Forelaws on Board In keeping with the promise and gift of intelligent life, universal forelaws of empathy and compassion (empirical attributes of cosmic genealogy seated within the genome of humankind and all intelligent life) expressly highlight and define reverence for life underlying evolutionary panaltruism and human unity - moving humanity to a compassionate/cooperative world order with new cornerstones for the United Nations, to global water equilibrium (first step toward climate stability), and to development of life-centered cosmologies.   As part and parcel of naturalistic Nature ("everythng is connected to everything else"), life-centered cosmologies reflect cognizance of the observable universe of humankind (13,000 million light years in all directions), of solar systems with and without intelligent life, and of global water equilibrium.  In 1859, Louis Pasteur's pivotal work in disproving spontaneous generation of life began the age of cosmic genealogy on Earth, increasingly more pronounced in modern times owing to emergent astrobiology (merging biology and astronomy) as pioneered and led by the late Sir Fred Hoyle, by Chandra Wickramasinghe, Brig Klyce, Halton C. Arp, and others. "But the climaxing observation appeared in year 2002.    How exceedingly ironic that 30 years after Fred Hoyle pointed to NGC 7603 as a crucial system which must force out acceptance of the existence of discordant redshifts - after a generation has passed - the luminous link between this active Seyfert and its appendage is observed to have two high redshift, quasar-like objects in it." - Halton C. Arp, American Astronomer, Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. "Life comes from space because life comes from life." - Brig Klyce, Astrobiology Research Trust. "If life is always derived from antecedent life in a causal chain that is clearly maintained throughout the fossil record, the question naturally arises as to when and where this connection stops. The continuation of the life-from-life chain to a time before the first life appears on our planet and before the Earth itself formed implies the operation of panspermia." - N. C. Wickramasinghe, Director, Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology. Reverence for life, highlighting the intrinsic unity of all intelligent life, underlies (in addition to evolutionary panaltruism and human unity) the age of cosmic genealogy on Earth, the cosmic community of intelligent life, and intelligent life reciprocally propagated from infinity to infinity (from habited sites to habitable sites) by intelligent life.   Fundamental to fulfillment of the promise and gift of intelligent life, deep human needs to know from whence we came, safety and security, and meaning and purpose rest, finally, on determinants consonant with universal forelaws of empathy and compassion:   individual mate selection, nurturing of offspring, and early childhood education in a healthful, sustainable environment. "The greatest discoveries of science have always been those that forced us to rethink our beliefs about the universe and our place in it." - Robert L. Park, University of Maryland, (in The New York Times, 7 December 1999). Evolutionary Panaltruism on Earth Reverence for Life in the Age of Cosmic Genealogy "Create a multi-disciplinary environment whereby compassion and altruism studies are supported and legitimized within the broader scientific community." - Vision of The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, Stanford University. Though today actively in denial of their own humaneness, international terrorists remain genetically predisposed (and reeducable) to compassionate humanness common to all intelligent life.  Evolutionary panaltruism and human unity are imperative in the transition on Earth to a compassionate/cooperative world order built upon universal forelaws of empathy and compassion and upon freshwater amply available worldwide (global water equilibrium). Given impetus by epochal developments in astrobiology and molecular biology, and involving societal breakthroughs basic to reverence for life and evolutionary panaltruism, i.e.  (a)  a healthful, sustainable environment for every planetary citizen, (b) universal health care publicly supported, (c) education for all based upon individual capability, (d) creative/productive employment for every planetary citizen, (e) post-retirement security, a compassionate/cooperative global society presupposes new cornerstones and guidelines for the United Nations: (1)  World Summitry on Economic/Societal Sustainability, (2)  Global Water Equilibrium (Project Ice-SHARE/Green Earth), (3)  The DEMOCRATHON Process, (4)  Reverence for Life. World summitry on economic/societal sustainability, ensuring the unifying, forward-moving legacy of Kyoto, Rio+10. Johannesburg and Copenhagen, marshals previously untapped human cooperation, energy and resources toward creation of the compassionate/cooperative global society.   Itself sustained and emboldened by scientific research validating the biological basis for human cooperation (Rilling/Berns et al, Emory Univ.), and empathy and compassion (Rodrigues/Saslow et al, Oregon State Univ. & UC Berkeley) - like the first mission designed to search specifically for terrestrial-like planets (Kepler, 2009) - world summitry proposed on economic/societal sustainability testifies to the quintessential unity and unfolding aspirations of humankind.  Ending international terrorism requires employing the total resources of the United Nations, including military, with primary emphasis on remedial education underscoring intrinsic, compassionate humanness and proper scrutiny of all social dichotomies ranging in realm from religious dogmas, to political ideologies, to economic systems.  Although following a philosophy antithetical to evolutionary panaltruism, adherents of global terrorism carry the same gene of empathy and compassion joining together all members of the human family.  Evolutionary panaltruism on Earth faces challenges not least of which include terrorism, fossil fuels, nuclear weapons/energy, and the specter of international trade wars.   Agenda items at the first and successive world summits on economic/societal sustainability include human unity - conflict resolution  -  overpopulation -  world hunger  -  social justice  -   the integrity of the human gene pool - climate stability - reverence for life and the environmental impact of ascendant worldwide veganism. As the state of balance between seawater converted to freshwater amply available worldwide on one side and, on the other, constancy in planetary sea-levels, global water equilibrium effectively addresses climate change while providing the basic necessity for a compassionate/cooperative world order on Earth.  Achievable global water equilibrium (Project Ice-SHARE/Green Earth) represents the first step toward climate stability.  In all stages of global water equilibrium, from seawater desalination to rolling back desertification, plastic pipe and other products made from non-narcotic industrial hemp are destined to make a major contribution.   An amazing plant requiring no genetic modification, industrial hemp can be cultivated with and without irrigation in countries like Afghanistan, Columbia, Mexico, and the USA - and processed into upwards of 10,000 useful products, including food and building materials.  Industrial hemp (a producer of paper, fiberboard, and hempcrete) and trees (in their full life cycle) have important roles to play in planetary climate stability - governed by generational vigilance and refinement of Earth's surface reflectivity (albedo) in concert with continuing scientific research and understanding of solar radiation.   "Regional changes in the surface albedo can cause variation in the energy budget of the Earth-atmosphere system, specifically in the tropospheric temperature, and therefore can be an anthropogenic source for climate change on a global scale." - from "Global and Regional Surface Albedo Changes due to Land Use Transformation: an Anthropogenic Source for Climate Change." (by E. Monier, S.Wharton, B. Laabs, R. Reck, UC Davis, American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2005, abstract #B41A-0153).  Implemented under UN Security Council purview and mandate, global water equilibrium Earth, like space exploration, captures the questing spirit of all humanity, with success of the latter tethered to success of the former. The DEMOCRATHON process ("people power"), proceeding from the Initiative and Referendum currently available in some form in 24 States in the USA and continuing to grow worldwide, is a political-educational-fundraising mechanism with potential and efficacy uniquely more widespread since the advent of Internet communication.   The promotion of industrial hemp is among the many globally important issues apropos to the DEMOCRATHON process. Recent creation of a synthetic bacterium by the J. Craig Venter Institute marks a profound achievement having both local and cosmic significance not only for bioscience but also for biophilosophy and the reverence for life ethic.    On May 20, 2010, responding to this development, President Barack Obama requested from the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues a comprehensive report to be completed within six months.    A week later the U. S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce held hearings entitled "Developments in Synthetic Genomics and Implications for Health and Energy." "Given the importance of this issue, I request that the Commission consult with a range of constituencies, including scientific and medical communities, faith communities, and business and nonprofit organizations." - President Barack Obama. "Craig Venter's successful implantation of a digitally determined genome sequence into a bacterium has been widely reported (29 May, p 6).   Now imagine a future where a successor to Venter is able to digitally reconstruct a set of the best possible sequences of human genomes and incorporate them, in pieces, into bacteria that could autonomously reproduce the sequences.    If these bacteria were then launched into space, the fragmented genome could be reassembled on countless habitable planets in the galaxy.   This would be a process similar to that outlined in the theory of directed panspermia proposed in 1973 by Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel (Icarus, vol 19, p 341).   Carried on comets, these bacteria could travel from one planetary system to the next, where the genome could reproduce.    The legacy of human life could then be thought to have been given an eternal existence in the cosmos." - Intergalactic Legacy (New Scientist, 9 June 2010) by Chandra Wickramasinghe, Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology. "The first message from an intelligent extraterrestrial civilisation may not emerge from a radio telescope but, instead, from a DNA sequencing machine." - John Walker, Fourmilab Switzerland. Holistically monitored and reviewed by this and succeeding generations, the future of artificial life (synthetic biology) turns essentially on its compatability with the promise and gift of intelligent life, with universal forelaws of empathy and compassion defining reverence for life, and with evolutionary panaltruism and human unity - allies as humanity progresses toward active membership in the cosmic community of intelligent life, in the age of cosmic genealogy on Earth. Compassionate/cooperative humanity, appreciative of the grandeur and import of cosmic genealogy, concerns itself with  life-centered issues and questions including cosmologies merging astronomy and biology (astrobiology)  -  infinities in Nature unrelated to mathematics and physics  -  the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)  -  the strong version of panspermia  -   Viruses and the Evolution of Life (Villarreal, 2005)  -  locally developed horizontal gene transfer and cosmic/intelligent life propagated from Earth, both keyed to reverence for life and evolutionary panaltruism  -  parent star stabilization/solar energy constancy  -  ground rules apropos to "artificial life" and ";synthetic biology" - polar wander/pole shift - climate change -  resurgent industrial hemp (any product made from petroleum, including high octane gasoline and plastics, can be made from industrial hemp) . . . . . all manifestly inseparable from "concern for others and for those who will succeed us . . . . ." (The Center for Naturalism). "The good of society as a whole can be promoted through the science of positive and "prosocial" emotions and behaviors - for example, by studying emotions and behaviors such as compassion, respect, joy, trust, love, empathy, gratitude, and tolerance." - Greater Good Science Center, University of California, Berkeley "Detection of convincing evidence for extraterrestrial life would be a significant event in human history.  Efforts to detect signs of intelligent life should be directed by the kind of signals which intelligent life is most likely to produce, given the constraints of physical reality.   Activities designed to spread life throughout the universe may not seem like reasonable behavior to us now, but as we learn more about life and its possibilities, it may seem like the most reasonable way we can participate in the evolution of life across the universe.  The discovery of intergalactic seeds produced by intelligent life would immediately change our view of the origin and purpose of life on Earth, and improve our expectations for the future of life in this universe."   (Robert T. Hemphill, from Searching for Signals from Civilizations Spreading Life Among the Galaxies). "But in order for life to climb the tree to a higher level, new genetic programs are required - which mutation and recombination alone cannot supply.  When they are supplied (through horizontal gene transfer), a major advance may ensure.  Thus, in strong panspermia, the problem of punctuated equilibrium is also resolved. . . . . . A consequence of this reasoning is that life on Earth can have descended only from life elsewhere that was at least as highly evolved as it is here."  (Brig Klyce, founder of Cosmic Ancestry and Astrobiology Research Trust). . "Darwinian evolution can produce variation that results from one or two point mutations, and can, by natural selection, lead to adaptation, or microevolution.   But that is not the same as macroevolutionary progress requiring whole new genes that differ from known predecessors by dozens to hundreds of essential nucleotides.  In strong panspermia, those new genes must be supplied from elsewhere . . . . . . . . . . Energy reaches Earth from the Sun, of course, but encoded instructions do not.   We have long believed that evolutionary progress takes place in a biologically closed system, because we thought, until recently, that life could not survive in space." (Brig Klyce,   Astrobiology Research Trust). "The lethal wave of influenza in 1918-19 . . . was first detected on the same day in Boston and Bombay.  Yet in spreading within the United States it took three weeks to go from Boston to New York." - Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe. "Microbiology may be said to have had its beginnings in the nineteen-forties.   A new world of the most astonishing complexity began then to be revealed.   In retrospect I find it remarkable that microbiologists did not at once recognize that the world into which they had penetrated had of necessity to be of cosmic order.   I suspect that the cosmic quality of microbiology will seem as obvious to future generations as the Sun being the centre of the solar system seems obvious to the present generation." (Sir Fred Hoyle, 1980, concluding a university lecture at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff with the title "The Relation of Biology to Astronomy"). ". . . . . this essay will examine the possible role of viruses in the evolution of complexity, including the evolution of human-specific attributes." - from "Can Viruses Make Us Human?" by Dr. Luis P. Villarreal, Director, Center for Virus Research, University of California, Irvine. "Theories of panspermia are rapidly coming into vogue, with the possibility of the transfer of viable bacterial cells from one planetary abode to another being generally accepted as inevitable." - from Progress Towards the Vindication of Panspermia - N.C. Wickramasinghe, M. Wainwright, J.V. Narlikar, P. Rajaratnam, M.J. Harris and D. Lloyd (Astrophys. Sp. Sci., 283, 403-413, 2003). "Astrobiology has emerged as a new science for the new millennium.  It seeks to understand life in the context of the wider cosmos.  The new Centre will continue in the pioneering traditions of astrobiology started in Cardiff over 25 years ago, taking note of the many relevant discoveries that have been made in recent years.  The Centre aims to combine the expertise of astronomers, biochemists and microbiologists to generate cutting edge science that would eventually enable us to answer the age-old question:   where did we come from?" (Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, director of Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology, and author of A Journey with Fred Hoyle - The Search for Cosmic Life, World Scientific, 2005). "We can soon launch panspermia missions to seed other habitable solar systems.  We can target nearby stars and star-forming zones in interstellar clouds.  Each mission can seed dozens of new solar systems where local life has not formed."  (Dr. Michael N. Mautner, Society for Life in Space (SOLIS). "and then there is the greatest opportunity of all, the prize of securing and safeguarding the planet for our generations to come." - UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, on global warming and the Stern Review. "A human being is part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space.   He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." -  Albert Einstein "Of course, today, for science in particular, electronic communication makes possible communities of individuals from all corners of the world."  The most direct evolution toward an enlightened science is for these groups to just go about supporting each other in doing science free of disproved, official assumptions." (Dr. Halton Arp, astronomer and author of Seemg Red, Apeiron, 1998). ". . . we have found a way to make a membrane (for use in seawater desalination) that can produce higher amounts of water compared to the commercial membranes being used today, while using the same process." -   Dr. Mohammed Rasool Qtaishat, Water for All. "knowledge gained is always subject to further testing as understanding matures" - The Center for Naturalism. Industrial Hemp Industrial hemp elicits appropriate recognition at world summitry on economic/societal sustainability.   Challenging the DEMOCRATHON process ("people power"  utilizing the Initiative and Referendum), significantly increased worldwide production of industrial hemp (re-introduction in the USA) - locally grown, processed and manufactured into products locally consumed (and exported/imported where in order) - is a realistic response, accompanied by others, to "Peak Oil"  and the inevitable depletion of extractable petroleum.  Any product made from petroleum (including high octane gasoline and plastics) can be made from industrial hemp.   Industrial hemp seeds can produce food such as bread, hempburgers, milk and ice cream.   Hemp fiberboard has been demonstrated to be twice the strength of wood fiberboard.  "Hempcrete"  blocks,  "lighter, stronger and easier to work with than masonry concrete,"  have been manufactured at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota (start-up costs were under $10,000.00).   "From Petrol to Agro:  Seeds of a New Economy," by Dr. Robert E. Armstrong, Center for Technology and National Security, National Defense University, discusses the transition to renewable resources. Space Exploration and SETI Appropriately but not solely, the exploration of space in the age of cosmic genealogy on Earth focuses on the search for extraterrestial intelligence (SETI), targeting, currently, the Kepler Mission.    SETI projects a positive, life-engaged future for humankind as part of life-centered cosmologies prevalent within the cosmic community of intelligent life. Although not alone as a harbinger of intelligent life reciprocally propagated from Earth, the Kepler Mission (launched by NASA in 2009 to monitor 100,000 stars for orbiting Earth-size planets) is the first space mission to search specifically for terrestrial-like planets.   Kepler will be followed by Terrestrial Planet Finder, 2012-2015 and Darwin, 2014.     A promising ally in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence,  the recent technology breakthrough by NASA will aid  observation of planet formation and planet detection by suppressing the light of stars.  This emerging expansion of cosmic focus and direction - likely to involve (complementing NASA) the European Space Agency (ESA), the Hubble Telescope, the International Space Station, and many if not most of Earth's space agencies and observatories - bodes well for life-centered cosmologies. To date 400 exoplanets have been discovered. "I am certain and have always stressed that the destination of mankind is to become more and more humane." The ideal of humanity has to be revived." - Albert Schweitzer "Whatever you can do . . . . . or believe you can . . . . . begin it Boldness has magic . . . . . power . . . . . and genius in it." Johnne Goethe Internal Pages:     - Cosmic Genealogy   - Ethical Veganism - Global Water Equilibrium - Industrial Hemp - World Summit on Economic/Societal Sustainability - The DEMOCRATHON  Process External Links: AGE OF COSMIC GENEALOGY -  Cosmic Ancestry - Can Viruses Make Us Human? -  Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology - Astrobiology Research Trust - Halton Arp Website -  NASA Astrobiology - NASA NEO Program - National Space Society - The Planetary Society - The SETI Institute - SETI League - International Astronomical Union - Exoplanets - Habitable Planets - The Rosetta Mission - Kepler Mission - Society for Life in Space (SOLIS) - Universe Today - Terraforming Directed Panspermia - Influenza from Space? - WORLD SUMMITRY ON ECONOMIC/SOCIETAL SUSTAINABILITY - Greater Good Science Center- The International Behavior and Neural Genetics Society - Federation of European Neuroscience Societies - The Biological Basis for Human Cooperation - Sustainability (In Context) - The Oregon Sustainability Act - World Constitution and Parliament Association - Commonalities - Peak Oil - The Sun-Earth Connection - Superfluidity in the Solar Interior: Implications for Solar Eruptions and Climate - Solar Activity: A Dominant Factor in Climate Dynamics - Changing Sun, Changing Climate - Living With a Star -  Project Worldview  - COMPASSIONATE/COOPERATIVE  GLOBAL SOCIETY - Proutist Universal - Ethical Vegetarianism (Book)- The New Paradigm Journal -  International Institute for Humane Education International Humanist and Ethical Union - Humanists Net - Altruists International - Dematerialism -  EarthSave International - Encoding Altruism - Topia.net -  Peter Singer Links - Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics (EJAIB) -  Eco-Ethics International Union (EEEU) - Pasteur Institute - Pasteur Foundation - J. 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