mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== THOTH A Catastrophics Newsletter VOL VII, No 3 April 30, 2003 EDITOR: Amy Acheson PUBLISHER: Michael Armstrong LIST MANAGER: Brian Stewart CONTENTS THE MYTHS OF THE ANCESTORS . . . . . . . . . Mel Acheson WOLFE CREEK CRATER . . . . . . . . . . Louis A G Hissink STARS ESCAPE FROM ASTRONOMICAL ZOO . . . . . . Don Scott HOW TO SEARCH FOR ALIENS . . . . . . . . . Wal Thornhill >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>-----<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< THE MYTHS OF THE ANCESTORS By Mel Acheson The Saturn Thesis interprets myths as eyewitness accounts of a celestial spectacle which people around the world experienced before the dawn of history. In that Age of Myth, certain planetary gods were palpable and active. The spectacle had its opening act (the Creation of the Gods), its dramatic development (the War of the Gods), and its denouement (the Death of the Gods). The mythmakers memorialized that spectacle in literature, art, architecture, institutions, political conventions, and religious rituals. The creation myths are interpreted not as the generation of the universe we think of today but as the formation of a celestial Earth seen from the terrestrial earth. In consequence, the question "What was before creation?" has a non-trivial answer. It leads to this first insight: The mythmakers had ancestors. The creation myths of the mythmakers would have been the Armageddon of those ancestors. The appearance of the celestial spectacle that opened the Age of Myth and fixed the attention of subsequent generations marked the end of whatever order?celestial, terrestrial, social, psychic?prevailed before. The definition of 'natural' was erased and redefined. The sky and the objects in it were reconfigured. Weather and climate shifted. (See, e.g., the discontinuity of variation in isotope ratios around 11000 layers down in cores taken from the Greenland ice sheet and from ocean floor sediments.) The force of gravity may have increased. Social and environmental relationships were transformed. New cultures arose from a new way of thinking. What were the myths of the mythmakers' ancestors? If they were not inspired by a spectacle in the sky, perhaps they shouldn't be called myths. Perhaps they were merely stories of explanation, analogous to what we call folk wisdom or common sense, metaphors of mundane experience that enabled the ancestors to live more comfortable lives. Either the ancestors left few records or their descendants, the mythmakers, judged the records not worth preserving. We know of only a few paintings on cave walls and some flower-strewn graves. Almost any speculation can be hung on those sparse pegs of evidence. But the paintings and the graves show no Saturnian symbology. Their style and content is entirely different from that of the later age. The paintings show realistic representations of terrestrial fauna instead of totemic reproductions of sacred forms. They also demonstrate artistic talent comparable with artists today. This implies constancy of artistic nature within a changing environment. Furthermore, it suggests that the forms produced in the Age of Myth, such as those depicted in petroglyphs, are also realistic representations of objects in the artists' environments?objects that therefore cannot be the stick-figure people and animals of popular interpretation. Thus it comes as no surprise that the forms of petroglyphs correspond exactly to the forms of high-energy discharge instabilities observed in plasma labs. But this is only a curiosity. The myths of the mythmakers' ancestors may never be reconstructed. The spectacle that inspired the myths we know today pretty much wiped clean both the factual and the artifactual records. The importance of asking what were the myths of the ancestors lies in a second insight: The mythmakers were OUR ancestors. The Armageddon of the mythmakers was our opening scene. The spectacular sky disintegrated. The gods went away. The story ended. Our age began with sacred hearsay and institutionalized ceremonies. There is no spectacle in our sky. There are no thunderbolts flying among our planets. There are no palpable gods decreeing an irresistible and inscrutable Truth that preempts our lives. Ours is a time of cycles, not of spectacles; of stability, not of novelty; of human scale, not of the scale of gods. We work toward self-chosen goals rather than commemorate the works of the gods. We accumulate knowledge from the operation of our cognitive abilities rather than parse revelations from the gods. We love the objects and beings of this Earth rather than venerate the gods. The Truth of the Age of Myth was a non-empirical fiat Truth to which people could only submit. The truths of our age are characterized by a provisional, testable, criticisable truthfulness that is relative to human senses and understanding. It's not that the gods are dead: The death of the gods is a theme from the mythmakers' mythology. It's that the very idea of "the gods" is alien in our world. The imposing, creating, warring, dying gods of the Age of Myth are now tiny points of light following distant and stable orbits. They are irrelevant non-participants in our lives and in our story. Our natural order is altogether different from the natural order of the Age of Myth. Yet the mythmakers were our ancestors. We have inherited from them a legacy with many benefits. But that legacy has also created a conflict. We have accepted our ancestors' story as the one true exemplary story. We have repeated it, emulated it, worshipped it, inverted it, parodied it, denied it. But we have not asked if it is OUR story. We have internalized the mythmakers' final judgment that we inhabit a fallen and defective world. We identify ourselves as the children of mythic heroes; and then we strike out with the rancor and resentment of disappointed expectations. We build a world of increasing comforts, physical, financial, and cultural; and then we flounder in the unredeemable guilt of survivors. We have not thought to view our world with lucidity apart from mythic narratives and categories. For example, does our propensity to view our world in terms of dichotomies derive from the mythical creation that divided the sky into the land of the gods inside the sacred circle and the domain of chaos outside it? Sacred/profane, good/evil, moral/immoral, true/false, correct/incorrect?these are not categories grounded in our nature or in our experience. The act of dividing permeates every aspect of our lives: compatriot/foreigner, believer/infidel, science/religion, creationism/evolutionism. But often the opposing categories are subsets of each other and cannot clearly be distinguished in the real world. The nature of our world is adaptable, uncertain, incidental, practical?qualities that are ambiguous and alive with possibilities. For millennia we have been adapting an adamantine patrimony to a growing awareness of our distinctness. The insights of the Saturn Thesis enable us to compose our own story from our own original ground without either rejecting or acquiescing to our mythic heritage. We can paint on our cave walls pictures neither of gods nor of animals but of the changing worlds of human understanding. Mel Acheson thoth at whidbey.com ******************************************************** Wolfe Creek Crater By Louis A G Hissink MSc. Wolfe Creek Crater was first discovered in 1947 from an aerial survey, but was previously known to the local Aborigines as "Kandimalal". The crater is circular and has a diameter of 880 metres, with the floor of the crater some 60 meters below the rim. It lies 90 kilometres south of Halls Creek on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia. Figure 1 is an aerial image of the crater while Figure 2 is a recent satellite image of the crater, showing the nearby Wolfe Creek drainage system. The satellite image is skewed to the right. Photos and diagrams can be found here: http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/ljurrasic/WolfeCreekCrater_int.htm It is conventionally interpreted as a classic meteorite crater and dated some 300,000 years BP. Fragments of the meteorite which created the crater have been found and unusual iron rich shale balls also occur around the crater rim, containing fragments and veins of iron-nickel metal and an iron-phosphide, Schreibersite. In July 2002 UTS Geophysics flew a geophysical survey over Wolfe Creek Crater for Geoscience Australia. Airborne Magnetic, radiometric and digital terrain data were collected. The author purchased the final digital data from the Department of Minerals and Resources of Western Australia, and which is also displayed on the Department1s web site. The data were manipulated with the Goldensoftware Surfer contouring program and the Mapinfo plugin Mapimagery, as well as Encom Technology's Mapinfo Discover package. The magnetic response of the crater is fairly weak, with a thin annulus magnetic high corresponding to the crater rim, and a very small high in the centre or the bull1s eye in the crater. The regional magnetic field slopes from west to east. The next image (Figure 4) is a composite of the Radiometric Total count, the Digital terrain contours, and the position of the section line AB. The most striking feature here is the concentration of the radioactive elements (Uranium, Thorium and Potassium) around the crater rim together with a south west-to-west concentration away from the crater itself. However closer inspection of the elevation contours shows that the crater rim is somewhat asymmetric in shape in that the south west crater rim is thicker and of a shallower slope than the steeper north-eastern part of the rim. This, coupled with the regional topographical slope to the southwest, suggests that the splay of radiometric material is probably related to subsequent erosion of the crater rim towards Wolfe Creek to the west. There is however a strong correlation between the radiometric counts with the crater rim. Figure 5 below is a composite profile along section AB showing the topography from the DTM data, (bottom profile), the Total count of the radiometric data and the RTP (Reduced to Pole) magnetic data over Wolfe Creek crater. There is good correlation between the geophysics and crater rim, and the radiometric total count is quite anomalous. Photos and diagrams can be found here: http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/ljurrasic/WolfeCreekCrater_int.htm The meteorite inferred to have formed the Wolfe Creek Crater has been described as an iron meteorite and the shale balls interpreted as deeply rusted (or highly weathered) remains of the iron meteorite. The structural relationship of the country rock to the crater is typical for an impact crater. The country rock is a quartzite capped with laterite, and often layers of laterite can be seen sandwiched in between the contorted quartzite, putting the impact as post laterite development. This has been confirmed in the field by the author in 1999 and 2000. The uranium abundance in meteorites is typically as 0.008 ppm, and that for the earth's crust 1.4 ppm, and often 50 ppm in some granites, and in the percent range for uranium ore deposits (Briefing paper No 78, 2002, The Cosmic Origins & Geological Role of Uranium, Uranium Information Centre, Melbourne Victoria, Australia). It is difficult to explain the anomalous concentration of radioactive uranium, thorium and potassium as the result of the catastrophic melting of the Wolfe Creek Meteorite itself on impact, given the extremely low abundance of uranium in meteorites. Experience elsewhere in this region shows that elevated radiometric counts are often associated with surface laterite deposits, one such example occurring on Nookanbah Station hundreds of kilometres to the west where a similar geophysical survey was conducted by the author on behalf of a client over a tenement hosting igneous intrusions known as lamproites during 2001. However the clear association of the radiometric anomaly at Wolfe Creek Crater with the crater rim itself, discounts any association with the known laterite at the crater. All that could be said is that the radiometric anomaly is associated with the crater rim, but is not derived from the meteorite itself since these meteorites don't have enough uranium in the first instance to create the measured anomaly. Unless the Wolfe Creek Crater meteorite was a rare one, which did have elevated levels of uranium, but there is little data to form this interpretation, if any. Aboriginal myths about Wolfe Creek Crater are unusual and the one published by the West Australian Museum mentions the local story of two rainbow snakes, whose sinuous paths across the desert formed the nearby Sturt and Wolfe Creeks, and the crater marks the place where one of those rainbow snakes emerged from the ground. Another aboriginal myth relates this crater to the morning star, though the reference is anecdotal. None the less if ancestral Aborigines had observed this crater being formed then either it is sheer coincidence as the aborigines are assumed to have arrived 40,000 years ago, or the geological dating is problematical. Giving the Aboriginal myth some credence, it is possible that what their ancestors could have described was an enormous electrical discharge between the earth and some other cosmic body. Such electrical discharges would have occurred over some hours of duration, and such a novel physical phenomenon would tend to be described by technologically unsophisticated nomadic hunter-gatherers in terms of an aboriginal metaphor, or a snake, hence the term "rainbow snake". This suggests that the Wolfe Creek Crater is an electrical discharge crater, not a meteoritic impact crater. References: 1. Australia's Meteorite craters, Alex Bevan and Ken McNamara, West Australian Museum, December 1993 2. Logistics report for a Detailed Airborne Magnetic, Radiometric and Digital Elevation survey for the Wolfe Creek Crater Project, July 2002, UTS Geophysics, for Geoscience Australia. Louis A G Hissink MSc. Consulting Diamond Geologist December 2002 ******************************************************** STARS ESCAPE FROM ASTRONOMICAL ZOO Don Scott The Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) site has run several discussions of the "variable star" V838 Monocerotis. Today they have another one. http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap021003.html but also see http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030402.html They include comments like, "V838 Mon may be a totally new addition to the astronomical zoo." I object to this "new" characterization. This zoo animal disproves standard fusion models. In fact this star (together with several others) simply demonstrates stellar evolution wholly NOT in keeping with thermonuclear stellar theory. To paraphrase my web page: FG Sagittae breaks all the rules of accepted stellar evolution. FG Sagittae has changed from blue to yellow since 1955! V605 Aquilae: Examination of old images and spectrograms reveal that V 605 Aquilae, studied by Knut Lundmark in the 1920's was a similar sort of beast,... V4334 Sagittarii is better known as Sakurai's object, for its 1994 discoverer. It, too, changed both spectral type and surface composition very rapidly, and is now hydrogen-poor and carbon-rich, and well on its way to becoming the century's third new R CrB star. So now there are at least four prime examples of stars that do not evolve according to the accepted thermonuclear model of how stars are powered. THESE CHANGES HAVE ALL BEEN OBSERVED DURING THE LAST FEW YEARS. These are stars that falsify the conventional understanding of stellar life cycles. All of them act in a manner predicted by the Electric Star hypothesis. If we trust ancient observers of the sky (our group is based on doing exactly that, is it not?), then there are three additional stars that have changed ("evolved") during the last couple of millennia. Sirius is a main sequence, brilliant white A-type star. The ancients (among them: Cicero, Horace, Ptolemy, and Seneca) called it red or "coppery" in color. Seneca, in the days of Nero, called it "redder than Mars", whereas he described Jupiter as "not at all red." Castor is designated as the alpha star in the constellation of Gemini, but it is not as brilliant as the beta star, Pollux. Stars in constellations are always named alpha, beta, gamma, etc., in decreasing order of apparent brilliance. Castor is the 23rd brightest star in the sky while Pollux is the 17th brightest. It has been suggested therefore that since the time of the ancients, Castor has lost luminosity. Capella was described as being a "red star" (we would call it M-type) by several ancient and medieval writers including Ptolemy and Riccioli. It has now been confirmed to be a binary - one G-type and one F-type. Not M-type. In the Electric Star version of "stellar evolution" things can happen quickly. If the fusion model were correct, it would take hundreds of thousands of years for a star to change from one place in the HR diagram to another. It would not be observed within a "human lifetime", or have been observed over an astronomically relatively short period of a mere, say, 2000 years. It didn't take FG Sagittae hundreds of thousands of years to "run down." The star V838 Monocerotis has moved half way across the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram in a few months. Migrating across the HR diagram can happen very rapidly - and apparently does! How many such counter-examples does it take for astrophysicists to realize their stellar fusion theory has been falsified? Don Scott http://www.electric-cosmos.org/ ******************************************************** HOW TO SEARCH FOR ALIENS Wal Thornhill "Next we come to a question that everyone, scientist and non-scientist alike, must have asked at some time. What is man1s place in the Universe?" The Nature of the Universe, Fred Hoyle. In March this year 13,000 people from across the U.S converged on Philadelphia for the largest meeting of science educators in the world. Many teachers there remarked that their students are always asking about SETI and astronomy. Kids have a keen interest in astronomy and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. What's out there? Are we alone? The first question we need to ask before we look for life on other worlds is how did intelligent life come to form on this planet? Are these unique circumstances, or are they common? Which stars are most likely to harbour worlds like ours? It is a question involving a broad mix of cosmology, mythology, geology and biology. Unfortunately, viewpoints today are polarized into only two choices, both requiring miracles. These choices are the creationist story and the evolutionist story. Subscribers to each camp have dug in for a fight to the death. Each side has quite sound arguments against the dogma of the other. Neither side allows the possibility that the answer may be found in no-man's land. Religions have adopted a literal belief that the creation stories of myth explain the origin of the Earth and the universe. However, mythical creation stories required human observers. They have nothing to do with the question of how the Earth began, much less how the universe was formed. Nor are they about how life and intelligent life originated. They are the story of the most recent in a series of cosmic cataclysms that have visited the Earth in its long and chequered career. Those cataclysms are recorded in the tortured strata and buried flora and fauna of the Earth. Science has adopted its own evolutionary mythology of Earth's history that largely discounts cosmic cataclysms unless they happened in the remote, unfathomable past (although in recent years there has been a grudging acceptance that the dinosaurs may have been wiped out by a hypothetical asteroid impact). The dogma has been expressed by Dr. Maxine Singer, President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, when she wrote "Evolution is the framework that makes sense of the whole natural world from the formation of atoms, galaxies, stars and planetsS " The religious story gives us no clue about where to look for extraterrestrial life. But the dogma of evolution also limits our thinking about SETI. Success is unlikely if our beliefs about our origin and place in the universe are wrong. This is demonstrated clearly in the following bleak excerpt from New Scientist. ---------------------------- Earth was a freak New Scientist 29 March 2003 HAZEL MUIR BAD news for people hunting extraterrestrials: the cosy, rocky planets that are essential for supporting life might be rare, cosmological freaks. The only reason we are here is because a nearby star happened to explode next to our young Sun just as the Solar System was forming, claims an applied mathematician. Thomas Clarke at the University of Central Florida in Orlando predicts that the vast majority of planets in the Milky Way are frigid gas giants like Jupiter, with hostile atmospheres and no solid surfaces to walk around on. "On average, a solar system will consist of an extensive rocky asteroid belt and some gas giant planets and moons," says Clarke. "It's kind of a dismal conclusion." Astronomers agree that the planets and moons of our Solar System formed in a swirling disc of gas and dust around the Sun. In the outer regions, cold, slushy gases condensed into the giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. And in the inner regions, dusty particles melted and stuck together, forming hot blobs of rock that cooled and merged to make Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. TYPICAL SOLAR SYSTEM: Debris in the asteroid belt will not form rocky and potentially hospitable planets unless there is an additional heat source. But it is not clear why the rock melted - the Sun then was not much hotter than it is now. Astronomers believe that the extra heat may have come from radioactive aluminium-26 that was sprayed out of a star that exploded up to 50 light years away when the planets were forming. Decay products of the isotope, which has a half-life of 720,000 years, have been found in meteorites. At last week's Lunar and Planetary Science conference near Houston, in Texas, Clarke suggested that without the heat from the aluminium, the Earth would not have formed. While asteroid-sized rocks would have aggregated in the inner Solar System, they would not have melted and clumped together to form planets. According to Clarke's calculations, the solid rocks would simply zoom past each other or collide and recoil like snooker balls. Only molten, squidgy rocks would deform and lose energy in a collision, he says, allowing them to stick together and grow. Debris in the asteroid belt will not form rocky and potentially hospitable planets unless there is an additional heat source But the chance of a star exploding at just the right time and place is very much against the odds. Stars only explode three or four times a century in our Galaxy. Clarke estimates that the probability of a supernova happening within 50 light years of any new solar system that is busy forming planets is only about 1 in 100. "So only a small fraction of planetary systems would be expected to have terrestrial planets," says Clarke. ------------------------------ "Trouble comes, however, when what we think to be knowledge is actually no more than illusion. Education then serves to transmit illusions from generation to generation, with the situation getting worse all the time. ..wrong ideas eventually become so deeply entrenched as to become unshakeable dogma." Our Place in the Cosmos ? Fred Hoyle & Chandra Wickramasinghe. The failure of the SETI project to find signs of extraterrestrial intelligence may indicate the Earth is a freak. Or it might indicate that many of the things confidently asserted by scholars like Thomas Clarke are far from the truth. For example, the fact that "astronomers agree that the planets and moons of our Solar System formed in a swirling disc of gas and dust around the Sun," does not make it so. It is probable that consensus about the so-called "nebular hypothesis" has been achieved simply because no astronomer has come up with a more plausible alternative. Clarke indicates one of the problems ? how do you form a planet from a ring of dust stretching clear around the solar system? Astronomers were surprised to find that moonlets in Saturn's rings on commensurate orbits merely swap orbits without colliding. So the ad hoc proposal making objects like that hot and "squidgy" will not help them to stick together if they never come into contact. In an electric universe there is a far more plausible explanation for the genesis of planets. It has almost biological overtones and is appealing in its simplicity ? one measure of a good theory. It explains why gas giants have been found recently in large numbers orbiting their parent star far closer than expected by the nebular hypothesis. But first we must deal with the origin of the parent stars ELECTRIC STARS The electric universe model assumes, based on good evidence, that the universe is not electrically neutral. So electric currents flow through the thin plasma of deep space in the form of giant filaments, detectable by their magnetic fields. These cosmic filaments take the form of "twisted pairs," well known to electrical engineers. Plasma physicists call them "Birkeland currents," after a pioneering scientist in the field. Observations and experiments support this model. Birkeland currents are ultimately responsible for the formation of stars. These cosmic electric currents are the most efficient scavengers of dust and gas in space. Matter is squeezed or "pinched" toward the current axis by a strong force that varies inversely with radial distance from the axis. Contrast that with the weak force of gravity, which falls off rapidly with the square of distance. Stars are formed like beads strung along a cosmic power line with their rotation axes aligned along the current filaments. Evidence for that model comes from the alignment of the spin axes of stars with the magnetic field in giant molecular clouds. The effect is rather like the old toy spinning tops, with the helical thread plunger passed through them to impart spin. The strong electromagnetic coupling between the proto-star and its environment is also capable of removing angular momentum during collapse - a severe problem for the gravitational collapse model of stars. The Hubble telescope offers a stunning unprecedented close-up view of a turbulent firestorm of star birth along a nearly edge-on dust disk girdling Centaurus A, the nearest active galaxy to Earth. It shows spectacularly the filamentary nature of molecular clouds from which stars are born. Full article with photos can be found here: http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=9r90r78d The electric universe model is a major departure from conventional views about how stars shine. It proposes that stars, after they have formed, continue to receive power from galactic Birkeland currents. Eddington wrote in his famous work, The Internal Constitution of the Stars: "In seeking a source of energy other than contraction the first question is whether the energy to be radiated in future is now hidden in the star or whether it is being picked up continuously from outside. Suggestions have been made that the impact of meteoric matter provides the heat, or that there is some subtle radiation traversing space which the star picks up." It is the second possibility that is true in an electric universe model. But Eddington did not pursue it because he was convinced that a star must collapse under its own gravity unless supported from within by an energy source. That was an incorrect assumption because gravity induces charge separation and electrical repulsion effects within a star ? something that Eddington dismissed. The simple fact that a proton weighs almost 2000 times as much as an electron ensures that this will occur. Each hydrogen atom in a star will be distorted by gravity to form a tiny radial electric dipole. The resulting electric field will ensure charge separation inside the star. Free electrons will drift toward the surface and leave behind a positively charged core. (This simple fact exposes the nonsense of collapsed stars ? that is, neutron stars and black holes. The phenomena attributed to them are simply explained electrically). The resulting internal electric forces counterbalance compression due to gravity more or less uniformly throughout the star. As the gadfly British physicist, Dr. Harold Aspden, had the temerity to remark, knowing the volume of a hydrogen atom and the mass of the Sun 19th century physicists could have calculated this. He wrote, "..the mass density within a star is not concentrated into a non-uniform distribution by the force of gravitation. The importance of this to cosmological science cannot be overestimated. It bears upon that question of how a nuclear fusion reaction can be initiated to feed the star's energy output. It obliges one to consider the prospect of a cold fusion process or to look for other explanations for the stellar energy source." Precisely! ? the simplest of observations about the Sun supports the electric star model. By the way, the problem of short-lived radioactive isotopes is solved by the fact that stellar electric discharges manufacture all of the heavy elements seen in their spectra. A supernova is not required. Then there is the Sun's strange atmosphere. Fred Hoyle wrote in 1955, "We should expect on the basis of a straightforward calculation that the Sun would 'end' itself in a simple and rather prosaic way; that with increasing height above the photosphere the density of the solar material would decrease quite rapidly, until it became pretty well negligible only two or three thousand kilometres up." Instead, the planets orbit inside its "huge bloated envelope." The Sun's atmosphere matches that expected from an electric discharge in a very low pressure gas ? the solar "wind" accelerating away from the Sun, the million degree temperature of the solar corona above a "cool" photosphere at 6000 degrees, and the magnetic fields that reveal electric currents in space. Where do planets fit into this picture? Companion stars and gas giants may be formed in the initial string of stellar "beads." Or they may be "born" later from a star when electrical stresses cause the expulsion of some of its positively charged core. It is an effective way to increase surface area to relieve electrical stress. A gargantuan stellar "lightning flash," called a nova, accompanies the birth. The result is generally a close-orbiting binary system and an "expulsion disk" ? in contradistinction to an accretion disk. The new companion can be a star or a gas giant. Gas giants may also undergo the same process, albeit less violently, giving birth to their rocky moons and planets. Notably, Saturn still has an ephemeral expulsion disk. With such an unconventional scenario, where is the best place to look for extraterrestrial intelligence? The immediate answer is ? not near a star like the Sun! Our situation is quite precarious ? almost freakish. A small difference in Earth's orbit or radiation from the Sun could extinguish intelligent life on this planet. Earth is highly unlikely to have supported life for hundreds of millions of years in its present situation. So SETI is mistaken to concentrate its search on Earth-like planets orbiting energetic stars like the Sun. A more helpful answer is that Earth-like planets and intelligent life are most likely to be found very close to less energetic, dim red stars. That is good news because they are the most numerous in the galaxy. It should be clear that there is no such thing as a "failed star" in an electric universe because internal nuclear energy is not the source of their radiance. It is also important to recognize that the term "dwarf" is a misnomer when applied to a dim red star. All red stars will appear much larger than the central physical body because their colour and size is largely due to a spherical anode glow at a great height above the surface. Many satellites will orbit within the glowing shell and diffuse atmosphere of a red star. That is the ideal place for life to take hold. Radiant energy falls equally over the surface of such a satellite, or planet, regardless of orbit, rotation and axial tilt. There are neither seasons nor day and night. And life-giving molecules, including water, will mist down through an atmosphere drawn from their parent star. The giant red star, Betelgeuse, sports unexpected hot spots. They may be stellar objects within, shining through an enveloping anode glow. The glowing sheath is so huge that if Betelguese replaced our Sun then Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Jupiter would be orbiting within it. Astronomers recognize that the plasma envelope of such stars is so tenuous that it would not impede planets in their orbits. There is a catch however for SETI enthusiasts. Intelligent beings living on a planet in this benign environment would not see a dark, star spangled heaven. If the misty atmosphere cleared sufficiently they might see a diffuse, brighter light from their primary or possibly a nearby binary partner shining through the glowing cocoon that surrounds them. If intelligent beings living on these protected planets have learned to use radio signals, we would not detect them, because the plasma of the anode glow would act as an impenetrable shield against radio signals. Nor would they be able to detect our radio signals, for the same reason. In fact, there would be nothing to suggest the existence of an immense universe beyond the plasma glow that surrounds them. There would be no reason for them to search for extraplanetary intelligence. UnlessS they discovered a way to communicate over cosmic distances that does not involve radio signals. In any case, radio signals are far too slow for sensible communication over the gulf of deep space. Having intelligent civilizations electrically "quarantined" inside their stellar wombs would satisfy the so-called "Fermi paradox," which is the question, "If the universe is teeming with aliens, where is everybody?" We are the freaks who have been given the opportunity to see the immensity of the universe and to live to ask the question. Our creation myths seem to be a human memory of Earth's expulsion from the maternal womb. Surely we should mine them for insights into the real history of the Earth and the only intelligent life we know, before letting our imagination run riot. If we appear to be alone it might simply be due to our primitive understanding of the universe, which is leading us to look in the wrong places and maybe with the wrong tools. I believe that if SETI is to succeed we must challenge our kids with possibilities and questions, not with the overwhelming "illusion of knowledge" that modern science portrays. Because, contrary to the bleak conventional outlook, the electric universe seems designed to produce intelligent life. The search must ultimately succeed! (c) Wal Thornhill 2003 author of The Electric Universe: A Holistic Science for the New Millennium See www.electric-universe.org ******************************************************** PLEASE VISIT THE KRONIA GROUP WEBSITE: http://www.kronia.com Subscriptions to AEON, a journal of myth and science, now with regular features on the Saturn theory and electric universe, may be ordered from this page: http://www.kronia.com/library/aeon.html Other suggested Web site URL's for more information about Catastrophics: http://www.aeonjournal.com/index.html http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/ http://www.flash.net/~cjransom/ http://www.knowledge.co.uk/velikovskian/ http://www.bearfabrique.org http://www.grazian-archive.com/ http://www.holoscience.com http://www.electric-cosmos.org/ http://www.electric-universe.org http://www.science-frontiers.com