We Are the Children of the Stars (6 page)

Another fascinating hypothesis is that of Dr. J. Mayo Greenberg of New York State University, who set up a laboratory experiment in which he produced “grains” of chemical debris comparable to the estimated size of grains of space dust.
⁶
He then arranged for the grains to collide under ultraviolet light (rampant in space) and found he could produce molecules of high molecular weight. He thinks this mechanical accretion-process, in giant interstellar dust clouds, could produce grains of a size and composition similar to
viruses.

His conclusion is that here may be the very
origin of life itself
– out in the colossal chemical laboratory between the stars. Hence, according to this theory, every planet in the universe is floating through this thin “space soup,” which can trigger off life in the warm seas of any and all suitable planets.

Life is, then, not the exception but the rule
, throughout the myriad of star-families of planets.

An entirely different clue leading to this same deduction comes from the examination of the “Murchison Meteorite,” which fell to Earth in 1970. Scientists of the Ames Research Center of NASA have found definite traces of amino acids (building blocks of living protein) in the meteorite, substantiated later by the researchers of two universities.
⁷

Two scientists of Arizona State University independently examined another meteorite that fell near Murray, Kentucky, in 1950, and detected the presence of all eighteen of the known amino acids. They also found two pyrimidines that are basic ingredients of the nucleic acid vital to living cells.

Significantly, those meteoric amino acids and pyrimidines have a molecular structure
different
from Earthly types in various esoteric ways, such as “left” or “right” configurations.

Hence, they are living matter
not
of this Earth, and almost a dead-sure clue to extraterrestrial life.

The consensus is that these findings
enormously increase the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe.

Even before the great breakthrough discovery of organic compounds in no longer “lifeless” space, astronomers and cosmologists were convinced by other evidence, not only that living worlds were widespread throughout the galaxy, but also that an immense number of them had evolved thinking beings who might be “signaling” their brother worlds.

Back in 1960, at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory of Green Bank, West Virginia, Project Ozma, under the leadership of Dr. Frank Drake, attempted to pick up intelligent signals from two nearby stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani.

Results were negative but now in the works is Project Cyclops, an international endeavor including Russia and the United States, which may cost up to $5 billion and involve no less than 10,000 radio-telescope dishes and antennae.

Purpose? “Its mission would be to add a new dimension to cosmology. It might establish the science of biological cosmology.” Namely, set up communications between intelligent biological beings on different worlds.

If top-notch, sober scientists boldly ask for the enormous sum of $5 billion to set up apparatus to contact other civilizations in outer space,
then surely they must be going by more than flimsy clues that such civilizations exist.

And they may, in time – to their own surprise – receive a staggering message from the very starmen who colonized Earth long ago and created Hybrid Man!

Hence, the discovery of organic-space clouds was only a confirming factor in a belief that scientists have almost unanimously held for a quarter century. This belief is based on certain astronomical data about stars that statistically indicate more than half
of them must have planets revolving about them, as our sun with its family of planets.

One of the first famed astronomers to speculate about the presence of life on other planets in the outer universe was Dr. Harlow Shapley, former head of the Harvard University Astronomy Department, who in his famous book
Of Stars and Men
states:

Exactly where these other life-bearing planets are we cannot now say; perhaps we never can, lost as they are in the glare of their stars, isolated as we are in space, and equipped with sounding apparatus that is still, we hope, primitive (and will improve). Although not seen or photographed, those planets are deduced as statistical probabilities. There must be at least 100,000 of them in our galaxy, if we accept the frequency the writer prefers.
⁸

This estimate of Dr. Shapley's is so conservative that it amounts to not more than one populated star per million in our galaxy.

He ignored in that paragraph the rest of the universe, and we know that the universe contains ten billion other galaxies.
⁹

More recent estimates are truly mind-staggering.

We find in one publication the statements of Dr. Harrison H. Brown of the Division of Geological Sciences, California Institute to Technology, Pasadena.
¹⁰
He estimates that virtually every star in our galaxy has a planetary system, in each of which from two to four planets might have an Earthlike environment and chemistry that encourages our kind of life to exist. He gives the enormous figure of 100 billion stars with planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone.

That would mean 200 to 400 billion planets like Earth, or perhaps Mars, on which life would almost certainly arise.

He also makes another startling observation: that, because a large part of the theorized mass of the universe is “missing,” there
may exist innumerable “dark stars,” or suns that have burned out and are thus invisible to our optical telescopes.

Dr. Shiv S. Kumar of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York City, has also speculated along this line and hypothesizes that the “invisible” or dark stars may outnumber the visible stars by twenty to one.

Dr. Harlow Shapley himself did not ignore this possibility and also spoke of many millions of tiny unseen stars sprinkled through the vast reaches of space, hanging between the giant burning suns we see. He added boldly that it was not impossible that life would exist on the surfaces of these dark and cool stars, which would be in the nature of large planets, but circling no sun.

And some of these “living” stars would by statistical certainty be
between
the Earth and Alpha Centauri, the so-called “nearest” star, which is somewhat over four light-years away (about 25 trillion miles).

It is quite a mind-boggling thought that small dark-sun planets that have given rise to life may be close “neighbors” within a mere light-year or two of Earth, making the possibility of alien visits even more likely. Because, as we have seen, any planet that first spawns life at all almost certainly will produce intelligent beings, simply because Evolution cannot stop at any point – or because the colonizing starmen have visited those dark-sun planets too.

Dr. Shapley bring forth a really earthshaking idea when he states: “There is no reason not to believe that the biochemical Evolution on . . . one-half of the suitable planets has equaled or attained much greater [technological] development than here [on Earth].”
¹¹

This means that more than half of his estimated 100,000 inhabited planets in our galaxy are occupied by people who are chronologically, and thus (according to Darwin) intellectually,
more advanced than we are.

Obviously, since we have already started an astronautics program, space flight has been known by the inhabitants of some of these planets for thousands or millions of years. Now, the mystery
here is – at least the mystery to orthodox science – why have we not been visited?

The answer is – we probably
have
been visited! That neatly solves the mystery, if the science establishment will only accept it.

No, this is not a reference to the controversial “flying saucers” and Unidentified Flying Objects that have been in and out of the news for more than fifty years, although we shall take up that subject later in some detail.

UFOs aside, even hard-nosed scientists believe we may have had at least one space visitor in recent times.

A very huge and puzzling “meteorite” fell thunderously in Soviet Siberia on July 30, 1908. It fortunately fell in a remote uninhabited woodland, but peasants heard the awesome explosion as far as 620 miles away. A large area of forest was flattened as if an immense object had fallen.

It was put down as a giant meteorite until several Soviet expeditions began exploring the site from 1921 on. They found a series of strange mysteries. No remnants of the alleged meteorite could be found anywhere underground.

Second, radioactivity had initially been released in enormous amounts. Third, the general destruction showed that the energy released had been far greater that the mere impact of a falling stone, no matter how huge.

Most significantly, the aerial path of the falling object had not been uniform but had seemingly
changed
during descent.

Various Soviet scientists then put forth an amazing theory – that it had been a
spaceship
, driven by intelligent beings and loaded with great power from a nuclear powerplant, which had exploded through some accident.

Or, a variant of this was that an
antimatter
spaceship had attempted to land on Earth and had met the fate of antimatter particles when they meet norm-matter particles – instant annihilation.

However, most scientists are dubious about any recent visits by starmen, preferring to consider that this happened only in ancient times (why?). Dr. Albert Einstein, for instance, stated that
he was in complete sympathy with the idea of a visit by spacemen back in prehistoric times.

Then we come to the words of an internationally acclaimed scientist of today, Dr. Carl Sagan, planet sciences expert of Cornell University. In a monumental book jointly written with a Soviet scientist,
¹²
Sagan estimates that super-technological starmen with interstellar spaceships may have visited Earth – hold your breath! – some 5,000 times since life first proliferated on Earth 500 million years ago.

Five thousand times! But if we divide that into 500 million years, we get one visitation every 100,000 years. So he is not suggesting a constant flow of starships back and forth.

The reason he suspects visitations from space is to account for the sudden uprise of civilization in Sumeria, ca. 8000 – 10,000 B.C. There are “legends” he cites as almost direct evidence that starmen landed there and launched mankind on the road to civilization.

And Sagan's speculations, of course, immensely bolster the theory of Hybrid Man as a star-colony – even if unwittingly on his part.

In a talk before the American Rocket Society in 1962, Sagan also gave the more accepted figure of how many civilized worlds should exist in our galaxy alone: one million as a minimum.
¹³

Now, an odd thought arises – how many of those inhabited worlds are also colonies of the starmen who colonized our Earth?

This brings up a new picture about the origin of life throughout space. Perhaps life did not spring up independently on each and every world. We can assume that one, or several, planets were among the earliest to form out of the amorphous condensing galaxy, between 10 and 25 billion years ago (cosmologists do not yet agree on the age of the macro-universe).

If life first arose – whether earth-bred from primary biochemistry or from space-cloud organic chemicals is not relevant – on just a few worlds and flowered into human or human-like intelligences, then they may have achieved space travel and eventually explored the entire galaxy.

Not waiting for the slow process of life arising spontaneously from “organic soup” or “life clouds,” they may have “seeded” any planets with primeval life.

And, as in the planet-hopping theory given before, they then “colonized” other worlds, including Earth.

Whatever the true answer is, many scientists have stated their belief, like Sagan, that our galaxy (as well as all others, inevitably) simply teems with life and with super-technological worlds. Many of them talk of vast organizations of “United Worlds” who cooperate with their neighbors in stupendous projects like galactic exploration and colonization.

Our starmen who produced Hybrid Man on Earth may thus actually be a group of advanced worlds who jointly colonize other planets. These are profound revelations we may not be told for some time to come – when we can withstand the shock without blowing our minds.

But orthodox (and opinionated) science as yet is not ready to accept any such radical explanation for the genesis of intelligent life on Earth. However, the real joker is that they still unconsciously supply grist for our mill in their general beliefs about the cosmos.

Soviet scientists have taken a step beyond other scientists in their attempts to contact the postulated civilizations in outer space.

Their huge, radio-telescope assemblies – both radial dishes and linear antennae – have for several years been trying to pick up nonrandom or patterned signals, which would instantly indicate other sentient beings deliberately sending such signals.

Several times, Soviet radio-astronomers tentatively announced exciting signals that seemed apart from natural ones, especially in connection with pulsars – stars that peculiarly pulsate in the radio spectrum with an intricate set of frequencies that are so utterly precise they seem man-made.

But theory indicated (rather shakily) that pulsars could send such “patterns” purely by natural nuclear processes.

But that did not discourage the Soviet searchers, and on October 16, 1973,
Tass
the official bulletin of the Soviet Union, “jubilantly announced” that their scientists had definitely picked up alien signals from other intelligent beings.
¹⁴
The feat was performed by three top-grade Russian astrophysicists, who said, “We have been receiving radio signals from outer space, in bursts lasting from two to ten minutes. Their character, their consistent pattern, and their regular transmissions leave us in no doubt that they are of artificial origin – that is, they are not natural signals, but have to be transmitted by civilized beings with sophisticated transmission equipment.”