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Welcome to America, land of the free, where someone who disagrees with you can hack and completely delete your blog, and feel quite good about doing it a well 
*shrug* Whatever happened to Voltaire and his biographer and “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”? I mean, why did we fight the Germans, the Soviet Union, why do we rise up against tyranny, when it’s often in our own backyard?
Hurricanes can cause as much damage if not more than something like even a very large earthquake. Why? Because hurricanes pack a triple punch: (1) wind, (2), rain, and (3) coastal flooding.
A Manhattan earthquake could occur because there are fault lines running directly through Manhattan.
A collapse of the western flank of the Cumbre Viejo Volcano could cause a mega tsunami scenario for the entire East Coast of North America.
An East Coast, off shore, continental shelf undersea landslide could cause a mega tsunami scenario larger than a collapse of the Cumbre Viejo volcano.
An asteroid impact or comet strike on a major urban center such as Washington D.C.
Global warming will eventually have far reaching effects by drowning all East Coast cities.
A very large Mid West earthquake could occur, which has happened more than once before between 1810 and 1813. These earthquakes are rare but they do occur and they are very, very big earthquakes. The largest of the early 19th century earthquakes was an 8+ with estimates at 8.6. A quake of this size in the Memphis region could perhaps have some minor effect on the because the entire East Coast and Mid West region is all a single plate and the land is largely flat, and thus the shock waves can travel much further , in comparison to somewhere like California.
There are many other possible scenarios but generally in the unlikely event that something does happen it’s either going to be some kind of tsunami, an impact or an earthquake.
One of Edgar Cayce‘s predictions involved the discovery of Atlantis somewhere in the Bahamas, which is of course the Bimini Road.
If one is inclined to think this way, proving that the Bimini Road is man-made in origin of course does not prove one way or the other that Edgar Cayce could not do something unique with time, because there are a lot of people who think that the Bimini Road is the remnants of Atlantis, whether it is or not. Perhaps Edgar Cayce predicted that people would just think and believe that the Bimini Road is some remnant of Atlantis? If of course time travel is possible. Who knows?
In reality, the Bimini Road is something that geologists call beach rock. Why is it called beach rock? Because it’s formed by deposition on beaches. It is fundamental to a branch of geology called stratigraphy, that rock forms in layers and generally all in the same direction unless those layers are folded. Fold mountains are the result of compression from tectonic forces, which is a completely different topic to that of beach rock. Back to beach rock. There are a number of ways to show that beach rock is naturally formed:
Sediments are deposited in layers and those layers will form in the same direction. In the case of beach rock, those sediments will run perpendicular to the shore, sloping downwards from beach to ocean. Now since Atlanteans building stone walls might want to shape and organize square shaped stones into neat fits, it is extremely unlikely that all those stones would have nicely lined up stratum (layers of rock) with every stone containing layers deposited perpendicular to the shore. Chances are that the stratum would be in all directions depending on what the Atlantean stone mason might have had for lunch that day. Cores drilled into the beach rock of the Atlantean Bimini Road show all layers deposited perpendicular to the shore, without any exceptions whatsoever. Chances are because the strata (multiple layers of rock) all pointed out to sea and downwards, that the Bimini Road beach rock is exactly where it was when it was first formed by natural geological processes, and that nobody built walls with it.
Beach rock is formed by a natural gluing together of calcium carbonate (CaCo3) and sand, underneath sandy beaches in the tropics; as in the Bahamas and the Bimini Road (Beach rock can also sometimes form in deep water as well). The important point about beach rock is that it forms very, very quickly (as far as rock goes), becoming a very hard limestone even in as little time as 50 years. Lots of examples of beach rock in various parts of the world contain human skeletal remains (from the World War II Pacific theatre), and even odd things like coca-cola bottles. The Bimini Road contains no ancient artefacts, or even any artefacts whatsoever. Surely some artefacts would be recoverable from core drilling as the beach rocks in the walls of the city of Atlantis would likely to have been formed sometime close to when Atlantis was built. Why? Because on a geological timescale of millions of years, beach rock can form in the blink of an eye and any older beach rock would likely be crushed and innaccessibly pushed under other layers of rock deposits and lava flows if they had been there for millions of years. So one would expect to find artefacts in beach rock if it was used for any kind of construction.
Atlantis is supposedly dated 9,000 years before Plato’s time, which would make it around 11,500 years old. The Bimini Road has been accurately dated as being forming throughout the period between 1,000 and 2,000 years ago. There are other time scales for dating Atlantis on the Internet but nothing anywhere even close to between 1,000 and 2,000 years ago.
Why does the Bimini Road look like it is laid out in stone blocks with stone mason produced cracks in between the blocks? The Bimini Road has cracks between blocks with rounded edges because the beach over the rock is eroded and the beach rock was exposed to the all of nature’s elements at some time after its natural formation. Beach rock forms cracks and rounded edges, appearing to be have been put together by stone masons; all as a result of natural processes with algae growing on the surface of the rock, and cracking off chunks of the beach rock as the algae helps to erode the rock. In short, it is well known to geology that rocks get cracks and rounded edges to those cracks, when exposed to all of nature’s fauna, flaura, and weathering fury.
Beach rock is found in other parts of the world including other parts of the Bahamas, the Vieques Island in Puerto Rico and Florida’s Dry Tortugas islands. Beach rock has even been found on the Blake Escarpment off the eastern continental shelf of North America – underneath 5,000 feet of ocean water.
Geological information was found here, all written by a USGS geologist by the name of Dr. Eugene Allen Shinn.
If he didn’t? Did Edgar Cayce predict Armageddon? Perhaps not.
When it comes to topics such as Atlantis, there is some very vague underwater evidence of prehistorical civilizations dating back over 10,000 years, which has very limited and even suspect evidence, and is generally not accepted by the acceptable (or perhaps the entrenched or incumbent), scientific community.
Perhaps it should be noted that George Bush was an incumbent and also incredibly unpopular president until Jan 20th, 2009. So more than one point of view should always be considered should it not? I digress, please excuse me.
Underwater evidence of prehistorical civilizations dating back over 10,000 years is not an Eric Von Daniken thing (who has since proven to be bit of a crook), whose theories are unsubstantiated; but more that there is some geological evidence to suggest there was some kind of civilization much older than what is accepted by historians. On the contrary, features like the Bimini Road can easily be explained as being purely geological in nature and any other explanation is purely speculative; but anything is possible. Other vaguely possible archeological sites off the coast of Japan and particularly in shark infested, low visibility waters off the coast of India could be very much more interesting but still, the former has been somewhat laughed at after exploration by scientists and of course the latter is somewhat inaccessible due to the presence of razor sharp toothed man-eaters that nobody can see. In the distant past I have also heard about some possible archeological evidence in South America somewhere, I think that had something to do with Lake Titicaca and the nearby ancient ruins of a city called Tihuanaca, supposedly dating back to being 15,000 years old; but this may have since been shown to be a bit of a myth – more on this topic later, which I am currently researching. Let’s face it, there is bound to be a certain mystical romance surrounding a lake that is 12,500 ft above sea level and is around 1,000 ft deep as well; pretty unusual really – the stuff of legends.
Crop circles and alien abductions fall into a similar vein to that of something like the Bimini Road because for example, crop circles really can be created by drunken cavorting engineering students without too much trouble; engineering students really are that bright even when they are blind drunk. And something like alien abductions can be explained using some very basic psychology of the human need not to be alone, and that death is not the final curtain so to speak, or perhaps just the undiscovered country that may very well turn out to simply be nothingness, no awareness whatsoever, or just a complete shutdown of consciousness – maybe a bit like turning a computer off – when it’s off, it’s off! In short, we may very well be alone in this universe as an intelligent species. We may very well be a fluke. Life is probably abundant but it is a remote possibility than any of it has an IQ greater than that of a gnat! But we should insist on living in hope and also avoid the dangers of self delusion; and just get on with it!
One problem with prophesies about 2012 and predicting Armageddon is matching together of multiple prophesies from different cultures, or prophesies from different civilizations – such as linking Mayan prophesies and Chinese prophecies (and others), which fall on the same date. What is ignored is the fact that both cultures had extensive knowledge of astronomy. Major astronomical events occur at the same time in multiple cultures because their timing is not dependent on a specific civilization, or any contact between those different civilizations, but it is actually based on commonly discovered astronomical facts; and a known astronomical fact that Sun, Earth and the galactic core will be lined up on Dec 21st, 2012. And obviously these particular types of astronomical events will occur when the will occur, not that their preordained, but many of them are predictable because that kind of thing is predictable in astronomy because planets, stars and yes even galaxies, circle around each other – it all has a lot to do with something that Isaac Newton called gravity.
So let’s get back to Chinese prophesies and the Mayans. Perhaps the only important factor is how much knowledge of astronomy each culture had? The fact is historians, anthropologists or even archaeologists simply don’t know how much the Mayans or the ancient Chinese knew about astronomy. Given that the ancient Chinese constructed monstrous palaces full of riches and sumptuously decadent temptations, and built walls thousands of miles long (the Great Wall of China); and that the Mayans had time to build cities carved of stone blocks – it would suffice to say that intellectuals from both ancient civilizations probably had PLENTY OF FREAKIN’ LEASURE TIME to gaze at the stars so to speak, for years and years and years and years.
There are a lot of gloom and doom books out there that are predicting Armageddon, all with no solutions, only cataclysm, mass annihilation and death. Many of these types of books simply ignore, gloss over and even skirt around scientific facts when the facts don’t suit a given prophesy. Most prophesies are not even loosely based on scientific fact, and as I am prone to point out – are postdictive prophesies as opposed to predictive prophesies. In other words, when an event occurs, sometimes even with hours, 101 Nostradamus pundits will find a matching piece of prose; describing the recently occurring past event; and I am not intending to be sarcastic here either.
… and the potential resulting calamity …
Did Edgar Cayce indulge in predicting Armageddon? What could happen in the case of a magnetic pole shift? Magnetic compasses would point in a different direction. So what? Given that most shipping and air traffic navigates using GPS (Global Positioning System) satellites, nothing much will happen at all. Some orienteering fans might get lost; perhaps a survivalist or two, and so on and so forth. Migratory birds and animals might be completely weirded-out as well, depending on how far the magnetic pole moves; although science is not really quite sure how migratory species actually do navigate because so far nobody has managed to ask them, mostly because they can’t answer us back.
What would happen if the rotational axis of the planet moves say from the north pole to 90 degrees away? Quite frankly, I cannot understand logically how this could actually happen anyway except as a result of a planetary collision. The planet Uranus has an unusual rotational axis, meaning it’s not the same as the other planets in our solar system, in that it rotates on it’s side. Could Uranus have rotated like this to begin with? This is unlikely because planet formation implies accretion of material by way of gravity, and in the same plane as the rotation of that original material around the sun – probably and very likely the case. Given that all the other planets do more or less the same thing consistently (they rotate on an axis close to the common orbital plane around the Sun; unlike Uranus which rotates on it’s side), it is extremely likely that Uranus was hit by something – hard! And it was probably something as large as another planet.
So the Earth has a rotational axis of 230, which was very likely caused by some kind of major impact a very long time in the past when the solar system was very much busier, and probably at least the size of the planet Mars. And it probably resulted in the formation of the Moon as well. So can the rotational axis of a planet shift? Yes but only if something really, really big hits it. Even if the Earth’s ice caps melted and a lot of weight got shifted towards the rotational equator, where a 20 to 30 mile bulge exists due to the speed of rotation, even then a rotational pole shift would not occur. Why? Because the weight is being shifted to the equator of rotational momentum anyway, exactly where that bulge is. Thus no difference is made. Melting ice caps could cause plates at the poles to gradually rise, and those at the equator to gradually sink (still occurring after the end of the last ice age), which incidentally is called isostacy or the isostatic balance. However, the rebalancing of relative crustal plate altitudes as a result of weight shift from poles to equator, is not going to cause a rotational pole shift either because the weight of the plates is still in the same place. All that’s happened is ice has changed to water and moved towards the equator. If anything that could perhaps accelerate the rotational momentum of the earth, which is also unlikely, which would once again make a rotational pole shift even more unlikely.
Getting back to a planetary impact, the fact is that if a Martian sized planet hit the Earth we wouldn’t be around to witness any rotational axis changes, and unlikely would be any of the features of the planet Earth either. Such an impact would impart an unimaginable amount of energy to the Earth, transforming the Earth and it’s solid crust into a boiling furnace of magma where the crust melted completely as a result of that massive amount of energy imparted during such an impact.
It is also inconceivable to think of any geological process that could cause a rotational polar shift other than perhaps some kind of massive weight shift within the liquid mantle, which due to centrifugal force as a result of current rotation, is impossible if not merely highly improbable – to the point of being a probably of zero. What Douglas Adams would have called an infinite probability! ******* impossible in other words.
So calamity as a result of polar shift is basically zero or not something we would notice, or perhaps even not something the existing surface of the Earth would notice either. So I cannot possibly see how any kind of pole shift can bring to pass some of the surface feature changes on the Earth that Edgar Cayce predicted, or how changes in volcanic and tectonic activities can come anywhere near indicating that a pole shift is likely to occur as a future event. With either kind of pole shift and their results being zero or total, predictions of pre-event and post-event calamities simply defy logic! Edgar Cayce’s predictions simply do not make any sense with respect to pole shift being either causal or resulting.
One final point is that there is such a thing as a wobble of the Earth’s rotational axis, but it is measured in feet per year, as in 20ft per anum, and it is called Chandler’s wobble. Like a spinning top the Earth wobbles on it’s rotational axis. However, and once again, getting a rotational axis pole shift to occur would take an enormous amount of energy to alter the current state of momentum of spin. Could shifting masses inside the liquid core or mantle do that? Given that the Earth is already spinning and going around the sun with a specific path, probably any change without some kind of massive impact to change the angular momentum of the entire planet, is more or less impossible.
Martian methane (CH4) holds interesting possibilities because most of the methane gas produced on earth is the result of decay of carbon-based material, such as life. That’s the same stuff that produces coal and crude oil. Methane is the same thing as natural gas.
Methane on Mars proving to be the existence of past or present life will change the way we as a species think, in that it will show that life is potentially abundant. If life can survive on Mars, then it’s probably everywhere! At least in microbial form.
Is it possible?
Azimov created a science fiction character called Hari Seldon, a statistician, who invents a new science called Psychohistory, which is applied to large groups of people, and probably has something to do with history repeating itself because people will be people. It’s a fictional science but it’s objective is to use statistical probabilities in order to attempt to predict and even direct future events, thousands of years in the making. Unfortunately, a psychic mutant shows up about 300 years after Hari Seldon‘s plans were put into action, and begin that such a mutant was such a low probability, that Hari Seldon perhaps never even considered the probability. The mutant threw a spanner in the works.
So is science fiction becoming science fact? Maybe.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a political scientist, mathematician and an expert at things like foreign diplomatic relations and how nations are built; and also how nations can meet with their demise. He also uses something called game theory to make general forecasts about future political issues and events. For example, he says that the Israel-Palestinian issue must be resolved within 10 years otherwise a global conflagration and nuclear war could result. Then again, Israel has been a flash point for 50 years. However, in two situations so far I have seen and read about Israeli Jewish intellectuals (probably radical thinkers in Israel), stating that Israel’s only possible solution is equal votes for Israeli’s and Palestinians in a single united country, and with proportional representation.
So can Bruce Bueno de Mesquita predict the future of political rivalries and potential conflicts using mathematics? Only time will tell. So far I can’t find any of his predictions on the Internet but I will look.
For the very first time in the history of the Earth, at least as far as we know, human kind is the first species (on Earth), to have evolved sentient intelligence. Does that mean perhaps that nature has learned from past mistakes, in that the only way of surviving things like an asteroid impact or a comet impact is for an evolved species to be able to out-smart, out-maneuver, and out-wit extinction level events? Anything is possible me thinks. Can nature be learning about Surviving Armageddon? Can nature find a way? Has nature found a way?
Geologically there have been a number of mass extinction events. The most well known one is that which rubbed out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, which incidentally could have been a combination of a number of lethal events including an asteroid impact or comet impact on the Yucatan peninsula, in addition to massive widespread and long period volcanic eruptions in the Deccan Traps in India.
There have been a few other mass extinction events in the Earth’s over 4 billion year history including volcanic events at 207 and 364 million years ago. There are also two others at 364 million years and 439 million years, the first being of unknown cause and the second the start of an ice age. The most abrupt and extensive of mass extinctions is now known as the Great Dying, and was the event at the end of the Permian period, at 251 million years ago because it killed off 90% of all marine species and 70% of all land-based species. At the time there was massive volcanism in Siberia (the Siberian Traps), which released enormous quantities of green house gases, particularly CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) and sulphur, into the atmosphere; various other things occurred as a result – all adding to the global warming problem. The scientifically accepted primary reason for the Great Dying was thus that of global warming, caused by a chain of events, including that of massive volcanism. Other ideas for the Great Dying also include some odd possible causes; for example, a gamma ray burst. A gamma ray burst occurs when a very larger star collapses under it’s own weight, exploding in a supernova (a very big bang!), probably forming a black hole from the core of the star, and also releasing two very focused jets of gamma radiation called gamma ray bursts, which can be lethal to life from tens of thousands of light years away.
For more information on extinctions and some details on the end of the Permian global warming extinction event.
So I’ll ask the same question again: for the very first time in the history of the Earth, at least as far as we know, human kind is the first species (on Earth), to have evolved sentient intelligence. Does that mean perhaps that nature has learned from past mistakes, in that the only way of surviving things like an asteroid impact or a comet impact is for an evolved species to be able to out-smart, out-maneuver, and out-wit extinction level events? Anything is possible me thinks. Can nature be learning about Surviving Armageddon? Can nature find a way? Has nature found a way?