Return to the Stars: Evidence for the Impossible (3 page)

Just as the theory of relativity (without which present-day physics and mathematics simply could not function) had only a mathematical proof for decades, tachyons are not yet demonstrable experimentally, but only mathematically. However, Feinberg is working on an experimental proof.

Believing in the future as I do, my fantasy runs away with me when I hear about research of this kind. Time and again during the last hundred years we have ultimately lived to see things that were considered impossible in the form of industrially manufactured products. So on this occasion I think I am entitled to enlarge upon an idea that, as I have said, is still in its infancy.

What might happen in the future?

If it became possible to capture tachyons or produce them artificially, they could also be transformed into the propulsive energy for space sondes. Then, I assume, a space-ship would be brought up to the speed of light using a photon propulsion unit. As soon as it was reached, a computer would automatically switch on the tachyon propulsion unit. How fast would the space-ship travel then? A hundred, a thousand times faster than light? No one knows the answer today. Scientists suspect that once past the speed of light so-called Einsteinian space would be left behind and the spaceship hurled into an as yet undefined, superimposed space. But at this vital moment in the history of space travel the time factor would become almost meaningless.

I know of many fields of research in which the work going on is mainly devoted to the service of interstellar space travel. I have been in many laboratories and talked to many scientists. No one knows how many physicists, chemists, biologists, atomic physicists, parapsychologists, geneticists and engineers are working on the project that will enable man to fly back to the world of the stars—they are often lumped together, somewhat inaccurately, under the generic name of futurological projects.

It seems to me to be an under-evaluation of the human potential if, under the pressure of proof provided by technological advances, people admit the possibility of investigating cosmic space at some future date, but obstinately deny that the universe may contain intelligences who knew all about interstellar space travel thousands of years before we did and so could have visited our planet.

Because it has long been the custom to hammer into us as schoolchildren the presumptuous idea that man is the 'lord of creation', it is obviously a revolutionary and unpleasant thought that many thousands of years ago there were unknown intelligences who were superior to the lord of creation, but however disagreeable it is, we had better get used to it.

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2 - On The Track Of Life

In my book Chariots of the Gods? I put forward the speculative idea that 'God' had created man in his own image by means of an artificial mutation. I voiced the suspicion that homo sapiens became separated from the ape tribe by a deliberately planned mutation. I have been attacked for making this assertion.

Because the tracing back of the origin and development of man has so far been limited entirely to our planet, my theory that extraterrestrial beings could have had a hand in the process is a bold one. Yet if this idea was considered within the bounds of possibility, our beautiful family tree— apes scrambled down from the trees, mutated and became the ancestors of man—would be destroyed. Since Charles Darwin (1809-1882) put forward his theory of natural selection, all fossil finds, from the skeletons of primitive apes up to homo sapiens, have seemed to be convincing arguments in favour of his theory. When the teacher Johann Carl Fuhlrott (1804-1887) discovered some old bones in the Neanderthal near Dusseldorf and used them to reconstruct 'Neanderthal Man', who lived in the last interglacial age and at the beginning of the Wurm glaciation, i.e. from about 120,000 to 80,000 years ago, he built up his theory of ape men on the basis of this find. It caused quite a stir in scholarly circles. Disconcerted religious opponents of Fuhlrott's theory put forward the rather unconvincing argument that there could not be a fossil man, because fossil men ought not to exist.

There are many other species in addition to Neanderthal man. The lower jaw of a kind of primate was found at El Fayum near Cairo. It was dated to the Oligocene Age, which was between thirty and forty million years ago. If that dating is correct, it would be proof that beings resembling man must have existed long before Neanderthal man. Fossil examples of hominids have also been found in England, Africa, Australia, Borneo and elsewhere.

What do these finds prove?

They prove that we cannot say anything definite, because nearly every new find throws doubt on the datings that have just been included in our text-books. In spite of the large number of finds, it is fair to say that they give very inadequate clues to the historical continuity of the origin and development of the human race. Certainly the track of racial development from hominids to homo sapiens can be followed back clearly for millions of years, but we cannot make nearly so definite a statement about the origin of intelligence. There are minimal indications from the remote past, but they do not add up to a whole. So far I have not been fortunate enough to hear an explanation of the origin of intelligence in man that is even tolerably convincing. There is a vast number of speculations and theories about how this 'miracle' is supposed to have happened. That is why I believe that my theory is equally entitled to a hearing.

In the course of the thousands of millions of years of general evolution, human intelligence seems to have appeared almost overnight. If we reckon in millions of years, we can say that this event must have taken place 'suddenly'. While still anthropoids, our ancestors created what we call human culture astonishingly quickly. But intelligence must have made a sudden appearance for this to happen. Several million years passed before anthropoids came into being through natural mutations, but after that the hominids underwent a lightning-like development. All of a sudden, tremendous advances appear about 40,000 years ago. The club was discovered as a weapon; the bow was invented for hunting; fire was used to serve man's own ends; stone wedges were used as tools; the first paintings appeared on the walls of caves. Yet 500,000 years lie between the first signs of a technical activity, pottery and the first finds in hominids' settlements. Loren Eiseley, Professor of Anthropology in the University of Pennsylvania, writes that man emerged from the animal world over a period of millions of years and only slowly assumed human features. 'But,' he goes on, 'there is one exception to this rule. To all appearances his brain ultimately underwent a rapid development and it was only then that man finally became distinguished from his other relatives.' Who was it that taught us to think?

Although I have great respect for the hard work done by anthropologists, I must frankly admit that I am not really interested in the prehistoric age that the eyeteeth of anthropoids or hominids can be proved to belong to by fossil finds. Nor do I think the date when the first homo sapiens used stone tools very important. To me it is as obvious that primitive man was the most intelligent being on our planet as it is logical that the gods chose this particular being for an artificial mutation. I am far more interested in when primitive man first introduced moral values such as loyalty, love and friendship into his communities. What influence were our ancestors under when they experienced this change? Who imparted the feeling of reverence? Who implanted the feeling of shame in connection with the sexual act?

Is there a plausible explanation of why savages suddenly clothed themselves? We are given vague hints about drastic changes or fluctuations in the climate. We are also told that the anthropoids wanted to adorn themselves. If that is the correct explanation, the gorillas, orangoutangs and chimpanzees living in the jungle could gradually have begun to wear trousers or use ornaments.

Why did the anthropoids suddenly begin to bury their fellows when they had only just outgrown an animal existence?

Who taught the savages to take the seeds of certain wild plants, pound them up, add water and bake an article of food from the resulting mush?

Why anthropoids, hominids and primitive men learnt nothing for millions of years and then suddenly primitive men learnt so much is a question that nags at me. Has too little attention been paid to this important question up to the present?

The field of research devoted to the explanation of the origin of mankind is interesting and very worthwhile.

Yet the question why, how and from what date man became intelligent seems to me to be at least as" interesting.

Loren Eiseley writes: 'Today on the other hand we must assume that man only emerged quite recently, because he appeared so explosively. We have every reason to believe that, without prejudice to the forces that must have shared in the training of the human brain, a stubborn and long drawn out battle for existence between several human groups could never have produced such high mental faculties as we find today among all peoples on the earth. Something else, some other educational factor, must have escaped the attention of the evolutionary theoreticians.' That is precisely what I suspect. There is a decisive factor that has not been taken into account in all the theorising on the subject. I doubt if we shall be able to supply the missing link without investigating the theory of visits to our planet by extraterrestrial intelligences and checking whether these beings should not be held responsible for an artificial transformation of hereditary factors, for a manipulation of the genetic code and for the sudden appearance of intelligence. I have something to say along these lines that strengthens my theory that man is a creation of extraterrestrial 'gods'.

In 1847 Justus von Liebig wrote in the 23rd of his Chemical Letters: 'Anyone who has observed ammonium carbonate, phosphate of lime or potash will obviously consider it quite impossible that an organic germ capable of reproduction and higher development can ever be formed from these materials by the action of heat, electricity or other natural forces...' The great chemist also claimed that only a dilettante could imagine that life had originated from dead matter. Today we know that this did happen.

Modern research assumes that the first life on earth originated one and a half milliard years ago. Professor Hans Vogel writes: 'In those days the barren land and the vast primordial ocean were enveloped in an atmosphere that was still without oxygen. Methane, hydrogen, ammonia, steam and perhaps acetylene and cyanide of hydrogen as well, formed a covering around the earth, which was still devoid of life. That is the kind of environment in which the first life must have originated.'

In their efforts to get on the track of the origin of life, scientists tried to make organic matter originate from inorganic matter in the conditions of the primitive atmosphere.

The American Nobel Prize winner Professor Harold Clayton Urey surmised that the primitive atmosphere had a composition far more susceptible to penetration by ultraviolet rays than our own. So he encouraged his colleague, Dr Stanley Miller, to check experimentally whether the amino acids necessary for the existence of all life would be formed in a primitive atmosphere created in a retort and subjected to radiation. Stanley Miller began his experiments in 1953.

He built a glass container in which he produced an artificial primitive atmosphere made up of ammonia, hydrogen, methane and steam. So that the experiment might take place in sterile conditions he had the Miller apparatus, as it is now known in scientific literature, heated to a temperature of 180° Centigrade for eighteen hours. In the upper half of the glass sphere he fixed two electrodes, between which electrical discharges were constantly flying. In this way, using a high frequency current of 60,000 volts, a permanent miniature storm was produced in the primitive atmosphere. In a smaller glass sphere sterile water was heated and its steam was conducted via a tube to the large sphere containing the primitive atmosphere. The cooled off matter flowed back into the sphere containing sterile water, to be reheated there and so climb up again to the sphere containing the primitive atmosphere. In this way Miller had created in his laboratory a cycle of the kind that had gone on on earth in the beginning of time. This experiment continued for a whole week without stopping.

What came out of the primitive atmosphere that was subjected to the steady lightning flashes of the miniature storm? The 'primitive soup' Miller had cooked up contained asparagine, alanine and glycine—in other words amino acids necessary for the building up of biological systems. In Miller's experiment complicated organic combinations had originated from inorganic matter.

During the years that followed countless experiments along the same lines were carried out under different conditions. Finally twelve amino acids were produced and now no one doubts that the amino acids necessary for life can originate from the primitive atmosphere.