“If you cross a street, you don't predict the probability of a car being there; you look to see if one's coming.”
If humanity had its wits about it, the asteroid inquiry, below, is an example of what it would do. There is so much danger on this living planet that we are a primitive species until we turn our collective attention to protecting ourselves from things beyond our control.
A shift of mind-set is what it will take to get us to seriously change our ways, and, most logically, this would come from an event that made the possibility of species annihilation real to everyone who was left. All good minds should be turned to how to bring about this shift in another way. My offering is crop circles — evidence that we're not alone would bring us all together in a vastly different juxtaposition to the universe, plus it would conceivably enroll a greater intelligence than ours in coming to our aid. The pattern so far has been that the incidence and complexity of the crop formations have increased in response to interest that has been shown, and anything that can put crop circles in our landscape conceivably could put an asteroid shield around the earth. (We've tweaked our booklet showing why crop circles can't be hoaxed, and it's done now. Please look: http://theconversation.org/booklet2.html. To view the booklet you must have at least Flash Player v.5. To get the latest version of the free Flash Player go to www.macromedia.com/flash.)
Does anyone have another idea for how to bring about a radical change in the way humanity thinks, or are there responses to this one?
A huge asteroid heading for Earth could kill 1.5 billion people and devastate the planet, scientists at an international gathering said Monday in Garden Grove.
The only question is when.
“It could happen this year or in a century or in a millennium” or far longer, said David Morrison, a space expert at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, in Northern California. Whenever it does, he said, we need to be ready.
Making sure that we are is the mission of 120 scientists and engineers attending the four-day gathering called the Planetary Defense Conference: Protecting Earth From Asteroids, which began Monday at the Hyatt Regency hotel. Billed as the first major conference of its kind, the confab has attracted astronomers, aerospace engineers, astronauts and emergency preparedness specialists from throughout the United States as well as Italy, Great Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany and Russia.
Among the strategies to be discussed are such extravagant-sounding scenarios as deflecting asteroids with nuclear warheads, lasers and mirrors — which would create gas jets that would disrupt the object's trajectory.
“We have reached a point in the evolution of life on this planet where we can actually do something about this, but not if we don't start planning,” said Bill Ailor, director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at the Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo, which organized the conference along with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Reston, Va. “Our goal,” Ailor said, “is to raise the consciousness of the public and of people who work in the field.”
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) who, among other things, chairs the House subcommittee on space and aeronautics and has introduced two bills encouraging research on threats from outer space, set the tone during a keynote address.
“Bin Laden was out there like a near-Earth object for a long time,” he said. “It took 9/11 — the slaughter of 3,000 innocents — for us to pay attention to that threat. I hope it won't take that long for us to recognize the threat of near-Earth objects; so far we've had a very tepid response.”
In fact, the U.S. government has been tracking and charting the paths of large asteroids since 1998. To date, Morrison said, about 60% of all those known have been charted; about 90% are expected to be done by 2008. “Among those charted,” he said, “there appears to be no danger.” As for the others, Morrison said, “I can't tell you anything about them — one could hit us in an hour, though it's not very likely.”
He bases that mixed assessment on the belief of most scientists that truly catastrophic asteroid collisions occur only about once every million years. The uncertainty, he said, stems from the fact that, because the last such collision occurred in prerecorded history, its date is unknown. (A more minor incident — the magnitude of which occurs about once every 100 years — happened in 1908, leveling more than 1,000 square miles of Siberian forest.)
“We want certainty,” Morrison said. “If you cross a street, you don't predict the probability of a car being there; you look to see if one's coming.”
Conference organizers say that, for starters, they intend to encourage the continuation of that process. The conference — held in Garden Grove because, Ailor said, “it seemed like a good place to start [and] the weather is good this time of year” — is expected to be the first of many held at least once every four years.
At Monday's opening session, participants heard presentations on the threat posed by asteroids and the methods by which it is assessed. Sessions through the rest of the week, Ailor said, will cover such topics as how to move a near-Earth object off course (including the early planning of a mission to do so), how to prepare for the disaster that will ensue if preventive efforts fail, and how to affect political and policy issues related to the impending threat.
“We want people to get excited about this topic,” Ailor said. “We want young people to consider it as a subject for future work.”
Scientists Want to Be Ready to Block Asteroid
A group gathered in O.C. says Earth could be hit in an hour — or in a thousand years or more.
By David Haldane, February 24, 2004A huge asteroid heading for Earth could kill 1.5 billion people and devastate the planet, scientists at an international gathering said Monday in Garden Grove.
The only question is when.
“It could happen this year or in a century or in a millennium” or far longer, said David Morrison, a space expert at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, in Northern California. Whenever it does, he said, we need to be ready.
Making sure that we are is the mission of 120 scientists and engineers attending the four-day gathering called the Planetary Defense Conference: Protecting Earth From Asteroids, which began Monday at the Hyatt Regency hotel. Billed as the first major conference of its kind, the confab has attracted astronomers, aerospace engineers, astronauts and emergency preparedness specialists from throughout the United States as well as Italy, Great Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany and Russia.
Among the strategies to be discussed are such extravagant-sounding scenarios as deflecting asteroids with nuclear warheads, lasers and mirrors — which would create gas jets that would disrupt the object's trajectory.
“We have reached a point in the evolution of life on this planet where we can actually do something about this, but not if we don't start planning,” said Bill Ailor, director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at the Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo, which organized the conference along with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Reston, Va. “Our goal,” Ailor said, “is to raise the consciousness of the public and of people who work in the field.”
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) who, among other things, chairs the House subcommittee on space and aeronautics and has introduced two bills encouraging research on threats from outer space, set the tone during a keynote address.
“Bin Laden was out there like a near-Earth object for a long time,” he said. “It took 9/11 — the slaughter of 3,000 innocents — for us to pay attention to that threat. I hope it won't take that long for us to recognize the threat of near-Earth objects; so far we've had a very tepid response.”
In fact, the U.S. government has been tracking and charting the paths of large asteroids since 1998. To date, Morrison said, about 60% of all those known have been charted; about 90% are expected to be done by 2008. “Among those charted,” he said, “there appears to be no danger.” As for the others, Morrison said, “I can't tell you anything about them — one could hit us in an hour, though it's not very likely.”
He bases that mixed assessment on the belief of most scientists that truly catastrophic asteroid collisions occur only about once every million years. The uncertainty, he said, stems from the fact that, because the last such collision occurred in prerecorded history, its date is unknown. (A more minor incident — the magnitude of which occurs about once every 100 years — happened in 1908, leveling more than 1,000 square miles of Siberian forest.)
“We want certainty,” Morrison said. “If you cross a street, you don't predict the probability of a car being there; you look to see if one's coming.”
Conference organizers say that, for starters, they intend to encourage the continuation of that process. The conference — held in Garden Grove because, Ailor said, “it seemed like a good place to start [and] the weather is good this time of year” — is expected to be the first of many held at least once every four years.
At Monday's opening session, participants heard presentations on the threat posed by asteroids and the methods by which it is assessed. Sessions through the rest of the week, Ailor said, will cover such topics as how to move a near-Earth object off course (including the early planning of a mission to do so), how to prepare for the disaster that will ensue if preventive efforts fail, and how to affect political and policy issues related to the impending threat.
“We want people to get excited about this topic,” Ailor said. “We want young people to consider it as a subject for future work.”
From: Copthorne Macdonald [mailto:cop@cop.com]
I enjoyed your booklet very much! The text mentions more than 25 eyewitness accounts of crop circles being formed. Have these people been interviewed? And are those interviews available to read? I, for one, would be very interested in hearing these accounts.
From Suzanne to Cop:
“The Secret History of Crop Circles,” by Terry Wilson, from about 10 years ago (my copy is on loan so I can't be sure), has reports about 24 of them. Then there's a good colleague, Nancy Talbott of BLT Laboratory, which does all the science on the crops and soil, who wrote about her own experience in Holland in 2001: http://rense.com/general17/talbot.htm. And there was a report out of Ohio this summer: http://www.cropcirclenews.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=112.
Do you think more should be pursued?
From: Cop to Suzanne
Thanks for the links to the stories — which I went to and read with interest. To me, eyewitness accounts of crop circles actually being formed is the strongest counter to the hoax hypothesis. Of course, the short-creation-time / high-complexity argument is another strong one. The observations were, of course, very different in these two examples. “Just happened” in one case; columns of light in another. This leads me to wonder what similarities (if any) are apparent in the 24 accounts in the book. In any case, the way you have brought a lot of diverse evidence together quite compactly in your booklet seems very effective to me. Not having read those 24 other accounts I can't be sure, but especially if there is some commonness to the reports — perhaps there have been just a few categories of observed phenomena — I do think that eyewitness reports would strengthen your case.
From Suzanne to Cop:
We'll add some links to a few things for the online version, including to the two eyewitness accounts on the Net — thanks for asking so that I went and dug them up. You know, any one of those pieces of data is actually enough. If we can't do it, what is doing it? Mostly people are ignorant about what's going on, and the booklet is not so much to prove anything but to inform people who are uninformed.
From: Paul Nugent [mailto:paul@aetherius.org]
Personally, I don't think we can prepare for an asteroid hitting Earth other than by a radical shift in human consciousness where we live with the collective knowledge that we are an evolving planetary species within the oneness of all Creation, and even then, we would still be very limited in what we could do about such an incident at this present stage in our evolution. I do believe other “extraterrestrial” beings could and would help us if our Karma so deserved to be helped. Certainly present terrestrial science by itself is not going to do anything of real value. Being consciously in touch with our own and the Universal Divinity is our best, and ultimately, only hope.However, what is more likely and therefore more concerning – in my opinion – is this piece below.Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us
· Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war
· Britain will be 'Siberian' in less than 20 years
· Threat to the world is greater than terrorism
Mark Townsend and Paul Harris in New York, 2/22/04, The Observer
Suzanne to Paul:
I'm with you about climate change being a priority, between one potential disaster and another. Did you see this post I put up February 4? GLOBAL COOPERATION IMPERATIVE: “The switch [to an ice age] could flip as early as next year.”Must be our civilization revolving around economics that makes it play win and lose rather than protecting the whole game. It seems primitive to me. A level of consciousness that needs to be elevated — to its universal aspect. That shift would be the key, where our intelligence could be most efficiently commandeered to solve our problems, and also where we'd stand the best chance for getting help from elsewhere. There's no Karma to hold us back from what we create from here on in — it's a question of when we can make that shift.Not only are we needing to shift, but it seems to me we need to be talking about that need. The talk would likely come first. Why isn't this subject on the lips of all thinking people? That would give it coherence and an impetus to come about, rather than just waiting for the slow process of cumulative change, for which we clearly may not have time.
Follow
