from
Thunderbolts.info Website
Dec 30, 2004
NOTES ON THE
PICTURES ABOVE:
TOP ROW: Left: Pattern traced by an electric spark across an
insulating surface dusted with fine powder. Note the parallelism of
the spark paths and the tendency for the tributaries to join the
main channel at near right angles. Note also the deep secondary
channel running along the center of the primary.
Center: Lunar rilles reveal features remarkably similar to the scars left by
electrical arcs. Sharp turns unrelated to topographic inclination,
and circular or oblong pits strategically placed along the rilles,
are two key pointers to electrical forces.
Right: With the curvature
of the Moon as backdrop, this photograph of the Aristarchus Plateau
underscores the extraordinary length of many lunar rilles--far
exceeding any observed lava flows on Earth. Note also that some of
the rilles cut across elevated terrain, a fact that precludes
creation by flowing liquid.
LOWER LEFT: This bolt of lightning carved a 40-foot furrow
across the infield of a baseball diamond. The more sinuous path
taken by the lightning can be seen roughly traced in the bottom of
the furrow, a key to understanding the patterns of electrically
machined rilles on bodies in space.
MIDDLE RIGHT: Schröter’s Valley on the Moon, commonly said to
be caused by basaltic lava flows from volcanic sources. A much more
narrow stream of pits winds its way down the valley.
LOWER RIGHT: The 700 km Martian rille, Nirgal Vallis. Note
the tiny tributaries for such a gigantic channel, the extreme
sinuosity, and the “fretted” cookie cutter appearance of the “lower”
reaches, all inconsistent with the dynamics of flowing water.
Laboratory study of the
way electric arcs affect surface materials will soon
challenge traditional geologic models. The evidence will show that
the cosmic “thunderbolt” dominated planetary
evolution.
When speaking of solar system history, proponents of the
electric
universe realize that their message can create huge difficulties in
communication. Abbreviated “first glimpses” of their
viewpoint will provoke incredulity, shock, and irritation. In the
electric model, the actual history of our solar system
does not resemble the currently accepted theories of the sciences.
Therefore, the reader must be asked to suspend all prior beliefs on
the subject, including matters thought to have been settled decades,
or even centuries ago.
In the later years of his life, Nobel Laureate Hannes Alfven,
the founder of plasma science, reached a startling conclusion about
the nature of the universe. He said that gravitational systems are
the “ashes” of prior electrical systems. This remarkable idea would
require the investigation of our solar system to move in an entirely
new direction. But the history of science suggests that such
dramatic turns do not occur easily, or without a jolt of unnerving
proportions.
In contrast to conventional theorists, advocates of the electric
universe contend that as recently as several thousand years ago,
planets moved under the influence of electrified plasma, a medium
that can easily overwhelm gravity. Orbits changed, and catastrophic
electrical encounters altered the terrain, the climates, and the
atmospheres of planets, including our Earth.
Though the duration of instability is unknown, the final episodes of
catastrophe occurred in the time of our early ancestors, who
witnessed celestial wonders beyond anything imagined today.
Charged planets and moons were held in a close array by electrical
forces and were seen as huge spheres in the sky. In periods of
instability, plasma discharges passed between planets,
capturing the obsessive attention of human witnesses. Ancient sky
worshippers observed the resulting plasma configurations as the
discharges mutated from one unstable phase to another, seemingly
alive, intelligent—and habitually combative. It was these events,
often earthshaking and terrifying, that supplied the raw content of
world mythology and inspired the great religious and symbolic
traditions of antiquity.
Planetary science will play a critical role in testing the
electric universe hypothesis. The claimed events could not have
occurred without leaving vast physical scars on all the rocky bodies
involved. Because most of the rocky bodies in the solar system have
surfaces unaffected by atmospheric or fluid erosion, they must have
preserved a relatively pristine record of these events. The scars
should still be visible today.
To produce the discharge formations claimed by the electric
theorists, one must envision interplanetary lightning raking across
the surfaces of the celestial bodies, alternately removing material
and implanting material. This re-sculpting of surfaces occurred
through intensely violent action, in stark contrast to geologic
processes occurring on Earth today. But presently-observed
terrestrial events provide most of the content of modern geological
theory. Hence, the
electric
universe challenges standard theory at
the level of underpinnings.
Charged bodies within a plasma develop insulating “sheaths”
or plasma cells around them. In space, we call these
sheaths “magnetospheres”. So long as charged planets remain outside
each other’s plasma sheaths they will stay electrically "invisible"
to each other. But two planets in close approach, moving deeply into
each other’s sheaths, will cause the electrical insulation to break
down, and the resulting arcing will leave surface features that can
only be obvious once the question is raised.
No inquiry into the issues raised here could afford to overlook the
thousands of channels torn across surfaces of planets and moons. The
lunar surface, for example, presents huge channels, called "sinuous
rilles”, first observed through earthbound telescopes, then viewed
close up from Apollo craft orbiting the Moon in the late 1960’s.
[Photograph above, upper right]
As seen from Earth, some lunar rilles look so much like a
terrestrial river that early astronomers wondered if subsurface
water might be present on the Moon. Yet closer views
showed that the characteristic features of rivers—tributary systems,
braids, smoothly curved meanders, delta fans, alluvial flood plains,
etc.—are either missing or oddly displayed in lunar rilles.
Before the space age, only the Moon could be seen with
enough detail to reveal the existence of sinuous rilles. But
after more than three decades of space exploration, virtually
identical terrain is known to exist on every closely observed body
of the solar system—on all of the rocky inner planets, on the
Martian moon Phobos, on the moons of the gas giants,
on asteroids, and even on comets. How did the same morphology
occur in such radically different environments?
The mystery only deepens as we learn more about these celestial
bodies. Many space objects are too hot, too dry, too airless, too
cold, or too small to have rivers of water. Where any kind of
flowing liquid is excluded, the specialists have proposed cracking
of ice under tidal stresses, or cracking of rocky surfaces by
meteoric impacts, or collapse of surface material above subterranean
flows of liquid, or venting of sub-surface gases. These diverse "explanations"
have been offered for essentially identical geologic formations.
In the mid-1970’s, engineer Ralph Juergens described for the
first time the expected effects of interplanetary lightning on
the surfaces of solid bodies in space. His original insights are
particularly valuable in light of plasma cosmology, with its
emphasis on electricity in the evolution of stellar and planetary
systems. Juergens showed that the strange features of
sinuous rilles can be explained by scaling up features of
powerful lightning strikes on Earth. Interplanetary lightning
could act (with variations) on worlds that are hot or cold, on
worlds with high or low gravity, on worlds with or without an
atmosphere, and on worlds with or without water, lava, or other
liquids.
• Often a rille
begins or ends on a crater or has a crater straddling the rille
at the place where the rille changes direction. Hyginus rille
on the Moon is a good example.
• Many craters are perched on the edges of rilles -- far in
excess of the random distribution predicted by orthodox impact
theory.
• Sometimes craters are so densely distributed in and around
rilles that when scientists count the craters to estimate the
age of the surface their conclusion flatly contradicts the
claimed age of the rille itself.
• Crater chains frequently run parallel to a rille, as near
Valles Marineris on Mars, or they can run
along the bottom of the rille for all or part of the rille's
length.
• Sometimes the rille appears to be constituted of overlapping
craters, making clear that the force producing the craters was
the agent producing the rille. This apparently continuous
cratering will often give a clean "cookie cutter" or fluted
appearance to the walls of the channel with no evidence of the
slumping that would follow fluid undercutting.
Experimental work is now
underway to explore the relationship between the electric arc and
scarring patterns in the solar system. Much more such research is
called for, but even the initial results, as they are published,
should be sufficient to provoke more vigorous laboratory work.
The channel produced by an electric spark, such as the one shown
above, is a sinuous rille in miniature. Electrical phenomena are
scalable: they exhibit the same forms and characteristics whether
the discharge occurs over a fraction of a millimeter or over
thousands of kilometers. In fact, computerized simulations of
high-energy electrical discharges indicate that the same patterns
can be scaled up yet another 100 million times to galactic size.
Scalability carries sweeping implications for planetary science.
With a microscope, industrial engineers observe the characteristic
features of rilles in the tiny scars that electric arcs leave on
damaged insulators and semiconductors or on the surfaces of
spark-machined tools. If interplanetary lightning caused the rilles
on space objects, then inexpensive and controlled experiments on
Earth may answer puzzles that have vexed planetary scientists for
decades. Present knowledge of electrical phenomena will also enable
scientists to calculate the energies involved in the formation of
rilles. How powerful is an interplanetary lightning bolt? Plasma
cosmologist Anthony Peratt estimates that a single such bolt would
be as powerful as 3000 100-megaton nuclear explosions.
In the coming year, our “Pictures of the Day” will return to these
questions often. Active “volcanoes” on Jupiter’s moon
Io and
Neptune’s moon Triton reveal the telltale signatures of
plasma
discharges. Enormous “dust devils” moving across the surface of
Mars, suggest similar phenomena at lower energies. The tracks of
these Everest-sized whirlwinds are eerily similar to the spidery
patterns of supposed “cracks” on Jupiter's moon Europa. In wildly
different contexts, we observe vast fields of parallel grooves,
flat-bottomed craters and crater chains; domes and blisters, all
explicable in fine detail as the scars of electric arcs.
In surveying scientific opinion on unexpected planetary geology, we
have found that the "best scientific guesses" frequently ignore the
most telling features. Experts may be reluctant to concentrate on
anomalies to phenomena they claim to understand. In fact, the
astonishing surface relief has forced planetary scientists to
produce whole libraries of fragmentary and often-contradictory
“explanations”, none of which has withstood closer scrutiny.
This is not, then, a mystery that can be resolved overnight. It
requires close examination of anomalous but recurring patterns. And
when it comes to the alien landscapes revealed in recent decades, it
is no exaggeration to say that every recurring pattern is an
anomaly.
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