What’s the weather like on the Sun today?

The question is not to engage idle chit-chat.

Remember when there were predictions that the world–or at least the computer dependent portion of it–would come to an end in the year 2000? All sorts of doomsday scenarios were hashed out because some computer programmers neglected to allow the century to be included in the date field of software (“01/01/98" as opposed to “01/01/1998"). The crisis passed. The world survived. New era.

September 11, 2001.

Five years, one month and twenty-six days after America was attacked by a bunch of criminals with a religious bent, the country seems poised again to spread its wings. The November 2006 elections have placed fear again in its proper place as a part of life and not the rationale for life. For over five years America’s leadership dribbled out terror-bile to (a) keep the nation prepared for the next attack or (b) keep themselves in power. The memory of 9-11 is one of sadness, not fear. Sadness for the nearly 3,000 lives extinguished for no good reason; sadness for the countless men and women who risked their lives rushing to aid their fellows. And there is some pride too. The passengers aboard United Flight 93 and Todd Beamer’s “Let’s roll” epitomize an attitude which we would like to believe is distinctly American: when the going gets tough, Americans get going. There may be other attacks, though not by the same bunch of criminals, and we may again be gripped by a free floating fear. But the nation has recovered from two such politically induced epidemics (1812 and 1941) and has come out stronger each time. We probably will be stronger by the end of this decade than we were when it started. America, with its amalgamated, synthesized culture, absorbs and rebounds. It’s a specialty.

But now we have to contend with the weather on the Sun.

In case you have missed it, the ancient Mayan “long” calendar ends on December 31, 2012. A slew of rational, intelligent folks are predicting that the axis of the earth will tilt and the earth’s magnetic field will reverse sometime around December 31, 2012. In other words, more terror is in the forecast.
 

The science of an earth tilt is rather sketchy. What is known and accepted fact is that the Earth and our solar system will be aligned with the center of the galaxy on December 31, 2012. We also know that the Sun has a proclivity to generate humongous electro-magnetic storms–four million tons of matter converted to pure energy per second. The most powerful solar storm in the last 500 years occurred on September 2, 1859. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) estimates that if a similar solar storm occurred today, it would cost $30 billion a day to the U.S. electrical power grid and up to $70 billion to the satellite industry. A major solar flare during March 8th to the 13th of 1989 is credited with frying the electrical grid in Quebec. The August 4, 1972 solar storm attracted a lot of attention in the science community because it occurred during an interval in the launch of U.S. space vehicles. The coronal mass ejection recorded on August 4 was the fastest ever recorded, traveling from the sun to earth in roughly 15 hours. During severe solar storms, the Earth loses about 100 tons of its atmosphere into space. On the other hand. . .

The absence of solar storm activity between May 10-12, 1999 caused the Earth’s magnetosphere to expand in volume by over 100 times. When the 11-year sunspot activity is absent as it was between 1645 and 1715, the earth’s climate cools.

Sun weather is important.

So what about December 31, 2012? What will the weather be like on the Sun? Will a solar storm on that day cause the earth to flip its axis?

Notice that the question assumes that there is a link between the stability of the earth’s axis and events on the sun. Assumptions–you gotta lov’em.

!Exclamation Mark 2012!

The number of books dealing with a potential cataclysm in 2012 is growing exponentially. At the top of this list has to be Patrick Geryl’s THE WORLD CATACLYSM IN 2012: THE MAYA COUNTDOWN TO THE END OF OUR WORLD (published by Adventures Unlimited Press, One Adventure Place, Kempton, IL). The number of exclamation marks in this book alone is enough to tilt the planet not to mention your head. Then there is Bob Frissell and his metaphysics work. Two of Frissell’s books, NOTHING IN THIS BOOK IS TRUE, BUT IT’S EXACTLY HOW THINGS ARE , and YOU ARE A SPIRITUAL BEING HAVING A HUMAN EXPERIENCE (published by Frog, Ltd, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California) both peripherally address the supposed cataclysm approaching in 2012. Frissell takes a very philosophical spin on the subject and he downplays the cataclysm stuff.

The Boring Science of It All

Why is the science on earth’s geology so boring? The above authors as well as others would say that geological science is so boring because it is so blatantly wrong. It achieves this distinction by ignoring the real world and constructing nice, neat scenarios to explain the world existing in a theory. Why can we display a “fresh from the Siberian tundra, an 18,000-year- old frozen woolly mammoth” in the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi, Japan? Traditional geological science would have us believe the mammoth was out one day chewing its food and did not notice that it was about to be frozen in a creeping mini-ice age. But the mammoth was flash-frozen, exclamation mark. (For an excellent discussion on mammoths and the freezing process, see “Woolly Mammoths Remains: Catastrophic Origins?” by Sue Bishop at THE TALKORIGINS website). In the staid, theoretical world of traditional geology where the age of the earth is measured at 4.54 billion years and the last magnetic reversal of the earth occurred 780,000 years ago, there is no such thing a sudden cataclysm. So how then do you explain the ‘facts on the ground’, so to speak? You don’t. You ignore them. But how? How do you ignore facts?

And You Thought Neanderthals Were Extinct

It would be very easy, if one were so inclined, to imagine Adolph Hitler as a Neanderthal. Neanderthals had bigger brains than modern humans. They were also much stronger physically. And you get the feeling–just a feeling mind you–that Neanderthals were more focused, more intense than your run-of-the-gene-pool human. With just the right mind-set, you can make Neanderthals the reality version of supermen–and presumably women. The fact that modern humans supposedly branched off from the species some 500,000 years ago does not–at least until recently–exclude the possibility that the genes of the Neanderthal live on in the gene pool of some European populations. Dare we say German European populations? No, we don’t say. Still, the longing for a unique and special place in the Universe can make the most intelligent of us ignore the facts on the ground, or facts beneath the ground. It is estimated that 99.9% of the genes in Neanderthals are also found in modern humans. But there was no cross-breeding, no exchange of gene pools. Neanderthals died out 35,000 years ago. The obvious question, given their superior mental and physical capacity, is why did they succumb to us lesser humans? Be a scientist for a moment. Ignore the question.

The fundamental problem with biology is Darwinism. A nice, neat theory about biological evolution that does not fit the ‘facts of reality life’. Like the formalism of geology with its emphasis upon slow, gradual changes in earth structure, Darwinism presents an evolutionary track for changes in life forms. While it is true that Darwinism may have gotten a bad rap (“man descended from apes” is not a Darwinism but a corruption of the species classification tenets of Darwin evolution theory), the popular concept is of life evolving toward ever higher levels. Levels of what? A cockroach always was a cockroach and will always be a cockroach; a whale was always a whale and will always be a whale; a human always was a human and always will be a human–biologically. So when we read that modern humans branched off from Neanderthal man–Neanderthal man with 99% of the same genes as modern man--500,000 years ago, we are left to puzzle exactly what does ‘branch off’ mean. Pardon my pun, but there may be some monkey business going on here and it is science flipping the facts. (For an excellent discussion on Darwinism, see THE TALKORIGIN ARCHIVES ).

The Barren Morphology Of Science

The weather on the Sun today?

Hot. (Courtesy of ACE Real Time Solar Wind website).

It would be naive to dismiss the various disciplines of science as merely another ranch of mysticism. But science, the science of academia especially, comes awfully darn close to being a religious dogma. Forget about any alternative view on Man’s birth and existence in the Universe. It is Darwinism or nothing. Forget about hundreds of different civilizations have risen and fallen during the course of earth’s 4.54 billion year existence. It is primitive society to Nile valley civilization or nothing.

Science, as a self-contained dogma with its own laws and rules, works very well. Logical is the word. Everything fits together. But maybe reality is not at all rational or logical. The leap from physics to quantum physics has undercut the absolutism of all science. The observer as creator has not yet penetrated the really hard science of geology or the history of human life on this planet. To a geologist, a rock is still a rock rather than a continuum of energy. To the hard-core historian, the archeologist, unearthed artifacts are merely flakes off the ever ascending ladder of what presently constitutes our “advanced civilization” rather than portals into how the prevailing mind-set of a society or culture framed reality.

Will the earth tilt on it’s axis on December 31, 2012? Well, it certainly is possible. But the more important issue is that the question is raised in the first place. In this 21st century, after the answers hurled at us during the 20th century, it is refreshing to basically wallow in a blissful state of ignorance before going out in search of answers again. This time the answers will come from that delightful cauldron known as quantum physics where nothing has been skewed, fixed or memorialized–yet.