We Are Not Alone

That got me thinking pretty hard about a lot of things, from religious ideas to mathematical odds. Sooner or later I came to the conclusion that if some divine intelligence had created us there was no particular reason why that same entity could not have created other worlds, other dimensions, realities our limited human brains cannot possibly comprehend.

Mm hmm. . . But honestly, Arty, (can I call you Arty?) that seems like such a fundamentally basic conclusion;  especially to students of The Urantia Book, who’ve had to come to grips with an actual numerical description of the inhabited material universe,  in the number of inhabited planets and estimates of its size that stagger the most vivid imagination.  Certainly, I suppose anyone could throw enormous numbers out there just to “stagger the imagination,” but there are hundreds of such numbers and they all reflect a consistent and coherent relationship that, well, makes compelling sense.  But a big part of the “staggering” comes when you read that just seven— “7”— galaxies like the Milky Way Galaxy— constitute the entire inhabited universe—  in this current universe age.

Trying to wrap my head around the gigantic number of stars out there in a huge array of galaxies, I began to wonder about the odds of there being other planets that might support life. All the planetary discoveries in the last few years strengthen the notion that no matter how unlikely the spark of life, the sheer odds are that it has been struck other places.

Exactly so. I wonder if the 24% who’ve seen UFOs (see below) would be shocked to hear that there are 619 inhabited worlds in our immediate system.  But I’ll bet they’d raise both eyebrows to learn that the projected number of inhabited mortal worlds in just the seven major galaxies is Seven Trillion.

More, carbon isn’t the only possible building block for life, DNA isn’t the only recipe for molecular combination or the storage and replication of information, and oxygen isn’t the only gas worth breathing. Even on this planet a wide variety of creatures use existing resources in different ways, from worms that live at the mouth of scalding hot submarine steam vents to bacteria that eat plastic.

Art, you’ll be thrilled to hear that there are seven distinct physical types as well as thousands upon thousands of minor variants of these seven differentiations:

1. Atmospheric types.
2. Elemental types.
3. Gravity types.
4. Temperature types.
5. Electric types.
6. Energizing types.
7. Unnamed types.

If you said we’re an atmospheric type, you can haz a gold star.  When the UB was written in the early part of the 20th century, our atmosphere was almost ideal for human habitation of the  “mid-breathers;”  maybe not so much these days.  But humans types can also be modified to live on sub-breather (think Mars) worlds, and super-breather (think Venus) worlds;  and if you could hang for a few million years, you’d probably see that happen. But by then you could be half way to Paradise; not a hard choice.

This talk is not new. There are entire organizations devoted to the pursuit of the truth about aliens and alien visitation. You wouldn’t believe the list for these groups in the US alone. The real possibility of life on other planets— and visitors coming here from them— has seeped gradually into our culture to such an extent that a recent AOL poll with a sample size in the hundreds of thousands reveals (last time I checked) that 73% of us believe extraterrestrials have visited Earth, 24% of us have seen a UFO(!)  and 76% believe that the government is covering up the existence of extraterrestrial life.  To those who say that if aliens are real they would reveal themselves, I say one in four is such a big number that perhaps they already have!

Of course they’re real; as real as we are.  And it’s not surprising that 24% have seen them in our skies. My first personal experience occurred in 1979 at about 2 in the morning while watching a meteor shower on a clear August night.  Two pale green, pea-sized objects, moving abreast of each other at breathtaking velocity, totally silent, coming out of the north to south down the front range area of Broomfield, Colorado,  executed a 100° right turn, i.e., a little more than a right angle— directly over my head, with the outside object pivoting around the inner object;  and in three seconds they had vanished over the western horizon.

I have also accidentally photographed UFOs while shooting landscapes in rural Colorado with a film camera.  I was unaware of the objects when I took the pictures, but they were obvious in the developed prints.  Under magnification, two classic “disks” exhibit equal blurring at the ends;  hard to say what direction or speed they might have been moving.

How did we get so comfortable with this kind of talk? Well, there are those who contend that Star Wars, Independence Day, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Star Trek, The Day The Earth Stood Still and others Hollywood products have been the government’s way of gradually getting us used that aliens are real.

Um, no.  The government didn’t make any of those movies.  They are all an expression of creative cultural science fiction in a free society.  But they have had the effect of introducing the idea of extraterrestrial visitors into the mainstream of culture in a practical way.

This slow desensitization would help us avoid global panic, because the challenge to orthodox religious beliefs and the notion that our governments are powerless to protect us in the face of far superior technology might very well upset and frighten vast swaths of the population. It’s an intriguing idea, this programmed desensitization, although it begs the question who might have such a broad and longterm view as to be able to orchestrate such a program, and how could they keep their lips zipped for so long? Maybe the aliens are helping.

Re-examining the ignorance-based conclusion that we are “alone” in an incomprehensibly vast universe of enormous galaxies of stars, that our little planet is the sum total of the evolutionary power of life to propagate intelligent creatures, is laughably absurd in its arrogant hubris.  But it’s just as stupid to assume that the world of today would “panic” to learn that a distant planet of mortal creatures had visited us decades ago, that they’re many centuries more advanced than we are, and that they’re only interested in us as an additional source of exotic protein.

Famed sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” How would aliens transport themselves across the vast distances of space? ~snip

Just like “Prot” said in the film K-PAX,  If they told us very much about it, we’d blow ourselves up;  or worse, someone else.

Of course you don’t have to go that far from the mainstream to find folks who believe in alien visitation. Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper claims to have had documented alien company when he was up in space, and despite the fact that Earth Day was last week, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell feels that the real action is elsewhere. He grew up in Roswell, New Mexico, and claims to have been told things as a boy by people who witnessed perhaps the most famous UFO event of our time. “Our destiny,” Mitchell says, “in my opinion, and we might as well get started with it, is [to] become a part of the planetary community. … We should be ready to reach out beyond our planet and beyond our solar system to find out what is really going on out there.”

They guy’s an astronaut. He’s been out there. I can’t help but wonder what he actually knows. How about you? Do you think we’re being visited? Have you been visited yourself? Have you seen something you can’t explain in the sky, something that leaves with the feeling there really is something going on up there? If this means we are really being visited and the government is covering it up, how do you think life on earth would change if the news emerged?

Urantia is a young world in a young system; even though there are numerous worlds in our neighborhood, the ones with the technology to violate our air space are all much, much older and more advanced than anything we even imagine.  That means they are most likely aware—as planets— of their reason for being in the universe.  And that means they are respectful of the over-care of the spiritual government, which controls the nature of the contact of one evolutionary world with another.

That means, with the exception of the possibility that aliens have actually crashed and have been marooned here, as guests of the government, the chances of them holding a “Get To Know Your Inter-galactic Neighbors Day” on the White House lawn are zero. It’s not that it would precipitate panic as much as it would precipitate philosophical chaos in practically every religion on the planet— all of whom are operating on 2000 year old cosmologies.

How do you think politics and governance might change in the face of such a major paradigm shift?

Eventually.  But.  Witness the way the Republican party is coping with its immanent death. They’ll keep scratching and clawing like a dead animal until every last drop of stupid is discharged from the death throes.  And the same will hold true with the flat earth politicians and backward-looking social groups that watch Fux News as if their life depended on it.

Do you think we would instantly have world peace because we would know beings superior to us in technology and wisdom were watching?

Of course not.  They simply would not interfere in any of our backward evolutionary struggles.

Do you think these beings would continue to watch us stumble and bumble along after their big announcement, torturing and killing each other and the planet, or would they guide us, help us, give us answers to eternal questions? What do you think those answers might be?

Ha!  Do you really think the answers aren’t already here— and are already being ignored??  Do you really believe more people would believe the truth—already available on our world— simply because aliens tell us??  Come on, Arty.  Even if Jesus came down here his own self, with cosmic spigots blazing full on, and spelled it out for Sean Hannity and his monkey followers in an 8 hour special, they would STILL call him a Commie-Fascist-Socialist Anti-Christ! and berate him 24-7 — a hundred-fold worse than they’re sabotaging Obama right now.

Urantia Book readers like us— see no magic bullets ever making massive shifts in mainstream thought;  we’re (society)  just too mired in cosmological error and confusion to catapult mainstream thinking into a true cosmology for the 21st century.  Some readers make the case that the revelation has, in fact, already failed;  that it was timed to coincide with the awakening of consciousness that occurred in the sixties, and it simply missed the boat because there was no effort to get the book into the hands of thinking men and women.

The Urantia Book itself predicts that  the social readjustments, the economic transformations, the moral rejuvenations, and the religious revisions of Christian civilization would be drastic and revolutionary— if the living religion of Jesus should suddenly supplant the theologic religion about Jesus— in other words, most of current Christianity.

Nevertheless, the appearance of the book has provided us with the cosmological revelation of an age, but what we’re able— and willing— to do with it remains in doubt.

Religion does need new leaders, spiritual men and women who will dare to depend solely on Jesus and his incomparable teachings.  If Christianity persists in neglecting its spiritual mission while it continues to busy itself with social and material problems, the spiritual renaissance must await the coming of these new teachers of Jesus’ religion who will be exclusively devoted to the spiritual regeneration of men.  And then will these spirit-born souls quickly supply the leadership and inspiration requisite for the social, moral, economic, and political reorganization of the world.

The hour is striking for a rediscovery of the true and original foundations of present-day distorted and compromised Christianity— the real life and teachings of Jesus.
—The Urantia Book