The Ancient Alien Question

by Philip Coppens

  However, if we look at all the archaeological and legendary evidence available, it is clear that the question of whether ancient aliens were here in the past is not a spurious question to ask. Scores of scientists, including Carl Sagan, studied the available evidence and came away with the conviction that contact had indeed been established in the distant past. There is best evidence, loads of it, but it depends on where your threshold of belief lies. What it takes to convince someone is a purely personal experience. For some, it takes too little; for others, a lot; for still others, nothing is satisfactory. There should be a consensus parameter, a problem our judicial system has resolved by installing trial by jury, in which a group of people need to arrive at a consensus view—what they accept to be credible evidence, and therefore what likely happened, and what we believe to be the truth. Science, however, is not a democracy. I leave it to the jury, though, to draw its own conclusion.

  Chapter 7

  Alien DNA, Earthly Life

  On February 17, 1600, the Domínícan fríar Gíordano Bruno was burned at the stake after the Roman Inquisition found him guilty of heresy. Bruno believed that God and the Universe were identical, which was considered to be heresy. When he was turned over to the state, he was condemned to death. Though it is commonly believed that Bruno was convicted because of his belief that the Earth orbited the sun and not vice versa, this was really but one component in a much larger vision Bruno shared and that caused his downfall. Bruno argued for an infinite number of planets, stars, and even galaxies. Most important, he proclaimed that life-forms, including intelligent beings, existed on a number of worlds throughout the infinite universe.

  The belief that life exists elsewhere in the universe is referred to as cosmic pluralism, the plurality of worlds, or simply pluralism. The belief can be traced back at least as far as Thales of Miletus in 600 BC, and to several of the founding fathers of the United States, specifically Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. Thales was—in my opinion, unfortunately—also the man who tried to explain everything without incorporating mythology. Bertrand Russell described him as the father of Western philosophy, but he should also be seen as the man who lay at the origins of our modern attitude of scorning myths and legends and treat them as unimportant. From Thales onward, we have removed thousands of years of our history, because it was based on or incorporated mythology.

  In Greece, the greatest proponents of pluralism were the atomists, who believed that the world was made up of two parts: atoms and nothingness, the empty void—specifically Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus. The reason why these philosophers are largely unknown is because Plato and Aristotle, their opponents, argued for the uniqueness of the Earth. The two now-famous philosophers argued that the Earth was unique, and, as a consequence, there could be no other worlds. Plato and Aristotle won the popular debate, but have now been proven to be at least partially wrong, though more than two millennia later it is clear that their skepticism continues in the scientific community. Even though we have not yet found definitive proof of extraterrestrial life, exobiologists (scientists who search for life beyond Earth and study the effects of extraterrestrial environments on organisms) have shown that there are numerous planets and moons that have all the necessary conditions and ingredients to harbor life. As humankind has downsized its space program in recent decades, it is an unfortunate fact that we may not soon find proof of extraterrestrial life, and may need to contend ourselves with mere indications.

  In the 1960s, the situation was completely different. The world was caught up in a frenzy as the two world superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, made space the final frontier of showing the world their superiority. Most of this ambition was concentrated on militarizing space and equipping it with a series of information-gathering satellites, if not weapons. But for general consumption, this true aim was dressed in far nobler terms. The Soviet Union took the first trophy when Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to travel into space, on April 12, 1961. The next, if not bigger trophy, was handed out on July 21, 1969, when American Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the surface of the moon. Since then, apart from depositing a number of robots on Mars, humankind has not physically reached farther into the depths of the solar system, let alone the universe. “Boldly going where no one has gone before” has, at least for the moment, been consigned to the realm of Hollywood and its spectacular use of CGI.

  In 1960 American astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake conducted the first search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) had just begun. Shortly afterward, Drake created the “Green Bank formula,” a mathematical formula that could calculate the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe. The Green Bank formula tried to identify the number of planets similar to Earth in the Milky Way galaxy, as earthly conditions were deemed to be required for life to develop anywhere else.

  Ever since, the Drake Equation—as it became popularly known—has been a beloved instrument in the quest for alien life, though it has never been properly able to provide a good indication of how universal—or not—life is. Some exobiologists find that the equation is too limited, as it only focuses on planets where life originated, rather than where life was seeded; as people move from country to country, so life might have moved from planet to planet. Specifically, in the event that life on Earth itself was seeded from elsewhere, even Earth’s life would not be included in the results of the Drake Equation! Most scientists, however, will point out that all the factors in the equation are unknowns and therefore nothing but guesses, meaning that the possibility of life in the universe, if based on the Drake Equation, can be anywhere from zero to billions of billions, depending on the predisposition of the person feeding the Drake Equation with these values. The Drake Equation is a nice gimmick, and judging from the manner in which Drake created it, it seems to have been designed that way.

  Another scientific tool linked with the Drake Equation is the Fermi Paradox, created by Enrico Fermi in 1950, which argues that there is an apparent contradiction between the high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations. Of course, as science refuses to look for, or validate evidence of potential contact with extraterrestrial civilizations, the existence of this paradox is something of a paradox in itself.

  Adrian Kent of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, argues that there might be a very good reason why ET has not made its presence known to us through radio astronomy. He believes that it is possible that there is competition for resources not just on planet Earth, but throughout the universe. Advanced species might therefore want to exploit other planets for their own purposes, which is precisely the theory that Zecharia Sitchin put forward. If this were the case, then Star Wars would not simply be a thing of science fiction, but pretty much what we would find in galaxies far, far away. Within this type of interstellar economy, evolution might favor the inconspicuous, Kent believes.

  Both the equation and the paradox are great tools armchair researchers and skeptics use to deride the entire field. To help resolve this problem, NASA set up the Kepler space telescope, which was designed to search for planets that transit or cross in front of their stars, as seen from Earth. The telescope has been reporting back to NASA since its launch in March 2009. As of February 2011, Kepler has confirmed 15 new planets and found an additional 1,235 planet candidates, including the smallest planet yet spied outside our solar system. In March 2011, it was announced that our Milky Way galaxy might be home to at least two billion Earth-like planets, or 2.7 percent of all sun-like stars. If we extrapolate that to other galaxies—and there are approximately 50 billion in the known universe!—the likelihood is that there are 100 billion Earth-like planets out there. At least! The odds are clearly stacked in favor of other life being out there somewhere, so the o
dds that we have been contacted in the past are looking up.

  Panspermia

  But what if alien life did not contact us; what if we are alien life? What if we—all life on planet Earth—come from elsewhere? The idea that life did not originate on this planet is old. One of the first known proponents of panspermia—as this idea is scientifically labeled—was the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, Socrates’ teacher. Anaxagoras claimed that the universe consisted of an infinite number of spermata, or seeds. He believed these seeds gave rise to life-forms when they reached Earth. He coined the term panspermia, meaning literally “seeds everywhere.”

  In 1864, Louis Pasteur revived the idea of extraterrestrial origins of life and found support for his experimental thinking from British physicist Lord Kelvin and German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz in the 1870s. In the early 1900s, Swedish chemist and Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius postulated that bacterial spores propelled through space were the seeds of life on planet Earth. British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle and his Sri Lankan student and, afterward longstanding collaborator, Chandra Wickramasinghe, revived the idea in the 1970s. Following Hoyle’s death in 2001, Wickramasinghe has remained the most vociferous proponent of the idea.

  Panspermia is directly opposed to the widely held assumption that life originated and evolved on Earth, without any outside interference, known as Darwinism, which is the thinking that has invaded all sciences. This is precisely why the notion of ancient aliens is such a scientifically controversial subject.

  However, the theory of evolution has one major shortcoming, which is its very starting point. Darwin proposed that life began in a “warm little pond” somewhere, almost like a geological stove, where some ingredients were haphazardly thrown together, accidently creating the soup of life. In 1857, Louis Pasteur showed that microorganisms are always derived from preexisting microbes, and so life as we know it here on Earth is always derived from life that existed before. In short, Darwin was wrong, but this did not stop the Darwinian perspective on the origins of life from continuing to dominate the Western scientific mindset. The standoff between Pasteur and Darwin is therefore interesting for the very fact that Darwin’s model was a theory, and Pasteur’s conclusions were based on scientific, experimental research. Yet for more than a century, Western science has preferred to believe in and promote a disproven theory!

  The key to panspermia is DNA, for without DNA, there would be no life. Still, it was only in 1953 that Dr. James D. Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of the DNA molecule, for which they were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. The discovery showed how incredibly complex DNA was. Crick has labeled it the best photocopying machine ever. Whereas we are continuously amazed at how many terabytes of information we can store on what is basically sand inside our computers, the amount of information stored in the DNA of our cells is still far more ingenious and complex!

  Though the discovery of the DNA structure—a double helix—was a tremendous feat, the immediate reaction from Crick was amazement: DNA was so complex and so perfect that he concluded that it could not have been formed in the primordial ooze that ruled the Earth four billion years ago. “At a molecular level life even in its primitive form is so incredibly complex that any prospect of transforming an inorganic system into biology must be considered awesomely difficult to say the least,” Wickramasinghe notes in Cosmic Dragons. On top of that, there simply had not been sufficient time on planet Earth for a complex system like DNA to form here. So where did it come from? Interestingly, the origins of life on Earth coincided with the last phase of the accumulation of material coming from comets that were passing through our solar system. Coincidence? Crick didn’t think so, and therefore concluded that DNA had come from elsewhere in the universe, thus subscribing to the theory of panspermia. So in the opinion of the man who had discovered the structure of life—DNA—life itself was alien.

  Crick proposed that DNA had ridden on the tail of one or more meteors and comets, landing on Earth from somewhere else in the cosmos. Where precisely DNA had originated from Crick did not postulate. The implication of his theory was that, because DNA was extraterrestrial, there was a high probability of coming across DNA-based life elsewhere in the universe that greatly resembled our own earth-bound life.

  Since Crick postulated this theory, other scientists have gone even further down this line of thinking. NASA astrobiologist Louis Allamandola has discovered that RNA—very similar to DNA—spontaneously forms in interstellar space. This means that any object, whether a comet or a meteor, traveling through interstellar space, would pick up this RNA and bring it back to a planet. Scientists have always objected to the notion that life could travel on a meteor or comet, arguing that it would be subjected to intense radiation and would therefore not survive the ride. But physicist Paul Davies has shown that if the microbe is inside the meteor, it would be shielded from such radiation.

  An even larger implication of Allamandola’s finding is that the universe spontaneously creates RNA, which suggests that our universe was somehow designed to create RNA/DNA-based life—not just on Earth or in our part of the galaxy, but throughout the entire universe! Life is therefore a universal imperative. This would mean that the entire universe could be teeming with DNA-based life. It would mean that life, as it exists on Earth, is not as unique as we believe, and other planets would contain similar life-forms. Indeed, the idea that DNA was created elsewhere in the universe and arrived ready-made on our planet is now extremely likely. These findings have extraordinary implications for the Ancient Alien Question.

  Though this is a tremendous scientific discovery, the scientific community is largely unwilling to accept it. Until recently, scientists’ consensus view was that there could be extraterrestrial life, but if there was, it would be too distant for us to have active contact with it. In short, the answer to the Alien Question is no. They argued that the fabric of the universe—space-time—hindered beings from traveling over such vast interstellar distances. The problem is one of food, the human life span, fuel, and other rather mundane subjects that are nevertheless key ingredients. And with these objections, they feel that they can uphold their consensus view that We Are Alone.

  We Are the Martians

  Life on Earth is often found in the most unexpected places, from the deepest crevices of the oceans to the hottest walls of active volcanoes. Finding life in what we would consider to be an inhospitable environment, such as inside a meteor crashing to Earth, would therefore seem unlikely, but not impossible. Finding evidence of life inside a meteor would prove that life exists elsewhere in our solar system, thereby destroying scientific consensus that life is all about our Earth.

  Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, has argued that filaments and other structures in rare meteorites appear to be microscopic fossils of extraterrestrial life that resemble algae known as cyanobacteria. He discovered these features after inspecting the freshly cleaved surfaces of three meteorites that are among the oldest in the solar system, one of which is the Orgueil meteorite, which crashed on May 14, 1864, near the French town of Peillerot. Some of the bacteria Hoover identified resemble bacteria found on Earth, though others looked less familiar. His findings suggest that some of the bacteria found here on Earth have extraterrestrial origins.

  The best candidate for life in our solar system outside of Earth has always been Mars. In the early phases of our solar system, conditions on Mars and Earth were pretty similar, and it was only later on that Mars became the inhospitable place it is now. Though we have never been to Mars, Mars has come to us. We know that an estimated one billion tons of rock have traveled from Mars to Earth. We know that microbes have been shown to be capable of surviving traveling the distance between the two planets and the shock of an impact on our planet. If there was life on Mars, it certainly could have traveled to our planet riding on a meteorite.

  Allan Hills 84001 (commonly abbreviated ALH 84001) is a met
eorite that was found in Allan Hills, Antarctica, on December 27, 1984, and that in 1996 was made famous when Bill Clinton entered the White House Press Room to broke with business-as-usual and announced to the world that NASA had found evidence of life on Mars. The announcement came about as NASA scientist David McKay believed he had found microscopic fossils of Martian bacteria based on carbonate globules inside the meteorite. Since 1996, the issue of whether or not this particular meteorite contains evidence of extraterrestrial life remains, to say it modestly, controversial, largely due to diverging scientific camps, showing once again that exobiology does not seem to be an exact science.

  There are 34 meteorites on our planet currently catalogued as likely originating from Mars. Among these, two have been put forward as being on par with ALH 84001 when it comes to indications of Martian life. One of them, the Shergotty meteorite, fell to Earth at Shergotty, India, on August 25, 1865. Its interior is said to indicate the remnants of biofilm, and therefore could be evidence of the existence of microbial communities. The other candidate, the Nakhla meteorite, fell to Earth on June 28, 1911, near Alexandria, Egypt. Many people witnessed its explosion in the upper atmosphere before it fell to Earth in about 40 pieces. When analyzed, the Nakhla meteorite turned out to be the first Martian meteorite to show signs of aqueous processes. The meteorite contained carbonates and hydrous minerals, which are the result of chemical reactions in water. Scientists also learned that the rock had definitely been exposed to water, which proved that there was once water on Mars. There is further evidence of carbon inside some of its fragments, but the presence of carbon is insufficient to convince all scientists that bacteria once lived on Mars.