Energy and the Human Journey: Where We Have Been; Where We Can Go

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Back to energy. The USA is by far history’s greatest energy-using nation. My ancestors helped steal Earth’s most plunderable continent, which had been lived on relatively lightly by horticultural and hunter-gatherer peoples, who also happened to be sitting on prodigious fossil fuel deposits, which are now running out as my great nation sucks the dregs of them. The Hydrocarbon Age will come to a swift halt, but perhaps not before turning Earth into a Hothouse Earth from an Icehouse Earth. The last time that happened, Earth had its greatest mass extinction episode. We don’t want to watch that movie, or star in it.

Those great amounts of energy were responsible for building the USA, beginning with its intact forests and soils, and then extending to coal, oil, gas, and uranium, as well as great rivers that could be dammed to provide hydroelectric energy. That energy was used to build and run the USA, as well as build history’s greatest killing machine, which has been used liberally since the nation’s founding.

With perhaps ET help, the USA became history’s leading technology nation, and much of my career has been spent in technology companies, from leading-edge energy to software to high-tech manufacturing. The USA’s historic standard of living rode on the backs of those energy sources, which are now running out.

I have been a student of collapsed civilizations since 2003, and when I update my big essay this year, I am going to deal with another theory of collapsed civilizations. Actually, I have already dealt with it plenty, but will get a little more into the academics. That use of energy, to either build things or burn to fuel things, is called anabolic and catabolic in biological parlance. One recent theory of civilization collapse is called catabolic collapse, and an analogy would be burning your furniture in the fireplace to warm your home. If you burn up your “capital,” instead of living off of your profits and interest, you will eventually go bankrupt. The catabolic collapse concept has been challenged by an ephemeralization one, which is Uncle Bucky’s concept.

I am going to deal with those concepts and the recent debates a bit in my next post.

Best,

Wade

Edited June 22, 2016 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

The issue of collapsed civilizations is important, especially as industrial civilization has rapidly burned through its primary energy sources and is scraping the dregs today. When I first began to study collapsed civilizations, led to it by Peak Oiler writings, the energy issue was always key in all analyses that I saw, but it was often camouflaged, often by seizing on aspects of it and kind of assuming away the larger picture, similar to the nonsensical analyses that I read for why the USA invaded Iraq. For instance, Jared Diamond’s environmental collapse hypothesis is simply a way of stating that the commandeered ecosystems could no longer provide the energy needed to sustain the society. Sometimes, it was “natural,” such as the collapse of the Greenland settlements, but it was usually a human-induced collapse, such as the Classic Mayans and most early Old World civilizations, beginning with Sumer onward, but it really goes back to the rise of behaviorally modern humans, as the first thing that they did upon leaving Africa was drive all competing human species and all of the easy meat to extinction.

All of the bickering between proponents of the competing collapse hypotheses is typical of scientific and scholarly discourse, I am sorry to report, but when you strip away their rhetoric, they are all centered on how societies run out of energy, whether it was induced by nature, humans, or some synergistic combination of them. Getting into the details can be very helpful for understanding the issues. The Tainter/Diamond aspect of the debate is helpful to understand, and a more recent one is the catabolic collapse hypothesis and those who challenge it, not so much to dispute the hypothesis, but their “solution” to the issue is “let’s ride bikes and put human muscles to more use,” and other austerity “solutions,” which you can see at the end of this article.

This comment by Walter Haugen is worth reading, partly for the “laws of physics” title to his book. As Brian O often stated, there are no “laws of physics,” only theories, and to even say “laws” puts physics into the quasi-religious state that I recently wrote about regarding evolutionary theory, as evolutionary theory was turned into the basis of a religion, and the “laws of physics” is a close cousin. Materialism is the religion of the Fourth Epoch, as false as the agrarian religions of the Third Epoch or the singing and dancing rituals of the Second Epoch. In the Fifth Epoch, spiritual and scientific dogmas will disappear, as both are based on fear, not love. In a world of abundance, a loving state is going to be far easier to attain, not something attained by an enlightened few, who become the central figures of religions (which I believe that none of them would have approved of). Today’s science and religion will not survive in the Fifth Epoch, and nobody will be sorry to see them go, other than perhaps the dark pathers who use them as means of controlling the great herd of semi-sentient humanity.

Yesterday, I read some more of Einstein’s writings on cosmic religion, which religious and scientific heretics have in common, which is distinctly different from the fear-based and moral-based religions that dominate today. As Einstein wrote, and I agree, if you have not experienced it, it is almost impossible to explain it. My cosmic religious state dominates my life, even with the many horrors of my journey. Nobody can wake up anybody else. They have to do it on their own, and for what I am doing, having one’s heart in the right place trumps all else.

A good example of the collapse debate, which you can see in those linked exchanges above, is Fuller’s ephemeralization concept. It is about efficiency, and as Greer noted, Fuller’s satellites replacing transatlantic cables is not a very good example (and yes, Fuller did use it in his Utopia or Oblivion), in that humanity’s greatest energy feat, and a huge and energy-intensive infrastructure to support it, was able to put those satellites into orbit. Sacrificing resilience for efficiency is risky and usually leads to disaster. That book I recently read, Arrival of the Fittest, made the compelling case that “inefficient” DNA was that way so that it could be resilient and adapt to environmental change. All of that “spare” and “junk” DNA is vitally important for adapting to change.

Although Fuller was my professional grandfather in ways, he was not the be-all, end-all, and I think that if he was alive today, he would have changed his tune in ways. He got to see FE in action just before he died, while he was also well aware of what Adam likely faced. I think that Fuller’s work in the 21^st century would have incorporated resilience into its framework, and with FE, resilience is easily achieved. Efficiency is primarily an energy-scarcity concept.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am going to wind down these energy sources and uses posts for now. Other than the zero-point field, the energy used on Earth is from either the Sun or the previous stars in our galactic vicinity, and life on Earth uses it to either build itself or run itself. Human societies make the same decision, of using that energy to build itself or run itself.

The only societies that ever came close to being energetically sustainable were Stone Age societies, after all the easy meat was driven to extinction. Hunter-gatherer Stone Age societies are the most violent in the human journey (which helped keep their populations “sustainable”), while horticultural Stone Age societies were the most peaceful preindustrial societies, if they became matrilocal and broke up the male gangs, such as North America’s Eastern Woodlands before Europe invaded. But the human line has not lived in “harmony” with its environment since it learned to control fire.

The fossil fuels that power the industrial age are being burned up a million times as fast as they were created, which is a little short of sustainable. In the USA, which is history’s greatest energy-using nation, about half of that energy goes to work, and about half to heat. American energy consumption peaked in the 1970s, and the American standard of living has declined ever since. Without something like FE, the rest of the world will be close behind, but declining from a far lower initial plateau.

Whether we experience Fuller’s Utopia or oblivion is going to ride on the energy issue, as always. Are we truly a sentient species? I think that we are about to find out.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

One little addendum, before I leave the energy sources and uses issue for now. What is very common is scientifically illiterate people failing to see much, if any, connection between energy and economics. Economics obscures that relationship, perhaps intentionally. I wrote this chapter in response to a scientist pal who wanted me to make the connection between economics and energy clearer, because somebody close to him could not see the connection at all. Machines do more than 99.9% of the work in the USA, but many people cannot see the connection between energy and economics, or make it into some ancillary resource, outranked by human cleverness, precious metals, money, etc.

Here is an analogy to make it clearer. Imagine a family of five in the antebellum south who owned 5,000 slaves who waited on them hand and foot. Not seeing the relationship between energy and economics would be like saying, “You have 5,000 slaves to do all of your bidding. That is wonderful. They don’t need to eat, do they?” Make the machines into humans, and make oil into food, and the relationship of energy and economics becomes clear. Slaves have to eat, and those machines run off of energy.

And, of course, machines can do things that slaves never could, such as fly, go to the moon, and allow me to write this and publish it so that billions of people can read it (even though slightly fewer will ) almost instantly.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Not much time for a post this morning, but briefly, I want to return to Moral Origins, and this will take more than one post. The social organization that formed around hunting big game was economically conditioned, although the author of Moral Origins did not emphasize it. Hunter-gatherer band social organization was keenly focused on preventing a man from trying to take over and becoming some kind of headman, or elite, if you will. The hunter-gatherer economy did not produce the energy surplus that could support elites. Any man who tried to become an elite and garner a disproportionate share of the meat would threaten the band’s viability. Hunter-gatherer band social organization was a solution that humans developed, which provided the greatest welfare to all, which was how a band’s members could all survive the rigors of their existence.

When the domestication of plants and animals began, or in the few places where a hunter-gatherer energy supply could support sedentism and a food surplus could be used for political purposes, then elites did rise, and they were men, by and large. There was a brief Golden Age of early agriculture, when women brought in more calories than the men and those societies often became matrilineal and were the most peaceful preindustrial cultures, and all pristine civilizations began peacefully. But as they grew, men took over again and women’s status declined as women became broodmares for the agrarian economy. Their status would not rise again until industrialization.

Best,

Wade

Edited September 1, 2016 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

As I have noted, with each Epoch of the human journey, its energy surplus increased, which is a society’s true wealth. Also, with each Epoch, humanity became more humane because it could afford to. Moral Origins was primarily concerned with hunter-gatherer bands, which hail from the Second Epoch. For all of the Third Epoch’s evils, such as mass warfare and slavery, the Third Epoch was vastly more humane than the Second, which was vastly more humane than the First.

In Moral Origins, the author vetted Earth’s last hunter-gathers, to winnow them down to the closest thing that there was to the late-Pleistocene hunter-gatherer bands, and his focus was generally on Inuit bands in Canada and desert-dwelling hunter-gatherers in Africa, particularly the !Kung people. In both cultures, the surplus energy was so low that killing members of the bands was common, for economic reasons. If a woman gave birth to twins, she would murder one of them, as she could not carry two of them each day. When the rare person lived to be old and decrepit, he/she was murdered by the band. In the Arctic, they would be put out in the elements and freeze to death, which was a painless death, and as humane as the band could muster. In Africa, if an elderly person was put out in the elements like that, they would have likely not died some painless death, but would have died via predation. So the “humane” treatment in Africa was to sneak up behind the elderly and crush their skulls with a blow to the back of the head. That was the most humane “retirement plan” that the hunter-gatherer economy provided.

In the Arctic, when times became really hard, parents would kill and eat their children. It was an example of what the Moral Origins author said was humanity’s “flexible conscience,” which may have been critical to humanity’s survival. Child-eating parents justified their cannibalism by stating that if they killed themselves instead, to feed their children, that the children would not be able to fend for themselves after the parents were eaten, so the entire family would go extinct, so it made more sense for the parents to survive, and when the crisis passed, they could have more children. And it was acceptable logic to others in those societies. Survival comes first.

To people living in the Fourth Epoch, such decisions are unimaginable, but they were regular ones in the Second Epoch. What made the difference between those Epochs was the level of energy surplus.

I regularly see Fourth Epoch people decry the practices of Third Epoch peoples, but those are scientifically illiterate and ignorant criticisms. Those “primitive” Third Epoch practices (such as the low status of women) are just what the energy surplus of the Third Epoch could support.

As Uncle Noam once said, today’s world is no more “moral” than when the Mongol Hordes rode. Bush and the neocons were no more “moral” than Hitler. In fact, Hitler used the Anglo-American process of “settling” North America as his model for “settling” Eastern Europe.

As I segue back to my journey with Dennis, his migrant farmworker background is responsible for his fanatical Christianity. Growing up on farms is not all bad, as agrarian cultures can produce people with a naïve honesty that peoples of the Fourth Epoch lack.

The human equipment has not appreciably changed since humans became behaviorally modern (and arguably ensouled), so the Epochs are not due to some evolutionary breakthrough, but humanity’s reaching the technological prowess and social organization necessary to tap a new energy source. It really is about that simple.

I recently talked FE with some pals, and one subject was how people are going to react to machines replacing them. I replied that machines had been replacing people for centuries (that is why slavery ended), and that machines already perform more than 99.9% of the work in the USA. People are getting all hot and bothered about the last 0.1%? Strange. Of capitalism’s many crimes (the suppression of FE is capitalism on steroids), one of its greatest is that it does not share the wealth and has led to surreal levels of wealth concentration, where a few hundred people possess the wealth of half of humanity. With the almost unimaginable energy surplus of the Fifth Epoch, all societal structures based on energy and economic scarcity will go the way of slavery and infanticide. And just like with every previous Epoch, the masses are going to be unable and unwilling to even imagine the coming Epoch before it arrives. I seek the few who can and will.

Best,

Wade

Edited September 2, 2016 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Last night, I finished Life on the Edge, and while the authors stick with quantum mechanics, their book is a good one, but they try to play God (or Dr. Frankenstein) by the book’s end, and discuss creating artificial life through understanding quantum physics, in completely materialistic fashion. That said, my essay update will venture into quantum mechanics a little more, especially its role in biology. The problem with quantum mechanics is that it is largely a math exercise and does not make sense. Einstein and Schroedinger were unhappy with quantum physics, even though they were fathers of it.

That stated, quantum physics is about the most battle tested theory in physics. It is valid, insofar as it makes accurate predictions, but Einstein and Schroedinger, among others, believed that quantum physics is an incomplete theory that does not describe what is really happening. The so-called unified field theory may resolve the paradoxes of quantum physics, as it unites with relativity in some way.

I have this feeling that the technologies that my friend witnessed are only going to be explainable by something like the unified field, which will turn today’s physics textbooks into doorstops.

It really is easy to have direct personal experiences that falsify materialism, and it really is mystifying at times that such seemingly smart people dismiss evidence that is easily acquired and can’t be denied. When you have experience, you know.

On a related note, I get emails from Steven Greer’s organization almost daily, and I was looking this past weekend at the videos that he sells. I bought the original Sirius video, but not sure if I will ever buy the others. Greer is damaged goods from his journey, understandably, and is really not the man to lead the populist movement that he is attempting to form (and a populist movement would not work for this if Jesus led it), but I’ll say this for what he has to say about the global power structure: it largely aligns with what my fellow travelers and I discovered on our adventures. We had multiple encounters with the Rockefellers and Rothschilds but they are not at the top of the global food chain, and sitting American presidents are lower still. In that regard, Greer’s work is valid, but there is not enough personal integrity in the masses for a mass movement approach to work, and Greer is not a man of the people like Dennis is and Brian was, and they did not have a prayer, either.

So, if you want to gain some understanding of how the world’s power structure works, Greer’s work is a good primer, but deep understanding is not needed for my approach. It is enough to know that they are there, are vigilant, cannot be snuck past or negotiated with, and killing people like Dennis, Brian, and Greer is a common enough strategy of theirs, when necessary. But my effort is likely low enough on the radar so that I do not have to worry about fending off murder attempts and the other outrages that accompanied the journeys of great men like them. The people who join my choir will face much greater threats from their social circles and themselves than from Godzilla’s minions.

Best,

Wade

Edited September 27, 2016 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

To take a little break from my days with Dennis, and my real-world anthropology lesson, I have studied a great deal of academic/scientific anthropology since then, from physical to cultural anthropology, from chimps and gorillas to the line that led to humans to hunter-gatherers to farmers to factory workers. The human journey has been greatly influenced by the energy issue, which always manifested as economic issues. Each phase was dominated by its energetic/economic conditions, and humanity’s growing energy surplus is its signature quality, never remotely approached by any other animals, which led to human dominance of Earth.

But, just like some plants and animals found a niche, never left, and became living fossils, in the human journey, the human line is full of niches that members of the human line and human journey found or evolved in, exploited and stayed, while the others moved on. Moving on could mean going extinct (just as staying in one place could), but it could also mean discovering how to wring energy from new environments or in new ways, while those who stayed behind may have survived and even thrived, but remained stuck in their niche. Chimps are descended from marginal gorillas, as gorillas got the heart of the rainforest, where life was relatively easy, while chimps had to exploit the periphery and had to venture farther to find food. The human line ventured farther from their rainforest homes, probably because it shrank as Earth kept drying out as it headed into the current ice age.

Chimps and gorillas stayed in their rainforest homes and have not evolved much over the past several million years, as well-adapted to their environments as they are. The human line, however, learned to master any environment and wrest energy from it, but like other animal lines, most humans also became stuck in their niches and did not leave, at least until humans who kept improving their toolset and knowledge invaded those “stuck” peoples, and usually either exterminated them or enslaved them.

Today, scientists and scholars study why certain human cultures became “stuck” in their epoch, while others found a way to tap a new energy source. China smelted iron with coal a millennium before England did, which marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Similarly, China used watermills before they took off in Europe, which marked Europe’s rise to industrialization, but China dismantled theirs, as using the streams for irrigation and transportation was more important to China than the power provided by watermills. Europe kept riding that energy-and-power wave and used it to conquer humanity and usher in a new epoch. As with the earlier epochs, those who invented the new energy technologies had no idea what they would lead to. Scholars have long asked the question of why Ancient Greece and Rome did not industrialize. Well, for one thing, they didn’t use coal (except for Rome on the Isle of Great Britain), which was the energy source that began the Industrial Revolution, which was really the main reason. Another reason was that the social organization of Rome and Greece was not amenable to industrialization, being slave-based economies, although England’s was not that much better, with a vast dispossessed peasantry. And most importantly, both Rome and Greece collapsed as they ran out of the energy supply that sustained all agrarian civilizations: fertile soils and wood. With no easily exploitable coal, Rome and Greece could not industrialize. No nation could industrialize on wood, and England only turned to coal when it was completely deforested, and by the American Revolution, New England was completely deforested, and it soon turned to English coal, until the American infrastructure was built to exploit American coal. The study of why China, Greece, and Rome became “stuck” in their Epoch, while England was able to exploit that new energy source and thereby found a new Epoch, will be a continuing study that I will follow with fascination, although I doubt that the basic dynamics so far discovered will change much.

Similarly, many hunter-gatherer peoples became “stuck” in their epoch, and I know of no more succinct summary of those dynamics than Keith Otterbein’s The Anthropology of War. Otterbein wrote tomes, but The Anthropology of War is a slim volume, coming in at a mere 140 pages, but that book is a brilliant summary, and the first time that a scientist developed a framework to both:

• Explain why some cultures developed agriculture and others didn’t, and;
• Why some farming cultures never rose to become civilizations.
  

The answer for both was warfare. Farming could have never begun among warring tribes and bands, as farmers were easy prey for marauding warriors, and warring horticultural villages could never rise above that stage and form states.

Otterbein further showed what the key dynamics were, and the main one for the appearance of farming was that it could have only appeared in areas where the big game had been rendered extinct and the culture reverted to gathering over hunting. Women always had the primary gathering duties, which led to their manual dexterity. For a recent cinematic example, watch 12 Years a Slave, in which a woman could out-cotton-pick the men by two-to-one and more. Men had the hunting duties, due to their size, speed, and strength (a result of our ape heritage), which is why they are superior athletes (the clichés “throw like a girl” and “type like a man” exemplify our evolutionary adaptations).

In those foraging societies, women’s status rose, and in many of them, a ten-million-year trend was broken, and the men left their natal groups instead of the women, which broke up the male gangs (Otterbein called them “Fraternal Interest Groups”), and those became the most peaceful preindustrial societies, and those ones invented farming, where the environment was conducive to it.

Big game hunting societies never invented farming, were patrilineal, and all four pristine civilizations began peacefully. With the rise of civilization, men rose to dominance again and women’s status universally declined, until the demographic transition of the Industrial Revolution, as women were no longer broodmares for the agrarian economy. Humanity is still transitioning out of the Third Epoch. Dennis was born in a transitional family, being raised as a migrant farmworker.

One of Otterbein’s primary examples of a culture that became stuck in the hunter-gatherer Epoch was Australia. It was the first “pristine” continent invaded by behaviorally modern humans, and they quickly drove the easy meat to extinction, during Australia’s short-lived Golden Age of the Hunter Gatherer. The Americas and parts of Eurasia also had those short-lived Golden Ages, until the easy meat had been rendered extinct.

But in Australia, the fleet-footed kangaroo allowed for big game hunting to continue, and Australia remained in patrilineal, mutually hostile warring societies (about 600 of them), and Australia stayed stuck in the hunter-gatherer Epoch clear until the industrializing English invaded them, and the invaders quickly drove those Australian hunter-gatherers to the brink of extinction. Although there were many candidates for Australian domestication, as on the other continents, the aborigines could never stop fighting each other long enough for anybody to go beyond foraging for bushfoods. Only where the big game was extinct and the plants were amenable to domestication did farming originate.

Until something better than Otterbein’s explanation comes along, that is my paradigm, and I doubt that anything is going to come along and revise it much.

We are actually at the same “stuck” stage today, regarding the next Epoch. The technology to base the next Epoch on was developed before I was born, but those technologies have been developed and sequestered by the global elite, and the rest of humanity has not mustered the requisite integrity and sentience to overcome humanity’s inertia and the organized suppression, as people are so trapped in their egocentric conceits and scarcity-based conditioning that very few people can even imagine the coming Epoch. I seek the few who have awoken past their conditioning, as they are the only people who have a chance of achieving true sentience before the next Epoch arrives, and I think that their combined sentience and integrity (although I do not ask for heroic levels of it) can usher in the coming Epoch. If we remain stuck here, it may very well be Game Over for humanity.

Best,

Wade

Edited October 3, 2016 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

That guy who uses my Columbus essay wrote a nice article as a prelude to our glorious national holiday. He does not pull any punches. This year, the traffic to my site has been fairly muted, Columbus-wise. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

My primary Avalon thread will go over 1.5 million views today, and the Russian bots seem to have been slowing down lately. These days, when I post on my thread, it is typical to see about 30-40 human viewers at one time. As I write this, there are 13 readers. I am going to commemorate 1.5 million views with a post that leaps ahead a little in my narrative of my lessons learned with Dennis, which I am going extend into what I learned after those days, to take it today and why I am taking my approach. I think that it will become obvious to discerning readers.

This year, the hits to my Columbus essay around Columbus Day were relatively muted, at nearly 3,000 visitors to my Columbus essay this month so far, and for the first time, at this time of year, it did not catch up to my big essay, which has more than 4,000 visits so far this month. This year has been a relatively slow one for my site, as this year I will “only” have about 90,000 human visitors. None of that is very important to me. What is important is beginning that high level conversation, and nobody has stepped up yet, although some are training for it. Then we will see how it goes.

I am constantly approached by people stuck in social consciousness (which is pre-sentient), who want me to water down my work so that members of their social circles can maybe take a sip of it, if it is not too much trouble, without their heads exploding. I have absolutely no interest in that. Spoon-feeding my work to the asleep is playing with dynamite. That said, I have plenty of executive summaries, easy-to-read presentations, short essays on various topics, introductory essays, I have done interviews, and so on. I have done plenty to provide sufficient introductions to my work, and the people I seek will dive in and not come up for air for months or years. They are out there, and I hear from them regularly, although few are brave enough to stand on the global stage with me.

The people I seek care and have been awakened, and few of them walk on Earth today. For those that I seek, they will be able to relate to these lessons learned posts, and many other posts and essays on my adventures. They will recognize a fellow traveler, and they will realize that I woke up the hard way. I hope that their awakening was an easier process, but I have noticed that how awake people are is often directly proportional to the impact of their awakening experiences. Many people think that they are awake, but are just at some intermediary slumbering state. People who drag along the baggage of their conditioning are not yet awake, and very few people want to wake up. It is just what it is, and it does no good to judge the situation.

My work is partly intended to help people recognize that baggage for what it is. For those few who care and have been awakened, which is really the hard part, then I need them to be scientifically literate, and not many people are, at less than 10% of the American population, for instance. I have also developed a curriculum so that those who aren’t can become scientifically literate enough to be useful for what I am doing. I designed it so that people do not need genius-level IQs to do the work. I believe that it really is not that difficult, if people have a love of the truth and are willing to do the work. I am guessing that an IQ of only 110 or so is needed. Some of my scientist pals think that I am wrong, but we will see.

My jury is still out on whether people need to relinquish the religion of this epoch, materialism, in order to be useful for my effort, although all of my fellow travelers that I respect in the free energy milieu had a mystical awakening, and they were usually scientists or scientists-in-training when it happened, which generally ruined them as mainstream scientists, as it did Brian O. Dennis has yet to relinquish the agrarian religion that he grew up with, and I doubt that he will in this lifetime, and he is the greatest human I have yet met or heard of.

I have devoted the rest of my life’s spare time to growing the choir, and at this time, it is far more important to me to get my material in as good a shape as I can, not broadcast it to the masses. But people constantly approach me to network, broadcast, and the like, but they have yet to do the work that my curriculum demands, which means that they don’t yet understand.

My day job has been far more demanding than I expected this year, and I have not been able to do my essay update yet, and this one will be rather significant. It will in no way change that essay’s thrust, but will flesh out the topics a lot more, from astronomy to molecular biology to geology to anthropology, to the latest findings and hypotheses on Earth’s and life’s evolution. It will be fun to update it, when I can find the time. It might not be until next year, alas. But I had a good hiking season (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9), even with all the demands on my time and energy, which sometimes got to be way too much, such as working every day for weeks on end, putting in 70-hour weeks, etc. My next month, for instance, will be one of those hurricane times, about a Category 5.

Best,

Wade

Edited October 16, 2016 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

As an addendum to the previous post, what I need are people who have the ability and willingness to think epochally, and learning to think epochally is probably the primary point of my big essay. People trapped in their egos have no chance to do so, as they can’t see any further than their immediate self-interest and project their fearful awareness on all they see.

Understanding the basics of how the world works is very important, and studying how complex life appeared on Earth, how humanity’s ancestors left the rainforest, how humanity left Africa, how plants were first domesticated, how civilizations first arose, and how industrialization happened are very important exercises in learning how to think epochally. Otherwise, people project their uninformed and egocentric awareness on all they see, and fail to see the big picture. I’ll provide some examples.

The demographic transition is the biggest effect of industrialization on humanity, as agrarian societies went from short-lived, illiterate, often brutal societies with many forced servitude institutions, in which woman were little more than broodmares to provide the peasant workforce, to something else. The energy surplus of industrial economies saw slavery end, life expectancies skyrocket, literacy become universal, societies became much more humane, and woman found much better things to do with their lives than become baby factories. But I recently heard the objection that in the Fifth Epoch, women will breed out of control, having ten children each, which betrayed complete ignorance of the demographic transition. Women are biologically equipped to become mothers, and most will continue to have one, but not much more than that. It has already happened.

A similar argument comes from so-called environmentalists, who say that with FE, humanity will simply strip-mine Earth until there is nothing left. I know that not only FE is sequestered from humanity by Godzilla and friends, but also antigravity (or electrogravity), along with advanced materials that make Flubber seem not so fictional. I hike year-round in forests, much of which are intact or are being allowed to recover, and the only reason for that is because we get our energy from fossil fuels, not wood. In Japan, they have not cut down a tree for nearly a century, and their forests are sacred groves. When people don’t need to rape Earth to live the good life, they won’t. Similarly, when people don’t need to rape each other to live the good life, they won’t, and crime and warfare will disappear. Maybe not overnight, just like slavery did not disappear in 1709 and 1710, when the foundation of industrialization was established, but anybody with any foresight could see that when machines replaced people, forced servitude would no longer make economic sense, which was the only reason why the institution existed. In a world of scarcity and fear, people’s exploiting everything around them, even their families, makes economic sense. Once the economic incentive ends, so will the practice.

One asteroid can provide all of humanity’s metal needs for the foreseeable future, and mining Earth will make as much sense as getting our water supply from our sewers. People will almost instantly see the insanity of it, and that practice will end. All greed-based institutions will end, as Earth’s poorest person will make Bill Gates appear a pauper, just like the average American today lives better than Earth’s richest human of three centuries ago.

Those who say that women will just breed with abandon, that we will just strip-mine Earth with FE, that we will just have bigger and more devastating wars, are the epochal equivalent of antebellum southerners quoting their Bibles to justify slavery. Just like how slavery disappeared in the industrial epoch, almost all of humanity’s hallowed institutions and ideologies will become meaningless in the Fifth Epoch, and I seek people who are able and willing to imagine it, not give knee-jerk objections, which are only projecting scarcity onto a world of abundance. Such objections really aren’t rational, but I encounter those arguments all the time, and surprisingly often from the so-called intelligent, those Level 3s who argue that not only is FE “impossible,” but they dismiss evidence of organized suppression as a “conspiracy theory,” and they conjure up every nightmare scenario that they can imagine, if the public had access to FE. Those are not the people that I need for my effort.

Best,

Wade

Edited October 16, 2016 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am waiting to have a conference call with Asia this evening, and this will be a post of sundry observations. I work for a truly global company today, and communicate with Eurasia almost daily, and one day not long ago, I had a conference call with Europe in the morning and Asia in the evening, and I rarely speak with anybody whose first language is English. It is exhausting.

In the Fifth Epoch, there will be one language, one race, no nations, few cities, if any, and they won’t resemble today’s at all. I read books in bed, and have been doing that since childhood. Anymore, I rarely read printed material outside of bed, at least when I am at home. My style is to read several books at once, and I often reread favorite fiction (fantasy, usually), and often pull books from my library that I want to reread (or ones that I haven’t yet), and I daisy chain between them. When the pile of books and magazine next to my bed gets to where I can’t walk anymore (the pile is about 20 books and magazines at the moment), then I will put them all away, other than those I am most actively reading, and start over.

I just got up from a little nap, and before I did, I read parts of The Devil’s Chessboard, which I have been rereading, and those books on The Age of Mammals in Europe and parasites. I have always been like this, but now I think that is becoming a kind of therapy to keep my mind nimble. I juggle many balls at once at my day job, often engaging in challenging creative and conceptual technical work that I have to try to help my colleagues on other continents understand. I’ll likely finish the parasite book within a month, during my 60-70 hour weeks, etc., and will have more to say later, but some recent reading in it really struck me. One was sneaking toward confirmation of what Seth said long ago, and was confirmed by the pleomorphic discoveries of Béchamp onwards. It was a cutting edge finding, which showed that the very same microbes could be symbiotic, harmless, or parasitic, depending on the internal chemistry of the host organism, humans in this instance. Maybe the mainstream will catch up to Béchamp one day.

Another thing that really strikes me, when digesting the latest findings in biology, is how primitive and barbaric our scientific methods are. The parasite book often referred to experiments with mice and other small animals, and what went unsaid, and I suppose the authors assume the readers know or it does not matter, is that virtually all of the experimental subjects are killed and often dissected, and even vivisected. Far more than 100 million animals are killed in experiments each year around the world. I again harken to Seth, who said that the people performing those experiments know less about life when the experiments are completed than before they began. It is a highly degenerate practice, spiritually, but is in keeping with the degenerate nature of materialism in general.

In the Fifth Epoch, science is not going to resemble today’s version much, if at all. I can still see the scientific ideal having its place, but the many evils of science, as well as the brute force practices so prevalent today, will disappear. There are no animal experiments like today’s in this world, for instance.

Best,

Wade

Edited October 17, 2016 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I recently mentioned ordering Greer’s latest video series, and began watching The History of New Energy video this evening.  Well, it was not the history of new energy as much as it was the history of Greer’s numerous failed efforts, and he does not seem to understand yet.  How disappointing.  He is still at the inventor-with-a-gizmo stage, interacting with billionaires, governments, the spooks, engaging the masses, and so on.  I guess that on one hand, it means that my approach is still unique and needed (although very few understand these days, and that is OK), but on the other, it began to become very painful to watch, as he unveiled his $100K offer for a working FE gizmo, mentioning Keshe the Messiah (whom Greer and everybody credible in the field has grave doubts about), etc.  Almost all that I saw in Greer’s talk reflected the field’s state of arrested development, as he focused on inventors, big money, heads of state, etc.  Kudos for his courage, giving his talk down the street from the White House, with what he has been through, but it reminded me of Dennis so much, doggedly trying the same approaches.

I could go on and on about the overlaps of our journeys, and plenty of them were in his video, but watching it began to be like recalling a nightmare.  I can understand why Greer has taken his approach, as well as Dennis’s and Brian’s approaches, but Greer is the last of them standing and his approach very likely does not have a prayer.  Also, Greer is taking the hero’s journey, which is something that I stopped believing in long ago.  I respect a lot of what Greer learned the hard way (that I could have told him a lot about before he got involved in the field), but I strongly doubt that his approach is going to bear any fruit.  I would love to be proven wrong, but I don’t see his approach working.  I am so disappointed this evening that I don’t know when I am going to watch Greer’s stuff again.  There is plenty there for the beginner, but it is really beginner’s level stuff, and I suppose that I should have expected as much.  

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Freeknowledge does his homework, which is what I ideally seek.  Way too many people approach me with their cup full, with New Age/Conspiracist “advice,” but they don’t do their homework.  Yes indeed, Niele’s book was influential, and was part of my adopting that Epochal framework.  Probably the two most “paradigmatic” books on my scholar’s journey were Fuller’s Utopia or Oblivion and Niele’s book.  In both instances, I had already been groping toward what they presented.  For instance, I wrote the “big picture” part of that DOE proposal a year or so before encountering Niele’s book, and finished the 2002 version of my site before encountering Bucky, which still comprises the bulk of my site today, but all of my writings since encountering Bucky have been more consciously comprehensive.  As far as energy and the human journey, Earl Cook’s work was more seminal to my work than Niele’s.  That Epochal Event table has Cook to thank for its genesis, and the numerical data partly comes from it.  I read Cook’s masterpiece in 2008 and Niele’s in 2010, and wrote that DOE proposal between them.  Encountering the Peak Oilers was another key event in my study for writing my big essay.

As far as Niele’s work and mine go, I began thinking in terms of humanity’s Epochal Events before reading Niele’s work, as you can see from that DOE proposal (I suspect that Cook’s book helped me the most in thinking in terms of Epochs), but Niele’s work helped crystallize it.  I invented the Second and Fifth Epochs.  As I recall, I began thinking about the First Epoch because of Niele’s book, and also began thinking in terms about early life on Earth in energy terms from reading Niele’s book.  I obtained Andrew Knoll’s book because of reading Niele’s, and as I sit back and take in the bookshelves in my office that I used for the first half of my big essay, I obtained almost all of them after reading Niele’s book.  Because I bought most of my books in the past decade from Amazon, even for those that I don’t have the receipt in them as bookmarks, I can instantly tell when I bought the book.  For instance, I bought Jonathan Lunine’s masterwork because I read about it in Niele’s.  

I was already writing in terms of the Third and Fourth Epochs when I encountered Niele’s work, as you can tell from the DOE proposal, but Niele is partly responsible for the First (as is Richard Wrangham), and the genesis of the first half of my big essay partly has him to thank, although you can see its genesis in my energy racket essay, which I wrote back in 2001 or so.

A relative recommended Rare Earth to me, and after reading it in 2010, I realized that I had read one of Peter Ward’s books several years earlier (in 2004) on the mammoth extinctions.  I have ten of Ward’s books today, and he might be the most cited author in my big essay.  When I get to my essay update (I’ll write more about that soon), Ward’s latest, with Joe Kirschvink, will be prominent.  The most satisfying part of my years of study since 2003, when I encountered Bucky and became more consciously comprehensive, was resuming my science studies in earnest (which really began back in 1990).  Ah heck, I am going to say it now, as some years have now passed and I am not putting him at risk of being unduly pestered; I contacted Peter Ward a couple of months before I first published my big essay, to get his permission to publish a graphic from one of his books.  

A happy aspect of my journey is that when I have contacted the great, they affirmed my impression that they were also great human beings.  When I first wrote to Uncle Noam back in 1992 (which I will write about soon), I got a gracious letter in reply.  When I wrote an email to Howard Zinn in October 2001, asking for permission to quote him in my Columbus essay, I not only heard from him the same day, he bestowed effusive praise on my essay.  When I contact people of far lesser stature, I rarely hear back from them.  It is the great ones who have been the most gracious and most enthusiastic about my work.  Chris Ferguson was nothing but gracious with me, unlike most of the others whom I encountered when trying to get housekeeping done regarding Brian’s legacy, including people who were very close to Brian.

Somewhat crazily, when I contact people in cyberspace who rave about my work, I rarely hear back from them, and when contacting people of global stature such as Peter Ward, I wonder if I will ever hear back at all.  Imagine my surprise when less than an hour after emailing Dr. Ward, he gave me gracious permission to publish that graphic.  That was more than I expected, and to get his consent in less than an hour was like my surprise at hearing back from Howard Zinn a few hours later, or getting a gracious letter from Uncle Noam, or my continuing correspondence with Uncle Ed, who will be 92 soon!  

I contacted Dr. Ward in June 2014, as I was busily working on my big essay, getting it ready for its August publication (I finished the first draft in early May).  I received that email from him around 9:00 AM, as I recall.  I had already heard from Michael Hyson on my first draft.  Michael spent all day reading it, and his response was, “Wow!”  Michael is a big-time biologist, and hearing from him in that way was gratifying and let me know that I did not waste my time in the study for and writing that first half of my big essay.  Peter Ward, however, is a world authority on the subject matter that the first half of my big essay covers, and writes popularized science himself.  He is arguably the best-qualified person on Earth to weigh in on the first half of my big essay, and not just on the science, but also how I wrote for the lay audience.

I did not seek Dr. Ward’s opinion on my work and did not expect to hear back from him after receiving his permission, which was more than I had hoped for to begin with.  Imagine my surprise a few hours later, on that June day, when I received another email from him.  He had spent the day reading my essay draft, and wrote to express his amazement.  Higher praise I could not seek.  I replied with surprised thanks, and at the end of the day, Dr. Ward wrote me again and stated that my effort on the journey of life on Earth was one of the best that he had ever seen.  If nothing else, his praise told me that I was at least doing a competent job of it.

Nobody can do what I do alone.  I had the help of many scholars, scientists, and pals in cyberspace, but without my radicalizing days with Dennis, I never would have done any of it.  So, I guess that I have to also thank that damned voice in my head.   

I was going to write about it soon anyway, but this seems to be the right time for it.  I am really getting the itch to update my big essay.  I have a stack of books and scientific magazines next to my desk, which I will use for that essay update (my quality reading since I last updated the essay in May 2015).  But it will likely take a month of full-time work to do so, and I was planning on doing it this year, in my spare time.  I was planning on having a few months off this year, to hike and work on that essay update.

I had a good hiking year, but my day job blew up into a full-time job and then some, in the standard corporate nightmare.  And it looks like getting a month off may be out of the question for the rest of my career, alas.  So, it is looking like I cannot update the essay how I wanted to, but I will have to now somehow squeeze it in.  That means that something is going to have to give, and my daily forum postings will likely suffer for it.  I am going to keep plowing away at my lessons learned posts, but when I finish them, likely within the next month, I will likely go fairly quiet as I work on the essay update.  Nothing is going to change the big essay’s thrust, but the update will go deeper in areas, polish up some others, and there will always be new scientific findings to update the essay with, just like any college science textbook. For instance, over the weekend I read that the newest findings are showing that the accretion disk that formed our solar system only lasted for a few million years and was likely much hotter than previously supposed, partly because of some short-lived isotopes such as aluminum-26, and the Hadean Eon is getting a makeover.  

Best,

Wade

Edited November 21, 2016 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Well, another singer has stepped up, that was quite a tune to listen to, and he is just getting started. I’ll be asking more questions about Chris’s journey soon, but wanted to expand a little on some of Chris’s observations.  There have been many Golden Ages for lucky organisms, and some lasted quite some time.  But they always ended, and it was always an energy scarcity dynamic that ended it, whether it was breeding to the environment’s carrying capacity, energy competition with other species, or hostile environmental conditions, often created by life itself.  Plants beat animals to land by 40 million years or so, so that was their Golden Age.  When animals came onto land and began eating plants, plants developed many defensive strategies to avoid being eaten, but about 160 million years ago, some plants decided to bait animals into helping them reproduce, which resulted in a symbiosis that led to humans.  When monkeys appeared, they soon became dimorphic, which is a result of how females chose their mates.  Males became soldiers that defended the territorial perimeter, and the bigger and stronger males got enhanced mating privileges.  So, this ideal of the big, strong, heroic, protective man being a female ideal is baked very deeply into the human animal.  Men and women coevolved into their respective roles, and shaking them has not been easy.

Monkeys are matrilocal, with males leaving their natal groups to mate, but somehow apes reversed that.  For all great apes, females leave their natal groups to mate, and males became even more dimorphic.  Then it got brutal.  Male gorillas and chimps will kill infants that they did not sire (the average female gorilla will lose one infant in her lifetime that way), and non-dominant orangutan males (unflanged) will rape any female that they can, and the flanged ones engage in epic battles over dominance that can leave them disfigured or dead.  Patriarchal gorillas constantly fend off gangs of males without harems, who try to unseat the patriarch.  Successful upstarts will then kill all infants of the former patriarch, so that the females will then quickly mate with them.  Chimps have ruling gangs that constantly vie for power, and genocide of their neighbors, taking the females as war booty, and killing their infants so that they will mate with the killers, is standard chimp behavior.  As thoughtful scientists have noted, evolution has plenty to answer for.

What an evolutionary legacy to inherit, and humans are deeply marked by that heritage, which can be seen in people today, and Chris honestly described his struggles with those “ideals” that came with his conditioning of growing up.  Societies exploit those “heroic” proclivities, as young men make the ideal cannon fodder.  In the West, the hero archetype is several thousand years old, and it is not easy to shake.

There were some brief Golden Ages of the human journey, too, such as the Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer, which lasted until all the easy meat was extinct.  And then it was territorial warring over scarce resources.  Australians never overcame that dynamic, until the British invaded and drove them to the brink of extinction, as peoples of an earlier Epoch never stood a chance when peoples of later epochs invaded (the Neolithic Expansion is another example).  Those so-called human golden ages almost always rode on the backs of other organisms and humans which were often driven to extinction to support those so-called golden ages (the English/American expansion across North America is another example).  The closest thing to that elusive human golden age that Chris hoped for was likely in matrilineal horticultural villages.  Those people became matrilineal because the easy meat in the area was hunted to extinction and women then began bringing in more calories than the men, and where the environment was conducive to it, plants were domesticated.  That broke up the ruling male gangs, and the rise of all pristine civilizations was peaceful.  But when there was an energy surplus (provided by food, in this instance), men began to play political games with it, rose to dominance once again, and women’s status universally declined with the rise of civilization, as the men dominated, with their physical strength, often psychopathic cunning, and violence.  

But each successive epoch saw increasingly humane societies, because they could afford to be, with their rising energy surpluses.  The energy of fossil fuels powered the Industrial Revolution, which liberated women and slaves and led to the demographic transition.  

In our evolutionary line, we can also see what rising energy surpluses can do.  During one of the glacial phases of this ice age (about a million years ago), gorillas left the region south of the Congo and never returned.  The chimps there suddenly had their food supply double, which led to larger and stable foraging parties, females and non-dominant males ended the rule of violent of male gangs, and bonobo societies are more peaceful than any human society has ever been.  The new energy subsidy allowed chimps to reengineer their societies.

The Fifth Epoch, like all of the previous ones, will ride on the back of an increasing energy surplus, but unlike the previous ones, this one promises to achieve true and sustainable abundance for the first time ever.  I’ll buy a ticket to see what can happen then.  In a nutshell, that is what I am attempting, and as Chris noted, the hero’s journey is not going to get it done.  But a choir can help, and might just be the critical missing piece.  If nothing else, trying out the choir approach should be fun. 

Best,

Wade

Edited December 7, 2016 by Wade Frazier