ChrisIB
Honorable
Les gardiens
Dolores Cannon
From the French
The demon haunted world: Science as a candle in the dark
Carl Sagan
Cosmic Connection
Carl Sagan
Dolores Cannon
From the French
All that we knew so far about abductions and UFO sightings is just the tip of the iceberg. Dolores Cannon's work in the field of regressive hypnosis now allows us to study these phenomena in depth and to better understand the reasons for the extraterrestrial presence on Earth. Everything is carefully explained. By examining areas so far unexplored by other investigators, she has made the incredible credible and understandable. These case studies, spread over more than ten years, cover topics such as: occurrences of missing time; spacecraft from other dimensions and other life planes; collaboration and bartering between extraterrestrials and the government.
The demon haunted world: Science as a candle in the dark
Carl Sagan
Advertisers must know their audiences. It's a simple matter of product and corporate survival. So we can learn how commercial, free-enterprise America views UFO buffs by examining the advertisements in magazines devoted to UFOs. Here are some (entirely typical) ad headlines from an issue of UFO Universe:
• Senior Research Scientist Discovers 2,000-Year-Old Secret to Wealth, Power, and Romantic Love.
• Classified! Above Top Secret. The Most Sensational Government Conspiracy of Our Time Is Finally Revealed to the World by a Retired Military Officer.
• What Is Your 'Special Mission' While on Earth? The Cosmic Awakening of Light Workers, Walk-Ins, & All Star-Born Representatives Has Begun!
• This Is What You Have Been Waiting For. 24 Superb, Incredible Life-Improving UFO Seals of the Spirits.
• I Got a Girl. Do You? Stop Missing Out! Get Girls Now!
• Subscribe Today to the Most Amazing Magazine in the Universe.
• Bring Miraculous Good Luck, Love, and Money into Your Life! These Powers Have Worked for Centuries! They Can Work for You.
• Amazing Psychic Research Breakthrough. It Takes Only 5 Minutes to Prove that Psychic Magic Powers Really Work!
• Have You the Courage to Be Lucky, Loved and Rich? Guaranteed Good Fortune Will Come Your Way! Get Everything You Want with the Most Powerful Talismans in the World.
• Men in Black: Government Agents or Aliens?
• Increase the Power of Gemstones, Charms, Seals and Symbols. Improve the Effectiveness of Everything You Do. Magnify Your Mind Power and Abilities with the Mind Power MAGNIFIER.
• The Famous Money Magnet: Would You Like More Money?
• Testament of Lael, Sacred Scriptures of a Lost Civilization.
• A New Book by 'Commander X' from Inner Light: The Controllers, the Hidden Rulers of Earth Identified. We Are the Property of an Alien Intelligence!
What is the common thread that binds these ads together? Not UFOs. Surely it's the expectation of unlimited audience gullibility. That's why they're placed in UFO magazines - because by and large the very act of buying such a magazine so categorizes the reader. Doubtless, there are moderately sceptical and fully rational purchasers of these periodicals who are demeaned by such expectations of advertisers and editors. But if they're right even about the bulk of their readers, what might it mean for the alien abduction paradigm?
Occasionally, I get a letter from someone who is in 'contact' with extraterrestrials. I am invited to 'ask them anything'. And so over the years I've prepared a little list of questions. The extraterrestrials are very advanced, remember. So I ask things like, 'Please provide a short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem'. Or the Goldbach Conjecture. And then I have to explain what these are because extraterrestrials will not call it Fermat's Last
Theorem. So I write out the simple equation with the exponents. I never get an answer. On the other hand, if I ask something like 'Should we be good?' I almost always get an answer. Anything vague, especially involving conventional moral judgements, these aliens are extremely happy to respond to. But on anything specific, where there is a chance to find out if they actually know anything beyond what most humans know, there is only silence.* Something can be deduced from this differential ability to answer questions.
[* It's a stimulating exercise to think of questions to which no human today knows the answers, but where a correct answer would immediately be recognized as such. It's even more challenging to formulate such questions in fields other than mathematics. Perhaps we should hold a contest and collect the best responses in Ten Questions to Ask an Alien'.]
In the good old days before the alien abduction paradigm, people taken aboard UFOs were offered, so they reported, edifying lectures on the dangers of nuclear war. Nowadays, when such instruction is given, the extraterrestrials seem fixated on environmental degradation and AIDS. How is it, I ask myself, that UFO occupants are so bound to fashionable or urgent concerns on this planet? Why not an incidental warning about CFCs and ozone depletion in the 1950s, or about the HIV virus in the 1970s, when it might really have done some good? Why not alert us now to some public health or environmental threat we haven't yet figured out? Can it be that aliens know only as much as those who report their presence? And if one of the chief purposes of alien visitations is admonitions about global dangers, why tell it only to a few people whose accounts are suspect anyway? Why not take over the television networks for a night, or appear with vivid cautionary audiovisuals before the United Nations Security Council? Surely this is not too difficult for those who wing across the light years.
Cosmic Connection
Carl Sagan
Oxygen chauvinism is common. If a planet has no oxygen, it is alleged to be uninhabitable. This view ignores the fact that life arose on Earth in the absence of oxygen. In fact, oxygen chauvinism, if accepted, logically demonstrates that life anywhere is impossible. Fundamentally, oxygen is a poisonous gas. It chemically combines with and destroys the organic molecules of which terrestrial life is composed. There are many organisms on Earth that do without oxygen and many organisms that are poisoned by it.
All of the earliest organisms on Earth did not use molecular oxygen, O2. In a brilliant set of evolutionary adaptations, organisms like insects and frogs and fish and people learned not only to survive in the presence of this poisonous gas but actually to use it to increase the efficiency with which we metabolize foodstuffs. But that should not blind us to the fundamentally poisonous character of this gas. The absence of oxygen on a place such as Jupiter is, therefore, hardly an argument against life on such planets.
There are ultraviolet light chauvinists. Because of the oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere, a variety of oxygen molecule called ozone (O3) is produced high in the atmosphere, about twenty-five miles above the surface. This ozone layer absorbs the middle-wavelength ultraviolet rays from the Sun, preventing them from reaching the surface of our planet. These rays are germicidal. They are emitted by ultraviolet lamps commonly used to sterilize surgical instruments. Strong ultraviolet rays from the Sun are an extremely serious hazard to most forms of life on Earth. But this is because most forms of life on Earth evolved in the absence of a high ultraviolet flux.
It is easy to imagine adaptations to protect organisms against ultraviolet light. In fact, sunburn and high melanin pigmentation in the skin are adaptations in this direction. They have not been carried very far in most terrestrial organisms because the present ultraviolet flux is not very high. In a place like Mars, where there is little ozone, the ultraviolet light at the surface is extremely intense. But the Martian surface material is a strong absorber of ultraviolet light–as most soil and rocks are–and we can easily imagine organisms walking around with small ultraviolet-opaque shields on their backs: Martian turtles. Or perhaps Martian organisms carry about ultraviolet parasols. Many organic molecules also could be used in the exterior layers of extraterrestrial organisms to protect them against ultraviolet light.
There are temperature chauvinists. It is said that the freezing temperatures on planets like Jupiter or Saturn, in the outer Solar System, make all life there impossible. But these low temperatures do not apply to all portions of the planet. They refer only to the outermost cloud layers–the layers that are accessible to infrared telescopes that can measure temperatures. Indeed, if we had such a telescope in the vicinity of Jupiter and pointed it at Earth, we would deduce very low temperatures on Earth: We would be measuring the temperatures in the upper clouds and not on the much warmer surface of Earth.
It is now quite firmly established, both from theory and from radio observations of these planets, that as we penetrate below the visible clouds, the temperatures increase. There is always a region in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune that is at quite comfortable temperatures by terrestrial standards.
But why is it necessary to have temperatures like those on Earth in order for life to proliferate? A human being is seriously inconvenienced if his body temperature is raised or lowered by a mere 20 degrees. Is this because we happen to live by accident on the one planet in the Solar System that has a surface at the right temperature for biology? Or is it that our chemistry is delicately attuned to the temperature of the planet on which we have evolved? The latter is almost surely the case. Other temperatures, other biochemistries.
Our biological molecules are put together in complex three-dimensional arrangements. The functioning of these molecules, particularly the enzymes, are turned on and off by altering these three-dimensional arrangements. The chemical bonds that do these rearrangements must be weak enough to be broken conveniently at terrestrial temperatures, and at the same time strong enough not to fall to pieces if left alone for short periods of time. A chemical bond known as the hydrogen bond has an energy appropriately intermediate between these unreactive and unstable alternatives. The hydrogen bond is intimately connected with the three-dimensional biochemistry of terrestrial organisms.
On a much hotter planet like Venus, our biological molecules would fall to pieces. On a much colder planet in the outer Solar System, our biological molecules would be rigid, and our chemical reactions would not proceed at any useful rate. However, it is conceivable that much stronger bonds on Venus and much weaker bonds in the outer Solar System play the same role that hydrogen bonds play on Earth. We may have been much too quick to reject life at temperatures very different from those on our planet. There are not many chemical reactions known that can proceed at useful rates at some very low temperature such as might exist on Pluto, 30 or 40 degrees above absolute zero. But there are also very few chemical laboratories on Earth where experiments are performed at 30 or 40 degrees above absolute zero. With a few exceptions, such experiments have not been performed at all.
We are thus at the mercy of observational selection. We examine only a small fraction of the possible range of cases because of some unconscious bias, or the fact that scientists wish to work in their shirtsleeves. We then conclude that all conceivable cases must conform to what our preconceptions have forced upon us.
Another common chauvinism–one which, try as I might, I find I share–is carbon chauvinism. A carbon chauvinist holds that biological systems elsewhere in the universe will be constructed out of carbon compounds, as is life on this planet. There are conceivable alternatives: Atoms like silicon or germanium can enter into some of the same kinds of chemical reactions as carbon does. It is also true that much more attention has been paid to carbon organic chemistry than to silicon or germanium organic chemistry, largely because most biochemists we know are of the carbon, rather than the silicon or germanium, variety. Nevertheless, from what we know of the alternative chemistries, it appears clear that–except in very lowtemperature environments–there is a much wider variety of complex compounds that can be built from carbon than from the alternatives.
In addition, the cosmic abundance of carbon exceeds that of silicon, germanium, or other alternatives. Everywhere in the universe, and particularly in primitive planetary environments in which the origin of life occurs, there is simply more carbon than alternative atoms available to make complex molecules. We see from laboratory experiments simulating the primitive atmosphere of the Earth or the present environment of Jupiter, as well as in radioastronomical studies of the interstellar medium, a profusion of simple and complex organic molecules readily produced by a wide variety of energy sources. For example, in one of our experiments, the passage of a single high-pressure shock wave through a mixture of methane (CH4), ethane (C2H6), ammonia (NH3), and water (H2O) converted 38 percent of the ammonia into amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. There were not enormous quantities of other sorts of organic molecules.
Thus, both the atoms and the simple molecules of which we are made are probably common to organisms elsewhere in the universe. But the specific way in which these molecules are put together and the specific forms and physiologies of the extraterrestrial organisms may be, because of their different evolutionary histories, extremely different from what is common on our planet.