CHAPTER THIRTY
The eye of the poet, quotes Ager from Shakespeare, "in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven." "So," says Ager, "ultimately must the eye of the geologist, in seeking the nature of the control. One always seems to come back to climate as the primary explanation of the sort of phenomena I have been discussing, but for the ultimate control, sooner or later, we must face the possibility of an extra-terrestrial cause..." [1]
Meanwhile, the Soviet geochemist, Y. P. Trusov, is writing that "the fundamental motive cause of geochemical processes is the contradiction between internal -physico-chemical -and external -macroplanetary, nuclear, and cosmic -factors active in the earth's crust." [2]
We shall see more and more of such intimations of the Earth's exoterrestrial transactions, until the earth sciences will undergo their own theoretical quantavolution. In this process, poorly equipped though we may be to move between geology and history, we shall have to reconcile the two modes of thought and bodies of fact. There ought to be no logical conflict between natural laws and historical events. Either historical occurrences -counting ancient voices, too, as historical events -will contribute to the affirmation or display of natural laws, or they are false or falsely interpreted. Either natural laws conform to validated historical behavior or the "laws" are not laws and require limitation or correction.
To pin down a quantavolution, even a single one, is like wrestling, "no-holds-barred." One grabs at any possible fact, at any method, hoping to take advantage of it. Tactics that scholars ordinarily spurn are demanded. If the geologist wants to know whether the Earth has long rotated at its speed of today, he asks the astronomer. If the astronomer is conventional, he replies "Of course." If the astronomer is a true empiricist and even a sceptic, he says "We don't know," and asks the paleontologists, the geophysicists, the ancient historian, and the mythologist for help.
M. G. Reade, a confectionary engineer, navigator, and scholar, addressed himself to the evidence of the Panchasiddhantika, documents of ancient India. There, at a time suspected of being around the eighth and seventh centuries B. C., he found evidence of "aberrational," slower rotations for the Earth from data given for five planets then known, amounting to a 360-day year. The same Hindu figures suggest "that the whole solar system may have been slightly more compressed than it is at the present day, the Earth and all the planets being rather closer to the Sun than they are at present." [3] This, with other pieces of evidence from wherever they occur, in a dozen fields of study, becomes valuable, once belief in the constancy of the historical skies is held in abeyance. The struggle to know becomes, as was said, "wrestling, no-holds-barred."
It may be argued that the most ancient cosmogonies of the world hold a consensus that amounts to a model of recent natural history. Perhaps scholars would agree that the following thirteen complex experiences are recited in or can be derived from the earliest sources and from the oral accounts provided by existing belief systems that pretend to refer back to the "beginnings." I imply in each case that proofs of fair reliability are accessible to expert ethnologists, linguists, and mythologists from among the many collections now available from all parts of the world.
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Modern explanations of this primeval cosmogonic consensus, should it be agreed to exist, are various. Perhaps it developed from a single diversifying human race that might be said to have taken off at the time of the Ice Ages, the early Holocene Epoch, or some such baseline. Or perhaps it developed when numerous sub-cultures, already diversified among early mankind, witnessed events independently. Or it may have diffused later on from a single powerful political-religious movement with a highly persuasive ideology.
In assembling this cosmogony, it may be appropriate to make no distinction between gods and nature, taking it for granted that when an ancient legendary voice says 'god' it means a discrete and powerful natural force or body which may ('the known god') or may not ('a new god') be behaving in a characteristic (i. e. predictable) manner.
These thirteen event-complexes of primeval natural history constitute, I think, a consistent, if presently non-authoritative, model of natural history, one which I have adapted to contemporary science in several books. Their numerous anonymous discoverers were fully human observers who imputed the phenomena to animated beings (gods) for compelling reasons, especially in an attempt to control them, so as to assuage terror and get on with the business of survival under most unfavorable conditions.
To put the hypothesis absolutely: nowhere on Earth is a people to be found whose legends contradict this total set of claimed experiences. No ancient people asserted a linear or uniformitarian history. Then the questions arise: could all this have been a universal set of illusions affecting all people? Was a universal genetic archetype of the human mind bound to erect this cosmogony? Was it a consensus of observers?
Scientists are not dealing here with 'anomalies, ' but with a universal set of consistent allusions. The detail is so extensive as to rebuff facile explanations; one ought not merely to conjecture 'archetypes, ' or 'grand delusions. ' 'Euhemerism' may provide the answer; it interprets myths as traditional accounts of historical personages and natural events. But euhemerism should not prejudge the case in favor of uniformitarianism by retrojecting current history.
Anthropologists finally established as research doctrine that primitive cultures are to be taken seriously; the statements of informants are to be examined, not ridiculed. And the examination can be conducted and completed without conversion of the anthropologist to the views of the informants. Pari passu, the most ancient "fossil voices" are to be audited seriously, even sympathetically. In this case, the voices would have to be translated into a model that would begin to make sense to modern physics and psychology.
The results would be foreseeable. Considering the intellectual revolution that would follow, the ancient cosmogonical consensus would be rejected by most scholars in short order. For the following principles of physics and natural history would be among the most likely to be inferred from the ancient empirical beliefs:
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If some such model is physically impossible, then we should have to discover and explain some other structural-functional mental dynamic, universal among human groups, that made necessary its elaboration as science-fiction.
If the early scientific catastrophists had gone on with their work, we would have learned enough by now to make what I have just stated an epilogue rather than a prologue. "If the catastrophists had gone on..." The German methodologist and sociologist, Max Weber, once wrote at some length about the scientific justification of "if... then..." historiography. "If Lincoln had not been assassinated, then the U. S. A. would have become more unified during the Reconstruction period:" may such a thesis be posed and dealt with scientifically? The answer Weber gives is "yes." So some legitimacy (the "legitimacy of scientific authority" Weber would have said) is owing us for proposing this line of thought for some future historian of science. The theses just presented and those yet to come are then monuments to a science that might have been and a budget of a future science.
Popular geology believes that the Earth is stable and quiet, and that where it is not so, the explanation has to do with a hot turbulent mantle that continually causes surface disturbances. Geologists were responsible for this belief and mostly share it. What can be labeled as the conventional geological position is summarized by Shelton [4] :
Most geologists look inside the earth for the ultimate driving force of diastrophism; no known exterior forces are sufficiently versatile to account for the variety of deformation we see... It would seem that plastic creep, perhaps in the upper part of the mantle, is the active element, and the brittle crust on which we live is passively riding on this very slow flow. Of course, discernible forces arise from the rotation of the earth, from the tides, and from gravity acting differentially on irregularities in the crust and its surface topography, but these influences probably can do no more than modify and locally complicate what is probably the essential mechanism of crustal deformation -very slow plastic movements at about the level of the upper mantle.
Shelton goes on the show why "this concept is attractive," why the presumed "plastic creep" has most of the essential capabilities needed to mold the Earth's surface over great lengths of time. "The combination of gravity with variations in the density of the material" operates so that "circulation in the deep plastic zone probably involves rising and sinking columns as well as horizontal currents... Some kind of very slow thermal convection -the rise of relatively warm columns and sinking of relatively cool ones -is a favored hypothesis for the ultimate cause of diastrophism." This is about as far as the theory of 'land-based geology' has come.
In contrast, we have been offering a space-based geology. Here the "ultimate cause" is exoterrestrial. Quantavolutions -intense and abrupt events of large scope -occur. Without exception these involve exoterrestrial transactions. No intrinsic Earth-force can produce quantavolutions. These events can be given values and measure; they can be comprehended and subjected to at least as much quantitative modeling and manipulation as is afforded by 'land-based geology. ' Unlike evolutionary theory, which deals in bulk low-energy transactions, quantavolution pursues bulk high-energy transactions. The forms that high energy takes have been discussed heretofore, and will shortly be summarized. In a score of guises, all will have ultimately originated by space transactions of particles and masses. The space transactors are galaxy, planets, Sun, Moon, comets, meteoroids, plasmas, electric charges, and so on, sometimes taken as independent, sometimes dependent, variables.
From the standpoint of the Earth, an expression of high energy denotes an exoterrestrial force when it achieves a specifiable level of intensity, scope, and abruptness. Invariably, it operates to include other forces and to develop, with them, countervalency, as well as extended effects. Here we shall give hypothetical examples of what would be prima facie demonstrations of the operation of quantavoluting high energy expressions originating exoterrestrially. Together with the materials assembled earlier in their respective chapters, the examples run the gauntlet of 'land-based' alternatives; the thesis is that they cannot have occurred without a direct or near relationship to an exoterrestrial event. The examples are hypothetical; they are conjectural approximations of what could at a later stage of the earth sciences assume a more qualified and varied quantitative formulation, of what could later on be historically located.
Supposing, in the first instance, we were seeking evidence of a "cosmic hurricane," that is, of a high-energy wind of ultimate unearthly origins. One will be entitled to claim exoterrestrialism with "the discovery of three heterogenous fossil agglomerations of the same age within an area of 1000 kilometers diameter from which sediments of the same age are patchy, missing, or abnormally continuous." And, we may add "provided that tempestites and other wind indications can be assembled for the area" since aquatic tides will invariably provide associated data, and in fact, by the principle of mutuality of high energy transactions, no effect is single. The proposed discovery is of unknown difficulty; it has not been attempted; it may be simple or practically impossible. Yet how else can we search for "fossil winds."
And this could denote cosmic cyclones as well, the uplift of immense agglomerations of material and their erratic deposition. Of many thousands of geological and atmospheric studies, is there one on the cosmic fossil cyclone? None, though we have mentioned the evidence of single fossil tornadoes. Yet we know the effects and conditions of cyclones, how they occur in multiples, of their transporting power, of their relation to volcanism and explosions, and of other characteristics that make them invariably part of a catastrophic scenario. In Solaria Binaria, Milton and I posit thousands of downbursting cyclones as the most logical means for a deluge to bring huge sky waters down to Earth, shaping itself thus with the help of the also inevitable electric discharges.
Let us posit another example, trying to isolate fossil electrical discharges, while granting their presence in every high-energy expression. We would seek "Metamorphosed rock on one-fourth the prominences of a 100 km diameter mountain range, which is not otherwise metamorphosized." Or we might seek "non-assembled heavy biotic dissemination in contemporaneous sediments taking the form of fusain and calcination and extending over an area of 500 km diameter." This latter may be from a conflagration as well.
The detection of thermal change goes beyond electrolysis and conflagration into non-calcinating fluctuations, and of these is climatology composed in part. The correlation of climate with exoterrestrial phenomena is proceeding apace. When we offer as a suggested criterion, "Cold and warm weather fossil species occupy contiguous strata or are mixed in the same deposits," we are probably opening up many strata of natural history to quantavolutionary exoterrestrialism. Unless it can be shown that the changes are gradual, the exoterrestrial presumption is justified.
The search for fire effects is broader because it admits the provenance of ashes: "Simultaneous fires devastating 3+ areas of 1000 km 2 , each of which is 1000+ km distant from the others." Without such evidence, the world can scarcely be said to have burned up, even in significant part, as the fossil voices insist. Paleochemical analysis, a field in its infancy, may be the appropriate technique; still, the very material to sample may have been blown or washed away, and there is the high energy of volcanism, to which are generally ascribed the ashes that cover many parts of the world. Somehow, we must go beyond the ancients, who united, in the concept of fire, spontaneous and celestial conflagration, volcanism, and electricity.
Especially for volcanism, there would occur evidence of "Plinian outbursts simultaneously of 20+ volcanoes anywhere on earth." This figure is modest; yet it would indicate exoterrestrialism; few volcanologists would deny the repeated occurrence of such phenomena and some might dwell upon much grander episodes.
Earlier we have sought evidence of fall-out. The archives of anomalistics, as R. W. Wescott has employed the word [5] , and which William James referred to as "the unclassified residuum," are replete with minor cataclysms, many of them traceable back to an origin on Earth, others patently exoterrestrial, and some of questionable origins. One might here venture in search of "Cataclysms of water, minerals, fluids, gases, biotica, and dust 100+ times greater than norms of the twentieth century, happening in a period of less than a year, and often continuing for many years."
And perhaps one should seek "Poisonous chemicals in similar strata at 4+ points at least 300 km from each other." But the mention of poisons could send one in search of "Six or more fossil conglomerates of similar sediments anywhere in the world exhibiting 2+ times the normal background radiation of modern age bones."
As for deluges of water and other space debris, one would raise the factorial on some of the above fall-out, and explore "A type of non-fossiliferous deep sedimentation discoverable over an area of 100 km diameter." Some creationist scholars, using the flood of Noah as a unique all-encompassing event, and pushing the principle of the mutuality of high-energy transactions to its limits, have managed to interpret all diastrophism and catastrophic morphology as effects of flood and tide.
Proving precisely a deluge, as distinct from, even although associated with, floods and tides, is a difficult problem for geophysics. The evidence is of a kind elaborated earlier in this book -the search for the sources of oceanic water, chemistry of seawater, and so on. Still it may be possible to discover a true exoterrestrial deluvial sediment by, if nothing else, the exclusion of all other explanations from related features.
Sometimes fossil lake and sea basins are detected and, rarely, a sudden displacement of waters from the bed is the subject of comment. The "outrageous hypothesis" of Bretz governing the sudden emptying of now extinct lakes in a barrier-bursting flood of northwestern U. S. A. -the Channeled Scablands -is a case in point. Where one lake is emptied, exoterrestrialism is doubtful. If "2+ bodies of 100 km 3 of water were abruptly displaced at the same time," exoterrestrialism would be indicated, possibly an axial tilt, or secondary events following the exoterrestrial event, such as a massive thrusting, a deluging and bursting of barriers, an ice surge and melt, a tidal damming and bursting, and a 9+ Richter seismism.
Fossil tides are also difficult to distinguish. One may propose "Tidal waves attaining 100+ meters in amplitude at 10+ land points not less than 400 kilometers apart. This might achieve a satisfactory level of confidence in an associated exoterrestrial event. For cosmic flooding, one would repeat the deluge hypothesis, where uniformly fossil-bearing strata are included.
We appreciate, however, that flooding of this kind may originate in the sinking of land followed by its rising or by the melting of an ice cap, flooding, and then either withdrawals of water for new ice or a rising of the land. Explanations of this kind are common, and usually omit any causal explanation beyond its mere statement, viz. "Here we find a marine-fossil stratum of age 'A' probably due to the ending of ice age 'III. '"
It is doubtful that the Earth can contract globally, if only because an exoterrestrial electrical discharge that might compact it would be associated with a thermal force that would expand it. That the margins of the continents can be flooded is probable; the ice caps contain enough potential water for the purpose; and that ice accumulations have melted in times past is fairly obvious. However, it is also now fairly plain that, for ice masses either to accumulate or melt requires a quantavolutionary exoterrestrial transaction.
At the same time, for the land to rise, carrying the biotica of shallow seas with it, also requires an exoterrestrial transaction. Here the criterion may be "An absolute rise of 300+ meters over an area of 100+ km diameter." Actually this may occur at the seabottom as well as on continental land. To identify an absolute local, much less a worldwide, expansion is again difficult. It may be that the universal lava venting, circular bubbles, high plateaus, and broken crystal grid of the Earth reveal global expansion.
Convection current theory, unfortunately vulnerable, can seek a merely terrestrial explanation of these phenomena. But if it tries to engage its currents to shape the Earth's surface as just described, as well as to push the continents around, it will logically have to posit a very young and turbulent Earth, which it will refuse to do. Or a large Earth expansion, which it refuses to do. Or an Atlantean concept of great sunken continental areas, which it would hotly reject and furthermore do not exist.
Land might be removed by explosion into space, with some fall-back. It can also accrete, meaning that a mechanism such as a cosmic wind or typhoon has incited local "minor" turbulence. Suppose "A heterogeneous conglomerate of 100+ km 3 filling a basin or composing all or part of an elevated range." Must this accretion be exoterrestrially caused? Probably indirectly by induced winds, tides, and bulldozing.
Bulldozing with a rock, or ice, or aquatic shovel can accrete (filling basins and forming hills); it can produce thrusting, and it can remove land features. Thus if "Five or more blocks composed of similar rocks, of 30+ km 3 each are separated by 100+ km from each other and are 10+ km from kindred strata," we can speak of thrusting by bulldozing provoked by exoterrestrial transactions. The figures used may, in fact, be much reduced. Thus, also, if "Two or more consecutive eras of sedimentary rock are missing over a region of 200 km diameter," the removal will have been accomplished, if not by bulldozing, then by hurricane or tides on a cosmic level of intensity.
The relation of cosmic pressure (electro-mechanical) to expansion and thrust may be explored by the detection of "Expanses of 10,000 km 2 with frequent granitic and metamorphic outcroppings designating a prior period of heavier overhang rocks and a thrust or blast removal of the overhang." The argument here would follow along the lines of argument against "plastic creep" in general.
When speaking of thrusting, the original event will have been a large-body collision or encounter near-in with a great body -Sun sized or greater to the eye, yet seemingly far removed. Inertia comes into play in the atmosphere and lithosphere. "A ten-second deceleration of the Earth on a single day" will produce many local thrusts, expansions, and probably every other high-energy manifestation. Even at this seemingly modest deceleration, one would be able to find later on extensive macro-and microfracturing of the lithosphere. Raise this deceleration to hours and the surface of the Earth would be extensively altered.
As evidence, what would be demonstrable is probably already present and awaiting discovery, that is "Areas of 500 km: exhibiting fractures of 85% of all included grids of 15 kilometer diameters in one or more strata." Perhaps here one should expect tortured seabottoms and igneous flows that would have been nonexistent or molten during the events. Axial tilting would also be denoted by patterns of inertial change probably by now totally confused in the morphology and petrology of the Earth, except as we have pointed out in earlier sections of this book, where axial tilt can be detected on gross features of the global map.
The most obvious form of exoterrestrial transaction is the meteoroid explosion, which is provable on its face, of course. That a great many of such intrusions are not yet discovered has also been shown. That the Earth should have fewer craters than the Moon only occurs by reason of their quick erasure here. As detecting techniques improve we should be able to speculate reasonably, in the manner used for fracturing above, that meteoroid impact craters arc present over all of the globe save where erased by other quantavolutionary processes.
Several biosphere phenomena may be hypothesized as indicative of exoterrestrialism in quantavolutions. The pandemonium accompanying quantavolutions is not likely to have left a geophysical record. "World-wide sound at 100+ decibels, approaching human physical limits" can be considered, given, for instance, the thousands of square kilometers of high audibility of the Krakatoa volcanic explosion; still such effects would not fracture rock nor (probably) affect the hearing of species genetically.
Other acoustical effects might, however, be mutating, and even chemically effective on the molecular level of the atmosphere and lithosphere. Legends do describe great sounds that suggest exoterrestrialism: we have alluded to them. So too, have we mentioned spectres as often the greatest contribution of ancient voices to the proof of exoterrestrial events affecting earth; thus we would allow as evidence of an exoterrestrial transaction "Reports of an observed cosmic intrusion of an apparition the size of the Moon when at meridian, or larger." We would expect such a spectre to be associated with at least several other high-energy effects mentioned above.
A final trio of expressions may be advanced. We should be alerted to magnetic effects. These may be indicators of axial tilting. But when localized, they can point to meteoroid explosions and peripheral and subsurface melts, where post-event magnetization differs from magnetic orientation, as displayed in the circummagnetic field of central Canada, having south Hudson Bay as its focus. "Inconsistent and strongly deviating rock magnetism over 5º grids of latitude-longitude" proves quantavolution.
In biospherics, "Biosphere extermination over 100 km 2 in 1 incident of under l-day duration" would be proof of exoterrestrialism. So would "The extinction of 3+ species in less than 1 year," or "Depopulation by 70% of l+ species of 10 biological families in less than a year in an area of 1,000 km diameter." A number of phrasings may be formulated to denote physical catastrophe in biological terms as well as in terms of physical science.
At the same time, genesis may be used as an indicator of quantavolution. Thus. "The simultaneous appearance of 3+ new species" will suffice to indicate a catastrophic innovation. "Simultaneous" means genesis within a century, or the smallest frame visible in the fossil record. An "appearance" should not prompt an assumption of missing transitional ages. Thus we have possibilities of operationally defining quantavolution as a happening of high intensity, everywhere, at the same time, and, as we shall shortly argue, quickly. In a great quantavolution, many things change at once, overlap, transact, follow in quick succession. A quantavolution of one kind, once initiated, has a prelude, a climax, a procession, a recession, a stabilization and finally a uniformity.
The concept of negative exponentialism holds that the initial quantity (intensity, number, frequency, amount. volume, locations, incidence, etc.) of a type of event decreases sharply with the passage of time, but ever less sharply as time is extended. Finally the rate is indistinguishably uniform, that is, the same, and the activity being observed is constant. One notes that this may be accomplished theoretically (i. e. imaginatively) or by the use of empirical data. In theory one can annihilate change by stretching time: increments of volcanism are spaced so far as to provide a negligible rate of change, or spaced so tightly as to provide catastrophic rates of change.
To denote negative exponentialism realistically (empirically) requires data on the beginning, the end, and at least one point of time in between. Thus, if 500 volcanos were active 11.500 years ago around Auvergne in France and 0 are active today, a decrease is undeniable (from 500 to 0 in 11500 y) but the decreasing might have occurred at any point and in a number of ways: all 500 might have stopped erupting last year, for all we know. At least one estimate of the number of active volcanos at some point of time between the two given ones is required to permit an elementary idea of the progression.
Let us suppose -which, alas, may be the fact -that all activity ceased before history began; further, that no evidence of relative youth is to be observed by geological examination; worse, that no radiometric test and not even Carbon 14 dating is capable of assigning relative dates. All we can say is that the first local references were 2000 years ago and no mention of volcanic activity is to be found. So the curve is flat for the past 2000 years.
What next? One can go searching for records of other volcanoes in other areas, the Mediterranean say, where history of a kind goes back another 2000 years. There we would have to discover some evidence -whether on official tablets, in legend, or in archaeological excavations of extinct human activity laid upon or beneath lava or ashes -that an ascertainable level of volcanism was occurring, whereupon the indicators of this would be presumed to indicate what was happening in the Auvergne. But this logic, of course, violates the ordinary supposition of most volcanologists, that volcanism in one area does not suppose or call up volcanism elsewhere, a supposition true in these days, it would seem, but not necessarily true if volcanism were more rampant.
One may resort to widespread ash layers as well. If layers are thick and far-flung, it may be reasonable to suppose the Auvergne would be afflicted by the same activity as is producing the ashes generally, and, with ever better chemical analysis, the ashes may even be traced to the neighborhood of the volcanoes in question.
Still, as the chapter on volcanism reflects, at the moment historical volcanology has to put together bits of evidence from widely separated localities in order to supply what is largely a conjectural statistical foundation to the generalization that at certain historical points in time volcanism leaped to peaks, subsided quickly, and then evened out, thus lending the appearance of a uniform activity but, if one wishes to assume our position, also letting us guess that volcanism is delineating negatively the exponential principle. .
For each and every type of expression of force involved in a catastrophe, there would exist a statistical curve delineating its individual intensity over time. Each expression would possess its peculiar rate of decline from its initial peak -its own "disturbance constant" -giving us various exponential or hyperbolic functions. Then, for instance, as more and more data illuminated the dispute over the late Cretaceous extinctions, curves might be drawn to depict the fate of biosphere segments and of inorganic expressions of the catastrophe, answering ultimately the questions: "How intense, what scope, how sudden?" for portions of each sphere, the several spheres, and the holosphere of Earth.
If peak catastrophic and holospheric turbulence has occurred, say, at five points of time in the holocene, there will be a new negative exponential curve to assign to the effects of each set of events. If these curves are merged, one gets a kind of roller-coaster curve, rising and falling in conformity with each set of events, while at the same time maintaining a momentum of generally falling activity until, at the end, like when the roller-coaster ride is ending, the past two thousand years become practically a smooth glide.
Such is the negative exponential curve of quantavolution, taken as a whole or in its subsets. For these phases in any high energy expression are subject to the successive sets of phases of the quantavolution of other kinds, subsequently, yet concurrently, initiated. These may accumulate intensity at any phase, or countervail, that is, diminish intensity.
The whole Earth is acting out the several stages for numerous forces at any given moment in time, and the state of the Earth may as a whole be deemed uniformitarian or disastrous as it is working its way through a low cumulative effect of the forces or a high cumulative effect.
The low effect - the world as it is today is mostly a descendant effect from original high effects. This we have considered as the principle of exponentialism, which results, in the end, as an almost uniform rate, with exceptional cases of high activity. In an article on "Landform Evolution" (geomorphology), interesting in its vagaries and confusion, the Encyclopedia Britannica cites many catastrophic conceptions, ascribes erroneously the beginnings of scientific catastrophism to Bishop Usher's Biblical literalism, and summarizes uniformitarianism today as holding, "Although present processes are similar in kind, process rates must have been variable." But it is doubtful that any scientific catastrophist ever believed that processes were dissimilar. It has always been an argument over rates.
It is also of interest, and insufficiently addressed by the many commentators who recognized that C. Darwin took from Malthus the idea behind his theory of the origin of species by means of natural selection, that he did not see the larger consequence of Malthus' idea of exponentialism. This latter idea expressed in the belief that while population rises geometrically, the means for its subsistence increases arithmetically -points to catastrophism but inversely, that is, negatively, implying that the catastrophe is a sudden leap and then an exponential decline from the leap in the direction of increasing gradualism. Ignore the leap and the character of exponential decline, as Darwin did, and natural history is stripped of its salient behavior. What appealed to Darwin and those of like mind, such as Spencer, was the competitive struggle as the means of subsistence grew scarce in relation to population; and the notion, of course, that "fitness" is an objective concept, in nature as in society.
There exists little speculative or empirical literature on the abruptness of catastrophe. Catastrophe by definition connotes an abrupt disintegration of an existing course of natural behavior. How is "abrupt" to be conceived? Suddenly, quickly -but is this seconds or millennia, or something in between? Should we say that, to have a quantavolution, an event or set of them has to occur in less than a million years? This would please some conventional geologists who have given themselves some five thousands of such units to reckon with. Five catastrophes distributed over the period would consume only one-thousandth of the time allowed.
But what kind of catastrophe is it that would take a million years to happen? Suppose some poison slowly entered the atmosphere or suppose the Sun for a million years was hyperactive, and radiated the biosphere beyond the sufferance of many species. Even conventional scientific gradualism would find the postulation of such slow "catastrophic" processes implausible.
Natura facit magnum saltum: that nature, when she leaps, leaps high, is a more believable axiom. This is no place to argue, as we do in another book, Solaria Binaria, for a million year history of the solar system. But if we were to cast dice, giving each possible source of catastrophe, whether slow or fast, an equal chance, we should very probably cast forth one of the fast catastrophes. That is, of the half dozen major types of catastrophe that are possible, only a special variety of particle and dust bombardment produces a slow catastrophe. And this, as we have implied, should be measured in hundreds rather than millions of years.
The many scientists who today make dire predictions about the effects of a carbon dioxide pollution of the atmosphere or of the removal of the ozone barrier to exoterrestrial particles, couch their forecasts in hundreds of years; why would the same and other scientists wish to insist retrospectively upon tens or hundreds of thousands of years for the same phenomena to have occurred? If they did, it would be for irrational, that is, ideological, reasons: they would be unconsciously straining to support an evolutionist view of natural history.
Luis Alvarez, and perhaps his associates as well, after suggesting that the sweeping extinction of the biosphere at the Cretaceous boundary came with a solar obscuration by dust raised by a meteoroid crash, elected a period of about three years of dusty atmosphere, then lowered the effect by a factor of ten, to three months [6] . Again, what is abruptness? What is "geologically instantaneous?"
Eicher notes a "huge" recent Chilean ash fall which is never over 10 centimeters deep away from the central volcanic area [7] . Yet in the Upper Cretaceous strata of Colorado, over thousands of square miles, there occurs a bed of bentonite, highly compressed volcanic ash, which is a meter thick. This may have been coincidental with the boundary events of which the Alvarez group speaks.
Smit and Hertogen inform us that the great biosphere extinction marking the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary "was abrupt without any previous warning in the sedimentary record." [8] O'Keefe at the same time accounts for the devastation of fauna at the end of the Eocene (assigned 34 million years ago) by radical climatic change induced by a ring of microtektites and tektites circling the Earth for perhaps a million years and obscuring the Sun [9] .
Ogden discusses abrupt changes in American forestation about 10.000 years ago, also climatically impelled, with the pattern of pollen deposits in lake sediments moving at the rate of a mile a year [10] . Hapgood has compared what arc regarded as 'normal' rates of ice retreat with the results of carbondating, and allows some 60,000 by the one and only 17,000 by the other. He believes that the carbondating must be in error [11] . Cracraft, in expatiating upon the "punctuated equilibrium model" of macroevolution, argues that speciation is a "geologically instantaneous phenomenon." [12]
There is, in sum, a growing body of paleontology and geology that perceives abruptness of change as a feature of natural history. What means "sudden" and "abrupt" is likely to be a much-discussed question in the near future. We can suggest here merely that every feature of the holosphere enjoys its idiosyncratic manner suddenness.
A species, a land mass, a body of water, and an atmosphere all change according to their nature, and measured in human terms, this may be fast or slow. When a quantavolutionist speaks of abrupt change, he can only mean the margin between explosion and extinction on the one hand, and the rate of change peculiar to a given organism or natural process when the rate is affected by a disaster produced by a specified high-energy expression.
Similarly, when speaking of energy of high intensity, the quantavolutionist is describing known natural forces proceeding at abnormally high rates. A recently discovered ash layer in E1 Salvador covers 1300 square miles and a once flourishing Mayan civilization. (The fall of ash was dated much earlier before the culture was unearthed.) Some 45.000 of such eruptions would be needed to blanket the Earth. The volcanoes, mostly extinct to be sure, are present; how many of these were ever exercised simultaneously?
One more, when speaking of scope, scale, or simultaneity, the quantavolutionist seeks limits appropriate to the effects of a high-energy force, between total immediate transformation and a highly significant change. Isaacs and Schmitt address themselves to oceanic energy sources; they provide global figures on the great energy sinks and low energy manifestations involved in currents, waves, tides, thermal gradients and salinity gradients. The rising and falling of waves is an energetic type of movement. When it occurs as a tsunami, or is pulled up tidally in an exoterrestrial encounter, it multiplies exponentially its force, as was said earlier, so that nothing can withstand it finally except the Earth itself.
The rotational energy of the Earth can he translated into 6X10 15 Megawatt years. All the electrical needs of the world projected into the 21st century amount to 3X 10 17 MW: if continuously mined from the energy of the Earth's rotation, the length of the day would be increased by five minutes per million years. This is the latest and one of the finest comparative measures by which the forces of nature are converted into everyday terms and may be used to explore the dimensions of catastrophe as well [13] .
Until recently, to take another example, only three cubic miles of petroleum have been drawn upon for the useful and often unpleasant industrialism of modern times; if, as we suspect, the origins of petroleum are largely cometary and cataclysmic, many an ungovernable object in the sky may contain that much and many more cubic miles of the substance or its components; awaiting the occasion of manufacture may be an abundance of cosmic electric potential.
Hibben once voyaged the far North with an eye for catastrophic remains. He remarks that the Pleistocene ice sheet (if it truly existed as such) never covered the central regions of Alaska nor parts of the Aleutian Range. He reports, as have others, the several hundred feet of frozen muck deposited in various unglaciated areas. In the muck are volcanic ash layers, peat, animal and vegetable matter in vast quantities, and ice fragments. Below the muck have been found mammoth bones, human artifacts, and tree stumps in their original position as they had grown. The total effect is of several simultaneously interacting high energy forces, whose total rate of burnup of the Earth's rotational energy must have in hours, not in a million years, taken up the equivalent of five minutes of the Earth's rotational energy, and perhaps then, indeed, as a prior condition, the Earth's rotation may have slowed by that much, or more.
All effects of high energy deteriorate exponentially, we repeat. Often, as with a hurricane that expends the energy of many hydrogen bombs, the force is largely employed within and against itself. Forces also act by the principle of countervalency. Bursting into operation, one force generates another, which may not only bring on a third, but may turn against the first and moderate (as well as heighten) its effects. A volcanic wind can halt a lateral hurricane; two sets of rocks can counterthrust. An extinction of one species can promote the survival of another species. Cross-tides may create destructive vortexes but also moderate each other. A deluge can dampen the fire with which it originated from a third force. And so on. The possibilities are very many; if the Earth exhibits patches of peaceful history here and there, these may be effects of countervalency.
Countervalency may occur on the grandest scale. Repeatedly the theory of the eruption of the Moon from Earth is challenged by the conviction that so large-scale and destructive an event would have destroyed the Earth's crust entirely, or at least its biosphere, or at least all vertebrates and forests, or at the very least mankind. Such is not the case.
The energy of the lunar eruption may or may not have exceeded the energy involved in wiping out the Martian atmosphere and biosphere; the gross energy expended (transformed) is not the issue; the counterrailing operations of the energy forms, the coincidences, are the determining factor in the extent of destruction.
One several occasions, the Earth's atmosphere may have been destroyed and transformed. The presence, according to the theory of Solaria Binaria, of a gaseous tube enveloping the solar system, even until a dozen millennia ago, allows for a drawing off of the atmosphere over half the world, for a rush of atmosphere from the opposite hemisphere, and for cataclysms of atmosphere from the plenum, not irreconcilably different from the atmosphere that it displaced.
In other uses, the very motions of the Earth itself will tend to deprive a catastrophic force of complete victory. If 50,000 volcanoes erupt simultaneously, the whole atmosphere will be put to work with electricity and water to bring down the dust, part of which, for that matter, may erupt into space in pursuit of the body that produced the motion changes and eruptions in the first place. In Saint-Pierre, there was a prisoner in his dungeon, sole survivor of the volcanic explosion of Martinique. In Hiroshima there were the unexplainable uninjured survivors of the blast and holocaust. Once again, problems posed by catastrophes find their solution in the behavior of catastrophes.
At the present stage of the earth sciences, there are probably many fewer persons who will insist upon finding the ultimate source of great turbulence inside the Earth alone. Still this conviction -or is it a hope -persists. Geologists tend to believe that nothing grave ever happened in the skies; biologists often look upon the rocks as gift-wrappings for their fossils; astronomers are inclined to believe that nothing serious happened upon Earth; anthropologists and historians usually believe that ancient times were as serene as nature today. This consensus is suspect. Some scholars apparently are still reassuring one another, so that all might eventually come to believe that no event of great importance has happened in any sphere of existence.
I hope to have suggested in this chapter some orderly means of bringing forward and considering exoterrestrially provoked quantavolutions. Most such means are difficult, even impossible. But what else can be done? Most of us, whether from timidity, distaste, or because expertly qualified for other forms of combat, will not engage in "wrestling, no holds barred."
Notes (Chapter Thirty: Intensity, Scope and Suddenness)
2. Interaction of the Science in Study of the Earth, loc. cit., 252.
5. V Kronos (Spring 1980), 36-50.
6. Op. cit. cf contra R. Jastrow, "the Dinosaur Massacre," Sci. Digest (sep. 1983).
7. Don L. Eicher, Geologic Time (Englewood Cliff, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1968), 72-3.
11. Hapgood, Path of the Poles, 127-8.
12. Phylogenetic Analysis and Paleontology (NY: Columbia U., 1979), 26.
13. "Ocean Energy: Forms and Prospects," 207 Science (18 Jan. 1980), 265-73.