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THE CONSTANT OF NINEVEH 35<br />
and 432,000 are found in many sacred texts<br />
and legends of the<br />
distant past. Why did the Mayas, the Sumerians, the Chaldeans,<br />
the Babylonians, and the Egyptians use in their calculations<br />
enormous periods of time that were all multiples of 360 days or<br />
360 years? Their choice must have had some reason and I can<br />
see only two possible explanations. Either the number 360 was<br />
given to their ancestors by astronauts or at<br />
that time the solar<br />
year was exactly 360 days long. The first explanation is very possible,<br />
the second one less so—but not totally impossible.<br />
The laws discovered by Johannes Kepler say that for the solar<br />
year to be exactly 360 days, the distance of our planet earth from<br />
the sun would have to be 1.009684 times shorter than now. That<br />
seems to be impossible at first glance, but less so if one<br />
remembers the theories of the planet Venus being a planet that<br />
wandered into our system at some time in the past and was captured<br />
by our sun. Earth certainly had its part in this capture and<br />
was possibly pushed further out from its original orbit, giving us<br />
a longer year. So it is possible that our year was exactly 360<br />
days long ago and that the Constant of Nineveh represented at<br />
that time exactly 6.3 million years of 360 days of 86,400 seconds<br />
each. As we will see later, there is another possibility, namely,<br />
that of a longer day of 24.35 liours as the result of a stronger pull<br />
of the moon which was at some time much closer to our planet.<br />
That could also explain why the Constant of Nineveh was calculated<br />
in stable seconds instead of days which could vary slowly<br />
over the ages.<br />
When after a while one gets used to the idea that all that takes<br />
place in the solar system is regulated by one Constant, the mind<br />
is ready to start understanding one of the great mysteries of<br />
human history, namely, the regular returns of ice ages, that have<br />
played a very important part in the existence of the primitive<br />
man and in the development of our present civilization.<br />
We are nearly certain now that the periodic invasions of ice<br />
from the polar caps are caused by several overlapping astronomical<br />
cycles. Some of these cycles are well known while others<br />
are objects of heated debates and therefore of particular interest<br />
to me.<br />
The first of these cycles is the precession of equinoxes, or the<br />
rotation of the axis of our planet around the pole of the ecliptic.
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