It Was Fun While It Lasted

8/9/2019 It Was Fun While It Lasted

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Kanook-Tlingit Nation

June 25th, 2010

I realize that some of you dont laze around wondering about the end-of-time and to be

truthful neither do I, only when a random thought suddenly fires across my grey matter might I

pull up short and briefly wonder like I said this is a rare occurrence in my day-to-day existence

wandering about on the Blue Marble. Why now is different I really dont know, but I decided to

wander through some of the different scenarios associated with our Earths and maybe ourUniverse coming up short with time, that is as our scholars understand it.

Well before Abraham traveled from the valleys of southern Turkey onto Canaanite soil, a

simple man walked the earth, a philosopher from, what some say in pagan antiquity who was

monotheistic and moral without any assistance from the Christian, Islamic or Jewish religions.

He was the model and substance in the 20 th Century for the musical theme of the movie, 2001, a

Hollywood Space Odyssey Thus Spake Zarathrustra composed by the German composer

Richard Strauss. It is reported, from antiquity, that this monotheistic man went beyond the last

turn of creation, and foretold the destruction of the world, and its wonderful rebirth to be

inhabited by the good that will live in a paradise beyond compare.

During the last few years, many of you good folk wandering around out there have either read

or seen some visual information addressing the end-of-the-world based on the information

contained or not contained within the Mayan Calendar. Whereas interpretation of the discs by

archeologists with degrees hanging on their office walls that stretch from Miami, Florida to

Barrow, Alaska, inform us uninformed that our years will zero out on December 21st, 2012.

This date corresponds to the end of a 394-year cycle called a baktun. And that a baktun is

part of a larger 8,000-year cycle called a pictun, and for some reason there is no continuation of

time shown on these ancient discs, prompting many scholars and non-scholars, and a few

scientists to speculate that this lack of evidence signifies the end-of-the-world. Think, for

yourself here, you visit our present days past and find a 12-month calendar that ends in a

December of a certain year, and you cannot located another calendar anywhere else in your

frantic search for another from a year-following do you immediately jump to the conclusion


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that the year shown, albeit a few years following your present time, do you assume that the end-

is-near? Some would!

Whatever kind of catastrophe awaits us in 2012, most of science believes that our eventual end

will come from beyond our sphere, you know an astronomical intruder that will provide what

some label a serious threat to the place you and I call home.

Just shy of 102-years ago around 7:15 AM local time a powerful explosion took place not far

from the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in the area of Krasnoyarsk Krai in Russia, albeit the

exact cause of the event is still under some serious debate, most believe it was the result of an air

burst caused by the fragmentation of a large meteoroid or comet at an altitude of 3.1 to 6.2

miles, estimates on the objects size range from ten meters to a few tens of meters across. Some

scientists tell us that an event such as Tunguska happens every century or so where a 35 meteor

slams into our home with the force of a small nuclear force, and that every few thousand years or

so our Blue Marble passes through unusually thick regions in the cosmos of the debris trails of

comet, turning our yearly friendly light show of meteors into a deadly firestorm.

A little over 63-years-ago on Feb 12 th, 1947, people going about

their daily business at 10:30 AM watched an incoming object moving

at approximately 31.3 thousand mph come flying out of the north at

about 41, causing a bright flash accompanied by the sound of it

slamming into the earth a few miles from Luchegorsk about 275 miles

northeast of Vladivostok its smoky trail around 20-miles long hung

around in the sky for hours.

As it entered the atmosphere it begin to break apart with its

fragments falling together, at an altitude of 3.5 miles a large part of it

broke up in a violent explosion, whereas before it began to breakup it original weight is estimated

at 1.9 million pounds, and the piece that exploded at around 198,000 pounds. Today if a 198,000

pound extraterrestrial object were to bump into let us say New York City finding a yellow cab

would be a little difficult to say the least, but it would solve part of their crime problem.

When you look at the possibilities or our extinction outside of the extraterrestrial element we

find a large yet diverse ways we can be done in, one of these that hasnt occupied but a few minds

is the;

1) Deliberate misuse of nanotechnology - Whereas molecular nanotechnology will enable

the construction of bacteria size self-replicating mechanical robots that can exist on dirt or

other organic matter. Such devices could in reality consume our biosphere or destroy it by

other means such as poisoning it, burning it, or blocking out sunlight. A person, group or


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government could cause the extinction of our civilization by deliberately or accidentally

releasing some nanobots into our environment.

2) Nuclear holocaust, albeit were on pretty good terms with our past Cold War advisory

Russia, both the USA and Russia still have huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons where

there are differing opinions on whether or not an all-out nuclear war would exterminate all

of humankind, the end of discussions relate that were not sure. Another side effect would

be a drastic change in our climate, whereas some predict a long-lasing nuclear winter, albeit

this scenario is also an unknown and there could be spotty mini-nuclear hotspots due to

the development of nuclear arms outside of the superpowers, as at last count our society has

some 2,000 tons of plutonium laying around, and that ten-times as much is tied up sitting

on a nuclear weapon. Consensus among most scientists and scholars is that our race

pushed back to the Stone Age would not survive, due to our advance civilization as it

stands today being unable to provide for them in a world that has been devastated.

3) Computers/Simulation this extinction event is based on the premise, labeled the

Simulation argument, whereas our society develops enormous amounts of computing

power in the near future that allows, among other things super sophisticated simulations

emulating life today or in the past, where all minds are simulated minds, and that these

minds (Matrix-movie) evolve and evolve pushing aside the minds of the real creatures

originally created and if we move into this realm, what if the computer grid just shuts

down. Considering all options available, not so far-out of an idea.

4) Badly programmed super-intelligence as we move toward creating a super-intelligence,

somewhere along the path our programmers at MSN make a mistake (which they have been

known to do once in awhile) and give the super-intelligence a couple of miss-commands

that turn into goals to annihilate humankind this is assuming that somewhere along the

way our idiot leaders give this super-intelligence physical presence on our labs or weapons

factories, or access to the command-and-control of world-wide military installations.

Thereby a simple mistake, such as asking it to solve for let us say, what is the total mass of

plutonium, we now have it attached to missiles and it decided that this plutonium is bad for

us, them and makes a decision to get rid of it, and it runs amuck and does its thing.

5) Genetically engineered biological agent There is no doubt that our society has made some

pretty impressive advances in the field of genetics, what if a tyrant, terrorist, or some

lunatic from Juneau created a doomsday virus, in other words an organism that combines

long-latency along with a highly virulent and high incident of mortality, and it spreads

across the globe spreading violent death. Highly violent viruses can be spawned


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unintentionally, as show lately when Australian researches, when they created a modified

mousepox virus with a 100% mortality while attempting to design a contraceptive virus

for mice for use in pest control while none of us are mice (albeit you might get an

argument for the term to apply to the members of the present sitting USA administration) it

is more than suspected than an analogous alteration would increase the mortality of the

human smallpox virus. Supporting this scenario the mistake was quickly published in a

scientific journal detailing the makeup of the mistake, giving the formula to the public in

some circles just scares the hell out of the political community as the protectors of the

human race. Just as nano-technology, genetically modified medicine carrys its dangers,

and there is no guarantee the genetically modified cure will remain as it is originally

designed, mutating in another form causing the demise of large portions of our civilization.

6) Physics Disasters there has been some speculation, albeit not in the local coffee shops

around the world, whereas some highly-evolved scientists tinkering with such things as

particle accelerators that some experiment in the future might just create a breakdown of a

meta-stable vacuum state (big-vacuum cleaner) in our part of the cosmos, thereby creating

a true vacuum of a lower energy density in turn creating an expanding bubble of total

destruction that would sweep through the galaxy and beyond at the speed-of-light, tearing

apart all matter as it sweeps along. And then there are some of these great minds who lay

awake at night worried that they might produce a negatively charged form of nuclear matter

(create a mini black hole) that would sink to the center of our Blue Marble and start eating

the rest of the planet. Seems impossible based on our present knowledge of physics, but

keep in mind we dont understand all there is to know about physics, that is why were

doing these experiments.

7) Naturally occurring disease just what if AIDS was as contagious as the common cold?

All across the spectrum, scientists, politicians and those who watch the news everyday

understand what a global pandemic would do to our home, and today we are subject to a

much faster spread of such a pandemic with jet travel, shipping goods from one country to

another at the drop-of-a-hat and our urban dwelling conditions as the population explodes

seemingly out-of-control in other words were ripe for another Black Death.

8) Runaway global warming albeit Al Gore and his thugs seemed to have marched us down

the wrong path, driven by their greed, a possible global warming scenario is not completely

out-of-the-picture whereas the globe continues to warm at an unchecked rate it might be

that this is a naturally occurring condition, only to be really stopped when for some reason

we slip into another Ice Age me, I think the jury is still out on the direct related causes of


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global warming, whereas CO2is such a small part of our atmosphere, that it might be there

is another reason some parts of our planet has experience a spurt of warming.

9) Asteroid or comet impact now I will walk us back into the primary purpose of this piece,

albeit a category that carrys a small risk of happening tomorrow, just as the

aforementioned, a good sized object, let us assume some 1.8 to 6.2 miles in diameter slams

into this Blue Marble, wait, records show us that there has been five and maybe well over a

dozen of mass extinctions caused by an extraterrestrial body breaking through our

protective atmosphere most of you have read about the much published fact that many

believe what is known as the K/T extinction some 65-million years ago was caused by a 6.2

to 9.3 in diameter asteroid bumping into the Yucatan Peninsula.

Some of us have been outside on a clear night and watched streaks of light flash across the sky

in the blink of an eye, and we know that small objects frequently whiz through our atmosphereand land somewhere. Our scientists know and understand that there is an inverse relationship

between the size of an object and the frequency that larger objects bump into our home.

Latest guesses put the statistics at asteroids with a 0.62 mile diameter striking the earth every

500,000 years here the kicker (on average), and that large ones running around 3 miles in

diameter slam into us every ten million years or so and that the last known 6.2 mile in diameter

object to run into our planet was the one that smacked into the Yucatan Peninsula, what is known

as Chicxulub around 65-million years ago. The energy released by the impact has been

calculated to equal 100,000,000 mega-tons of TNT, which created a crater more than 110 miles indiameter, making the Chicxulub Crater one of the largest confirmed impact structures on Earth.

Some scholars argue that such an impact would have killed frogs as well as dinosaurs, yet frogs

survived the extinction event, while others state, after analyzing the core samples from

Chicxulub, that they prove that the impact event happened about 300,000 years before the mass

extinction, thereby not even being a causal factor in the extinction event.


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Over the last few years several other craters

approximately the same age as Chicxulub have

been discovered, all between the latitudes of

20N and 70N such as the Silverpit crater a

buried sub-sea structure in the North Sea just off

the coast of the United Kingdom, albeit the

designation as a extraterrestrial crater is disputed,

whereas some maintain the crater like formation

was caused by the withdrawal of rock caused by

salt mobility. It estimated age is between 75 and 45 million years ago.

Under the assumption that it is really an impact crater, the impactors size is estimated at 395

feet across traveling at 44.7 thousand to 111.8 thousand mph having a mass of 2 x 10 times 9 kg,

in other words pretty big and damn fast. This size with the tremendous mass it had traveling at it

speed it would have generated a very large tsunami so far no evidence in the surrounding area

has been found linked to a huge tsunamis, of course were talking a few million years ago.

Another crater during the same timeframe is the Boltysh Crater in central Ukraine in the basin

of the Tiasmyn River, a tributary of the Dnieper River. The crater is some 25-miles in diameter,

and is surrounded by an ejecta blanket of breccia preserved over an area of 2,510 square miles,

with an estimate that immediately after impact the ejecta area was 9,650 square miles to a depth

of 3 feet or more and some 1,960 feet deep at the crater rim.

Albeit both craters are much smaller than Chicxulub, the sequence has led many scholars to

believe that the Chicxulub impact may have been only one of many impacts during the period

noted. One other crater, albeit is

contested as being an impact crater is

the Shiva Crater located under the

waves in the Indian Ocean just west of

Mumbai. It too has an estimated age

of 65 million years. As shifting

currents more than likely have

changed its shape, whereas today it has been measured being 373 miles long and some 249 miles

wide and is believed to have been caused by an asteroid or comet some 25-miles in diameter.

As some evidence supports the fact of some serious impacts happening around the 65-million

year time frame, of which each one could possibly be an end-of-life impact, but three of them


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spaced even 1,000 or more years apart would have made life-starting-over a complicated

proposition.

Recent observations of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact with Jupiter in 1994 demonstrated that

gravitational interactions can fragment a comet, giving support to many impacts over a period

of a few days if the comet should collide with a planet, and if the piece of rock is far enough out

in space from the planet and breaks up, one or more of the pieces might establish an orbit of their

own and impact the planet at a later time-frame. This might apply to the Sivan and Chicxulub

craters even though they might have been formed 300,000 apart.

Impact timeframes of millions of years are a little hard for one to grasp, whereas an impending

doom projected out a few million years will not cause one to run to their corner market to stock

up on bottle of whatever but consider that asteroids with diameters ranging from 16 to 33

enter our atmosphere approximately once per year, with as much energy riding with them to

equal the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, about 33,100 pounds, Ordinarily they explode in

our upper atmosphere and vaporize. Objects averaging around 164 in diameter slam into us once

every 50-100 years, producing the likes of Tunguska and recent calculations show there is strong

possibility of a one some 0.62 miles in diameter bumping into us in the month of March in the

year 2880, albeit the chance of this happening is rated on a scale of 0-10 at a low rating of 2 on

the Torino Scale.

Around 12,500 years ago our scientists say that our planet was going through a gradual

warming period with the ice moving slowly back towards the poles after 100,000 years of heavy

glaciations, with many square miles of the Northern Hemisphere under thick tracks of ice,

dipping down into England, New England, Great Lakes area and as far south as Olympia in the

State of Washington. In the midst of this retreat of the Ice our planet experience a 1,300 year

blast of chilly weather whereas the temperature in these regions dropped a sudden 14.4F, this

sudden drop of temperature is classified as a mystery.

Winter returned for 1,300 years and civilization went into reverse, today some speculate with

their super-dooper computers and sheets and sheets of calculations that the planet collided with

the debris from a vast comet measuring some 31 to- 62 miles across that had wandered into

our Solar System some 30,000 years ago, and then breaking up. Our orbit drug us into the debris

field which upon contact unleashed a firestorm that blanketed the atmosphere with ash and

dust, thereby reducing the heat and light from our friendly Sun.

The remnants of the massive comet are still around, and periodically our orbit and the orbit of

the stuff crisscross and we witness many of its fragments as periodic meteor showers and we

drift once again through the Taruid Complex.


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Albeit the huge comet broke up, there remains a portion that maintained most of the mass of the

breakup in one ball, which is known as Comet 2P/Encke, which lately made a pass through our

local system some 24 million miles from Earth on Nov 17th, 2003.

Orbit of the Taruids NOT 2P/Encke

Today, conservative estimates suggest that for every asteroid on a dangerous Earth-

Approaching orbit that there are hundreds more which have yet to be discovered, whereas today

we have mapped over 300 known objects on Earth-crossing orbits, with a majority of them

having the potential of causing death and destruction surpassing anything we have experienced in

our human history. Latest estimates, called by some scholars a rectal reach say there are at

least 100,000 objects out there we will sooner or later bump into, and some with an extreme reach

call for as many as 1,000,000.

August 13th, 1930 began as a normal day along the banks of the River Curuca in the Brazilian

Amazon region, near the Peruvian frontier. The inhabitants on the bright sun-lit morning were

going about their daily chores, when around 8:00 AM the sun became blood-red and darkness

crept across the landscape, caused by a large cloud of red dust accompanied by a fine white ash

covering the trees and plants. There then followed ear-piercing whistling sounds (three of them)

after which three huge explosions in rapid succession. Immediately after the three rapid

explosions the whole forest turned into a blazing inferno which lasted several months, causing a

dramatic decrease of population over a large region. Albeit the people along the River Curuca

survived they believe the world was at end and their death was just around the corner.

Five days later, Father Fedele dAlviano, an Italian Capuchin-Franciscan monk, began his

annual missionary trek into the River Curuca region and found the people still in a high-state of


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event effecting an area the size of Great Britain, and if the impact is in one of our oceans a tidal

wave moving at tremendous speeds destroying low lying coastal regions, and if on land in

addition to the devastation caused by the impact creating enough dust throwing it into our fragile

atmosphere blocking out the rays of our life-giving Sun in any case ruining your day.

One such event, that our scientists have identified is the Ries Crater in Bavaria some 15-miles

in diameter within the city of Nordlingen, whereas a 4,900 foot across asteroid hit, excavating

more than a trillion tons of material and scattering it over the northern hemisphere, somewhere

around 7.5 million years ago.

Albeit there are currently a large number of asteroids having orbits intersecting with ours

doesnt translate that a collision is inevitable, thank goodness, our scholars tell us they range in

size from a few meters to up to 6-miles in diameter a working group chaired by Dr David

Morrison of NASA Ames Research Center estimates that there are 2,100 such asteroids larger

than 0.62 miles, and maybe 320,000 larger than 300 feet in diameter. The 300 foot asteroids

would not cause a global incident, but it would certainly make life miserable locally when it

slammed into the area. They have concluded that an object larger than 1.2 miles in diameter

would put a large portion of our global population at a serious risk, in other words a bunch

would not survive. And any object over 3-miles in diameter would cause a mass-extinction on a

very large scale but, with data since gathered from the collision of Shoemaker-Levy 9 with

Jupiter they have lowered the size of a globally threatening body to one about 0.62 miles in

diameter.

About every 100 million years a monster passes through our atmosphere and slams into the

earth, generating global earthquakes, mile-high tidal waves, killing off all large land animals and

making life beneath the waves purely chaotic with death soon to follow as it causes the

vaporization of trillions of tons of water or vaporized rock falling into the sea and the land

surfaces food-chain is destroyed as the dust blocks the Suns rays and photosynthesis goes by the

wayside. Evidence found to date show this happened 65-million years okay on the Yucatan

Peninsula, whereas our tiny ancestors (if you believe this sort of stuff) were the beneficiaries of

the demise of the giant lizards wandering about.

But dont worry we have technology that keeps watch over the skies designed to give us ample

warning if a large rock is threatening our space, supposedly giving us sufficient time to do

something about it question is what? Rambo and the Terminator have reached retirement age

and Bruce Willis has also hung up his gloves leaving us with Morgan Freeman to send out a

bunch of nuclear missiles to either blow the heck out of it, or give it a push one way or the other

and to lead the global prayer session when nothing works.


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Earth just might escape being eaten which in a sense would make little difference to any of its

dead life on its surface. Where in 2008 British astronomers ran another simulation that showed

due to the Suns weakened gravitational pull moving outward away from the what was the center

of the Solar System however because in addition to the Suns expansion the Earth would still be

within the outer atmosphere of our friend , and in this the pull of the outer layers would

eventually drag or beloved home back towards the Sun and vaporize our home in about 7.5

billion years, like I said nothing to run down to the corner grocery store to prepare for right about

now.

But our grip on life here is estimated to come to a close about 1-billion years from now, when

the Suns growing brightness wipes out our planet turning it into a hot-dry global desert where

dropping carbon dioxide levels will starve plants of their ability to conduct photosynthesis and

wed all die along with the plants.

In order for humans to maintain their slim hold on life our future depends on some new

solutions that require our race finding a way to get off this doomed world and set up a few

colonies at another location albeit another solution might be to capture a large enough asteroid

and use its gravitational effects to pull us out of orbit and nudge Earth further away from the Sun,

where brains who stay awake at night worrying about this scenario tell us that a continuous

asteroid passage every 6,000 years or so should keep Earth at a comfortable distance and give life

another 5-billion years here on this Blue Marble.

Some say that even life aboard a massive fleet of spaceships would beat species extinction,

which I see if we come to this solution we need to learn how to get-along-together better than

we do today.

The Sun will eventually lose most of its mass as it slowly morphs into a white dwarf, and our

Solar System resembles others that our Spitzer Space Telescope showed us in 2009, a white star

with dust and rocky debris drifting around it which just may have contained at one time a planet

like Earth. Hopefully by that time some of our species would have escaped and colonized some

other part of our Galaxy, and escape the scenario of death by cremation.

In our concept of time, we look out and see that Stars come and go but Galaxies seem eternal,

where our Milky Way acts like it has all the time in the Universe with its spiral arms like

cauldrons where new stars form out of gas that falls in like a fine rain from intergalactic space.

Stars like the Sun will some day die, but consider in Orion and Taurus freshly minted stars are

switching on for the 1st time whereas the bright fizz of a supernova is a sideshow, where most

stars die and unnoticed death and leave behind massive relics of fading embers.


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Since stellar lifetime is a very strong function of mass the smaller lower mass stars are very

stingy when it comes to burning up their hydrogen, thereby the lowest mass stars will eke our a

dim existence for over a trillion years.

Therefore, the end of the Milky Way will come every so slowly in a stellar lockdown.

Massive stars live short lives and die in a super charged explosion leaving behind a neutron star

or a black hole, neither of which emits any light. Stars like the Sun and those less massive die

as white dwarfs, slowly cooling with carbon-rich embers. Eventually more and more mass will

be trapped in compact stellar remnants or cooling white dwarfs and in Galaxies across the

Universe the twinkling lights will go out, and after tens of trillions of years the Universe will fade

to black but as bleak (black) as it appears the end of starlight doesnt mean that life must end.

A star shines by converting a tiny proportion of the energy locked in pure matter into

radiation where the ultimate source of starlight is gravitational energy, in other words there

are many ways to convert gravitational energy into heat of radiation, so even after the stars have

all faded enterprising civilizations could survive by harnessing the energy of black holes, and

new artificial star could be created is so missed.

Some bright enterprising individual or group about 15-years-ago determined that the expansion

of the Universe was getting faster whereby they laid out the fact of the presence of dark

energy, a product of pure space that has an effect opposite to gravity, in that it repels rather

then attracting. The made this discovery based on the observation that distant supernova are

much fainter than expected in a decelerating Universe.

Think, Dark Energy is an embarrassment to mainstream physics, fundamental theories dont

predict it and no one walking around today can figure out how a pure vacuum can have such a

bizarre property. Albeit in some theories dark energy is not considered a cosmological

constant of Einsteins original formulation, as dark energy varies over time and space. If dark

energy grows, some theorize that it will cause the Universe to come unglued in about 20-billion

years in a crescendo called the Big Rip where first galaxies, then stars, and finally atoms will

be torn apart by dark energy nothing can survive.

Even without the Big Rip cosmic acceleration will steadily remove galaxies from view.

Where after a 100 billion years, most galaxies will recede faster than the speed-of-light, leaving

frozen final images on the edge of our horizon as if a boundary of a massive black hole.

The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will have long merged and our view of the Universe

will end at the edge of the super-galaxy and as time moves forward familiar gravitational

structures become unglued planet detach from their dead stars and drift through interstellar

space, stars dead or alive detach from galaxies and float about helter-skelter, eventually the


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proton finding itself not stable will decay the vast time taken to reach this point is to the age

of the Universe what the age of the Universe is to a millisecond.

As the proton decays the end is in sight, as everything falls apart whereas with the decay of

the proton atoms come apart, black holes evaporate and our existence blinks out!

It was fun while it lasted!

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It Was Fun While It Lasted