Who Built the Moon? (22 page)

‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’

God: Genesis 1:26

For those people who call themselves creationists, the Bible is the word of God. But which Bible is the authentic one? There are countless versions of the books contained in both the Old and New Testaments and the oldest versions have been carefully dissected to reveal the different styles of authorship woven into the fabric of the stories. Two of the three main traditions – the Yahwist and the Elohim (a word meaning gods in the plural) – talk of a specific sequence of creation. This deals with the arrival of plants, then good and evil, then animals and next women.

The third, priestly tradition has a sequence of creation that is rather more in line with modern theories about evolution. First comes light followed by heaven, the Earth (land and then sea), vegetation, then the Sun, Moon and stars. Next come birds and fishes and finally man and women together.

An interesting fact is that the first two traditions use the Hebrew
yàsar
for the creative act of making man, which has a simplistic or crude implication of being shaped, as a potter models clay objects. Both also use the word
demut
for likeness, which implies similarity or looking the same. However, in the Priestly tradition, (the version that has God talking to his wider council about making man in their image) He uses a very different word. In this case the word
bàrà
is used for the creation of man and this is a word that carries a more complex, creative value. Next we find
selem
as the chosen word for the use of the creator’s image, which means something more like a precise duplicate.
Selem
is a term directly related to the Canaanite word for Venus that is associated with resurrection and therefore rebirth of the individual.
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We find it strange that a supposedly singular God is talking to others around him, even before humans have been created. He has already made the Sun, Moon and Earth and supplied the oceans along with plant and animal life – but to whom is he talking? And why do they all, whoever ‘they’ are (including God Himself) apparently have heads with noses, ears and eyes, bodies with arms and legs and presumably even genitalia?

Why is God, along with his undisclosed team, human in appearance?

It is not our place here to try and make sense of Judaeo-Christian myth, but we came to find the idea fascinating and surprisingly plausible. The Bible has been edited, changed and added to by a succession of people who wanted it to support whatever they deemed to be true. Early Christians even accused the Jews of having incorrect versions of their own scriptures when they were found to differ from the texts the early Christians had doctored. In terms of Christianity, it seems unlikely that a passage that involves God talking to others before he created humanity would have survived, had it not been for an important aspect of the new Christian faith. This was the ‘new’ concept of the trinity – where God is said to comprise three separate entities including his living human mode as Jesus.

We are not attempting to claim that the Bible provides us with any evidence for the authorship of the message we had discovered, but a close look at the situation did lead us to a tantalizing thought.

Could the only known intelligent life force in the Universe be responsible for the message? To be blunt: Could modern humans have built the Moon?

There is obviously one very substantial issue of logic to address here, which is obviously the time gap of 4.6 billion years between the creation of the Moon and the present era. Clearly, if humanity created the Moon, this would have to be explained. In reality, this may not be the obstacle it appears to be, because leading scientists are currently debating the possibility of travelling backwards in time. Virtually everyone speculating about time travel is agreed that the associated mathematics indicates it should be possible. We will come to the problem of travelling in time shortly, but for the moment let us put the issue of the time gap aside and consider the reasons why the Moon’s message might be from closer to home than we ever dreamed could be possible.

The hypothesis we originally laid down was:

1. The Moon was engineered by an unknown agency circa 4.6 billion years ago to act as an incubator to promote intelligent life on Earth.
   
2. The unknown agency knew that humanoids would be the result of the evolutionary chain.
   
3. That unknown agency wanted the resulting humanoids to know what had been done and they left a message indicated by the dynamics of the Moon and its relationship with the Earth.
   

Firstly, it has to be acknowledged that there are no other possible candidates that we know of anywhere in the Universe. God exists by faith and not as a result of evidence, and aliens may or may not exist. It is entirely possible that we are totally alone, either in our part of space or in the whole of the Universe. In any case, who would have more to gain from a life-producing planet than the very intelligent creature that has most benefited from its existence, namely humanity?

The question of how the UCA could have known that the intelligent species on Earth would evolve with ten fingers and therefore adopt base-ten arithmetic, at a time when the Moon was exactly where it is today, is answered instantly if humanity is the agency we are seeking. The mystery simply dissolves if we are that unknown creative agency.

Another difficult issue to explain has been how the UCA could possibly have used Megalithic and metric units as part of the message. Once again, this scenario resolves the problem. Indeed, it adds to the message because it makes it very clear that the UCA ‘has to be’ humans from our future, travelling back in time to manufacture the Moon.

The motive for the message becomes obvious and absolutely necessary. If humans do not become alerted to the need to manufacture the Moon as an incubator for life – we would not be here.

However, there is the problem we can’t avoid. Humanity might be described as having been reasonably technologically advanced for around 100 years. The Moon came into being some 4,600,000,000,000 years ago. We have to admit that this does represent a bit of a gap.

The answer can only be time travel.

Time is perceived as flowing like a river from the past into the future and we are all riding the wave in one direction. But what if it were possible to head back upstream? Not necessarily for humans themselves, though that cannot be ruled out, but for pre-programmed super-machines; equipment so sophisticated that it could engineer planetary-sized objects. After all, most spacecraft today are unmanned units that carry out all kinds of experiments, take photographs and even analyse samples of alien rock. It would not therefore be hard to imagine a project team from our relatively near future designing and deploying ‘chronobots’
⁴⁰
to construct key elements of the past.

But is time travel a dream or a possible reality?

For most people such thoughts cause headaches. The question that anyone will reasonably focus upon is: If humans went back in time to build the Moon so that there would be humans – where did humans come from?

It seems like an impossible loop – but is it stranger than the age-old conundrum about the chicken and the egg? Logically, it is necessary to have a chicken to lay an egg, yet one needs an egg for that chicken to have sprung from. A creationist would have no problem as their God manufactured the first chicken with an ability to lay eggs. The evolutionists would be a little sneakier and say that a creature that was not quite a chicken laid an egg that produced a mutation that was the first proper chicken. So, the egg came first.

It really is not worth losing sleep about such problems, as the only way to deal with any paradox is to simply accept it.

Today, we are programmed with a need for neat, predictable Newtonian-style logic. Simple cause and effect – so that if ‘A’ happens ‘B’ will result. People everywhere seem willing to accept the idea that we were either created by God, or that we exist due to a mega-series of flabbergastingly beneficial accidents. Look at these two possibilities again and then ask yourself if it is any more far-fetched or unreasonable to suggest that, as a species, we went back to create our own life-giving planet system and ultimately ourselves? (For some reason, to the religiously-minded, the insurmountable question of ‘Who made God?’ can be safely ignored, as can the ridiculous improbability of an infinitely flowing stream of beneficial serendipity to non-believers).

Humans throughout history have generally had a psychological need for a higher authority, whether it be a supreme deity or the laws of physics. Thankfully, that is not necessarily the whole story at all.

The debate about time travel goes on amongst the experts as it has done for many decades. Generally speaking, philosophers don’t care for the idea, for a whole host of logical or illogical reasons, though some of them are coming round in the face of the latest evidence. Meanwhile physicists are becoming increasingly certain that time travel is possible, and they have the mathematics to back up what is far from being a simple hunch.

Whilst the idea of travelling into the past is so counterintuitive for most people that they just cannot get their heads around it, a physics heavyweight and a philosophy heavyweight from Oxford University have another view. They once teamed up to confront the apparent paradox that seems to forbid the highly fluid present penetrating the apparently frozen structure of the past. David Deutsch and Michael Lockwood have the problem in context; saying about the quantum physics of time travel: ‘Common sense may rule out such excursions – but the laws of physics do not.’
⁴¹

Most people have a real problem with the idea of time travel, and the so-called ‘grandfather paradox’ encapsulates why the idea appears to assault common sense so strongly. The idea is that if a young man was able to travel back from the present time to, say, 1950, he might kill, or cause his grandfather to be killed before his own father was born. If this were to happen, it would mean that he could not exist and therefore could not have killed his grandfather. The problem just goes around in apparently impossible circles. The only solution appears, at first view, to be to consider all such journeys as utterly impossible – if for no other reason than to save us from terminal confusion!

However, Deutsch and Lockwood are not so easily fazed and they remain unconvinced about the need to protect our sensibilities from issues of reality just because laypeople tend to become confused. In an article published in
Scientific American
they discuss another apparent time paradox that deals with the possibility that even knowledge does not seem to require a beginning.

They refer to the grandfather-killing scenario as being an ‘inconsistency paradox’ and then they discuss another type of apparent time-traveller violation of logic that they call a ‘knowledge paradox’. This is an apparent violation of the principle that knowledge can only come into existence as a result of problem-solving processes, such as biological evolution or human thought. In the example, they talk about a hypothetical art critic who goes back in time to visit a famous artist from the previous century who, the critic realizes, is only producing very mediocre work. The time traveller shows the painter a book containing reproductions of his later and greater works, which he then proceeds to carefully copy in every detail with oil paints onto canvas. This means that the reproductions in the book exist because they are copied from the paintings and the paintings exist because they were copied from the reproductions. So, where did the inspiration come from?

‘This kind of puzzling paradox,’ say Deutsch and Lockwood, ‘once caused physicists to invoke a chronology principle that, by fiat alone, ruled out travel into the past.’ But they believe that travelling into the past does not violate any principle of physics, however much it seems counterintuitive to the average person. Furthermore, the Oxford duo state that quantum-mechanical effects actually facilitate time travel rather than prevent it, as some scientists once argued.

They explain the basics of the concept of time by pointing to Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity where three-dimensional space is combined with time to form four-dimensional space-time. Within this, everyone’s life forms a kind of four-dimensional ‘worm’ in space-time, with the tip of the worm’s tail corresponding to their birth and the top of the head to the person’s death. The line along which the ‘worm’ lies is called the person’s (or object’s) ‘worldline’ and each moment of time is a cross section of that worldline.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts that massive bodies, such as stars and black holes, distort space-time and bend worldlines. This is believed to be the origin of gravity – and, for example, the Earth’s worldline spirals around that of the Sun, which in turn spirals around that of the centre of our galaxy. Deutsch and Lockwood propose that if space-time becomes really distorted by gravity some worldlines would become closed loops where they would continue to conform to all the familiar properties of space and time in their own locality, yet they would become corridors to the past. They state:

‘If we tried to follow such a Closed Timelike Curve (or CTC) exactly, all the way around, we would bump into our former selves and get pushed aside. But by following part of a CTC, we could return to the past and participate in events there. We could shake hands with our younger selves or, if the loop were large enough, visit our ancestors. To do this, we should either have to harness naturally occurring CTCs or create CTCs by distorting and tearing the fabric of space-time. So a time machine, rather than being a special kind of vehicle, would provide a route to the past, along which an ordinary vehicle, such as a spacecraft, could travel.’
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So, world-class physicists like Professor Deutsch can conceive of potentially giant spacecraft voyaging backwards in time. Perhaps such craft could be filled with chronobots that could even self-replicate to take on a task that might take hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of years. Building an object the size of the Moon with pre-programmed orbital requirements is unlikely to be a quick exercise. But time would literally be on their side.