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Recovering the Lost World,
A Saturnian Cosmology -- Jno Cook
Part 3: Saturn and the evolution of life.

[Table of Contents]

$Revision: 19.3 $
Contents of this chapter: [Initial Conditions] [A Comet's Path] [Ice Cover] [Seasonal Plants] [Periodic Extinctions] [Below the Pole] [New Postulates] [In the Solar System] [Saved from Destruction] [The Genesis of Life] [Endnotes]

This chapter presents the celestial mechanics I have used as background to the narrative of this text. I'll describe how Saturn may have first entered the Solar System before the Cambrian, repeatedly returned at intervals of millions of years, and then in the last three million years returned to stay. This will set the stage for further events after about 6000 BC.

In addition I will suggest that the rise of complexity in life forms after the Cambrian, is due entirely to periodic plasma contacts between Saturn and Earth.

NOTE: If you are not interested in background matters, skip this chapter and go to the [next] chapter, or go directly to the [beginning] of time.

[Saturn and the Sun]
Image: A diagram of how Saturn and its planets entered the Solar System. The Saturnian System could have come from any direction. Over the following millions of years the orbit of Saturn would flatten to the ecliptic.

Problems with the Initial Conditions

On a whim I attended a conference in Nevada in August of 2001, given by Kronia, the organization with a website of the same name, organized by David Talbott and others. The conference dealt with aspects of the Saturnian Configuration expanded on these pages.

I was familiar with the work of Immanuel Velikovsky, and the subsequent work by David Talbott. Velikovsky, in "Worlds in Collision" (1950), described how Venus interacted with Earth in ca 1500 BC. Talbott, in "The Saturn Myth" (1980), established that in remote antiquity a large globe stood above the Earth at the north horizon. Talbott's book is overwhelming in detail, and convincing in its thesis (even though he would interpret some details differently today). The conference brought out information by Wal Thornhill on plasma streams in the universe. Others in attendence were Don Scott, Dwardu Cardona, Anthony Peratt, and Marinas van der Sluijs.

I came away from the conference unsatisfied. There was no cohesive chronology put forth, and the mechanics of an intersection of Saturn and the Solar System lacked elegance. I decided to start this text (as web pages) in an effort to put things in order and to develop a cohesive chronology. However, initially the lack of an adequate model of the celestial mechanics was an obstacle.

After the conference I wrote up the information I had available to me and then the site lingered as I repeatedly got stuck. I backed up to study a few things. I had no problem with the plasma theories. What was missing were concepts and data from other disciplines. I needed a broader base to work from, and ended up spending time reading or rereading biology, evolution, geology, and archaeology. I read books supporting orthodoxy as well as books at the edge of speculation.

By mid 2003 I knew that many of the statements I had made were not supportable and that a new explication was needed. I started rewriting in February of 2004, and finished in draft form a year and a month later, March 2005. As of March 2008, I see that additions, word edits, and data tweaks have continued for more than three years. (See the [change log] of the index file.)

What needed to be reinvestigated was the idea that Saturn, together with Earth, could enter the Solar System in about 3400 BC and end up in a circular path in a matter of 300 years. That just didn't make sense.

There were three main problems with this hypothesis:

Also, I could not initially imagine how Earth might have ended up suspended below the south pole of Saturn. I juggled these problem areas simultaneously, often falling asleep imagining Saturnian orbits and Earth conditions. I'll address them one at a time.

A Comet's Path

My first objection was to the suggestion of a 300 year period for Saturn to "corkscrew" into an orbit about the Sun, approaching the Solar System, from below the Sun's equator. In Thornhill's model this would have happened with Earth and Mars in tow below the south pole of Saturn. [note 1a]

If Saturn were to be introduced into the Solar System, it would have had to have been because of the gravitational attraction of the Sun. Saturn would enter on a comet's path, headed straight to the Sun, but, like all comets, avoiding a direct collision, swing tightly around the Sun, and disappear again into the far reaches of space.

Because of the fact that Saturn, Mars, Earth, and Neptune all have their axes aligned at 31 degrees from the axis of rotation of the Sun, it has to be concluded that these planets are distinct from the other planets of the Solar System. (See Chapter 2, "The Solar System and Cosmology," for the alignment of rotational axes.) Axial tilt is probably the strongest and most persistent condition for a planet, because the rotational momentum is enormous, and nothing short of the torque of an unbalanced force due to the electrical field of another planet could influence it. And even if the rotational axis were to be tilted to a different location by a momentary external torque, the gyroscopic reaction would be to return to the old direction of the axis in a matter of days. [note 1]

The Earth, Mars, Neptune, and Saturn are foreign to this Solar System. Together they must have constituted a self-contained solar system, whose axis of rotation pointed in a direction 31 degrees away from the the Sun's axis of rotation. No matter when the Saturnian System and the Solar System were combined into one, the angle of the spin axes would not have changed even over a billion years.

Nor would it matter from which direction the Saturnian System first approached the Solar System. Over time, Saturn would have leveled its orbit to the ecliptic due to gravitational interactions with the Sun's planets. Additionally, the planets (Earth, Mars, Neptune) traveling with Saturn as it first approached the Solar System would have rotated at the equator of Saturn, as do the planets of the Sun, and as do the satellites of all the planets -- not below the Saturnian south pole.

With Saturn on an orbit which always turned close to the Sun at each approach, a planet orbiting Saturn would have a good chance of switching orbits and being lost to the Sun. At some point on Saturn's swing around the Sun, a satellite in orbit might come to a virtual standstill -- where the gravitational pull of the Sun could overcome that of Saturn. This would most likely happen when the planet was directly between Saturn and the Sun. The forward motion of the Saturnian System as a whole would carry the planet into an orbit around the Sun. [note 2]

For Earth this had to have happened a long time ago, since biological indications are that the Earth became adapted to seasonal climates about 250 million years ago. Orbiting Saturn, the Earth would have had no seasons, since the Earth's rotational axis would have been parallel to Saturn's axis of rotation.

Thus, as my new starting point, I assumed that the Saturnian System intersected with the Solar System at some point in the past with a number of planets -- Earth, Mars, Neptune at least -- on equatorial orbits. Some were lost to the Sun, to rotate independently as satellites of the Sun. It is likely that this happened over a very long period of time, enough time, in fact, so that Saturnian planets would end up on orbits flattened to the equator of the Sun.

Ice Cover

The Earth has an ice cover near the poles. The ice of Antarctica is estimated to be 30 million years old. Within the north polar region there is glacial ice in Greenland (but not elsewhere) estimated to date to three million years ago. There has been no other glaciation on Earth since the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago.

To allow for the formation of ice at the poles, I at first imagined Saturn with its planets on an elliptical path which would bring the whole system to perihelion with the Sun at infrequent intervals. That might start to account for the ice if, following Immanuel Velikovsky's suggestion, it was caused by the heat generated by a shifting lithosphere.

Velikovsky had suggested that the polar ice was generated in a very short timespan by massive freezing rains. The constant rains would be the result of a torque applied to the planet by another planet passing at close range. This might cause the lithosphere to relocate with respect to the underlying core. It would crack, bulge, and split open and the heat generated would cause evaporation of oceanic water to the point of saturating the atmosphere. The saturated atmosphere would cause endless rains.

Velikovsky's suggestion actually made much more sense than many other theories, as, for example, basing northern glaciation on the fact that it supposedly snows constantly at the north pole (it does not), or invoking Milankovich's cycles of changing global temperatures based on the precession of the Earth's spin axis and the slow revolution of the Earth's eccentric orbit (but cold temperatures do not make glaciers), or basing it on the long-term changes in the Sun's sun-spot cycle.

I had much less of a problem with Velikovsky's suggestion than these other theories and I allowed it to stand as a possibility. Perhaps, as he suggested, forces could wrench the Earth's lithosphere while Saturn came to perihelion with the Sun. But there were some drawbacks to this theory which have always nagged at me. Polar glacial ice is not frozen rain; it is compacted snow. Additionally, northern Asia has never been glaciated, even though it is clearly within the Arctic circle just like Greenland.

Whatever the cause of the glaciation, we can account for the persistent glaciation only by having the Earth revolve around the Sun with the polar axis tilted at an angle. At a minimum you would need a winter season of no sunlight (as we have today) to retain snow and eventually compact it to ice. If Earth had been on an equatorial orbit around Saturn until recently, there would have been no seasons -- since the axis of Saturn and Earth would have pointed in the same direction of space. The same is true if Earth had been below the south pole of Saturn until 3400 BC. Then the north pole would have been directly lit by Saturn and would have been warmer than any other part of the planet. But the Greenland glacier is 3 million years old.

Seasonal Plants

Even the diurnal habits of nearly all the animals on Earth argue against the Earth having been below the south pole of Saturn up until recent times (as Thornhill first suggested), or having existed within Saturn's coronal glow discharge envelope where there would be no difference between night and day (as Cardona at one time suggested).

The Earth might have been a satellite of Saturn at one time, but most likely that relationship had ended a long time ago. How long ago? Talbott at one time suggested the Eocene, 50 to 60 million years ago (mya). The Eocene makes some sense. It is the age of the expansion of mammals, the spread of grasses, and the takeover of modern plants. It also falls after the K-T boundary -- the giant 'meteor' impact in the Yucatan, 63 million years ago, which marked the eventual demise of the dinosaurs and the end of the Cretaceous period.

There is, in fact, a clear distinction between two entirely different periods in the Earth's biological history, but the separation between the two periods dates from long before the Eocene. At an earlier time, and throughout most of the age of the dinosaurs, the plant cover of the Earth consisted of slow-growing, heavily-armored, and hard (siliciferous) plants. Pine trees, which date from that era, even today take three years to come to seed. The later period saw the development and spread of fast-growing, soft-bodied, seasonal plants.

Although the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago, might be suggested as a division between these two biologically distinct periods, this is not early enough. Grasses first developed during the Creteceous era (140 to 65 mya), but the first flowering plants (Orchids!) date from the yet earlier Jurassic (200 to 140 mya) or Triassic (250 to 200 mya) Periods. If we are to look for a time when Earth first joined the Sun's planets, it has to be even earlier, perhaps in the period preceding the Triassic, the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago. [note 4] 


   period/epoch	   start 	  features

 -Quaternary	   1 mya   glaciation in Europe and America 
 -Tertiary
   pliocene	  12 mya   modern plants and animals, Rockies
   miocene	  30 mya   large mammals, Alps, Andes, Himalayas
   eocene	  65 mya   mammals dominate, primates
 -Cretateous	 140 mya   early mammals, flowering plants, grasses,
			   extinction of dinosaurs at 65 mya
 -Jurassic	 200 mya   pines, birds, small mammals
 -Triassic	 250 mya   dinosaurs, orchids
 -Permian	 300 mya   first reptiles, end of large trees
 -Carboniferous  345 mya   fern trees, pines, insects, amphibians
 -Devonian	 405 mya   fish, first land plants
 -Silurian	 425 mya   corals, scorpions
 -Ordovician	 500 mya   marine invertebrates
 -Cambrian	 600 mya   snails, sponges, trilobites
  precambian	3100 mya   single cell forms, sponges, algae  
  (creation)    3900 mya   (oldest rocks)

Dates vary; these are from William Matthews, "Fossils" (1962)

Periodic Extinctions

Among the periodic extinctions that life on Earth has experienced, the extinction and glaciation at the end of the Permian stands out. The Permian produced the forerunners of both dinosaurs and mammals. The close of the Permian is marked by a drying of inland seas, equatorial glaciation, and mountain building (the Appalachians and proto-Rockies), and we see the largest extinction ever -- 99 percent of all aquatic species disappeared and 95 percent of land species.

Current thinking is that the land extinctions were caused by massive lava flows which happened in Siberia, accompanied by increased carbon dioxide and methane gases. As the methane oxidized (along with organic material from the lowered inland seas), carbon dioxide increased even further and oxygen levels dropped. I do not buy these particulars.

Some seven lifeless layers of sediment (wind blown sand and dust) follow each other. This is today visible in South Africa's Karoo Desert. Today these layers are estimated to span 100,000 years, but this time span is based on guesses at the sedimentation rates. I doubt if all of it extended over more than a few thousand years. The extinctions at the end of the Permian were not the result of a single, or an occasional, plasma contact with Saturn, but the result of a nova event. The Permian depositions of material and extinctions were perhaps serial but they were rapid. I think that this happened as Earth was still in orbit around Saturn for, in this instance, it is certain that the equatorial regions of Earth were hit. Shallow inland seas were vaporized and a dense cloud cover followed which cooled the Earth. The falling snows built glaciers in central Africa, India, and equatorial South America.

At this point, harking back to the earlier concept of the possible jolting of the Earth in the periodic visits of Saturn to the Sun, I realized that the frequent and periodic extinctions of the Paleozoic (the period since the Cambrian) might be due to more than just geological upheavals. [note 5]

Robert Bakker has put forward a theory of simple causes for extinctions -- changes in climate, the spread of species hostile to others into new territories, the spread of viral or bacterial infections. This suggested that geological changes were not per se the cause, although these happened with some regularity. Of course, new territories would open up with the periodic orogeny and the frequent retreats and advances of the inland seas (as in central North America). But it would seem that neither the spread of hostile species, nor geological upheavals, could explain the periodicity of extinctions -- events which were sudden and wholesale, followed by millions of years where nothing happened. [note 6]

If Saturn's occasional return to the Sun were to have a worldwide impact on the Earth, there had to be some mechanism to account for this, other than possible geological disturbances. Mountain building, or the draining of inland seas, is extremely slow from a biological point of view. Biological organisms will adapt during the millions of years that it takes to raise mountains (if mountain building indeed takes millions of years). What was needed to explain the extinctions was a more sudden cataclysmic event.

Then I realized that massive plasma discharges could have been almost totally responsible for the extinctions. Similar to any comet, a coma and tail would form as Saturn approached the Sun, and Saturn, because of its enormous size and the extended time spent at a much lower electrical potential away from the Sun, would discharge electrically to anything nearby, whether that was Earth still in orbit around Saturn, or Earth in a close orbit around the Sun, or any of the other planets of the Sun. [note 7]

It would not matter if Earth were still a satellite of Saturn, or had become a planet orbiting the Sun, the plasma discharges of Saturn, as it neared perihelion with the Sun, would affect Earth in either case. The major difference between these two situations would be that, if Earth were in orbit around the Sun, the plasma discharges might be of an entirely different magnitude, and thus have an entirely different extinction affect. It would also depend on where the plasma would strike the face of Earth (land or ocean) and how close Earth was to Saturn as it passed by. As a matter of fact, it is the case that no two extinction events have been alike. The biological extinctions are definitely periodic, but their effect at any one time is completely different from their effect at other times.

During any of the near approaches of Saturn, the Earth could have been displaced to a new orbit, depending on how the two planets approached each other. This would also have had a major effect on the climate. The biological record indicates that Earth experienced extreme changes in climate, often lasting tens of millions of years following extinction events.

These concepts might be the answer to the "Planet X" theory, which suggests that an unknown planet of very long period caused the mass extinctions of life on Earth at 26 million year intervals since the Cambrian, 560 million years ago. It has been suggested that Planet X would travel at a right angle to the equator of the Sun, that is, circumpolar, since nothing like Planet X has been found in the ecliptic.

Most likely Saturn was "Planet X," and not on a circumpolar orbit but on or near the ecliptic. The extinctions would be caused by changes in climatic conditions coupled with X-rays, UV radiation, and Gamma rays (high energy photons). Plasma discharges would certainly be to blame. If we recognize the Yucatan Chicxulub impact crater (65 million ya) as an anode burn mark, it serves as an example of the possible destructiveness of an arc mode plasma contact. [note 8]

Below the Pole of Saturn

Lastly, I could not accept the postulate of the Earth located below the south pole of Saturn as an a priori condition. Nothing in all our experience with the paths of planets or satellites indicates that this would be remotely possible as an initial condition. Secondaries revolve around their primaries at the equator of the primaries, they do not hang suspended sub-polar. Of course I would have to accept the sub-polar configuration as an accidental condition at some later time, for certainly all of the Saturn imagery describes this condition.

The solution to this problem came from considering, first, the mechanics of both planets as satellites of the Sun, and second, the electrostatic charge of the planets. [note 9]

Once a planet orbits the Sun, it would be governed by the gravitational forces of the Sun. The possibility of Earth being recaptured by Saturn as a satellite is virtually nil. Capture requires a forward motion which not only matches the passing planet, but requires passage on the outward side of the capturing planet (away from the Sun), and then a sudden change in direction and dramatic reduction in speed to become a satellite. This is highly unlikely, for the orbital speed around the Sun is much greater than the orbital speed of a satellite around a planet. If a planet were to meet Saturn, as Saturn was rounding the Sun, the planet would be pulled or pushed, gravitationally and electrostatically, into a larger or smaller solar orbit. It would not end up orbiting Saturn. [note 10]

But if Saturn and another planet were to override each other, which could easily happen because the orbits of all the planets are tilted at different angles, the smaller planet would be gravitationally attracted to Saturn while electrostatically repelled -- if the smaller planet entered the plasmasphere of Saturn. This would not change the orbits around the Sun of either Saturn or the planet -- but it would tend to continuously raise or lower the orbit of the smaller planet.

Such a condition would thus leave the planet on the same orbit, but with the orbit tilted at a different angle. The orbit of the planet would come to coincide with the orbit of Saturn over a long period of time. Each additional circuit of the planets around the Sun would continue to slightly modify the smaller planet's orbit.

The gravitational attraction between Saturn and Earth would be nearly equal to the gravitational attraction between Earth and the Sun if Earth were some 100 million miles from the Sun and a million miles below Saturn. The resulting acceleration (force) would point up (at an angle) toward Saturn. The two would not meet, because of the repulsive force of the electric field, but the orbit of Earth would be continuously modified under these conditions, and it is likely that Earth (as with Mars) would end up on an orbit (around the Sun) below Saturn. This would be a stable position, due entirely to gravitational and electrical forces between Saturn and the captured planet interacting with the gravitational attraction of the Sun. Earth would also end up entirely below the Sun for all of its orbit.

New Postulates

The postulates developed so far represent an entirely new timetable for the entry of Saturn and Earth into the Solar System -- completely different than the original hypothesis based on Wal Thornhill's rapid "corkscrewing" or Dwardu Cardona's concept of a long and recent existence in the enclosing coronal glow discharge (as discussed earlier). A period of 300 years has been replaced with 250 million years or more.

As Saturn passed close to Earth, gravitational and electrostatic forces would have displaced Earth to a different orbit with each passage. But it is the arcing from Saturn, using the Earth as part of a circuit, which would have caused the extinctions.

An electric arc is accompanied by every harmful thing from which you want to protect yourself: ultra violet radiation, x-rays, destruction of protective layers in the atmosphere, creation of toxic gases, high energy subatomic particles, transmutation of elements. Arcing could thus induce any number of rapid biological changes in species -- which would not only result in the disappearances of species but would also initiate speciation. New species always show up after a mass extinction, although it often takes a hundred thousand years to be noticed in the fossil record. I'll buy the slow alterations of a particular species due to natural selection, but I have never accepted speciation as due to natural selection. There is just no evidence for it. But here is a possible cause. We have then solved two problems at once: extinction and speciation.

Massive arcing would change the environment by removing shallow inland seas and radically altering winds and temperatures, perhaps for hundreds of years. Arcing could also induce the rapid development of harmful microbes (as the tail of Venus' magnetosphere seems to do to us today).

I was still wondering when Saturn (with Earth as a satellite) might have first intersected with the Solar System, when it struck me that it had to be late in the Precambrian or shortly after the Cambrian. If this were the case, then that first intersection would have been responsible for the initial wild diversity of life which sprang into being in the Cambrian. A comment by Steven Gould triggered this. He mentions that, amazingly, the Earth had supported one-celled life for nearly all of its 5 billion years of existence (actually 3.9 billion years), before taking complexity any further -- at the very last moment. That last moment is the time since the start of the Cambrian -- 560 million years ago.

It is not just the enormous expansion of species in the Cambrian which is absolutely amazing -- every currently recognized biological phylum comes into existence at that time, plus a dozen which have since disappeared -- but the repeated follow-up periods of new species since that time. And all of it happens in what would be the last fifteen percent of the age of the Earth.

At this point I started to rewrite the web pages. The following were the new postulates and some corollaries:

With the above list as a starting point, I could proceed to visualize the interaction of Saturn and Earth after 6000 BC, and have some confidence of being on the right path toward a connected narrative. At the same time a 4 billion year vista of the past suddenly opened up.

I will suggest in Chapter 14, "The Celestial Mechanics," that Saturn went nova, that is, went through a mass expulsion repeatedly at rather regular intervals since the creation of the Earth. Initially this seems to have happened at 700 to 650 million year intervals, reducing to 450 to 250 million year intervals shortly before the Cambrian. The earliest record of creation of a planet by a mass expulsion is the Moon, 4.5 billion years ago. Earth was created in a mass expulsion from Saturn 3.9 billion years ago. Mars, as dated from Martian meteorites, had its genesis 3.1 billion years ago.

Based on the interval between the ages of the Moon, Earth, and Mars, it is likely that all three of these were mass expulsions during nova events of Saturn. The last three mass expulsions of interest to us are: the event preceding the Cambrian at 570 million years ago, the event at the close of the Permian at 250 million years ago, and the expulsion witnessed by humanity in 4200 BC. Throughout the Permian, Earth was still on an equatorial orbit around Saturn.

Although we frequently know next to nothing about the specifics, it should be possible to chart a course of likely events and probable dynamics which will match the sparse information we have. A new element added to the normal planetary dynamics is, of course, the part played by planetary plasmaspheres and the attendent plasma discharges and repulsive electrical forces.

What I will attempt to do in the following chapters is to plot the progression of changes for the planets of the early Solar System using the simplest and most likely explanation which makes the case at any point and sets the stage for following events. This removes much of the inexplicable "changes in orbits" for which the catastrophism of Velikovsky and Talbott have been faulted. I hope to bring the story back to the normal expected interactions between a star and its planets. In fact, most of the events after 3114 BC reduce to a series of small changes of a set of nearly identical orbits.

In the two previous chapters I have offered some measure of the size of the Solar System, told of the creation of planets, and have in this chapter hinted at the 500 million year long history of the repeated interactions of Saturn with the Solar System. Continueing in this chapter I will next step back to show that Saturn probably was the cause of the development of higher life on this planet, and in subsequent chapter tell how our remote ancestors experienced Saturn in the skies above Earth, probably since 27,000 BC.

Saturn and the Solar System

For the sake of readers not familiar with terms like 'Precambrian' and 'Permian' I am producing a chart of the biological ages of the Earth below. 


-- 3.9 bya (billion years ago): first (oldest) rocks 
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-- 3 bya	
-
-
-		The whole of this period 
-               (from 3.9 bya to the Cambrian) 
-		is known as the "Precambrian."
-		Primitive life forms exist,
-		but do not 'advance' until
-		the "Cambrian Explosion."  
-                   
-- 2 bya	
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-- 1 bya
-
-
-
-
- 500 mya   560 mya: Cambrian explosion; 20 phyla established;
-                    first animals with hard exoskeletons.
- 300 mya   350 mya: Devonian. First land plants and animals. 
- 200 mya   250 mya: Permian mass extinction.
- 100 mya    60 mya: Primates (end of dinosaurs); 30 mya: last extinction 
-- 0 ya      12 mya: Modern plants and animals; 3 mya: glaciers, hominids; 
                     0.1 mya: h.sapiens; 0.06 mya: Cromagnon

We have almost no data for the 3 1/2 billion year period preceding the Cambrian. The best that can be suggested, therefore, is that Saturn, with the Saturnian planets (including Earth) encased within its coronal discharge, first approached the Solar System 560 million years ago, at the start of the Cambrian.

Over a period of hundreds of millions of years, the Saturnian satellites -- Earth, Mars, and Neptune -- were lost to the Sun, probably one by one. Each ended up rotating about the Sun rather than Saturn, with their axis of rotation still inclined to the 31 degree tilt of their original star, Saturn. Saturn would remain on a cometary path, sweeping close to the Sun at perihelion and then returning again to the far reaches of space, to come back at a later date.

Shortly before 560 million years ago, Saturn approached the Solar System. At first it was perhaps an accidental crossing of the paths of two Star Systems. But once the Saturnian System was gravitationally swept around the Sun, it was on a path which would return it again and again. On entering the electric field of the Sun, Saturn would lose its red dwarf-star characteristics and its giant coronal discharge would shrink to a much smaller size, producing some severe climatic stresses to Earth. Saturn would then assume a cometary tail, a coma, bow shock horns, and a frontal plasma discharge, or some combination of these. [note 11]

After the Precambrian (560 million ya) and before the Triassic or Jurassic (200 million ya), with Earth still traveling with Saturn, these infrequent excursions would radically change the heat and radiation received by the Earth as Saturn approached the Sun. The orbit of Earth around Saturn might have been altered, accounting for some of the long lasting climatic changes. And Earth would become suddenly (even if rather briefly) subjected to plasma discharges from Saturn at arc level as Saturn got yet closer to the Sun -- with all the attendant by-products. Certainly such events would cause some massive global changes -- severe changes in climate and perhaps geological disturbances. It would also cause extinctions, followed by speciation.

Since the Cambrian some of the satellites of Saturn were lost to the Sun, that is, they ended up in close orbits about the Sun. Earth was lost to the Sun at the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago. The new orbit about the Sun might initially have been of high eccentricity and at a diverse inclination with respect to the Sun's equatorial disk. Over time -- millions of years -- the eccentricity and orbital inclination would degrade to a more circular and flatter orbit through gravitational interactions. Saturn, much more massive than any of the inner planets, would remain on an elongated eccentric orbit of a very long period. [note 12]

This model would allow the Earth to have experienced the Sun for the last 200 to 250 million years. And Earth would have been warmer than at present, for I am proposing an orbit at the location of Venus today, or closer, not only for Earth, but for any of the lost Saturnian satellites. The changes in climate over the last 500 million years attests to this. Conditions would be stable for very long periods of time, and then Saturn would reappear in the sky, with a tail and horns, and a brush with death would ensue for the planets near the Sun.

On each of the 19 or 20 approaches of Saturn since the Cambrian, the orbit of Saturn would be adjusted slightly, and become more rounded, as happens to comets today. This results from the plasma discharges which happen as a comet traverses the electrical field near the Sun. But changes due to electrical discharge are minor compared to interactions with other planets. Comets in historical times have changed their orbit minutely on approaching the Sun, but large changes have been effected on passing near Jupiter. And somewhere before the last 3 million years, the orbital period of Saturn was greatly reduced.

This estimate is based on the fact that the northern glaciation of northwestern Europe and northeastern America started about 3 million years ago (coincident with the appearance thereafter of three Homo species and three species of Australopithecus). Except for the south pole, there is no previous evidence of glaciation since the Permian, 250 million years earlier. Not that arc contacts could not have been made, but any contact with ocean areas (and Earth is mostly ocean) would leave no evidence. Only an arc in an ocean close to land will leave evidence of glaciation. The south pole glaciation seems to be 30 (or 40) million years old. [note 13]

Saturn thus keeps returning to disturb the inner planets of the Sun, although not always to the same degree. But it is not likely that Saturn would ever come very close to any of the inner planets (that is, within a million miles), because even a few degrees difference in orbital inclination adds up to millions of miles of separation when two planets are both the same distance from the Sun and in the same sector of the ecliptic. [note 14]

In addition, planets do not collide, for they are each protected by their electric field, that is, by their plasmaspheres. However, the same plasmaspheres will cause the exchange of plasma or arcing in an attempt to equalize charge, after the plasmaspheres touch. It is this last, the plasma discharge, which will be significant. And a plasma discharge can travel millions of miles. In addition there will be sudden stupendous repulsive forces when the plasmaspheres merge.

A stream of plasma connecting from another planet will change the climate. If the plasma arc is localized, it will burn giant craters on land surfaces, vaporize material, raise stupendous clouds of dust, and explosively launch large rocks. If the arc strikes water it will bring ocean water to a boil, raising clouds which will condense to snow or freezing rain. If this happens near land an ice cover will form, with a much longer climatic effect. [note 15]

Saved from Destruction

You might wonder why the Earth was not utterly destroyed in the repeated massive plasma discharges from Saturn during the previous four billion years. Mars and the Moon, and almost all other satellites, have been dried up, evacuated of any atmosphere, and sculpted with craters and scars. Only Earth, Venus, and Titan, a satellite of Saturn, have atmospheres. But only Earth has an atmosphere which does not consist of poisonous gases. Only Earth has unfrozen water, and lots of it. Earth was at a distance from the Sun so as not to be either fried to a crisp or turned into a frozen wasteland. And only Earth seems to be crawling with life. How did we escape the destruction that all the others have experienced? [note 16]

The answer apparently lies with the unique combination of our particular distance from the Sun (which actually is not all that critical), the existence of a magnetic field, lots of water, an atmosphere, and a fast spin. Earth is the only inner planet with a magnetic field, except Mercury. However, Mercury has only a very slight magnetic field. Mercury is but a small dried-up prune of a planet, nearly standing still, baked ceaselessly by the Sun, and only a little larger than our Moon. It is the Sun's moon. No hope for life there.

The Earth's magnetic field protects the atmosphere with a tightly-held ionosphere (the inner surface of the more extensive plasmasphere). The atmosphere and the oceans, or the shallow inland seas at an earlier time, in turn deflected much of the damage of any electrical plasma strike that struck the planet directly through the vacuum of space. [note 17]

We were also saved from possible obliteration during the nova event of Saturn in 4200 BC by being located below Saturn rather than in its equatorial plane. The nova blowout might have brought humanity to an end, as it nearly obliterated all life at the end of the Permian, 250 million years earlier, when Earth was still orbitting Saturn at its equator. At that time Earth suffered a plasma discharge at equatorial level to the shallow seas of Central Africa or the Sahara, resulting in a glacier which covered South America, North Africa, and India -- which were joined together at that time.

The Genesis of Life

A few billion years ago the Earth must have been in a condition similar to what Venus experiences today -- a cooling crust, unremitting volcanism, ceaseless lightning, and a turbulent poisonous atmosphere -- a condition which grinds rocks to dust and builds landscapes. Add water to this landscape, and couple it with extreme electrical conditions, and you probably have the makings for the genesis of life. This will probably happen on Venus but it will take some billions of years.

These same conditions were probably what first brought complex molecules and self-replicating molecules into existence on Earth. Experiments with a reducing hydrogen atmosphere, methane, ammonia, water, and an electrical arc have produced many of the organic compounds which form the basis of life. This is, in fact, a popular high school Science Fair experiment. More complex versions of this experiment have produced the long-chained polymer molecules which are also needed, and recently have generated cell-like enclosures and the basics of RNA. The probability of achieving a living replicating organism are not all that astronomically high. However, no one has had the time to run the experiments for a half billion years.

But Earth did run these experiments, for nearly 4 billion years. During almost all of that time 'life' never went very far beyond the simplest forms. The 'progress' was incredibly slow. And it occurred in two or three spurts. Most of the 4 billion year-long era is called the Precambrian and it extended over nine-tenths of the history of the Earth.

Early life forms may not even have had cell walls. But after a half billion years, 3.2 billion years ago, the first cellular organisms (procaryotic cells) show up in the geological record. These are simple microscopic single-cell forms, akin to bacteria and blue-green algae. They have cell walls and a single chromosome, but no nucleus. There is also very early evidence of photosythesis and thus the slow creation of atmospheric oxygen. [note 19]

After another two billion years (at 1.6 or 1.2 billion years ago), the much larger eucaryotic cells -- cells with a nucleus and other inclusions like mitochondria -- show up. And then, near the end of the Precambrian (560 million years ago) we start to see the first multicellular soft-bodied organisms, worms and plants -- by evidence left as impressions in mud and sediment. The explosion of life in the Cambrian, and all that followed, is but a continuation of this. However, despite the high complexity of life forms which eventually develop, it is the first forms, the simple procaryotic cells (cells without a nucleus, like bacteria), which still constitute the bulk of living tissue today. Gould has estimated that bacteria and other single cell organisms constitute 80 percent of the biomass of Earth today.

The three discontinuous steps in the development of cellular complexity are approximately 650 to 700 million years apart. The geology of the Precambrian follows a similar series of geological alterations at 700 million year intervals, paralleling the development of life forms. I suspect that the cause of each of these alterations was a mass expulsion and severe plasma blast initiated by Saturn -- a nova event. Many organisms continued an existence through the Precambrian because the life forms remained below the surface of the Earth's waters.

At the close of the Precambrian we see another massive destruction of the terrestrial landscape. Following this is the most impressive expansion of the complexity of life ever. It is as if species spring up out of nowhere. Some 20 phyla show up for the first time, although some date from before the Cambrian. But only half of them last through the extinctions of the following 500 million years, and no new phyla are ever established again.

The genesis of life (barring the complexity of the Cambrian) may very well be a condition regularly experienced by planets throughout the Universe. The process is almost predictable. Certainly the chemistry -- methane, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide gases, water, and electrical discharges -- is common, and most of the planets that we have detected elsewhere are close enough to their star to receive heat from their primary.

However, it requires plasma activity to create advanced life forms. Not a continuous flow, which will destroy all the cellular forms already in existence, but periodic bursts, short enough to allow a portion of the cells to escape complete destruction but long enough to effectively alter millions upon millions of the organic chemical structures of the remaining cells -- almost all of which will die off. A few will survive, with altered forms and functions. This is what we would otherwise call the slow 'random' process of 'natural selection' -- but with a billion years of changes occurring all at once. Left to itself, random changes from chemicals, heat, and gamma rays will never create anything beyond bacteria -- even given the span of the billions upon billions of years ascribed to the 'life' of the Universe. A single nova event at the end of the Precambrian did what the previous 4 billion years had not managed to accomplish. [note 20]

Similarly, the Earth today would still be largely populated by the ocean-bottom plants and animals of the Precambrian -- sponges, seaweed, worms, and trilobites -- if it had not been for the much more frequently repeating series of limited plasma discharges which started some time after the Cambrian. These were completely different from the infrequent novas; they involved attempts at charge equalization by Saturn on reaching the neighborhood of the Sun, a space that was regularly traversed by Saturn after the Cambrian. The amount of plasma flow was limited by the short time duration that Saturn was close to the Sun -- probably only a matter of months.

I would vote for life being almost universal throughout the Galaxy. But I doubt if any of the life forms will ever get beyond the simplest organisms. It is likely that life anywhere else will never go beyond sponges and trilobites.

Endnotes

Note 1a --

The corkscrew idea was reiterated (to me) by the Saturnian people as late as summer of 2007. Interestingly, in the 2007 book by Wallace Thorhill and David Talbott, "The Electric Universe," there is an illustration of circular and spiralling magnetic lines, shaped like a funnel, located above (and below) the axis of the Solar System, with the Sun as the main focus (attributed to S. T. Zuess, 1999). The magnetic lines spiral toward the Sun, and are reminiscent of the proposed spiral (corkscrew) path taken by Saturn on approaching the Solar System. This would be a slim basis for insisting on a spiral path for a planet. Certainly comets elevated above the ecliptic do not spiral into the poles of the Sun.
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Note 1 --

The Earth may be a gyroscope, but does not quite react as a solid gyroscope does, for the Earth is assumed to be composed of 99 percent semi-liquid. See endnotes on this in another chapter.
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Note 2 --

I am assuming that all of Saturn's satellites also rotated about Saturn in a prograde direction (counterclockwise direction as seen from above the north pole), as they do today.

The prograde direction of Saturn's travel around the Sun was probably critical, because a satellite circling Saturn would describe an epicycloidal path in moving around the Sun with Saturn, making it look as if at some point it were standing still. The 'stand-still' nodes for this path are located between the passing Saturn and the Sun. And, in fact, at these locations the satellite would still have the forward speed of Saturn, nearly appropriate for an orbit around the Sun at that location, but reduced somewhat by the orbital speed of the satellite in the reverse direction around its planet.

At this location along the path of a Saturnian satellite the gravitational attraction of the Sun might overcome or equal the gravitational attraction of Saturn for the satellite. The Sun could easily 'capture' the satellite if the speed and direction of the satellite were at that point equivalent to a possible orbital path around the Sun.

If the satellites had rotated retrograde, the stand-still nodes would be placed on the outside of the orbit of Saturn. There are of course two additional possibilities, based on an initial orbit of Saturn in a retrograde direction around the Sun.
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Note 4 --

There is a greater variety (and geographic distribution) of orchids than any other flowering plant -- on the order of 40,000 or 70,000 species. Orchids are found from the Arctic to the tropics.

Grasses grow from the bottom, rather than the top, as other plants do. This is a biological solution to being grazed, just as trees attempted to move away from ground level. Most earlier plants had attempted to protect themselves by being tough and difficult to chew.

Before the end of the Cretaceous (and the end of the age of the dinosaurs), when the wind blew, dust was everywhere. It is these duststorms which have provided us with the fossils of that era. Sands and volcanic dust have piled up in some areas to depths of hundreds of feet. The remains of animals covered in thick layers of sand cannot be destroyed by scavengers. After the spread of grasses the sedimentation rate dropped. It is one of the noted differences between the periods before and after the Cretaceous. We have found far fewer fossils from this later era.
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Note 5 --

I checked the record of orogeny (at least for the American continent); it looks periodic as well. However, orogony is more likely to be caused by an expansion of the Earth -- which is a whole different topic altogether. The expansion and the creation of the world's oceans dates from the Jurassic during which time the oldest ocean depressions were formed. See the [Changing Size of the Earth] file for more. The disappearances of the inland seas after the Permian is probably the result of a runoff to the much lower levels of the first true ocean depressions.
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Note 6 --

Robert Bakker, in "The Dinosaur Heresies" (1986). He convincingly suggests dinosaurs were warm blooded, and also writes about the extinction of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, stating the rather startlingly fact that "sedimentation stopped" after this time. He did not note that this was the time of the takeover of the soil by grasses. Bakker's claim about sedimentation started my search for the point in time between the two differing biologies that the Earth seems to have experienced.
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Note 7 --

I will assume that all the 'lost planets' of Saturn ended up orbiting the Sun at close distances, the location Saturn reached as it swung about the Sun at perihelion -- perhaps something on the order of one-half AU or less. Venus today orbits the Sun at about 2/3rd AU, Mercury orbits at 1/3rd AU. An orbit at 1/2 AU would make the climate of Earth much warmer, but it would be moderated by the Earth's enclosing atmosphere.
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Note 8 --

The Chicxulub impact crater is surrounded with smaller perforations at the edge, typical of any of similar anode marks elsewhere, such as the craters of the Moon. It is not an impact crater. But it is big.

Tom Van Flandern writes, about the "K-T boundary," the Iridium layer separating the Cretateous and Tertiary periods (the start of the Eocene), which also marks the extinction of the dinosaurs..

"Was the K/T boundary event the result of a single asteroid impact (causing the 200-300 km diameter Chicxulub crater in Mexico) or something more? We note the following points as evidence that it was something more:"

"The global set of craters Manson, Karn, Kamensk, Gusev, and another impact in the Pacific Ocean apparently all date from close to the same epoch. However, the diameter and abundance of quartz grains are larger in western North America than elsewhere in the world, suggesting that the single largest impact was the Chicxulub event. (See Remarkable Papers 95.13 and 95.14 in this Bulletin.)"

  • "The K/T boundary consists of two distinct claystone layers, the upper (soot, iridium) one with shocked grains, the lower one without."

  • "Gorceixite (altered tektites with swirl patterns) is segregated within each layer, suggesting that different impact events formed these glassy beads."

  • "A single bolide impact cannot simultaneously explain the pattern of major floral extinctions on land and other extinctions at sea."

  • "Sediments in Cuba range from 5 to 450 m thick, probably from a giant wave. The (upper) ejecta layer is 50 cm thick in nearby Haiti, far more than at any other site, suggesting a major impact within 1000 km, which would be far from the Chicxulub crater in Mexico."

  • "The K/T boundary layer is apparently absent from the Antarctic regions. Just as for the Sun, planets spend up to six months continually below the horizon as seen from each polar region alternately. So the boundary event apparently affected the entire globe except for the south polar regions. This pattern suggests multiple impacts from an exogenous source over a period of at least one day."

"Considering these factors arguing against a single impact, noting the strong evidence for at least one planetary explosion event, and remembering the earlier list of predictions made by the Exploding Planet Hypothesis that are fulfilled at the K/T boundary on Earth, we conclude that the explosion of a solar system body was the most probable cause of the K/T boundary event at 65 Ma. The earlier P/T [Permian/Triassic] boundary event at 250 Ma may also have been caused by the explosion of another solar system body, either larger or much closer than the K/T boundary source body. Other geological extinction events may have been caused by single asteroid impacts, or by other types of cosmic catastrophes."

-- from [http://www.meteresearch.org]

The accumulation of data cited above starts to look more and more like a gigantic plasma strike followed or preceded by smaller strikes, "over a period of at least one day." Probably less than that.
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Note 9 --

Thornhill has repeatedly warned against considering only the electrostatic forces (electrical fields) as a model for the interaction of planets in space. Certainly plasma interactions are complex and affect electrical fields, but I see no reason not to apply the simplification of electrostatics to interactions between the planets of the Sun. The caveat remains, however.

The example put forth by Thornhill (as an illustration) is a pith ball (a rosin lump), negatively charged, attracted to a grounded rod, which becomes positively charged by induction. But all planets "see" each other as negative, and thus repel each other -- at close distances, when located within a single plasmasphere.

The gravitational interactions between two planets are based on spherical fields which are sensed through the plasmasphere. The electrical field between two planets, when experienced, is modified by the magnetic field of the planet into a toroidal shape. The difference between these two would be sufficient to nudge a nearby and smaller planet away from the equatorial region of the larger planet. I'll develop this particular mechanism, which seems to have been particular to the Earth's capture by Saturn (and is likely for the other captured planets), in the next chapter.
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Note 10 --

To be 'captured' as a satellite by a another planet, the potential satellite would have to slow down, somehow, from a forward speed on the order of 50,000 to 100,000 miles per hour, depending on the radius of its orbit around the Sun, to something less than 5000 miles per hour. This is simply impossible to do.

As a comparison, note the Earth travels around the Sun at about 67,000 miles per hour. The Earth's Moon travels around Earth at a speed of 2,300 miles per hour.

Two satellites of Saturn, however, Iapetus and Phoebe, look like captured objects. They are on very large and irregular orbits, at 3.5 and 13 million km distant from Saturn, and do not fall on the equator, as all the remaining satellites do. The Maya "Book of Chilam Balam" seems to recognize their existence in an era before 3000 or 4000 BC. If this is correct, then these satellites have not fallen into an orderly orbit in over 5000 years. (As of May 2006, I have started adding information from the "Chilam Balam" to these pages. See Chapter 18, "The Chilam Balam" for details.)

If, as I have assumed, Jupiter at this time orbited the Sun at one or two AU, it would, as the Sun's largest planet, also have influenced the orbit of Saturn, as well as the orbits of the Sun's planets.

A magnetic coupling between two planets has often been suggested in the past as an explanation of how a planet could be forced into a sub-polar (or supra-polar) position. But planetary magnetic fields of the inner planets are far too weak to effectively interact with each other, and Mars has no magnetic field. In addition, magnetic forces attract and repel chaotically.
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Note 11 --

It could be suggested that the intermittent nova events of Saturn before the Cambrian, initially at 650 million year intervals, reflect much earlier contacts between Saturn and the Sun, extending back billions of year, and possible to long before the creation of the Earth. The regularity of these nova events also suggest that perhaps they were caused by the approach of Saturn to the Sun, when Saturn would again be under severe electrical stresses. Some of the more recent changes in the frequency of the nova events (the start of the Cambrian, end of the Permian, the start of glaciation in Antarctica, and the northern glaciation) correspond roughly to the periods in the past when asteroids were broken up. See Chapter 14, "Celestial Mechanics," for more details.

The diameter of the coronal discharge depends on the density of the electrical current which is determined by the density of electrons available locally and the magnitude of the local electric field. Approaching the Sun, both would increase. In glow mode the dimensions of the plasma emitted from a comet (coma, tail, horns) are much larger than the physical dimensions of the comet. The shape and size is determined by the electrical field near the Sun, the distended magnetospere, and the Solar Wind.

For a typical comet (typically a rock only a few miles across), the observed coma frequently exceeds a diameter of 200,000 miles. The visible plasma tail of the same meteor might extended 150 million miles. A recent comet, in 2008, had a 3,000,000 mile diameter coma. (The Sun has a diameter of 880,000 miles.)

The Earth would be protected somewhat from the change in size of Saturn's coma by its own electrical charge, magnetosphere, and a gravitationally held atmosphere. Titan, a huge satellite of Saturn, today has a cloud cover and a self-contained atmosphere.
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Note 12 --

The certainty of plasma contacts between a planet arriving from deep space, and thus in a condition of electrical stress, and a local planet near the Sun, is almost guaranteed. The two planets would certainly come close enough -- both physically and electrically -- to exchange an electrical arc.

First, the approaching Saturn would move at a slower speed than Earth already orbitting the Sun, thus allowing the Earth to catch up to the location of Saturn. Once close to the Sun, Saturn would be moving at a much greater speed, thus overtaking Earth if it were located 'ahead' of Saturn. The net result would be that Earth just could not hide, even with Earth initially located directly opposite side of the Sun from the approaching Saturn.

Secondly, Saturn would develop a increasingly larger coma (plasmasphere) on approaching the Sun, which would measure tens of millions of miles in diameter. It is the outer shell of this coma which will initiate a plasma connection to a Solar System planet. The plasma stream, or as a toroidal plasma thunderbolt, could travel millions of miles. (In a later chapter I will describe a return lightning strike from Jupiter to the Sun, witnessed worldwide, which would have traveled 480 million miles.)
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Note 13 --

The climate of Earth (from oceanic Oxygen isotopes) swung wildly in the last 200 to 250 thousand years, with peaks at 100 and 40 thousand year intervals. This seems to indicate the intermittent buildup of glaciation, and thus proposes intermittent plasma contacts. In the last 60 thousand years the climate became gradually colder, followed by a swing to warmer temperatures about 12,000 years ago. However, the cold and warm periods may have other reasons than the building land glaciers, which I will discuss in another chapter.

I do not buy the Milankovich climatic cycles supposedly induced by minute changes in the precession of the Earth's orbit and polar axis based on today's conditions. If the Milankovich model has been operational for millions or billions of years it does not explain why we had no glaciation before very recently. It may be an added factor, but it is certainly not the primary cause of glaciation.
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Note 14 --

[diagram for note 14]
Image: distance to a planet near Earth on an orbital plane inclined one degree to the ecliptic.

If the orbits of two planets are inclined one degree apart and both are located 1 AU from the sun, they will be separated by 1,600,000 miles. Today planetary orbital inclination differ by up to 10 degrees.

(93000000) * s(1/deg) / c(1/deg) = 1,623,319 miles
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Note 15 --

Plasma discharges seem to have lessened in intensity over time, especially in the last few million years, with more frequent contacts between Saturn and Earth.
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Note 16 --

The Cassini space probe launched by the Huygens space ship has determined a methane, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide atmosphere for Titan in January 2005. Hardly poisonous, but not exactly benign.

The distance that the Earth is from the Sun will make the overall climate warmer or colder, but the climate is not likely to be as extreme as it is estimated to be under current assumptions which base temperatures only on solar radiation.
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Note 17 --

Magnetic fields are without doubt the most mysterious aspect of the planets. Nothing -- spin, size, density, or location -- seems to correlate with the magnetic field of a planet. Mercury, thought to have a metalic core, has only a very weak magnetic field. Venus should have a magnetic field since it is the same size as the Earth, but it does not. Yet Venus has a gigantic coma and plasma tail, usually indicated for a planet with a magnetic field. Mars should have a magnetic field since it is larger than Mercury, but has none. Jupiter's magnetic poles are up side down. Uranus should have a magnetic field closely aligned with its axis of rotation, as other planets do, but it is at right angles instead.

The Earth's ionosphere is actually a separate element, consisting of a shell closer to Earth, of the much larger plasmasphere (generally identified as the "magnetosphere"). I have in these discussions also neglected the toroidal Van Allen belts which encircle the Earth above the equator.
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Note 19 --

Bacteria reproduce by simply dividing into two organisms, but will exchange their chromosomal material at times. They will also release their chromosomal material to the environment, encased in a shell. We know these packets as viruses.

"Bacteria trade genes more frantically than a pit full of traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange."

-- Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, "What Is Life?" (1995)

Most bacteria reproduce very frequently. An exception are the methane producing bacteria deep within oceanic muds near coastal regions, which are thought to reproduce only every thousand to ten thousand years.
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Note 20 --

The outstanding parameter of life is that it reacts to the environment. This is true for single cells as well as complex organisms. It is the inadvertent outcome of repeated extinctions which 'select for' those organisms which have the ability to adapt to the environment
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Calculations are in Unix bc notation, where ^ denotes exponentiation; the functions (a)rctangent, (s)ine, and (c)osine use radians; angle conversions to radians or degrees by the divisors rad=.017+ and deg=57.2+; other functions are shown as f( );
units: million == 1,000,000; billion == 1,000,000,000;
one AU == 93,000,000 miles.

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