Dark Tales Of Lost Civilizations (43 page)

“Assessment?”

“These, and others such as in Genesis 6:1-4:
Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them
. In the King James Version they are identified as
giants
and are loosely interpreted as depicting extraterrestrial contact or technologies. Characteristics of the Ark of the Covenant and the Urim and Thummim are identified as high technology, from alien origins. Absent or incomplete explanations of historical or archaeological data point to existence of ancient astronauts. We differ.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
. The evidence of the crackpots include archaeological artifacts they argue are anachronistic or beyond the technical capabilities of the historical cultures. Sometimes referred to as OOP or
out-of-place
artifacts. We have the most solid OOP ever.”

“Nonanachronistic but anomalous constructs?”

“For example, the ancient Nazca Lines comprise hundreds of enormous ground drawings etched into the high desert landscape of Peru. But they could have been made with appropriate technology. Joe Nickell of the University of Kentucky showed that pretty conclusively. Likewise to all the absurd claims of aliens assisting in the construction of ancient monuments and megalithic ruins such as the Giza pyramids of Egypt, Machu Picchu in Peru, Baalbek in Lebanon, or the Moai of Easter Island. Mainstream archeologists have shown how they could have moved large megaliths of at least forty tons. No mysteries there.”

“Bottom line?” said the IID Director.

“None of the tables show data of the solar system, the Milky Way Galaxy, or the locations of pulsars, or anything. On one hand, they knew too much about the underlying physics of a cosmos with black holes. On the other hand, where’s the evidence of extraterrestrial contact?”

“Genomics Team?” asked the IID Director.

“Biological disciplines maintain there’s no evidence to support ancient astronauts or paleocontact,” said the Chairman of the Genomics/Epigenomics Committee. “Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, strongly believed in what he called
directed panspermia
, that Earth was intentionally ‘seeded’ with life, probably in the form of blue-green algae, by intelligent extraterrestrial species, to ensure life’s continuity. This could have been done on other planets of this class, using unmanned shuttles. We don’t care about biogenesis, the origin of life billions of years ago. There are no inexplicable DNA in cells, functionally, nor in the noise of
junk DNA
, let alone anything showing that we interbred with extraterrestrials, notwithstanding movies like
Mars Needs Women
.”

“Setting aside Nanoanalysis for last, what do we have? Secrets of the ancients? Nope. Paleocontact with extraterrestrials? Weak. That leaves time travel. Srinivasa?”

The Chairman of the Time Travel Committee, Srinivasa, stood up and continued the conversation. “Sir, Professor Paul J. Nahin, in
Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction
, led us to interview Kip Thorne, author of
Black Holes and Time Warps
. Let me flick quickly through this PowerPoint.”

“Slide 1: Nahin’s presentation of the various arrows of time are illustrated as follows:

1a: The perceptual arrow of time or of time as perceived by the human observer;

1b: The cosmic expansion arrow of time believed conventionally to be
the
arrow of time from which all others are derived, although we received a more nuanced discussion by Professor Sean Carroll at Caltech, in
From Eternity to Here
;

1c: The gravitational arrow of time, which is more interesting, as that’s where black holes come into the picture, and the Nippur tablets show too much understanding of black holes;

1d: And the quantum arrow of time including K particles which, unlike any other matter in nature, actually show a time asymmetry. For this reason Oxford’s Roger Penrose suggested that K particles or
kaons
might be responsible for
the
arrow of time.

2: Methods that have been proposed for evading the implications of these arrows of time:

2a: Einsteinian relativity allows for limited time travel where local observers, through greater acceleration toward light speeds, experience time more slowly than their nonaccelerated peers, irrelevant to our inquiry;

2 b: Kurt Godel’s solutions of Einstein’s equations allowing for time travel in a rotating universe, unlike our universe which is not spinning like a dervish, and which is also much bigger than his;

2c: Kip Thorne’s black hole wormhole solutions of time travel. Such time travel could only work at subatomic levels;

2d: J Richard Gott’s black hole solutions which both allow time travel when the universe’s mass is compressed to subatomic levels
and
allow the universe to create itself. However, our charter is no more able to explain the origin of the cosmos than the biology team is able to explain the origin of life;

2e: J Richard Gott’s supposed cosmic strings for time travel assume the existence of as yet undiscovered cosmic strings;

2f: Ronald Mallett’s gravitational laser solutions that suggest sufficient amounts of laser light create a gravitational force which can be capitalized to stir time and create a local field variance for the sending of signals through time. From this, we’ve gotten no positive results in the lab;

3: The various arrows of time are the academic side of mere wish fulfillment fantasy; eternal human yearning to revisit the past and remedy its wrongs or re-enjoy its joys, a task that may occur anyway owing to:

4: So-called time travel paradoxes that plague philosophical discussions of time, meaning, there is
zero evidence
.

“This casts a dim light on the potential of time travel. All we really know about what lays beyond the event horizon of a black hole or, in the
10 the minus 43rd power of the first second of the universe and with it multiple universes and quantum gravity and time travel,
is: we have a lot to learn. Not in time for your next White House briefing.”

“Bottom line?”

“Physics and mathematics do not quite exclude time travel, but neither do they give us any workable engineering designs for time machines. We know whomever or whatever gathered the data for the nuclear physics and M-theory data on the tablets may have had fundamental science beyond our ability to interpret. We cannot exclude that there are scraps of such super-human science on the tablets, and our quantum supercomputer network has been crunching away cryptographically in search for incomprehensible needles in clay tablet-haystacks.”

“So we don’t know diddlysquat?”

“No sir, except for the Nanoanalysis.”

“We’ll break for breakfast and get back at 0900.”

5. Molecules of Mari

That morning in a hardened deep underground conference room, the Director of Interstellar Intelligence Directorate asked Dr. Daisy Weal to speak.

“Dirt,” said Dr. Weal. “The first point I want to make is how complicated the molecular database is in soil, which we had to establish as a baseline to figure out the anomalies of the dig.”

“Talk
dirty
to me,” whispered an IID researcher to another, who glared for a moment and then returned his attention to Dr. Weal.

“This is the way that Craig Tyler at Los Alamos puts it:

‘There is an invisible world all around us. Air molecules mix and mingle. Radio waves course silently by. And in the soil under our feet, countless trillions of microscopic organisms perform important ecosystem services. They break down plant matter, protect crops from disease, and filter the groundwater. Yet less than one percent of them have been studied in a laboratory. Most of their activities—and most of the organisms themselves—remain unnamed and unexplored by science.’

“Such is the secret life of dirt,” continued Dr. Weal, “and our ignorance of this is no small omission. But Los Alamos scientist, Cheryl Kuske, is changing all that with a sweeping approach to genetic study called
metagenomics
.”

People around the table nodded, even if they weren’t entirely clear on this.

“Traditional microbiology lab work entails studying the genetic information from a single organism grown in a culture. Metagenomics, on the other hand, works directly with the complex mixture of DNA found in samples taken from the natural environment—as in our soil sample from around the YBC 8888 dig, where the first fragments of ancient nanomachinery were found. While a genome is the complete set of genetic information for a particular organism such as the human genome, a metagenome is the complete set of genetic information for an entire community of organisms, and metagenomics describes the gathering and processing of this rich swath of biological information.

“A soil metagenome is a diverse and complicated thing. On average, one gram of soil contains a billion microorganisms, typically spanning thousands up to millions of different species, representing all three major biological domains of life.

“Kuske says the following: ‘Although these organisms are microscopic, they collectively impact human activities and the Earth’s processes at regional and global scales. Most of their roles are beneficial.’ Indeed, the lure of such beneficial, collective impacts is part of what makes soil metagenomics so promising. Emerging technologies derived from microbes hold potential for human health, industry, biofuel, greenhouse gas absorption, and even the cleanup of large-scale environmental contamination. Scouring every gene of every microbe by traditional methods might seem inadequate. Kuske asserts, ‘We have all these pressing environmental issues, and we don’t have time to do this step-by-step. We have to jump.’”

“We did need to jump,” said the IID Director. “So what did you find as the signal, once you analyzed and subtracted out all the metagenomic noise?

“Well,” said Dr. Weal, “my second point is that the metagenomics completely confirmed the age of the soil from which the tablet was removed. It’s exactly right for that time and place when compared to other samples, and it’s aged exactly the right number of years.

“Third, we could then carbon date the nanomachinery fragments. And that was the first big surprise. They were not 3,750 years old, not even close.”

The Time Machine Committee perked up.

“How old were they,” said the chairman of that committee.

“Approximately 117,000 years old.”

“What?” several people at the table cried out at once. “That’s impossible, human civilization only goes back 5,000 to 10,000 years.”

“I wouldn’t be telling you this if my team hadn’t checked and rechecked, and had it independently confirmed. The last glacial period was the most recent glacial period within the current ice age occurring during the last years, from about 110,000 years ago to about 10,000 years ago, of the Pleistocene,” Dr. Weal said.

“Nanotechnology before the ice age? How can that be?”

“That glacial period is sometimes colloquially referred to as the
last ice age
,” said Dr. Weal, “though this use is incorrect because an ice age is a longer period of cold temperature in which ice sheets cover large parts of the Earth, such as Antarctica. Glacials refer to colder phases within an ice age that separate interglacials. The end of the last glacial period is not the end of the last ice age. The end of the last glacial period was about 12,500 years ago, while the end of the last ice age may not yet have come. Little evidence points to a stop of the glacial-interglacial cycle of the last million years.”

People were tapping and finger-wiggling on their NotePads, although anything written there would need to be cleared as properly encrypted before removal from the room.

“The last glacial period is the best-known part of the current ice age and has been intensively studied in North America, northern Eurasia, the Himalayas, and other formerly glaciated regions around the world. The glaciations that occurred during this glacial period covered many areas, mainly on the Northern Hemisphere.”

“Glaciers never got as far south as Babylon,” said one IID researcher.

“True, not for millions of years, but the glacial in question could have easily disrupted settled agriculture all over the inhabited world,” replied Dr. Weal.

“What settled agriculture? That only began approximately 10,000 years ago.”

“Our current civilizations, such as Mesopotamia, the Indus valley in what’s now Pakistan and western India, Mesoamerica, southeast Asia, and China may only be 10,000 years. But there is evidence that many plants and animals were undergoing domestication before the ice age. We just had a long break. We lost all direct record and oral history.”

“You’re saying there was prehistoric civilization, with quasi-modern mathematics, and nanotechnology, a dozen times older than any consensus history?” asked another IID researcher.

“Exactly what I’m saying,” said Dr. Weal.

“We can return to that at another meeting,” said the Director. “Prehistory as such is not yet in our mandate, except so far as it explains the Nippur tablets. So what about the ancient nanotech fragments?”

“Sir, the long-term goal is to repair what the decay of a hundred millennia has broken. Imagine what we could learn if we had operational ancient nanodevices.” said Dr. Weal.

“What would that take?”

“If you had a handful of gears and ratchets that came from an exploded clock, could you reconstruct the clock? The beta-test of such reverse engineering is the Antikythera mechanism, the ancient mechanical computer designed to calculate astronomical positions and the dates of the Olympics. It is now thought to have been built about 150–100 B.C. The degree of mechanical sophistication is comparable to late medieval Swiss watchmaking.”