Fermi's paradox Archives - The Day After The Singularity

I made my media debut on Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland podcast recently. It was both fun and challenging. Being a novice, I expected to stumble a bit. And I did. Thankfully, Whitley was there to pick me up, dust me off and put me back on my feet. Every time. Thank-you, Whitley!

I have to admit that I was a little bit overwhelmed by his effusive introduction. My book is the product of twenty years work. The journey was long, open-ended and always uncertain. Arrival was never guaranteed and never assumed. There was a lot of life that happened along the way that put everything in doubt. I really didn’t think about it all that much as I was living it– I was single-minded, focused on the next step, and then the next, and so on – until I heard Whitley welcome me to Dreamland- and then it hit me – all at once – that I’d actually gotten there.

The journey began around the 50th anniversary of the Roswell Incident. Colonel Philip J. Corso published The Day After Roswell and there was a real sense that Disclosure was right around the corner. I was following the story closely. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of the UFO phenomenon thanks to my own experiences starting when I was a kid. So it was a very exciting time. It was also a very trying time for me personally. Through a confluence of events, including my Dad’s sudden, unexpected death, I reached an inflection point in my life. I was miserable at work. Corporate America can be soul crushing. The writings of Carlos Casteneda had a big influence on me and I could hear the words of the Yaqui Indian Sorcerer Don Juan in my head. “A path is just a path, without heart.” My path no longer had a heart. I needed a new one. So I quit.

I was unmarried with no children so I could just take my life in a new direction and I did. I had family in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the time, so I packed my bags and moved to New Mexico. I looked at it as a life ‘reboot.’ My plan was to just relax and let my head clear until I was ready to figure out what to do next. I did that for a while, keeping my eyes open for a new path forward. Then one day I was reading the paper and an ad caught my eye. Whitley Strieber will be appearing at an Albuquerque bookstore to sign books and give a talk. I had read his books Communion, Transformation, Confirmation, etc., so I went to see Whitley.

When I got to the bookstore, all the seats were taken and there was a crowd standing behind the seats, so I joined the crowd in the back. We were all waiting for Whitley to begin speaking when I realized I was standing next to Richard Hoagland. I had been following the latest controversy regarding the ‘Face on Mars’ and the infamous “Cat-Box” image, which had just been released by NASA. I introduced myself to Richard and explained that I’d been a graphic arts specialist in the publishing industry and had processed countless images in the course of my career. I knew exactly what had been done to the image and told Richard that no junior person in my field would have ever applied that filter. It seemed a transparent attempt to distort and obscure The Face. I knew I wasn’t telling Richard anything he didn’t already know, but it was a bonding opportunity. I understood his outrage over the “Cat-Box” trick.

Long story short, I ended up going to work for Richard and The Enterprise Mission. Before I left my Corporate America j-o-b, I’d made the transition from print to digital. I learned to design websites back when html was hand-coded. It was really not my thing, but I also got into 3-D modeling and animation, which I enjoyed. I had a unique skillset (especially in Albuquerque, New Mexico back then), a high-end Mac and some exotic software that not many others had. Richard was planning a documentary film about video from NASA Space Shuttle mission STS-80 showing multiple UFOs zipping about in the Earth’s atmosphere and what looked like some sort of exotic weapons test, so he hired me to do the CGI for the film. It was the first of an unlikely series of coincidences.

I built 3-D models of the space shuttle and the Earth and did some tests shots, but nothing ever came of it. Richard went to Florida to investigate some archeological controversy and had a massive heart attack while there. He spent months in the hospital. It was a miracle he survived. The documentary did not. When a film production shuts down, crews scatter quickly, looking for the next gig. I was rooming with a local PBS director who was directing our documentary and I no longer had family in New Mexico, so it was back to California for me.

I knew I could make a living as a consultant, while I kept an eye out for my next opportunity. I’d gotten a little taste of the Disclosure movement and I wanted more. My next chance came in 2001 in the aftermath of the original Disclosure Project press conference when Dr. Steven Greer took his Disclosure show on the road. I contacted Greer about arranging a film crew to cover the August 4th, Disclosure press conference in L.A. I had well-placed friends in Hollywood, who helped arrange a crew of young, up and coming filmmakers to cover the press conference.

My plan was to use the footage to make a short film on the desktop. I mixed Disclosure testimony with CGI antigravity craft and called it Beyond 2001. It was an attempt to envision the post-Disclosure world. My hope was that some of the young filmmakers would catch the Disclosure bug and maybe show the film to some of their bosses, resulting in a budget and full-length film. That was the plan.

Things did not go as planned. I’ll just hit the highlights: The partnership with Greer didn’t work (creative/philosophical differences). He didn’t like the short film I made. And the young Hollywood up and comers didn’t catch the Disclosure bug. They only saw the project in terms of their careers. It didn’t seem like the right move. They weren’t sure it was for real was another factor. Almost without fail, the first response I would get upon screening was, “Is this for real?”

What’s interesting is, while things didn’t go as planned, they still went. Through sheer happenstance I was introduced to documentary film director Suzanne Bauman, who was very knowledgeable about the subject. She liked my short film. We became partners, which was a big coup for me. Suzanne is an Academy Award Nominee for her film about Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Jackie: Behind the Myth, and is among the most brilliant filmmakers in the world. And Richard was back in the saddle! Hoagland, after having recovered from his brush with death, came out to California, met with Suzanne, my friends, etc., we had dinner meetings and strategy sessions and still it went nowhere. I thought maybe a documentary just wasn’t sexy enough for the Hollywood types. I wrote a fictional screenplay about the UFO cover-up. That didn’t fly either.

I am not a businessman. People in Hollywood who get movies made are businessmen. I did the best I could. I made blistering arguments about the size of the Universe, the inevitability of advanced extraterrestrial life, Fermi’s paradox, etc. In the end, none of it mattered. It was just a bridge too far at the time. Fortunately, my Hollywood friends had some practical advice- “you’d be a lot more marketable if you’d written a book,” they told me.

I thought, okay- so, I’ll write a book. I knew how to produce one from my days in the publishing industry. I just had to figure out how to write one. The great visionary Arthur C. Clarke once said you have to write about a million words before you’re any good at it. Well, if Sir Arthur had to write a million words, how many would I have to write before I got good at it? Ten million? A hundred million? The first couple drafts were not good.

My plan was to use Fermi’s paradox as the framework for my Disclosure narrative. I would make the case that Fermi paradox theorists were right that someone before us should’ve already colonized the Galaxy- and they have, including Earth, meaning we are part of a much larger civilization spread throughout the Galaxy. I had the Moon data suggesting it was an artificial satellite made from a hollowed-out planetoid. I had LaViolette’s work on pulsars suggesting a radio message for Earth. And of course, the “embarrassment of riches” that is UFO evidence. I had the Disclosure project testimony. I thought I could make a pretty good case. Then I discovered the technological Singularity.

There’s a well-known Buddhist saying that the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. I felt like I’d travelled a thousand miles only to came upon a sign that said: Must walk another thousand miles. I don’t remember exactly how I first heard about the Singularity. I think it was probably an article on the Internet about Google Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near. Whatever the case, once I got my hands on a copy of Kurzweil’s book, I had both a Eureka! moment and an “oh crap,” moment.

As I read Kurzweil’s take on Fermi’s paradox that we’re alone in the Universe and we’re going to be the civilization that colonizes the Galaxy and eventually the entire Universe, I realized he was completely unaware of the Disclosure movement, UFO evidence, Moon data, the pulsar beacon network, etc., and ironically, the post-Singularity world he envisions is very similar to what close encounter experiencers have reported: direct mind-to-mind communication, the blurring of the lines between biology and technology and between what’s real and what’s not. What’s more, I realized Kurzweil was unaware that the type of evidence he expects should exist if ETs had achieved post-Singularity civilization circles literally right overhead every day (made explicit by the Total Solar Eclipse). And when I discovered his prediction that there would be a non-random group of stars somewhere in the heavens if extraterrestrials had already been through the technological Singularity, I knew I had to rewrite my book – yet again – because I knew of just such a grouping of stars, thanks to Dr. Paul LaViolette’s work on the pulsar beacon network laid out in his book, Decoding the Message of the Pulsars. And I knew that I was facing another thousand miles… but I knew I had it.

I never really thought about it all that much, but it all flashed before me like a near death experience, as I listened to Whitley’s introduction. Then the interview went by in a flash. Whitley had said it would go smoothly beforehand, and it did for the most part, but afterwards all I could think about were the things I forgot to mention, the things I left out.

One regret was the 1991 Total Solar Eclipse (TSE) in Mexico when hundreds of Mexicans had video cameras at the ready for an appearance of the ‘Masters of the Stars,’ as foretold in the 1,200-year old Mayan prophecy known as the ‘Dresden Codex.’ I’m glad I told the anecdote about the wild coincidence that brought the Dresden Codex to my attention on the day that I’d been writing about the 1991 eclipse, but I failed to explain the deeper significance of the UFO/TSE event in Mexico beyond the old Mayan prophecy and how it’s our Rosetta stone for understanding life in the Universe.

The great science populist Isaac Asimov once called the Total Solar Eclipse the greatest coincidence in history. He was wrong. The TSE occurs because the Moon is 1/400 size of the Sun and 1/400 of the distance between the Earth and Sun, but it’s not a coincidence. UFOs appearing during the Total Solar Eclipse draws attention to the engineering of the Earth-Moon-Sun system. The TSE reveals the Sun’s corona, which acts as a natural coronagraph like astronomers use to block the Sun’s glare so they can study its atmosphere. Understanding solar weather is critically important. Solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) are a threat to civilization/life on Earth. There’s an even greater threat to the solar system. Dr. Paul LaViolette discovered a warning encoded in the non-random location of pulsars around the Galaxy’s one radian point. The galactic core occasionally erupts, sending out a superwave of cosmic dust and radiation that could cause the Sun to send lethal flares our way. The Sun could even go supernova. By periodically calling attention to the Sun’s corona, the TSE reinforces the warning embedded in the pulsar beacon network. It also implies the ‘Masters of the Stars’ are the Builders of the Moon, who seeded life here on Earth in the aftermath of some distant technological Singularity, somewhere else long, long ago.

My interpretation based on Webre’s context communication theory is that UFOs seen and videotaped at the Dresden Codex Total Solar Eclipse event point to a new model of the Universe based on the technological Singularity, which posits that life in the Universe is engineered by a post-Singularity civilization. It’s an update of the Extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) for the UFO phenomenon that I call Post-Singularity Extraterrestrial Transmigration hypothesis (PSETH). Simply put the idea is that we’re not merely being visited by aliens from afar, we’re part of this post-Singularity extraterrestrial civilization that has been colonizing the Galaxy and probably the entire Universe since the original technoSingularity.

Wow, now that I read what I just wrote above, I’m not so sure I regret not trying to explain all that. I’m not sure my book translates all that well to media interviews and sound bites. At least, I haven’t figured out how to do it adequately to this point. I guess that’s why I had to write a book in the first place, and why a documentary or a screenplay just wasn’t going to cut it. I hope everyone that may have found me somewhat incomprehensible at times will read the book.

All things considered, I think Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland was the perfect venue for my debut. Whitley was a very gracious host. I was totally blown away by his introduction and I’m so grateful to him for that. It was a humbling experience. Thank-you, Whitley!

For me, the journey that led to The Day After the Singularity began by happenstance with an ad for a book signing and a lecture in Albuquerque, New Mexico. How fitting that I’d get my first media exposure on Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland- also by happenstance!

As official Disclosure unfolds in the mainstream media, old habits die hard. Yes, UFOs are real, but they just can’t be ET. So the Times turned to an old school scientist from academia for reassurance. Senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for astrophysics Leon Golub said the possibility that UAPs (don’t call them UFOs) are extraterrestrial “is so unlikely that it competes with many other low-probability but more mundane explanations.” He added “there are so many other possibilities — bugs in the code for the imaging and display systems, atmospheric effects and reflections, neurological overload from multiple inputs during high-speed flight.”

Blah blah blah… Put aside for the moment that the Navy already ruled out his mundane alternatives, Golub couldn’t be more wrong. The whole point of Fermi’s paradox is that they should be here. The Universe is so big and so old that some other more advanced civilization should’ve been here by now. Many times. This is what Manhattan Project scientist Enrico Fermi told his colleagues, including Edward Teller, at Los Alamos way back in 1950 when discussing UFOs, then called flying saucers.

Fermi made the simple but profound observation that there were so many stars in the Galaxy that if just 10 percent had planets and 10 percent of those planets were capable of evolving life and 10 percent of those life-bearing planets develop a technological civilization and so on, there would be thousands, maybe millions, of civilizations in our Galaxy. The only real question was whether or not interstellar travel was possible. Teller pooh-poohed it, but Fermi thought it might be doable. If so, then where are they? Well, the short answer is they are here.

The Fermi paradox exists solely because of denial, which is rooted in our assumptions about the Universe. The first Big Assumption was that the Earth was flat. From our tiny perspective it certainly seems that way, but the flat Earth assumption fell away about two thousand years ago after Eratosthenes, curator of the library of Alexandria, proved the Earth was a globe. Eratosthenes did this by measuring shadows on the summer solstice in two cities known to be a certain distance apart. From this simple experiment, Eratostenes was able to show not only that the Earth was a big ball, but also make a fairly accurate calculation of its size. It’s kind of mind-boggling that the flat Earth assumption has made a bit of a comeback here in the age of geosynchronous satellites and space flight.

The second Big Assumption was that Earth was at the center of the Universe. Another seemingly reasonable deduction. The Sun, Moon, planets and stars appear to revolve around the Earth. When Copernicus floated the idea that the Sun not the Earth was at the center and that the Earth revolved around the Sun there was all sorts of objections. It certainly doesn’t feel like the Earth is moving. Some said if it was moving there would be tremendous winds and the Earth would quickly leave the Moon behind. But along came Galileo and the telescope and the second Big Assumption went the way of the first one.

The third Big Assumption is that mankind is the alpha dog of the Universe, the crowning achievement in all creation. This assumption is an offshoot of the Second Big Assumption. After all, if the Earth really was at the center of a Universe created by an almighty deity and we’re Top Dog, then it stands to reason that everything was made for us. It’s basically a Western religious belief that we are the whole point of all creation. This is where the long-held assumption that we are alone in the Universe comes from.

This Third Big Assumption that we are the biological center of the Universe has eroded over time as the science of astronomy has matured. The writing was on the wall well before the Hubble telescope gave us two images that have settled the issue for all intents and purposes. The Hubble Deep Field and Ultra Deep Field images reveal a Universe far beyond our ancestor’s ability to imagine.

Over ten days, Hubble peered into a slice of sky the equivalent of a dime on edge at a distance of 75 feet to produce the Hubble Deep Field.[i] The image showed there were, in fact, 3,000 galaxies in this little strip of empty space.[ii] The Hubble Ultra Deep Field made an even deeper reach out into the void, capturing 10,000 galaxies residing in the thin edge of nothingness.[iii]

The Big Picture looks like this: there are more than 100 billion galaxies in the universe that are filled with stars and planets like beaches with sand.[iv] Typical galaxies hold between 10 million and one trillion stars. Planets are surely even more abundant. The total number of planets in the universe is anyone’s guess but the number might be more properly expressed as somewhere just south of infinity.

Excerpt from The Day After the Singularity

The Milky Way is an average Galaxy with 100-400 billion stars. If we pick a middling number and say the average Galaxy has 200 billion stars, then there may be as many as three trillion stars in the Hubble Deep Field. If our Solar system is average then each star will have 8 or 9 planets. Pluto counted for a while. Now it doesn’t, but there might be a planet X? Don’t know about that. So say each star has 8 planets. That’s 24 trillion planets in the Hubble Deep Field. 24 trillion planets in the width of a dime 75 feet away.

There are 10,000 Galaxies in the Ultra Deep Field. That means there are approximately 20,000,000,000,000 stars and 160 trillion planets in that little speck of sky. There could be more. There could be less. But one thing’s clear: It’s 100 percent statistically certain there’s life elsewhere in the Universe. Applying Fermi’s reasoning it’s 100 percent certain that someone else came long before us. It’s 100 percent certain that someone else developed a technological civilization and 100 percent certain they developed computing and hit the Singularity long ago, which means Golub is 100 percent wrong when he says low probability solutions that the Navy has already ruled out are more likely than an extraterrestrial explanation.

The faulty assumption that has caused Golub and his colleagues to err so greatly is a close cousin to the Third Great Assumption that we are the biological center of the Universe. In the modern-day scientific version of Great Assumption #3, Darwin’s evolution has replaced the deity-driven creation theory, but the belief that we are still “the first to come this far;” as Google’s Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil put it in The Singularity is Near, has somehow managed to endure. Call it intellectual inertia, or whatever, but the net result is the assumption that if life exists somewhere out there in the Cosmos it will be on planets that are, for all intents and purposes, remote islands adrift in a vast ocean. Isolated. Unrelated. It will have evolved from the ground up one cell at a time like we believe it did here on Earth and it will be completely alien, having come from an environment likely to be very different than ours. For our hypothetical ET counterparts, interstellar space travel will be just as next-to-impossible so those pesky UAPs (UFOs) must be something, anything else.

This is old-world, dead-paradigm-walking talk. It’s classic pre-Singularity thinking. Those planets out there may very well be like islands in some sense, but they’re more like the Galapagos. Isolated yes, but not completely alien, not totally unrelated. Given the statistical certainty that we are not going to be the first to pass through the ultimate evolutionary threshold, those pesky UAPs (UFOs) are just what we would expect to see if someone else has already developed the technology to spread throughout the Cosmos “at the speed of light or greater,” as Kurzweil predicts will happen once a civilization successfully navigates the Singularity.

[i] Villard, Williams, Hubble’s Deepest View of the Universe Unveils Bewildering Galaxies across Billions of Years, Hubblesite.org, Jan. 15, 1996, http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1996/01/

[ii] see Hubble’s Greatest Discoveries, Hubblesite.org, http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/press_resources/hubbles_greatest_discoveries.php

[iii] Savage, Villard, Christensen, Stiles, Hubble’s Deepest View Ever of the Universe Unveils Earliest Galaxies, Hubblesite.org, March 4, 2004, http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2004/07/text/

[iv] Mackie, To see the Universe in a Grain of Taranaki Sand, North and South Magazine, New Zealand, May 1999, http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~gmackie/billions.html

Into the Singularity- with Whitley Strieber on Dreamland

UFOs & the Third Big Assumption