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Gaia may hide. More about all this can be found at http://www. jpl.nasa.gov/images/ newplanets. 12. Hoyle, F. and C. Wickramasinghe, Our Place in the Cosmos: Life did not begin on Earth — it arrived from space and is still arriv- ing, Phoenix, London, 1993. 13. Tritium 3H is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. It has a half-life of 12.43 years and decays by beta emission to helium-3 (3He). Tritium is produced naturally by the interaction of cosmic rays with nitrogen and oxygen, mainly in the upper atmosphere. Tritium exists in the atmosphere in the form of tritiated water molecules (HTO) and is transferred from the atmosphere to the Earth's surface through vapour exchange and rainfall. The involve- ment of tritium in the hydrological cycle makes it an excellent transient tracer for track- ing water movement in natural water systems. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, large quan- tities of anthropogenic tritium were delivered to the atmosphere by the thermonuclear weapons tests. This anthropogenic signal com- pletely masked the small quantities of naturally produced tritium. Tritium is used as a tracer in chemical and biochemical research. 14. Gold, Thomas, Das Jahrtausend des Methans. Die Energie der Zukunft — unerschépflich, umweltfreundlich ("The Millennium of Methane — The Energy of the Future: inexhaustible, environmentally friendly"), ECON, Diisseldorf, 1987. 15. Gold, Thomas, "The Deep, Hot Biosphere", Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA 89:6045, 1992. It should be mentioned here that in this paper Gold draws attention to the fact that such ideas have been "textbook" wisdom in the USSR for decades. With the takeover of the former Eastern Bloc and especially its oil industry by Western capital, this knowlege has largely "disappeared" from academia in the former Second World. Prof. Igor Hrusecky, Chairman of the Department of Geophysics and Hydrocarbon Potential, University of Bratislava, Slovak Republic, alerted the author to this in February 2001. This kind of thinking is eminently more rational than the "going par- adigm" in Western academia; it can be proved experimentally and does not require any deus ex machina. That it is not permitted even to be considered as an alternative shows Western (geo-) science as a fraudulent enterprise driven by special interests. 16. Kuhn, T.S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1962. By some 20 years later, para- digms had become the slogan in science; and it can be shown that they are little more than the effect of academic nihilism which has turned science and art into pure formalisms. "The crustification of thinking along pre-determined schemata, the suffocation of new ways of shows science to be irresponsible and politics to be criminal. For more data, see also: Ellis Evans, J.C. and D. Wynn Williams, "A Great Lake under the Ice", Nature 381:644-46, 2000; Stone, R., "Russian outpost readies for other- worldly quest", Science 279:658-61, 1998. 8. Aldersey Williams, H., The Most Beautiful Molecule: The Discovery of the Buckyball, J. Wiley & Sons, New York, 1995. The name of the mineral honours architect R. Buckminster- Fuller, who popularised geodesic domes. 9. Hoyle, F., The Nature of the Universe, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1953. 10. This is termed the "Chandrasekhar limit" (or, in the popular vernacular, "event hori- zon"): any mass greater than 1.4 solar masses will not explode into a supernova, but implode to form an all-consuming "black hole". 11. Interestingly, Uranus orbits the Sun at an oblique angle which does not fit with the "going paradigm" of planet formation. Reuters reported in June 2002 about the discovery of an entity akin to our solar system around 55 Cancri, a star within the constellation Cancer (at some 41 light-years or 410" km distance from Earth) which can be seen with the naked eye. Three "gas giants" orbit 55 Cancri (as in our solar system); in a position analogous to Mars, Earth and Venus, there is a "void" (of factual knowledge?) within which another 80 - NEXUS The Mysterious Origins of Oil Continued from page 38 www.nexusmagazine.com AUGUST —- SEPTEMBER 2004