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Comets in the Ancient World

15 July 2013
Catastrophism

Excellent post by Hossein Turner at http://hozturner.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/the-great-comet.html … a fresh insight into the Great Comets of the Ancient World, inspired no doubt by comet ISON and its appearance later in the year. Comets are common on rock art – but not always recognised as such. However, the fact that many petroglyphs have features in common with Chinese comets as illustrated on the Silk Manuscripts (drawn up between 200BC and 9AD) may serve to shed some new light on the origin and meaning of some of the etchings on rock faces. The Silk Manuscript depicts 29 different kinds of comet (or broom stars) and each morphology, or shape, is associated with a particular negative aspect. These are disasters of some kind, from plague and epidemics to climate change (drought and famine) and the appearance of invading forces at the borders of China. 

He then goes on to make links between the rock art and electrical disturbances in the atmosphere caused by such comets – featuring the Electric Universe model on the one hand, and comets on the other, balancing what have been two largely different fields of research and one which has caused some disagreement in the past

There are a lot of images in the first fifteen or so pages of the posting and well worth a look. Later, on page 18 of 25, Hoz says, 'at first one might question the possibility of a comet possessing enough energy to generate extreme electrical activity in another body in space (such as the Earth). This is because despite the successful predictions by Wallace Thornhill regarding the Deep Impact mission and the energetic behaviour of the impact, the comet's atmosphere did not seem highly charged. The electrical explanation may well be that comet Tempel was only a short period comet passing through the solar plasma while the Sun itself was not particularly energetic. Thus, it wasn't that bright. Comet Holmes, on the other hand, also a short period comet, produced a bright outburst in 2007, an anomalous coma larger than the Sun itself. What sort of energies may have been produced?' he asks, and a NASA press release revealed Holmes was so bright they were fearful their instruments would be damaged (see www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/cool_comet_prt.htm

When Comet Hyakutake came close to the inner solar system it produced X-ray energies far greater than predicted, he adds. ROSAT images revealed a crescent shaped region of x-ray emission around the comet one thousand times more intense than anyone predicted – see http://science1.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2000/ast23aug_1m/ It also produced Extreme Ultraviolet Emissions – energies associated with hot plasma (see http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/pn96-19.html). Hence, it a comet came close to the Earth they might perhaps be capable of electrical interactions – and the possibility of the Earth becoming enveloped in the glowing inner core of an active comet is worth exploring – and he provides some ideas on what might occur (or have occurred at some points in the past).

Turner draws a parallel between electrical charges taking place between Jupiter and Io and electrical arcing phenomena. Peratt and Dessler, in 1987, had a paper published that theorised dense magnetospheric plasma within the orbital zone of Io was responsible for producing discharges on its surface – such as hot volcanoes. This is interesting as Piers Corbyn has been thinking in terms of Earth facing CMEs on the Sun causing earthquakes and volcanoes on the surface of the Earth  – and parallel with the Chicxulub asteroid or comet we had the enormous outpouring of the Deccan Traps. Is it a coincidence?

Turner then turns to Velikovsky and his ideas concerning the planet Venus. This involved Venus behaving like a comet and striking Earth with electrical discharge phenomena. Turner then turns to Clube and Napier's 'The Cosmic Serpent' and how they argued that over the last four thousand years, or so, Earth has suffered from disastrous effects from short period comets coming close to the Earth and disintegrating (creating the various meteoric streams associated with the Taurid complex). The theory was further developed in their next book, 'The Cosmic Winter' and again Turner speaks in terms of comets rather than a single very large comet that splintered into various constituent pieces. This is an interesting expansion on the theory of Clube and Napier as one of its shortfalls is that they proposed a single large comet that began to disintegrate – and this process took place over thousands of years. In Turner's variation on the theme there is no need to think in terms of a huge giant comet as a succession of comets would suffice. This might accommodate cometary encounters as far back as the Late Pleistocene – even deep into the Ice Age. Comets is in fact a much better explanation than 'a comet' as such, and widens the Clube and Napier hypothesis considerably. Comets, of course, would have come out of the night sky and could well have been pictured as the 'wrath of God'. Turner then quotes Graham Phillips who took Clube and Napier somewhat further by claiming humans actually worshipped such comet intrusions – see www.grahamphillips.net/eden/eden_5.htm … rather than as 'instruments' of God. Very often, it would seem, comets were depicted as divine manifestations (of the Gods) as in for example Hindu deity images.

 

Turner then turns his attention to the Electric Universe effects on Earth by comets (and by planetary encounters) and looks in particular at Venus from a Velikovsky perspective and its infamous anomalous heat (derived, he says, from adiabatic compression rather than co2 forcing) – see www.whiteworld.com/technoland/stories-nonfic/2008-stories/Venus-temp.htm. He says Birkland currents affect the Poles of Venus creating differential rotation and notable vortices that are similar to features on Saturn (and so on) (see also www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576504004072 and Turner claims this is evidence of field aligned current flow (at the Poles of Venus). However, none of this, he thinks, explains the hot surface of Venus, and suggests adiobatic compression as the answer – plus solar radiation and lastly, co2.

The long tail of Venus is the result of a very weak magnetosphere resulting in ions in its upper atmosphere being eroded by the solar wind. The slow rotation of Venus could be due to external electrical currents impinging on the partially ionised atmospheric layers. Its atmosphere actually rotates faster than the planet itself. Somewhat unexpectedly, he says, the small magnetosphere could be the result of a core where the remnant magnetism has died down 'over a very long period of time'.

In summary, he ends by saying, 'it is the opinion of this author that an Electrical view of the solar system (alongside gravitation) may open the possibility towards a fairly recent human history of interplanetary catastrophe. However, the author is sceptical about some of the claims of planetary catastrophism and has suggested an alternative possibility where large comets immerse planets and moons in intense radiation when they come too close. And so on.

 

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