SUNGOD This posting is not free. I spent 4 hours of my extremely precious time this afternoon writing this. If this posting benefits you, you owe me an act of personal investment in my future by showing this posting to someone else. Homer ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SUN GOD Although the One True God of Adore is the God of J.E.M, (Joy in Eternal Miracles), Adorians also worship the Sun God Ra, as an emissary of Jem. This is about Ra. I can hear someone asking me, "Homer is money all Adorians care about?" Yes. But one has to take a look at what Adore's viewpoint really is. Life consists of consumption and production. You can't take a breath without consuming fuel and oxygen and producing exhaust and carbon dioxide. The Sun/Earth system is like a gigantic rechargable battery. The primary chemicals involved is the cycle between Carbon and Oxygen and CO2. All chemical reactions both absorb energy and release energy at the same time. Endothermic reactions are those that absorb more energy than they release. Exothermic reactions are those that release more energy than they absorb. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to tear apart the CO2 molecule into Carbon and Oxygen. When they finally fly apart they release some energy so you get some of it back, but it takes much more to pull them apart than you get back, so this is endothermic. On the other hand it doesn't take a lot of energy to bring Carbon and Oxygen back together again, and when they do they release a lot more energy back into the world than it took to start them combining. This is exothermic. The amount of energy released by rejoining carbon and oxygen is so much more than the energy necessary to start the reaction in the first place, that the reaction is self sustaining. If you put a match to wood (carbon), it will burn under its own heat. Endothermic reactions in general will not do this. BUT YOU HAD TO HAVE AN ENDOTHERMIC REACTION BEFORE YOU COULD HAVE AN EXOTHERMIC REACTION! You have to store energy in an endothermic reaction before you can release it in an exothermic reaction. The two processes exactly balance. What is stored during the endothermic part is released during the exothermic part. When carbon and oxygen burn and rejoin into CO2, they release just as much energy as they absorbed when they were split! In this sense the Carbon Oxygen cycle acts like a rechargable battery. You pump energy into CO2 splitting it up into Carbon and Oxygen, and later you come along and release that energy by setting fire to the Carbon in an Oxygen atmosphere. The Sun/Earth system acts like a huge Carbon Oxygen cycle rechargable battery. The recharging/production cycle is driven by the Sun, and the decharging/consumption cycle is driven by fire of one kind or another. In a highly simplified view, energy from the Sun hits the free CO2 in the ground and the air, splitting it into Carbon and Oxygen, and thus 'pushing' plants up out of the ground. The body of the plant is the Carbon that has been freed from the Oxygen, and the atmosphere around the plant is the Oxygen that was freed from the Carbon. A tremendous amount of potential sun energy is stored in this SEPARATION of Carbon and Oxygen. The energy thus stored is released again when fire burns the plants or animals eat them. As plants are pushed into existence by the Sun, Oxygen fills the atmosphere. When the Oxygen content of the air gets to great, the slightest lightening strike will create a forest fire the likes of which you have never seen. When the Oxygen content drops down, the fires go out, and so the cycle repeats itself. This is in part why the Oxygen concentration in the atmosphere has stabilized at around 30 percent. Animals do the same thing to plants that fire does. By eating plants, animals bring Oxygen in the air together with the Carbon in the plants, igniting them with an internal chemical match so to speak, and the result is CO2 released back into the atmosphere and the ground, releasing the stored heat and usable sun energy which the animal can then use to do useful work. The animal kingdom is a slow fire to the plant kingdom. This cycle of Sun -> Plants -> Animals -> Sun happens over and over again, pumped by the Sun. OK, so what does money have to do with this? In this model, value is stored energy tempered by the usefulness of that stored energy. In general there is no value where there is no energy, for where there is no energy there is nothing. Sometimes however some forms of energy can be more harmful than helpful, in which case the absence of harmful energy can be of greater value than its presence. Useful vaccuums are like this. Energy from the Sun is stored in many objects on the planet, in general it starts with plants, but ends up in many different forms afterwards. The form of energy is as important as the amount of energy stored. For example there is energy stored in both a battery and a stick of dynamite. However the energy in a stick of dynamite would be totally useless and even counterproductive to someone wanting to light a flashlight. Forms of energy can be converted into each other, but usually at some expense and expenditure of the energy to be converted. For example, the energy in the dynamite might be converted to energy in a battery but that might take more energy in time, trouble and materials, to do the conversion than it was worth. Energy that is fully expended is called entropy, it is essentially energy that is no longer stored in any useful way. Energy that is totally dispersed and energy that is stored in useless forms are both forms of entropy. In this sense, entropy is defined relative to a person's need and use for energy and relative to their ability to convert it into a useful form. A stick of dynamite would be a form of entropy to someone in desperate need of a flashlight. However if he goes at it just right, he might get some useful light out of the stick of dynamite! :) Sun light starts off highly concentrated, ends up on earth as plants, gets eaten by animals which may or may not do useful work, and finally gets radiated as heat which goes off into the cosmos where it is not generally useful again. Once the Sun burns out the cycle ends for the time being. This process is the River of Light. Presumably all the entropic energy radiated into space at the end of the cycle gets collected back together again during the next contraction phase of the universe leading to the next Big Bang. Within this conceptual matrix, animals form a very particular kind of game. They are not 'pushed' into existence by the Sun, the way plants are. Animals must consume fuel that has already been pushed into storage in order to survive. In this sense animals are miners (or harvesters) for they need to mine fuel in order to have fuel. But they need to have fuel in order to mine fuel! Every effort an animal uses to mine fuel, consumes fuel. Therefore an animal must be given an initial alotment of fuel to begin his foraging day. This is done at the beginning of life through investment by the mother or father in feeding and growing the child. If an animal consumes more fuel than it mines, it eventually runs out of fuel and dies. (Some animals think they are plants by the way, they go out in the sun, and expect it to push them into existence. They usually end up living off of other's assets.) Mining has to do with exothermic reactions. The action of mining is the action of investing a small amount of energy in the vast sea of stored energy in the Sun/Earth system, and getting an exothermic return out of it. One then has more fuel to live another day, plus some excess. In this way the animal increases its net worth. Material Net Worth consists of three things to an animal. 1.) Fuel on hand which it owns and can consume in sow/reap investment cycles. 2.) Capital equipment in working order that the animal can power with that fuel in order to indulge in sow/reap investment cycles. The primary capital mining equipment owned by an animal is its body, and its fuel storage facilities. 3.) The mine field that the animal has access to in which to sow and reap exothermic reactions. The animal plants a seed of corn. Through endothermicity the Sun pushes it into an ear of corn with 100 seeds. The animal reaps the corn, puts some away in his fuel house, eats the rest of it and through exothermicity releases the stored sunlight into useful energy which it can use to do more useful work, the next day. Useful work is defined as succesful mining. (There is a fourth item which is part of one's non material net worth, and that is knowledge, talent and skill born of experience. But that's a whole other story.) The animal must burn some fuel already in his system to ignite the newly eaten corn in his stomach, but he gets much more out of it than the small amount he needs to start the fire. The animal in fact must burn some fuel just to take in a breath in order to sweep in the components of his next combustion cycle (Oxygen). If he doesn't have the energy left to take in that breath or to ignite the combustion cycle, he is dead. The animal that has a lot of fuel in his warehouse (money in the bank), but no capital equipment to mine with or mine field to ply his trade to, is a sinking ship. He may be very wealthy, have a high net worth, but the rats on his boat will be packing their bags shortly, and looking for the nearest rope. The animal that has a lot of capital equipment to work with, but no fuel or mine field, is out of luck from the word go because he can't make a move without an initial alotment of fuel. The animal that has a lot of stored fuel and capital equipment but no mine field to get more, is also a sinking ship, for he will spin his wheels all day long, with no return. Tbis is the guy planting his seeds in a toxic waste dump. Thus true 'wealth' to an animal is to have a vast mining field that is easily minable, working equipment and enough fuel to turn an exothermic profit by the end of the day. By far and away the mine field is the most important of the three. You can always get loans or investments of fuel and capital equipment from others if you find a good mine field, but without the mine field you might as well give it up now. Thus if an animal is not doing well, the first thing you want to do is see what kind of mine field he is trying to mine. It is pretty clear from this model that the animal is sort of on a rat race wheel. Every breath he takes consumes some of his precious joules that he has stored in his fuel house. If he does not put those released joules to useful work, meaning mining more fuel, he will eventually run out of fuel and die. Thus any animal that is not doing useful work is headed for the grave. Useful work by the way doesn't necessarily mean going out and running around doing things, it can mean sleeping and digesting your food or taking a rest to allow regeneration or indulging in play to increase one's skills. Even art is a form of useful energy. This is all useful work. But if the amount of useful work done during a day is less than the amount of fuel consumed, then the fuel tanks will be just that much lower at the end of the day. Thus for an animal, sow/reap investment cycles in the natural exothermicity of the Sun/Earth system is the order of the day, they are in fact an ethical mandate, as the wages of sin are death. So yes, all Adorians care about is money. Money is merely a statement of personal net worth, which includes personal fuel in the bank, extant useful captial equipment on hand and vast mining fields that are easily accessible. It has little to do with ownership per se, and more to do with successful living in the long term, of which ownership is a small part. Although it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that money in the bank, a personal tractor outside in the yard and 3 acres of land is some kind of affluence, one has to rememeber the over all scene. The ultimate congolmerate of fuel stores, capital machinery and viable mine fields is civilization itself. Thus investing in a kid, who will invest in his kids, who will invest in his kids, may not produce an immediate return the way selling a loaf of bread for 2 drachmas will, but it is never the less an investment in your own future, as one day the benefits of that tree will bear fruit and you will eat thereof. We don't live but once. When looked at this way, one's net worth is a much grander thing than what you report to the tax department. Learning to invest is the grander scheme is a sign of a true investor and a real winner in life. That includes investment of fuel, equipment, and mine fields, along with time, skill and knowledge. The Sun God Ra smiles upon those who invest in the grand scheme of things to produce a return. His smile is the return you get. You can count on it. Homer ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Homer Wilson Smith News, Web, Telnet Art Matrix - Lightlink (607) 277-0959 SunOS 4.1.4 Sparc 20 Internet Access, Ithaca NY homer@lightlink.com info@lightlink.com http://www.lightlink.com