The Infancy Gospel of James--a different nativity story you haven't heard before

The Infancy Gospel of James is one of the books that didn't make it into the Bible as we know it today. The nativity story presented in this banned gospel is one you may not have heard before. It tells the backstory of Mary and her unique upbringing as a vestal virgin in Herod's Temple in Jerusalem, and her betrothal to a much older widower when she was twelve. And then the load of trouble she found herself in after she became miraculously pregnant at 16 with Jesus.  While not a "gnostic" gospel per se, this book does present very interesting Christian material you probably have never heard before.

I read The Infancy Gospel of James yesterday on my Gnostic Insights podcast. Pop over for a listen! It's my Christmas present to you! Here's the link to the podcast webpage, or you can have a listen using your favorite podcast app. 

The Infancy Gospel of James: Mary and the Birth of Jesus – Gnostic Insights

Cheers!

cyd

Torus at center of our Galaxy will soon be revealed!

The following article reprint holds out the hope that in the very near future the toroidal nature of our cosmos will be demonstrated beyond doubt.  This will prove yet another scientific aspect of the Simple Explanation cosmology. Read on!

Are Black Holes Actually Dark Energy Stars?

Why one physicist believes our whole understanding of black holes is wrong.

Nautilus  Jesse Stone

George Chapline believes that the Event Horizon Telescope will offer evidence that black holes are really dark energy stars. Photo by NASA.

What does the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way look like? We might find out. The Event Horizon Telescope—really a virtual telescope with an effective diameter of the Earth—has been pointing at Sagittarius A* for the last several years. Most researchers in the astrophysics community expect that its images, taken from telescopes all over the Earth, will show the telltale signs of a black hole: a bright swirl of light, produced by a disc of gases trapped in the black hole’s orbit, surrounding a black shadow at the center—the event horizon. This encloses the region of space where the black-hole singularity’s gravitational pull is too strong for light to escape.

But George Chapline, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, doesn’t expect to see a black hole. He doesn’t believe they’re real. In 2005, he told Nature that “it’s a near certainty that black holes don’t exist” and—building on previous work he’d done with physics Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin—introduced an alternative model that he dubbed “dark energy stars.” Dark energy is a term physicists use to describe a peculiar kind of energy that appears to permeate the entire universe. It expands the fabric of spacetime itself, even as gravity attempts to bring objects closer together. Chapline believes that the immense energies in a collapsing star cause its protons and neutrons to decay into a gas of photons and other elementary particles, along with what he refers to as “droplets of vacuum energy.” These form a “condensed” phase of spacetime—much like a gas under enough pressure transitions to liquid—that has a much higher density of dark energy than the spacetime surrounding the star. This provides the pressure necessary to hold gravity at bay and prevent a singularity from forming. Without a singularity in spacetime, there is no black hole.

The idea has found no support in the astrophysical community—over the last decade, Chapline’s papers on this topic have garnered only single-digit citations. His most popular paper in particle physics, by contrast, has been cited over 600 times. But Chapline suspects his days of wandering in the scientific wilderness may soon be over. He believes that the Event Horizon Telescope will offer evidence that dark energy stars are real.

This strange toroidal geometry isn’t a bug of dark energy stars, but a feature.

The idea goes back to a 2000 paper, with Evan Hohlfeld and David Santiago, in which Chapline and Laughlin modeled spacetime as a Bose-Einstein condensate—a state of matter that arises when taking an extremely low-density gas to extremely low temperatures, near absolute zero. Chapline and Laughlin’s model is quantum mechanical in nature: General relativity emerges as a consequence of the way that the spacetime condensate behaves on large scales. Spacetime in this model also undergoes phase transformations when it gains or loses energy. Other scientists find this to be a promising path, too. A 2009 paper by a group of Japanese physicists stated that “[Bose-Einstein Condensates] are one of the most promising quantum fluids for” analogizing curved spacetime.

Chapline and Laughlin argue that they can describe the collapsed stars that most scientists take to be black holes as regions where spacetime has undergone a phase transition. They find that the laws of general relativity are valid everywhere in the vicinity of the collapsed star, except at the event horizon, which marks the boundary between two different phases of spacetime.

In the condensate model the event horizon surrounding a collapsed star is no longer a point of no return but instead a traversable, physical surface. This feature, along with the lack of a singularity that is the signature feature of black holes, means that paradoxes associated with black holes, like the destruction of information, don’t arise. Laughlin has been reticent to conjecture too far beyond his and Chapline’s initial ideas. He believes Chapline is onto something with dark energy stars, “but where we part company is in the amount of speculating we are willing to do about what ‘phase’ of the vacuum might be inside” what most scientists call black holes, Laughlin said. He’s holding off until experimental data reveals more about the interior phase. “I will then write my second paper on the subject,” he said.

In recent years Chapline has continued to refine his dark energy star model in collaboration with several other authors, including Pawel Mazur of the University of South Carolina and Piotr Marecki of Leipzig University. He’s concluded that dark energy stars aren’t spherical or oblate, like black holes. Instead, they have the shape of a torus, or donut. In a rotating compact object, like a dark energy star, Chapline believes quantum effects in the spacetime condensate generate a large vortex along the object’s axis of rotation. Because the region inside the vortex is empty—think of the depression that forms at the center of whirlpool—the center of the dark energy star is hollow, like an apple without its core. A similar effect is observed when quantum mechanics is used to model rotating drops of superfluid. There too, a central vortex can form at the center of a rotating drop and, surprisingly, change its shape from a sphere to a torus.  

In the condensate model the event horizon surrounding a collapsed star is no longer a point of no return but instead a traversable, physical surface.

For Chapline, this strange toroidal geometry isn’t a bug of dark energy stars, but a feature, as it helps explain the origin and shape of astrophysical jets—the highly energetic beams of ionized matter that are generated along the axis of rotation of a compact object like a black hole. Chapline believes he’s identified a mechanism in dark energy stars that explains observations of astrophysical jets better than mainstream ones, which posit that energy is extracted from the accretion disk outside of a black hole and focused into a narrow beam along the black hole’s axis of rotation. To Chapline, matter and energy falling toward a dark energy star would make its way to the inner throat (the “donut hole”), where electrons orbiting the throat would, as in a Biermann Battery, generate magnetic fields powerful enough to drive the jets.

Chapline points to experimental work where scientists, at the OMEGA Laser Facility at the University of Rochester, created magnetized jets using lasers to form a ring-like excitation on a flat surface. Though the experiments were not conducted with dark energy stars in mind, Chapline believes it provides support for his theory since the ring-like excitation—Chapline calls it a “ring of fire”—is exactly what he would expect to happen along the throat of a dark energy star. He believes the ring could be the key to supporting the existence of dark energy stars. “This ought to eventually show up clearly” in the Event Horizon Telescope images, Chapline said, referring to the ring. 

Black Hole vs. Dark Energy Star: When viewed from the top down, a dark energy star has a central opening, the donut hole. Chapline believes that matter and energy rotating around the central opening (forming the “ring of fire”) is the source of the astrophysical jets observed by astronomers in the vicinity of what most believe to be black holes.

Chapline also points out that dark energy stars will not be completely opaque to light, as matter and light can pass into, but also out of, a dark energy star. A dark energy star won’t have a completely black interior—instead it will show a distorted image of any stars behind it. Other physicists, though, are skeptical that these kinds of deviations from conventional black hole models would show up in the Event Horizon Telescope data. Raul Carballo-Rubio, a physicist at the International School for Advanced Studies, in Trieste, Italy, has developed his own alternative model to black holes known as semi-classical relativistic stars. Speaking more generally about alternative black hole models Caraballo-Rubio said, “The differences [with black holes] that would arise in these models are too minute to be detected” by the Event Horizon Telescope.

Chapline plans to discuss his dark energy star predictions in December 2018, at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. But even if his predictions are confirmed, he said he doesn’t expect the scientific community to become convinced overnight. “I expect that for the next few years the [Event Horizon Telescope] people will be confused by what they see.”

Jesse Stone is a freelance writer based in Iowa City, Iowa. Reach him at jessebstone@gmail.com. 

 

A familiar pattern emerges when electrons slow down

 

  This is what a solid made of electrons looks like (nature.com)

• NEWS

• 29 September 2021

This is what a solid made of electrons looks like

Physicists have imaged elusive ‘Wigner crystals’ for the first time.

• Davide Castelvecchi

This scanning tunneling microscope image of a graphene sheet reveals that a ‘Wigner crystal’ — a honeycomb arrangement of electrons — has formed inside a layered structure underneath. Credit: H. Li et al./Nature

If the conditions are just right, some of the electrons inside a material will arrange themselves into a tidy honeycomb pattern — like a solid within a solid. Physicists have now directly imaged these ‘Wigner crystals’, named after the Hungarian-born theorist Eugene Wigner, who first imagined them almost 90 years ago.

Researchers had convincingly created Wigner crystals and measured their properties before, but this is the first time that anyone has actually taken a snapshot of the patterns, says study co-author Feng Wang, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. “If you say you have an electron crystal, show me the crystal,” he says. The results were published on 29 September in Nature¹.

To create the Wigner crystals, Wang’s team built a device containing atom-thin layers of two similar semiconductors: tungsten disulfide and tungsten diselenide. The team then used an electric field to tune the density of the electrons that moved freely along the interface between the two layers.

In ordinary materials, electrons zoom around too quickly to be significantly affected by the repulsion between their negative charges. But Wigner predicted that if electrons travelled slowly enough, that repulsion would begin to dominate their behaviour. The electrons would then find arrangements that minimize their total energy, such as a honeycomb pattern. So Wang and his colleagues slowed the electrons in their device by cooling it to just a few degrees above absolute zero.

A mismatch between the two layers in the device also helped the electrons to form Wigner crystals. The atoms in each of the two semiconductor layers are slightly different distances apart, so pairing them together creates a honeycomb ‘moiré pattern’, similar to that seen when overlaying two grids. That repeating pattern created regions of slightly lower energy, which helped the electrons settle down.

Graphene trick

The team used a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) to see this Wigner crystal. In an STM, a metal tip hovers above the surface of a sample, and a voltage causes electrons to jump down from the tip, creating an electric current. As the tip moves across the surface, the changing intensity of the current reveals the location of electrons in the sample.

Initial attempts to image the Wigner crystal by applying the STM directly on the double-layer device were unsuccessful, Wang says, because the current destroyed the fragile Wigner arrangements. So the team added a layer of graphene, a single-atom sheet of carbon, on top. The presence of the Wigner crystal slightly changed the electron structure of the graphene directly above, which was then picked up by the STM. The images clearly show the neat arrangement of the underlying Wigner electrons. As expected, consecutive electrons in the Wigner crystal are nearly 100 times farther apart than are the atoms in the semiconductor device’s actual crystals.

“I think that’s a great advancement, being able to perform STM on this system,” says Carmen Rubio Verdú, a physicist at Columbia University in New York City. She adds that the same graphene-based method will enable STM studies of a number of other interesting physical phenomena beyond Wigner crystals. Kin Fai Mak, a physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, agrees. “The technique is non-invasive to the state you want to probe. To me, it is a very clever idea.”

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02657-6

My two cents:  Those frozen electrons reminds me of orange sections and autumnal toroidal fruit. Somewhat like the flower of life, but looks more like orange slices arranged in an impossible way, to me.

cyd

The Great Torus of Jupiter

 After this many years of writing the Simple Explanation blog, what can I say here other than, "Hey! Look at that torus they're calling Jupiter!"  

Scientists have known for a few decades that the upper atmosphere of Jupiter is hundreds of degrees warmer than expected. Now they are offering an explanation that looks suspiciously like another planetary torus has been discovered. 

Using Hawaii's Keck 2 telescope, scientists looked for positively charged hydrogen particles in Jupiter's atmosphere. They found a ring around the north and south poles and particles coming in (they assume) [or going out, I would conjecture], as well as waves of heat cascading down the outside of the planet. Yes, it can be explained by the way they conjecture the mechanism, or could be explained by the Simple Explanation's toroidal core theory of planetary development. The official imagery certainly implies that as a possible mechanism. We'll await further proof at some later date.

Meanwhile, here's the link to the original article.  

Jupiter’s magnetic field lines (blue) steer charged particles in the solar wind toward

the planet’s poles, generating auroras (white) similar to Earth’s. High-altitude winds 

then carry heat (red) from the auroras toward Jupiter’s equator, warming the planet’s 

upper atmosphere, as shown in this artist’s illustration, which overlays a visible 

light image of the planet.

J. O'DONOGHUE/JAXA, HUBBLE/NASA, ESA, A. SIMON, J. SCHMIDT

J. O’Donoghue et al. Global upper-atmospheric heating on Jupiter by the polar aurorae. Nature. Vol. 596, August 5, 2021, p. 54. doi:  10.1038/s41586-021-03706-w.

Fractal antennae and DNA--It's Simple!

Once again, A Simple Explanation has proven one of its claims. Turns out there is now scientific proof that DNA responds to electromagnetic forces at fractal levels of size.  Here's the abstract of the study, published at PubMed.gov--

DNA is a fractal antenna in electromagnetic fields

Martin Blank 1, Reba Goodman

Affiliations 

• PMID: 21457072
 
• DOI: 10.3109/09553002.2011.538130

Abstract

Purpose: To review the responses of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) to electromagnetic fields (EMF) in different frequency ranges, and characterize the properties of DNA as an antenna.

Materials and methods: We examined published reports of increased stress protein levels and DNA strand breaks due to EMF interactions, both of which are indicative of DNA damage. We also considered antenna properties such as electronic conduction within DNA and its compact structure in the nucleus.

Results: EMF interactions with DNA are similar over a range of non-ionising frequencies, i.e., extremely low frequency (ELF) and radio frequency (RF) ranges. There are similar effects in the ionising range, but the reactions are more complex.

Conclusions: The wide frequency range of interaction with EMF is the functional characteristic of a fractal antenna, and DNA appears to possess the two structural characteristics of fractal antennas, electronic conduction and self symmetry. These properties contribute to greater reactivity of DNA with EMF in the environment, and the DNA damage could account for increases in cancer epidemiology, as well as variations in the rate of chemical evolution in early geologic history.

***************************************

The conclusion of the article is the important part to the Simple Explanation. It is saying that DNA reacts to electromagnetic frequencies at varying scales of transmission, as the EMFs cause the DNA to respond to them as if they were antennas set up to receive these transmissions.  Because the DNA vibrates to these external frequencies, the huge proliferation of EMF devices in our environment constantly bombard our DNA with vibrations at a fractal scale small enough to cause changes to the DNA.  Although I haven't talked about the 5G networks here before, be assured that 5G exposure is extremely dangerous to our DNA. I will be avoiding it like the plague. A real plague, that is, not this excuse-of-a-plague everyone is freaking out over.  Masks won't help stop EMF bombardment!

Back to the Simple Explanation, our bodies are made up of fractals of consciousness. The Simple Explanation calls these consciousness fractals UCs, which stands for Units of Consciousness.

And our brains are made up of fractal neuronal antennae that pick up information from our environment in exactly the same way these DNA strands pick up EMFs.

Simple Explanation Merchandise Spotted in London

 A longtime follower of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything sent me this photo of a kid's torus skateboard design sitting beside his water bottle with a Simple Explanation sticker afixed. My London follower has even made a shortcut of Simple Explanation's name, he writes so often. Between us, we call it aseoae.  Took me a minute to realize he was referring to A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything with his aseoae! 

What a lovely skateboard and bottle!

Did you know you can purchase aseoae merchandise like the stickers and sweatshirts? Pretty cool designs! Visit my cafepress store to see the designs! 

Aeons, Archons, Angels, or Aliens?

 Aeons, Archons, Angels, or Aliens?     A Gnostic Interpretation of Ancient Aliens Theory

Cyd Charise Ropp, Ph.D.

During the lost months of the 2020 shutdown, I spent much of my time watching the History Channel series "Ancient Aliens." I began with a skeptical mind, but was soon persuaded by the variety of evidence presented. Many years earlier I had read Erich von Danikens’ Chariots of the Gods, so I had the basic outline of ancient alien theory already in my head. I had also read Whitley Streiber’s Communion when it came out, so I felt I had a passing familiarity with the concept of alien abductions. But the evidence presented on "Ancient Aliens" goes far beyond those early revelations. By this point in time, only a dedicated naysayer could remain completely skeptical.

Here’s the ancient aliens theory: that a variety of aliens from off-planet have been visiting our earth for thousands, if not millions, of years. That the stories told around the world by ancient human cultures of gods descending from the sky and living among them are true histories and not mere fables. That ancient aliens have given knowledge to humanity, particularly technological knowledge, to assist in the progress of human culture. That ancient aliens may have edited our DNA to make us into the modern human form we see today, and that they are possibly continuing to edit our DNA by means of alien abductions.  Moreover, it is even suggested that our entire ecosystem may have been seeded by aliens from the get-go, including the placement of our moon to stabilize earth’s axis and to create tidal motion.

I persuaded my brother, Bill, to watch the program with me, and so it is that we have watched and discussed every episode of their 15-season run that has been rebroadcast over the past couple of years, some more than once. Yes, many of the stories presented in the series overlap, and most of the evidence shows up time and again with the same commentary attached, yet my brother and I have found the repetition helpful in our effort to discern the truth of various aspects of the ancient aliens claim.

Bill and I are nothing if not open-minded, yet we anchor our gullibility with an unusually well-developed sense of logic and critical thinking. As you know, both of us are PhDs with specialties in Philosophy and Rhetoric, and we have both taught critical thinking and logic at universities. So do not come away with the idea that we uncritically bought every claim hook, line, and sinker. 

We have paid special attention to the question continually raised by the ancient aliens theorists—were these “gods” of the pre-flood era merely misinterpreted alien visitors with alien tech? Are the “fallen angels” of the Book Enoch angels from God, or were they actually ancient astronauts who moved to earth and occasionally married human women? It is said that the worldwide flood was sent by God to wipe out the angel-human offspring known as Nephilim. What were the Nephilim and what God would have wiped out the entire earth and everyone on it to kill them off, and how is it that some humans were spared by warnings from “angels”?

As observed by the program’s resident theorists, these types of stories can be taken as fables or as true histories and, if histories, are these actually the Biblical God, angels, and the gods of ancient cultures, or are they actually advanced, off-planet aliens who are apparently engaged in disagreements over human destiny, with sometimes catastrophic consequences?  These are the questions that have occupied much discussion between Bill and me over the past couple of years, and they have run on a parallel track to our Gnostic Theology pursuits as we untangle the differences and origins of archons, aeons, angels, and fallen angels, and the difference between the God Above All Gods and the God of this world. I am happy to announce that we have turned a rhetorical corner and landed upon some sound hypotheses at last. Perhaps you can use our analysis the next time you consider the role of extra-terrestrials in our world.

I realize that the following memes I’m going to share with you may sound new and strange unless you have previously studied gnostic cosmology. If you are new to Gnostic Insights, I encourage you to go to the GnosticInsights.com website and open the menu tab called “The Gnostic Gospel Primer.” There you will find a Valentinian Gnostic cosmology based upon the Tripartite Tractate book of the Nag Hammadi library. These initial eight episodes lay out in a clear and understandable way the basic cosmology of our universe and the origins of all things. The story is not difficult to understand, but it helps to listen to it from the beginning and go in order. There you will find episodes describing the God Above All Gods, as well as entities known as Aeons which dwell in a space called the Fullness of God, also known as the Pleroma. Aeons, by virtue of the fact that they dwell in the Pleroma, are by definition a type of ET.

This ancient well in Sardinia, Italy, the Santa Christina well, is said to represent the “keyhole shape” found throughout the ancient world. To me, it looks like the Pleroma.

Ancient alien theorists speak of ETs directing evolution to create our intelligent hominid species. Ancient alien theorists call into question the mainstream theory of evolution. They rightly point out that this planet of ours has not been around long enough for evolution to have spontaneously bumbled upon our exquisite design. They even call into question the premise that life on earth evolved randomly from a primordial soup into ever-increasing complexity and function. “Pan-spermia” has been proposed as a method by which primitive alien life forms hitchhiked their way across the heavens on asteroids to seed our oceans. According to ancient alien theorists, ETs probably interfered throughout ancient history to promote life on earth, including many interventions in protohumans to direct our upward evolution.

I tend to agree with much of what they say about the impossibility of Darwinian evolution to achieve our current biosphere. I invite you to listen to the Gnostic Insights podcast called “Evolution and Conscious Aeonic Design,” which you can find at the Gnostic Insights.com website menu under the tab “Complete Episodes Library.”  In that episode I call into question Darwinian evolution in favor of the same sort of planned evolution promoted by the ancient alien theorists. But where they identify “ETs” as the source, I identify those ETs as Aeons of the Fullness directing evolution.

Episode Four of the Gnostic Insights Primer describes these Aeons that came before this universe. The Aeons populate the Fullness of God in the Pleroma, and they consist of names, places, personalities, powers, and forces, all arranged in a hierarchy, each of them representing a quality of God that would come to realization in this cosmos in which we dwell. It is through their intervention in our universe that evolution occurs to bring about their vision of our material cosmos.  Simply ascribing evolution to the intervention of flesh and blood ETs merely pushes back the same ontological problems of random evolution—order cannot arise spontaneously out of disorder. 52 card pickup never finds the cards stacked in suits, and endless games of 52 card pickup over billions of years simply cannot achieve endless results of order from chaos. The physics of entropy always wins out. No matter how many times you toss the components of life up into the air, they never assemble themselves into complex working structures on the way down.

What is true for physical evolution is also true of technological innovation. Ancient alien theorists point out that our most important technological innovations are often discovered simultaneously by multiple inventors worldwide. Whether it’s old tech such as language, medicine, metallurgy, and architecture, or new tech such as radio, relativity theory, and the telephone, these inventions appear without evolutionary precedent, arriving fully formed to multiple people, often through dreams and visions. The ancient alien theorists ascribe these technological innovations to ETs guiding our development, either through physical manifestation as the benevolent gods of ancient earth cultures, or nowadays through the transpersonal field or Askashic record. They suggest the Akashic record is a pre-scripted, computer-type code, existing in a transdimensional space, that humans are programmed to access as needed.

Ancient alien theorist include our DNA as a form of proof of non-evolutionary technological leaps, as our modern human form does not appear to have evolved from more primitive versions. Yes, there were numerous protohumans, but they all mysteriously disappeared by the end of the last ice age, or the time of the great flood.

I agree that there is a transpersonal field, which is the repository of our collective memes—all that were, are, and will be. But I ascribe this transpersonal field to the divine dimension of the mind of the Universal Unit of Consciousness as described in my Simple Explanation blog and book. And I would agree that we are triggered to access this field as needed. It happens all the time in our daily lives for all sorts of information. Same thing holds true for inventors who see a need and whose contemplation leads them into the field for solutions.

The ancient alien theorists suggest that it is our familiarity with the field that is leading us in the trans-human direction of hooking our human brains up to a computer-mediated “cloud” so we can access information on demand and even download our complete consciousness, thereby achieving non-material immortality. Here I strongly disagree. I would say that the force behind such a drive for incorporeal immortality has two motivations. One motivation is our innate spiritual connectivity to the Fullness of God, the Son, and the Father, which promises the continuation of our immortal souls after death. The other motivation is from the other side of the coin—that of the archonic desire to achieve god-like status, including omniscience and immortality, without the benefit of God’s will and blessing. In other words, it’s replay of the presumptuous thought that brought about the Fall of Logos. It seems clear to me that our tech billionaires who are leading the way with transhumanism and space exploration are themselves personally playing out the Fall of Logos in their attempt to play God.

Again, if you have not listened to the Gnostic Insights Primer episodes, you will find a full episode devoted to the Fall of Logos and its cosmic consequences. You will find these episodes at the Gnostic Insights.com website under the menu tab labeled “The Gnostic Gospel Primer.”

Ancient alien theorists suggest that ancient astronauts developed our planet in order to create a sentient species fit to house the Ba, or soul, as described by ancient Egyptians. They theorize that ETs created humans to be vessels for souls, which implies that without their intervention, creatures do not have souls. Of all the theories proposed, this one strikes me as completely off-base. I would say that all creatures have souls. According to Gnostic cosmology, all creatures are the fruit of the Aeons. The Aeons sent their fruit into creation in order to populate creation with the Fullness of God. This fruit is called the Second Order of Powers, and we are all Second Order Powers, from bacteria on up to humans and beyond. If the universe is indeed populated by extra terrestrial life forms, then these, too, would be Second Order Powers because all life forms are. And all of us Second Order Powers possess souls.

There is, however, one type of entity in the universe that does not possess a soul, because these entities are not creatures from the Fullness of God. These entities are called archons. Archons are the inverted shadows of Aeons. Archons are incorporeal waves of entropy that emanate from the Demiurge. Archons are not "fallen angels" because they never were angels. We know these archons as demonic forces that frustrate and bedevil us in order to feed off of our negative energy. The world's bad habits and cruelty are shepherded by archons. They are the forces the Second Order Powers were sent to do battle with in a never-ending war for dominion of the cosmos. For more on this topic, listen to Episode Five of The Gnostic Gospel Primer called "The Deficiency and Boundary."  

Knowing what we know about archons, we can identify the non-physical entity known as Satan as an archon. Satan is also called The Accuser, and he is the source of temptation and illness, and the head of an army of demons or archons. Traditional theology identifies Satan as a fallen angel who rebelled against God because God elevated humans above angels. I would reinterpret this myth in a Gnostic way by saying that the God against whom Satan rebelled was not the Father God Above All Gods, but rather the God of this world, who is called the Demiurge in Gnostic texts. It is the Demiurge that Satan sprang from and it is the Demiurge with whom Satan struck the wager concerning the fate of Job. Satan is also credited with advancing human technology.

The archons appear to be very interested in advancing human technology. I suspect this is because it is easier to distract, delude, and even destroy humanity via technology than with any other means. Not only war technology and weaponry, but more benign appearing helpful technologies. I'm sure I don't need to tell you how destructive and divisive the internet has become through the innovation of social media. And how appealing and irresistible television has become! Then there is the realm of virtual reality—a realm controlled by archons who want nothing more than to delude and ensnare human souls. This type of delusion and division is the bread and butter of archons. So, when ancient aliens theorists point out the leaps made in technological innovation by the influence of incorporeal beings, I suspect archons at play.

Which brings us to angels. Angels are described as beings who appear to be trans-dimensional. By that I mean that sometimes they appear as physical humans and sometimes they appear as incorporeal light beings. They can physically touch humans, as when Peter was awakened in his prison cell by an angel's touch, yet the same angel can pass through solid walls, as recounted in Acts 12:7. It is said that angels were sent to earth to protect and assist humans, and 70% of Americans believe they have a guardian angel. In Gnostic cosmology, it appears that angels are a type of being created by the Fullness of God, specifically for the benefit of humans, to assist them in the never-ending war against the archons. Angels are possibly aeonic personalities that have come from the Pleroma to assist. Therefore, when ancient alien theorists tell of incidents where non-corporeal beings appear as light forms to interfere in a positive manner with human technology, these are angels. Examples of angelic interference include the occasions where mysterious forces have appeared above U.S. ICBM sites and disabled nuclear-armed missles in their silos. These beings have also appeared outside the windows of the International Space Station and U.S. space missions to the moon.

So far we have identified Aeons, archons, and angels as entities who insert themselves into human affairs. But what of actual off-world, flesh and blood ETs from other planets and galaxies? Do they really exist? Yes, the remainder of encounters appear to be ETs. Ancient alien theorists propose that in the days before the flood, "gods" lived side by side with humans and occasionally took human women as sexual partners. These ETs claimed to have come from the star systems of Sirius and Orion in particular. These ETs had advanced technologies that they shared with the humans around them. They designed the ancient monolithic structures, including the pyramids found around the earth on every continent. They were the ones who used their tech to levitate gigantic boulders into place in stone structures all over the earth. Many of them appeared to have elongated skulls and green or blue skin. Some of them had reptilian, birdlike, or insectoid features, and some appeared to have non-human heads of canines, lions, and other animals. The Book of Enoch reports that some ETs mated with human women and produced monstrous offspring known as the Nephilim.  Enoch says that the great flood unleashed to cleanse the earth of these hybrid abominations, as they were not part of God's plan for humanity. After the flood, the ETs on earth seem to have retreated or gone into hiding. Occasional modern sightings of strange humanoid creatures living deep underground, under the ocean, or under the ice of Antarctica, hint at their possible continued presence.

It is my opinion that the extra-terrestrials can be thought of as Second Order Powers just like us. It is often suggested by ancient alien theorists that the ET civilizations may be a million years more advanced than our own, and that is how it is they have interstellar flight and other advanced powers and technology. Looking at this theory with a Gnostic eye, it is my theory that we can think of their home planets as exactly like ours, but far ahead of us in time. In keeping with the concept of fractals, I suggest that these ET civilizations advanced with the aid of Aeonic design, and struggled with their own archonic influences, exactly as we do now. It is highly likely that civilizations all eventually fall as the egos of the ETs struggle against one another for dominion and control, even as we do—a fractal replication of the Fall of Logos. Ancient alien theorists point to evidence of space battles above and on earth in the past, including a notable battle above Nuremberg in 1561.

Just as we are planning to do, it is likely that ETs sent out their own exploration and colonization missions, and that some of them came to planet earth. They probably had the same motivations that our own tech billionaires have—preservation of their genetic line against future catastrophes married to the archonic drive to be as gods and terraform worlds to their own ends. There is also pictorial evidence that some of these ETs may have been robots given the task of seeking out and terraforming worlds. It is also quite possible that the civilizations that sent out the ET missions have already destroyed themselves through plague or warfare.

Finally, let us turn to the question of the ultimate ET: God. Who and What Is He? 

Episode Two of the Gnostic Insights podcasts describes the attributes of the Father, also known as the God Above All Gods. Briefly, the Father is the Illimitable, Eternal, Omniscient Consciousness that underlies our reality. The Father does not look or sound like anything.  He doesn’t hold conversations the way we do. The Father is undifferentiated consciousness itself. This Consciousness is the ground state from which all subsequent events emerge.

Possibly the most egregious heresy in Gnosticism is the proposition that the God of the Old Testament, Creator of Heaven and Earth, the Jealous God of the Hebrews, Yahweh, or Jehovah, is not the Father on High that Jesus called Father. The God of this earth is known to Gnostics as the Demiurge, and He arose as a result of the Fall of Logos the Aeon due to Logos’s presumptuous thought. To learn more about this topic in depth, please listen to Episode Four of the Gnostic Insights podcast.

The God of the Old Testament, Yahweh, is more tangible than the Father Above. Yahweh has discussions with humans as well as with entities such as Satan. He uses language and engages in prolonged conversations, as when He gave precise building instructions for the ark to Noah. He even makes wagers over Job and appears to change his mind regarding the sacrifice of Isaac.  When people refer to God as an old white man with a beard, it is the image of the Demiurge to which they refer, not the undifferentiated consciousness of the Father. This Demiurge character is the God Yahweh, the God of this world and the God of the Hebrews especially. It is the Demiurge that has a special relationship with the children of Abraham. Yahweh takes care of the Hebrews when they pray to Him and follow His rules, and He has arranged a variety of cataclysms, plagues, and floods, to preserve their particular line of DNA. Yahweh favors the Hebrews in battles.

Therefore, it seems to me that when ancient alien theorists refer to God as having sent the world wide cataclysm and flood that wiped out the Nephilim and all but about 3,000 surviving humans, it is the work of the Demiurge calling himself God. This is the jealous God who wants sole control of the earth and the God who is angered by uppity archons like Satan and other "fallen angels." This is the God who wants Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on the mountain as a show of faith. But it was a true angel of the true Father Above who stayed Abraham's hand and saved Isaac's life. It is the Demiurge who tired of his people's captivity in Egypt and sent the plagues so the Pharoah would release the Hebrew slaves and who parted the seas to make good their escape. But it was true angels from the true God who protected the Hebrews during their 40 year trek through the desert, guiding them with their light bodies and feeding them with mana.

Well, there you have it. Aeons, archons, angels, or aliens?  I hope these distinctions help you sort out the ancient aliens theory.

Birth of Planets in Orion Nebula

These NASA/Hubble images are thought to be planetary proplyds, or the beginnings of planets surrounding stars in the Orion nebula. Their press release says, 

"The brighter discs are indicated by a glowing cusp in the excited material and facing the bright star, but which we see at a random orientation within the nebula, so some appear edge on, and others face on, for instance. Other interesting features enhance the look of these captivating objects, such as emerging jets of matter and shock waves."

You can tell that many of these objects appear to be toruses surrounding stars. One image in particular resembles a developing zygote--look at the fourth row down and the fourth image in from the left. You can clearly see the opening at the top of the torus and can easily imagine the toroidal funnel going down to the center and out the bottom.

Now compare the image above to this image of a developing mouse embryo. It appears that a similar dynamic mechanism is involved in both cases.

In 2018 I posted this article on the torus of a newly forming planet, which you can access here.

Then again in 2020 I posted an article noting the similarities between a newly fertilized egg and swirling patterns of massive systems.

MIT researchers were surprised to discover that the swirling patterns precisely mirror other systems, from atmospheric hurricanes to ocean circulation hydrodynamics to quantum fluids. 

As you can see, the swirling patterns emanate from a central interior position and spread over the surface of the egg. You can also see the depression on the far side of the egg begin to appear as it prepares to sink inward toward the middle, where it will eventually form the hollow tube of the organism's gut.

I predict that when NASA/Hubble is able to photograph the planetary proplyds as motion pictures, we will see the same exact swirling patterns found in embryos and hurricanes.

As above, so below.

Visit My New Gnostic Insights Website and Listen to the Gnostic Podcast!

Oh, happy day! It was not easy, but I have managed to launch a podcast! Gnostic Insights is the name of the program, and you should soon be able to find it on all of your regular podcast hosting apps. Or better yet, click on this link to go straight to my Gnostic Insights website.

Here you will find podcasts that explain gnosis, as simply as humanly possible. What is gnosis? Gnosis is knowing. Gnosis is not faith, or studying, or imagining. Gnosis is remembering. Remembering who you are, why you are here, what your mission on earth is, and where you will go when you die. Gnosis involves remembering the origin of consciousness and creation. The who, what, when, where, and why of everything.

If you are a regular reader of A Simple Explanation, you will be interested in seeing how I have woven the Simple Golden Rule and Units of Consciousness into this ancient Gnostic gospel. 

Check it out!

Our Lovely Milky Way Torus

 Here is a new NASA image of the lovely torus that is our galaxy--

STARS WITH A VIEW  Two newly discovered clusters of stars lie far from the Milky Way’s spiral arms. Planets orbiting these stars might get this view of the galaxy in all its spiraling glory.

R. HURT/ESO/JPL-CALTECH/NASA

A Simple Explanation of Gaia Hypothesis--Plus Nautilus Article Reprint

 One of the basic propositions of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything is what I call the Simple Golden Rule--everything, no matter the scale, reaches out to others and "holds hands" to create something larger than itself that can only come about through cooperation with others. 

In the diagram below, you can see how everything "levels up" to contribute to larger and larger structures. Up near the top of the diagram, we reach the global or "Gaia" scale of organization and consciousness.

In this article reprint, from his 2016 book Earth In Human Hands, David Grinspoon lays out his observation that all planets in the Universe will be either fully alive and teeming with life, or fully dead and devoid of life. Grinspoon presents an explanation of the Gaia hypothesis that links lifeforms and minerals in a synergistic dance that requires us to think of the Earth as a living form. I am reprinting this article from Nautilus Cosmos so that you can see how the Simple Explanation's "building upward" orientation contributes to the Gaia hypothesis.

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Why Most Planets Will Either Be Lush or Dead

BY DAVID GRINSPOON JANUARY 12, 2017

Can a planet be alive? Lynn Margulis, a giant of late 20th-century biology, who had an incandescent intellect that veered toward the unorthodox, thought so. She and chemist James Lovelock together theorized that life must be a planet-altering phenomenon and the distinction between the “living” and “nonliving” parts of Earth is not as clear-cut as we think. Many members of the scientific community derided their theory, called the Gaia hypothesis, as pseudoscience, and questioned their scientific integrity. But now Margulis and Lovelock may have their revenge. Recent scientific discoveries are giving us reason to take this hypothesis more seriously. At its core is an insight about the relationship between planets and life that has changed our understanding of both, and is shaping how we look for life on other worlds.

Studying Earth’s global biosphere together, Margulis and Lovelock realized that it has some of the properties of a life form. It seems to display “homeostasis,” or self‐regulation. Many of Earth’s life‐sustaining qualities exhibit remarkable stability. The temperature range of the climate; the oxygen content of the atmosphere; the pH, chemistry, and salinity of the ocean—all these are biologically mediated. All have, for hundreds of millions of years, stayed within a range where life can thrive. Lovelock and Margulis surmised that the totality of life is interacting with its environments in ways that regulate these global qualities. They recognized that Earth is, in a sense, a living organism. Lovelock named this creature Gaia.

Margulis and Lovelock showed that the Darwinian picture of biological evolution is incomplete. Darwin identified the mechanism by which life adapts due to changes in the environment, and thus allowed us to see that all life on Earth is a continuum, a proliferation, a genetic diaspora from a common root. In the Darwinian view, Earth was essentially a stage with a series of changing backdrops to which life had to adjust. Yet, what or who was changing the sets? Margulis and Lovelock proposed that the drama of life does not unfold on the stage of a dead Earth, but that, rather, the stage itself is animated, part of a larger living entity, Gaia, composed of the biosphere together with the “nonliving” components that shape, respond to, and cycle through the biota of Earth. Yes, life adapts to environmental change, shaping itself through natural selection. Yet life also pushes back and changes the environment, alters the planet. This is now as obvious as the air you are breathing, which has been oxygenated by life. So evolution is not a series of adaptations to inanimate events, but a system of feedbacks, an exchange. Life has not simply molded itself to the shifting contours of a dynamic Earth. Rather, life and Earth have shaped each other as they’ve co-evolved. When you start looking at the planet in this way, then you see coral reefs, limestone cliffs, deltas, bogs, and islands of bat guano as parts of this larger animated entity. You realize that the entire skin of Earth, and its depths as well, are indeed alive.

The acceptance of the Gaia hypothesis was, and remains, slow, halting, and incomplete. There are several reasons for this. One is just the usual inertia, the standard conservative reluctance to accept new ways of thinking. Yet Gaia was also accused of being vague and shifting. Some complained that the “Gaians” had failed to present an original, well‐defined, testable scientific proposition. How can you evaluate, oppose, or embrace an idea that is not clearly stated, or that seems to mean different things to different people? There was certainly some truth to this. Gaia has been stated many different ways. Also, it didn’t help that Margulis and Lovelock were more than willing to mix science with philosophy and poetry, and they didn’t mind controversy; in fact, I’d say they enjoyed and courted it.

The truth is, despite its widespread moniker, Gaia is not really a hypothesis. It’s a perspective, an approach from within which to pursue the science of life on a planet, a living planet, which is not the same as a planet with life on it—that’s really the point, simple but profound. Because life is not a minor afterthought on an already functioning Earth, but an integral part of the planet’s evolution and behavior. Over the last few decades, the Gaians have pretty much won the battle. The opposition never actually surrendered or admitted defeat, but mainstream earth science has dropped its disciplinary shields and joined forces with chemistry, climatology, theoretical biology, and several other “‐ologies” and renamed itself “earth system science.”

The Gaia approach, prompted by the space-age comparison of Earth with its apparently lifeless neighbors, has led to a deepening realization of how thoroughly altered our planet is by its inhabitants. When we compare the life story of Earth to that of its siblings, we see that very early on in its development, as soon as the sterilizing impact rain subsided so that life could get a toehold, Earth started down a different path. Ever since that juncture, life and Earth have been co-evolving in a continuing dance.

As we’ve studied Earth with space-age tools, seen her whole from a distance, drilled the depths of the ocean floor, and, with the magic glasses of multispectral imaging, mapped the global biogeochemical cycles of elements, nutrients, and energy, we’ve learned that life’s influence is more profound and pervasive than we ever suspected.

All this oxygen we take for granted is the byproduct of life intervening in our planet’s geochemical cycles: harvesting solar energy to split water molecules, keeping the hydrogen atoms and reacting them with CO₂ to make organic food and body parts, but spitting the oxygen back out. In Earth’s upper atmosphere some of this oxygen, under the influence of ultraviolet light, is transformed into ozone, O₃, which shields Earth’s surface from deadly ultraviolet, making the land surface habitable. When it appeared, this shield allowed life to leave the ocean and the continents to become green with forests. That’s right: It was life that rendered the once deadly continents habitable for life.

The more we look through a Gaian lens, the more we see that nearly every aspect of our planet has been biologically distorted beyond recognition. Earth’s rocks contain more than 4,000 different minerals (the crystalline molecules that make up rocks). This is a much more varied smorgasbord of mineral types than we have seen on any other world. Geochemists studying the mineral history of Earth have concluded that by far the majority of these would not exist without the presence of life on our planet. So, on Earth’s life‐altered surface, the very rocks themselves are biological byproducts. A big leap in this mineral diversity occurred after life oxygenated Earth’s atmosphere, leading to a plethora of new oxidized minerals that sprinkled colorful rocks throughout Earth’s sediments. Observed on a distant planet, such vast and varied mineral diversity could be a sign of a living world, so this is a potential biosignature (or Gaiasignature) we can add to the more commonly cited Lovelock criterion of searching for atmospheric gases that have been knocked out of equilibrium by life. In fact, minerals and life seem to have fed off each other going all the way back to the beginning. Evidence has increased that minerals were vital catalysts and physical substrates for the origin of life on Earth. Is it really a huge leap, then, to regard the mineral surface of Earth as part of a global living system, part of the body of Gaia?

What about plate tectonics and the dynamics of Earth’s deep interior? At first glance this seems like a giant mechanical system—a heat engine—that does not depend upon biology, but rather (lucky for life), supports it. Also, although we’re probably still largely ignorant about the deeply buried parts of Earth’s biosphere, it’s unlikely there are any living organisms deeper than a couple of miles down in the crust, where it gets too hot for organic molecules. Yet, just as we’ve found that life’s sway has extended into the upper atmosphere, creating the ozone layer that allowed the biosphere to envelop the continents, more and more we see that life has also influenced these deeper subterranean realms. Over its long life, Gaia has altered not just the skin but also the guts of Earth, pulling carbon from the mantle and piling it on the surface in sedimentary rocks, and sequestering massive amounts of nitrogen from the air into ammonia stored inside the crystals of mantle rocks.

By controlling the chemical state of the atmosphere, life has also altered the rocks it comes into contact with, and so oxygenated the crust and mantle of Earth. This changes the material properties of the rocks, how they bend and break, squish, fold, and melt under various forces and conditions. All the clay minerals produced by Earth’s biosphere soften Earth’s crust—the crust of a lifeless planet is harder—helping to lubricate the plate tectonic engine. The wetness of Earth seems to explain why plate tectonics has persisted on Earth and not on its dry twin, Venus. One of the more extreme claims of the Gaia camp, at present neither proven nor refuted, is that the influence of life over the eons has helped Earth hold on to her life‐giving water, while Venus and Mars, lifeless through most of their existence, lost theirs. If so, then life may indeed be responsible for Earth’s plate tectonics. One of the original architects of plate tectonic theory, Norm Sleep from Stanford, has become thoroughly convinced that life is deeply implicated in the overall physical dynamics of Earth, including the “nonliving” interior domain. In describing the cumulative, long-term influence of life on geology, continent building, and plate tectonics, he wrote, “The net effect is Gaian. That is, life has modified Earth to its advantage.” The more we study Earth, the more we see this. Life has got Earth in its clutches. Earth is a biologically modulated planet through and through. In a nontrivial way, it is a living planet.

Now, 40 years after Viking landed on Mars, we’ve learned that planets are common, including those similar in size to Earth and at the right distance from their stars to allow oceans of liquid water. Also, Lovelock’s radical idea to pay attention to the atmosphere and look for drastic departures from the expected mixture of gases now forms the cornerstone of our life‐detection strategies. Gaian thinking has crept into our ideas about evolution and the habitability of exoplanets, revising notions of the “habitable zone.” We’re realizing that it is not enough to determine basic physical properties of a planet, its size and distance from a star, in order to determine its habitability. Life itself, once it gets started, can make or keep a planet habitable. Perhaps, in some instances, life can also destroy the habitability of a planet, as it almost did on Earth during the Great Oxygenation Event (sometimes called the oxygen catastrophe) of 2.1 billion years ago. As my colleague Colin Goldblatt, a sharp young climate modeler from the University of Victoria, once said, “The defining characteristic of Earth is planetary scale life. Earth teaches us that habitability and inhabitance are inseparable.”

In my 2003 book Lonely Planets, I described what I call the “Living Worlds hypothesis,” which is Gaian thinking applied to astrobiology. Perhaps life everywhere is intrinsically a planetary‐scale phenomenon with a cosmological life span—that is, a life expectancy measured in billions of years, the timescale that defines the lives of planets, stars, and the universe.

Organisms and species do not have cosmological life spans. Gaia does, and this is perhaps a general property of living worlds. Influenced greatly by Lovelock and Margulis, I’ve argued that we are unlikely to find surface life on a planet that has not severely and flagrantly altered its own atmosphere. According to this idea, a planet cannot be “slightly alive” any more than a person can (at least not for long), and an aged planet such as Mars, if it is not obviously, conspicuously alive like Earth, is probably completely dead.  If the little whiffs of methane recently reported by the Curiosity rover turn out to be the signs of pockets of Martian life on an otherwise generally dead world, this would prove that my Living Worlds hypothesis is wrong, and that life can take on very non-Gaia-like forms elsewhere. But a living world may require more than temporary little pockets of water and energy as surely exist underground on Mars. It may require continuous and vigorous internally driven geological activity. I believe that only a planet that is “alive” in the geological sense is likely to be “alive” in the biological sense. Without plate tectonics, without deep, robust global biogeochemical cycles which life could feed off and, eventually, entrain itself within, life may never have been able to establish itself as a permanent feature of Mars, as it did on Earth.

As far as we can tell, around the time when life was starting on Earth, both Venus and Mars shared the same characteristics that enabled life to get going here: They were wet, they were rocky, they had thick atmospheres and vigorous geologic activity. Comparative planetology seems to be telling us that the conditions needed for the origin of life might be the norm for rocky worlds. One real possibility is that Mars or Venus also had an origin of life, but that life did not stick, couldn’t persist, on either of these worlds. It was not able to take root and become embedded as a permanent planetary feature, as it did on Earth. This may be a common outcome: planets that have an origin of life, perhaps even several, but that never develop a robust and self‐sustaining global biosphere. What is really rare and unusual about Earth is that beneficial conditions for life have persisted over billions of years. This may have been more than luck.

When we stop thinking of planets as merely objects or places where living beings may or may not be present, but rather as themselves living or nonliving entities, it can color the way we think about the origin of life. Perhaps life is something that happens not on a planet but to a planet: It is something that a planet becomes.

Think of life as analogous to a fire. If you’ve ever tried to start a campfire, you know it’s easy to ignite some sparks and a little flicker of flame, but then it’s hard to keep these initial flames going. At first you have to tend to the fire, blowing until you’re faint, to supply more oxygen, or it will just die out. That’s always the tricky part: keeping it burning before it has really caught on. Then it reaches a critical point, where the fire is really roaring. It’s got a bed of hot coals and its heat is generating its own circulation pattern, sucking in oxygen, fanning its own flames. At that point it becomes self-sustaining, and you can go grab a beer and watch for shooting stars.

I wonder if the first life on a planet isn’t like those first sparks and those unsteady little flames. The earliest stages of life may be extremely vulnerable, and there may be a point where, once life becomes a planetary phenomenon, enmeshed in the global flows that support and fuel it, it feeds back on itself and becomes more like a self‐sustaining fire, one that not only draws in its own air supply, but turns itself over and replenishes its own fuel. A mature biosphere seems to create the conditions for life to continue and flourish.

A “living worlds” perspective implies that after billions of years, life will either be absent from a planet or, as on Earth, have thoroughly taken over and become an integral part of all global processes. Signs of life will be everywhere. Once life has taken hold of a planet, once it has become a planetary‐scale entity (a global organism, if you will), it may be very hard to kill. Certainly life has seen Earth through many huge changes, some quite traumatic. Life here is remarkably robust and persistent. It seems to have a kind of immortality. Call it quasi‐immortality, because the planet won’t be around forever, and it may not be habitable for its entire lifetime. Individuals are here for but an instant. Whole species come and go, usually in timescales barely long enough to get the planet’s attention. Yet life as a whole persists. This gives us a different way to think about ourselves. The scientific revolution has revealed us, as individuals, to be incredibly tiny and ephemeral, and our entire existence, not just as individuals but even as a species, to be brief and insubstantial against the larger temporal backdrop of cosmic evolution. If, however, we choose to identify with the biosphere, then we, Gaia, have been here for quite some time, for perhaps 3 billion years in a universe that seems to be about 13 billion years old. We’ve been alive for a quarter of all time. That’s something.

The origin of life on Earth was not just the beginning of the evolution of species, the fount of diversity that eventually begat algae blooms, aspen groves, barrier reefs, walrus huddles, and gorilla troops. From a planetary evolution perspective, this development was a major branching point that opened up a gateway to a fundamentally different future. Then, when life went global, and went deep, planet Earth headed irreversibly down the path not taken by its siblings.

Now, very recently, out of this biologically altered Earth, another kind of change has suddenly emerged and is rewriting the rules of planetary evolution. On the nightside of Earth, the lights are switching on, indicating that something new is happening and someone new is home. Has another gateway opened? Could the planet be at a new branching point?

The view from space sheds light on the multitude of rapid changes inscribed on our planet by our industrial society. The orbital technology enabling this observation is itself one of the strange and striking aspects of the transition now gripping Earth. If up to now the defining characteristic of Earth has been planetary‐scale life, then what about these planetary‐scale lights? Might this spreading, luminous net be part of a new defining characteristic?

David Grinspoon is a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. He serves on the science teams for several active and proposed interplanetary spacecraft missions. In 2013 he was appointed as the inaugural chair of astrobiology at the U.S. Library of Congress. His latest book, Earth in Human Hands, was published in 2016. Also a musician, he plays guitar for the House Band of the Universe. He tweets @DrFunkySpoon.

From the book Earth in Human Hands by David Grinspoon. Copyright © 2016 by David Grinspoon. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing, New York, NY. All rights reserved.

This article was originally published on Nautilus Cosmos in December 2016.