Exo-archeology is a dormant science yet is does have it good points. The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence project was established in 1984. Today it has 150 scientists looking for extra-terrestrial life forms and artifacts. It is important not to be biased about what form extra-terrestrial life may take.
In popular culture people are far too willing to make summary judgments and close down an investigation. Science fiction writers such as Jules Verne, Frank Herbert and Ray Bradbury have provided ideas for many to consider about green men ‘out there’. The potential forms of Green Men, Men in Black, Bin-creatures of Planet Alpha-Beta and even of the Universe itself cannot be conclusively known right now, a priori. Let’s not bias our judgments about what we should be looking for, and instead leave the inductive reasoning parameters set to ‘maximum imaginable’.
Humanity as a ‘civilized’ being is merely 7000 years old and for most of that period the science was crude compared with today. In 7000 years ordinary people would believe that the science of today is crude. Imagine being limited by quantum-cosmological topology and inabilities to overcome quantum determinism at the material level of four dimensions!
Science fiction writers of course can postulate innumerable novel shapes of extra-terrestrial civilization few of which need to resemble anything found upon the Earth. Early astronomers have of course been deceived by the patterns in observable fields that resemble man-made constructions; anthropomorphic anticipation criteria in observations are natural enough when one hasn’t much of an idea about what sort of things an extra terrestrial civilization might build.
The 13.3 billion year old Universe had an origin out of nothing or next to nothing at a singularity of infinitely small size. The math theories that model the Universe break down at that scale very often and where the Universe came from before that is left to additional speculation. There are many people that have thought about what existed before the nothing at the beginning of the Universe for millennia.
The philosopher Plato wrestled with the issue about forms, and the neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus became an emanation theorist positing in what way The One issued the Universe essential from nothing-matter was believed to be the lowest form of things, and evil was a wicked illusion. Some modern cosmologists posit the entire Universe could have been created by intelligent life forms other than God. The weak anthropic principle supports the concepts derived in multiverse theory (based on M-Theory and super-string theories) of a natural selection of Universes created through intelligent design.
Exo-archeology should not be looking for simple anthro-construction verisimilitude patterns in space, they should be searching for largest scale and intermediate range patterns of alterity (I mean patterned change to physical matter here) of physical constants in ways that are inconsistent with what should be expected. Unfortunately science is still discovering the ‘normal’ content of the Universe and thus the comparison of anomalous patterns to normal ones isn’t generally practical.
Myself-I published a book with a photo from the Hubble of the center of the Milky Galaxy (the general direction) a few days before (2 or 3) the tidal wave in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Thailand. When it was reported that the largest light in the Earth’s sky in history beside the sun had occurred then caused by x-ray emissions or such from a black hole or super-nova event at the center of the Milky Way galaxy (it wasn’t in human eye visible wavelengths) it made me think; could gravity waves associated with huge stellar events that may travel at the speed of light have set off the undersea quake?
Because the phenomena happened on my birthday it was all even stranger, and I had just completed painting a home for someone from Thailand. If the Universe was design what sort of methods would the designers be capable of using to communicate with mere mortals? Light signals with gravity waves-when gravity waves can be measured perhaps that field will produce interesting results if they can ever be measured or actually exist.
Cosmologists have followed up Augustinian theories of determinism with a vengeance. The ongoing post-Newtonian Universe paradigm provides much material in support of the concept of physical determinism. The entire Universe has grown like a mustard seed to a tremendous size with bound physical criteria regarding what will occur in the long range. The complete effective nature of calculus in discovering the history and future of the Universe is founded upon deterministic criteria.
Free will seems to be the primary possible exception to overall determinism, and it is useful here therefore to consider something of the Christian ideas about pre-destination of a Calvinist sort. Not from a doctrinal point of view but from a schematic point of view some of the concepts of how determinism and free will can exist for the human soul become apparent. If free will does exist then extra-terrestrial life may have it as well.
Consider that within the unified field criteria for the formation of the Universe that God purposed free will choices in it such that an individual could be saved or unsaved according to himself. God then pre-destined that every human being would have two choices. God may have made it easier to make the choice to be saved and provided grace to drive the soul in that direction something like setting a prevailing wind toward a particular destination, yet obviously the inventive and determined individual might chose to go against the tides of God, sail into the ill winds of eternal hell and end up in perdition.
Free will would let each individual make his choice about where they would go, and though God may know what each individual would choice a priori they nonetheless each have the free choice to accept Jesus Christ as their Savior and do his will receiving a little merit in the process as a sort of holiday bonus for being good or become a broken form like an oil coated pelagic cormorant with a broken wing tied to a dead albatross hung about a sailors neck who made the wrong choice and ran into the rocks of the furies of Yipswitch and legions of Doom.
It may be easier to say that each mortal could have a Feynman diagrammatic liberty to adhere to either of two equally attractive particle packets yonder and that a conscious will is free to make the choice. Quantum super-position presents possibilities in the non-selected or non-downloaded realm that may not exist in the plainly material world. Exo-archeologists may search in quantum mechanical events and relations to potential extra-dimensions in the future for intelligent designs and channels of communication or even living.
It is believed that God was the ‘I Am’ who pre-existed the nothing from which the Universe was created. Augustine believed that ‘the Earth’ mentioned in Genesis referred to the unformed fundamental building blocks of mass. In reading one of ‘The Great Ideas; books edited by Mortimer Adler in 1960 recently on ‘Theology and Religion’ I found an interesting article on Augustine’s ideas about the relationship of God and The Word of God to the issuance or creation of this Universe that fit in well with the ongoing scientific speculations paradigmatically speaking regarding the initial singularity or membrane. Space-time of course is a phenomena experienced by people in space-time.
God is eternal and that means that everything is in the present. Past, present and future are a sub-species, and cosmological theorists regard the essential theories of physical cosmology as time reversible; the math works equally well in both directions and it is for reasons of thermodynamic selection of incomplexity that time moves in one direction until the Universe is ‘spent’. It may be that even that assumption of time flowing in one direction along with space does not exist in black holes and other fields of unknown structure. Extra-terrestrials may build in unusual places once they have overcome the oppression of mass cultural ignorance.
Some believe that the pace of thinking may be equivalent to energy levels and life-span. If neutron star beings could think it might be very slowly with a thought spaced apart millions of years. Extra-terrestrial may live and communicate in advanced forms that only a vast and wide-ranging, protracted search for Intelligent Design might find unless the Exobiologicals or exo-sentients choose to shine a bright light on the people of the Earth.
