‘We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted, cherished group of creatures… If the universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in.’
John O’Keefe (astronomer at NASA)
One big issue remains to be answered. Megalithic structures were built across western Europe and used to observe the movements of the Sun and the Moon, but how could the unit of measure upon which these structures were based be so beautifully correlated to the circumference of both these bodies as well as of the Earth?
There seem to be three main conclusions to be made:
1. It is a coincidence that the Earth, the Moon and the Sun all fit the system perfectly when every other object in the solar system does not.
2. The Megalithic people were – 5,500 years ago – able to measure the size of the Earth, Moon and Sun and invent a system of units that worked perfectly with them all.
3. The Earth, Moon and Sun were somehow designed to integrate in this way.
Could it be a coincidence? On top of all the other strange facts regarding the Moon and its role in creating life on Earth, it becomes rather unrealistic to keep putting everything down to a random fluke of nature. Why would such multilayered, wildly improbable coincidences keep happening in the zone where we humans exist and nowhere else?
Could our Stone Age forebears really have mapped the Sun and the Moon as well as the Earth? Surely, this is not possible to believe. Archaeologists may have underestimated their scientific prowess, but to map and measure other worlds and then compute a common integer system of metrology is surely beyond modern man, let alone the inhabitants of the British Neolithic period?
The final option is conscious design. The idea of deliberate design seems unreasonable; common sense tells us it’s wrong. But we must remember the wise words of Albert Einstein: ‘Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.’
Experts, of whatever variety, seek to explain things in the way they were taught at university: ‘If it doesn’t fit my world-view it must be wrong.’ But it is always good science to follow the words that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put into the mouth of the fictional character Sherlock Holmes: ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’
It was not unreasonable to believe that the stonemasons of the Neolithic period were smart enough to measure the polar circumference of the Earth and that they devised a unit of measure that has an integer relationship to the dimensions of the planet. Such a feat can be achieved with very simple tools, as demonstrated later by the ancient Greeks. But surely they could not have measured the circumference of the Moon and the Sun?
That leaves one remaining possibility. These three bodies travelling through space are indeed the result of conscious design.
If your brain is finding it hard to be as objective as Conan Doyle suggests, then consider this: viewed from the Earth’s surface the Sun is 400 times as far away as the Moon. And for some inexplicable reason the Sun is 400 times the diameter of the Moon. Bizarrely, this causes them to appear to be the same size in the sky, which is why solar eclipses occur – when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun, they fit like two overlapping coins.
But there is more: the amount of sky that the Sun and the Moon take up is half a Megalithic degree (a degree being 1/366th part of the heavens). That is a very human aspect because this visual equilibrium only occurs when viewed from our standpoint on the surface of the Earth at this point in our planet’s history.
The value 366 keeps on repeating. It a physical fact that the Earth’s circumference is 366 per cent greater than that of the Moon. (Does anyone still want to argue for a coincidence?)
Conversely, the Moon’s circumference is 27.322 per cent that of the Earth, which doesn’t sound too meaningful – except that the Moon turns once on its axis and orbits the Earth once every 27.322 Earth days! By what strange mechanism do the relative circumferences of the Earth and its Moon conspire to be the same value as its orbital period measured in Earth days?
The relative sizes of these bodies and time measured in days are completely unrelated. It is not the result of any mechanism – it seems like it is a deliberate echo to draw attention to these values.
As the table shows, it is the repeating values that make the Earth, Moon and Sun relationship so special. And there is a direct connection with the speed of light. For all the world, it is as though someone designed the set-up with the detailed perfection of the proverbial Swiss clock.
There are three numbers, together with their divisions and multiples, that keep on repeating for the Earth, Moon and Sun. These numbers are 366, 27.322 and 100.
Another strangeness of the Moon is the way that it imitates the apparent position of the Sun when viewed by people on the planet’s surface.
The point on the horizon at which the Sun rises or sets marks the point at which the Moon will appear six months apart. There is no astronomical explanation for this miracle of observational astronomy. It does not happen for any reason of necessary planetary mechanics – other than it was planned that way.
The henges (circular or near-circular structures) of prehistoric Britain were divided using 732 poles (366 × 2). Because the Sun and the Moon each occupy half of a Megalithic degree of the horizon, each would fit exactly when viewed from the centre of the henge.
| 366 | There are 366 rotations or ‘star days’ in an Earth year. The rising/setting Sun and Moon have a combined width of one 366th part of the horizon. There are 366 degrees in a circle according to Megalithic geometry. There are 366 Megalithic Yards to one Megalithic second of arc of the polar circumference of the Earth. The circumference of the Earth is 366 per cent larger than the Moon. 366 lunar orbits of the Earth take 10,000 days. |
| 27.322 | The circumference of the Moon is 27.322 per cent that of the Earth. The rotational period of the Moon is the same as its orbital period – 27.322 days. |
| 100, 400, 10,000 and 40,000 | There are 100 Megalithic Yards to one lunar degree. The Moon’s orbital speed is 100 times slower than the Earth’s. The Moon’s circumference is 400 times smaller than that of the Sun. The Moon is 400 times closer to the Earth than the Sun. There are 40,000 Megalithic Yards to one solar degree. There are 40,000km to the Earth’s polar circumference. The Earth orbits the Sun at 1/10,000th the speed of light. In 10,000 days the Moon completes 366 turns on its axis. |
Science is the process of noting observable facts very carefully and then using them to draw conclusions about the way things work. It is not up to anyone to put restrictions on what those conclusions might be – the truth will speak for itself. If one keeps an open mind, it would appear that the number patterning in everything to do with the Earth has been planned. The only reasonable explanations are that aliens set up everything or God created heaven and Earth for our benefit.
If it was aliens who seeded the Earth from the start, then they did this more than 4.5 billion years ago – that is 4,500,000,000 years in the past. To have had such super-advanced abilities back then they must have evolved very early in the development of the universe. Assuming that they have survived the dangers of the cosmos, since that time they would have effectively evolved to become as perfect as God. Imagine how far humans will have evolved in the future over such a massive period. The time frame involved is 20 times greater than that covered since our forebears were small hamster-like creatures.
However, it is extremely unlikely that any life form could have evolved to such an advanced level so early in the development of the universe. That means the likelihood of God as the power behind the creation of the Earth seems irresistible. Even an open-minded atheist will have to admit that the possibility has now to be taken very seriously.
One assumption about God is that He has boundless powers – and any intellect that can balance the rules of physics so perfectly in favour of life has to be omnipotent.
The Sun and the Moon appear to be same size in the sky because the Moon is 1/400th of the Sun’s size but is, amazingly, 400 times closer to the Earth. Each of these heavenly bodies covers half of a Megalithic degree of the arc of the sky. If they could be viewed side by side they would mark a very neat 1 megalithic degree.
The question then is, why does He need humans, and, if He does, why does He not create them without imperfections and why does He not talk directly to them?
The answers to such questions are firmly in the realms of theological philosophy. Great minds have considered such questions since history began. Many believe that freewill has to exist and that God’s whole purpose is to create creatures that make their own judgements. Whatever the reason, it seems that there is some communication directed from the creator towards us today.
It appears that our planet and its Moon were built using ratios and units that relate to the Sun, and are so remarkable that they would, once found out, cause any intelligent life form to pay attention.
If the Earth was created, along with the Sun and the Moon – who planned them? What sort of a ‘God’ might have been responsible for our existence? How far did the intervention of this potential creator extend? Was it simply a matter of supplying the Earth with a suitable Moon, in order to ensure the sort of stability that would ultimately lead to advanced life, or was a much more tangible and personal relationship intended? How much did this creative force, no matter what form it might have taken, know about the ultimate result of the exercise? Was it aware that the intelligent species that finally lifted its head from the savannah to stare at the starry vaults of heaven would be a ten-fingered, ten-toed bipedal anthropoid?
If the Earth, Moon and Sun were created to produce intelligent life, how come our solar system is just a tiny dot in the vast expanse of the cosmos?
A new theory that has gained a lot of credence suggests that we might not be as unimportant as generally assumed since the early part of the 20th century.
For most of human history there has been a rather egotistic idea that we humans are entirely central to God’s creation. Everything was believed to have been made for our benefit. But ever since Nicolaus Copernicus suggested that the Earth was just one of many planets in a system with the Sun at its centre, the idea that we are just a dot in an infinite universe grew to become the most widely held view of science and most non-religious laypeople.
The Copernican, or cosmological, principle, as it is known, states that nothing distinguishes the position of Earth or our galaxy from any other place in the entire universe. But could this modern idea be wrong?
The Copernican principle today is based on two ideas: that the universe is both homogeneous and isotropic. Homogeneous means that whilst there may be localized differences, averaged over large enough scales the universe has the same properties everywhere. Isotropic means that the universe appears to have the same properties when viewed in any direction from every location; basically, the idea is that if you could plant your feet firmly on any alien planet at any point in the cosmos, the sky would look pretty similar to what we see from here, in every direction, which means that there is no centre and no outer fringe to the universe.
This principle was totally embedded in the cosmological establishment until 1998, when astronomers studying stellar explosions known as type 1a supernovae made a discovery that raised eyebrows around the world. It was accepted wisdom that supernovae are uniformly bright and therefore the fainter they appear the more distant they must be. But the furthest supernovae were so faint that they would have to be an impossible distance away. This suggested that at some time over the last 2 or 3 billion years they must have begun to accelerate away from us. Rather than the universe’s expansion slowing down as expected, it seemed as though it has been speeding up.
This problem was solved by inventing a hypothetical substance called ‘dark energy’. This undetectable energy was thought to pervade space, overwhelming the force of gravity and driving the accelerating expansion. No one really knows what it is, where it comes from or even if it exists at all, but it was accepted that this dark energy would have to account for around 73 per cent of the total mass-energy of the entire universe to be responsible for what we see.
Space exploration is now beginning to give us a better understanding of this makeup of the universe. The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) is a NASA Explorer mission that launched in June 2001 to make fundamental measurements of the properties of our universe as a whole. WMAP is considered to have been stunningly successful, completing a new Standard Model of Cosmology in January 2013.
By making accurate measurements of the cosmic microwave background fluctuations, WMAP was able to measure the composition of the universe to an accuracy of better than a few per cent of the overall density. The breakdown shows that 4.6 per cent is atoms (solid matter). More than 95 per cent of the energy density in the universe is in a form that has never been directly detected in the laboratory: 24 per cent is cold dark matter and 71.4 per cent is dark energy.
If 71.4 per cent of the energy density in the universe is in the form of dark energy, which has a gravitationally repulsive effect, it is just the right amount to explain both the flatness of the universe and the observed accelerated expansion. Whilst no one knows what this dark energy actually is, its observable properties are assumed to define its existence.
There is also an opinion expressed by George Ellis, a leading cosmology theorist at the University of Cape Town, who is focused on the philosophy of cosmology in that he takes the view that we need to think beyond describing what we consider to be the physical. He has raised an important suggestion: ‘If we analyse the supernova data by assuming the Copernican principle is correct and get out something unphysical, I think we should start questioning the Copernican principle.’
According to Ellis and other cosmologists, our uncertainty about galaxy distances could mean that the distribution of matter looks the same in all directions – and yet varies with distance from us. This suggests that the Earth might be sitting right in the middle of a ‘void’, an unbelievably vast spherical bubble in an otherwise homogeneous universe. This giant bubble contains the billions of stars and galaxies we see from Earth, but beyond that, where everything is too far away for us to see, the stars and galaxies are far more densely packed together.
This new theory leads to an even more astonishing conclusion. For things such as the cosmic background radiation to appear isotropic to us from within this void, our little planet would have to be at the centre of the entire visible universe!
This theory makes great sense of all the available evidence. Techniques to investigate this amazing possibility are being developed right now. But if the Earth is at the centre of all we see out in space, surely that makes us humans entirely special? Perhaps we are the whole reason for the visible universe existing at all? This seems like a theological idea, but it is entirely scientifically based.
Did the creator God build everything we see through our finest telescopes as a way to prepare the cosmos for human beings?
This could be the logical next question: Is there a message from the creator of the universe addressed to the modern world?
Whoever or whatever God is, He does not appear to have had any direct contact for a long time – except, of course, in the hearts of some religious believers. The scriptures of most religions have been frozen in time for millennia. There were many prophets who supposedly spoke with God in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but only two leaders of religion have interfaced directly with God since the prophet Muhammad died in Medina on 8 June 632. Both of those leaders are relatively recent: Sayyid ‘Ali Muhammad Shirazi, the Bab (1819–50), and his successor Mirza Husayn ‘Ali Nuri Baha’ Allah (1817–92). They left behind many volumes of supposed scriptures, all of which are deemed by their followers to be nothing less than the direct word of God.
According to Christian tradition, God made a brief personal appearance as a man travelling around a small patch of desert in the Middle East some 2,000 years ago. Born Yeshua, a Jewish teacher from a priestly bloodline, he is worshipped today under the Greek designation Jesus Christ and assigned the status of the ‘Son of God’ and the Jewish Messiah.
Those ancient otherworldly contacts by God were conducted in the style of their times: men with flowing beards standing on mountains holding tablets of stone bearing God’s words. Today, we might expect contact from the creator to take a different form.
Around 50 years ago, at a time when space research was all the rage and the USA and the USSR were vying to be the first nation to land men on the Moon, a brand new organization came into existence. SETI, which stands for Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, was the brainchild of an electrical engineer, who naturally focused his attention on radio astronomy. The man in question was Frank Drake, and what he wanted to know was whether someone, or something, out there in the depths of space might be trying to talk to us via radio waves.
Drake and others reasoned that in a universe that is filled with quite naturally occurring radio signals, there might be one or even several messages that had been generated intentionally – saying something as simple as ‘Hi there. We are here’. SETI originally had financial support from NASA, although it is now an independent organization. The whole idea captured the public imagination at the time and to some extent it still does. Millions of people throughout the world devote a chunk of their personal computer ‘down time’ to help SETI wade through the morass of radio waves that bombard the Earth every day, trying to work out if any of them might have been created intentionally. But what are they listening for? What sort of message would alien life forms choose to create on the off-chance that some other sentient living creatures might be listening in a time frame that could result in a response?
Drake’s work had a huge cultural impact, generating a fascination with alien life that helped to spark TV series such as Star Trek, and films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as countless sci-fi books.
It seems logical to assume that the laws of physics are something to which all sentient life forms would inevitably turn their attention. After all, any species that could either send or receive radio broadcasts of any kind would have to understand the basic laws of physics, and as a result SETI assumes that what we would be most likely to receive would be a mathematical pattern – for example, something relating to prime numbers, to pi, phi or to other number sequences, or mathematical equations that would stand out from the background of naturally occurring radio signals.
Radio emissions from space are perfectly natural in origin – they occur right across the electromagnetic spectrum – and because SETI could not listen to all of them, some decision had to be made as to the possible frequency an extraterrestrial transmitter might choose to use. In 1959 two young scientists from Cornell University in the USA addressed this problem in an article for Nature magazine. Phillip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi came to the conclusion that the best place to look for an intended signal would be in the 1420MHz range, since they reasoned that this was a fairly ‘quiet’ part of the spectrum and therefore one that a prospective communicator was likely to choose. SETI followed the pair’s advice and this is the frequency range that is still being monitored on a daily basis.
Whilst SETI has good intentions, from a statistical viewpoint what is the chance that we will actually ‘hear’ any message that has been sent, even assuming such a communication has ever existed? Frank Drake came up with what became known as the Drake equation. The conclusion was that there may well be thousands of intergalactic civilizations, and that any of them could be broadcasting messages into space, hoping to contact other life forms. Even if this is true, the chances of us latching onto such a signal are extraordinarily poor. SETI has now been tuned into space for a matter of only 50 years or so, whereas the Earth has existed for around 4.6 billion years. Humanity itself, in the form of Homo sapiens, has been present for around 200,000 years, though only capable of hearing any sort of radio broadcast for a century or so.
And, should we survive for a few more centuries, it may well be that radio signals are about as important to our lives as smoke signals or the pigeon post!
Even assuming there was an intelligent species out there somewhere that was trying to get in touch with their neighbours in space, they would have had to reach a period of technological expertise at the same time as us, or at least at a period commensurate with the fantastic distances involved in space. Bearing in mind that nothing in space is supposed to travel faster than the speed of light, and also recognizing that stars and galaxies exist at a vast distance from us, any proposed message that does reach us could have been travelling for thousands or millions of years. And if we should ever receive such an intended message, the culture that sent it may well have ceased to exist during the long intervening period, or else tired of sending messages of any sort. Supposing this is not the case, it would take an equally protracted period for our reply to get back to the source of the original message. All things considered, it doesn’t look good for intergalactic telephone calls.
Some astronomers are now beginning to rethink all their assumptions about the likelihood of ever finding alien life. Howard Smith, a senior astrophysicist at Harvard University, said in January 2011: ‘The new information we are getting suggests we could effectively be alone in the universe. There are very few solar systems or planets like ours… It means it is highly unlikely there are any planets with intelligent life close enough for us to make contact.’
Smith believes that the time has come to rewrite the famous Drake equation and bin its estimate of the likelihood of contacting alien life. When the formula was introduced, back in 1961, it multiplied factors such as the rate of star formation, the proportion of stars likely to have planets and the fraction that might develop intelligent life to suggest that there were likely to be around 10 detectable advanced civilizations in the Milky Way. The assumption was used to justify the creation of SETI, which today employs 150 scientists and other staff in the search for alien contact. But Smith’s 2011 paper, delivered at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, argued that the optimistic estimates put into the Drake equation have generated a grossly inflated value for the chances of finding alien intelligence.
Back in August 2004 an article appeared in the magazine New Scientist, authored by Paul Davies, then a scientist at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University (subsequently relocated to UNSW – University of New South Wales) in Sydney. Davies complimented SETI for its tireless efforts across four decades, but wondered whether radio signals are a reliable way of passing a message to another species, bearing in mind the timescale and distances involved. Wouldn’t it be more likely, Davies suggested, that any such species, which may be immeasurably older than our own, would leave us a more enduring message than a fairly random and easily overlooked radio signal?
Davies suggested that instead of radio transmissions any advanced creatures elsewhere in the galaxy or beyond would be more likely to have chosen to leave ‘artefacts’ in the vicinity of worlds that looked as though they might one day give rise to intelligent life – something that any such future species could not fail to recognize.
Meanwhile, Professor Christopher Rose, of Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Gregory Wright, a physicist with Antiope Associates, also in New Jersey, are on record as saying that the transmission by an extraterrestrial civilization of a radio signal, which may well have to be detected 10,000 light years away, does not make any sense. They also believe that it would be far more efficient to send us some kind of message inscribed on physical matter – a kind of ‘message in a bottle’. And they believe such a message could already be waiting for us in our own backyard. We merely have to find it, and to recognize it as a clear message.
Professor Rose observed that, when considering any sort of intergalactic communication, ‘if energy is what you care about, it’s tremendously more efficient to toss a rock’. Once radio signals pass us by they are gone forever, so aliens would have to beam signals continuously over millions of years. And since we have only had radio for a minuscule fraction of our existence as an advanced species it is quite likely that such signals could well have been missed.
Given that the Earth is in a constant state of flux, with mountains rising and falling, continents shifting and seas roaming the planet’s surface, the question arises as to what medium could sustain a message for millions or even billions of years? Well, the only place that has remained entirely stable is the Moon.
Could the Moon itself be a message? Once the ancient EMS system is applied to it, it shines out like a neon light on a wet and foggy night.
If there is a message being delivered to us in the shape of the relationship of the Earth, Moon and Sun there is no reason to attribute it to aliens because there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that aliens exist. But a creator God is thought to be entirely possible by the majority of scientists.
There are lots of reasons to suspect that such an entity did, and no doubt still does, exist.
If God did make life on Earth possible by His organization of the laws of physics and the structure of the Earth and Moon, did He leave it at that or did He create a message that we could understand, when we were ready?
To say that the Moon and its relationship with the Earth and the Sun is odd is a total understatement. And it is strange in the extreme that our Megalithic ancestors appear to have known about the underlying relationships and units of measure that arise from these relationships.
First of all there is the presence of solar eclipses – those times when the disc of the Moon fits neatly and absolutely across the disc of the Sun. If ever there was a message that said ‘Look! Take Notice!’ this is surely represented by the total darkening of the sky during the middle of the day. Total eclipses scared the hell out of our ancestors, and the astronomers of many ancient civilizations went to incredible lengths to predict them. By the laws of chance the possibility of such a happening is very, very remote. It works because the Moon is 1/400th part of the size of the Sun and because it is capable of standing 1/400th part of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The coincidence is deepened by that very round, decimal ‘400’. After all, even if such an outrageous happening as a solar eclipse did take place, the number involved could not have been any other.
Total eclipses of the sort we see today, and have seen throughout human history, did not always happen. In the distant past things were very different and they will not occur in the distant future. This is because the Moon’s orbit is expanding over time as it slows down. A ‘mere’ billion years ago, the Moon was around twice as large in the sky as it is today, and it took only 20 days to orbit the Earth. Also, one Earth ‘day’ was about 18 hours long, so none of the beauty of the EMS system existed.
The Moon is gradually receding from the Earth into a higher orbit, and it has been calculated that this will continue for about 50 billion years and then the Earth and Moon will be trapped in a ‘spin–orbit resonance’. At this point the Moon and Earth would rotate around their axes in the same time, always facing each other with the same side. At this time the Moon will be a mere speck in the night sky, lost among the background stars.
It follows that any message in the structure of the Earth– Moon–Sun relationship is time critical. It works now – in the human period of our planet’s lifecycle. With our present level of intelligence and our understanding of the laws of probability these patterns should be alerting us instantly to the fact that there is something very strange taking place in our own backyard.
If any such series of mathematical peculiarities were to be received by the scientists at SETI, news broadcasts all over the planet would be filled with shouts of ‘We have found evidence that there is intelligent life out there in space’. It is precisely the sort of message SETI is looking for and it exists in our own immediate environment. There is only one reasonable conclusion to be drawn: this is all part of a ‘set and forget’ system, the originator of which somehow knew how things would pan out with the passing of 4.6 billion years and that there would be people around with ten fingers who would be in a position, in terms of intelligence, to recognize what had taken place.
Ten fingers are important because this has caused humans to choose base ten as the standard means of counting. For example, it is conspicuous that the Moon completes 366 lunar orbits of the Earth in a neat 10,000 days – but it would seem very different if we had four fingers, or six fingers on each hand.
| Lunar orbits | Days | |
| Five fingers per hand (Base ten) | 366 | 10,000 |
| Four fingers per hand (Base eight) | 556 | 23,420 |
| Six fingers per hand (Base twelve) | 266 | 5,954 |
If all of the many Earth, Moon and Sun relationships illuminated by the EMS system are a blueprint, they refer to the finished product rather than to the point of creation. By finished product, I mean right now – the point at which human kind has reached some level of scientific and cultural maturity.
If God did create us for some greater purpose, we must surely be ripe – ready for direct communication from our maker. In a little more than a century and a half, the world has changed from a network of isolated communities – with no external communication for the masses, and only horses as the primary means of transport and the posted letter as the main means of communication over distance for the well-to-do – to an interconnected global village. People now routinely fly around our planet and even remote villages have television, email and the Internet to connect them to the entire world and stream them information. We are now, arguably, ready and able to understand a communication from God – in the language of 21st-century science rather than folklore and superstition.
The problem is that although we are largely intellectually mature, we also now have the means to destroy ourselves. The so-called Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union during the second half of the 20th century was only prevented from turning into the real thing thanks to the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) – the fact that both sides had nuclear weapons created a standoff. But now, just a few years later, we are in a position where less rational states are close to having the ability to deliver death on a gigantic scale. Some are driven by a godless pursuit of totalitarian dictatorship and others by a belief that their religious scriptures demand the destruction of everyone who does not worship God in their preferred way.
If there ever was a time when we need a communication from the intellect that planned the whole of creation – this is it. We need to have the next level of guidance, conceivably in an entirely explicit manner.
So, if the Moon is our wake-up call, what is the message?
The very size of the Moon may be part of a clue. The circumference of the Earth is 366 per cent greater than that of the Moon. And we can look at the same facts in a different way. The size of the Moon is 27.322 per cent that of the Earth, and of course 27.322 days is the number of days in the orbit of the Moon. This simply should not happen and it is not ‘numerology’ or random ‘number plucking’. These number relationships are very real and they occur time and again.
The reason we should quite definitely take notice is that we are dealing with related but different aspects of the Earth–Moon–Sun relationships and yet the numbers come out to the same each time. On the one hand we are dealing with the physical size of the bodies concerned and on the other we are talking about their orbital characteristics. These are not related and any relationship between them has changed across time. It is only now, at this particular point in the Earth’s development, that that they show these amazing correspondences.
Any one of these peculiarities might be put down to a strange coincidence. What is not half as easy to explain is why they appear so frequently and are all related numerically to each other. They are all variations on the same theme and they all rely in part on the size and orbital characteristics of the Earth, the Moon and the Sun. They all turn irrational numbers into a rational number: 27.322 × 366 = 10,000
If that is not shouting ‘pay attention’, I really can’t think what it would take to wake us up!
Scientists such as Paul Davies have said that we should be looking for a message of the ‘set and forget’ type. A medium that is either very big and robust, in order to endure for billions of years, or very small and in massive numbers so that some will survive through all kinds of catastrophe. But it could be both – the extremely large working together with the invisibly small to deliver a message of vital importance.
When it comes to the very large, the Moon fits the bill like nothing else could. Huge and unchanging across billions of years, it is visible to everyone on the planet on most days. It is the ultimate noticeboard.
So what in our environment could provide the other half of a potential message? The requirements are that this medium is:
• Small and robust enough to survive all varieties of disaster
• Has been around unchanged for several billions of years
• Can be found in every part of the planet
• Is known to contain a massive amount of information.
At first this question might seem to have no answer. The requirements sound impossible – but they are not.
What then could possibly fulfil all of these criteria? When Alan Butler and I began the search for something in nature that could provide humans with a reproducible and exact measure – it actually took us just a matter of days to realize there was only one solution. And that was the turning of the Earth on its axis. Nothing else works.
So, too, the question of what could be the safe repository of super-ancient knowledge. One answer lies inside every sinew of our bodies, every fibre of every leaf, of every plant and the slime trail of every snail. The answer is deoxyribonucleic acid – DNA, the instruction manual for all life.
Things don’t get much smaller than DNA. Most people are aware that DNA is the code of life itself. It exists in all living cells and contains the information necessary to create everything, from an amoeba to a blue whale. All the hereditary information that replicates any life form is held in the long strings of DNA, which even for the most basic of creatures is a fantastically complicated structure.
Inside cells, DNA exists as long chemical structures, which are called chromosomes. These chromosomes duplicate before a cell divides to create a copy. The whole business is incredibly sophisticated and yet even the very earliest creatures that inhabited the Earth already had DNA, or its companion RNA in the case of viruses, otherwise they could not have replicated.
The very existence of DNA has led many people to speculate that the presence of this most marvellous of molecules is, in itself, proof positive of the existence of God. The writer and researcher Lyall Watson suggested in his book Supernature that the odds against such a complex mechanism as DNA occurring by chance were greater than the known number of atoms in the universe.
The late Professor Sir Fred Hoyle, a well-respected member of the scientific community, once said: ‘Rather than accept the fantastically small probability of life having arisen through the blind forces of nature, it seemed better to suppose that the origin of life was a deliberate intellectual act. By “better” I mean less likely to be wrong.’
Meanwhile, Peter T. Mora of the Macromolecular Biology Section, Immunology Program, National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, wrote: ‘The presence of a living unit is exactly opposite to what we would expect on the basis of pure statistical and probability considerations.’
One influential figure, who eventually came to believe that DNA in particular may well point at an intelligence underpinning life, was Professor Anthony Flew. As discussed earlier in this book, Flew was a dyed-in-the-wool atheist until it became clear to him that the evidence amassed by science clearly demonstrated to his sceptical mind that intelligence must have been involved in the creation of DNA.
How could it be that random bits of matter could come together and create something as elegant and complex as DNA? In 2004, astrobiologist Paul Davies observed: ‘Most people take the existence of life for granted, but to a physicist like me it seems astounding. How do stupid atoms do such clever things? Physicists normally think of matter in terms of inert, clod-like particles jostling each other, so the elaborate organisation of the living cell appears little short of miraculous. Evidently, living organisms represent a state of matter in a class apart from the rest.’
It used to be thought, and still is in many scientific circles, that life developed in the chemical ‘soup’ that existed on the early Earth. Numerous attempts have been made to replicate what is supposed to have happened quite naturally. The first took place in the 1950s, when a graduate student from Chicago University created the exact conditions that were present in the primordial oceans of the Earth. By collecting the right chemicals together and then subjecting the mixture to synthetic lightning bolts, Miller was delighted to discover that he had created amino acids, which are the chemicals necessary for DNA and for life. Unfortunately, that is all he managed to create and to this day, despite repeated claims to the contrary, no scientist has actually created even a single-celled creature. We can read complex genomes, replace parts of cells with material from other cells and even clone animals, but up to the time of us writing this book nobody has created life. And as far as DNA is concerned, a fundamental mystery still remains: how DNA came about in the first place, because from what we understand to date, only DNA can create DNA.
No aspect of biology has received more attention in the recent past than DNA, which has been studied in minute detail in laboratories all over the world. One of the puzzles that has come to intrigue researchers over the years is why so much of the information within strings of DNA appears to do absolutely nothing. Huge amounts of information that have no apparent purpose whatsoever.
Physicist, cosmologist and astrobiologist Paul Davies has been as fascinated as we are by humanity’s attempts to contact other sentient species out there in space, but like us he is somewhat sceptical regarding the possible success of organizations such as SETI, for all the reasons outlined earlier. Nevertheless, Professor Davies does not rule out the chance of a contact occurring. He has suggested: ‘But what if the truth isn’t out there at all? What if it lies somewhere else? Now may be the time to try a radically different approach.’
Davies is also a supporter of the ‘set and forget’ message, proposing: ‘… a legion of small, cheap, self-repairing and self-replicating machines that can keep editing and copying information and perpetuate themselves over immense durations in the face of unforeseen environmental hazards’.
And then he went on to say: ‘Fortunately, such machines already exist. They are called living cells.’ Davies speculated that any message placed inside living cells – specifically within DNA – could last as long as life on Earth itself. We could, in effect, each be walking telegrams, though up to now we haven’t managed to read the message, or even to realize that it is present within us all.
A potential problem here might be that as life replicates, it also gradually mutates and Professor Davies pointed out that this might turn the original message into nonsense – were it not for one important fact: there are large sections of the DNA genome that appear to do nothing at all. These sections are generally labelled ‘junk DNA’ – apparently useless lumps of data that are more or less totally immune to degradation, even across vast periods of time.
The idea that DNA contains a message is one shared by more and more scientists.
When a team of genomic researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California presented their own findings in June 2004 the audience gasped in unison. Those listening simply could not believe what they were hearing from Edward Rubin and his team, who were reporting that they had destroyed huge sections of the genome of mice without it making any discernable difference to the animals under test. The result was truly amazing because the deleted sequences included what is known as ‘conserved regions’, which were previously assumed to have been protected because they contained vital information about functions. One of the sections removed by Rubin and his team was 1.6 million DNA bases long and another was 800,000 bases long, and yet the mice offspring grew and thrived as if nothing had happened.
It remains a fact that the redundant DNA sequences are as well protected as any other, which means that whatever information they contain has remained the same for billions of years. Paul Davies saw this as an ideal place to plant a message, or perhaps a whole series of messages, in the knowledge that it would stay intact for eons and even indefinitely. Elaborating on this possibility, he said: ‘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), and a simple image like a ragged circle resulted, the presumption of tampering would be inescapable.’
The available space within the DNA sequence could easily accommodate a wealth of information and, unlike a random radio message, it would remain present until the day someone decided to find out what it might say.
It seems strange that this information is coming to light at exactly the same time as we are beginning to realize just how peculiar our solar system, and in particular the Moon, truly is. But perhaps it isn’t strange at all, and it could well be that the ‘intention’ of whomever or whatever arranged things so carefully for us was, from the start, that there would come a time when we would be emotionally and intellectually ready to get a long and precise ‘letter from God’.
So, potentially, we have the sort of messages that many commentators are suggesting would be most likely: something very big and something extremely small – a twin approach that seems both sensible and logical.
If there was a message from the beginning of life on Earth 3.5 billion years ago, there could be no receptacle for it other than DNA. Everything else has been destroyed by the ravages of time and tide, meteor bombardment and the natural degradation of mountains, deserts, oceans and even continents. The only hiding place was in the cells of every speck of life clinging on to survival for the sake of a bigger, better, evolved future. As long as one species of something survived – the message would remain intact.
Those who deny evolution (usually on the basis of their unsophisticated analysis of ancient scriptures) surely deny God. God gave us eyes and brains and the power to reason – so why throw reason out of the window just because some low-rent religious teacher told you to? Do the reported words of Gautama Buddha, Yahweh, Jesus or the prophet Muhammad really represent what they meant to communicate? From my own limited researches into ancient Judaism and early Christianity, I suspect a lot of the original message has been lost through time and translation.
Surely life on Earth is a journey – a pathway from zero to somewhere special. We humans have a responsibility to play our part in our planet’s development. We are, to the best of our species’ knowledge, the highest form of intelligence anywhere – absolutely anywhere across all of time and space.
The process of inbuilt experimentation and improvement cannot be an accident of a crazed universe. Just as the starting rules of creation were unmistakably planned to produce life, so life itself appears to have been fixed to carry a substantial message.
But how do we know that DNA can be created so that it can carry a message above and beyond the coding that produces another frog, zebra or human? At the forefront of recent research is a genetic entrepreneur by the name of Craig Venter. His team of researchers have already created a new life form.
Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, USA, stitched together every ‘letter’ of a genetic code in their laboratory to form an artificial chromosome 1 million characters long. The organism they shaped was very humble – a variation of a bacterium that causes mastitis in goats. In truth it was not the creation of life but an impressive construction of a new entity from existing building blocks.
Venter is a smart man but he is not playing God, as some people have suggested. Not by a long way.
However, Venter and his team decided to go beyond the manual for self-replication and add to the ‘invented’ creature some information that was not directly necessary, in order to ensure that the genome would always be identifiable as synthetic – they spliced fresh strands of DNA into the code to provide a biological ‘watermark’ that would do nothing for the final organism except carry coded messages.
One of those ‘watermark’ messages hidden in the code was a line from the celebrated Irish author James Joyce: ‘To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.’
James Joyce died in 1941 and his much-admired words might survive for 100 or even 1,000 years or more before the civilization that appreciates his prose finally ends. But as part of the Earth’s pool of DNA his genius might endure for a billion – even a trillion – years. There is no greater immortality than that which comes with the certainty of being passed on from generation to generation. An enviable message in a world where death and degradation are otherwise guaranteed.
Venter’s efforts are admirable but probably unimportant in the grand scheme of real life. Unimportant other than that they demonstrate that messages can reside in DNA – the basic coding of life. Immutable and unchanging.
However, science is moving fast.
In mid 2012 it was reported that George Church, a bioengineer, and Sri Kosuri, a geneticist, at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, had successfully stored an astonishing 5.5 petabits of data (that’s around 700 terabytes – or 14,000 large Blu-ray discs) in just one gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record a thousandfold. DNA was being treated as a biological digital storage device.
DNA has been identified as a potential storage medium for three reasons: it can store one bit per base (and a base is only a few atoms in size); it’s volumetric; and it’s incredibly stable – DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years without any special conditions.
The study of DNA has grown rapidly. Whilst it took years for the original Human Genome Project to analyse a single human genome of around 3 billion DNA base pairs, modern microfluidic chips can do it in hours. Scientists now foresee a world where biological storage would allow us to record anything and everything without limit. The bottom line is that DNA is like an invention from a distant science fiction future, where the impossible has become possible. But the odd point is that DNA is the most ancient ‘machine’ imaginable, being billions of years old.