After spending over 40 years in the service of the Earth Mother Agatemaster has emerged to share the images of his heart created from a mixed media brew of macro photography, lapidary arts, and digital graphics manipulation. Agatemaster is also the "Head Earthling In Charge" of the Earth's Greatest Inter-Galctic Souvineer Shope Greetings From Earth. When in the Sol System stop on by and buy. Borg welcome.BIO The Wonder of It All:
Those Things about Earth That Make It a Garden of Life
By
J.L.Snyder


Before you begin this story of Earth, picture a pre-solar system with planets orbiting a mass of material at absolute zero; (the temperature at which all atoms stop moving) the temperature of open space. Lit only by the glow of distant stars the orbiting matter spirals in decaying orbits to the central mass and all movement ceases locked for an eternity unchanging until influenced by more matter that may be attracted by the accumulated central masss gravity. Astronomers suggest that the majority of the matter in the universe is such cold dark matter. It takes matter to make energy and energy can change from one form to another but with out enough matter to create a fusion reaction no radiant energy can be generated leaving that region of space a stony dead Popsicle.

To truly appreciate space ship Earth a passenger should understand the life support systems of ones conveyance. When it comes to real-estate the three factors to consider are location, location, and location. In the big picture our location in the Milky Way is not in an area of high star density with our nearest neighbor 4.3 light years away, though this is a trinary system our neighbors have a conservative life style and are not prone to the late night nova or the most disruptive gamma ray out burst. Material propriety is also upheld by the lack of black holes in the near vicinity. Nothing runs down a neighborhood more than finding black holes on a nearby street corner. There goes the neighborhood.

Even before these timely concerns comes the origin of the material our solar system is made from. The universe has an abundance of Hydrogen and Helium and neither of these elements will support life. A star in its fusion changes Hydrogen into Helium and then continues to progress up the periodic table creating element after element until reaching number 26, Iron. Most stars usually stop at Iron and may nova and end as a neutron stars or just collapse into a white dwarf. White dwarfs have extreme gravitational fields and would not serve the purposes of evolution. The idea of life forming with only the elements up to and including iron places blinders on creation. With no gold, silver, copper, lead plutonium, chromium the things we would make would have to subsist with out ball bearings for example. I am uncertain life could exist with out some of these heavier elements.

Back to location. It so happens that in our region of space a giant star once existed. It was not as big as they come and thats good because we would have ended up in the region of a black hole. It was large enough that when its fusion got to Iron, it sealed its core and made its own way to a super nova. At that point in its life it released a billion times more energy than its normal out put and generated all the elements heavier than Iron in a fraction of a second. That super nova must have crisped our stellar neighbors they are probably still pissed. It took the debris a million years to cool and allow itself to be gathered up again by gravity (from the looks of this mess it must have been some party).

When 98% of the debris was swept into a central location the fusion started again and our Sun was born. The Sun is at best a medium sized star but with the potential to burn thousands of times longer than its larger counter parts that consume their fuels like Americans.

Another thing about location has to do with the three phases of water. Water turns solid at 0 degrees C of 32 degrees F and becomes a gas at 100 degrees C or 212 degrees F. Life maybe able to exist above and below this temperature bracket but not very far from its borders and certainly not flourish. Our location in the solar system allows Earth to maintain water in its liquid phase. However with out the greenhouse effect produced by the first water vapor surrounding in a cooling shroud, the molten earth the earth itself would still be a quite solid -18 degrees C once the surface solidified exactly like the conditions on the dark-side of the moon. Again the abundance of water served to keep this planet between the brackets of the liquid water phase. The next planet towards the Sun, Venus is way to hot to support its water which is miniscule in anything but the vapor phase. Mars on the other hand is equally unable to support the liquid phase of water having the majority of its water locked in the solid phase.

Water is the essence of all life on earth. Some people believe that life was created so that large bags of water could move about the planet with more determination than the water cycle provides. The water cycle too is able to defy the ever present clutch of gravity (gravity the one energy that controls everything else) and carries water to the earths highest regions powered by variations in atmospheric temperatures thanks to the solar wind. All the earth is continually cleansed by the universal solvent (water dissolves more substances than any other chemical).

Water is polar molecule, which is somewhat rare, charged with a positive and negative end. Earth has more water (particularly in the liquid phase) than any other planet or moon. The one thing about water that makes it God like is its ability to expand as it shifts from a liquid to a solid. All substances when they go from the liquid to the solid phase contract. Water expands buy 10%. The power of this phenomenon is indominible and a key to life on Earth. If water was like everything else and contracted when turning solid, lakes and ponds would freeze from the bottoms up and life would have had a much harder time getting a foot hold on its contact between matter and space. Water does this by forming six molecule rings (thats why all snowflakes are six sided) when it solidifies and it traps a little space in the center of the molecule making water then swell as it crystallizes. The power of this expansion is so great that in its smallest extremes it still has the power to crumble granite by wedging its cracks apart.

Our atmosphere not only provides us with a medium for the water, carbon dioxide and oxygen and the nitrogen cycle to function but also shelters us from negative outside influences like radioactive particles in the solar wind. If these radioactively hot particles landed daily on Earth genetic mutations would be much more prevalent. We can thank Van Allens radiation belts for trapping those particles and giving them a chance to decay before they reach the Earths surface.

In coming meteorites would also prove fatal with speeds related to the speed of the Earths rotation. Meteoroids can hit the surface of the Earth (it is more like the Earth slamming into the sand grain) at a speeds above 30,000 miles per second. A grain of sand at that speed could cripple a bus. Instead the Mesosphere with only 1% of the Earths atmosphere changes those high velocity sand grains into plasmic balls of flame 6 feet in diameter. Time has also helped life in this matter. Life has only been abundant in Earths last 10% of its existence. In the preceding 90% of Earths existence Earth has been efficient in sweeping its orbit of much of the potent in coming missiles with an evolution challenging exception every 30 million years or so.

The last life supporting layer in the upper atmosphere is the ozone layer. Ozone an unstable three atom molecule of oxygen provides another filter for incoming radiation. Ozone limits the amount of short wave ultraviolet radiation that hits the Earth. Short wave ultraviolet radiation burns just like a sun burn. When one molecule of man made pollutant can destroy a hundred thousand ozone molecules before it decomposes you can see the concern for the ozone layer. Think of it like a window screen; you do not have to increase the size of the mesh in the screen very much before the mosquitoes get in.

Earth has a carbon dioxide level about .03 %. Venus has a carbon dioxide level of 98%. Both Earth and Venus started out the same so the scientists say. Carbon dioxide and water vapor control the heat lose of the Earth at night. If we were on the moon and the moon had changing night and day like Earth it could cool down to -100 degrees below zero F at night. Such radical temperature changes would be extremely hard to adapt to. The greenhouse effect on Venus is extreme. If we had Venuss carbon dioxide we wouldnt cool enough. Our lower carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and moderate green house effect are due to sea life that metabolized the carbon dioxide into calcium carbonate for their skeletal structures (exactly the same as bone) and lowered the carbon dioxide levels over many 100s of millions of years leaving behind deposits of thousands of feet of limestone rock the most abundant rock on the Earths surface.

Stepping back from Earth a little, notice that the Earth rotates on a tilted axis of 23 degrees in an orbit that is mildly elliptical. In the Northern Hemisphere we are actually a million miles further from the Sun in summer and a million miles closer to the Sun in winter. The inclination of the Earths axis allows for the change in seasons. If there were no inclination of the Earths axis the climates of Earth would be controlled solely by latitude. Equatorial Regions would be stifling hot and Polar Regions bitterly cold with only two narrow bands of moderate temperatures. Looking at a world map the Southern Hemisphere has little habitable land and the Northern Hemisphere little enough particularly with the present human world populations.

The Earth shows its procession of the poles to be slow in regard to life on Earth and you can thank the moon for that. Our moons orbit stabilizes the wobble in the poles. If the poles wobbled then the continents would change latitudinally and so would their climates. Hot continents have adapted to the rigors of hot climates and so have the arctic biomes but if one were headed for the other the result may not be as vibrant and diversified a biosphere. Consider the affects of two moons on Earth as well as none and the options are endless.

This I hope is not a complete list of the idiosynchosies of Earth. We live on the third rock from the Sun but it is ever so more than that. When we look at the universe and wonder about the location of other life forms one can only marvel at the number of conditions that need to be satisfied to allow energy to invest itself into matter so that it can evolve into its complex and fragile infinite and wonderful varieties. These are the physical limits of our world. The basic four parts of the universe are made up of Space (the womb of life), Matter (the Mother), Energy (the universal Father), and Time (controlled by God). Earth is a delicious delicacy, a great aberration and wonder and to me special.


Starring into Gods Eye

By

J. L. Snyder

Since water is the essence of life and life is dependant upon waters uncanny way of expanding as it freezes-like no other substance- allowing ice to float and cap a lake in winter instead of freezing the lake and everything in it from the bottom up, I figured if one could understand why water expands quite uncontrollably as it freezes then you could get a peak at the reflection of GOD. Recently I heard a scientific explanation that water expands like no other substance because the water molecules form rings of six with space in the middle of the ring. Crystals as they form take the basic shape of their molecules and this also explains why all snowflakes are hexagonal.

It is interesting then that empty space is the miracle of ice, but then empty space is the womb of the universe. Mother matter can not exist without space.

On the other hand Father Energy created by matter could not move without space. Energy in the form of a black hole can destroy all matter into finite smallness which is a more, zero, nothing, than empty space.

Life, the combination of matter and energy can not live in matter or energy, only where matter meets space, the Alpha and the Omega, a conduit of time, matter, and energy, makes matter weightless, tames the cryptic speed of light, yet is clear enough to allow us to look back millions of years in time to maybe see where time began this time but thats another story. Amen