In around 3100 BC, ancient Egypt became a united kingdom and its period of recorded history began. At the same time, the Sumerians were building their great cities and developing sophisticated techniques of metalworking, glass manufacture and agriculture. In the Indus valley of the Indian subcontinent, the Harappa and Mohenjodaro civilizations were also constructing huge cities and in the British Isles, superb megalithic structures like Newgrange, Maes Howe and the Ring of Brodgar were being built. Is it not very strange indeed, that within such a precise period of time the whole world suddenly decided to step up a gear and enter into a period of true civilization?
We found it more than odd that these unconnected peoples should all take such a large step forward at exactly the same time. And we have recently come across very new information that made our suspicions even greater. On December 23rd 2004, new findings were published that markedly revise the dating of the first American civilizations. It reported that evidence now shows that the oldest civilization in the Americas dates back far earlier than previously thought – in fact right back to 3100 BC, at which time complex societies and communal building suddenly appeared in Peru. This emerging culture was the first in the Americas to develop centralized decision-making, formalized religion, social hierarchies and a mixed economy based on agriculture and fishing.
One member of the team that has reported these findings in the pre-eminent scientific journal, Nature, is Jonathan Haas of the Department of Anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago. He said:
‘The scale and sophistication of these sites is unheard of anywhere in the New World at this time, and at almost any time. These dates push back the origins of civilization in the Americas to something more parallel to those of the other great early civilizations.’ 26
Some of the settlements that are believed to have had at least 3,000 inhabitants included platform mounds, thought to be pyramids, central plazas, temples and housing. The largest pyramid at Caral, known as the Primade Mayor, is contemporary with the earlier Egyptian pyramids, dating from 2627 BC. From this data, the archaeologists have concluded that there was large-scale communal construction and population concentration across the entire area.
Dr José Oliver, a lecturer in Latin American archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, said: ‘This confirms that by 3100 BC monumental buildings were already under way, not just at an isolated site but across a whole region.’
As we have already stated, science is about recognizing patterns. Humans have not changed physically or intellectually over the last hundred thousand years but suddenly, just over 5,000 years ago, unconnected people around the world began building major structures and cities; but apart from some Sumerian–Egyptian interaction, these groups appear to have developed quite independently. Archaeology has not found obvious cross-cultural artefacts so it is assumed that they all blossomed at the same time through sheer coincidence.
But if they appeared worldwide because they had all benefited from the instruction of an unknown creative agency, one shouldn’t necessarily expect an exact commonality of interpretation of these ideas. Nevertheless, it is clear that there are some significant cultural connections such as the building of pyramids and Venus worship.
There is, it seems, some very powerful, albeit circumstantial, evidence for an intervention by a highly advanced group more than 5,000 years ago. We have to admit, however, that we cannot conceive how any agency could have maintained contact with the Earth’s development over several billions of years. Nevertheless, we do not see it as our place to reject information just because we cannot explain it. Everything depends on the ground rules of the observer: if someone refuses to look at obvious patterns because they consider a pattern should not be there, then they will see nothing but the reflection of their own prejudices.
Reciprocal Numbers
As we reflected on what we had found, the number play involved in the Earth–Moon–Sun system was nothing less than staggering. We were amused by the charm of this virtual machine especially when using the metric system. We looked at this little equation using kilometres:
(Moon x Earth)/100 = Sun
This means that if we multiply the circumference of the Moon by that of the Earth, the result is 436,669,140km. If we then divide this figure by 100 we arrive at 436,669km, which is the circumference of the Sun, correct to 99.9 per cent.
How weird!
Of course, if we divide the circumference of the Sun by that of the Moon and multiply by 100 we get the polar circumference of the Earth. And, as we have pointed out, if we divide the size of the Sun by the size of the Earth and multiply by 100 we get the size of the Moon.
None of this is magic or pointless numerology. It may well be nothing more than an amusing coincidence but, given all of the ratio patterning we have observed, it would be foolish to ignore it.
However, the idea that kilometres can be meaningful to issues regarding the Moon is hard to swallow. Any reader could be forgiven for doubting what they read here. Nevertheless if anyone chooses to check out the numbers – it all works. And if you are still not sure about the idea, have a look at this fact; it certainly astounded us when we came across it.
The Moon has a sidereal rotation period of 655.728 hours, which means it rotates once every 27.322 Earth days. Given that the Moon has an equatorial circumference of 10,920.8 kilometres, this means that the Moon is turning at 400 kilometres per Earth day!
Just consider these unquestionable facts as a whole:
The Moon is one 400th the size of the Sun.
The Moon is 400 times closer to the Earth than the Sun.
The Moon is rotating at a rate of 400km per Earth day.
Coincidence? Well, maybe – or maybe not.
The Earth is rotating at 40,000 kilometres a day and the Moon is turning at a rather precise 100 times less. The Moon always faces the Earth as it travels on its orbit around our planet and yet the average distance is such that the equatorial rotational speed is precisely one per cent of an Earth day. These figures are entirely checkable and indisputable. How could all this be accidental?
Surely, only a fool would not wish to examine this situation further. Yet we have to be realistic about how some people will view our decision to consider the apparently impossible. We are well aware that many, and possibly most, experts will turn a blind eye.
Terence Kealey, a clinical biochemist and the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, wrote an article in the (London) Times on November 15th 2004 under the title ‘Who says science is about facts? They only get in the way of a good theory’. In this he recollected as follows:
‘When Charles Moore was editing The Spectator he once asked me why, of his contributors, it was those trained in science who were the least honest… Charles Moore had supposed that scientists would revere facts, but that supposition is a myth: scientists actually treat facts the way barristers treat hostile witnesses – with suspicion.
The mythmaker was Karl Popper. Popper was not a scientist but a political philosopher who proposed that science works by ‘falsifiability’: scientists discover facts; they create a theory to explain them; and the theory is accepted until it is falsified by the discovery of incompatible facts that then inspire a new theory… Yet it is a myth that working scientists always respect falsifiability. Scientists often ignore inconvenient findings.’
We could not agree more, and therefore we will not be surprised if people ignore the possibility that the metric system just might be (crazy though it sounds) fundamental in some way to the Sun and the Moon as well as to the Earth. The fact remains that, for some reason, the kilometre demonstrates the essence of the Sun–Moon–Earth relationship, both in terms of size and orbital characteristics.
As if all of this isn’t incredible enough we must also address the fact that the Moon has an orbit that makes it a ‘mirror of time’. As we observed earlier, the Moon mimics the Sun at key points in the year. For example, whilst the Sun sets in the north at t
he time of the summer solstice, the Moon sets in the south and when the Sun sets in the south at the time of the winter solstice, the Moon unerringly sets in the north. This is an aspect of Sun and Moon associations that undoubtedly seemed like magic to our ancient ancestors and is yet another reflection of the current position and orbital characteristics of the Moon.
The Reasons Why Not
We have a constructed a scenario that fits all the facts but has deliberately ignored some of the challenging consequences that have arisen. We now need to deal with the reasons why this scenario might be wrong. Without the intellectual tether of having to conform to ideas that are within the bounds of what is already accepted, we have argued that an intelligent agency constructed the Moon to enable life to develop upon the planet we call Earth. We have taken a holistic view and we have not ignored any facts that we do not wish to have in our picture of what might have been.
The first problem that we thought we confronted – that of motivation, has been potentially answered in that it might be part of a grand quest to convert the Universe into an intelligent, self-aware single entity at the end of time. Such an idea would certainly seem to sit well with the principles of some Eastern belief systems such as Hinduism.
The Moon was already outrageously impossible before we introduced the issues of the intricate web of interrelated values, which we have argued is a deliberate message. With the number values that exist in the ratios alone, we fail to understand how anyone could seriously claim that they are coincidences. But the biggest challenge we have to confront is the issue of how the Megalithic Yard and the metric system came to be involved with an artificial Moon constructed as a life-support system for the Earth.
We cannot hide from the problem that, if our deductions are accurate, our unidentified creative agency has had contact with us at least once over the last 6,000 years. If this agency wished humans to know what they had done – and they (or it) are capable of making contact so recently – then why don’t they just turn up right now and tell us what was done in the distant past, instead of leaving messages on the Moon?
We were puzzled. This did not seem to make sense.
As we debated this tricky point, we considered an alternative scenario that would not require direct contact from the UCA. Perhaps, we mused, the rise of the Megalithic system and even the metric system were programmed into our planet, to the extent that humans respond to these values quite naturally and without knowing why. Perhaps the gravitational effects of the Sun and the Moon interact with the Earth’s own gravity and the effects of its spinning journey through space. It is known that the spinning orbit of the Earth does cause a disturbance in time-space, so maybe the value that we have called the PIN number, the value 366, is actually the heartbeat of our planet. Perhaps we cannot help but follow certain numerical patterns?
We were raising questions faster than we were solving problems but there was a strong logic to this notion. We knew that the ancient Sumerians had used a system virtually identical to the metric system in the middle of the third millennium BC, with a double kush that was 99.88 per cent of a metre. This unit was accompanied by others that were virtually a litre and a kilo.
We had already noted that the second of time appeared to be real in some way, rather than just an abstract convention. On Earth a pendulum that swings at a rate of once a second will have a length of a metre, with tiny variations dependent on the user’s precise distance from the planet’s core.
Perhaps the values programmed into the Earth by the UCA were so fundamental that any intelligent life form evolving on the Earth would respond to them. The relatively recent discovery that pendulums appear to go haywire during a total eclipse could point to brief interruptions of this Earthly harmony. We were aware that we were putting speculation upon speculation but it made sense. And we have to remember that we are not trying to displace any well-reasoned theory already in existence, so these possibilities have the benefit of being alone in fitting all of the known facts.
The bottom line to all this is that some unknown creative agency made the Moon out of parts of the Earth so that it would act as an incubator for life. The next question to confront was this: What was put into the incubator so that it would eventually grow into an intelligent life form? Setting up the hardware was impressive enough but what software was used?
Chapter Ten
The Impossible Accident
‘A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature.’
Professor Anthony Flew, December 2004
Not very long ago, religion was the only guide to the way the world was perceived. For right or for wrong the various scriptures of theological tradition provided a way of making sense of everything from the miracle of birth to the movement of the stars in the sky. But today we have rational thinking – we have science.
The word ‘science’ is from the Latin scire, meaning ‘to know’ and it is concerned with the organization of objectively verifiable sense experience. In other words, it makes sense of the way we see the world in a testable and verifiable way. It seems that there is nothing that science cannot explain given enough time and study. From Anthropology to Zoology, the people of the twenty-first century have experts who can explain where almost everything came from and how it works.
But science does have its limits. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, for example, means that we cannot exactly know the position and the momentum of a particle simultaneously. We can choose one or the other – but we cannot have both. And there is at least one subject that science appears to be unable to explain. The origin of life.
In his book, How to Think Straight, Professor Anthony Flew has pointed out that practical reasoning and clear thinking are essential for everyone who wants to make proper sense of the information we receive each day. He stresses the importance of being able to quickly know the difference between valid and invalid arguments, the contradictory versus the contrary, vagueness and ambiguity, contradiction and self-contradiction, the truthful and the fallacious. These, he says, are the qualities that separate clear thinkers from the crowd.27After sixty-six years as a leading champion of atheism and logical thinking, Professor Anthony Flew has made sense of new information which has led him to state that science appears to have proven the existence of God. Flew’s reason for this monumental about turn is the discovery of evidence that shows that some sort of intelligence must have created the world we inhabit. He has particularly pointed to the investigation of DNA by biologists, which has shown that an unbelievable complexity of the arrangements are needed to produce life; leading to the conclusion that intelligence must have been involved.
We have bemoaned the lack of objectivity that often pervades the academic community but we must applaud a man who is prepared, at the age of eighty-one, to throw away the cornerstone of his life’s work. That takes guts!
The first the world knew of Flew’s change of heart was his letter to the August–September 2004 issue of the Philosophy Now journal where he stated: ‘It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism.’
Flew is a man of principle and when he was asked if his startlingly new ideas would upset some people, he responded by saying, ‘That’s too bad… my whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads.’
How refreshing. That is exactly what we are trying to do with the information we have gathered about the Moon and the origins of life on our apparently designed incubator.
We have arrived at a point where we need to try and understand the emergence of life. And we find, at this precise moment, that the old assumptions about how life originated have been thrown out of the window.
The first question we asked ourselves is: What do we mean by ‘life’?
We use the term to cover all kinds of organisms from cyanobacteria to plants and animals. The essence
of life is reproduction, the formation of identical or near identical copies of a complex structure from simple starting materials. The increase of complexity involved in the formation of living organisms from their precursors distinguishes the processes of biological growth and reproduction from physical processes such as crystallization. This local increase of complexity can also be described as a decrease of entropy, which we have already speculated might be the motivation of the unknown creative agency that seeded and promoted life on Earth.
But where is the boundary of what is and what is not a life form. Is, for example, a virus a living entity? The standard answer is ‘no it is not’, but that is now seen as a very debatable point. Viruses cannot replicate on their own but can do so when they occupy a host. In the late nineteenth century, researchers realized that some diseases were caused by biological objects that were then thought to be the simplest and smallest of all living, gene-bearing life-forms. Throughout most of the twentieth century, though, viruses have been designated as non-living material.
All living organisms possess a genome, which is the set of instructions for making the body, and this is always composed of nucleic acid. It is usually DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) or in the case of some viruses, RNA (ribonucleic acid). The genome consists of a number of genes, each of which is a segment of nucleic acid coding for a particular type of protein molecule. In October 2004, French researchers announced findings that blurred the boundary once again. Didier Raoult and his colleagues at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille announced that they had sequenced the genome of the largest known virus, Mimivirus, which had been discovered in 1992. This virus, about the size of a small bacterium, contained numerous genes previously thought to only exist in cellular organisms. The virus is therefore a very smart bit of ‘dead’ matter or it is part of a unique club of entities only known to exist upon Earth.
Who Built the Moon? Page 14
