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Transformer, I may have mistaken your writing project. You are writing a science fiction story to publish? Or just a short story? It sounds like enough story line for a book, but you would know better than I.

There are fictional stories. There are science fiction stories with a poor basis in science. There are science fiction stories that are predictive of future scientific discoveries. There are hypotheses that make no understandable predictive observations. There are hypotheses that make accurate predictive observations of phenomena. Based on your criticism, which criteria would you need to exceed to overcome the scientific communities "unforgiving" attitude.

Sounds great! But I expect a signed copy.

I am not familiar with your story line. You needed a warmer martian climate and I offered a solution, it is up to you how or whether it works.

Mike, this is one of the most under appreciated trees on the planet; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populus I have these in my back yard and they grow like weeds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populus_trichocarpa It is a large tree, growing to a height of 30 metres (98 ft) to 50 metres (160 ft) and a trunk diameter of over 2 metres (6.6 ft), which makes it the largest poplar species in the Americas. It is normally fairly short-lived, but some trees may live for up to 400 years. A cottonwood discovered in Haines, Alaska set the national record at 101 ft (31 m) tall and 32.5 ft (9.9 m) around. ​There was one in my neighbors back yard that we played around the base of as kids, it was 30 - 40 cm in diameter. Less than 20 years later it was a monster at maybe 150 cm's diameter. We have farming of these trees where adequate water allows. All for paper products. Other uses are leachate control systems for landfills, these are great fast growing multi-purpose trees.

Can I wait till the kid grows up! Well let me think about this, it is really quite a bit more challenging than what I have done so far.

Mike, what would you like to know more about. I have additional images from my website and I can explain any detail you would like more information about.

So you can change to a different planetary orbit and have it be a more warmer and wetter planet. There is speculation that Jupiter and Saturn could have been in a closer orbit. You could use their movement out as the means to the relocation of the planet to its current orbit and even include the loss of Mars' magnetic field due to the relocation. Tell the story of the damage to the core generator and tie in the Valles Marineris and the Tharsis region and you can tell a gripping tale. Image below courtesy NASA Image above courtesy of Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA MOLA colorized relief map of the Tharsis region in the western hemisphere of Mars. The volcanoes appear white. The three aligned volcanoes left of center are the Tharsis Montes, from north to south the volcanoes are Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons and Arsia Mons. Ascraeus Mons is the tallest with a summit elevation of over 18 km (59,000 ft). Just off to the northwest, Olympus Mons at 22 km (72,000 ft) is the largest mountain in the solar system. The red spiral feature in the north is the volcano Alba Mons at 6.8 km (22,000 ft). Mars' lower gravity from its smaller mass allows the volcanic mountains to attain altitudes over twice as high on Earth. Make it big and make it grand. A story of war and relocation of gas giants sounds like a great back drop.

A strong magnetic field to protect a thick green house atmosphere full of water vapor may do the job. Its science fiction right?

And as a multi-generational group that gathered several times a year at chronologically indeterminate periods based on the indiscriminate behavior of a separate species, the ducks behavior would be considered; A - Instinctive or B - Learned group behavior based on reinforcing environmental signals.

I think it is not so clean cut. Even we humans with our lower sense of smell can distinguish the change of seasons. That smell of the coming fall season here in the forested NW U.S. is so locked into my memory I can imagine it now. These biological mechanisms that trip the behavior to migrate in the case of wildebeest or to gather to feast on them as in the case of the crocodiles is likely seasonal change in regards to temperature and humidity and not a trigger, for example, from a particular length of daylight that would seem more an instinctual response. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildebeest Wildebeest are famous for their annual long-distance migration, seemingly timed to coincide with the annual pattern of rainfall and grass growth. The timing of their migrations in both the rainy and dry seasons can vary considerably (by months) from year to year. At the end of the rainy season (May or June in East Africa), wildebeest migrate to dry-season areas in response to a lack of surface (drinking) water. When the rainy season begins again (months later), animals quickly move back to their wet-season ranges. Factors suspected to affect migration include food abundance, surface water availability, predators and phosphorus content in grasses. Phosphorus is a crucial element for all life forms, particularly for lactating female bovids. As a result during the rainy season, wildebeest select grazing areas that contain particularly high phosphorus levels. One study found, in addition to phosphorus, wildebeest select ranges containing grass with relatively high nitrogen content. Large-scale wildebeest migration is quite likely a consequence of decisions being made by individuals at multiple spatial scales, involving a balance of food abundance, food quality, local density of other wildebeest, social interactions, surface water, perceived predation risk, and culturally (or possibly genetically) learned routes and ranges. though not decisive, in the wildebeests case it is a behavior with a wide timing variable (by months), that would complicate a crocodiles response if it were a instinctively derived behavior in them. I do not believe the behavior of either the wildebeest to migrate or the crocodiles to gather to feast is incumbent of an instinctual trigger. Both animal groups have life spans that overlap considerable enough in generations that there is always a majority of "past experienced" adults over the younger "first timer" participants. This would be what in itself programs instinctual behavior. This could be tested in the case of wildebeests with a small isolated group that were fenced in for several generations and then set loose. My guess is they would have enough instinct to reestablish in time the migratory behavior that is reinforce by learned group behavior. The period of time it takes to reestablish the behavior is proportional to the isolation period. Simply being the more generational separation from the migratory behavior the longer it would take to reestablish. And of coarse with enough time the instinctual behavior would be lost.

Thanks Mike. I am not much of an artist so I rely on images from USGS, NOAA and NASA for illustrations that may or may not convey the idea I am trying to express. I need to include more of them, but if they do not quite fit It can seem confusing. It is difficult to determine the amount of background information to include. I hope those that are geologically fluent are not put off by the recycled images, while in the other direction the reader with little geologic understanding is left confused by the lack of more basic explanations. It is difficult to balance this difference. I have opted for the "keep it simple" and hope for the best. I have over the years discovered that most people are not interested in geology. It is the most challenging of all spectator pass times, nobody would watch tennis if it took the ball 20 million years to cross the net. OK, here is an image I acquired through GeoMapApp with some overlays that I added. So A is the Columbia River Gorge where the images of the basalt flows were taken. The area in red is a rough outline of the range the flows achieved. "forming a large igneous province with an estimated volume of 174,300 km3 (41,800 cu mi). Eruptions were most vigorous from 17–14 million years ago, when over 99 percent of the basalt was released." About this time the basin and range extension occurred, It is roughly outlined in blue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basin_and_Range_Province The physiography of the province is the result of tectonic extension that began around 17 Ma (million years ago) in Early Miocene time. Well, we have two unusual events happening during the same period of geologic history, these are probably related in some way. In the model the Earth's magnetic field generator had previously been in a lower energy period, causing the mantle to contract inward while putting the crust into a state of long term compression and subduction. This caused the Pacific Plate to be overrun by the N.A. continent. The mid ocean ridge that had been the divergent plate boundary between the Pacific and the completely subducted Farallon plate was now slowly moving east under the continental crust. At 17 million years ago it was at a somewhat longitudinal north-south position under what is now the Columbia River Basalt Group then running south passing under the Basin and Range Area. Divergent boundaries are very thin sections of crust, while the average ocean crust depth is 8 km (5 miles thick.) 1/5 as thick as the continents crust, it is just a mere 1 to 2 km (0.62 to 1.2 mi), at the point where the sea floor is continually formed by magma flowing into the fissure created by the opposing movement of the ocean crust. At 17 Million years ago this thin section is not operating as a tension releasing mechanism but is still able to allow large heat flow from the mantle through it's thin boundary area, exposing the overlaying continental crust to its higher temperatures. The model then has the field generator increasing to a level that produces the slow outward displacement of the mantle and the extending of the worlds divergent boundaries. The Pacific plate is put in tension, it's anchor point at the far side of the Pacific in the Mariana Trench allows the greatest amount of lateral kinetic movement. The Pacific plate is pulled, extending the preheated overriding crust. As time passes the Basin and Range Area is slowly pulled, extending out to its current condition. At some point when the tension reaches a level beyond the subducted plate's strength, the plate fractures and creates the Central Valley (C) as the broken edge is drawn west and the overlaying crust collapses into the void. The plate failure resulted in a massive fault slip in the ocean plates Mendocino (D) and Murray (E) fracture zones. The sudden shock of the release of tension can be seen in the tearing of the adjacent plate section to the north. The explosive movement tore the seafloor creating the Juan de Fuca fracture (B). Up to this catastrophic event the Columbia basin had been in an extension event concurrent with the Basin and Range to the south and had been producing flood basalt flows through the thousands of tension fractures that resulted. (estimates range to up to 20,000 such dikes). Many of the dikes were fissures 5 to 10 m (16 to 33 ft) wide and up to 10 miles (16 km) in length, allowing for huge quantities of magma upwelling. This abundant basaltic material was due to the Yellowstone Hot Spot. It is according to the model aligned with and centered on the subducted divergent boundary that is slowly moving east and is today in its present location in NW Wyoming. This catastrophic plate failure was possibly the impetus for the larger basaltic releases, the shock wave would have likely triggered responses of this type. Images above used and modified by this author was furnished through and in no way endorsed by Ryan, W. B. F., S.M. Carbotte, J. Coplan, S. O'Hara, A. Melkonian, R. Arko, R.A. Weissel, V. Ferrini, A. Goodwillie, F. Nitsche, J. Bonczkowski, and R. Zemsky (2009), Global Multi-Resolution Topography (GMRT) synthesis data set, Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst., 10, Q03014, doi:10.1029/2008GC002332. Data doi: 10.1594/IEDA.0001000, through http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/

I'm 51, so you look like your just the right age to get the education done and take it all for the serious hard work it will be. A family to support and to support you brings a sobriety to ones temperament and goals that no other impetus can match. Good luck.

Image courtesy of USGS

Popcorn, I become quickly overwhelmed by these discussions and struggle to place them in a context that I can even remotely conceive as accurate or even as rudimentary compared with the range of understanding of most members here. The expanding cosmos to my mind is a mechanism that is creating space or distance between all of the concentrated quantities of mass. A black hole is simply a mechanism that increasingly removes all of that space. It seems almost intuitive that there should be a balance in such matters but I could be wrong.

WOW, what a nice day. By the looks of the ocean surface you had little wind and a smooth ride, just perfect. Are those white Cretaceous rocks calcium, bird droppings or ? Thanks for sharing Mike.

You may want to take the Earth and remove one life sustaining attribute at a time and see how far you could deconstruct an ideal life sustaining planet. At what point can you say it has X amount of chance to have life of the most basic form. Mars is our ideal laboratory, we are quite fortunate to have it to study. It is most likely to be at or just past that X point of possible life. If it is there it is probably deep under ground near volcanic sources where stable temperatures and water are present in a chemo-synthesis derived biological environment, far from the lethal radiation that has sterilized the planets surface. To consider what it takes to provide intelligent life a possible chance anywhere is really a long shot in anyone's book.

These are the first steps to an eventual takeoff to landing pilot-less commercial airline industry. They will save a fortune in not having to pay pilots to fly. But they will have to supply a "pseudo" pilot for many decades to transition the public into the concept. Most crashes occur during takeoffs and landings, with pilot error being the primary cause. Time will eventually show that the pilot-less planes are safer with less fatalities and the airlines are able to maintain services without pilot fatigue and human error lurking on every flight. The pseudo pilots of the future may instead be answering passengers questions via email and reassuring them the turbulence is nothing to worry about. With an occasional coming out to deal with passenger safety issues. Flight attendants may be the true indispensable human component, having the job of being the face of the airline while assuring emergency evacuations are carried out correctly.

I want my +1 back!

Oh what the hell, +1. That was probably not easy to do.

Hello sunnydart, in both this model and the current standard model the planet's interior heat is migrating to the surface. http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2011/07/17/kamland-geoneutrinos/ This article is about the Kamioka Liquid-scintillator Antineutrino Detector (KamLAND), and states, of the 44 trillion watts of heat that continually flows from Earth's interior into space, 50 percent of the heat is due to radioactive decay and other sources, and primordial heat left over from the planet's formation must account for the rest. The research says radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium in Earth's crust and mantle is a principal source of the 20+ trillion watts. But where does the other slightly more than half come from? Stuart Freedman who is a member of Berkeley Lab's Nuclear Science Division and a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley and who is also leading the participation of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), says in the article; "One thing we can say with near certainty is that radioactive decay alone is not enough to account for Earth's heat energy". "Whether the rest is primordial heat or comes from some other source is an unanswered question." So this heat will move to cooler materials such as continental and ocean crusts. The ocean crust makes up 66% of total crustal area and is 1/5 as thick as the continental crust. The continental crust is approximately 25-70 km (31 mi), thick and with the ocean crust that is 7-10 km (6.2 mi) thick, they together form the upper layer of the tectonic plates. The ocean heat conveyor in my model is driven by the thermal release of the 80,000 kilometer (49,700 mile) long tectonic rift system that is referred to as the mid-ocean ridge. This system contains the world's largest continuous volcanic mountain range stretching 65,000 kilometers (40,400 mile) and occupies every ocean in the world including the Arctic Ocean sea floor. These volcanic structures rise to more than 3657 meters (12,000 ft.) high and are 1931 kilometers (1,200 miles) wide. While the ridge does run in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean it does not do so in all the others. While the average ocean crust depth is 8km (5 miles thick.) 1/5 as thick as the continents crust, it is just a mere 1 to 2 km (0.62 to 1.2 mi), at the point where the sea floor is formed by magma flowing into the fissure created by the opposing movement of the ocean crust. Image oceanexplorer.noaa.gov As seawater is forced under pressure into the layers of semi molten rock under the mid-ocean ridge (heat exchanger), it is heated to 300-400°C (572-752 F) and becomes extremely corrosive from volcanic chemicals. This high pressure super-heated fluid is capable of dissolving the surrounding basaltic rock and leaching out metals and other elements. This fluid is also very buoyant and begins rising rapidly back to the surface, reentering the ocean at hydrothermal vents. Measurements show that heat flow is 10 times greater near the ridge crests than for ordinary oceanic crust. Heat flow is a measure of the heat escaping per second from a given area and is usually measured in watts/m2. The numerous hot springs at divergent plate boundaries show that significant heat is also carried out of the crust by convective pore water. This data implies that a large source of magma lies beneath the ridge. Image courtesy NASA But to be an efficient atmospheric heat exchanger the ocean would have to resemble the dimensions of an industrial cooling pond. A large surface area with shallow depth to maximize evaporation and thermal transfer. http://www.scribd.com/doc/61249428/Introduction-to-Physical-Oceanography#outer_page_32 Oceanic dimensions range from around 1500 km (932 miles) for the minimum width of the Atlantic to more than 13,000 km (8,077) for the north-south extent of the Atlantic and the width of the Pacific. Typical depths are only 3–4 km. So horizontal dimensions of ocean basins are 1,000 times greater than the vertical dimension. A scale model of the Pacific, the size of an 8.5 x ×11 inch sheet of paper, would have dimensions similar to the paper: a width of 10,000 km scales to 10 in, and a depth of 3 km scales to 0.003 in, the typical thickness of a piece of paper. So, as you can deduct from the paragraphs above, in either model a majority of that heat ends up in the ocean. Whether or not you want to call it a planetary cooling system is up to you. I do not believe it is, the volumetric heat capacity of the Earth dominates the ocean to such extremes the ocean could not handle a true thermal equivalent of what would be considered a balanced system. The atmosphere weighs 5,700,000,000,000,000 (quadrillion) tons or a little over a millionth (0.000 001) or 1/1,200,000 of one Earth mass. The oceans 320,000,000 cubic miles of sea water weigh 1,450,000,000,000,000,000 tons which is 0.022 percent of the total mass of Earth. That puts things into perspective; the ocean dominates the atmosphere in both mass and temperature bias but is almost insignificant compared to the volumetric heat capacity (VHC) of the planets solid mass that contains temperatures high enough to phase-change the ocean into a Venus like atmosphere if even a fraction of the VHC was transferred into the ocean. Hi Mike, the heat that Joly's model speculated to cause the super-continent breakup appears to be, if I understand correctly, caused by the large continent trapping the heat that slowly built up to a level that broke the land mass, releasing the immense volcanic lava flows. My model does not require a localized thermal content to break up land masses. The model has the crust put in tension during the outer cores expansion from increased temperature. The continental breakups are just periods of higher amplitude in the field generator. The crust is extended to a greater degree during these higher energy periods. The extra expansion in the crust produces the massive lava releases like the Deccan traps. The Deccan Traps were formed at the end of the cretaceous period 60 - 68 million years ago at which time it was estimated to cover 1.5 million square kilometers possibly half the size of India. Most of the volcanic flood basalt erupted near the area of the Western Ghats and continued off and on for maybe 30,000 years forming multiple layers of more than 2,000 m (6,562 ft) thick. It is considered one of the largest volcanic features on Earth. A real clear example of tension fracture and magma release according to my model would be the forming of the Atlantic Ocean. At the end of the Triassic period some 200 million years ago, environmental devastation by almost continuous volcanic activity eliminated half of all species that lived alongside the early dinosaurs, including most of the large amphibians and around one-fifth of marine organisms. Most of the land on Earth was locked up in the Pangaea super-continent, but this broke apart when the North American and African tectonic plates parted. The separation of the plates created a basin that became the Atlantic Ocean and opened up fissures in the Earth's crust, triggering volcanic eruptions that lasted for 600,000 years. The Mid Atlantic Ridge is a classic expansion fracture in massive scale.

I would base my choice on one that was likely to live in close cooperative social groups. Developed animal groups such as wolves work closely in coordinated societies that communicate effectively to hunt and raise offspring. It is these conditions that likely produced the first communications with hand gestures in our earliest ancestors. A situation that has stalled the wolves ascent due to the lack of bipedal stance that would free ones hand to communicate the direction of game or the danger from predators. The hand communication would undoubtedly be reinforced with grunts and other audible accompaniment that would drive an evolutionary move towards developing the vocal physiology of speech. The freeing of several limbs is an important stepping stone to not just walking up right but to the foundation of visual communication that in turn initiates the development of speech. The process of speech development will involve its participants in verbal communication of continuing complexity and competitive advantage that would drive an evolutionary response of a extraordinary speed and development. The larger brain will be able to utilize the increased imaginative capacity to make tools and harness the potential of fire. The rest they say is history.

Yes I agree, this information revolution of language was extraordinary in its scope. A cultural body of lingually shared trans generational information would be indispensable to our rapidly evolving ancestors. I believe it is analogous to our modern computer driven information revolution. The increasing brain capacity through rapid reproduction cycles would compress many more mutations within a millennia. At what age would the average female first bear a child? I would think it was early, maybe 13-14 years. Total life expectancy could be twice that. I feel this story and imagination dynamic is a nice fit. The imagination that gains insight from the story would also be more inclined for creativity. The tool and clothing development would have a likely connection in this. It surly is not a coincidence that humans seek out entertainment and even education based on story line formats. I think we are wired for this type of information sharing going way back to the beginning of language.

I could see it being almost inevitable that once the concept of the past is understandable, a hunter injured for example, would contemplate that traumatic moment and feel the regret of the mistake. He would possibly reexamine the events leading up to the accident searching for a answer to his regret. These experiences would lead to either fear or hope for tomorrow depending on the severity of his wounds and his knowledge of the fate of others with similar injuries. If the injured had been considered one of importance this could be quite traumatic for all those involved. This would likely create fertile grounds for superstition and the need to anticipate the possible dangers lying in wait for them tomorrow. Its an inevitable byproduct of increasing brain size. The increase of imagination that visualizes the stories with increasing complexity would also drive the superstition that would increasingly be included in those stories. Those that can process this flow of information and apply it to survival would likely pass their more advantageous brain and possibly even their cultural "education system" of language and stories on to their offspring. This may not be the standard model of evolution, it is one that has an internal mechanism of an information feedback creating an accelerated development of brain size in human ancestors.

I have often imagined that first moment when our very early and possibly pre-verbal ancestors became aware of the concept of yesterday, today and tomorrow. I would like to see experiments of some sort, its probably not possible, but to know if an elephant or chimp has any concept of past or present would be to me a defining difference between us and them. Not that they remember what they learned but that it was a place and time in the past. And with man that past/present ability makes way for experiences of regret and hope that could develop into primitive religion and then into philosophy. I have debated whether past/present/future would need to be in place or would it have developed in tandem with language as simply a tool they constructed to communicate more clearly. It would seem to be a natural development in language to refer to, for example, what happened on a hunt, and then extend those "stories" out over years. This to me is possibly the driver of our brain evolution. Those who could communicate and imagine the images in stories and use that information could understand the world around them better and improve their chances to survive. This could be the engine that would progress brain development quickly.