our industrialized world is based on textbook science and feats such as putting men on the Moon were performed within the parameters of textbook science. With the waning of overspecialization and overreliance on reductionism in the last decades of the 20th century, multidisciplinary works have proliferated and will tend to dominate the references for this essay. I have found them not only very helpful for my own understanding, but they are appropriate references for a generalist essay. I have also avoided scientific terminology when feasible. For example, I use “seafloor” instead of “benthic,” and if a non-specialized term will suffice for a scientific concept, I will often use it.

The mainstream theory is that matter consists of elementary particles (which are all forms of energy), and their interaction with the Higgs field is responsible for all mass. Almost all mass in the known universe consists of protons in hydrogen atoms, and those protons are in turn comprised of quarks, and electrons and neutrinos are the other first generation fundamental particles. Protons have a positive electric charge, electrons a negative charge, and neutrinos no net charge. The simplest atom consists of one proton in the nucleus and one electron in “orbit” around it, which is the most common hydrogen atom. Today, mainstream science recognizes four forces in the universe: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces in an atom’s nucleus. Gravity attracts matter to matter, and is thought to be responsible for the formation of stars, planets, and galaxies. But the universe seems to be built from processes, not objects.

The Standard Model of particle physics is complex, but the preceding presentation is largely adequate for this essay’s purpose, while it can be helpful to be aware that the physics behind FE and antigravity technologies will probably render the Standard Model obsolete. If FE, antigravity, and related technologies finally come in from the shadows, the elusive Unified Field may come with them, and the Unified Field might well be consciousness, which will help unite the scientist and the mystic, and that field may be divine in nature. But that understanding is not necessary to relate the story that White Science tells today of how Earth developed from its initial state to today’s, when complex life is under siege by an ape that quickly spread across the planet like a cancer once it achieved the requisite intelligence, social organization, and technological prowess.

With the above limitations acknowledged, this essay will explore the earthly journeys of life and humanity, and energy’s role in them.

Energy and Chemistry

Chapter summary:

This chapter presents several energy and chemistry concepts essential to this essay. Even though scientists do not really know what energy is (they do not know what light or gravity are, either), energy is perhaps best seen as motion, whether it is a photon flying through space, the "orbit" of an electron around an atom's nucleus or of Earth around the Sun, an object falling to Earth, a river flowing toward the ocean, air moving through Earth's atmosphere, rising and falling tides, and blood moving through a heart.

In their dance around an atom’s nucleus, electrons exist in “shells.” The most stable electron configuration exists when the electrons fill the shells and each electron is paired with another, and each electron spins in the opposite direction of its partner. The classical view of an electron had an electron orbiting the nucleus much in the same way that Earth orbits the Sun, but quantum theory presents a different picture, in which an electron is a wave that only appears to be a particle when it is observed. Even then, a hydrogen electron’s orbit as presented by quantum theory does not look much different from the classical image, and the classical view largely suffices for this essay in presenting the energetic aspects of the electrons’ properties.

When one electron shell is filled, electrons begin to fill shells farther from the nucleus. For the simplest atoms it works that way, but for larger atoms, particularly those of metallic elements, electrons fill shells in more complex fashion and electrons begin to fill subshells not necessarily in the shell closest to the nucleus. When an electron is unpaired or in an unfilled shell, it can be a valence electron, which can form bonds with other atoms. In most circumstances, only unpaired electrons form bonds with other atoms. Electron bonds between atoms provide the basis for chemistry and life on Earth.

For that simplest element, hydrogen, its lone electron has an affinity to pair up with another electron, and that smallest shell contains two electrons. Hydrogen is never found in its monoatomic state in nature, but is bonded to other elements, as that lone electron finds another one to pair with, which also fills that simplest shell. In its pure state in nature, hydrogen is found paired with itself and forms a diatomic molecule. In chemistry notation, it is presented as H 2 . The most common hydrogen combination with another element on Earth is with oxygen (“O” in chemistry notation), which forms water and is presented as H 2 O. Oxygen has two unpaired electrons in its electron shell (its outer shell has eight positions for electrons, with six of them filled), and oxygen’s electrons pair with electrons in other atoms with a “hunger” that is only surpassed by fluorine, which is the most reactive known element. The “hungriest” atoms can completely strip an electron from nearby atoms and form ions, whereby the resulting atoms have imbalances between their electrons and protons, and thus possess net electric charges. An atom that loses an electron in a chemical reaction is called “oxidized,” while the atom that gains one is called “reduced.” When electrons are transferred or shared, those hungriest atoms will cause the greatest amounts of energy to be released in the reactions. Fluorine is so reactive that if it were sprayed on water, the water would burn.

The element with two protons in its nucleus is helium (the number of protons determines what element the atom is), and its electrons are paired and its shell is filled. Consequently, helium does not want to share its electrons with anything. Helium is the most non-reactive element known. It has never bonded with any other element, even fluorine. In the periodic table of the elements, helium is in the family known as noble gases (formerly named “inert”), because they resist reacting with other atoms. Their electron shells are completely filled.

An electron’s distance from the nucleus can vary. It is not a smooth variation of distance, but only certain distances are possible. When an electron changes its distance, it jumps in a process known as quantum leaping. That quantum leaping reflects how electrons gain or release energy. When light hits an atom, if it is absorbed by an electron, the photon gives the electron the energy to move to an orbit farther away. When an electron emits light, that lost photon removes energy and the electron falls to a lower orbit. The potential energy in the electron as it orbits the nucleus and the potential energy in a rock that I hold above the ground are similar, as the diagram below demonstrates.

Below is a diagram of a hydrogen atom as its electron orbits farther from the nucleus when it absorbs energy.

As the diagram depicts, the atom gets larger. When an electron moves into an orbit farther from the nucleus, the atom will vibrate more, like the way a car’s engine will vibrate more when it runs faster. Lateral movement (also called translational motion) is called temperature. While finding an accurate definition of temperature can be a frustrating experience, temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy (the energy of motion) in matter. As with the behavior of photons, at the atomic level the concept of temperature can break down, and classical behaviors emerge as groups of atoms lose their quantum properties.[39] When one atom collides with another, there is a transfer of energy, as there is in any collision. The transferred energy can be stored by the electrons leaping into higher orbits. They can in turn release that energy in the form of photons and return to lower orbits.

The increased movement of heated atoms is why substances expand in volume. The more motion, the higher the temperature, and just as an engine will fly apart when the RPMs go too high, when an atom vibrates too fast, an electron can leave the atom entirely and the atom becomes an ion. As substances become hotter, the electrons will be in higher orbits, and will fall farther when giving off photonic energy, so the photons have more energy (shorter wavelengths). Get a substance hot enough and it will emit photons that we can see (visible light). Those first visible photons will be on the lower end of the spectrum of light that we can see with our eyes, and will be red. Get the substance hotter and the light can turn white, which means that we are seeing the full visible spectrum of light. Nealry half of the Sun’s energy output is in the form of visible light. Get matter hot enough and it becomes plasma, as electrons float in a soup with nuclei. Those electrons are too energetic to be captured by nuclei and placed into shells.

When two atoms come close to each other, if the potential energy of their combined state is less than their potential energy when they are separate, the atoms will tend to react. But the reaction only happens when the electron shells come into an alignment so that the reaction can happen. It is an issue of alignment and the atoms’ velocity. If the shells do not meet in the proper alignment and velocity, the reaction will not happen and the atoms will bounce away from each other. The faster and more often the atoms collide, the likelier they are to react and reach that lower energy state. Chemical (electron shell) reactions need to reach their activation energy to occur, and this is measured in temperature. The activation energy for hydrogen and oxygen to react and form water is about 560 degrees Celsius (560o C). Nuclear reactions work in similar fashion, but for nuclear fusion in the Sun’s core, at 16 million degrees Celsius, at a pressure 340 billion times greater than Earth’s atmosphere at sea level, in 10 billion years at one trillion collisions per second, a proton has a 50% chance of fusing with another proton.[40] Nuclear fusion is thus far rarer than electron bonding, and far less energy is released when atoms bond via electrons. The fusion of a helium nucleus releases more than a million times the energy that it takes to ionize a hydrogen atom. As will be discussed later, some reactions have a cumulative result of absorbing energy, while others release it. The first can be seen as an investment of energy, while the second can be seen as consuming it. Organisms and civilizations have always faced the investment/consumption decision.

Below is a diagram of two hydrogen atoms before and after reaction, as they bond to form H 2 .

Elements with their electron shells mostly, but not completely, filled are, in order of electronegativity: fluorine, oxygen, chlorine, and nitrogen. In that upper right corner of the periodic table, of largely filled electron shells, phosphorus and sulfur also reside. Carbon and hydrogen have their valence shells half filled. With the exception of fluorine, those elements listed above provide virtually all of the human body’s atoms. The body also contains metals, particularly sodium, magnesium, calcium, and iron, which “donate” electrons and make key chemical reactions possible. Fluorine forms the smallest negatively charged ions known to science and wrecks organic molecules for reasons discussed later in this essay. Organisms do not use fluorine, except for some plants that use it as a poison.

When atoms combine through shared electrons (called “covalent” bonds), the electrons are not always shared equally. The classic example of this is the water molecule. Oxygen “hogs” the electrons that the hydrogen atoms share with it. Because those electrons spend more time in the oxygen atom‘s electron shell than they do in the hydrogen atoms’ electron shells, the oxygen atom in a water molecule will get a negative charge to it, and the hydrogen atoms will get positive charges. The charges will not be as strong as if they were ionized atoms, but those charges “polarize” the molecule. In a body of water, oxygen atoms will attract hydrogen atoms of neighboring molecules, and a relatively weak attraction known as a hydrogen bond forms. Below is a picture of hydrogen bonds in water. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Those hydrogen bonds make water the miraculous substance that it is. The unusual surface tension of water is due to hydrogen bonding. Water has a very high boiling point for its molecular weight (compare the boiling points of water and carbon dioxide, for instance) because of that hydrogen bonding. Water’s unique properties made it the essential medium for biochemical reactions; the human body is mostly made of water.

Those energy and chemistry concepts should make this essay easier to digest.

Timelines of Energy, Geology, and Early Life

Timeline of Significant Energy Events in Earth's and Life's History

Abbreviated Geologic Time Scale

Early Earth Timeline before the Eon of Complex Life

The Formation and Early Development of the Sun and Earth

Chapter summary:

In the tables above, some dates have ranges as such old dates often have relatively thin evidence supporting them, which can be interpreted in different ways. Those dates will be adjusted as the scientific evidence and theories develop. As I was writing this essay, a study was published that may have pushed back the beginning of the Great Oxygenation Event by several hundred million years.[41] Moving dates can change some theories of causation, but few scientists will dispute the idea that Earth’s atmosphere was primarily oxygenated by oxygenic photosynthesis. It is the only plausible mechanism for that oxygenation event and Earth’s continuing high atmospheric oxygen content.[42]

After the Big Bang, when matter began to coalesce, virtually all mass in the universe was contained in hydrogen atoms, with traces of the next two lightest elements: helium and lithium. According to the Standard Model, atoms have no mass by themselves, but the field that gives rise to the Higgs Boson provides the mass. Gravity attracted hydrogen atoms to each other and, where “clumps” of hydrogen became large enough, the pressure in the clump’s center (a star’s core) became great enough so that the mutual repulsion of the protons in hydrogen nuclei was overcome (like charges repel each other, while opposite charges attract), and the protons fused together. That fusion released a great deal of primordial Big Bang energy, and fusion powers stars.

Depending on the star’s size and the resulting temperatures and pressures, various larger elemental nuclei can be produced. Iron is the heaviest element created during a large star’s primary fusion process. Nuclei larger than the simplest hydrogen nucleus contain neutrons as well as protons. As the name implies, neutrons have no net electric charge, but have about the same mass as a proton (an electron has less than a thousandth the mass of a proton, so virtually all the mass in atoms is provided by its protons and neutrons). Radioactive decay into daughter isotopes is mediated by the weak nuclear force.

In the smaller stars that eventually become white dwarfs, the primary fusion process creates oxygen as its heaviest element. Even though the Sun is larger than about 95% of the Milky Way Galaxy’s stars, it is destined to become a white dwarf in about six or seven billion years.

Several different fusion processes have been identified, and stars from about half the size of the Sun to about nine times larger can undergo a process known as s-process fusion late in their lives, and that process has created about half of the elements heavier than iron; bismuth is the heaviest element created by the process. Those heavier elements are eventually blown from the star by its stellar wind as it becomes a white dwarf. Stars with more than nine times the mass of the Sun undergo a different process at the end of their lives. When the hydrogen and helium fuel is used up and the fusion processes in those stars’ cores are reduced low enough, gravity will cause those stars to collapse in on themselves. That collapse creates the pressures needed to fuse those other atoms heavier than iron, including the heaviest elements. Uranium is the heaviest naturally produced element. In an instant, r-process fusion occurs. Depending on a collapsing star’s composition, it can collapse into a black hole or neutron star or explode into a supernova.

When a star becomes a supernova, those heavy elements are sprayed into the galactic neighborhood by a stupendous release of fusion energy. Over the subsequent eons, gravity will cause the remnants of stars, and hydrogen that had not yet become a star or did not fuse within a star, to coalesce into an accretion disk, and a new star with its attendant planets will form. The Sun will take more than ten billion years to live its life cycle before becoming a white dwarf. Large stars burn much more quickly and can become supernovas after as little as ten million years of main-sequence burning. The rule is: the larger the star, the shorter its life.

The accretion disk from which the Sun and its planets were formed appeared in a relatively short time, and the disk was originally a molecular cloud that may have been disturbed by an exploding star. A "local" exploding star likely provided the bulk of our solar system's matter, and the entire mess gravitationally collapsed into the disk. Earth’s age is estimated to be about 4.6 billion years, and formed fewer than 100 million years after the Sun did. In a mere 50 million years after formation, the Sun became compressed enough to initiate the sustained fusion that still powers it and will for several billion more years.

Our solar system’s planets initially formed from clumps of heavier atoms, and the rocky planets formed in a region too hot for lighter elements and compounds to condense. Oxygen and iron, those two largest products of main-sequence burning, comprise nearly two-thirds of Earth’s mass.

Just past our solar system’s “frost line,” the largest planet and first gas giant, Jupiter, formed. In our solar system’s early days, smaller agglomerations of mass, called planetesimals, swarmed. Those that began their lives inside the frost line were rocky, and those outside the frost line were generally comprised of lighter elements. Those planetesimals bombarded the forming planets and increased their mass. Other planetesimals were ejected from the solar system as the gravity of the Sun and planets whipped them around. Today’s solar system provides mute evidence of that bombardment, as all rocky planets and moons are heavily cratered. Earth’s geological processes have removed most evidence of that bombardment, but other rocky bodies have preserved the evidence. It is thought that the bombardment of Earth by the planetesimals comprised of lighter elements provided the materials for Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. Venus and Mars were also bombarded with the lighter elements and may have plentiful water long ago, but only Earth retained its water. The biggest collision between Earth and its neighbors may well have created the Moon, and although the currently prevailing hypothesis has plenty of problems, the other hypotheses have more. Moon rocks obtained by NASA’s Apollo missions show that the oldest parts of the Moon’s surface are about the same age as Earth.

Today’s prevailing scientific theories consider stars to be the observable universe‘s energy centers. According to today’s theories, 95% of the universe is not observable, as about 70% is dark energy and 25% is dark matter. At this time, dark energy and dark matter have never been observed. Any theory that relies on unobserved phenomena is going to be highly provisional, and I consider it unlikely that the prevailing cosmological theories a century from now will much resemble those of today. The scale of the universe, from its largest to smallest objects, is truly difficult to imagine, and this animation can help provide some perspective.

The chemistry of Earth’s land, oceans, and atmosphere provides the raw material for life, but if the Sun disappeared tomorrow, Earth’s surface would quickly become a block of ice with an insignificant atmosphere. Partly because humanity has not explored beyond our home star system, our planet is the universe’s only place officially acknowledged to host life as we know it.

What is called geologic time is the calendar of Earth’s life cycle so far. The scale of geologic time strains human brains with its immensity. Writing about a geological period that “only” lasted 24 million years is part of the sometimes surreal experience of writing in terms of geologic time. European geologists developed most of the calendar’s names in the 19th century, generally naming the timeframes after the locations where the first fossils of that time were discovered in their particular sedimentary layers. Earth’s calendar has been divided into eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages, and those categories are defined by the layers’ geological particulars, usually the discovered fossils.

The journey of life on Earth has been greatly affected by geophysical and geochemical processes as well as influences from beyond Earth, such as:

Continental formation and moving tectonic plates, and volcanism;

Land-based dynamics, including erosion, weathering, uplift, and subsidence;

The chemistry of the oceans and atmosphere;

The currents in the oceans and atmosphere, including oceanic tides;

The physics of Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field;

The climate, including precipitation and changing temperatures;

Comet and asteroid impacts;

Earth’s relationship with the Moon;

Variations in Earth’s orientation to the Sun;

Slowly increasing solar output as the Sun grows older, and minor variations in solar output.

Those processes and events can interact with each other, and a few examples can provide an idea of the dynamics’ complexity. What follows are today’s orthodox views, to the best of my knowledge, and they can certainly change in the future, perhaps even radically, just as cosmological and subatomic theories may change radically. It seems to me, however, that geophysical and geochemical processes are understood better and have more robust data than many other areas of science, so geophysics and geochemistry are areas where I expect fewer radical changes than others. Maybe that is because it is neither too big nor too small and closer to our daily reality than distant stars or what is happening inside atoms.

Volcanism can not only temporarily alter the atmosphere’s chemistry, but the ash from volcanism can also block sunlight from reaching Earth’s surface and lead to atmospheric cooling.[43] Carbon dioxide vented by volcanism in the Mesozoic era is what made it so warm. Tectonic plate movements can alter the circulation of the atmosphere and ocean. When continental plates come together into a supercontinent, oceanic currents can fail and the oceans can become anoxic, as atmospheric oxygen is no longer drawn into the global ocean’s depths, which may have triggered numerous mass extinction events.[44] When continents are near the poles, ice ages can appear, but in our current ice age the tipping point is variations in Earth’s orientation to the Sun, which is affected by, among other influences, the Moon.

Tectonic plates can collide, such as the collision of India into Asia, which formed the Himalayan Mountains and raised the Tibetan Plateau. That continuing event not only changed Earth’s weather patterns and influenced the monsoons’ formation, it also exposed a great deal of raw rock to the atmosphere and consequently removed atmospheric carbon dioxide through weathering, which in turn made the atmosphere cooler. That may have contributed to the ice age that we currently experience, although other studies indicate that the carbon removal may have been more due to the burial of organic matter. The debate is continuing as the complex dynamics are subjected to scientific investigation.[45] For all of the controversy over the dynamics, few scientists argue against the idea that atmospheric carbon dioxide has been falling, fairly consistently, since about 150-to-100 mya, from more than a thousand parts per million to the roughly 200-300 parts per million (“PPM”) of the past million years. Nearly 35 million years ago (also written as “35 mya”), carbon dioxide levels fell below 600 PPM, when the Antarctic ice sheet began to form.[46] During the current fossil fuel era, Earth’s atmosphere may reach 600 PPM again, or higher, in this cent