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THE DAILY FLAME
Monday, August 08, 2005
 


ONE SIMPLE THEORY COVERS IT ALL

Remember the Collector Society Forum where Neal Adams popped in and raised a call to arms for Justice for Jack Kirby? Well that thread developed into an intensive debate about Neal's Science Project. A few forum members with background in the sciences helped extend the discussion to more than 17 forum pages - highly recommended for those interested in the subject.

Summing up, Neal called everyone in for a fireside chat.

Guys,

Tell you a story, come in around the fire.

You sorta know my age. I was a science geek when the Pangea thing showed up.

Now, I was like everyone else, told since birth that there was all this stuff floating around and along came gravity and gathered it all together into clumps and we have a solar system. True, I was like we all are, taught not to question. So I swallowed my questions (wasn't gravity there all along? It suddenly showed up and it all happened? FWOOMP? Or FWWWOOOOOOOMP? Not evolutionary? Don’t things happen slowly? Just FWWWOOOOOOMP?) Then I was told the planet was molten from all the FWOOMPING. Then it differentiated and began to cool, so granitic rock ON TOP, then BASALTS and on down to heavier silicates. Iron at the core.

SSSo I thought, "Melted, molten" How come we find iron at the surface? And in silicates? Then the questions multiplied. IF it cooled for 5 BILLION years, how come it’s so hot down there? Unless...something is still REALLLLY going on??

Then came the Pangea theory. God, it made so much sense, in so many ways, in tectonics, distribution of animals, dinosaurs and plants, etc.

Then, doubts crept in.

Did geology do tectonic matching in the Pacific as well as the Atlantic? No, No? Why? What, what? Wasn’t necessary? If I were Chinese, wouldn't I think the Pacific was opening and the Atlantic closing? Why was one hemisphere spreading apart and the other hemisphere's continents moving together? Preposterous. What about the Antarctic Ocean, all spreading apart? IT ALL made no sense.

To my relief a group of geologists stepped forward and said, "No, we think the earth grew and the crust simply spread."

"Thank God." I thought, "a sensible answer."

I had gotten to the point of total frustration, All the continents had, what, gotten together on one big continent on one side of the earth and the remaining three quarters of it was water, five miles deep, no islands, nothing. This boggled my mind; we haven't evolved but a handful of real fish that live at that depth, compared to upper ocean fish. I visualized this Earth in my mind. It was almost funny.

Truly the oddest planet in a Jack Kirby universe." Like an eye, "I thought," an iris, the land, the rest of the eyeball, the ocean. My-o-my-o-my, it was so unnatural.

And these geologists came and saved my sanity. The earth simply grew. Huzzah. [One of these, I found much later was Professor Sam Carey, a brilliant and awarded geologist.

http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/carey.html

My happiness was however, short-lived. The "community" required that they show HOW the Earth grew, or expanded, or that they must withdraw.

They were Geologists, right or wrong, they weren't Physicists. They withdrew, in derision.

Now rifts were being discovered all over the ocean floor supporting Carey and his "nuts."

Someone, no name, came up with the theory of subduction, I hit the books. Denseness? No! Direction up? No! Down? Impossible. Equal and opposite? No. Anything? No!

Yet it caught on, anything it seemed was preferable to the unthinkable.

If anyone said growth or expansion, someone said, "Big Bang," and that was it. In my head I was confused (why? I'll never know, but then, yes, authority, you know, is a strong force.)

Yet those questions kept popping up. If rifts pull apart, how do landmasses come together? If subduction slides oceanic plate under continental plate, how come the "subduction zones are out in the ocean? Land could never meet land this way. If rifts pull apart, how does together ever happen?

In the beginning they said continents would slide under continents, now they say, "no, never." Continents never slide under anything. But if the Earth was molten and cooled, it was 100% covered with granitic rock, what happened to all that other granitic rest of Earth's surface. I checked the continental thing, no, no subduction of the continental plates that they said was a silly old idea. Impossible!

But three quarters of the Earth's surface is missing. Where did it go? Three quarters of the one billion to five billion year old continental plate is gone. But granitic rock can't subduct!

So, so, so how old is the ocean floor? They measured it. No older than 180 million years old. NO! Yes! 70% of it is only 60 million years old. NO! Yes! If there was no water would the same thing happen? They say yes! Does it happen on Mars? What? Subduction? On Mars?

No, no sign of subduction on Mars. Is there tectonic movement on Mars?

First "they" said NO definitely and unequivocally. Now they say, "well yes, and quite a bit." (Heh.)

Still no subduction?

Absolutely not! They say. They're probably right about that, but how can you have one without the other? Ah, well. Then things became appalling. Near the subduction zones there are high ridges and mountainous granitic formations like in Arizona and such. At the "zones" the trenches, these bluffs. Projections, mountains, and such must be sheered off and piled up at the trench area! No, actually not at all. It is a big wide-open trench. That's impossible, nothing about all of this computes in any way. Thank God for Geology, it is covered with water.

So, the Earth is growing, like Carey said, and someone's going to have to prove it.

But you know, there's a lot of contradictions lying around all the fields of science. What if one theory covers it all? One must. There must be only one. It must be simple and it is probably right in front of us, but we can't see it.

The End

Neal Adams

Drawing some inspiration from Neal's storytelling savvy, I followed him with my own summation of the exchange.

I'll take a cue from the Master Creator and greatest mentor the world has ever known and tell y'all a story. Pull up your chairs again, get close to the fire and start roasting the marshmallows.

I was never a science geek as a kid. Oh, I like to try to figure out how everything works but science seemed to complicate things too much for me. It all seemed a lot simpler to me. So instead of being a geek about how the universe was made, I was a geek about how civilization got to where it is. That seemed a lot simpler to me than how science was explaining how everything works.

The way it looked to me was that the world revolved around The Creators. The Creators made everything happen in civilization. They'd come and go from age to age, from time to time, in different guises, depending on the time and needs of civilization.

It's a very simple model for how the universe works. The first Creators, at the dawn of human intelligence, started scribbling things in the ground with twigs and branches (because they didn't yet know how to talk) and that's how they started teaching everybody that the sun and moon looked like they were spinning around the Earth. They knew the Earth was also spinning but they began with the simple, understandable concepts first. Those first Creators knew they were gonna die, so they scribbled down some stories that they could later hear when they'd come back again a few generations down the line, so they'd remember where they'd left off and keep teaching about how our universe works.

Later, a new set of Creators came and they started drawing pictures on the cave walls. They told stories which made people think about how the universe works. They too knew they were gonna die so they left their cave drawings in order to remember where they left off when they'd come back later.

The next time The Creators came they were writers. They wrote epic stories about how the universe works and why people die. They also knew they were gonna die, so they wrote the stories down in a way that people would never forget them, so the stories would still be there when they come back again. People were really impressed with their stories and made religions out of them. The Creators were just writers, though.

The Creators, in these stories, told about how the universe works and how people are gonna conquer death one day. They said that one day a Creator would come and remind the other Creators that it's time to conquer death. That way The Creators wouldn't have to keep dying and coming back again all the time.

Then one day, a Creator came by and said he's the one the other Creators told everyone about. People didn't believe him so they killed him. Well, he was the one, you know. So he came back to life and became a Master Creator. He told everybody that there was one more that would come in the end who'd conquer death for everyone and then everyone would know what The Creators are all about - mainly that everybody's a Creator, they simply forgot.

Then, in the end, The Creators all came back and waited for the Master Creator so they could all get together and fix everything and conquer death and go to Titan.

That's when the Master Creator came and Neal Adams began telling everybody how the universe works.

And that explains how the creation of matter is an ongoing process and why everything in the universe is so simple.

Michael Netzer

Permalink Posted: 5:34 PM EST 

 
   
 



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