People on Slashdot like to allege that EU Theory is absurd. So, let's get down to business!
When the rover descends down into Victoria crater, NASA will be surprised to find that what they thought were sand dunes down there are in fact glassified sand. That peculiar formation down there is a fulgarite. It's not sand. It's more like solid rock. I'm guessing that the rover will be able to figure this out. Shouldn't be too hard. Wallace Thornhill discusses the formation of these Victoria Crater fulgarites in depth on his holoscience page.
NASA will discover this and then, for a brief few moments, wonder why this particular pattern became glassified (as opposed to just a flat melted bottom). Then, not understanding what they're seeing, they will move on to other things -- because, after all, if it doesn't have to do with evidence for water or life, why would they be interested?
It would be nice to think that getting this prediction right might mean something to some people out there, but there will be other opportunities...
By the way, when the rover descends into Victoria crater, those things that look like sand dunes at the bottom will not be sand dunes at all. They will be glassified sand... rock... more technically called fulgarites.
Here's another prediction for you that we'll probably know the answer to within a few weeks. When that rover descends into Victoria Crater on Mars, those unusual sand dune -like features at the bottom of that crater will not be sand at all. They will be glassified. They will be more like rocks than sand. It'll be interesting to see how NASA will spin that one...
I would suggest that the "sand dunes" are the result of the central arc spots, forming overlapping circular depressions (see diagram above). Certainly, the orthogonal ridges have more in common with a corona discharge pattern than they do with sand dunes. They may therefore be solid, glassified sand, rather like that found in dry soil following a lightning strike. Such glassified sand is known as a "fulgurite." It is noteworthy that the Apollo astronauts found clumps of glass-crusted soil near the centers of small (1 to 5 foot) craters on the lunar surface. It raised a stir because the glass was a surprise. In addition, orthogonal lineaments in the lunar soil were reported. They cannot have been there for long.
The blast effect of the cosmic "spark" together with the electrical stripping of ionized surface matter, produced the clean crater and surrounds. The sudden outward movement of the arc spots may have formed the radial pattern on the crater floor. The scalloped crater wall is simply the erosion signature of the irregular ring of enlarged anode spots.
The dark material on the crater floor may be from an exposed strata and/or the arc may have modified the lighter material. It may be rich in Martian hematite "blueberries." The somewhat curved dark streaks beyond the crater wall are to be expected from an electric discharge because of the rotating winds it generates.
I wish the Mars Rover, Opportunity, every success in exploring Victoria crater. It may at last be able to provide confirmation of the electrical model of planetary cratering. Of course, that does not guarantee acceptance by planetary scientists. That requires giving up strong beliefs imbibed with mother's milk.
Like others, you act as if the loudest person in the room is always right. You prefer that all of your beliefs in astrophysics be vetted by eminent authorities within the field, ignoring the possibility that those people may have been educated incorrectly about how plasmas behave in space. You accept the idea that invisible matter and forces are the primary constituents of our universe -- an inherently untestable theory. This is not strange to you, but the idea that plasmas could be electrical, as they are within the laboratory, ironically enough, is. When large bodies in space flicker at an amazing 450 times per second, you accept without skepticism that the flickering is the result of spinning objects even as you use 60 Hz electricity to run your computer and are surrounded by objects that operate on the basis of electricity. When you see others on Slashdot collectively abuse EU advocates and ignore their arguments, you'd rather feel like you are part of a majority than objectively test your own beliefs by investigating the facts for yourself. You, in fact, have never read what EU Theory says in any great detail, thinking that you can determine that it is absurd without ever investigating it. You will one day realize that you were wrong to think this, but by then, it will be too late to remedy the harm you've incurred. You will have already played your part in the larger drama that props up the mainstream views and tamps down any alternative views, regardless of the weight and character of the evidence, as if astrophysicists are infallible and in complete ignorance of the fact that our mainstream astrophysical theories change on a weekly basis.
You ignore the fact that your own views of EU Theory are the result of numerous people who acted just like you for many years before you arrived on the scene. Your ignorant imitation of them has created a self-perpetuating myth, which is more important to you now than actually perceiving reality. Your actions ultimately contribute to delaying the proliferation of important technologies that would evolve from an acceptance of this new paradigm. In other words, your hubris unknowingly undermines your own quality of life. It's quite ironic. It will one day make for a great story. But for now, it's still quite sad for those of us who know better. Much of astrophysics today is nothing more than mathematical fairy tales. We will one day tell these stories to children with a disclaimer that man once believed them, but no more.
I've forwarded your comments to the theorists. If they're portraying the mainstream views on Martian blueberries as overly-simplistic, then that is indeed something that demands correction.
As for the danger of electrical effects, they are clearly transient phenomenon. That said though, there appear to be some areas that are more dangerous than others. Anywhere that you can observe geological features that appear to have possible electrical causes -- when electrical plasmas are gouging out surface features -- I would expect that that would be fairly serious as far as human health is concerned. We see much potential evidence for this especially on the Martian South Pole. The Martian "geysers" there have possible electrical explanations too. They appear just as likely to be proton beams from the Sun strong enough to gouge out material beneath the ice and project it into the air some distance. We can see these geysers in action within their image databases even though NASA has yet to announce this fact -- probably because it has little to do with their search for evidence of water and life. I obviously have no idea if NASA ever intends to do so, but sending people to the Martian South Pole could be disastrous.
Why not make a prediction based on EU and then attempt to disprove that prediction? If the prediction is valid, EU would gain some credibility.
The very fact that you state this indicates that you have not really read the theory at all. Wallace Thornhill's accurate prediction of the Deep Impact mission results -- results which continue to baffle NASA scientists many years later -- demonstrates without any doubt whatsoever that the EU model for comets is correct. Few, if any, of these mission results were expected, and yet Thornhill accurately predicted pretty much all of them -- including a pre-impact flash, the following dust-up, an alteration in the arrangement of the jets, an absence of water on the surface, and more. How in the world would Thornhill know in advance of two flashes during impact if he didn't understand what was happening? Nobody was predicting anything like that, and there's little reason to believe that it would occur in the absence of electrical plasmas. The implications of his prediction are so devastating to mainstream astrophysics that it has been completely ignored even though it was far too accurate to be coincidence or accident. If you want to observe the details, you'll have to actually do some *real* reading:
I've heard every single argument under the Sun regarding his accurate prediction. One person argued that he made the prediction *after* the results were observed, as if that makes any sense whatsoever. His prediction used to be featured on wikipedia's Deep Impact mission results page, but in the Slashdot tradition, this accurate prediction has been taken off of those pages -- as if it never happened -- because it is viewed as nothing more than an impediment to proving mainstream theories. In fact, NASA hasn't said much at all about the Deep Impact mission results since it happened because results which do not conform to the mainstream are uninteresting to them.
"Reading" the theory does not mean reading the wikipedia entry or even just the various Picture of the Day webpages, which are clearly intended for a non-scientific audience. You must read either "The Electric Sky" by Don Scott or "The Electric Universe" by Wallace Thornhill. If you want a more technical discussion of the theory, then visit Ian Tresman's homemade wiki page:
Your demand for a prediction though is pretty typical of what I deal with on these forums. People have no idea what they're talking about around here when it comes to EU Theory, and it drives me to push you people harder to educate yourselves. There's going to be a large collective regret about time lost when you finally realize that you should have spent the time to educate yourselves before ridiculing people for believing something that is completely logical and supported by observations.
The truth is that EU Theorists make predictions all of the time and their theory is inherently testable. That doesn't though mean that people are paying any attention.
Let's pretend, for instance, that NASA decides to send people to Mars' South Pole in order to investigate the apparent geyser activity there, and possibly to extract water from the ice. I've seen some pretty startling Mars Orbital Camera images from the South Pole that could be interpreted to be showing proton beams that are so powerful that they are excavating material from beneath the ice, throwing it up into the air, and then that material falls back onto the ice. NASA has decided to believe that these geysers have tectonic and/or chemical causes, but you can make a pretty logical argument based upon the images that these geysers are the result of proton beams from the Sun. Any beam of charged particles that's strong enough to gouge out material would surely be a hazard to humans.
Look very closely at the right-hand image on the following page, and it is quite clear that NASA has unknowingly captured these geysers in action, whatever the cause:
Nobody really knows what these things are. But to think that they might send people there, that there could be a possibility that these people might be exposed to intense beams of charged particles, and that your argument for *not* considering it as a possibility has something to do with not being able to prove that God doesn't exist, is pretty reckless. It's not as if this data point exists by itself. There is evidence all over Mars that indicates electrical activity that is being ignored in favor of evidence for water.
Remember now, you still have no idea what EU Theory really states. You are operating with confidence on a complete lack of information and you've drawn all of your conclusions on the basis of observing other people's reactions to EU Theory. Let's be extremely clear: EU Theory is not anywhere in the same ballpark as creationism or any religion whatsoever. It's based upon laboratory plasma physics, where we find that plasmas are electrical in nature. They have electrical resistance and we use Maxwell's Equations to model them. The only thing keeping space plasmas from being electrical as well are the astrophysicists themselves.
The thing is, though, their interpreations of the data will now define the next mission there. If they repeatedly insist on skewing their interprations towards one single preferable finding, they can quite possibly end up with an eventual human mission to Mars that will be a complete catastrophe. At some point in time, they need to start getting serious about ruling out *all* interpretations of the observations. The idea that Mars is being terraformed by electrical activity -- as was hinted by the unexpected observation of lightning bolts at the cores of dust devils, martian dust storms that appear to consist of these electrical dust devils, numerous rilles that cannot have been generated by fluids or lava flows, crater chains that blend into rilles and rilles peppered with craters, and simple laboratory experiments that can replicate surface features there quite simply (including the Martian spiders and Martian blueberries) -- all of this stuff needs to be refuted and ruled out before we send people there. We can agree on that, right?
Those arguments are being ignored. Nobody is refuting them. They are valid arguments. Nobody's ever explained why they are not. And I think it's a very dangerous game. Underestimating electrical activity could have serious ramifications. It would be a real fiasco to have to send up a second mission to investigate why the first failed. Would the public even pay for it? It has to be perfect on the first try. That means ruling everything out.
If people think Electric Universe Theory is absurd, then it must be demonstrated to be so as far as Martian geology is concerned *before* we send people to Mars because they're alleging that they're seeing a *lot* of activity there. When peoples' lives will be on the line, can we afford to just ignore the alleged danger?
I think I'm with you guys for a very long time now. This is really too good to be true. None of you guys have read what EU Theory states. You have no clue. And you're so sure that you're right. I have to be here when things start to fall apart for all of you. It's going to be a spectacle. The thing is, it's an unusual situation because the evidence already exists to convince all of you. But when you don't read it, you become quite impenetrable! It's one of the most interesting problems I've ever encountered in my entire life.
The thing is, I'm going on the record here. Most of you guys refuse to do so. The story would be so much better if we could correctly attribute all of the players involved. That would definitely make it a lot easier to tell the story later.
Make no mistake about it though: *Everything* you say here will be picked apart in the future. If you're going to crack jokes, make sure they are at least funny first. People will be reading these jokes, and interpreting them through the context of arrogance. It might not be as funny to those people as you think it is to me. We don't know yet what's going to result from this hubris.
They ask their questions as if they already know the answers...
Currently: "Is there water on Mars? Hell yeah, and we're going to find it! Then, we'll know that our current theories are correct. We are in fact masters of the universe, just as we thought!"
Rather than: "Is there water on Mars? Well, these geological formations could be the result of this, this and this. Let's keep an open mind on the possibilities, including even the strangest possibilities, and load up sensors to test every single one of them, focusing heavily on using sensors that can differentiate between the possibilities. Then, when we see the data, we can create differing interpretations and compare these interpretations on the basis of the data."
There's a very big difference. NASA has become results-oriented and uncertainty (a necessary tool for maintaining objectivity) has become a casualty. Uncertainty doesn't make for good PR releases, you know? It's important to look real busy and have answers! If something didn't go as you planned, then God forbid, don't mention that because then people might think that you don't know what you're doing and they might stop funding you. Rather than bravely reasserting the role of cautious scientist with the public, apprehensive about making speculations that might turn out to later be untrue, NASA and the astrophysicists in general have decided that it's more important to act like a story-teller, where speculation runs rampant and frequently turns out to be untrue, where every mission is pre-scripted and integrated into a pre-planned history for future generations of how we learned what the universe was. Thing is -- the universe won't be learned that way. That's fiction. It's silly. There will clearly be surprises. At this rate, though, we won't notice them. Our belief that we know the end of the story will inevitably blind us to the truth.
Collisions with Jupiter do not help us much with understanding craters on Mars. I should have been clearer that I'm specifically speaking about impacts between non-gaseous planets. Those impact craters tell us the most about the process that's happening.
The one single impact that we've observed in space in great detail, the Deep Impact mission, raised *way* more questions than it answered. It was clearly a rejection of mainstream models for comets, and yet there was never any subsequent realization or reaction to that data. It's never been accepted to be the paradigm-shift that it should have been. It's been swept under the rug, as if nothing anomalous occurred with that mission at all.
One would think that scientists would want to know the precise details of what happens when two solid bodies collide. It wouldn't be completely absurd to imagine an experiment involving pushing a small asteroid into Mars with cameras waiting on site or something (it might even make for a good NASA PR campaign -- the public obviously likes explosions). The unusual characteristics of craters within the universe demand as much. But what we get instead, for the most part, are computer simulations as evidence that the mainstream views of what happens during collisions are correct. It's not considered a pertinent question. The whole thing is considered resolved, and we've now moved on to assuming this point in our interpretation of observations of Martian craters. A consensus has formed even though numerous enigmas remain within the field of crater studies. There have been anomalies from day one, starting with Meteor Crater in Arizona that remain mysterious.
Humans are masters of convincing themselves of whatever they want. If we can convince ourselves that an omnicient, invisible being monitors our every movement and decides our eternal fate when we die, we can surely convince ourselves that Mars is exactly what we want it to be. We'll find the evidence, I assure you!
But is this real? Are we creating an artificial reality? If you only ask the specific questions that pertain to the answers that you want to find, without much consideration for finding things that you don't expect, and always settling on the favorable interpretation when multiple possibilities exist, won't you create your own self-perpetuating myth? What consideration is being put into alternative non-water causes for the Martian geological observations? I propose AB-SO-LUTE-LY NONE.
I'm aware of the mainstream attempts at explaining these observations. I don't find them very convincing. Computer simulations can be created to recreate just about any observation, but it does not mean that this is what actually happened. The search for the truth has taken a back seat to the search for evidence to confirm our perceptions. When details don't fit into these popular explanations, they are brushed aside for future consideration -- or just brushed aside entirely and never presented to the public. NASA has no interest, for instance, in showing the public that Martian dust storms have been observed to be filamentary (they haven't even done a story on it) because it doesn't suit their purpose of proving that water covered the planet. But this presupposes that this detail is not important. What if it is? What if its suppression to the public is affecting the public's perception of Mars? What if we have created a self-perpetuating myth of what is really happening on Mars?
We appear to be more concerned with validating our current perception of the universe than in finding an explanation that can satisfy all of our observations without any remaining enigmas. We are projecting our preferences and prejudices upon our search for the truth, and I'm quite certain that this strategy is doomed to failure. We need to allow for the possibility within these missions to find things that we did not expect to find at all. I don't see that happening.
We use our experience on Earth to form a hypothesis about similar features on another planet.
But weather systems on other planets are not anything like our own. Many of the geological features we see on Mars cannot be explained by fluid or lava flow. Dust devils on Mars have lightning bolts at their cores, and I've seen pictures of Martian dust storms that demonstrate pretty clearly that there is vertical filamentation all along the edges of these dust storms.
Mars is not like Earth. Instead of basing our analysis of Martian geology and Martian weather on Earth's geology and weather, shouldn't we be developing geologic and weather model that works for *all* planets, and that can explain both Earth and Mars and all of the other planets? How does Earth's weather system, for instance, help us to understand the unusual rotational velocities of cloud cover on Uranus? I don't think you can make a good case that it does, and I think the same argument can be made of attempts to perform the same reasoning for less conspicuous items on Mars.
We form a hypothesis but we can't support or deny it until we observe evidence. If the evidence supports then it looks like we knew it all along. If the evidence denies then it raises more questions.
I get the sense though that some theories are being favored. The water on Mars theory is definitely favored over any other logical explanations of our findings there, right or wrong. Much of the evidence that's cited as pointing to water can also indicate other things.
Consensus is built with mathematical models. Probes and telescopes are used to validate our hyptheses. Again, if observational evidence does support a hypothesis then more questions are raised and new ones are formed. As for not correlating with physical impacts (I'm not entirely sure what you are referencing here) there are craters formed by volcanoes and probably some caused by exploding meteors (meteorites).
I'll excerpt from another posting in this same thread:
The Deep Impact Mission demonstrated *two* flashes of light. Why is that? It's a *very* important question.
Why do craters sometimes appear to be the result of rilles, and rilles sometimes appear to be actually chains of craters? These are supposed to be two *completely* different processes -- one from fluid or lava flow and one from collisions. Why do they appear to be related in many situations?
Why do many asteroid craters have flat bottoms? I understand that there are theories regarding this (melted bottoms), but have we observed flat bottomed craters from our own nuclear explosion tests? No, I don't think so...
Why do many craters have central peaks? Oftentimes, if not always, the stratigraphy of the land surrounding the crater is preserved within these central peak. Isn't that a bit unusual?
Why do the Aristarchus and Tycho craters on the Moon lack deposits? From what I understand, it's been known for many decades that the rays of Tycho have no discernible depth. The material surrounding Aristarchus is not material at all. It's actually channels.
We have hypotheses. Yes we want water to be found on Mars and it shouldn't be unexpected. There is an incredible amount of water in the universe and it would be foolish to only expect to find it on Earth or the moons of Jupiter.
Mars was a molten ball of magma that eventually began to cool. Why would anyone not expect that sometime between being a molten ball of magma and its current state as a presumably cold, dead world that there wasn't flowing water on it?
I have problems with astrophysicists' theories of how planets formed, but that's a whole different story.
I have a hypothetical situation: What if everything NASA is seeing is the result of electrical activity instead of water, and NASA sends people to Mars in search of water, life and national prestige, only to have them subjected to intense transient electrical storms in various forms? What if these people then died due to persistent equipment failures?
So yes there is a reasonable basis for thinking that planets get hit by hard objects.
I'm not alleging that collisions do not occur. I'm alleging that we do not understand what happens when collisions occur between two solid bodies. The Deep Impact Mission demonstrated *two* flashes of light. Why is that? It's a *very* important question.
Why do craters sometimes appear to be the result of rilles, and rilles sometimes appear to be actually chains of craters? These are supposed to be two *completely* different processes -- one from fluid or lava flow and one from collisions. Why do they appear to be related in many situations?
Why do many asteroid craters have flat bottoms? I understand that there are theories regarding this (melted bottoms), but have we observed flat bottomed craters from our own nuclear explosion tests? No, I don't think so...
Why do many craters have central peaks? Oftentimes, if not always, the stratigraphy of the land surrounding the crater is preserved within these central peaks. Isn't that a bit unusual?
Why do the Aristarchus and Tycho craters on the Moon lack deposits? From what I understand, it's been known for many decades that the rays of Tycho have no discernible depth. The material surrounding Aristarchus is not material at all. It's actually channels.
With so many enigmas surrounding craters, why do NASA scientists expect that they can already know what they will find with Victoria crater?
One of the inevitable problems that will eventually come up regarding life on Mars is the electrical activity there. NASA has been down-playing it because their purpose appears to be to demonstrate that there was once water covering the planet, but many of the images of Martian geology do not support that theory as much as they support the notion that electricity is terraforming the planet. People on Slashdot have made a hobby of ridiculing the Electric Universe theorists, but it is not even debated that dust devils on Mars can have lightning bolts at their cores. Pictures don't lie...
Same goes for the Martian spiders. You can generate Martian spiders by covering an old VGA CRT monitor with fiberglass dust, charging it up, and then discharging to the same location repeatedly with your finger. Anybody can do it. We all have the materials in our own houses. So much for one of the greatest enigmas in the universe!...
There are lots of things happening on Mars that do not fit into NASA's attempt to prove that water flows or flowed over all of Mars, and we'd be very wise to take a closer look if we plan on sending people up there. I've only included a very small handful here. Rather than ridiculing the EU Theorists, people should put serious effort into debunking them if they feel that they are wrong because what they are saying is very important. If you send somebody up there into an environment that has not been properly characterized -- if the environment is far more electrical than we are imagining it to be -- we could subject them to massive equipment failures and they could die. Within that context, it is not at all a waste of time to investigate the alarming things that the EU Theorists are pointing out.
I'd like to preface this by saying that I think that the guys at NASA are very intelligent and certainly well-meaning. However, their missions are becoming increasingly scripted. They increasingly presuppose their findings before even embarking upon the mission, as if the future holds absolutely no unexpected findings. I realize that nobody likes to feel like they are surrounded by things they don't understand. We all want to feel like we are masters of our own universe, and you have to have a purpose before people will consider putting money to it. But where does this confidence come from that they know that all of these formations are caused by water? Every week that goes by, our probes and telescopes bring more unexpected observations. Our theories of the universe are constantly changing. Objects that we thought were completely different increasingly appear to have similar characteristics. Many enigmas remain regarding fundamental questions about things like comets, the Sun and even the fundamental building blocks of the universe. As far as I can tell, nobody's ever even observed an impact occur on any planet. At some point in time, their speculation hardened into consensus without ever thinking to validate it. Many of the craters we observe in the universe have highly unusual features that don't appear to strictly correlate with physical impacts.
My point is that the overall predictive track record and the large number of unsubstantiated consensuses within astrophysics today do not support the notion that we should be able to accurately predict our findings on Mars at this point in time. Our findings there have raised more questions than answers. We need to swallow our pride and get on with trying to be objective about these missions, or we risk creating an expectation within the public that science is a pre-scripted story. We need to allow for the possibility to be surprised, even on the big picture questions, or we run a risk of squandering the little time we have left on that planet with those rovers.
The Tunguska event is enigmatic for the sole reason that no popular theory currently in existence can comprehensively explain all of the information that we know about it. Fitting Tunguska to a mainstream impact theory will always invariably involve ignoring some of the details that we know about the event. People here on Slashdot oftentimes mirror the attitudes of traditional scientific culture, which frequently demonstrates preferences and prejudices for particular solutions to problems within the interpretive sciences. It's the very existence of enigmas like Tunguska, the Grand Canyon and the impossible dimensions of the flying and long-necked dinosaurs, to name a few others, that should occasionally inspire objective people to look for answers outside of the mainstream. The fact that this does not happen means that explanations are being ignored for the sole reason that they violate a mainstream substrate for our understanding of the universe (it's the incredible claims require incredible proof argument). But when we do this, the mainstream scientific opinion then becomes a self-perpetuating myth -- an artificial reality that we impose upon ourselves because it suits our preferences. Our scientific institutions must in fact fully investigate all possible explanations of anomalous data if we ever hope to create a popular scientific view that is impervious to challenges. By ignoring the Electric Universe view in particular, people unknowingly ignore what is by far and without question the most satisfying explanation for all of the details of the Tunguska event...
If EU Theory is to be a satisfying explanation for this event, then we must expect that we have information from other sources about other similar events that corroborates this concept. And we do. A popular misconception is that the Great Chicago Fire was an isolated incident. In fact, numerous fires instantiated themselves across the country simultaneously, all with very specific and unusual characteristics...
If Comets are in fact electrical in nature, then we should be able to test this theory scientifically. We have. And the EU Theorists were demonstrated to be right with nearly every single one of their predictions of the Deep Impact mission:
It's not that it is impossible to understand events like Tunguska. It's that people have not *liked* all solutions equally. It's that there are great social barriers to paradigm-shifting changes within the interpretive sciences. There is this sense that in order to accept that some specific thing has a non-traditional explanation, then we would have to immediately and comprehensively present all of the equations and details necessary to explain the entire universe within this new paradigm. But that ignores the fact that it took us decades, if not centuries, to develop the mainstream theories. That's hardly fair at all, and no single person could ever explain the entire univ
How would any of you possibly know that that proof has not been made? None of the skeptics here have actually read "The Electric Sky", "The Electric Universe" or "God Star". At most, the Slashdot crowd has only read a handful of Thunderbolts.info Picture of the Days. At least EU enthusiasts are aware of what both theories say. That's an important starting point for deciding which to believe.
Also, it's worth noting that there are numerous extraordinary claims made within astrophysics that never met the burden of extraordinary proof. The incredibly fast rotation of neutron stars; the concept of a black hole has had to change so many times that very little of the original theory is even left; the consensus that Venus is experiencing a runaway greenhouse effect; the idea that the cosmic microwave background represents the aftermath of an explosion; the idea that all redshift is the result of a doppler effect and the idea that quasars must be at the edge of space due to their unusual redshifts; the idea that planets and stars form by gravitational accretion... None of these incredible assertions have met the standard of extraordinary proof, and yet consensus exists within the mainstream community on all of them. In order for us to meet the burden of extraordinary proof, we at a minimum must investigate alternative explanations of these phenomenon one at a time. But what actually happens is that much of what we believe about these things was formulated because no alternative was thought to be possible. EU Theory provides an alternative way of explaining all of these things and involves no invisible particles or forces. All that is necessary is to imagine that plasmas in space have a finite electrical resistance in space just like they do within the laboratory. Plasmas that contain less than 1% ionization will conduct electricity very well. That people would prefer to believe in invisible particles rather than a phenomenon we can characterize within the lab is pretty surreal. It's testament to the power of public relations. I guess the EU Theorists would have to cede that public relations is probably the most significant force within the universe.
Their laboratory is the sky itself, and the telescopes they use. One of your posts talks about absorption lines. If you're going to make arguments based on absorption lines of stars, then you are implicitly accepting the same laboratory astrophysicists use, because you're accepting the same data astrophysicists use.
The fact remains that 99.99% of all visible space consists of matter within the plasma state. If you want to understand the universe, therefore, it makes complete sense to study plasmas within a real laboratory where we can create controls. EU Theorists have no problem with some of the incredible technologies that have been developed for observing space phenomenon. The problem has been the interpretations of space observations, which consistently categorize electricity in space as a second-order phenomenon -- little more than a side effect of other processes happening. And yet, each time we build new probes and telescopes, we continue to make observations that support the notion that electricity in space *is* doing things of great importance.
Mainstream astrophysicists aren't even aware, for instance, that the bipolar symmetric morphology is the classical z-pinch electrical plasma morphology. We see this shape in various manifestations time and time again, and there is rarely any realization that plasma physicists have no problems generating them in the lab. We observe jets of matter that appear to be light years in length coming out of black holes. We see numerous rilles on planets that follow the topography of the land both up and down, in defiance of gravity. We see electrical torus rings surrounding the equators of pretty much all bodies in space. We see cloud movement on planets that is far too fast and much too far from the Sun to be explained by solar heating. We now see upper atmosphere lightning here on Earth, which suggests that lightning is a part of a much larger solar system circuit. We see a stream of protons and electrons moving into both poles of the Sun. We see dust devils on Mars that have lightning bolts at their cores, and we now have images of the edges of Martian dust storms that demonstrate that those dust storms are actually armies of dust devils. We can replicate the precise morphology of Io's plume in the laboratory with a plasma gun, and pictures that have been returned of Io are absolutely indistinguishable from Kristian Birkeland's old terrella experiments. The solar wind continues to accelerate as it moves past the planets and the Sun's corona is around 100 times hotter than its surface. We can explain pretty much the entire HR diagram in terms of laboratory plasma physics. Comet researchers have had virtually zero success in finding traces of volatiles on the surface of comets, and the streams of apparent OH coming off of them can be easily explained with electric machining of oxygen atoms off of the comet, which then combine with Hydrogen protons from the solar wind. There are currently discussions within EU circles about the Aether Physics Model, whose creator has successfully predicted all of the electron binding energies for the entire periodic table based upon an aether theory that is compatible with EU Theory. I haven't even started talking about all of the advances that have been made in understanding ancient astronomical records, ancient texts and ancient mythologies. When re-interpreted within the context of a plasma cosmology, many of these writings formulate a single, coherent story that spans multiple continents and describes a sky that looks nothing like the one we see today.
Actually, it's quite clear that people will argue against Electric Universe Theory regardless of what it says or what evidence supports it because people refuse to read what it says.
Nay, the whole scientific method is there to help remove human fallibility from the process.
I'm curious which part of the scientific process is it that causes EU advocates to lose their jobs within the fields of astrophysics, plasma physics and geology when it's discovered that they are doing work that supports EU theory?
And "mediocre" people also come up with endless streams of perpetual motion machines, which are rapidly torn apart by properly applying the scientific method. Part of a good scientific education is to stop you from going down useless paths.
I suppose you believe that laboratory plasma physics is a "useless path"? You seem to be unaware that the EU Theorists are proposing that plasma phenomenon that we observe within the lab scale up to galactic scales. In the laboratory, plasmas are electrical phenomenon. The only thing standing in the way of space plasmas being electrical too are the astrophysicists themselves. They've been taught to believe in magnetohydrodynamics that nearly all space plasmas can instantaneously neutralize any charge imbalances and have frozen-in-place magnetic fields. They completely ignore the fact that sustained magnetic fields, in every other field of science, require the presence of an electric current. They treat magnetic fields as if they are separate entities that can store energy.
Rather than accepting the notion that the interstellar magnetic field, for instance, is being caused by an interstellar current, as Maxwell's Equations demands, the mainstream astrophysicists would prefer to invent an invisible particle called dark matter to explain galactic rotation curves. We can explain those curves using nothing more than electrical plasmas in plasma physics. This is not even an inherently testable theory. It's not good science, and mainstream astrophysicists have surprisingly few successful predictions to point to that can validate their theories. They completely ignore the fact that Wallace Thornhill correctly predicted nearly all of the results of the Deep Impact mission to Comet Tempel 1 -- results which continue to baffle NASA scientists. It's not possible that he could have so accurately predicted those results by accident. The prediction was far too detailed.
The arguments on that page boil down to "I don't understand how that can work, therefore it can't be correct".
It would be nice to see a technical explanation for why Don Scott is wrong. The theorists continue to wait.
It was only a few months ago that people pointed to Tim Thompson's arguments against The Electric Sun Theory as proof that EU Theory was bogus. Now that the EU Theorists have responded to that piece, there has been no serious challenge to his response. It's been a few months now. If this is so bogus, what is causing the delay?
Right. The guy who comes up with proof that one of our most basic theories is erroneous will be hated. He most certainly will not be one of the most celebrated scientists of all time like Einstein, and he most definitely will not win a Nobel prize for his insights. Because scientists hate discovering new and remarkable things they didn't know about before. History is full of scientists like John Levy, whose work on asteroid impacts was supressed by The Establishment even after he presented clear and convincing evidence that he was correct... No, wait, asteroid impacts are in every geology and astronomy book today.
There is a very long list of catastrophists and EU Theorists who have been shunned by the mainstream and made to pay a price for their beliefs. You bring up Einsten. Surely, you must be aware of the treatment that Einstein's friend, Velikovksy, received by Carl Sagan. Not everything that Velikovsky said really hit the mark, but his theory that dramatic planetary rearrangements can occur will eventually become accepted as fact. Hannes Alfven was treated as an outsider for his beliefs despite winning the Nobel Physics prize. Dwardu Cardona will certainly be treated the same way as people come to the realization of what he's accomplished in his book, God Star. There are plasma physicists at prestigious institutions within this country that are afraid to admit that they support EU Theory 100% because they will LOSE THEIR JOBS if they do so. I hope that you know the story of Halton Arp -- who lost his telescope time for believing that quasars were being ejected from the centers of spiral galaxies -- a fact which appears to not be going away any time soon because a newer peer-reviewed paper has come out with a fresh set of statistics to support his theory. But Halton Arp has to continue doing his work now in another country.
I think you will find that there is a very large barrier to publication of EU ideas within mainstream peer-reviewed journals if you care to look into it. Many people don't do the research and then try to cast EU advocates as conspiracy nuts when in fact nobody's alleging any sort of secret conspiracy. There's no need for a conspiracy. It's just psychology. People tie their belief systems to their egos. If you attack somebody's belief system, then they will interpret it as if you are physically attacking them, and they will defend their ideas quite bitterly. People here on Slashdot tend to be the worst offenders because they also tend to be technology advocates. People who know a lot about the advanced state of our technology will oftentimes infer that our interpretive sciences are just as sophisticated as our technologies. Technology advocates (I used to fall into this category myself) prefer to believe that we are masters of our own universe. Believing that we understand more than we do about the space sciences naturally follows from this desire.
So now, we think we know what the train was like when it left.
And that, right there, is the problem, for if you can't measure that, then you lack the data to draw conclusions.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I will feel very humbled if it turns out to be sand. I'd have to reconsider my beliefs, to be honest.
But I'm quite certain that it *will* be hard.
People on Slashdot like to allege that EU Theory is absurd. So, let's get down to business!
...
When the rover descends down into Victoria crater, NASA will be surprised to find that what they thought were sand dunes down there are in fact glassified sand. That peculiar formation down there is a fulgarite. It's not sand. It's more like solid rock. I'm guessing that the rover will be able to figure this out. Shouldn't be too hard. Wallace Thornhill discusses the formation of these Victoria Crater fulgarites in depth on his holoscience page.
NASA will discover this and then, for a brief few moments, wonder why this particular pattern became glassified (as opposed to just a flat melted bottom). Then, not understanding what they're seeing, they will move on to other things -- because, after all, if it doesn't have to do with evidence for water or life, why would they be interested?
It would be nice to think that getting this prediction right might mean something to some people out there, but there will be other opportunities
By the way, when the rover descends into Victoria crater, those things that look like sand dunes at the bottom will not be sand dunes at all. They will be glassified sand ... rock ... more technically called fulgarites.
Wallace Thornhill's analysis (from http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=158bp
And you're not paying attention.
Like others, you act as if the loudest person in the room is always right. You prefer that all of your beliefs in astrophysics be vetted by eminent authorities within the field, ignoring the possibility that those people may have been educated incorrectly about how plasmas behave in space. You accept the idea that invisible matter and forces are the primary constituents of our universe -- an inherently untestable theory. This is not strange to you, but the idea that plasmas could be electrical, as they are within the laboratory, ironically enough, is. When large bodies in space flicker at an amazing 450 times per second, you accept without skepticism that the flickering is the result of spinning objects even as you use 60 Hz electricity to run your computer and are surrounded by objects that operate on the basis of electricity. When you see others on Slashdot collectively abuse EU advocates and ignore their arguments, you'd rather feel like you are part of a majority than objectively test your own beliefs by investigating the facts for yourself. You, in fact, have never read what EU Theory says in any great detail, thinking that you can determine that it is absurd without ever investigating it. You will one day realize that you were wrong to think this, but by then, it will be too late to remedy the harm you've incurred. You will have already played your part in the larger drama that props up the mainstream views and tamps down any alternative views, regardless of the weight and character of the evidence, as if astrophysicists are infallible and in complete ignorance of the fact that our mainstream astrophysical theories change on a weekly basis.
You ignore the fact that your own views of EU Theory are the result of numerous people who acted just like you for many years before you arrived on the scene. Your ignorant imitation of them has created a self-perpetuating myth, which is more important to you now than actually perceiving reality. Your actions ultimately contribute to delaying the proliferation of important technologies that would evolve from an acceptance of this new paradigm. In other words, your hubris unknowingly undermines your own quality of life. It's quite ironic. It will one day make for a great story. But for now, it's still quite sad for those of us who know better. Much of astrophysics today is nothing more than mathematical fairy tales. We will one day tell these stories to children with a disclaimer that man once believed them, but no more.
I've forwarded your comments to the theorists. If they're portraying the mainstream views on Martian blueberries as overly-simplistic, then that is indeed something that demands correction.
As for the danger of electrical effects, they are clearly transient phenomenon. That said though, there appear to be some areas that are more dangerous than others. Anywhere that you can observe geological features that appear to have possible electrical causes -- when electrical plasmas are gouging out surface features -- I would expect that that would be fairly serious as far as human health is concerned. We see much potential evidence for this especially on the Martian South Pole. The Martian "geysers" there have possible electrical explanations too. They appear just as likely to be proton beams from the Sun strong enough to gouge out material beneath the ice and project it into the air some distance. We can see these geysers in action within their image databases even though NASA has yet to announce this fact -- probably because it has little to do with their search for evidence of water and life. I obviously have no idea if NASA ever intends to do so, but sending people to the Martian South Pole could be disastrous.
The very fact that you state this indicates that you have not really read the theory at all. Wallace Thornhill's accurate prediction of the Deep Impact mission results -- results which continue to baffle NASA scientists many years later -- demonstrates without any doubt whatsoever that the EU model for comets is correct. Few, if any, of these mission results were expected, and yet Thornhill accurately predicted pretty much all of them -- including a pre-impact flash, the following dust-up, an alteration in the arrangement of the jets, an absence of water on the surface, and more. How in the world would Thornhill know in advance of two flashes during impact if he didn't understand what was happening? Nobody was predicting anything like that, and there's little reason to believe that it would occur in the absence of electrical plasmas. The implications of his prediction are so devastating to mainstream astrophysics that it has been completely ignored even though it was far too accurate to be coincidence or accident. If you want to observe the details, you'll have to actually do some *real* reading:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/pdf/ElectricComet.pd
I've heard every single argument under the Sun regarding his accurate prediction. One person argued that he made the prediction *after* the results were observed, as if that makes any sense whatsoever. His prediction used to be featured on wikipedia's Deep Impact mission results page, but in the Slashdot tradition, this accurate prediction has been taken off of those pages -- as if it never happened -- because it is viewed as nothing more than an impediment to proving mainstream theories. In fact, NASA hasn't said much at all about the Deep Impact mission results since it happened because results which do not conform to the mainstream are uninteresting to them.
"Reading" the theory does not mean reading the wikipedia entry or even just the various Picture of the Day webpages, which are clearly intended for a non-scientific audience. You must read either "The Electric Sky" by Don Scott or "The Electric Universe" by Wallace Thornhill. If you want a more technical discussion of the theory, then visit Ian Tresman's homemade wiki page:
http://www.plasma-universe.com/index.php/Plasma-U
Your demand for a prediction though is pretty typical of what I deal with on these forums. People have no idea what they're talking about around here when it comes to EU Theory, and it drives me to push you people harder to educate yourselves. There's going to be a large collective regret about time lost when you finally realize that you should have spent the time to educate yourselves before ridiculing people for believing something that is completely logical and supported by observations.
The truth is that EU Theorists make predictions all of the time and their theory is inherently testable. That doesn't though mean that people are paying any attention.
Let's pretend, for instance, that NASA decides to send people to Mars' South Pole in order to investigate the apparent geyser activity there, and possibly to extract water from the ice. I've seen some pretty startling Mars Orbital Camera images from the South Pole that could be interpreted to be showing proton beams that are so powerful that they are excavating material from beneath the ice, throwing it up into the air, and then that material falls back onto the ice. NASA has decided to believe that these geysers have tectonic and/or chemical causes, but you can make a pretty logical argument based upon the images that these geysers are the result of proton beams from the Sun. Any beam of charged particles that's strong enough to gouge out material would surely be a hazard to humans.
5 25southpolar.htm
Look very closely at the right-hand image on the following page, and it is quite clear that NASA has unknowingly captured these geysers in action, whatever the cause:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2007/arch07/070
Nobody really knows what these things are. But to think that they might send people there, that there could be a possibility that these people might be exposed to intense beams of charged particles, and that your argument for *not* considering it as a possibility has something to do with not being able to prove that God doesn't exist, is pretty reckless. It's not as if this data point exists by itself. There is evidence all over Mars that indicates electrical activity that is being ignored in favor of evidence for water.
Remember now, you still have no idea what EU Theory really states. You are operating with confidence on a complete lack of information and you've drawn all of your conclusions on the basis of observing other people's reactions to EU Theory. Let's be extremely clear: EU Theory is not anywhere in the same ballpark as creationism or any religion whatsoever. It's based upon laboratory plasma physics, where we find that plasmas are electrical in nature. They have electrical resistance and we use Maxwell's Equations to model them. The only thing keeping space plasmas from being electrical as well are the astrophysicists themselves.
That makes sense. Those are very good points.
The thing is, though, their interpreations of the data will now define the next mission there. If they repeatedly insist on skewing their interprations towards one single preferable finding, they can quite possibly end up with an eventual human mission to Mars that will be a complete catastrophe. At some point in time, they need to start getting serious about ruling out *all* interpretations of the observations. The idea that Mars is being terraformed by electrical activity -- as was hinted by the unexpected observation of lightning bolts at the cores of dust devils, martian dust storms that appear to consist of these electrical dust devils, numerous rilles that cannot have been generated by fluids or lava flows, crater chains that blend into rilles and rilles peppered with craters, and simple laboratory experiments that can replicate surface features there quite simply (including the Martian spiders and Martian blueberries) -- all of this stuff needs to be refuted and ruled out before we send people there. We can agree on that, right?
Those arguments are being ignored. Nobody is refuting them. They are valid arguments. Nobody's ever explained why they are not. And I think it's a very dangerous game. Underestimating electrical activity could have serious ramifications. It would be a real fiasco to have to send up a second mission to investigate why the first failed. Would the public even pay for it? It has to be perfect on the first try. That means ruling everything out.
If people think Electric Universe Theory is absurd, then it must be demonstrated to be so as far as Martian geology is concerned *before* we send people to Mars because they're alleging that they're seeing a *lot* of activity there. When peoples' lives will be on the line, can we afford to just ignore the alleged danger?
I think I'm with you guys for a very long time now. This is really too good to be true. None of you guys have read what EU Theory states. You have no clue. And you're so sure that you're right. I have to be here when things start to fall apart for all of you. It's going to be a spectacle. The thing is, it's an unusual situation because the evidence already exists to convince all of you. But when you don't read it, you become quite impenetrable! It's one of the most interesting problems I've ever encountered in my entire life.
The thing is, I'm going on the record here. Most of you guys refuse to do so. The story would be so much better if we could correctly attribute all of the players involved. That would definitely make it a lot easier to tell the story later.
Make no mistake about it though: *Everything* you say here will be picked apart in the future. If you're going to crack jokes, make sure they are at least funny first. People will be reading these jokes, and interpreting them through the context of arrogance. It might not be as funny to those people as you think it is to me. We don't know yet what's going to result from this hubris.
Classic!
They ask their questions as if they already know the answers ...
Currently: "Is there water on Mars? Hell yeah, and we're going to find it! Then, we'll know that our current theories are correct. We are in fact masters of the universe, just as we thought!"
Rather than: "Is there water on Mars? Well, these geological formations could be the result of this, this and this. Let's keep an open mind on the possibilities, including even the strangest possibilities, and load up sensors to test every single one of them, focusing heavily on using sensors that can differentiate between the possibilities. Then, when we see the data, we can create differing interpretations and compare these interpretations on the basis of the data."
There's a very big difference. NASA has become results-oriented and uncertainty (a necessary tool for maintaining objectivity) has become a casualty. Uncertainty doesn't make for good PR releases, you know? It's important to look real busy and have answers! If something didn't go as you planned, then God forbid, don't mention that because then people might think that you don't know what you're doing and they might stop funding you. Rather than bravely reasserting the role of cautious scientist with the public, apprehensive about making speculations that might turn out to later be untrue, NASA and the astrophysicists in general have decided that it's more important to act like a story-teller, where speculation runs rampant and frequently turns out to be untrue, where every mission is pre-scripted and integrated into a pre-planned history for future generations of how we learned what the universe was. Thing is -- the universe won't be learned that way. That's fiction. It's silly. There will clearly be surprises. At this rate, though, we won't notice them. Our belief that we know the end of the story will inevitably blind us to the truth.
Collisions with Jupiter do not help us much with understanding craters on Mars. I should have been clearer that I'm specifically speaking about impacts between non-gaseous planets. Those impact craters tell us the most about the process that's happening.
The one single impact that we've observed in space in great detail, the Deep Impact mission, raised *way* more questions than it answered. It was clearly a rejection of mainstream models for comets, and yet there was never any subsequent realization or reaction to that data. It's never been accepted to be the paradigm-shift that it should have been. It's been swept under the rug, as if nothing anomalous occurred with that mission at all.
One would think that scientists would want to know the precise details of what happens when two solid bodies collide. It wouldn't be completely absurd to imagine an experiment involving pushing a small asteroid into Mars with cameras waiting on site or something (it might even make for a good NASA PR campaign -- the public obviously likes explosions). The unusual characteristics of craters within the universe demand as much. But what we get instead, for the most part, are computer simulations as evidence that the mainstream views of what happens during collisions are correct. It's not considered a pertinent question. The whole thing is considered resolved, and we've now moved on to assuming this point in our interpretation of observations of Martian craters. A consensus has formed even though numerous enigmas remain within the field of crater studies. There have been anomalies from day one, starting with Meteor Crater in Arizona that remain mysterious.
Humans are masters of convincing themselves of whatever they want. If we can convince ourselves that an omnicient, invisible being monitors our every movement and decides our eternal fate when we die, we can surely convince ourselves that Mars is exactly what we want it to be. We'll find the evidence, I assure you!
But is this real? Are we creating an artificial reality? If you only ask the specific questions that pertain to the answers that you want to find, without much consideration for finding things that you don't expect, and always settling on the favorable interpretation when multiple possibilities exist, won't you create your own self-perpetuating myth? What consideration is being put into alternative non-water causes for the Martian geological observations? I propose AB-SO-LUTE-LY NONE.
I'm aware of the mainstream attempts at explaining these observations. I don't find them very convincing. Computer simulations can be created to recreate just about any observation, but it does not mean that this is what actually happened. The search for the truth has taken a back seat to the search for evidence to confirm our perceptions. When details don't fit into these popular explanations, they are brushed aside for future consideration -- or just brushed aside entirely and never presented to the public. NASA has no interest, for instance, in showing the public that Martian dust storms have been observed to be filamentary (they haven't even done a story on it) because it doesn't suit their purpose of proving that water covered the planet. But this presupposes that this detail is not important. What if it is? What if its suppression to the public is affecting the public's perception of Mars? What if we have created a self-perpetuating myth of what is really happening on Mars?
We appear to be more concerned with validating our current perception of the universe than in finding an explanation that can satisfy all of our observations without any remaining enigmas. We are projecting our preferences and prejudices upon our search for the truth, and I'm quite certain that this strategy is doomed to failure. We need to allow for the possibility within these missions to find things that we did not expect to find at all. I don't see that happening.
But weather systems on other planets are not anything like our own. Many of the geological features we see on Mars cannot be explained by fluid or lava flow. Dust devils on Mars have lightning bolts at their cores, and I've seen pictures of Martian dust storms that demonstrate pretty clearly that there is vertical filamentation all along the edges of these dust storms.
Mars is not like Earth. Instead of basing our analysis of Martian geology and Martian weather on Earth's geology and weather, shouldn't we be developing geologic and weather model that works for *all* planets, and that can explain both Earth and Mars and all of the other planets? How does Earth's weather system, for instance, help us to understand the unusual rotational velocities of cloud cover on Uranus? I don't think you can make a good case that it does, and I think the same argument can be made of attempts to perform the same reasoning for less conspicuous items on Mars.
I get the sense though that some theories are being favored. The water on Mars theory is definitely favored over any other logical explanations of our findings there, right or wrong. Much of the evidence that's cited as pointing to water can also indicate other things.
I'll excerpt from another posting in this same thread:
The Deep Impact Mission demonstrated *two* flashes of light. Why is that? It's a *very* important question.
Why do craters sometimes appear to be the result of rilles, and rilles sometimes appear to be actually chains of craters? These are supposed to be two *completely* different processes -- one from fluid or lava flow and one from collisions. Why do they appear to be related in many situations?
Why do many asteroid craters have flat bottoms? I understand that there are theories regarding this (melted bottoms), but have we observed flat bottomed craters from our own nuclear explosion tests? No, I don't think so
Why do many craters have central peaks? Oftentimes, if not always, the stratigraphy of the land surrounding the crater is preserved within these central peak. Isn't that a bit unusual?
Why do the Aristarchus and Tycho craters on the Moon lack deposits? From what I understand, it's been known for many decades that the rays of Tycho have no discernible depth. The material surrounding Aristarchus is not material at all. It's actually channels.
I have problems with astrophysicists' theories of how planets formed, but that's a whole different story.
I have a hypothetical situation: What if everything NASA is seeing is the result of electrical activity instead of water, and NASA sends people to Mars in search of water, life and national prestige, only to have them subjected to intense transient electrical storms in various forms? What if these people then died due to persistent equipment failures?
I'm not alleging that collisions do not occur. I'm alleging that we do not understand what happens when collisions occur between two solid bodies. The Deep Impact Mission demonstrated *two* flashes of light. Why is that? It's a *very* important question.
Why do craters sometimes appear to be the result of rilles, and rilles sometimes appear to be actually chains of craters? These are supposed to be two *completely* different processes -- one from fluid or lava flow and one from collisions. Why do they appear to be related in many situations?
Why do many asteroid craters have flat bottoms? I understand that there are theories regarding this (melted bottoms), but have we observed flat bottomed craters from our own nuclear explosion tests? No, I don't think so
Why do many craters have central peaks? Oftentimes, if not always, the stratigraphy of the land surrounding the crater is preserved within these central peaks. Isn't that a bit unusual?
Why do the Aristarchus and Tycho craters on the Moon lack deposits? From what I understand, it's been known for many decades that the rays of Tycho have no discernible depth. The material surrounding Aristarchus is not material at all. It's actually channels.
With so many enigmas surrounding craters, why do NASA scientists expect that they can already know what they will find with Victoria crater?
One of the inevitable problems that will eventually come up regarding life on Mars is the electrical activity there. NASA has been down-playing it because their purpose appears to be to demonstrate that there was once water covering the planet, but many of the images of Martian geology do not support that theory as much as they support the notion that electricity is terraforming the planet. People on Slashdot have made a hobby of ridiculing the Electric Universe theorists, but it is not even debated that dust devils on Mars can have lightning bolts at their cores. Pictures don't lie ...
9 16dustdevil.htm
5 09dustdevils.htm
4 11marspits.htm
...
7 mars.htm
...
7 24spiders.htm
...
5 14russellcrater.htm
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050
Martian dust storms appear to be armies of these dust devils. You can make out unmistakeable filamentation in these dust storms. Why is it there?
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2007/arch07/070
Would you call these craters or rilles? Is there a difference?
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050
The infamous Martian blueberries can be created in the lab with a cheap (electrical) plasma gun apparatus
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2004/arch/04082
Same goes for the Martian spiders. You can generate Martian spiders by covering an old VGA CRT monitor with fiberglass dust, charging it up, and then discharging to the same location repeatedly with your finger. Anybody can do it. We all have the materials in our own houses. So much for one of the greatest enigmas in the universe!
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060
These rilles on Mars defy many of the characteristics of fluid flow that we've used to understand fluid processes here on Earth
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2007/arch07/070
There are lots of things happening on Mars that do not fit into NASA's attempt to prove that water flows or flowed over all of Mars, and we'd be very wise to take a closer look if we plan on sending people up there. I've only included a very small handful here. Rather than ridiculing the EU Theorists, people should put serious effort into debunking them if they feel that they are wrong because what they are saying is very important. If you send somebody up there into an environment that has not been properly characterized -- if the environment is far more electrical than we are imagining it to be -- we could subject them to massive equipment failures and they could die. Within that context, it is not at all a waste of time to investigate the alarming things that the EU Theorists are pointing out.
I'd like to preface this by saying that I think that the guys at NASA are very intelligent and certainly well-meaning. However, their missions are becoming increasingly scripted. They increasingly presuppose their findings before even embarking upon the mission, as if the future holds absolutely no unexpected findings. I realize that nobody likes to feel like they are surrounded by things they don't understand. We all want to feel like we are masters of our own universe, and you have to have a purpose before people will consider putting money to it. But where does this confidence come from that they know that all of these formations are caused by water? Every week that goes by, our probes and telescopes bring more unexpected observations. Our theories of the universe are constantly changing. Objects that we thought were completely different increasingly appear to have similar characteristics. Many enigmas remain regarding fundamental questions about things like comets, the Sun and even the fundamental building blocks of the universe. As far as I can tell, nobody's ever even observed an impact occur on any planet. At some point in time, their speculation hardened into consensus without ever thinking to validate it. Many of the craters we observe in the universe have highly unusual features that don't appear to strictly correlate with physical impacts.
My point is that the overall predictive track record and the large number of unsubstantiated consensuses within astrophysics today do not support the notion that we should be able to accurately predict our findings on Mars at this point in time. Our findings there have raised more questions than answers. We need to swallow our pride and get on with trying to be objective about these missions, or we risk creating an expectation within the public that science is a pre-scripted story. We need to allow for the possibility to be surprised, even on the big picture questions, or we run a risk of squandering the little time we have left on that planet with those rovers.
That Deep Impact link is here:
www.thunderbolts.info/pdf/ElectricComet.pdf
The Tunguska event is enigmatic for the sole reason that no popular theory currently in existence can comprehensively explain all of the information that we know about it. Fitting Tunguska to a mainstream impact theory will always invariably involve ignoring some of the details that we know about the event. People here on Slashdot oftentimes mirror the attitudes of traditional scientific culture, which frequently demonstrates preferences and prejudices for particular solutions to problems within the interpretive sciences. It's the very existence of enigmas like Tunguska, the Grand Canyon and the impossible dimensions of the flying and long-necked dinosaurs, to name a few others, that should occasionally inspire objective people to look for answers outside of the mainstream. The fact that this does not happen means that explanations are being ignored for the sole reason that they violate a mainstream substrate for our understanding of the universe (it's the incredible claims require incredible proof argument). But when we do this, the mainstream scientific opinion then becomes a self-perpetuating myth -- an artificial reality that we impose upon ourselves because it suits our preferences. Our scientific institutions must in fact fully investigate all possible explanations of anomalous data if we ever hope to create a popular scientific view that is impervious to challenges. By ignoring the Electric Universe view in particular, people unknowingly ignore what is by far and without question the most satisfying explanation for all of the details of the Tunguska event ...
...
The uncontested details of the event:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/0602 02tunguska.htm
The EU explanation:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/0602 03tunguska2.htm
If EU Theory is to be a satisfying explanation for this event, then we must expect that we have information from other sources about other similar events that corroborates this concept. And we do. A popular misconception is that the Great Chicago Fire was an isolated incident. In fact, numerous fires instantiated themselves across the country simultaneously, all with very specific and unusual characteristics
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/0602 06chicagofire.htm
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/0602 07biela.htm
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/0602 09chicagofire.htm
If Comets are in fact electrical in nature, then we should be able to test this theory scientifically. We have. And the EU Theorists were demonstrated to be right with nearly every single one of their predictions of the Deep Impact mission:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/0602 09chicagofire.htm
It's not that it is impossible to understand events like Tunguska. It's that people have not *liked* all solutions equally. It's that there are great social barriers to paradigm-shifting changes within the interpretive sciences. There is this sense that in order to accept that some specific thing has a non-traditional explanation, then we would have to immediately and comprehensively present all of the equations and details necessary to explain the entire universe within this new paradigm. But that ignores the fact that it took us decades, if not centuries, to develop the mainstream theories. That's hardly fair at all, and no single person could ever explain the entire univ
How would any of you possibly know that that proof has not been made? None of the skeptics here have actually read "The Electric Sky", "The Electric Universe" or "God Star". At most, the Slashdot crowd has only read a handful of Thunderbolts.info Picture of the Days. At least EU enthusiasts are aware of what both theories say. That's an important starting point for deciding which to believe.
Also, it's worth noting that there are numerous extraordinary claims made within astrophysics that never met the burden of extraordinary proof. The incredibly fast rotation of neutron stars; the concept of a black hole has had to change so many times that very little of the original theory is even left; the consensus that Venus is experiencing a runaway greenhouse effect; the idea that the cosmic microwave background represents the aftermath of an explosion; the idea that all redshift is the result of a doppler effect and the idea that quasars must be at the edge of space due to their unusual redshifts; the idea that planets and stars form by gravitational accretion
The fact remains that 99.99% of all visible space consists of matter within the plasma state. If you want to understand the universe, therefore, it makes complete sense to study plasmas within a real laboratory where we can create controls. EU Theorists have no problem with some of the incredible technologies that have been developed for observing space phenomenon. The problem has been the interpretations of space observations, which consistently categorize electricity in space as a second-order phenomenon -- little more than a side effect of other processes happening. And yet, each time we build new probes and telescopes, we continue to make observations that support the notion that electricity in space *is* doing things of great importance.
Mainstream astrophysicists aren't even aware, for instance, that the bipolar symmetric morphology is the classical z-pinch electrical plasma morphology. We see this shape in various manifestations time and time again, and there is rarely any realization that plasma physicists have no problems generating them in the lab. We observe jets of matter that appear to be light years in length coming out of black holes. We see numerous rilles on planets that follow the topography of the land both up and down, in defiance of gravity. We see electrical torus rings surrounding the equators of pretty much all bodies in space. We see cloud movement on planets that is far too fast and much too far from the Sun to be explained by solar heating. We now see upper atmosphere lightning here on Earth, which suggests that lightning is a part of a much larger solar system circuit. We see a stream of protons and electrons moving into both poles of the Sun. We see dust devils on Mars that have lightning bolts at their cores, and we now have images of the edges of Martian dust storms that demonstrate that those dust storms are actually armies of dust devils. We can replicate the precise morphology of Io's plume in the laboratory with a plasma gun, and pictures that have been returned of Io are absolutely indistinguishable from Kristian Birkeland's old terrella experiments. The solar wind continues to accelerate as it moves past the planets and the Sun's corona is around 100 times hotter than its surface. We can explain pretty much the entire HR diagram in terms of laboratory plasma physics. Comet researchers have had virtually zero success in finding traces of volatiles on the surface of comets, and the streams of apparent OH coming off of them can be easily explained with electric machining of oxygen atoms off of the comet, which then combine with Hydrogen protons from the solar wind. There are currently discussions within EU circles about the Aether Physics Model, whose creator has successfully predicted all of the electron binding energies for the entire periodic table based upon an aether theory that is compatible with EU Theory. I haven't even started talking about all of the advances that have been made in understanding ancient astronomical records, ancient texts and ancient mythologies. When re-interpreted within the context of a plasma cosmology, many of these writings formulate a single, coherent story that spans multiple continents and describes a sky that looks nothing like the one we see today.
Actually, it's quite clear that people will argue against Electric Universe Theory regardless of what it says or what evidence supports it because people refuse to read what it says.
I'm curious which part of the scientific process is it that causes EU advocates to lose their jobs within the fields of astrophysics, plasma physics and geology when it's discovered that they are doing work that supports EU theory?
I suppose you believe that laboratory plasma physics is a "useless path"? You seem to be unaware that the EU Theorists are proposing that plasma phenomenon that we observe within the lab scale up to galactic scales. In the laboratory, plasmas are electrical phenomenon. The only thing standing in the way of space plasmas being electrical too are the astrophysicists themselves. They've been taught to believe in magnetohydrodynamics that nearly all space plasmas can instantaneously neutralize any charge imbalances and have frozen-in-place magnetic fields. They completely ignore the fact that sustained magnetic fields, in every other field of science, require the presence of an electric current. They treat magnetic fields as if they are separate entities that can store energy.
Rather than accepting the notion that the interstellar magnetic field, for instance, is being caused by an interstellar current, as Maxwell's Equations demands, the mainstream astrophysicists would prefer to invent an invisible particle called dark matter to explain galactic rotation curves. We can explain those curves using nothing more than electrical plasmas in plasma physics. This is not even an inherently testable theory. It's not good science, and mainstream astrophysicists have surprisingly few successful predictions to point to that can validate their theories. They completely ignore the fact that Wallace Thornhill correctly predicted nearly all of the results of the Deep Impact mission to Comet Tempel 1 -- results which continue to baffle NASA scientists. It's not possible that he could have so accurately predicted those results by accident. The prediction was far too detailed.
It would be nice to see a technical explanation for why Don Scott is wrong. The theorists continue to wait.
It was only a few months ago that people pointed to Tim Thompson's arguments against The Electric Sun Theory as proof that EU Theory was bogus. Now that the EU Theorists have responded to that piece, there has been no serious challenge to his response. It's been a few months now. If this is so bogus, what is causing the delay?
???
There is a very long list of catastrophists and EU Theorists who have been shunned by the mainstream and made to pay a price for their beliefs. You bring up Einsten. Surely, you must be aware of the treatment that Einstein's friend, Velikovksy, received by Carl Sagan. Not everything that Velikovsky said really hit the mark, but his theory that dramatic planetary rearrangements can occur will eventually become accepted as fact. Hannes Alfven was treated as an outsider for his beliefs despite winning the Nobel Physics prize. Dwardu Cardona will certainly be treated the same way as people come to the realization of what he's accomplished in his book, God Star. There are plasma physicists at prestigious institutions within this country that are afraid to admit that they support EU Theory 100% because they will LOSE THEIR JOBS if they do so. I hope that you know the story of Halton Arp -- who lost his telescope time for believing that quasars were being ejected from the centers of spiral galaxies -- a fact which appears to not be going away any time soon because a newer peer-reviewed paper has come out with a fresh set of statistics to support his theory. But Halton Arp has to continue doing his work now in another country.
I think you will find that there is a very large barrier to publication of EU ideas within mainstream peer-reviewed journals if you care to look into it. Many people don't do the research and then try to cast EU advocates as conspiracy nuts when in fact nobody's alleging any sort of secret conspiracy. There's no need for a conspiracy. It's just psychology. People tie their belief systems to their egos. If you attack somebody's belief system, then they will interpret it as if you are physically attacking them, and they will defend their ideas quite bitterly. People here on Slashdot tend to be the worst offenders because they also tend to be technology advocates. People who know a lot about the advanced state of our technology will oftentimes infer that our interpretive sciences are just as sophisticated as our technologies. Technology advocates (I used to fall into this category myself) prefer to believe that we are masters of our own universe. Believing that we understand more than we do about the space sciences naturally follows from this desire.
And that, right there, is the problem, for if you can't measure that, then you lack the data to draw conclusions.