Oddbean

still thinking about the timelines thing, of the biblical history, and i may have mentioned this before but i think that the tower of babel story is actually about a massive catastrophe that occurred ~6500 years ago, not literal events, due to this catastrophe, so many people died that in many cases the survivors were still small children who barely even learned how to speak their mother tongue https://i.nostr.build/6GALW.png these images appear all over the world, and have the geometric pattern of the "cosmic thunderbolt", which for a long time i didn't realise was the basis of many paleolithic scrawlings of human-looking things that were actually variants of these these are the geometry of massive earth-originating electrostatic discharges that occur during times when the magnetic flux lines of the galaxy cross at 90' with those of our sun (it's magnetosphere protects us also from galactic radiation and stellar winds) the fields weaken and become less ordered - and it's because of teh unifying influence of the sun's field when the magnetic flux is more disordered, a lot more electrons end up entering the earth's crust via the polar regions, and eventually enough charge has built up that the difference between the absence of electrons in the upper atmosphere and the surface reach a point where the atmosphere between it is insufficiently resistant to current and a discharge occurs this phenomena can be seen in earthquakes, because of the high temperature state of the magma, it conducts electricity more than normal, and so the normal level of ground resistance is lower where the eruption is leaking out and this allows the electricity to discharge up into the sky this Cosmic Thunderbolt is when the level of charge collected in the earth's giant capacitor reaches the point where even ground that is normally highly resistant (eg, soil made mostly out of silica) cannot isolate the earth from the sky and bam! in combination with this, there is also an overall escalation of cloud formation and when one of these cosmic thunderbolts happens, an enormous amount of water is generated out of all the silica and carbonaceous material that it incinerates, that it escalates a stage further and you see an uptick in rain as well, which also increases the chances of more discharges as the greater density of matter in the atmosphere continues to increase very likely, both sodom and gomorrah, and the tower of babel stories are related to incidents of cosmic thunderbolts, the amount of energy that comes from these, and the heat, exceed that of the biggest atomic weapons, and literally a person standing in the path of the bright flash will be instantly turned into a pillar of ash the tower of babel was not a literal attempt to make a giant sky scraper, it was a whole metaphor of the rise of a corrupt, moderately technologically advanced civilization like the one we have now, a global imperium, and when the peak of the cycle, which the first major incident recorded of these catastrophes being Sodom and Gomorrah, all of the cities of this empire were hit by hundreds of these thunderbolts this is the only logical explanation i can see for how it scattered the languages - that a great number of the survivors were children who wandered off to make their own settlements and built a whole culture out of the childlike understanding of what they had learned before their world was destroyed

oh yeah, and i forgot to mention... see those circles and dots either side of the central column of the cosmic thunderbolt yes, these are plasma rings, which also spin very fast and are what is commonly referred to as "ball lighttning" and this is the basis of the stories of fire dragons, as ball lightning can drift a long way from where it forms before dissipating, all the while causing the atmospheric gas to emit insane amounts of heat and light

they are simplified versions of the roots-and-tree geometry of the electrostatic shock emerging from the ground, as it travels upwards they move towards each other because the electricity converts the atmosphere into plasma, which is more conductive than normal inert atmosphere in normal conditions, and then the top part splays out as it has to go wider again to complete the circuit in the ionosphere the "legs and arms" shape is because the regions of lower resistance through which the arc travels from the ground tend to be small central zones in the middle of a higher conduction area, bubbles of magma under the ground, or similar, or worn down river valleys and plains, or highly conductive chunks of material like large bodies of rock formed from volcanic eruptions (these are full of magnesium/iron/silicates, ie basalt)

https://png.pngtree.com/thumb_back/fw800/background/20240423/pngtree-a-stunning-of-volcanic-lightning-image_15718905.jpg volcanic lightning is a smaller scale form of the phenomena and you can see that it resembles the upper half of these diagrams

the only protection i can think of from this kind of discharge would be inside a faraday cage, and importantly, it can't be an earthed faraday cage, ideally it has a very strong insulator coating around the conductive material a properly designed, heavy (like 2 feet thick) concrete bunker structure with a mesh of like 6" grid inside it that has been deliberately welded to become a complete conductive shell would probably be necessary to be able to survive this, and probably it would also help if the structure was spheroid or conical so if there is a huge discharge that passes through, it has minimal chance of going inside the cage my idea of a prefab concrete dome bunker continues to escalate the shape of the conductive mesh should also extend outwards and sideways to ensure it doesn't go through the centre, and probably ultimately you want it to just be a straight up sphere with heavy conductors in a classic cat-ball style cage, with weaker conductors in a fairly close mesh to keep charge from not going to the thick conductors

well, if it's that much energy you be way too close to a low resistance section of the crust i'm gonna start thinking about how that can be estimated i'd guess that since in general thunderstorms are electrons coming down from clouds, that were seeded by those electrons negatively charging dust, that a historical map of lightning strikes would help avoid a likely patch where a giant zap could erupt suddenly after way too much energy comes from a CME there's probably some kind of electrical resistance value that you can map to different soil types as well, and then from that make a heat map of potential lower resistance areas of the surface to avoid

yeah, i thought of that the other day... that the sun is literally dumping jigawatts of power on us on a regular basis, and all we have to do is plug into the ground where it can be pulled out and create electric potential difference the thing that i don't know about is how you take violent electrostatic energy and safely apply it to work without fusing everything, it's probably some kind of tuning problem

here: https://geology.com/articles/lightning-map/lightning-strikes-map-lg.jpg goodness... mongolia and siberia keep on looking better note also, egypt is pretty calm - must be all that desert, lower mineral content and deeper layers of pure silicate sand

oooh... maybe the reason why that region of northeast africa is so insulated is BECAUSE it was a location of a recent past cosmic thunderbolt the sheer thickness of the crust over mongolia explains its resistance level though mongolia is looking better and metter for my future migration plans

Astonishing parallels between magnetic fields and vortices, as we know them from the earth and the galaxy, and our number symbols, letters and runes https://eckstein.substack.com/p/astonishing-parallels-between-magnetic