Miracles of the Gods: A New Look at the Supernatural (497 page)

take the trouble 'to transmit', we should not even know whether our two stellar 'comrades' still existed.

'Their' light which hits us today is already 900 years old. Meanwhile a great deal can (and will) have happened on those stars! Why should we call them up? Even if they are still in the best of health and possess an adequate technical civilization, an echo could not reach us for 1,800 years. Who would be interested in that? New different systems of interstellar communications must be invented, for even higher frequency astronomy which sends and receives with gigantic parabolic reflectors to observe celestial objects is unsuitable. So far no one knows the right wave-length! In that case is any form of communication possible between such widely separated intelligences?

Yes, through visions.

The first intelligence was formed sometime and somewhere in our galaxy. Astrophysicists know that solar systems incomparably older than ours exist and therefore presumably much older intelligent beings, too. The earliest intelligences began to ask questions in order to extend their knowledge.

Before these intelligent extraterrestrial beings planned space travel, they engaged in astro-physical and astronomical research (as our own experts did before they sent the first rockets into the atmosphere).

When they began to build spaceships their mathematicians and ballistic experts got together and calculated that, given the high velocity of the spaceship, time was different for the launching planet and the crew of the spaceship.

Inconceivable?

It has long been scientifically proved that different times hold good on interstellar flights at high speed.

Time dilation, as this time shift is called, was first 'discovered' in our day, but it is an 'eternal' law, which was equally valid for the first space-travelling intelligences. What am I to do, says Zeus? was the question Friedrich Schiller asked in his poem 'Dividing the Earth'. What are we to do? was also the question the extraterrestrial beings asked themselves. How were they to realize the goal of their expedition, namely increasing their knowledge, if millennia would have passed when they returned from their journey into space? If there was no one left alive at home who could evaluate and benefit from the fruits of their voyage?

Time and space could only be conquered, said the extraterrestrial academics, if they arranged for descendants at various times in as many places in the cosmos as possible -naturally 'in their own image'! So the astronauts were trained and given the mission during the long journey to make for all the planets apparently similar to their home planet and land on them. Having thoroughly explored a planet they had to separate the most advanced form of life and make it intelligent by a deliberate artificial mutation. (*) After what pattern? Obviously 'in their own image'.

Thus time was overcome by a fairly simple trick. From then on intelligent groups of their 'kind' -

formed in their 'image' -existed at various times on various planets like their home star. The chronological building up of the planned breeding made it possible to hand on acquired experience and knowledge in a quasi-endless relay race, despite the time shift. The expedition's goal of increasing knowledge was assured.

It would be absurd to claim that human intelligence is unique and alone in the cosmos. There may be millions and millions of forms of intelligence in the universe, but envoys with a different form of