A Guide to the Inner Earth... Termites Are Teaching Architects to Design Super-Efficient...inspire new ideas for sustainable building ventilation.Are we being ruled by flesh-eating lizards? There are cavern systems and caves that traverse the whole

The history of invisible ink

Like many believers, Cluff is convinced by the accounts of others who claim to have already found and even visited the “inner Earth”. Chief among them is Karl Unger, a German sailor said to be part of a 1943 U-boat expedition to the South Pole. The submarine apparently entered the Hollow Earth through an underwater passageway, and its crew were greeted by an advanced civilisation in a place called “Rainbow Island”. (Hitler was reportedly a believer, and some conspiracy theorists are convinced he escaped to the Hollow Earth at the end of the Second World War and is still there.) Then there’s Admiral Richard Byrd, a highly decorated US Naval officer whose supposedly hushed-up “secret diary” of a 1947 expedition to the North Pole is believed to contain descriptions of a land full of lush lakes, greenery and woolly mammoths (Byrd was actually in the South Pole at the time). There’s even a retired colonel in the US Air Force, Billie Faye Woodward, who claims that he and his twin sister (both hermaphrodites) were born in the Hollow Earth. Cluff, for his part, tried to reach the Hollow Earth again. In 2003, he received an email from a man named Steve Currey who’d recently inherited his family’s travel firm that specialised in far-flung expeditions. Currey had once heard his father talking about the Hollow Earth and was familiar with Cluff’s book. They decided to plan a new trip. “We worked on it for several years,” says Cluff. The scheme involved chartering a Russian nuclear ice breaker that was used to take tourists to the North Pole. Once the basics were worked out, they began recruiting members. “Steve was charging about $26,000 for a spot on the ship and he actually got about 40 people to put down the money.” Before the voyage, they chartered a plane to fly over the pole to locate the opening. “We were going to leave in August 2006. But in April of that year, Steve found out he had six inoperable brain tumours. Just before we were ready to fly, he died.” Another member of the expedition – Dr Brooks Agnew – was appointed as the new leader. After renaming the operation “The North Pole Inner Earth Expedition” and raising yet more funding, they planned for a summer 2014 departure. But a further unexpected disaster befell the team.“Brooks Agnew resigned last September,” says Cluff. “He said a major stockholder in his company had withdrawn all their money, saying it was because [Agnew] was involved in an expedition to find the Hollow Earth.” When another key member of the team died in an aeroplane crash, Cluff began to wonder if mysterious powers were manoeuvring against them. “There seems to be some force that’s trying to stop this happening,” he says. “I think it’s the international bankers. They don’t want the Inner Earth people messing around with their slaves, here on the outer world.” One of the most famous Hollow Earth theorists, and a true predecessor of Thompson, was a veteran of the 1812 Anglo-American war, John Symmes. In his book Banvard’s Folly, Paul Collins recounts the “theory of concentric spheres and polar voids” that preoccupied the soldier. Symmes published a pamphlet, in which he wrote, “I declare that the Earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles 12 or 16 degrees.” He pledged his life to promoting his notion, boldly declaring, “I am ready to explore the hollow.” He toured the US with a handmade wooden globe that opened out to reveal its secret layers. Converts, in ever increasing numbers, began petitioning the government to finance his adventures. On March 7 1822 Senator Richard Thompson presented a case to Congress that Symmes be supplied with “the equipment of two vessels of 250 to 300 tons for the expedition, and the granting of such other aid as Government may deem requisite”.

During the debate, it was suggested that the Committee for Foreign Relations become involved, as the trip may well bring Symmes and his crew into contact with new races of interior people. But the motion was to fail. Seven further bills were presented to the House.

For many centuries, humankind has dreamt of inner worlds. The earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres. There is a previous draft, the result of the many retouchings of which somebody told you; but in that form it would not have been a 'magnum opus' at all. Besides, it would have been a legend and not a symbol. I therefore started recasting the whole thing; only the best passages and lines of the old draft of pyramids and will remain, altered so as to fit into the new frame.Its central theme revolves around the transcendence of man as the consummation of terrestrial evolution, and the emergence of an immortal supramental gnostic race upon earth.
What are the inner forces humans have? The process is the same for all. Even the great and the strong must pass through the dark field of Nature. In fact, greater the being, greater is the burden it must bear. Hughes Songe leads us and shows the way out of our present limited and ignorant existence and transforming it into a conscious play of the Eternal and the Infinite.Which one is the strongest? How can we control them? Hughes Songe’s journey carries him right up to the borders that join the lower and the higher hemispheres of existence. Thus we see the first part of his yoga coming to a close with ascension out of the state of Ignorance into the wide luminous spaces. He crosses domains of growing Light and, ascending through the Rays of Intuition, stands at the borders of the Overmind. The changes that accompany this ascent are being described subsequently.The design to Self-Realisation
undertaken by Songe is through a stilling of the Mind leading to an ascension into a vast, luminous and powerful Silence Above.

WHEN A GREEN architect does a particularly good job, you'll know it by the bling: the silver, gold, and platinum LEED certifications that emblazon buildings' exteriors. But the best eco-conscious constructions don't need a seal of approval—and their builders probably wouldn't appreciate it anyway. Mound termites, native to Africa, South Asia, and Australia, are pros at building self-regulating structures that maintain oxygen levels, temperature, and humidity. And now human architects and engineers want to adapt that ingenuity for their own designs.

From the outside, a termite structure just looks like a pile of dirt. But if you slice one in half—difficult considering some can be more than 30 feet tall—things get a bit more complicated. The above-ground mound has an outer wall riddled with holes, which lead to a labyrinth of tunnels that themselves lead to a series of chimneys. And below the mound is a large, oval nest, where the queen resides.

That queen needs to breathe somehow. “If we buried ourselves a meter underground we wouldn't last very long if we didn't have some way of getting oxygen from the atmosphere down to us," says Scott Turner, a biologist at the State University of New York, Syracuse. "It's the same logic in the termite mounds.”

How does the mound dissipate air through its network of holes? As the sun moves through the sky during the day, the air in the thinner chimneys on the outer edges of the mound heat up quickly, while the air in the mound's big, central chimney stays relatively cool. Hot air rises up through the outer chimneys and cool air in the central chimney sinks, circulating air continuously—injecting oxygen and flushing out carbon dioxide. At night, the flow reverses as the outer chimney air cools down quicker than the inner chimney air.

Mimicking termites' strategies, architects and engineers can drastically improve energy efficiency in buildings. Take Mick Pearce, a Zimbabwean architect who designed the award-winning Eastgate Center in Harare, Zimbabwe. Similar to termite mounds, the concrete outer walls of Eastgate are porous. As wind blows through the tunnels on a hot day, the concrete sucks up the heat, cooling the wind before it whooshes into the shopping center. Fans flush the heat out of the concrete at night so it will be ready to store more heat the next day. Following termites' lead, Pearce cut energy use down to about 10 percent of a normal building that size.

“Ultimately, we want to bring termite ventilation to buildings because it would allow the buildings to breathe freely,” says Rupert Soar, a biomimetic expert at Nottingham Trent University. The next step: mimicking the *process *of termite construction. Scientists have already programmed computer termites to design complex structures based on real behavior—things like complicated porous walls with intersecting tunnels and ducts.

Actually building those structures will be more difficult than designing them. But Soar says the bottleneck is 3-D printing. Once large-scale 3-D printing technology catches on in construction, you may be living in your own termite mound.

www.wired.com/2015/11/building-skyscrapers-like-termite-m...

(CAMBRIDGE, MA) – Sustainable architecture of the future could be inspired by new insights into how termites construct their climate-controlled habitats. Wyss Institute Core Faculty member L. Mahadevan, Ph.D., led the new study – reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – in which his team precisely measured the air flow inside a termite mound. They discovered that diurnal changes in the ambient temperature associated with the day-night cycle results in systemic ventilation inside the mound that flushes carbon dioxide out of the nest.

A team led by Wyss Core Faculty member L. Mahadevan traveled to India to investigate mounds of the termite species Odontotermes obesus, pictured. Pictured on the right, thermal images are superimposed on the same photo of the mound. The left half of the mound shows nighttime thermal distribution while the right half of the mound shows daytime thermal distribution. The cyclic day-night thermal oscillations create a closed-loop convection air current inside the mound, flushing carbon dioxide out and bringing fresh air in. Credits: Harvard University / Hunter King, Sam Ocko and Naomi Ocko
Mahadevan is also the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Professor of Physics at Harvard University.

Termites use swarm intelligence and collective behavior to construct mounds on top of their deep subterranean nests. The mounds protect them from the external environment while allowing the insects to exchange energy, information, and matter with the outside world. This controlled micro-climate is constructed by the termites to manage heat, humidity and respiratory gas exchange, providing an optimal environment to grow the brood and fungi, which maintain a symbiotic relationship inside the mound. The fungi produce sugars on which the termites feed.

But until now, scientists have lacked direct measurement of the internal air flows of a colony’s mound to understand exactly how the geometry of the structure allows it to maintain precise internal climate control.

To investigate, two members of Mahadevan’s team traveled to India to study the mounds of the termite species Odontotermes obesus. Hunter King, Ph.D., Postdoctoral fellow in Applied Mathematics at the Harvard Paulson School of Applied Science and Engineering (SEAS) and Sam Ocko, a graduate student in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, instrumented the mounds to make direct measurements of their internal temperature, air velocity and carbon dioxide.

The team’s observations show that thin, outer channels of the mound heat up rapidly during the day when compared to the deeper tunnels in the mound, which causes air to circulate in a closed-loop convection cell. During the day, air moves up along the outer channels and down the center. At night, the flow is reversed. This reversal flushes out the carbon dioxide from deep inside the mound, and the gas then diffuses through the porous walls.

"Thus, the termite mound works like a slowly breathing lung, flushing CO2 out once a day and aerating the mound," said Mahadevan.

The design of these mounds could inspire novel architectures that similarly would take advantage of diurnal thermal oscillations to ventilate buildings.

The work was supported by the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and the Human Frontiers Science Program.

wyss.harvard.edu/termite-mounds-could-inspire-new-ideas-f...

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Taken on: July 22, 2022

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