Stellar Confusion: Behold a Pale Horse Pg. 76-78

Secret societies need members and special knowledge. Otherwise, believers would realize that the Illuminati was just an 18th-century group of nerds who read too much philosophy and wanted to educate the population. It's boring unless you can trace it back to something special or new. The secret society of the Dragon needs members and Cooper is happy to oblige.  

Cooper wants to put all the famous thinkers in history into this group. His first candidate is Plato. As a Ph.D. in philosophy, I really want to spend 2k words on why this is bullshit and how, if Plato had access to the secret knowledge, why does his theory of the forms fail the third man objection? Cooper writes, "Plato's initiation encompassed three days of entombment in the Great Pyramid, during which he died (symbolically), was reborn, and was given secrets that he was to preserve. Plato's writings are full of information on the Mysteries."

I've read a considerable amount of Plato. One could argue that Plato's access to secret knowledge is all of his philosophical works but that is being overly generous. Plato learned his philosophy from Socrates, the Pythagoreans, and some of the other precursors to Hellenic philosophy. The rest of his claim: not only is it not correct, but I cannot even figure out where it comes from. Searching turns up references to this book, some other esoteric books, or pages on Platonic solids. This is where we take a pass. If Cooper comes back to Plato, so will I, but my doctorate is tempting me to spend the rest of my day on why this is wrong. 

So, begrudgingly we move on...space stuff. One of the telltale signs of omni-conspiracy theories is when the theorist tries to marry the occult with science. David Icke does it when he pushes his lizard aliens into ancient Sumeria. Cooper is better at it because he's using actual science such as Antony Hewish's 1974 Nobel Prize in physics. Cooper claims that Hewish discovered radio signals originating from a star that exploded in 4000 b.c.e. and he ties that into the creation of the Giza Pyramid. 

None of this is true. I'm making the assumption that Cooper has read this somewhere and his source is incorrect. Hewish designed and built a type of radio telescope that allowed his research assistant Jocelyn Bell to discover, for the first time, a pulsar. A pulsar is a rotating neutron star, which ejects a beam of magnetic radiation. Due to the specific rotation of the star, the beam can be detected at regular intervals, or "pulses." It was not an exploding star and the specific one they discovered is located in the constellation Vulpecula. 

Cooper cites a crank astronomer who tried to tie together Atlantis, Babylon, and a star exploding. His name is George Michanowsky, and his book "The Once and Future Star," is a strong contender for the next book in this blog. It looks delightful. 

Cooper then makes a mistake, he offers a prediction. Not some vague bullshit either, he offers a specific prediction based on Michanowsky's book. He begins quoting Michanowsky, "An accurate star catalogue now stated  that the blazing star that had exploded within the triangle [made of stars: Zeta Puppis, Gamma Velorum, and Lambda Velorum] would again be seen by man in 6000 years.' According to the Freemason's calendar it will occur in the year 2000, and indeed it will." 

It did not. 

Cooper then moves toward Galileo, the craft not the person. His claim here is that the probe will orbit Jupiter under the guise of a science mission. In reality, the probe contains 49.7 pounds of plutonium-238 "supposedly being used as batteries to power the craft. When its final orbit decays in December of 1999, Galileo will deliver its payload into the center of Jupiter."

Why? Because when the gravitational force of Jupiter crushes the Pu-238 it will result in an atomic explosion that will ignite the hydrogen and helium atmosphere resulting in the birth of a new star which has already been named LUCIFER. He begins discussing this plan and how it likely won't work, because the society in charge--the JASON society is just flexing their technology. Cooper says that this is overkill because "as the documents that I read while in Naval Intelligence states that Project Galileo required only five pounds of Plutonium to ignite Jupiter and possibly stave off the coming ice age."

Where to begin? 

Galileo did have Pu-238 as a power source. This is a really cool thing that NASA and the JPL do to power spacecraft and planetary rovers. A radioactive isotope is used to power the machines through the Seebeck effect, which exploits a temperature difference between the radioactive material and another. So they weren't exactly batteries but they weren't far off from that either. Anyway, Pu-238 is not a weapons-grade isotope of Plutonium, that's Pu-239. It could work, but as far as we know, 238 doesn't decay the correct way for our use. There's no reason to think that JASON would send 238 into Jupiter when they could have sent 239. Secondly, Jupiter's atmosphere wouldn't ignite to form a new star. This is evidence of Cooper filling the gaps of his ignorance with how he thinks it works. A star isn't "on fire." You can't take a failed star like Jupiter and just turn it on. Jupiter never collected enough mass to begin the process of stellar fusion. We could send every nuclear weapon on Earth into Jupiter and the only thing it would accomplish is making the atmosphere more radioactive. Third, the probe deliberately crashed into Jupiter's atmosphere in 2003 and nothing happened.  

Why create this LUCIFER star? Cooper's theory is that LUCIFER will be used to stave off the coming ice age because global warming is a hoax. The coming ice age is a concept that conservatives love to trot out now to disprove climate change. It's not that they believe the ice age is coming, it's that they like to believe that if science was wrong once it's wrong always so we don't need to worry about climate change. What they purposefully fail to understand is that the ice age hypothesis was based on a minority position and was never the scientific consensus. Conservatives will then offer the Galileo gambit--which is a conspiracy theory tactic claiming that the consensus was against Galileo too and he was right. The gambit ignores a few things--importantly that Galileo wasn't against scientific consensus he was against religious theocracy and if he hadn't kept insulting the Pope he would have been fine. The other thing that they ignore is all the times the consensus of science was correct and then evolved into new ideas as more information was provided. New knowledge means that we get to change our position. 

Though the coming ice age was offered primarily in sensationalist and conspiracy literature. It occupied pseudo-science television shows like Leonard Nimoy's "In Search Of..." (season 2 ep. 23) where most people were exposed to it. When people trot the ice age argument out, I like to commit my own fallacy of "guilt by association" and ask them about the other theories offered on shows like that: ancient aliens, Bermuda Triangle, and Sasquatch. 

For our purposes with Cooper: LUCIFER would not fix the problem of a coming ice age. A new star in the place of Jupiter would solve all future issues as it would rip the Earth into being caught between the two stars. The gravity forces would pull them together and suck the Earth into the new gravitational well. 

I don't understand who the audience is for this claim. It's an utter mystery to me because if JASON can do this doesn't it mean that JASON controls the world? Why aren't we more focused on that? Cooper is losing the thread. In a paragraph or two he gets it back and we'll be back into the MYSTERIES next week.