Who Built the Moon? (24 page)
Read Who Built the Moon? Online
Authors: Christopher Knight,Alan Butler
The geneticists were utterly perplexed because the regions they removed made no difference to the mice in question, so there seemed to be no reason why these non-coding sequences, apparently functionless parts of the DNA, should be protected from change. Why should they matter? It is like having the world’s finest encrypted security system built into your waste bin.
Any burglar who observed that your rubbish had so much apparently unnecessary protection would immediately suspect that you were hiding something of great value in an unexpected place. And that is the thought that occurred to Paul Davies. He believes there could be a message from extra terrestrials in what has been referred to as junk DNA.
We suspect he might be right about the message but not about the author. He says:
‘Looking for messages in living cells has the virtue that DNA is being sequenced anyway. All it needs is a computer to search for suspicious-looking patterns. Long strings of the same nucleotides are an obvious attention-grabber. Peculiar numerical sequences like prime numbers would be a clincher and patterns that stand out even when partially degraded by mutational noise would make the most sense… if a sequence of junk DNA bases were displayed as an array of pixels on a screen (with the colour depending on the base: blue for A, green for G, and so on…’
He then asks what the message could contain and notes that one segment of DNA, chopped out by Rubin and his team, contained more than a million base pairs – enough, he says, ‘for a decent-sized novel or a potted history of the rise and fall of an alien civilization.’
And this would be from just one part of the junk DNA.
As we digested Davies’ suggestion about number sequences making a screen we were immediately reminded of how the numbers that we have identified as the lead key of the message produce 10,000 – or if the decimal point is removed from the values we get the following:
3663 x 273 = 999,999
As close to a million as makes no difference.
These are the PIN numbers of the Earth and Moon doubly cross-referenced by their orbital periods and relative masses. Without the decimal point, they describe a screen (possibly a computer monitor) that has a million pixels with sides of 3663 and 273.
One of the ‘high security’ sections of apparently empty genome removed by Rubin’s team had just over a million elements. It would be more than interesting to apply the 3663 x 273 matrix to this data.
It may well give us vital information about building equipment that moves matter backwards in time and it will tell us where to start the process of planning to build a Moon! It is likely that it will also instruct us where to look for further information.
If we are correct, we are all carrying this ‘treasure map’ in our hearts, our brains and even our hair. But so too is every living creature on God’s Earth.
‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,’ said God.
Could it really be true that a team of humans will control the creation of our world and seed it with DNA so that humans will evolve in our own image? Will a future president of the United States of America, or perhaps a Director General of the United Nations sanction the launch of a mission to create these mammoth, but necessary, changes to the past, whilst quoting the words from verse 26 of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis?
This is not a blasphemous thought. Some Christians and indeed people of other religions might find this idea offensive because it appears to suggest that we humans are God. But this is not the case. It merely suggests that we acted and will act on creative information that was originated somewhere else by some elemental force that transcends all Universes – all parallel realities.
The awe and mystery of existence remains intact and for those that want to call that essence ‘God’, He remains unchallenged.
However, the account we describe here does sit well with the scriptures of the great religions. Genesis is remarkably accurate and, as it turns out, the creationists may not be entirely wrong about a grand design in which humans were existent from the start. They will have to adjust their dating assumptions, which do not come from the Bible anyway. And they will have to accept that evolution was just a mechanism within the grand design.
The Hindu perception of the way the Universe works also remains intact, and the only adjustment they might adopt would be to accept that the cycle of rebirth has twisted into reverse as well as going forwards. We doubt the intellectuals within Buddhism will have a problem with this.
We see this process of self-conception as something akin to a Möbius strip, named after August Ferdinand Möbius, the nineteenth- century German mathematician and astronomer. Möbius was a pioneer in the field of topology. Along with his contemporaries, Riemann, Lobachevsky and Bolyai, Möbius created a non-Euclidean revolution in geometry.
The simple construct that is a Möbius strip can be made with a strip of paper by joining the ends with a 180° twist. It then only has one surface and one edge that goes around forever. Without the half- twist it would have been impossible to move from one side to the other without crossing an edge – but suddenly the barrier does not exist. If one travelled in a straight line on a Möbius surface one would return to the starting point.
Figure 13
The world’s most famous graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher(1898–1972) was fascinated by the imagery of the Möbius surface.
We see an analogy with humankind who evolved from DNA, seeded on Earth some 3.5 billion years ago by ourselves, just a little in our future. When we reach the point of being able to travel back in time we will have completed a circuit of the single-sided loop and then move off into a new trajectory.
Once the idea of time travel is accepted as a scientific possibility, there is no problem with the idea that humans in the future engineered both DNA and the life-nurturing Earth–Moon system billions of years ago. We exist because the right circumstances were present for life to develop – and so why does it matter whether a super-entity (God), extraterrestrials or humans arranged it to be so? Why should it be wrong to arrange for our own arrival?
Each of them is extremely unlikely, but nothing like as unlikely as the notion of random chance – the endless mega-string of beneficial good luck.
The idea of the Möbius principle is that it is a loop that twists back in time and returns forward again. Imagine a situation whereby an artefact (say a black monolith) was manufactured in the year 2010 and was taken back in time by four billion years in 2011, where it was buried in a location of long-term stability on the Moon. The artefact could be recovered from the Moon before it was manufactured and the atomic matter from which it was made would exist in two places at the same time, until it was transported back to the early Moon.
This seems impossible. But just about everything about quantum physics sounds implausible. Quantum physics tells us that everything from light to matter is made up of tiny, indivisible packets called quanta that do not work as we normally see the world. Niels Bohr, one of the pioneers of the subject said: ‘Anyone who can contemplate quantum mechanics without getting dizzy hasn’t properly understood it.’
One of the features of this branch of science is the recognition that particles (or wave functions) briefly exist in several different places simultaneously. The monolith that had two concurrent realities would be a quantum effect on a worldly scale instead of at a sub atomic level.
Once the 2010 artefact goes back in time, the duality will be resolved and the world will continue as normal. Equally, we could consider all of the time, from the building of the Moon through to the point of time travel, as a Möbius loop where we end up back where we started. Thereafter we break out of the loop and move forward in the normal way.
We have speculated that chronobots were sent back to engineer the Moon and they must have returned again nearly a billion years later to seed the ploughed Earth with DNA, to begin the process of evolution that would result in the arrival of humans.
But it appears that there must have been other interventions at specific times in the past to bring about certain events.
We have always agreed with archaeologists who say that the existence of the Megalithic Yard is inconsistent with the technology otherwise known to have been present amongst the people of western Europe over five millennia ago. But we heartily disagreed with them when most chose to ignore Professor Thom’s findings rather than attempt to reconcile them. Such people are obstacles to knowledge.
When we discovered that the Megalithic system extended to the Moon, our credulity was stretched to the limit but our curiosity carried us forward to try and make sense of that which looked impossible to reconcile. When we found that the metric system had been in place almost perfectly, four-and-a-half thousand years before a team of French scientists reinvented it, we were amazed. Then we discovered that metric units were perfect integers for the most crucial aspects of the Moon as well as the Earth.
We have noted that through ancient history different civilizations have recorded that people with super powers arrived from nowhere to teach humanity about the sciences. Then we noted how all the parallel developments that occurred around the world in unconnected locations happened at the same time.
We have to conclude that people will travel back to points in history, such as the era around 3100 BC, when several civilizations, from South America to North Africa to Asia to Europe, were suddenly emerging and building similar structures. It seems probable that the Megalithic structures that have lunar alignments, and use the unit that describes the dimensions of the Moon, were deliberately designed and left to point the way forward.
We do not yet know whether the detailed message is indeed inside the protected sections of DNA, but wherever it is, the initial message was only recognized because of all those Megalithic structures extending their weathered and ancient stone fingers into the night sky.
The fact that the imperial pound and the pint are mathematically derivable from the Megalithic Yard was puzzling and when we found that the same Stone-Age unit describes metric spheres we were dumbfounded. How could such surprising consequences come about so accurately by chance alone?
It now seems that the past has been modelled by the future. A strange Möbian twist for reality.
Of course this all sounds so improbable that some people will refuse to believe it. They will reject the fact that everything we have put forward is real and testable and the elements of unavoidable speculation are scientifically sound. But many creationists will still shout that black is white and many so-called scientists will return to their deeply flawed paradigms as though they were real.
But when the message is actually found. What then?
The Möbius Mission
‘My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose.’
Haldane’s Law put forward by geneticist, J P S Haldane
We have come on a strange journey since we first realized the science that lay behind the stone circles at Stonehenge, Brodgar, Avebury and thousands of other Neolithic sites across the British Isles.
We believe that our determination not to draw conclusions too early has paid dividends. We have refused to ignore those pieces of the puzzle that seemed outlandish or even downright impossible, and have retained our tolerance for unexpected results.
They say all progress is dependent on the unreasonable person. Alexander Thom was certainly an unreasonable person, or else he would have capitulated in the face of the wave of rejection he received from the majority of professional archaeologists. How irritating of the man, his opponents thought, to repeatedly insist that his reams of data, gathered over scores of years, show that the Megalithic builders worked to an incredible degree of engineering accuracy and employed precise standardized units of length.
Any reasonable person, and certainly any academic who wanted future employment within a specific discipline, would have buried the data that showed that the Megalithic Yard and its accompanying geometry were integer to the Moon and Sun as well as the Earth. It sounds ridiculous, and those who are members of the ‘club’ will consider anyone who speaks of it equally ridiculous.
Yet the Moon unquestionably does conform to Megalithic geometry and now, we believe, we are beginning to understand why.
The SETI institute is still sweeping the skies looking for incoming electromagnetic radiation that deviates even a tiny amount from the anticipated background noise – something that could conceivably be an indication of intelligence elsewhere in the cosmos. But the message they seek is already with us because, by the standards of what SETI considers might constitute a message, surely the material we have described here must be the world’s first prime contact with a consciousness that existed 4.6 billion years ago.
The assumption of SETI and its operatives is that another intelligence will make contact from far away and so the searchers are focused on staring into the far depths of space for a message. But if any entity were that smart why would it have to make a long-distance call?
Four hundred years ago our solar system was the great mystery – but our own immediate environs hold less fascination in the light of incredible devices such as the Hubble telescope, which can reach far into space and into the past. We have ticked the box that is the solar system and astronomers are more interested in distant quasars and nebula. Is it this new leading edge of attention that has previously blinded us to the obvious in our own backyard?
The message we have received has told us about the way that the Moon was constructed to give life to the Earth, and there are tantalizing hints that this design may extend to the rest of the solar system, and possibly even beyond. Why is Jupiter in such an untypical orbit that just happens to be a cosmic umbrella for Earth? Why does Venus provide such a perfect clock and calendar when viewed from Earth?
Modern scientific culture has evolved from its roots in the ancient world and has become a complex web of many highly specialized disciplines. Gone are the days when one man, such as the seventeenth-century Robert Hooke, could be a groundbreaking inventor, microscopist, physicist, surveyor, astronomer, biologist and even artist. Today the sheer enormity of available information has led to highly defined specialisms, and academics are expected to keep to their field – despite the truism that science has no experts. No one, for instance, doubted Alexander Thom’s abilities as a professor of engineering but he was not welcome in the world of archaeology.
The gains from modern science are beyond counting. But the loss, arguably, is the synthesis of information generated by the many gentleman scholars that once existed, before becoming extinct somewhere around the late nineteenth century. So few scholars now have a chance to view the bigger picture – to seek out patterns that might unexpectedly exist when apparently unrelated data is brought together. It has to be remembered that the difference between a major breakthrough and nothing at all can be just the angle of view rather than anything else.
Occasionally, two or more disciplines are brought together to form a new speciality in science. One of these turned out to be the subject that was directly invented by Alexander Thom, namely archaeoastronomy – a field of study involved with the use of astronomy by ancient cultures. Our previous book,
Civilization One,
demonstrated the geometry that lies behind Thom’s proposed Megalithic Yard. We unambiguously showed how it is directly related to other measurement systems (linear, volumetric and weight) and put forward a testable theory of how it was reproduced using Venus and a pendulum. We therefore decided to send a copy of our book to a man who we believe is the world’s only professor of archaeoastronomy. He received a précis and the completed book but we received no response whatsoever.
We knew that the information we had put forward was not incorrect because people suitably qualified in astronomy and mathematics had carefully checked it. So why no response? Perhaps the approach was so counter to the worldview of this particular expert he could not understand it. Or maybe he just did not like the implications of our conclusions.
We also attempted to get a copy of the book to a world-class physicist. When he was told of the subject matter he responded almost angrily by saying that it was well known that Thom’s work had been discredited decades ago and only weirdos clung onto the romantic hope that Stone-Age man possessed a rational and unchanging unit of length.
In actual fact he was repeating a mantra that has sprung up in academic circles but is no more than an urban myth, because no one has proven Thom to be wrong. We responded by pointing out that we had done our research very carefully and that whilst there are certainly people who have argued against Thom’s conclusions, they have not proven his conclusions to be wrong – nor is it possible for anyone to prove a negative.
The academic then responded politely and accepted what we said, although he explained that he did not have time to read our book due to personal problems.
We therefore expect to have a fight on our hands when it comes to getting leading academics to review the findings contained in this book. But fight we will.
Finally, it is probably helpful to apply to our whole hypothesis a test created by the late, great astronomer Carl Sagan, that he called a ‘Baloney Detection Kit’. Sagen suggested a set of tools shown below for testing claims and detecting fallacious or fraudulent arguments. We have put our responses beneath in italics.
Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts.
All of the key elements that we consider constitute a message are checkable using data published by leading authorities.
Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
Yes please. We have tried and will continue to do so.
Arguments from authority carry little weight (in science there are no authorities).
At least it should be a level playing field.
Spin more than one hypothesis – don’t simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
We have had to dismiss only one possible hypothesis: coincidence, and have investigated every other avenue we can think of.
Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. Quantify, wherever possible.
We struggled to accept our own results initially and we remain entirely open to any other interpretation that might be brought forward.
If there is a chain of argument every link in the chain must work.
Unlike the existing main theories of the Moon’s origin and the origin of DNA, we believe that we have a very strong chain with no weak link.
Occam’s razor – if there are two hypotheses that explain the data equally well, choose the simpler.
Absolutely. But the simplest is also the weirdest, although it is also the most scientifically robust
.
Ask whether the hypothesis can, at least in principle, be falsified (shown to be false by some unambiguous test). In other words, is it testable? Can others duplicate the experiment and get the same result?
The number sequences we have found are checkable by anyone with a book on basic astronomy and a calculator. The question is just how far people are prepared to go in claiming coincidence.
We believe we have made a case that deserves to be heard and investigated. It is hard to imagine how even the most sceptical, unimaginative academic could deny the possibility that we are looking at a message here. Not to investigate and discuss it further would be anti-scientific and, we believe, very foolish.
Everyone who has bothered to think about it is agreed; any message from the distant past either has to be very big or very small. We believe it is both.
We have good reason to think that Professor Paul Davies and others who suspect that there could be a communication addressed to us in apparently empty sections of DNA are correct. If the next layer of the message is, as seems likely, contained in the cells of our own bodies – it must be sought out!
Our suggestion that the group of a million unused base pairs, found by geneticist Edward Rubin and his team, might be a viewable message if laid out on a format of 3663 x 273 has to be tested. It might be the answer and, if so, humankind is on the verge of a new age – an age of maturity.
But if the message is not detected in that way, the peculiarities of the Moon remain and we need all serious scientists to work together to solve this riddle – which must be almost in our grasp.
We call on the world to assemble a team of leading scientists from all of the disciplines that could possibly be involved in deciphering the Moon’s message and, if our third scenario is correct, constructing the CTC – the time transport system. And we may need observers from the leading religions.
We suggest that this be called ‘The Möbius Mission’ – a project to begin all projects!
Albert Einstein was an incredibly wise man as well as a scientific genius. Amongst his many quotable observations he once said: ‘Imagination is more important that knowledge.’
How true. We therefore need people with depth of vision as well as knowledge and practical ability. So, it is our intention to first approach scientists such as Paul Davies, David Deutsch and Ronald Mallett. We feel sure that their curiosity will help to change the world.