How would a society look that lasts thousands of years?

Societies collapse when they reach a certain level of decadence. The Roman society collapse is a perfect example. When the ruling party (s) become too powerful and corrupt and they refuse to take care of their citizens a select few will revolt. The history of the United States indicate that only three percent of the colonists were actively involved.

But what would a truly long term successful society look like? What would make it last through the ages? I look at the US and see the mess it has become. It is filled with greedy and corrupt politicians who have forgotten who they work for: the American Public. It doesn't matter which party they belong to, as I believe nothing will change. The approach is different, but the enslavement of the average citizen is still the result. Work for money, pay taxes and watch it all get wasted on frivolous things like shrimp on a treadmill. Work, pay taxes, let politicians waste money. Vote new politicians in. Work, pay taxes, watch the new politicians start the cycle all over.

To break out of the cycle, a society must first be able to find an appropriate place for all it's citizens based on their strengths and abilities. We have done a very poor job of that in the US. I watch movies like Divergent and the Minbari from the series Babylon 5, and I think that providing generalized groups like that could help people feel like they belong to something greater than just themselves. I like that concept. This concept has worked to some degree in India for many centuries. For my book, I took the best of these concepts and developed my own Guilds:

Warrior
Religious
Worker
Artisan
Science

Each of these guilds were guided by a council that elected an Elder as their leader. Generally speaking the Elders only held office for a short time, but because of an ongoing Guild war, the Elders remained in place and became more and more decadent as time passed. The Guild Elders worked together as the Council of Elders for the good of the society. All five guilds shared the power and responsibilities of governing equally. But they became petty and caused rifts between the remaining Guilds, even after the treacherous Warrior Guild deceived the other guilds they were sworn to protect. This is where our story begins as the remaining four Guilds have fought the Warrior Guild to a standstill in our galaxy. Will help arrive, or will the Warrior Guild finally succeed in their attempt to overtake the remaining resistance and control the rich resources of this galaxy?

More to come! 

Telling Time in Space

On Earth, we have difficulty telling time when working on a global scale. If you're traveling in an airplane what time standard do you use when crossing time zones? Many people know that
Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the standard time used in the airline industry and military. It is based on the "zero hour" for the time zones and remains a constant. They do not observe "Daylight Savings Time" and change the clock. This is good for the airlines and military, as they schedule flights and missions to land and depart globally.

So what might that look like to a society that has a federation of planets spread across the galaxy? Most time pieces would need to be based on some type of constant. Our time is based on the rotation of the planet and it's orbit around our sun. But as we know, all planets rotate at different speeds as well as orbit their stars at different distances and different speeds.  So planetary time would have it's limitations for any society that existed on a galactic scale.

In my opinion, they would have to rely on a star's orbit around the black hole at the center of the

galaxy. However, it couldn't just be any star, it would have to meet very strict criteria. First, the orbit would have to be stable. So it couldn't be too close to the black hole so that the constant pull wouldn't cause the orbit to decay. Next, it would need limited external influences during it's orbit around the black hole. We can see first hand the influence of some large body on the orbits or Neptune and Pluto from beyond the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. I suggest the star would have to be somewhat isolated, yet in the middle of the galaxy so that the gravitational pull of the black hole was not too strong to pull the star out of its orbit, yet not too far out so that external forces would not alter its orbit either.

In Star Trek, they used a star date system to tell date and time. I never understood or cared how they configured their star dates enough to research how it worked. Now that I'm writing my own SciFi series, I find myself up against a need to develop my own "star date" time system. So I decided to model it after the GMT with a few twists. First, I like numbers to be meaningful. The Bible is full of repeated numbers. The numbers three and seven and multiples of seven occur in many places as well as the number 12...or is it 13? There were 12 Apostles, but if you add Jesus you get 13 total.

Think there are only 12 zodiac signs? Think again...their were originally 13. And that also flows nicely with the legend of the 13 Crystal Skulls, which is part of the lore I used as a basis for my first book. So, I picked an imaginary binary star system and called it "Tituan" and created "Tituan Mean Time" or "TMT". Tituan Alpha and Tituan Beta are both type "F" stars (blue to white in color and roughly 1.7 times the size of our sun). They orbit around a common central of mass, or "barycenter" like in the illustration of a Double Star system. It creates a huge magnetic field around itself. For more information on stars, go to:

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/stars/startypes.shtml

A day on Tituan Alpha or Beta, would last 39 hours (3 x 13), and a Tituan year is 507 days. This makes the year divided into 13 months each lasting exactly 39 days each. All orbits slowly decay, as is natural for any heavenly body that orbits a black hole. As the black hole continues to grow it will eventually swallow the inner stars and planets first, then begin to pull the outer ones as well. The magnetic field generated in this binary field combined with its distance and speed created a near perfectly stable orbit, with a decay rate of only .001 mm per 100,000 years.

Now, to our story...

In the year 2197 (13 x 13 x 13), humankind began to search out new worlds that could help support the struggling home world. Long depleted of its natural resources, humans were forced to find other planets to colonize. With several outposts and colonies established they adopted TMT and started their new calendar at year one. They sent out probes to help find solar systems in the galaxy that had the best natural resources to help support the home world. But the vastness of space takes a long time to cross, and several thousands of years passed before humans colonized what we know as Earth today. For humankind the year is now 15,789. The date is indicated by “year.month.day”, which would look like: TMT 15,789.3.15, or it is the 15th day of the third month in the year 15,789. Time is identified  in military style by simple number of hours and minutes in a day based on each minute lasting 60 seconds for a total of 39 hours in a day. So the date and time for a log entry would read:

TMT 15,789.3.15 1245 hours

At least it is for my book!  :-)

Ancient Sites, Ancient Mysteries

It's been four years since I resigned my position as a project manager at Unisys and began this journey to write a SciFi novel. Seems like a long time, but the average for a first time author to become published is 7 years, and the book length is around 180 pages. My first book in the Harmonic Wars series "Guardians of the Crystal Skulls" should be in print no later than June according to my publisher, and it should be just under 500 pages. I also have a good draft for the second book that is close to 1,000 pages. This story reminds me of "Game of Thrones" meets "Star Wars", but on a PG-13 level. I say GoT for its complexity of storylines and number of characters, and Star Wars because of the epic space struggle of Good vs Evil. I can't wait for this to be out and selling! :-)

Over the last four years, I did a great deal of research on ancient sites that had mysterious origins. I found that there are a great many pyramids that are buried all over the world. Archeologists are currently excavating one in Bosnia where several more are suspected to be buried. Also, another has been discovered in Tiahuanaco, Bolivia.

http://www.ancient-code.com/history-changer-researchers-discover-buried-pyramid-at-tiahuanaco/

The Chinese have worked very hard to prevent present day archeologists from excavating any of the hundred or so pyramids that are there. What's most distressing is that at least one of those is eight-sided like the Great Pyramid of Giza. Why? Could it be that another pyramid exists that was built with the same precision? Could there be another pyramid with the same passageways that are only found today in the Great Pyramid? I wonder if it too was built on an aquifer? We have discussed previously that a Why hide their existence? Maybe the reason is right in front of us.

The stated purpose that Tesla used to secure the funding for the Wardenclyffe project was to transmit radio waves. Interestingly enough, it too was built over the top of an aquifer. In reality Tesla was trying to transmit electricity wirelessly and give it to people for free. JP Morgan did not like the idea of not being able to charge people for electricity, so he pulled the funding for the project. Mysteriously, the building and tower was destroyed in a fire. Big business won out against the average citizen. How differently would your life be today if electricity were free, limitless and wireless? Think of the highways as capable of focusing that electricity to power your vehicles as the rode on beams of light. By tapping into the natural energy of the earth harmoniously rather than destroying the land and our atmosphere by remaining a petroleum based society. I would like to have seen that society.

I know, what does a 20th century inventor have to do with ancient sites or ancient mysteries? I'm convinced that Tesla had rediscovered an ancient technology that provided vast amounts of energy wirelessly. I believe our ancestors created the pyramids to generate the electricity into the atmosphere and the obelisks where placed strategically to pull the energy back down like a lightening rod. Electricity can travel great distances through the ground using the water and natural minerals. Tesla illuminated light bulbs through the ground miles away from his energy source. How much more would a pyramid have been able to produce?

As we discover more pyramids buried around the world through ground penetrating radar, we must be ready to re-evaluate our history and accept the fact that our ancestors were far more advanced than we are today. The evidence continues to grow of a thriving, global society that used earth's energies in harmony with nature. So what happened? The same thing that happens today: greed and corruption. I can imagine a highly advanced society that also digitized all their documents and "saved them in the cloud" only to find that when the electricity stopped flowing, they didn't have enough knowledge resident to rebuild it. How can that be? Do you have any printed reference material today? Once people bought encyclopedias, but I would venture to say nobody reading this has a set. Most have probably never even seen one. Where do you go today when you need information? You go to the internet. Do you memorize the information, because I'm certain most of you don't print anything up and keep it for future use. Most of you don't remember any phone numbers because you have them programmed into your smart phones. How well would you do if the electricity grid fails and cannot be brought back?

Within 2 generations our whole civilization will revert to hunter-gatherers in an attempt to survive.

Things like electricity, the internet, and cell phones would seem almost like magic to the new generations as they would not have any real understanding. How many kids today know what an 8-track tape deck looks like? How about a record player? Hell, they've never seen a rotary dial phone, much less experienced a "party-line". See how fast things can change? I find it hard to believe that a society can exist in antiquity and have the ability to build these advanced stone structures without a written language, like can be found at Puma Punku, Bolivia. And the oldest structures are the most advanced! The Incas that lived in these locations quite possibly just took over the abandoned cities. There's a lot of evidence that points to the additions to these location that the Incas built, which are not nearly as advanced as the picture above. See how the stones seem almost melted together? There is no mortar between the joints, the shapes of the stones and their weight is what locked them in place. And the stones are fitted so perfectly that a piece of paper will not slip between them. But these are only on the oldest structures.

That is the society that interests me. I look forward to finding out more about them. Until then, I'll continue to dream and will create my SciFi story about this fabled civilization. How they came to be here, what happened to them, and what is likely to happen again. See you again soon!

~D.B. Stearns