A whole new world of technology is envisaged from building self-replicating machines that could, for instance, carry out surgery at a cellular level inside the human body. However, an increasing number of scientists are suggesting that nature may have used this idea a long time ago. As Professor Paul Davies has pointed out, the living cell is full of nanomachines designed and refined by biological evolution. And he posed the question: ‘Could it be that some of them acquired their amazing properties by deploying fancy quantum tricks?’36 He says: ‘One vital part of a cell’s reproductive machinery is a little motor, called a polymerase enzyme, which crawls along unzipped strands of DNA and forges the links that match up the unpaired nucleotide bases with complementary bases floating through its environment.’
Apoorva Patel of the Indian Institute of Science, believes that living cells may use quantum mechanics to boost their information-processing efficiency, which could explain why the genetic code is the way it is, and why it is found in all organisms. As Davies points out, quantum theory describes atoms and molecules as waves, which can overlap and combine coherently – known as superposition. This means that the normal rules of time/space do not apply and an atom can exist in a superposition of excited and unexcited states, or of states corresponding to several spatial locations at the same time. These superpositions are expected to be the basis of quantum computers that will be able to hunt for a target among a jumble of data. This is said to be equivalent to finding a name in a telephone directory when you know only the phone number.
The role of quantum theory in the origin of life is not yet clear. But it seems that the new technologies that humankind is now investigating may be at the root of life itself. Paul Davies acknowledges that life somehow emerged from the ferment of the quantum molecular world, and he adds:
‘The role of quantum processes in living matter is still unclear. It is entirely possible that quantum mechanics was the midwife of life, but has played an insignificant role since… All scientists agree that life somehow emerged from the ferment of the quantum molecular world. The key issue is on which side of the quantum-classical divide the transition to life occurred. Niels Bohr once said that anyone who is not shocked by quantum mechanics hasn’t understood it. I believe that anyone who is not shocked by life hasn’t understood it. The question before us is whether quantum mechanics is shocking enough to explain life.’
It seems to us that whoever seeded life on our planet, all those billions of years ago, was using a form of self-replicating ‘technology’ which will eventually come to be understood. And we might not be that far from that understanding now.
Who Built the Moon?
At this point we are as sure as we possibly can be that the following statements are true:
The Moon is approximately 4.6 billion years old.
The Earth is approximately 4.6 billion years old.
The Moon was manufactured from lighter materials taken from the young Earth.
The Moon was made as an incubator to foster life on Earth.
The manufacturer of the Moon seeded life on Earth.
Evolution as described by Darwin is broadly accurate.
The manufacturer of the Moon left deliberate messages, intended to be read by humans at this point in geological time, to draw attention to what they have done.
It appears reasonable to assume that the manufacturer of the Moon (the UCA) has a good reason for wanting humans to understand what was done. The UCA could have seeded life and moved on, if its motive was pure altruism. It therefore seems that it is important to work out who built the Moon.
It seems certain that we have only identified the first ‘introduction’ aspect of the message from the UCA. The details of the message are likely to hold the key to the next phase of human development: information that will change our destiny forever.
We believe that we have succeeded in identifying the key numbers that will be used in deeper layers of the detailed communication. We trust that others will take up the challenge of interpreting other aspects of the message, but our immediate task is to try and work out who built the Moon.
And we believe there are only three possibilities.
Chapter Eleven
Childhood’s End
‘And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.’
Genesis 1:16, The King James Bible
Good things and terrible things have always happened to mortal man. The warmth of spring, the survival of infants, the provision of animals to hunt, plants to harvest and freedom from disease must surely be the work of an unseen force with powers far beyond than that of mere people. So too, the ills and woes of failed crops, floods and death wrought upon whole tribes by war and desperate want. It must be the will of the gods.
Thank the gods, fear the gods, appease the gods.
Religion is as old as the stories that humans first told. From the early Stone Age to the Internet Age, humankind appears to need the power of deities that inhabit an unseen world and yet have the power to affect the lives we live. The greatest love and the greatest hate spill forth in the name of gods.
Today, the great religions of the world tend to describe the gods in the singular as God, even though they all refer to many aspects under different names.
The Hindu tradition has ideas that are increasingly seen as corresponding with modern science. It perceives the existence of the cyclical nature of the Universe and everything within it, where the cosmos follows one cycle within a framework of larger cycles. The Universe has been created and reached an end, but it represents only one turn in the perpetual ‘wheel of time’, which revolves infinitely through successive cycles of creation and destruction. This cycle of creation and destruction of the Universe could be seen as a series of Big Bangs and Big Crunches, where all matter explodes outwards from nowhere and then recedes back again. Within these gigantic cycles the soul also undergoes its own cycle, called samsara – where death and rebirth sees the same souls repeatedly reincarnated.
Meanwhile, Christianity is a broad church indeed, covering an incredible span of beliefs. At one end of the spectrum there are many scientific thinkers – including at least two Fellows of the Royal Society. One of them, John Polkinghorne, was a mathematical physicist before resigning his position as a professor at Cambridge University in 1979 to be ordained as priest in the Church of England. Polkinghorne has since devoted his life to exploring the connections between science and theology, describing the Universe as open and flexible – a place where patterns seem to exist and where he says the ‘providential aspect’ cannot be ruled out.
Many Christians fully support science and have no problem with evolution, quantum mechanics or the big bang origin of the Universe. For them it is simply a question of the authorship of the blueprint that obviously exists. The designer of all this is their God. And yet they also believe in an event that others would find incredible. Without wishing to be disrespectful, we would précis that event as follows: The initial intellect that created everything became a man and died, nailed to a wooden post, some two thousand years ago, before briefly returning to human life and then transferring back to His ethereal state somewhere outside of the physical world. This anthropoid interlude for this creator deity (many billions of years after the start of the Universe) is believed to compensate for the bad behaviour of those people who accept this story as real, thereby ensuring a pleasant continuation of consciousness after their physical body has ceased to be alive.
At the other end of the Christian belief are the creationists. They hold that a collection of ancient Canaanite and Mesopotamian myths, from at least three separate traditions and first written down in the sixth century BC by Jewish priests, are a literal account of how the world came into being. They take an uncomplicated view of life and consider that all species are unchanging and derive their forms from an unchanging, divine blueprint. To a creationist a rose is a rose is a rose, and it is foolis
h to think that a rose bush could become a daffodil, or an apple tree. They see God’s plan as timeless and unchanging, with separate types of plants and animals that have nothing to connect them. For them the world and everything within it was created in six days of a single week, somewhere around 4004 BC.
It is of central importance to creationists that there is an absolute divide between humans and other animals. They often use the phrase ‘don’t let them make a monkey out of you’ in the mistaken belief that evolutionists claim that humans developed from monkeys.
Buddhist philosophy is evolutionary and in many ways agrees with mainstream scientists. Buddha taught that all things are impermanent, constantly arising, becoming, changing and fading. Buddhist philosophers consequently rejected the Platonic idea of production from ‘ideal forms’ as being the fallacy of ‘production from inherently existent other’. According to most schools of Buddhism there is nothing whatsoever that is inherently or independently existent.
Buddhist philosophers have always accepted that the Universe is billions of years old and they have no corresponding creation myth to that of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Unlike creationists, Buddhists believe that both humans and animals possess sentient minds that survive death.
There are many people today who are agnostic, meaning that they do not see any proof of God but neither do they believe it to be impossible that there could be a God. Perhaps a small minority of the world are true atheists believing that all matter, including their own self-awareness, is merely the culmination of multiple accidents occurring at random within the basic laws of physics.
The classical argument for God has been that there must have been a ‘first cause’ but this is considered to be invalid by relatively modern philosophers such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant, because the thesis is negated by its own premise. If everything must have a first cause then what made God? It therefore follows that the Universe could arrive spontaneously just as much as God could.
But, it occurs to us, what if God and the essence of the Universe were, and are, the same thing?
God in Contact
Human societies have probably always developed the idea that the world they see around them must have a conscious mind behind it. And the Judaeo-Christian tradition holds that God has had quite regular contact, particularly with His chosen people, from Adam through characters such as Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Ezekiel, Isaiah and John the Baptist (Jesus Christ cannot count because that would be God talking to Himself). Following the crucifixion of Jesus, God, or members of His ethereal team, are believed to have had contact with inspired individuals from St Paul to Joan of Arc, and there have been many miraculous appearances at locations such as Lourdes in France, Fatima in Portugal and Knock in Ireland.
These visitations are held to be wonderful by believers and considered baloney by others. Apart from the apparent miracle of existence itself, all other aspects of God require faith. Faith could be described as intellectual belief that transcends normal standards of proof. In other words, the individual with faith holds things to be true that are not evidenced in a form that rational science would accept.
But what would happen if God suddenly turned up in an unambiguous way; if the creator of the Universe appeared, in person, on the Earth with positive proof of identity?
Logic says it could not happen because it is likely that only the agnostics would be happy. Those who would be most likely to welcome the coming of God are, by definition, the people with the most complex belief systems. And every group (possibly except one) would be disappointed. Would Mormons be told they had it right after all or maybe Roman Catholics?; or maybe some followers of Mohammad or Siddhartha Gautama or any one of the countless prophets down the ages.
Imagine the Pope and the Dalai Lama sitting shaking their heads in disbelief as it turns out that the Australian Aboriginal people and those of the Japanese Shinto faith both had it right when they called God Izanagi. Surely, it would have to be those with the most religion who would have the most to lose.
But then, it is not likely that they are all correct in some way and that God is actually non-denominational. What if He now considers that the childhood of the human race is over and we are now grown up enough to be told the true mysteries of existence – he might choose to make gentle contact to let us know that in some way ‘we had arrived’.
It is our initial thought that the number patterns built into the Moon and its relationship with Earth, could be a first global contact with God Himself. Such an event would change everything. If God formally made his presence known, who would dare wage a war in His name? The world might listen carefully instead of proclaiming its right to speak on His behalf from the churches, synagogues, mosques and temples around the globe.
What evidence is there that this message could be from God?
The first problem is one of definition. What do we mean when we speak of God? For recent convert, Anthony Flew, God is simply the creative force that does not interact with people, but for many millions of others He is a benign father figure who listens to their prayers.
Upon reflection, the only way to deal with this point is to ignore it. If the human species has reached the end of its ‘childhood’, the nature of God will be appreciated in a new light anyway.
The most fundamental case for the God scenario, when it comes to the message the Moon has to impart to us about its artificial construction, is that any entity who created our world is God, almost by definition. Scriptures from all around the world attribute the making of our planet and the heavens to a creative force that usually has a special relationship with humankind. That relationship is so special in Christianity that it is central to the very belief system that the creator of our world actually became a man for thirty-three years some two millennia ago.
The fact that the numbers used in the Moon’s message are in base ten, implies that the UCA knew that the intelligent species that would evolve on Earth would have ten fingers. God would know that. It is also clearly the case that the UCA knew that it would be at this particular point in the Earth’s history that humans would be ready for the next stage of their relationship with God.
The story told in the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament would turn out to be remarkably correct and even the Christian creationists would be right in part.
‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’
In this scenario, God did create the Earth and the heavens, and by regulating its attitude with the Moon caused it to have liquid water on its surface:
‘And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’
In its early years the Moon was orbiting close to the Earth, gradually slowing down both its own spin and producing a spin that gave regular days and nights:
‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.’
The tilt of the Earth was held steady by the Moon and the Earth enjoyed regular days, years and changing seasons:
‘And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.’
The early Moon was huge and powerful as it orbited close to the Earth raising colossal tides every time it passed overhead. If the Moon had not been created, the seas of the Earth would cover virtually all of the planet leaving little dry land:
‘And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divid
ed the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.’
Thanks to its close proximity, the Moon’s tidal surges travelled far inland, constantly stirring the life-nurturing soup of the oceans, ready for the moment life arrived. As more advanced life developed, plant life came first:
‘And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.’
The first animal life began in the oceans before spreading to land and into the air:
‘And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.’
Millions and millions of creatures came and went, slowly changing into more complex life forms and eventually gaining intelligence and self-awareness. One branch of mammals climbed into the trees and later returned to the plains as hominids – our ancient, ape-like ancestors. There were many species of hominid that learned to use primitive tools and that survived as hunter-gatherers. As recently as 25,000 years ago there were still three species of human: Homo floresienis, Homo neanderthalis and Homo sapiens. The Neanderthals had larger brains than ours and we can be sure that they laughed and talked and cried – their burial practices even suggest that they may have had religious belief. But today, we are alone:
Who Built the Moon? Page 16