We have awakened to the fact that as large as our planet is, its resources are limited. To illustrate the fragility of our planet’s systems, consider the following; the Earth is about 8,000 miles in diameter, and the depth of breathable atmosphere is no more than five miles. To draw a perspective of just how thin that is, imagine a ball four feet in diameter wrapped in a large single sheet of copy paper, the thickness of that paper represents the depth of breathable atmosphere in relation to the ball.
WWWCooperation with our ecological systems, and conserving them work to our great advantage and benefit, and has become glaringly apparent that in order for our planet to continue sustaining us with any degree of quality, we need to sustain it as well. We must keep the golden-goose healthy. So far, our cooperativeness with our planet has been somewhat, shall we say, one-sided, and we may be suffering under the delusion that nature revolves around us, rather than we around it. We have been feeding off it while trashing it; for instance we use our oceans both as a pantry and a toilet—not an especially cooperative alliance.
WWWCommon horse sense tells us that a one sided relationship is doomed to be temporary; sooner or later, probably sooner, as in any personal, business, or family relationship, the giver will no longer comply with the taker. In a personal relationship, we can recognize certain signals that warn us something is amiss, provided our ego isn’t flying close to the sun and tamed enough to allow perceiving it. There may be signs of an emotional distance, or a mood of alienation.
WWWAs a result of disrespecting and abusing the very bosom that nurtures us, Mother Earth likewise is exhibiting clear signs of alienation. When we practice this with personal or business relationships and lose them, we can move on to other similar relationships; in the case of our precious environment, we cannot stop the world and get off, it’s the only one we have.
WWWThere are many clear signs of alienation as when she responds to our careless disregard by giving us mercury with our fish, and when we’re being impacted with glaring consequential changes that warming is manifesting on our planet. Looking at just a few, we see that Greenland has the fastest rising temperature on the planet, rising 8 degrees Fahrenheit in the past ten years. NASA scientists estimate that Greenland is losing 100 billion tons of ice each year, and satellite analysis shows that its melt area has increases 30 percent.
WWWIn August of 2010, a massive chunk of ice four times larger than the island of Manhattan broke away from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier. Climate scientist, Dr. Konrad Steffen, with the University of Colorado has been conducting research in Greenland for the past twenty-years, and estimates that if Greenland’s melting continues at its present rate, sea levels could rise three feet by the year 2100, flooding parts of cities like New York and Shanghai, displacing millions of people.
WWWAnother alienating sign is the wildfires in the western United States that have increased by 78 days or 64 percent in the last thirty-years. Western fires have become monstrous, and recorded history shows nothing of the magnitude we’re seeing today. Since 1999, ten of the busiest fire seasons occurred. A 100,000-acre fire was considered huge ten to fifteen years ago, where one or two a year was unusual. Today a 200,000-acre fire is common. In fact they’re even seeing 500,000 and 600,000-acre fires.
WWWAnd, there is Lake Chad, surrounded by Nigeria, Niger Cameroon, and Chad, once the sixth largest lake in the world (25,000 square kilometers). This lake has shrunk 90 percent in thirty years, and the thirty million people who live in the area are now forced to compete for its water and fish.
WW
Mother Earth Bestows Her Services Free
For instance, New York had crystal clear fresh water purified for them for decades from the Catskill Mountains, so good, they bottled and sold it. Regrettably, with their continuous population growth, much of the watershed land was being altered and transformed into resorts. farms and homes; along with all the sewage attendant with it, contaminating their wonderfully pure water to such an extent that it couldn’t even meet Environmental Protection Agency standards.
WWWNew York then contemplated building a plant to do the same job their pristine watershed was doing—the cost would be between six and eight billion dollars with a $300 million per annum maintenance expense, in contrast to it being free compliments of Mother Earth. The other option was to restore the natural purification capability of the land for $1 billion, which as a bonus, would also facilitate flood control—a no brainer. In 1997 New York started purchasing the land to restore it.
WWWAnother example is Atlanta. They removed twenty-percent of their trees in the urban area because of rapid growth, which resulted in a yearly increase of 4.4 cubic-feet of storm water runoff. To build containment and runoff structures with the capacity to hold that volume, would cost $2 billion. Replanting trees around homes and along streets with no maintenance costs was of course the answer.
WWW
Cooperation vs. Ego
There are many egos in the world that insist on remaining in denial mode, shutting out all incoming information to protect their own beliefs, agendas, and ideologies. They are like the man who falls off a cliff, and as he plummets, he’s heard to mutter, “So far so good.”
WWWImagine if science and religion were to come together in collaboration and cooperation, united in the quest of the stewardship of our environment, one contributing inspiration, the other, knowledge. When it comes to our precious world, we must get beyond the narrow thinking that religion in only about the spiritual and science is only about the physical, because our environment is both spiritual and physical. Merging both could perhaps give us a decent chance toward resolving the problem, and may even be powerful enough to produce a small miracle—get Congress to move boldly—providing environmental leadership to the world by our example.
WWWCooperating and respecting Mother Earth’s delicate systems will be an investment of incalculable benefit to each of us, especially our progeny, and would make the Louisiana Purchase Treaty seem like we got fleeced.

© Joe Arrigo

• This summer there will be a two-year televised worldwide search for four people to train as astronauts for a trip to Mars in 2023, and NASA won’t be sending them. It may sound like science fiction, but this a deadly serious endeavor by a private company in the Netherlands called Mars One.
  WWWAlready, Mars One has received 10,000 emails from interested people. It’s especially impressive that that many people want to leave this Earth, because unbelievably, it’s a one-way trip to colonize the planet. Anyone who is over 18 years-old can apply with a one-minute video of themselves expressing why they think they should be chosen.
  WW
  Mars One
  Mars One was founded is 2011, the members coming together to develop a plan for man to reach Mars. So far it has contracted with Paragon Space Development Corp., to design life support and space suite systems, and is in discussions with SpaceX for the spacecraft, Canada’s MDA Robotics for the rovers, Thales Alenia Space in Italy for the MTV (Mars Transit Vehicle), ILC Dover, Astrobiotic, and Surrey Satellite. For every component, Mars One has at least one potential supplier.
  WWWHow do they intend to raise the money? By an ongoing, global media reality series, from the selection of the astronauts, their training, and from lift-off to

  

  Bas Lansdorp

  landing. From a group of astronauts chosen by the Mars One experts, the audience will get to choose who actually goes. Co-founder of Mars One, Bas Lansdorp says, “We will finance this mission by creating the biggest media event ever. Everyone in the world will be able to see everything that will happen in the preparations and on Mars.”
  WWWThe first equipment to arrive on Mars will be a communications satellite in 2016, a demonstration rover in 2018 to search Mars for the best location for the settlement, and a 5,500-pound supply lander.
  WW
  The Process
  By July 2015, twenty-four astronauts will be selected and organized into six teams of four people, and they will be put through eight years of training, spending three months at a time in a Mars colony simulation every two years under stressful situations, to learn how they respond in close living quarters while isolated from the rest of the world. They will learn new skills such as construction and electrical repair, cultivating crops in confined spaces, and dealing with routine and serious medical situations like dental maintenance, bone fractures and muscle tears.
  The The Mars lander will be tested eight times before landing the first team.
  WW
  The Flight
  The flight will take the astronauts between seven to eight months starting in September 2022, spending those months in an uncomfortably small space, not being able to shower, rather washing with wet towelettes, and eating freeze dried and canned food. Noise will be constant from the ventilators, computer and life support systems, with three hours of exercise every day to keep their muscles from atrophying. If they encounter a solar storm, they will take protection in an even smaller sheltered area, as long as several days.
  WW
  Landing and Colonization
  When the first team of four land on April 24, 2023, there will already be in place a colony of habitats and solar arrays that started construction before they left Earth, the rovers doing much of the heavy construction before their arrival. The units they will live in are spacious by comparison to their flight space—550 square feet per person or 2,200 square feet combined interior space, all connected by passageways so they are able to move freely from one end of the settlement to the other.
  WWWThey will be able to finally shower and prepare fresh food which they will grow themselves, and they will conduct research on how their bodies are responding and changing due to living in a gravitational pull 38% of that on Earth—a 200 lb. man would weigh 76 lbs.. a 125 lb. woman, 48 lbs.
  WWWThe colony will initially have two rovers, two habitats, two life support landers and two supply landers, and a new group of astronauts will come to Mars every two years increasing the colony’s size.
  WWWThe most intriguing aspect of the mission is the people; those that are willing to accept the fact that they are going to another planet for the rest of their lives. That’s a commitment that is certainly frightening to most of us, arousing and mixing our emotions where we don’t know whether to admire or look upon them as insane. Nevertheless, this is an exciting prospect, to actually watch these intrepid pioneers go where no man has ever gone before.

 “All I need is one cell to clone a mammoth.” 
These are the words of cloning scientist, Insung Hwang. He, Dr. Love Dalen a mammoth DNA expert, and Jim Coates a permafrost expert, went on a highly ambitious expedition to Northern Siberia to find a single frozen microscopic cell with a viable mammoth DNA.

Dr. Love Dalen

Many scientists doubt that any living cell could have survived the freezing 60⁰ below zero temperatures of the Siberian tundra, but despite that, Hwang and his colleagues at the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in Seoul, Korea, are armed with new cloning technologies, aggressively looking for an intact nucleus of a mammoth cell, because it has a much greater chance of being preserved than the cell itself.
WW
OFF TO SIBERIA
Hwang and his team ventured into Musica Crater in Siberia, the largest mammoth graveyard on Earth where most of the permafrost is intact, giving them the greatest chance of finding a living 30,000 year-old nucleus with its DNA. They find a small cave-like hole that’s an excellent candidate for harboring mammoth remains. It’s slightly wider than the width of a man that’s partially filled with water and mud, and where the ceiling is unstable. Permafrost expert, Jim Coates insists it’s extremely dangerous and strongly recommends staying out. WWWHwang, listening to Coates’ dire warning, has a crucial decision to make—this cave is their last hope of an expedition costing $1 million dollars to succeed—he feels that science is not only about lab work, but also about risky dirty work that has to be done. He’s going in. He and his team from the Biotech Foundation find a treasure trove of mammoth remains of bone and muscle. The entrance of the cave starts to collapse, and those outside desperately call for them to exit immediately. They do, barely escaping with their lives, and 44 pounds of mammoth remains. WWWWith their portable lab kit and a computer, they determine there is a good potential they have viable cells. Now the task is to keep them frozen for a 2.000 mile trek back to Seoul, which they do successfully. At the Biotech lab they examine their most promising specimens and find a that a piece of mammoth muscle is still red, making it their number one candidate for a live nucleus. They dissolve the tissue samples in a protein solution, filter it, and incubate them for 10 days. WWWAnd yes, there is a viable cell from the muscle, but the surprise is that they get even better results from bone marrow with four excellent cells. This is first time ever a live mammoth cell is in the hands of man.

WHAT TO DO WITH A LIVE NUCLEUS
Now that these scientists have the nucleus containing a mammoth DNA, they will then implant it into an egg of the closest living relative of mammoths—the elephant. Once they are joined, the cell will divide, and multiply, forming a blastocyst. And that blastocyst will be implanted into a healthy elephant with the hope that she will give birth to a baby mammoth after a gestation period of about 22 months.
WW
ONTO BORNEO
Hwang is working with Dr. Helmut Hilderbrandt who I believe is one of a team of two that were the first to artificially impregnate an elephant. They meet at the Saban Wildlife Refuge in Borneo where there is a farm of eight Asian elephants. They need two elephants to complete this  seemingly impossible task.
WWWOne will be the surrogate carrying the baby mammoth, and the other will be the egg-donor. To determine which two are the optimum candidates in terms of health, Hilderbrandt uses an ultrasound probe which he inserts into the elephant through the rectum with his entire arm. So, they have the blastocyst, the surrogate, and the donor, and this is as far as I can take this saga, we’ll have to wait and see what the next development is.
WWWSeeing one of these magnificent creature with their stupendous tusks would indeed be an astounding sight to behold, as the largest known mammoth species reached heights of 13 feet at the shoulder and weighed 9 tons.

© Joe Arrigo

The other evening I watched a fascinating and extremely well-done four-hour movie titled Pope Joan, about a brilliant young girl living in Mainz, Germany during the 9th century who roses to become the Pope, known as John Anglicus, played by actress Johanna Wokalek, and  Pope Leo IV played by John Goodman.
WWW As I watched I wondered could this story possibly have any basis in truth? It turns out, it could, being a mystery; there are compelling clues but no actual historical documentation proving it. According to the movie, during that same period, Vatican records were blatantly expunged of her existence and replaced with a fictional account.
WWWIt was a time of ignorance and superstition making life brutal for women, living in mud huts, not being allowed on the streets which would brand them as prostitutes, life expectancy was about 35, and education was only for males—a learned woman was considered unnatural, despicable; therefore, the only way a woman would ever be able to achieve such a monumental stature was to disguise herself as a man, where intelligence and talent would be recognized and heralded rather than scorned. And disguise herself she did.
WWW When her brother is killed by a Viking attack, Joan takes his cloak and his identity and enters the monastery of Fulda to become a scholar, healer and a cardinal, then travels to Rome where she gains notoriety as a healer and a scholar. She was unanimously voted in as Pope in the year A.D. 855.
WWWAs the movie depicts, two-and-a-half years into Pope Joan’s reign, at a crossroads in a papal procession to the Church of the Lateran in Rome, she was stricken with sharp abdominal pains—they were contractions—she was having a baby. From that point on many stories conflict; one story claims she and her child were killed, another says she was dragged from the tail of a horse, another yet tells she was stoned to death, most accounts agree she died that day.
W
What Are the Clues?

Medieval rendition of Pope Joan

We need to realize that people of that period didn’t bathe, only washing their face, hands and feet, and that the robes clerics wore were quite loose allowing no visual hint of body form. The clergy always were clean shaven, and because of malnutrition most men and women were gaunt.
WWWMatin Polonus, a monk, who authored History and Popes, and close advisor to the Pope wrote about a young woman from Mainz who learned Greek and Latin, as the movie portrays, and became “proficient in a diversity of branches of knowledge.” The Renaissance poet Giovanni Boccaccio also stated in his book, 100 Famous Women, Pope Joan is number 51, and he also wrote about her in the DeMulieribus Claris.
WWWRare book dealers in Rome have tarot cards where the card for hidden knowledge is “LaPapesse,” the female Pope. Inside the cathedral in Duoma, Italy, there are terra-cotta busts of 170 Popes, and Cardinal Baronius, the 17th century Vatican librarian wrote that one of the faces was Joan the Female Pope, and one of the 17th century’s most famous artists, Bernini, carved the images of a woman wearing a papal gown, telling a story of a woman giving birth.
WWWNovelist Donna Cross who spent seven years researching the time period, and wrote the international best seller, Pope Joan on which the movie is based, says the historical evidence exists, “I would say it’s the weight of evidence, over 500 chronicle accounts of her exist.” And Mary Malone who wrote, Women and Christianity says, “Ninety percent of me thinks there was a Pope Joan.”
WWWInteresting and intriguing is that the crossroads where Pope Joan gave birth was named Vicus Papissa, the Street of the Female Pope, and for over one hundred years, Popes would take a detour to avoid the intersection of shame.
WW
Mystery
The Catholic Church and many scholars dismiss the story of Joan as myth, yet for centuries the story of Pope Joan has persisted.
WWWIt seems women were a threatening force in the medieval church where many were tortured for their religious beliefs, many became martyrs, and some  became saints while disguising themselves as monks—such as St. Eugenia.
WWWIt also seems Pope Joan will remain a mystery, and a legend.

© Joe Arrigo

So, what can we do about it? It’s comforting to know we have the science to intercept asteroids, exampled by Japan’s Hayabusa probe which they landed on, and returned from the potato-shaped asteroid Itokawa, and NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is currently orbiting around 4 Vesta in the asteroid belt; we even crashed NASA’s Deep Impact probe into the comet 9P/Tempel. We can get there, and there are a variety of options being researched to deflect these big stones from a path whose destination is Earth.
WWWUnfortunetly only a tiny portion of NASA’s budjet is designated to developing technologies to implement such a mission. That’s due to Congress’ feeling that these collisions are rare, which is true, but what their superficial thinking misses is that it only takes one to take out a city, or even bring us to extinction. An extinction asteroid is one that’s about six miles in diameter as the one that took-out the dinosaurs. Fortunately, there is private research being conducted worldwide that we’ll be exploring.

The most obvious way most of us think of to rid ourselves of this threat is a nuclear bomb, and it is a viable option. The most common sense method is to deliver and detonate a nuclear device strategically near the asteroid, knocking it off  its course.
WWWRobert Weaver is a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). He runs simulations on the Cielo supercomputer to determine our ability to use a one-megaton bomb—50 times the power than the one dropped on Hiroshima—to annihilate an Earth bearing big rock and breaking it into pieces, causing most of them to miss Earth by changing their direction, and more importantly, that those still making it to Earth would be small enough to burn up in the atmosphere.

Just a Spacecraft

A spacecraft could be flown to, and impact an asteroid, nudging it off course. It could also fly near and follow the asteroid with the spacecraft’s slight gravitational pull tugging on it and changing its course—a one-degree change of course could mean missing Earth by millions of miles, given enough time. It’s likely that NASA and its partner agencies would be able to detect an asteroid ten to fifteen years out, which is plenty of time to send a craft to fly in formation with it. Astronauts Edward Lu and Stanley Love were the first to propose this concept.

Mirror Satellites

Dr. Massimiliano Vasile, from the University of Glasgow feels the best way to divert a killer rock is to deploy a swarm of mirror satellites to focus beams of concentrated sunlight onto its surface as long as its applied well in advance of the impact. Concentrating sunlight heats the rock converting the surface material to gas, which will then create a rocket like thrust nudging the asteroid into a new orbit. Dr. Vasile says, “Our studies show this technology is genuinely feasible, and unlike methods where an explosion or impactor is used to divert the asteroid, there is no further risk from fragments.”
WWWHe and his colleagues concluded using a nuclear device might be the most effective method for a small asteroid of about 300 feet in diameter, but with larger ones there is a risk of splitting them into unpredictable and dangerous fragments. They calculated ten mirror satellites with metal surfaces of 60 feet in diameter orbiting an asteroid 500 feet in diameter focusing sunlight to the surface would push it off course in 200 days, or 1,000 satellites with six foot diameter mirrors could do it in 90 days.

Giant Space Laser

Researchers at the University of California and California Polytechnic State University are proposing launching an array of solar powered lasers into orbit that would deflect or vaporize incoming asteroids. The system is known as DE-STAR, or Directed Energy Solar Targeting of Asteroids an exploRation, and would use the sun’s energy, focusing it into laser beams that could evaporate asteroids—a directed energy orbital defense system.

WWW

Pebbles

A swarm of pebbles could deflect an asteroid if launched early enough. British researchers from the University of Strathclyde have calculated that 1,000 pounds of pebbles would deflect an 800-foot asteroid 22,000 miles if it met it eight years out, or about three orbits before the predicted Earth impact. The swarm would be launched in a single rocket, then directed at the asteroid in a tight formation, the pebbles being too small to fragment into dangerous smaller pieces.

In his proposal, Paek used the asteroid Apophis as his test model. Apophis is 1,066-foot diameter, 27-gigaton rock that will make a close pass to Earth in 2029 and then again in 2036 as it orbits back toward Earth’s path. For an object of that size, Paek figures it would require five tons of paint. The pellets would burst on impact and splatter a five-micrometer-layer on the surface. He also calculates it would take 20 years for the cumulative effect of solar radiation pressure to pull it off Earth’s trajectory.
WWWHis plan is to manufacture the paintballs in space, perhaps on the International Space Station and transferred to a spacecraft, rather than attempt launching them from Earth, as the turbulence may rupture them.