Before the Beginning

In an earlier monograph, the events of the creation, as written in the Old Testament, were explained in light of the Saturn thesis of David Talbott. Latter-day Saints typically believe what most of Christendom believes about the creation: that man had not yet been placed on the Earth when the first events transpired, that the creation account was subsequently revealed to prophets long after the first events themselves.

However, other evidence suggests that the creation story may actually be an eyewitness account, handed down from generation to generation. That is, even though the scriptures speak of man’s creation at the end of the story, Adam and his early descendants may have seen events that they came to call the ‘creation’ because it brought into existence a radically different world from the one they had previously known. Indeed, the ancient traditions and records of other cultures clearly portray the creation as an event witnessed by all mankind.

To fully understand how this might be, we must consider the work of Wal Thornhill, plasma physicist and electric universe proponent, who has given us a practical view of the conditions that may have existed in our solar system during the time when Adam was placed on the Earth, before Saturn became dominant in Earth’s heavens. Thornhill’s proposition not only fits with the sketchy details of the creation recorded in the Old Testament and the many traditions of other cultures, but it gives us a more complete view of the world our forefathers experienced before the epoch Latter-day Saints know as the Patriarchal Age, the Golden Age or the Age of Saturn. It was the world as it existed before the event that came to be known as the creation and the age of abundance that followed it when Saturn came to dominate Earth’s ancient skies. It is also an amazing view of what may be the most common condition of planets in our universe today — radically different than our own — and what the Earth and the heavens looked like in our world’s earliest epoch before the celestial collision that made it the harsh place it is today.

In his monograph entitled, “Other Stars, Other Worlds, Other Life?” Thornhill begins by pointing out that the most common stars in our galaxy, by far, are called Brown Dwarfs — ‘brown’ because they emit far less light than bright stars like our Sun, and ‘dwarfs’ because they are much smaller than the Red Giants that dominate the starry skyscape by their sheer size. In fact, Brown Dwarfs are remarkably small, approaching in size the gas giant planets in our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn.

Brown Dwarfs are far too small and cool to be powered by internal thermonuclear processes. (A serious problem for orthodox science, the very existence of such small, cool stars argues strongly for Thornhill’s electric universe theory.) The plasma envelope surrounding a Brown Dwarf is so tenuous that its planets could orbit within the star’s atmosphere. Rather than being vaporized by the intense heat of a thermonuclear star, such planets would encounter a salubrious, electrical environment. Such small, cool stars may be excellent incubators for life-bearing planets that might orbit them, as we shall see momentarily.

Spectrographic analysis of the light emitted from Brown Dwarfs confirms that their ‘atmospheres’ are rich in water (the atmosphere being the area within the photosphere) and other molecules of elements important to life. They emit light predominantly in the blue (ultraviolet) and red (infrared) ends of the visual spectrum.

The photosphere, together with the corona, is the source of light and heat in an electric star. The plasma envelope of the largest stars can extend many millions of miles above the surface. For example, were our Sun such a giant star, its atmosphere might extend beyond the present orbit of Jupiter! All the inner planets would orbit within its plasma envelope. Thornhill speculates that planets orbiting a parent sun within the envelope of the sun’s atmosphere are likely the most common arrangement in the universe since the recent discoveries of planets orbiting distant stars are all uncommonly close-orbiting planets. This is crucial because such an arrangement would put those planets in an environment radically different from the one in which we find ourselves today.

Consider what such a state of affairs would mean to the inhabitants of such a planet. Light would seem to come from all around rather than from a single, point source as it does now. There would be neither glaring sunlight nor shadows. There would be no day or night. There would be no stars or sun seen crossing the sky, and therefore no way of marking time. Even the parent sun would be virtually indistinguishable in a uniformly lighted sky.

Radiant energy would be evenly distributed over the entire planet, making every part of the planet pleasantly habitable, from the equator to the poles. There would be no seasons, no tropics and no ice caps. The weather systems we know would simply not exist. Such a mild, friendly climate would have none of the harsh extremes we endure now.

Lit by mostly ultraviolet and infrared light, the world would have been a bit gloomier than what we know, with a pale purple sky. On the other hand, because plants thrive on red light, such an arrangement would be very friendly to plant life — especially true because of an abundance of water and other life-giving molecules accumulated by the planet from the ‘atmosphere’ of its sun. Indeed, the environment within the parent sun’s atmosphere would be very conducive to life: consistent temperature, ample light for growth and abundant water. Under those conditions, one would expect such a planet to be teeming with life, a veritable planetary greenhouse.

The law of entropy that governs our existence would be suspended or largely negated in the altered electromagnetic environment near such a star. The energy received from the parent sun would operate to create more complexity and life, not dissolution and death as on our world. Oxidation or decay, as we know it, would be greatly mitigated. Aging would be slowed for the same reason because organs within the body would not be crippled by degeneration, as they are now. In fact, the electromagnetic environment would probably energize our cells and cause the body to renew and repair itself more rapidly and easily than at present. The lifespan of a human living on such a planet might be several times longer than in the harsh environment we presently endure.

All this should sound familiar to the student of the scriptures. What Thornhill describes sounds remarkably like the world described in the early verses of Genesis and in the fabulous traditions of all ancient cultures. Clearly, as established by Talbott’s research, Earth, Mars and Venus were once satellites of one or perhaps two Brown Dwarf parents, Jupiter and Saturn. All the remarkable conditions listed above pertained to our planet at one time. Our earliest ancestors lived in that exceptional environment.

Then, one tragic day, our pacific, primordial home experienced a “galactic traffic accident,” as Thornhill puts it. A pernicious intruder began to capture our Brown Dwarf parent, along with its planetary entourage. That interloper was Sol, our present-day sun. The trespassing sun usurped our parent sun’s power in the process and this extinguished its light and power until it became a faint shadow of its former self. Ultimately, after a long period of instability as the original system struggled to maintain its unique configuration in a new electrical environment, the original polar planetary configuration was dismantled in the aftermath of the capture, but not before creating a spectacular and astonishing celestial pageant for Earth’s newest inhabitants, Homo Sapiens, which became the basis for their cultural and religious traditions. Eventually, the ‘fall’ of Earth from its position near its parent and sister planets to its present, isolated orbit around the interloper sun gave us the world we know today: brilliant day with a glaring sun, black of night with a star-strewn sky, heat and cold, storm fronts, wind, rain, snow, ice ages, a largely uninhabitable planet and an existence fraught with pain and danger. Indeed, a “lone and dreary world.”

Perhaps more importantly, if we are to believe these prophecies, our parent planet will be returned one day to its “paradisiacal glory.” (Tenth Article of Faith, History of the Church, Vol. 4, pp. 535-541.)

Now we know what that change will bring.

© Anthony E. Larson, 2000