He embodied the ravages of Time, and the destructive power that it wields. They were the Children of Zeus: Hermes, Apollo, Athena and the Muses, and they signified our acceptance of Time, and the start of civilisation.Ĭronus was, in the end, a bit of a rebel. He was, effectively, setting the clock back in order, and all that Cronus had devoured was restored, including Rhea’s other children.Īll this marked a new era in the universe, and the gods that followed Cronus were the gods of humankind. He challenged his father, Cronus, forcing him to regurgitate the past. When Zeus grew to manhood, he knew that order had to be restored. She hid him from the clutches of his father, suspended him, as legend goes, between the earth and sky, where Cronus would not see him. His name was Zeus, and Rhea was determined he would live. Desperate, he took away her children and devoured them. Foiled by nature, Cronus watched in horror as Rhea gave birth to the future. Things went well, at first, until Rhea decided that she too wanted children. With his head now firmly buried in the sand, Cronus took a wife, Rhea, and founded a new Kingdom. But he had overlooked the reality of his own existence, and his own potential progeny. No light meant no sun, and no sun meant no time, so Cronus thought he’d cracked it. When she did, Cronus imprisoned her children in Tartarus, the abyss of perpetual darkness. So he castrated his father (understandably, one of the Greek’s most heinous acts), and sat back, satisfied that he was the sole descendant but forgetting that Gaia, the ancestral mother, would continue to give birth. If he could prevent his father from bringing forth children, the cycle of birth and rebirth would be stopped. First, he looked towards his Father, Uranus. The task of stopping Time was taken up by Cronus. Entropy informs us that Time only goes one way, and that it can’t be halted, but like many of the Greek and Roman gods, Cronus incarnated human aspirations, and one of those aspirations was the wish to gain power over Time - perhaps to even stop it altogether. The God Cronus was identified with Saturn, hence the Roman harvest feast of Saturnalia, and he gave us the word chronology, which relates to the order of Time. Nevertheless, Uranus, which was discovered and named only in 18th century when telescopes became powerful enough for the job, still mysteriously appears in the cosmological myths as the Father of the Sky. The Ancient Romans saw the wandering stars or planets as gods, although apparently only five planets were known to them at the time: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. This article was originally published with the title "More Mysterious Methane" in Scientific American 300, 3, 21 (March 2009)ĭoi:10.The Greek and Roman God of Time was Cronus. Still, by knowing that Mars's methane comes from discrete areas, scientists can look for new sources and target the regions for future lander missions. The methane could also be a relic of past processes, somehow sequestered and then released. Although the methane could have come from the activity of microbes living below the permafrost, an equally plausible explanation is that it came from reactions between minerals and water trapped in rocky layers underneath. Mumma is careful not to overstate the significance of his study, published online January 15 by Science. They detected large methane belches during the summer of 2003 and located the areas of those emissions. Mumma of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and his colleagues monitored about 90 percent of the Red Planet's surface for three Martian years (equal to seven Earth years). Using ground-based telescopes, Michael J. Though by no means settling the issue, new detections of methane at least point in the direction of further study. The presence of methane on Mars, first discovered a few years ago, has piqued the curiosity of researchers, who wonder if the gas results from geologic activity or, more intriguingly, from living organisms, as is largely the case on Earth.
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