Schoch Waves from our Solar System and Beyond

There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. . . . Just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves. — Plato, the Timaeus What we think of as the full “history of human civilization” is just the latest cycle of ascendance in a series. Humanity has flourished during the last 12,000 years — a “brief” period of stability in great, turbulent forces that reign in our sun and beyond. This is the umbrella theme of Robert Schoch’s book, Forgotten Civilizations — a book which also includes references to a dozen other chapters of occluded science, well-documented experiments and observations that have been set aside by the scientific community because they don’t fit into the prevailing paradigm. The book is an invitation to a dozen research projects, but here I will try to summarize just one theme: cosmoclimatology. * The stormy surface of the sun, * earth’s magnetic field and ionosphere, * the motion of our solar system through interstellar space, * the seething black hole at the center of our galaxy All these systems can erupt, periodically, in ways that are threatening to life on earth. In the ~2 million year history of hominids, there have been many worldwide calamities of celestial origin and more of geologic origin. The latest of these have destroyed civilizations and our memory of technologies that were once highly developed. Robert Schoch’s wide-ranging book is a breath of fresh air for people like me who think that the scientific community has been willfully blind to diverse findings that would require a rethinking of established paradigms if they were accepted. I’ll focus here just on Chapters 7 through 9 (of 15). These discuss cosmoclimatology = influence of astronomical systems on the earth’s atmosphere. Our sun and even the galactic core have been subject to periodic disturbances that are associated with extinction-level effects on a living earth. But first, let’s remember some reasons to take these possibilities seriously on a human time scale. * The Carrington Event of September, 1859 was the result of a solar flare that happened to be pointed toward our planet. At the time, telegraph wires were the only widely-deployed electrical technology. The electrical disturbance caused by particles from the sun blew out telegraph systems and shocked the operators. A comparable event in 2023 could knock out computer systems globally and fry the transformers which are essential to power grids around the world. [Speculation in New Scientist] * From about 1600 to 1800 was a Little Ice Age, with temperatures noticeably colder than anything we recognize in our lifetimes. In Europe and N America, there was a lot more snow, ice lasted longer into the spring, and growing seasons were shorter. * The Egyptian Pyramids were built with technologies that we cannot reproduce in the 21st Century. Hollow stone vessels and core drill holes attest to a capacity to work with hard rock that today’s science cannot support or even explain. A thousand-ton foundation stone in Lebanon is ten times larger than any crane today could lift. [I referenced these and other anomalies in a 2021 article.] * There are extensive, ancient tunnel systems in Europe, South America, and Asia. The best known are at Derinkuyu in Turkey. There are miles of underground tunnels, living quarters for tens of thousands of people, space for gatherings, for cooking, for keeping livestock, all in 7 layers going down to 85 meters below the surface. Schoch states the obvious: Such underground cities were not built with hand shovels, and there must have been powerful motivation to move living quarters underground. A natural hypothesis is that before the 12,000-year time frame for which we have historic records, there was a highly developed technological civilization and there were long periods of ultraviolet or cosmic ray or other condition that compelled whole communities to seek refuge underground. End of the last ice age The Younger Dryas is the name geologists give to the end of the last ice age. There were two dramatic events, about a thousand years apart, with a return to freezing conditions in between. There are competing theories for the cause of the sudden warming; Schoch believes that the ice age ended with a series of solar storms. One of the pieces of evidence that he cites is vitrification of (human-carved) stone monuments. Vitrification means melting of stone, creating a glass-like consistency on the surface. He has found forts in Scotland, stones on the Giza Plateau and elsewhere in Egypt that show signs of vitrification. He takes this as evidence, (1) that the monuments and the Pyramids themselves are much older than the Egyptian dynasties (~5,000 years) and, in fact, older than the Younger Dryas (~12,000 years); and (2) that there were severe solar outbursts, sending tongues of plasma into space from the sun’s atmosphere, touching down on earth and causing these vitrifications locally. Also part of this story: People lived in underground cities to escape dangerous levels of radiation on the earth. Smaller mammals also were able to burrow underground, but the extinctions of sloths, mammoths, and sabre-tooth tigers during this period occurred because large mammals could not hide underground. By jp.morteveille - jp.morteveille, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1707170 The solar storms melted glaciers the world over, causing flooding which imprinted mankind’s mythic history, including Noah’s flood, the story of Gilgamesh, Manu and Matsya, and countless indigenous legends. Schoch talks about the solar cataclysm as causing a die-off of humanity. The most technically advanced groups tended to live near the seacoast, which was suddenly under a hundred meters of water, and their economies were more fragile, depending on trade with distant lands for the essentials of life. Only primitive peoples survived. Thus began a global dark age, from which civilization began to re-emerge only 6,000 years later in the Indus Valley, the Yangtze Valley, the Nile Valley, and the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia. Sunspots, solar storms, and earth’s climate Sunspot activity is approximately cyclical with a period of 11 years. The sun’s magnetic field varies on a 22-year cycle, reaches a minimum and flipping direction when sunspots are at a maximum. The average 11-year cycle can vary by a year or two. There have been 24+ recorded cycles since sunspots were first tracked in 1755. Sunspots are magnetic storms on the sun’s surface, unrelated to the energy generation that is occurring at the sun’s core. They appear dark because they are slightly cooler than the average 5800o surface temperature, but sunspots are fringed by areas where temperatures are hotter than 5800o, and indeed the hotter temperatures more than make up for the cooler sunspot temperature. During periods when sunspots are more numerous, the earth is warmer, but it is not because of luminosity from the sunspot fringes. Rather, magnetic storms on the sun send plumes of ionized gas which increase the earth’s high-up magnetic field and deflect cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are an important mechanism for seeding clouds in the lower atmosphere, so fewer cosmic rays lead to lower cloud cover (albedo, reflecting sunlight back into space) and more of the sun’s radiation reaching the earth. [Mackey, 2009] Reading this chain of reasoning, I am reminded what an MIT colleague told me long ago: computer models of the world’s climate future are … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mitteldorf.substack.com