In the earlier years of the twentieth century, there was a common fallacy that travel faster than sound was impossible. At only one fifth of a mile per second, sound doesn't travel very fast when compared to light but there was this belief that the sound barrier was indeed the limit to speed. This was really nonsense. Things had travelled faster than sound since time immemorial. For example, when a whip is cracked, the end of it exceeds sound velocity—hence the mini sonic boom. When a plane piloted by Chuck Yeager, the Bell X -1, exceeded the sound barrier on October 14th 1947, the real test was whether or not the structure could withstand the velocity. Everyone really knew that the speed of sound wasn't an impenetrable barrier!
We also have a barrier in that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. There is a tendency, especially for Star Trek viewers, to think that the light barrier is much the same as the sound barrier—an imagined superstition almost. But, it isn't. It's got a lot to do with Einstein's theories of relatively—the Special and General published in the early 20th century—which effectively do not permit a velocity faster than light. (see additional chapter)
If faster than light travel isn't possible, then mankind in its present state is restricted to earth or, at the most, the solar system. We will never be able to travel further beyond, except possibly on a never to return trip to the stars. This could be accomplished if a spaceship could be engineered to travel at near light velocities. The energy requirements would be absolutely huge, many times beyond what is available on the earth at the moment. Although we would observe the ship taking years to travel to its destination, to the occupants, due to relativistic effects, very little time would have passed. On arriving at a star perhaps one hundred light years distant, the crew may have only aged a few years while on earth, over one hundred years will have passed. The same crew could return to find a different earth, a planet over two hundred years further on. It would be as if Captain Cook had just returned from his voyage of discovery to the Southern Hemisphere in the year 2001. For such travel to be viable and to have any meaning, the beings would need to be very long lived indeed. They would also need to be the masters of huge energy sources, perhaps matter / antimatter power, but before that stage would have been reached, the beings would already be used to a space environment within their own solar system and will have already evolved beyond their usual planetary appearance.
I think we can also forget the concept of space warps, wormholes, bubbles in time and the host of other Star Trek motion techniques. While some may be vaguely feasible, they are only that. Bending space is possible—the space-time continuum can be warped using an extremely massive object such as a black hole. Space can be folded in on itself but that doesn't mean to say travel through this warp would be possible. More likely, anything within the vicinity would be ripped apart and be flushed down a black hole singularity without any trace surviving.
Teleportation is another travel idea. We've all seen it on TV. Someone stands in a beam, they are disassembled, beamed somewhere else and then reassembled. A quick and easy way to travel, one would think. Perhaps in the future it may be possible to do this to inanimate objects without a complex structure but doing it to a living being is more problematic. The major difficulty would be to disassemble and reassemble a thinking, conscious being. Not only is the structure extremely complicated, how would it be possible to copy the thought structures within a brain? How would the memory patterns be replicated? In fact, if instead of disassembly, a pattern is made of the person and this information transferred by a beam somewhere else, other matter could be used to reconstruct another identical being.
Would this be a good way to travel? Imagine booking your holiday only to find a replica of yourself is going instead. It wouldn't be much fun, would it? However, the ordinary Star Trek transporter mechanism could still result in philosophical problems. Who is to say that once disassembled in the beam, the person doesn't actually die. I mean, being disassembled into atoms would be rather fatal on most occasions. Irrespective of whether or not the body is reassembled, could this be another person? Could this be someone else with the same memories? This would mean that every time a transporter is used, the person dies and a new person is created. Somehow I don't think I would take the chance!
What about time travel? It's certainly possible to travel forwards in time. We're doing that right at this moment. You could travel into the future by suspended animation, sleeping away the years in a curious limbo until revived at some distant time. Alternatively, you could travel very fast, approaching the speed of light, so that the time dilation effects of relativity would enable you to return to earth at a future date, long after all friends and relatives have died.
There is no known way, however, to go back in time, if even for a microsecond. There is the old paradox of someone going back in time to murder his grandfather, the latter action changing the course of events so that he wouldn't exist in the future, but, if he didn't exist, how could he go back in time? One theory, derived from an offshoot of quantum theory, states that with every event, even on the sub atomic level, the universe splits into two universes, one perhaps where you bought a box of apples and another where you didn't. The number of universes or dimensions would be unbelievably huge. In this case, you could go back to murder your grandfather and get away with it, except that you would be in a different universe.
The idea that flying saucers are piloted by people from the future, on an historical sight seeing holiday or otherwise, is worse than ridiculous. Not only do they risk changing the future and their own existence, the very nature of the universe goes against such an idea. Entropy, or disorder, increases with time. Open a partition between two different gases in a tank and you'll see them mix. They will never randomly separate again, however long you wait. There seems to be what many physicists call an arrow of time which only goes in one direction and even this may be an illusion created by our own existence and entropy. We are very conscious of things being born, growing old and then dying. We are also conscious of change and sequences of cause and event happenings. This may be the illusion too.
You can ask the question, who am I? Am I the person that existed last year or am the person that will exist next year? No, you are the person existing now but that definition of “now” is really quite strange. The difference between the past and the future gets smaller and smaller the more you define it. Is it one second ago and one second hence? Shorten these periods of time to half a second, a millisecond or even less. Where does the past end and the future begin? The present “now” becomes infinitely small until it effectively doesn't exist but we are all quite sure that we do exist. Therefore, existence must have the illusion of time as one of its properties.
Looking at other things which may not be possible, I would include telepathy in this list. The ability to transmit and receive thoughts is almost taken for granted in the realms of science fiction and even amongst many people in everyday life. There is no real scientific evidence for this, notwithstanding the demonstrations of stage performers. Many exponents of telepathy say that it is the rigorous scientific method which upsets their attempts to prove that it is possible. Regardless of the fact that there is no known medium or method whereby thoughts can move through the air to another person, if it does exist it is exceptionally uncommon. Millions of people going about their everyday lives are not aware of telepathic contact with others. In fact, quite the reverse occurs; how many complain that others can't understand them or can't sympathise with their troubles or complaints? People living together for many years don't often have to say words to communicate but this isn't telepathy, it's a matter of body language and habit.
If there was ever a good working sense of telepathy, it probably died out a very long time ago. Telepathy doesn't promote modern living. Imagine the thoughts of hundreds or thousands in a shopping centre? Imagine our true thoughts being transmitted to others? Sometimes we cover our thoughts with pleasantries or white lies for purely practical purposes, other
wise society as we know it would not be able to function.
As already mentioned, future technology may allow a certain type of telepathy to exist whereby specific thoughts are read by brain censors and then transmitted, maybe by radio or micro waves, to another person with a receiver.
I'm also being a humbug by giving the thumbs down to telekinesis or mind over matter. Forget Star Wars where Jedi knights have the ability to make objects move by the power of thought. Were this an attribute that humans possessed, even to a very slight degree, with six billion people on the planet we would see a lot more evidence for it than we do now.
What about beings composed of energy? I don't know how they would function or how they would think but that probably means nothing. We have very little knowledge of our own thought processes which take place as electrical impulses flittering between neurone cells in the brain without having to think of how disembodied thought processes work. There could however be something there which we're just not aware of. For example, beings that have existed for millions or billions of years longer than humans may have evolved to different planes of existence. If we tried to work out how they exist or think, we would have much less success than a cat trying to build a mainframe computer. Maybe a cat could have a vague notion that an object such as a mainframe computer existed, at least part of the time when such thoughts didn't interfere with mice hunting, but that would be as far as it would get.
There may be beings, perhaps not even in ordinary space, so far beyond us that communication is nebulous at best. To them, we may be nothing more than bacteria. Sitting here, reading this book, you are not aware of the billions of different bacteria cells inhabiting your body. Some are beneficial and essential, some aren't. How often do you give your body's coinhabitants the time of day? And what about stars? Are they cognisant? It's an utterly ludicrous idea but maybe the electrons moving about within them constitute some form of thought, and, stars being large, the thoughts could be big! Perhaps the sun is an intelligent being, constantly contemplating the universe and even ourselves to whom it gives heat and light? Perhaps the ancients, including the Egyptians during the reign of Akenaten, were right to worship the sun!
Whatever we think about intelligent stars, any attempt to delve further would be a waste of time. To make sense of what may be going on out there, we have to take a “sensible” approach otherwise we would just be as well saying that everything and anything is possible and fairies are dancing at the bottom of the garden outside. This is why I have tried to eliminate flights of fancy in this chapter so that in the next few chapters we can devote more time to considering alien evolution and alien existence as accurately as possible. Based on what we know is possible, as described in this chapter, some very disturbing results materialise!
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Phase 3
The Exordicans
If extraterrestrials exist, will they look like us? The answer to this question is complex but there is good reason to suppose that some will have evolved along similar lines to us and many other good reasons to suppose that they haven't. The starting point for life will be similar virtually everywhere in that we're looking for an earth type world at a reasonable distance from a star where water remains in a liquid phase over most of the surface—a habitable zone.
You would naturally come to the conclusion that if the starting conditions were the same as earth, then it's likely that evolution would go along similar lines and after a few billion years, human -like creatures would be crawling over the surface of the planet in their billions. The problem is that on so many occasions on earth, evolution has occurred at the whim of sheer chance and there are many examples in the past where circumstances or accidents have favoured one type of creature over another.
At this particular juncture in our evolution where mankind may evolve in a space environment, there remains a consistency with a large number of animal species over the last few hundred million years in that all have four limbs. We have two arms and two legs: birds, bats, crocodiles, kangaroos, whales and even snakes have the same. Insects and arachnids do not. The answer for this is that all life of this type had a common ancestor, the species that first moved from sea to swamp conditions then ultimately on to the land. But it didn't have to be that way.
Approximately half a billion years ago from the Cambrian period onwards, there was a massive explosion of life. The famous Burgess shales show fossils of many species that were apparently successful for a considerable time, species that were much different from anything living in our biosphere today. Found in British Columbia, Canada in an area called Burgess Pass in the Rocky Mountains, what is particularly distinctive about the fossils in the shales is that unusual circumstances conspired to allow the fossilisation of many soft bodied creatures which otherwise would not leave a trace behind in the rocks. This area is so special that it has become protected.
The diversity of life that existed during this era was quite amazing. Most of the creatures are now extinct; the trilobites, which were a dominant species on earth for a very long time, and others, some with six appendages, disappeared without further trace. Perhaps some of the creatures were unable to adapt to changes or it is even possible that they died out through fluke occurrences. However, it seems to be the case that changes have taken place in earth's biosphere over the last few hundred million years. Catastrophic changes happened, so catastrophic that most species were wiped out.
Some say massive volcanic eruptions changed earth, making the environment virtually uninhabitable so that food chains were disrupted and species died out. Others say collisions with meteors were responsible, as with the extinction of dinosaurs sixty five million years ago. Whatever the cause, earth's history, sporadically dotted with periods of extreme violence, saw several mass extinctions which changed the outlook for all coming after.
Who is to say that if dinosaurs had not been extinguished sixty five million years ago, species of them would have gone on to develop intelligence? Perhaps they would have become “civilised” before us? Maybe there is a planet somewhere in the galaxy with intelligent dinosaur-like creatures but, this is speculation and evolution is a matrix of possibilities among which this is just one. At any rate, dinosaurs had existed for a very long time before their extinction; some had come along, reached their peak in the environment and then disappeared. By the date of the extinction, dinosaur species were quite different from what they had been over one hundred million years before and, collision with meteor notwithstanding, what would have stopped them from going extinct at a later time? The meteor may have put the finishing touch to species in decline. It is also suggested, with a lot of validity, that some species of dinosaur evolved into birds—now widespread and successful.
Whatever possibilities existed in the past, we are here now and our species, humanity, is a comparative newcomer at an age of only sixty thousand years. Stretching away into the past are several other humanoid species that existed a lot longer than us and then became extinct. It even appears to be the case that our species, and the Neanderthals, almost became extinct about forty thousand years ago. Both seem to have survived an environmental cataclysm which reduced their numbers drastically, leaving only small gene pools from which others would continue. This event could have been something volcanic in nature, perhaps triggering a nuclear winter on top of existing ice ages. We are lucky to be here! Imagine what would have happened if the humanoid species had all been wiped out? Would intelligent life (that's supposed to be us) ever have developed on earth again? Probably, the answer to that is yes but not for a hundred million years or so until conditions for this type of evolution returned.
Regardless of the shape, size and appearance that life has evolved into on another planet, it will need to be able to make sense of the universe in which it lives. I know there are many animals on earth without a proper ability to see, but while they don't see with eyes, they are able to carry out this function by other means such as smell or hearing. Nevertheless, sight using eyes re
mains a widespread method of being in touch with things. Creatures that never had the ability to look up to the night sky and wonder about what is out there would never have the urge to explore space so, intelligent as animals with acoustic sight, like bats, may become, it is unlikely that they will ever be astronauts.
Eyes are good things to have. They evolved on earth because they were useful for survival and in doing so employed a part of the electromagnetic spectrum in which there's plenty of output from the sun. This electromagnetic spectrum is a description of energy which is continuous from low frequency energy like radio waves to high frequency such as x-ray and gamma radiation. With high frequencies, more energy is packed into a given space. Basically, from the low energy end of the spectrum we go from long wave to short wave radio frequencies. We are all familiar with them. They don't have a great deal of energy, their wavelengths are quite long and we are able to use them to propagate information. Microwaves have more energy—some forms are used in mobile phones. They are also used in ovens, albeit the shorter wavelengths. We then go into the infrared region. We can detect infrared radiation by facing the sun to feel its heat—infrared equates to heat. The infrared leads on to visible light, the colours of which are evident in a rainbow—this is the region of the electromagnetic spectrum we use for sight. Beyond this, ultra violet is a more energetic region we can't see ourselves but can detect using instruments. Bees see in ultraviolet, too much can burn our skin, and its energetic nature is observed when materials fluoresce. Further along the spectrum, x-rays are highly energetic, able to pass through many materials and are dangerous, and gamma rays are more energetic still and are very penetrating and dangerous. Fortunately, the energetic radiation from the sun is shielded by our atmosphere and the earth's radiation belts.
Basically, all the energy bands listed above are part of the same spectrum. We see using visible light but astronomers use all the other regions to explore the universe. Why can't we see radio waves? The answer is that our eyes are too small. To make any sense of radio waves, our eyes would need to be very large, much larger indeed than satellite receiving dishes. Radio telescopes, like Jodrell Bank, need to be very large to capture enough of the low frequency energy to give a good picture and this picture, from a dish over two hundred feet across, is probably not as accurate as a visual image from a small telescope.
Alien Psychology Page 3