474 How do we learn? When we are very young we believe our parents know everything, but once we get into some form of formal education "BAM"!

    We come to believe that what our parents understand is really very little and we start forming the opinion at a very young age, that teachers are important for understanding knowledge. After all, they have a certificate proving their learned knowledge in their field of expertise! We have all seen the time when our children stop telling us what they did in school, part of that is for their own protection in trying to hold on to that feeling that our parents are all-knowing, yet we have seen our parents seem to struggle with concepts that children feel that they understand because they learned it from someone with authority. In today's modern world, very few average individuals understand how things work. From the cars they drive to the phones, everyone absolutely needs to survive. If something breaks we either send it out to be fixed or simply buy a new one. You add to this the unfairness of schools, that with so many kids to watch, teachers do not have the time to find out what really is happening between their students, and always go in the easiest direction for maintaining discipline. So the lesson that "life is not fair," becomes an overshadowing burden. As we enter higher education after graduation and embark on our field of study, we believe that we are to be taught by Professors and Doctors of Philosophy and then come to find out that at least for the first few years TAs or teacher assistants are to take their place. I have been given several reasons for this, 1) many courses are required that each student must take, no matter which discipline you are going into and they would rather focus their attention on students that have followed their chosen field and have a few years under their belts so many of the fundamentals have already been understood. 2) that once someone reaches Ph.D. levels, publish, publish, publish if you want to become a "tenured teacher" which then gives much greater job security, but at the cost of much less hands-on, teaching students!

    None of this encourages thinking outside the box as they say but instead puts emphasis on collaborative learning. It is as if everyone in that discipline, all needs to swallow the same information so that a common system of beliefs can be reached. Yet if their basis for facts is not 100% true then they all start out from the same slightly incorrect position which of course will only increase with time the incorrectness of any following truths! This could be compared to building a tower with one piling slightly different from the others and unless that difference is understood and accounted for, anything built on that piling will naturally cause the whole tower to lean. The premise that so many have reached concerning mankind's presents on the planet has started out as a "negative" instead of as a "necessary"! There is proof that the next ice-age should have started around 3,500 years ago which would have kept up with the standard of around 10,000 years of an inter-glacial period, not the 13,500 years that the planet has recently seen! It is the 3,500-year difference that is so critical for mankind to understand. What was happening that long ago that was so important and of large enough presence to stop the onslaught of the next ice-age? To understand that we must go back even further in time to when mankind's population was so quickly increasing that we could no longer support, protect, shelter, feed, and cloth ourselves by hunting and gathering what nature was able to provide. Just like a wolf pack that grew too large to sustain their numbers on the food available, mankind had to begin defending the territory that they needed for survival. However, all other groups of people were facing the same problem. How to protect their territory needed while following their food source? Over time and many wars that did little to solve each population's problem. Defendable areas were cloistered around food sources such as fishing grounds, and animals had to be forced to stay in defendable areas, instead of simply following the growing seasons. Plants started being cultivated instead of simply being allowed to grow at random and mankind went from being hunter-gatherers and settling down in protective and protectable areas with good land to farm and became an agricultural-based-societies. Trade became necessary to both have access to materials not easily found within their own borders and to secure beneficial connections with neighboring populations. All of this required, trees to be removed both as a heating source, to build with, and allow for larger and larger fields to house their livestock and for the planting of crops! Individually this would not have been enough to take enough mid-term carbon storage and release it back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, to prevent the coming of the next ice-age. However, when populations around the planet over the next few thousand years also went from hunter-gatherers into agricultural-based societies, this did indeed keep carbon dioxide levels high enough to offset the never-ending carbon sequestration that nature required. This did stop the start of the next ice age but could have only worked as a temporary fix-around. 

    There are records going back a few thousand years (if that much) talking about very cool years when starvation happened because of crop failures. Many times these periods were several years after major population declines because of plagues, or other mass death periods. which brought on huge declines in maintaining agricultural lands and allowing forests to take over where once large tracts of farmland had been keeping trees at bay. All of this allowed the removal of enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to cool the planet. As populations recovered, the trees were again removed to insure more agricultural lands became productive again. When Europeans entered "America" it was estimated that between 50 and 80 million natives who for the most part were mainly all agricultural-based societies, were killed by the introduction of European diseases, years later as those areas that had been used for agricultural uses started being overgrown with trees again and the planet started suffering more cold years and many in Europe were forced to flee to America to escape failed crop's and settle far enough south to once again re-open fields that now, long dead people, once farmed, again warming the planet. 

    It was only around 200 years now that mankind started using fossil fuels to support both increasing populations and to use as fuel to support industry. This return of once sequestered carbon from long-term storage is what nature demanded without using this type of stored carbon the planet would simply have kept sequestration carbon at a rate that could not long be sustained by the removal of mid-term carbon storage back into the atmosphere. Trees hold somewhere in the vicinity of 1000 gigatonnes of stored carbon and the planet removes around 10 gigatonnes per year and plate tectonics replaces around 3 gigatonnes per year for a net loss of 7 gigatonnes per year, (7 goes into 1000 only 142 times,) Yes there is carbon stored elsewhere as in soil carbon but that is what the planet recycles over very short periods of time. Earth was teetering on the edge of entering into the Next-Last and Neverending ice age that only mankind prevented around 3,500 years ago. Agriculture maintained that balance "barely" for the next 3,400 years! 

     Now, is the time to really think outside the comfortable box that we have put ourselves into, and start understanding the purpose that nature caused us to be here for!!! Life Cycle of a Planet by Daniel James Kadavy shows us the correct way forward not just to save all carbon-based life on the planet for as long as mankind can remain as a viable species on the planet, but also to repair so much of the damage that we have caused and improve the money-based economy for a very large percentage of us!

    It really is up to the few of you who read my post to start that all-important conversation on not just "Why We Are Here" but how do we explain to so many others that same question with such a beautiful answer. Can there be a better reason than that for the life that we have been given? I can be reached at 402-890-7946 24/7 or at   danielkadavy212@gmail.com to read 473 other posts I ask everyone to read the 1 million words at (like that would ever happen even I am not that naive)  go to   https://lifecycleofaplanet.blogspot.com Thank you, Dan