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Back in March of this year, a minor event was publicized by Paul Sutherland on his astronomy news website Skymania. The story concerned the cutoff from funding by Cardiff University, in Wales, for research being conducted by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe. The Professor, already retired from active teaching, was pursuing a theory first developed while studying the origins of the SARS respiratory disease. At the time, a group of self-described “astrobiologists,” including Wickramasinghe, postulated that the isolated virus originated from an extraterrestrial source, possibly a comet. It received some play in the legitimate press in England, and the continuing studies conducted by the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology (for which Wickramasinghe was the only paid staffer) had from time to time generated some equally interesting and controversial points. The last (and most controversial) finding involved the “Hoover” meteorites.
Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, claimed to have discovered biological signatures within the core of some meteorite samples and published his preliminary findings in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. Following up on Hoover’s discovery, Professor Wickramasinghe invited the NASA scientist to the Cardiff Centre and together they cracked open a meteorite. Viewing the sample through an electron microscope, Wickramasinghe agreed with Hoover’s finding and proceeded to republish the original paper on his own web journal. Soon after that publication, he was informed by the University of their decision to eliminate support for the Centre.
Before going any further with this, we must establish certain truths, as far as we are capable of being truthful with ourselves.
Truth 1: The original scientists were the shaman, the priest and the philosopher. The study of life was predominantly a mental exercise throughout most of our known history.
In its current condition, science is a highly compartmentalized group of disciplines, each one specialized and distinct to the point of having its own language and culture. It is quite possible for discoveries in one area to go unremarked in others for years, even though the consequence of an isolated discovery may have a broad effective range.
Truth 2: Our current level of scientific “truth” is a mixed bag of disconnected premises and failed relationships.
Modern genetics involves a unification of several disciplines of science, principally biology and chemistry. The resulting discoveries, expanding from the classic Mendel model into the areas of DNA composition, revealed a discrete system of design parameters. The science of biochemistry has now reached the point where the genome of any living organism can be mapped and revised, which leads us to –
Truth 3: “Reengineering” anything implies it to have been “engineered” in the first place.
As complex organisms, we humans are aware of our own presence in the world. We understand, if only unconsciously, the conflicting nature of existence. Duality is a condition universally acknowledged to differing degrees, if not physically then, at least, metaphorically. We think in terms of Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, True and False, Black and White, Ego and Id, You and Me. The most oppressive duality centers on individual beings and groups – Man versus Mob. We are programmed to follow the group and do so while harboring conflicting impulses of our own individual preeminence. As a result, we usually surrender to prevailing wisdom as involuntary prisoners while suppressing an overwhelming desire to escape its grasp. In this sense, the sociological impetus to gather together originates from a more primitive area of the brain, while the desire to rise to another level in a singular form emanates from a place capable of producing various impressions through inductive reasoning. And so we arrive at –
Truth 4: We are, as a group, biologically incapable of arriving at any agreement regarding our own origin, due to the suppressive impulses produced by our individual brains.
I’m not qualified to pinpoint where in the brain, exactly, the governance of our thought processes is managed in respect to individual cognitive blindness. I suspect it is in the region of the basal nuclei, the point in the brain where higher functions begin to appear. In any event, in taking the four statements (herein classified as “truths”) together, we arrive at a single conclusion: Our design is not an accident of evolution. It is a purposeful form of experimentation, complete with fail-safe mechanisms intended to ensure our continued cooperation. How else can we explain the eternally devoted adherence to the concept of the Godhead? Taken line by line, no religious viewpoint survives a logical examination. Yet, as we are all constantly reminded, religious belief superimposes itself upon nearly every human activity. It is the great distraction, the beard, the waving hand that pulls our eyes away from the source of the magician’s power. We are, in fact, all alien to this planet, in the service of a long-forgotten originator who we comically refer to as “God.”
Atheism itself, as a belief, contributes to the deception. It distracts us from the truth just as surely as any fundamental religious tenet. It ties us to this planet as its progeny, slithering out of the primeval soup like sea monkeys on the run. It is merely another dead-end, structurally. Going back to the brain itself, its design in humans shares some characteristics with other vertebrates, even more with other mammals, but the highest levels of reasoning continue to be reserved for us. This is plainly illogical, both biologically and statistically. Neither basic Darwinism nor Catastrophic Evolution can explain why no other life-form on this planet has ever been able to approach our mental capability.
In his novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (which started out as a BBC radio script, adapted into a television series, before finally morphing into literature), the late Douglas Adams begins by describing a young woman in London who had a sudden revelation about the true meaning of life. Before she could tell anyone else, a Vogon Constructor ship appeared out of nowhere and destroyed the planet. This is an overriding theme throughout the history of storytelling. From Icarus to Adam and Eve, every attempt to uncover the basic truth of our existence is ultimately thwarted. It is a part of our intrinsic nature to fear such truth and to expect some unpleasant consequence resulting from its pursuit. It is the root justification behind the principles of Causality and Determinism, where we remain fixated on past events in order to predict future possibilities. What if, in the end, both sides of the duality window were operating under an unseen control mechanism, purposely vague and unpredictable from our vantage point? If this idea bears any relationship to the truth, then I should drop dead before I reach the next paragraph.
Well, I guess I cheated death once again. The theory of inner-suppression should have prevented me from continuing along these lines by activating some biological self-destruct mechanism. Maybe mine is defective. Maybe some mob is on its way to kill me for some past perceived slight and will reach my location before I can post this online. Either way, I feel comfortable (despite sensing an impending heart attack) that the elemental form is correct. Animal life, programmed to follow certain growth patterns and periodically weeded to promote such growth, was planted on this planet, rather than formed independently out of a chemical bath. We are aliens, carefully designed for some purpose, sent to this planet for study and ignorant of the facts. Yet, we are advanced enough to harbor a sense of disconnection with the perceptions of ourselves and our external relationships. We are always longing for something unexplainable. The truth (in theory) is that we are simply cosmic orphans, having arrived inside a space rock, and our unspeakable belief that we don’t belong is well justified.
