Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
–Arthur C. Clarke, Author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Inventor of the Geosynchronous Satellite.
Since I stepped into the Wayback Machine and dropped into the wild and wacky 1970s with the article on Pyramid Power, I thought I needed to address that other peripherally persistent paranormal phenomenon.
I don’t believe that space aliens (or even ALIENS!) were responsible for the pyramids, Stonehenge, Easter Island, the Nazca Plateau, Teotihuacan, or the Ziggurat of Ur. As I said earlier, human beings, even without modern technology, had technology and it worked.
They also had motivations that we don’t share, because we live in a different culture, in a different time. So what to our modern eyes appears to be a wasteful dedication of tremendous labor and resources to a strange obsession would seem the most normal of things to them.
The human brain physiologically is fairly the same now as it has been since Cro-Magnon times. To suggest that this brain simply couldn’t accomplish any of these things without the intervention of an advanced alien species is really just unfair to our ancestors.
That said, I fully believe that there are extraterrestrial species, probably extradimensional and extratemporal ones (and some that might qualify as all three) and that they have visited this world in our past and likely still do.
So lets look at this a little less sensationally than the cable channels do for bit. Lets talk about the physical realities of time, space, and dimension, and just exactly how those realities can give us some insight into the nature of our visitors.
Firstly, as we know, space is really really big. Enormous in fact, and possibly infinite. Since Einstein and his contemporaries and successors have established that we exist within a time-space continuum, that bigness may be both infinite and eternal.
So given that, the denial by any person or group that there is certainly the potential for alien life is truly against all odds. To insist that only this tiny little gravel in the whole vastness of vastness alone contains not only the spark of life, but the sole intelligence, and spiritual monopoly over all that is, was, or will be is ludicrous.
Carl Sagan, in the original Cosmos book and series popularized something called Drake’s equation. This was formulated by astronomer Frank Drake to address the potential for communicating with an alien species.
In general terms, it says there are a certain number of stars in the galaxy, and of those, a certain number that have planets, and of those planets a certain number that could sustain life, and of the life-sustaining planets, a certain number that have civilizations that arise capable of sending signals into space, and of those civilizations, a certain number that don’t end up nuking or polluting themselves out of existence before they can send a signal. And finally, of these, they have to be sending the signal at the time that we are able to receive it (which in our case has only been a little less than a century) and be close enough that receiving that signal is within the lifespan of the civilization sending it.
This last couple of points is where things get really tricky.
The speed of light is a constant (the” “c” in E=mc2) throughout the known universe. This constant speed means that the light from a distant star will travel a certain distance in a certain time, and we use this to measure how big space is.
The typical measurement is a light year.
For reference, a light second is a bit over 186,000 miles (a bit under 300,000 km). So there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours per day and 365 days in a year. It’s about six quadrillion miles.
To put that in perspective, the sun at a scant 93 million miles away is 8 light minutes. The planet Mars is around 2 light minutes, but even when we fly there in the most direct path, our conventional spacecraft still take several months.
Six quadrillion miles is huge. And that is one light year. Just one. Outside our solar system, there’s nothing that is that close.
The nearest star is about five light years away. Thirty quadrillion miles. That’s almost across the street compared to most of the stars we see in the sky at night.
So going back to Drake’s equation, let’s say some brilliant alien physicist on Alpha Centauri sends a radio message out in the general direction of our boring little blue dot. It would take about five years for that message to reach us, and another five years for any reply we sent to get back to them. So a round trip text takes roughly a decade. Since we have only really been able to receive radio messages since the early 1900s, in the entire 40 millennia lifespan of humanity, we’d have only been able to send and receive maybe a dozen messages.
Now assume that the physicist on Alpha Centauri lived over 100 years ago. He sent the message out, then they had an atomic war and the technology was lost. That message sailed right past Earth before Tesla and Marconi were experimenting with variable oscillation of electrical waves, and we never even knew about it.
That’s just the guy next door. Let’s talk about someone sending a message out from somewhere like Antares, the big red giant in Scorpio. That’s 554.5 light years. If we got a message from them now, it would have been sent almost forty years before Columbus began the colonization of the Western Hemisphere.
If the message got sent from the other side of our own Milky Way galaxy, it would have started it’s journey to our tiny speck a bit less than 106,000 years ago. So the civilization on that planet developed technology before the coming of the modern homo sapien, a mere 43,000 years ago.
Now suppose they lived a long time ago in a galaxy far far away?
The Great Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda is our closest intergalactic neighbor, and that is just over 2.5 million lightyears away. On Earth, 2.5 million years ago, the first homonids that would eventually give rise to the human race were just evolving in what is now Central Africa, and the Ice Ages were about to begin. Any intelligent signal we’d get from Andromeda now would have been beamed out that long ago.
These vast distances in time and space are one of the many reasons that contact with “space aliens” would seem so very unlikely as to be nigh impossible. Even if there had been a message sent out (intentionally or not) might the great gulf of years not simply have ended the species that sent it?
On our own planet, we have evidence of several mass extinctions due to planetary upheavals, environmental disasters, and bombardment by interstellar debris. Within our recorded history the precarious grasp our own species has on planetary dominance has been significantly threatened by war, famine, pestilence, and death. Our advancement to the stage where we can send and receive such signals has gone hand-in-hand with the discovery of technologies that could effectively destroy us, and possibly make the planet unlivable for any succeeding species.
In two and half million years, could any species survive all these factors? And if it did, what might it have evolved into in that time?
In 2.5 million years we moved from being just another animal in the ancient jungle to sending probes into interstellar space. How would another couple of million years change us? Would we even be recognizable as the species that sent that probe? And would we even want to still communicate with whoever, or whatever it reached?
The fact is that the Andromeda galaxy we see today was what it looked like that long ago. For all we know, the entire galaxy may no longer be there, or it may be vastly changed. Stars will have died and been born in the ongoing pattern of entropy that characterizes our experience of passing time. And our perception of this is currently limited by that speed of light, beyond which nothing can be observed.
The reality of this has lead authors of science fiction, futurism, and space fantasy to develop several tropes for Faster-Than-Light (FTL) travel. Whether it be warp drive, wormholes, or hyperspace, these stories all rely upon some means of getting us out there in the thick of it all, meeting with the aliens, making love and war, and doing all those human things we do that apparently all the aliens do just enough like we do so that we understand it.
Numerous science fiction stories talk about alien spores that form a hive mind when they “infect” the fauna of the planet onto which they drift. Compare this to the “zombie ant” phenomenon, where a fungus invades an ant, takes control of it’s behavior, and uses it to spread the fungus.
There are theories that it is not just the ants that are part of some fungal consciousness. Much has been made lately of the size and interconnectivity of mushroom mycelia underlying forests and fields. There are theories that some kind of plant telepathy is going on across the fungal network, and that we may be dealing with some sort of intelligence that is so different from our own that we don’t even realize it is intelligence. Whether it’s origin is terrestrial or otherwise is an open topic.
There are even a few texts I’ve encountered asserting that the psychotropic effects of psilocybin are a means of this fungal consciousness communicating with humans, and elevating us to a higher order of being.
And that’s just one bizarre possibility for carbon-based life like ourselves that depends on things like amino acids and liquid water. If we get into critters made from silicon and methane, all bets are off. They certainly wouldn’t register as living by our standards, and we might not even be able to determine they were communicating with us, or even with each other. In that context the whole “magic crystal” branch of occultism takes on a completely different character.
Which is the other great trope of science fiction, that the majority of the aliens look and act and communicate just like us. This, of course, is where things can also go awry.
Even if an alien species can get to Earth from so very very very far away, we might not even recognize them. Douglas Adams pointed out this in So Long And Thanks For All The Fish. Roger Zelazny takes it a step further in the story ‘Kjwalll’kje’k’koothai’lll’kje’k featured in his My Name Is Legion anthology. Leonard Nimoy was influenced by Adams when he made the fourth Star Trek film, so this idea that we have an intelligent alien species living among us, but that they are so alien in how they respond and interact with their environment is not new.
The evolutionary history of cetaceans is about as well documented as that of our own homonid ancestry, so calling dolphins and whales “aliens” may be a bit of a stretch. The cephalopods in our oceans also demonstrate what we would consider “intelligence”. There are several internet videos of the octopus at the aquarium that would leave it’s own tank, crawl across the floor, and help itself to a tasty snack from one of the other tanks, before returning home. This sort of behavior is on par with chimpanzees and gorillas.
Yet the chimpanzees and gorillas inhabit our terrestrial environment with gravity (or at least without buoyancy) limited vertical depth (without supporting structures), and they have bilateral symmetry and binocular vision. Sound and scent do not travel as far through the medium of air, and changes in pressure are less intense. And rarely do we find that food just floats by.
So our ability to understand and possibly communicate with chimpanzees and gorillas is ultimately aided by our shared experience of the world. We have far less in common with the dolphin and even less with the octopus.
How then do we expect to understand and communicate with the little green man from Alpha Centauri? In fact, would we even recognize him? Has he been sending us messages for ages and we just think it’s noise, part of that “cosmic background radiation” that used to show up on old TVs when the broadcast day had ended (yes, boys and girls, that actually was a thing when I grew up).
Well, the scientists argue that the aliens will also have thought of that. They’ll have realized that “life, but not as we know it” is probably more the norm for the universe than “life as we know it” and looked for something that does seem to be truly universal. Which brings us back to math.
Numbers are universal, they are immutable, the idea of number is endemic to the nature of reality. There are things and other things and because of this number exists without question in all times, spaces, and dimensions. And the permutations that can be applied to number, which we call mathematics, is also a finite, established, and absolute. So we can send signals using numbers and have these signals interpreted by another vastly more alien species.
There are some other things we have in common with the aliens. Things like frequency and wavelength, which along with mathematics, can be used to express more complicated concepts like atomic structure, chemical makeup, interstellar distances, and music.
Yes. Music.
Music is the result of intervals of waves. At varying frequencies, you get higher or lower tones, but the basic set of tones in human hearing tend toward 7 discreet whole notes and another 5 half notes. Every piece of music ever written is made of just 12 notes. Ergo this sort of thing might give us a simple basis for a shared language, like an interplanetary esperanto, when we meet the aliens.
If any of my readers are familiar with the classic film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you have seen this theory in action. Benevolent little grey aliens visit the earth in the late 70s, imprinting psychic messages to those humans who are receptive. Some of them interpret the messages as five specific tones, which are translated by the scientists into the latitude and longitude of a location. Others express the message as paintings or drawings or sculptures. I always found it fascinating that the aliens spoke to us through art, which I believe is a marker for highly intelligent self-aware life.
In the end they bring everyone together at the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, where the mothership arrives and returns people who were “abducted” through history from places like the Bermuda Triangle.
In writing the movie, director Steven Spielberg drew upon many of the popular themes of the UFO subculture of the 1970s. The alien abductions, the little grey men with big heads and big almond-shaped eyes, suspension of passing time aboard alien ships, and even the government cover-up were a part of the modern zeitgeist following Chariots of the Gods. It is little wonder that the immensely popular film, and the more kid-friendly ET, has perpetuated these impressions of the alien encounter to the present.
But for a number of reasons such as I just mentioned, it is very very very unlikely that visiting aliens from a distant planet would look anything at all like humans, or humanoids. We are more likely to encounter the “Old Ones” from Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness than smaller, taller, greyer, greener, furrier, scalier, multiple-limbed and eyed versions of ourselves. So where were these guys coming from?
Well, the UFOlogists and sci-fi writers have postulated on more than one occasion that they look like us because they made us in their image. That is, according to several different theories and popular fictions, at some point in the remote past, maybe around 2.5 million years ago, the aliens beamed down to the jungle in Central Africa, beamed up some monkeys, and started tinkering with the DNA, splicing in genes from their own, in order to create what would become the human race.
This is an intriguing and potentially comforting theory, but I don’t put a lot of credence in it. Namely because, aside from a certain Dr. Moreau, we humans don’t seem to have any interest in gene splicing monkeys into proto-humans (and that is a good thing). While we’re happy to mix DNA from jelly-fish into a tomato, that’s in the interest of increasing shelf-life. There’s not a profit motive to making monkey-people…at least not yet.
Permutations of the original story in the novel Planet of the Apes suggests at some point in our future, intelligent simians may be substituted for menial labor, essentially bred as a slave race. Well, we’ve done that for horses, and we have done it for so many other species for the pure purpose of food, so it’s not an impossibility.
But why overcome the extreme problems of interstellar travel just to drop in on a little rock and play havoc with monkey DNA? Speculative fiction gives us every option from said slave labor to preserving something of a dying alien species. It’s a kind of terraforming or colonization, by way that the colonists don’t know they are colonists.
But then why come back a couple of million years later, looking just the same as you appeared to the monkey-men, and start that whole probing business? Did they not evolve at all during that period of time? Shouldn’t they have even bigger heads and be even less human like?
Well, there’s an obvious answer for that, too (except for the whole probing thing). They’re time travelers.
Time travel solves a lot of those pesky problems about the universe being too big and the aliens being too far away and them dropping in to check up on us every now and then.
In quantum reality, potential exists for multiple outcomes until one outcome is fixed by observation. Multiverse theories say that all those other outcomes got fixed by other observers observing them, and so they went on to the next potential outcome and the next, until all other possible universes exist. Since this would tend to become quite crowded, other quantum universes are separated from us by membranes that prevent our being aware of them. They may, and probably do, exist in the same space and time that we do, but don’t experience them and they don’t experience us.
Until, of course, something breaks.
Perception of other planes of existence, even our own altered states of consciousness, could very well be traversing the boundaries between these quantum states. Our dreams, scientifically, are internal illusions created by our brains to process experiences into memory. But that same science can’t fully explain how a few ounces of soggy meat can do that, or any of the other things we experience as living thinking creatures. So who can say whether when I dream I walk on the sands of Mars an aeon ago and listen to the strange harps that play in the shadows of two moons.
If they have mastered time travel, then they can land here before they even leave Rigel VII, park the DeLorean next to the police call box for as long as they want, and still be home in time for dinner. The FTL trope almost always involves some kind of time travel, because our measurement of time is tied to our experience of the universe, and that is tied to the speed of light.
So I got to thinking, that maybe the aliens didn’t create human beings in the distant past. Maybe they simply were human beings from the distant future, after we’d evolved the big heads and grey skin and the weird probing fetish.
Maybe we were coming back at points along our timeline to fix ourselves, and keep us from wiping out the future. Maybe we’re trying to stop nuclear war or environmental collapse or Trump from getting that sports almanac and other worthwhile endeavors.
At least that all seems a tad more likely to me than that millions of years ago an unbelievably advanced alien civilization decided to propagate itself using Earth’s monkeys. Or that the same civilization needed them for slave labor or even food.
Let’s be real, if you can cross time, space, and dimension at that scale, breeding a bunch of metachimps to tend bar (or mine ore) is not a requirement of your culture. Exploiting the local primitives is a fairly exclusively human point of view.
In solving the secrets of the cosmos necessary to make it your local park, you will have elevated yourself as a species beyond that. You may, in fact have elevated yourself beyond the need to work with time, space, and dimension in the way our current terrestrial understanding of physics allows.
You might just be using magic.
The descriptions of “fiery chariots” pervade many early accounts of extraterrestrial interaction, though the people of the time considered them to be gods and angels. The seraphim and cherubim of the Bible (left) with their wheels within wheels, and many faces turning in all directions are not terribly dissimilar from the spinning towers of the Hindu vimana (right) or “Celestial Chariot”.
The Chariot is a powerful symbol. In ancient times, the chariot was the jet fighter of the battlefield. . It provided a mobile platform for striking at an enemy, breaking ranks, and delivering grievous harm to foot soldiers. Invariably the nations that possessed this technology rose to being feared powers in their regions.
It’s natural association with the solar deity can be found in almost every culture where it existed. In Egypt, where it was a later import, it gives way to the Boat of Ra, but otherwise it is ubiquitous from the Asian steppe to the Hibernian shores.
It comes down to us as an emblem of force, of active energy working upon the face of the void. As such it is an apt metaphor for a process transcending space time. Some older versions of this Tarot show wheels all around the central platform, denoting “impossible” motion, and the capacity to operate outside of normal dimensions.
In Smith’s version this is carried in the gyro, or spinning top on the emblazon of the front. It’s intriguing that our own spacecraft carry such gyros as a means of finding their way where normal conventions like up/down and east/west/north/south don’t function. This inertial navigation system was developed by people who worked in places like Area 51, and things like the USAF Project: Bluebook investigating UFOs.
But, of course, that’s only a coincidence. Or maybe it’s ….
Our word “astral” comes from the Greek meaning star. Astral travel is basically space travel. Those who first coined the term in ancient times were experiencing, or believed that they were experiencing, arriving on other worlds, inhabited by strange and wonderous beings.
These worlds they equated with the “planets” they saw in the night sky, and perhaps the further stars. Humans have been traveling through interstellar space before the Voyager mission, and long before the Montgolfier brothers even floated above Paris in their balloon. We just called it something else.
And by the same token, it’s highly likely that alien beings of greatly evolved intellect may have found a means of visiting this world, or this dimension, or even this universe, using methods that we wouldn’t recognize as space craft. These aliens may have been perceived as spirits and gods, though not in the sense that Von Däniken describes them. His theories are of physical spacemen arriving in physical machines that were mistaken by “primitive” people for other things, and described in less technological terms.
By his telling, our ancestors could not conceive of a flying machine, so they had to speak of great birds. I’m not sure I buy that. Early humans may have ascribed mystical properties to stones and metals, but they knew what they were. I don’t think they could have mistaken a glass and metal craft for a living animal. Indeed, in India, the stories of the Vimana are distinctly about such machines, used by the “gods” in battle.
On the other hand, experiences of “wheels within wheels”, “wheels full of eyes”, and “beings of coals of fire” found in various Biblical accounts of angels are certainly more in keeping with the idea of an advanced life-form that is being experienced in an extra-dimensional or extra-physical way.
There are at least a half dozen episodes of Star Trek where the aliens are just glowing balls of light. These are intelligences that have grown beyond the need for the physical body. The ability of such a being to manifest or appear to manifest in a physical form is also postulated -so that we can communicate with it.
To excerpt from the episode Errand of Mercy one such alien, having created the illusion of an entire human-like culture offers the following:
“. . .please leave us. The mere presence of beings like yourselves is intensely painful to us. . . .Millions of years ago . . . we were humanoid like yourselves, but we have developed beyond the need of physical bodies. That of us which you see is mere appearance for your sake.”
I find these ideas echoed well in Jason Miller’s Consorting with Spirits. He offers that the purpose of meditation, ritual, and incantation is needful to bridging the gap between the world we inhabit and the world that such rarified beings inhabit. Instead of using hypergolic rockets or warp drive to reach them, we are bending the nature of reality using the intrinsic energy of the universe itself.
This is a kind of technology. It operates according to certain rules, and produces certain results repeatedly, provided that all required factors are met. We simply call it magic, like many of our ancestors did.
Two hundred years ago, the electricity being used to make these words appear before you, some time and distance from where they were written, would have been considered a work of pure sorcery, and probably a tool of the devil.
In my own lifetime, we have taken machines that once filled entire buildings and made them fit in one’s pocket.
We can now see each other from across the globe, in real time, without even batting an eye.
How much harder is it to believe that an older race, a different kind of race, can do the same thing across millions of light years of space or thousands of years in time or myriad dimensions beyond our reckoning?
Up until the last 150 years or so, this belief would have been held by most of the people in the world. As science has moved to the forefront, and catalogued and quantified much of our natural world’s processes, the ability of people to accept a spirit behind every tree and under every rock has waned. This is a sad loss.
Science has told us that there are no angels, so we’ve started calling them aliens.
The truth is out there.
I’ll be back next week.