The EARTH from SPACE ...

[Michael Grove]

Reading clockwise from the Top-Left, of this collage of photographs; THE first full-view of Earth taken from 

Apollo 17  in December 1972, the crew took the first ‘Blue Marble’ image of the entire planet Earth

as they traveled back from the Moon with the Sun behind them illuminating our world; THIS amazing image

was taken by the Galileo spacecraft as it flew by the Earth-Moon system on its way to Jupiter in 1992; the

jacket cover of The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning by James E. Lovelock; THE day the Earth

smiled - Cassini, 2013 -  this incredible image of Earth, the blue dot of light to the centre-right of the image,

was taken by the Cassini spacecraft from Saturn, 1.45 billion kilometres (900 million miles) away, on 19 July

2013; the Earth from Saturn - Cassini, 2011 - NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured this image of Saturn

eclipsing the Sun and, as a bonus, Earth appears just above the rings of the giant planet; and finally a

stunning view of the Earth at night - Suomi NPP, 2012 - This incredible ‘Black Marble’ composite image

was taken by the Suomi NPP satellite in April 2012, showing the Earth lit up at night by a mixture of artificial

lights and the Sun.

as the late astronomer Carl Sagan coined it - the ‘Pale Blue Dot’

  social animal is a tribal carnivore " - E. O. Wilson

James Lovelock wrote in his concluding chapter of The Vanishing face of GAIA ...

entitled TO THE NEXT WORLD ... Individual intelligence alone is NOT enough, and our

amazing achievements come from the additional ability of our brains to communicate

and persuade, so that the thoughts of one or a few can persuade the many to lose their

identities and act coherently as if they were a single individual. This powerful

amplification of the expressed intentions of a tribal leader can always prevail against

an incoherent foe or the natural world. This synchronisation of WILL we share with social

insects and termites as well as with flocks of birds and fish, and it empowers us far

beyond the possibilities of a single isolated intelligence, even one much more able than

we are. This may be why some whale species with brains and neurone-counts far greater

than ours have never reached the dominance of humans ... Almost all of our

achievements come from single acts of genius or leadership amplified coherently by

the many. This applies not only to great or appalling acts, but to the numerous mundane

things that keep society running: the water and electricity services, and road systems.

We are deeply impressed by the power of our weapons, yet they are puny compared

with the most powerful weapon of all - CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE ... Perhaps the

 gravest error of monotheist religion, including Islam, is to believe that human are made

in God's image. The implication is that we cannot, through natural selection, IMPROVE.

To think of us as the perfect model of sentient life is as absurd as to imagine that the

first photosynthesisers to emerge 3.5 billion years ago were also perfect. By evolving

and changing they made possible everything that has happened since; if they had stayed

as they were there would never have been trees of flowers or animals and ourselves.

NOTHING in the universe can be perfect and humans have so far to go to approach

perfection that surely THE future is FULL of PROMISE.

As often seems to happen, wartime energy and post-war euphoria serve as breeding grounds for visionary thinking and bold, new break-throughs in human knowledge. Such was the case with Clare Graves. Rather than re-hash older psychological constructs or participate in the debates between the conflicting theories of the day, he decided to start afresh by searching for the reasons behind shifting views of human nature.

 

 

Clare Graves was one of the first psychologists who understood that we live, act, make decisions, and undergo change through complex systems. His informal drawings and illustrations would be familiar to any serious student of quantum physics, general systems and chaos theory.

 

His ideas can best be crystalised by this following statement -

 

“Briefly, what I am proposing is that the psychology of the
mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating,

spiralling process, marked by progressive subordination of

older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order

systems as man’s existential problems change.”

 

 

[Michael Grove]

     Every day between two and three thousand aircraft fly across the

     North Atlantic, with the UK – and NATS – acting as the gateway

     to Europe. Up to 80% of all Oceanic traffic passes through the

     Shanwick Oceanic Control Area (OCA), which is airspace

     controlled by the United Kingdom.

     With this in mind, me•we have created a data visualisation 

     showing a day of traffic from August 2013 and the oceanic

     airspace structures that help to make it all work.

[Michael Grove]

The somewhat on-point description back in my days as a Eurocontrol 
Upper Airspace Air Traffic Controller, was that ALITALIA stood for the 
somewhat ignominious description of [BE]ing...

Always Late In Take-off Always Late In Arrival

Marseille air traffic alert

The disarming detail that both pilots may have fallen asleep on the job might have never been revealed had it not been for the quick work of alert by Marseille air traffic controllers.

The plane had regularly declared its position upon arriving into French airspace at Brest, but then, as the plane passed from Bordeaux air traffic control to Marseille, pilots failed to respond to Marseille air traffic controllers. They had tried in vain several times to contact the pilots about their position.

Alarmed about a potential terrorist incident, French air authorities contacted their roman counterparts at 5.21 am.

They in turn contacted the ITA Airways central command, who tried to contact the pilots via their satellite cell phones.

French authorities alerted two fighter jets to prepare to fly near the passenger plane to surveil the pilot’s cabin. Meanwhile ITA’s command centre began sending messages to the pilots via ACARS, a digital data link system for transmission of short messages between aircraft and ground stations via satellite.

Despite the fact that ACARS messages are displayed on the pilot’s monitors, there was still radio silence. More than 10 minutes after repeated attempts to reach them had failed, the pilots eventually responded and went on to land in Rome 20 minutes before their scheduled arrival time.