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*< NEWS/VIEWS ARCHIVE <../news/news.htm>*****
/The astronomer, Herschel, had the crazy notion that people inhabited
the Sun beneath the shining clouds. Well, maybe not our Sun, but he
might yet have the last laugh./
*15 December 1999*
*Other stars, other worlds, other life?*
Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, Dr. S. Ross
Taylor has concluded after a lifetime's work on the formation of the
solar system: *"When the remote chances of developing a habitable planet
are added to the chances of developing both high intelligence and a
technically advanced civilization, the odds of finding 'little green
men' elsewhere in the universe decline to zero."* The bleak suggestion
that we are freaks of chance and probably all the intelligence there is
in this immense universe is intuitively unsatisfactory.
The problem with all predictions about intelligent life elsewhere in the
universe is that it assumes we have defied history and reached a
pinnacle of understanding at the close of the 20th century. History
teaches that the peak we have climbed may be atop a house of cards. We
might accept Dr. Taylor's conclusion based on the current model but it
could be like pronouncing intelligent life to be highly unlikely in the
ruins following the crash of a jumbo-jet. The solar system could be the
result of a cosmic traffic accident. Possibly it is not the most
hospitable environment for life. So using it as a benchmark must lead to
pessimistic forecasts.
Let's examine a key assumption underlying such speculation - that we
understand what constitutes a star. The first presumption appears in the
following statement from the Encyclopedia Britannica: "The most basic
property of stars is that their radiant energy *must* derive from
internal sources. Given the great length of time that stars endure (some
10,000,000,000 years in the case of the Sun), it can be shown that
neither chemical nor gravitational effects could possibly yield the
required energies. Instead, the cause *must* be nuclear events wherein
lighter nuclei are fused to create heavier nuclei..." Astrophysicists
have never considered the simpler alternative - that stars are powered
externally. All their genius has been directed at modelling how a giant
ball of hydrogen could be coaxed into slowly releasing pent up atomic
energy in the most difficult way imaginable - heating it to tens of
millions of degrees. With one notable exception, no one has bothered to
look for an alternative despite the fact that none of the observed
features of the Sun have any business being there in the thermonuclear
model.
The exception is the work of a remarkable engineer from Flagstaff
Arizona, the late Ralph Juergens
. In his model, stars
simply form a positive electrode (anode) in a galactic glow discharge.
The Sun and all stars are lit up by the electrical energy that shapes
and flows along the arms of the galaxy. The Sun is a giant ball of
lightning! This surprisingly simple model fits all of the observations
about our Sun and forms one of the key ideas in the Electric Universe. A
star's size, brightness and color are then largely determined by its
electrical environment. That explains the puzzling lack of neutrinos
expected from nuclear reactions in the Sun's core, and how some stars
are able to vary their output far more quickly than the thermonuclear
model allows.
Stellar lightning bolts are effective particle accelerators that can
synthesize heavy elements in nuclear reactions at the surface of a star.
The heavy elements seen in the Sun's spectrum are created at the surface
of the Sun, along with the few neutrinos we observe. That neutrino
numbers seem to follow surface and external effects like sunspots and
the solar wind is to be expected in an electric star. It is inexplicable
in the thermonuclear model.
In the last few years a new class of faint stars has been discovered.
They are called L-Type Brown Dwarfs because the element lithium appears
in their spectra. They are the most numerous stellar objects in the
galaxy and bridge the gap between stars and Jupiter-sized planets. They
are too small to be shining from internal thermonuclear power. A further
puzzle is that they radiate blue and ultraviolet light even though they
are cool at a temperature around 950K. Water molecules dominate their
spectra.
All of these puzzles are simply explained by an electric star. There is
no lower limit to the size of a body that can accept electric power from
the galaxy so the temperatures of smaller dwarfs will range down to
levels conducive to life. The light of a red star is due to the
distended anode glow of an electrically low-stressed star. The blue and
ultraviolet light come from a low-energy corona. (Our Sun's more compact
red anode glow is seen briefly as the chromosphere during total solar
eclipses. And the Sun is electrically stressed to the extent that bright
anode "tufting" covers its surface with granulations and the corona
emits higher energy ultraviolet light and x-rays as relativistic
electrons strike it).
At the other extremity of size, Red Giants are a more visible and
scaled-up example of what an L-type Brown Dwarf star might look like
close-up. The Red Giant Betelgeuse is so huge that if it were to replace
our Sun then Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Jupiter would be engulfed
by it. Astronomers recognize that such stars could swallow planets yet
their plasma envelope is so tenuous that it would not impede the
planetary orbits within the star's atmosphere. However, astronomers
believe that any planet it swallowed would be gradually vaporized by
intense heat from the star's core. But the standard stellar model has to
be seriously fudged to explain Red Giants, their central temperature
turns out to be so low that no known nuclear process can possibly supply
the observed energy output. The electric model, on the other hand, works
seamlessly from Supergiant star to a planet-sized Brown Dwarf.
Since an electric star is heated externally a planet need not be
destroyed by orbiting beneath its anode glow. In fact life is not only
possible inside the glow of a small brown dwarf, it seems far more
likely than on a planet orbiting outside a star! This is because the
radiant energy arriving on a planet orbiting inside a glowing sphere is
evenly distributed over the entire surface of the planet.
There are no seasons, no tropics and no ice-caps. A planet does not have
to rotate, its axis can point in any direction and its orbit can be
eccentric. The radiant energy received by the planet will be strongest
at the blue and red ends of the spectrum. Photosynthesis relies on red
light. Sky light would be a pale purple (the classical "purple dawn of
creation"). L-type Brown Dwarfs have water as a dominant molecule in
their spectra, along with many other biologically important molecules
and elements. Its "children" would accumulate atmospheres and water
would mist down. It is therefore of particular interest that most of the
extra-solar planets discovered are gas giants, several times the size of
Jupiter, orbiting their star extremely closely. It is our system of
distantly orbiting planets that seems the odd one out. In fact it argues
in favor of a galactic traffic accident between the Sun and a sub-Brown
Dwarf like Jupiter or Saturn.
So let's examine a second major plank of standard theory - that we
understand where planets come from. The nebula theory of the origin of
planets is so problematic that it only survives because no one has been
able to come up with a better idea. A many-body system controlled by a
single force, gravity, is inherently unstable and should fly to pieces.
In an Electric Universe the model is simple. Planets are "born" from
stars in a descending hierarchy of size by the highly efficient
expedient of electrical splitting of an unstable positively charged
core. That is why the majority of stars have partners. It explains why
many of the extra-solar planets orbit their star extremely closely -
that is where they were created. It is why Jupiter and Saturn have a
large number of close-orbiting moons. Close orbits are normal. Distant
or highly eccentric orbits are more likely to be a result of capture. An
exchange between orbital and electrical energy quickly stabilizes orbits.
It can be seen that the Electric Universe model provides a superior
environment for the establishment of life than a planet relying on a
distant star and having to be self-sufficient for its atmosphere and
surface deposits. Such a planet needs to rotate fairly quickly to even
out the energy received and must have a small axial tilt for the same
reason. It has only a limited range of orbits and eccentricity for life
to survive. It also requires that the star maintains a steady radiance
over millions of years. This is the Earth's present situation and I
believe Prof. Taylor is right in considering the chances for life to
have begun and to have survived here are close to zero.
If the following sounds like science fiction, so be it. Science fiction
writers are far better than experts at predicting future knowledge. What
then might be the Earth's history? The distant orbits from the Sun
suggest that we were captured along with our Brown Dwarf parent. In the
process, the electric power that drove our parent star was usurped by
the Sun. As well as turning out the primordial light, the Sun stripped
the Earth from its mother's womb along with the Moon. Night fell for the
first time and stars appeared. Ice ages began suddenly. The polar caps
formed. High latitudes became uninhabitable. It is worth adding that
many of the moons, or remaining offspring, of the gas giants have
surprisingly icy surfaces and some have atmospheres. Life may have
existed once on Mars and some of those moons.
The Electric Universe model has almost biological overtones that favor
life. In the process of growing in a galactic electromagnetic pinch,
stars are prevented from becoming too massive by "budding off" other
stars and gas giant planets. Some progeny remain to form binary or
multiple star families. Others escape from their parent. All receive
their share of energy from the galaxy. The most common stars in the
galaxy are also the dimmest, the L-Type Brown Dwarfs. These stars have
the "food" required for life present in their atmospheres. Such a dwarf
star/gas giant may undergo a nova outburst to eject part of its core to
form dense Earth-like planets and moons. If they remain close to the
parent they may be enveloped within the "womb" of the stellar anode glow
where it seems the principal conditions for life are present. Our search
for intelligent life should therefore focus on the faintest close stars
in the sky. But there is a problem in relying on radio signals because
they cannot pass through the hot plasma of an anode glow. (That could
account for the lack of success of SETI so far). It would limit the
ability of intelligent creatures living in that environment to know
anything about the wider universe since they would not see stars. There
would be no incentive for space travel which, in any case, might be a
problem through the anode glow region. Maybe we on Earth are almost a
"one off", as Dr. Taylor says, to have survived an escape from our
stellar cocoon to see the wider universe. If so, I hope we learn to use
our privileged position wisely.
The most disturbing idea I have left to last: the words used by ancient
civilizations that are interpreted today as "the Sun" - like the
Egyptian "Ra", the Greek "Helios", and the Roman "Sol" - all originally
referred to the gas giant Saturn! Was that planet our primordial parent?
Was Saturn until recently a much larger brown dwarf? (The apparent size
and color of an electric star is an electrical phenomenon. If Jupiter's
magnetosphere were lit up it would appear the size of the full Moon).
Was ancient man around to see it as a sun? If not, why would anyone call
a faint yellowish speck in the night sky - the Sun? Just how recently
did Saturn get its icy ring? Does the discovery that the human race
seems to have spread from a handful of survivors in the not so distant
past have anything to do with this story? Oddly enough, an
interdisciplinary approach can answer many of these questions in
surprising detail. But it requires letting go of a lot of "things we
know ain't so".
The present model of isolated self-powered stars with a family of
relatively distant planets gives infinitesimally small windows of
opportunity for life to gain a foothold, let alone sustain it for
millions of years. An Electric Universe where energy is available to
objects throughout the entire volume of a galaxy is an infinitely better
environment for life. Faint, dwarf electric stars may be crucial to a
radical reassessment of the likelihood of other intelligent life in the
universe. Who knows, the Cassini mission to Saturn may be a kind of
homecoming? It will return some surprises.
*"Meanwhile, following the ages-old tradition of commemorating the
Earth's lucky escape from doom in a cosmic accident and its first new
year in the solar system - I wish you all a HAPPY SATURNALIA!"*
Image Credit: Dr. S. Ross Taylor - Photo by Darren Boyd.
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