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-- From the big bang to the Sun The
official myth of contemporary science begins with a titanic explosion, at an unimaginably
high temperature, which gave birth to space, linear time, radiation, matter and everything
that scientists consider as existing in the Cosmos. The big bang - as coined by Fred Hoyle
in the 1940s - occurred from the midst of absolute nothingness, nowhere, because there
weren't "places" nor was there any "time". "Why did the big bang
happen?" is a border question between cosmogony and metaphysics, science and
religious myths. It is a physical and philosophical singularity in which the concepts of
reason lose their force and meaning, although some scientists have tried to explain its
occurrence as a "quantum instability" in the primordial vacuum. This transfers
the problem to conceiving what this primordial vacuum could have been, and what were its
properties.
According to data available today, this initial explosion happened between 13 and 20
billions of years ago, per our way of counting time. About one thousandth of a second
after the initial instant (that many physicists modestly confess to be unattainable by
knowledge), the temperature exceeded one hundred billion degrees, and the Universe wasn't
even the size of a mustard seed. There weren't atoms, nor particles, nor radiation, nor
the elementary interactions that organize the physical universe: only an extraordinary
force of repulsion capable of overcoming all attraction of incipient gravitation and
saturating the newborn Cosmos with energy, swelling enormously in the following split
seconds.
The colossal expansion made the temperature fall to a few billion degrees, allowing the
emergence of gravitation, nuclear forces, light and particles. The primeval elementary
particles - photons, protons, electrons and neutrons - arranged themselves as energy and
matter, forming atoms of hydrogen, helium and some lithium, which constitute more than
ninety percent of all known matter in the Universe. The initial mass of the Cosmos split
into billions of chunks that later became galaxies by the driving force of gravitation.
But science declares its ignorance up to now about why and how this fragmentation of the
universe into galaxies and stars happened.
The most ancient galaxies - many of which can be seen through our telescopes - are
sterile. That is, they cannot support life based on chemical structures because their
stars contain only hydrogen and helium, that by themselves do not constitute a
sufficiently diversified chemical basis to support life as we know it. Stars of the first
generation, consequently, can't bear organic life in their planetary systems because they
lack carbon, oxygen, phosphorus, magnesium, iron, calcium and all chemical elements whose
atomic number is greater than three which corresponds to lithium. These heavier elements
essential to life were synthesized in the high temperatures of stellar nuclei and released
only when the larger stars exploded, at the ending of their existence, throwing into space
this new raw material to form the second generation of stars and their planetary systems.
The Sun is a second or third generation star. It formed together with its planets and
satellites from the agglutination of the remaining debris of older stars that exploded
millions of years before, after cooking the heavier elements that entered in the Solar
System's composition in the alchemist ovens of their nuclei. According to the contemporary
myth of cosmology, an ancestral star exploded in our galactic region. Its debris began
agglomerating slowly under the forces of gravitation, then constantly gaining speed, in a
process named coalescence.
When a large star comes to the end of its existence, it exhausts the fuel that nourished
its thermonuclear reactions - hydrogen, that was converted into helium. Then it swells
enormously and turns into a red supergiant, whose diameter can be larger than the Earth's
orbit. When the outward pressure of the thermonuclear reactions in the supergiant's
nucleus becomes insufficient to counteract the weight of its mass, the star collapses into
itself and implodes. In a few moments this implosion reverts in a tremendous explosion
turning into a supernova. The bulk of the star mass disintegrates in splinters, chips and
dust thrown violently into space, and its brilliance outshines that of a medium-sized
galaxy for several days. Right in the center of this blast, spinning madly many times per
second, remains a small and enormously dense neutron star also known as a pulsar or,
instead, a dimensionless black hole, whose dreadful gravitational force doesn't allow even
light to escape it, remaining invisible like a ghost of the disappeared star.
The debris launched into space forms halo-shaped clouds which contain the necessary
elements for the chemistry of life. Such a cloud, with a diameter of several light-years,
will become the matrix of a new generation of fertile stars. Some privileged planets of
these new systems can be suitable for the development of life, if they remain at a
distance where thermal radiation and light are in the right proportions to permit the
gamut of chemical reactions essential to biological processes. This is a synthesized
version of the contemporary scientific myth concerning the origin of the Sun and its
escort planets, satellites and asteroids.
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2 – The primitive Earth
Earth is the planet situated right in the middle of the ecosphere, where the distances
from the Sun permit the best conditions of light and temperature for life. It was formed
four and a half billion years ago, together with the Sun and the other planets and
satellites of our system, by the agglutination of planetesimals and comets, that is, other
smaller heavenly bodies which were also formed by the debris of the exploded ancestral
star. This succession of collisions continued for hundreds of millions of years, as the
protoplanets increased in size by the aggregation of smaller bodies passing within range
of their growing gravitational fields. These shocks generated very high temperatures; the
body that later became our beautiful blue planet was, in that primitive era, a flaming
ball of boiling rocks and metals in state of fusion. Due to their higher density, most
metals sank in the molten rock to form the nucleus of the new heavenly body
The materials that formed the planetesimals are grouped in metals, rocks and volatiles,
the same constituents of asteroids, meteorites and comets that wander interplanetary space
as remnants of an earlier phase. The asteroids and meteorites may be metallic, rocky or a
mixture of both, while the nuclei of comets contain rocks mixed with volatiles - water,
ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide and complex organic molecules that remain frozen while
far away from the Sun and vaporize under the heat when they pass nearby. In these
occasions they usually form a coma - a halo of brightly glowing gas around the nucleus -
and an exuberant tail made of dust and plasma millions of kilometers in length when the
gases in the heated nucleuses are "blown" by the solar wind.
Studies done on computer models have shown that the birth of the Moon happened in the
stage when everything was undergoing fusion, when an early planet the size of Mars crashed
into the primitive Earth, causing a major cataclysm. This collision, probably the greatest
in the Earth's history, was not head-on, but at an angle such that the bulk of both masses
joined into one single body which today is Earth. A large portion of the melting mass,
however, veered into nearby space and became the Moon, after being rounded by gravity. A
supplementary detail given by the computer is that this entire delivery happened in a
period of only nine hours.
Once the Earth and Moon were formed, they began to cool, a process somewhat delayed by the
impact of latecomer planetesimals. These collisions continued for hundreds of millions of
years and in fact have never ceased entirely. The Moon, too small to retain an atmosphere,
sent back to space the volatile substances deposited on its surface by the shower of
millions of comets. The Earth, however, whose gravity is much stronger, retained these
volatiles from which the oceans and the primitive atmosphere were formed.
In an initial phase, comets either vaporized in the air or exploded on impact, producing
dense steam clouds that remained trapped in a very hot atmosphere. A later phase brought a
rain of unimaginable proportions which fell on the entire Earth for millions of years,
continuously. At first, the temperature was so high that the raindrops vaporized before
reaching the surface. Eventually the rain started to furiously wash down the sizzling
mountains, cooling and eroding them, forming scalding mud torrents which collected in the
largest depressions and grew into the primitive oceans. Nothing remained from that remote
era: the violence of nature was so intense that surface rocks were ground and dissolved as
soon as they emerged from the depths through the orogenic movements of the volcano
scattered crust. On the Moon, however, which didn't retain an atmosphere or oceans, the
surface kept the testimonies of the past: the marks and scars caused by the impact of
asteroids throughout its lifetime, since the chaotic infancy of the Solar System to the
most recent meteorite.
About six hundred million years after the beginning, a less hostile scenario for the
development of life appeared. The Earth's crust cooled, permitting the development of
oceans and an air envelope to wrap it, though the constitution of that atmosphere was most
unlike the one we live in. The distance from the Sun was perfect to allow median
temperatures ideal to promote the occurrence of uncountable organic chemical reactions
without being blocked by cold or having their products promptly decomposed by excess of
heat. A great diversity of molecules and substances were then formed in the atmosphere and
oceans, many of them essential to life processes.
But the existence of a staged set does not automatically imply the beginning of a
performance.
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3 – Life comes from far away
And science doesn't really know how life began, though we did learn how to produce some
of its basic molecular components in laboratories - several amino acids - which for some
decades nurtured the illusion that the creation of life in vitro was in sight. However,
these seemingly promising experiments have achieved little progress, succeeding only in
the production of sugars such as glucose and ribose, and some short chains of amino acids.
Producing the most simple of synthetic bacteria is far beyond that, and seems to be
decidedly unattainable in the foreseeable future.
By the same token that science declares to know nothing about the transition between the
primeval fireball and the earlier galaxies and stars, it also considers the initial phase
of the appearance of the first live beings as a terra incognita, an era pervaded by much
speculation and short-lived certainties that soon vanish away. That's why we must take
another leap over the unknown, a four billion year leap to the stage when early bacteria
appeared in that primitive world, leaving fossils as witnesses of their existence in rocks
of that primal era, named archeozoic.
When life appeared - or arrived here, from the depths of interstellar space - it was
formed by unicellular organisms that didn't need oxygen, which was absent in the primitive
atmosphere under its free molecular state. Rather, for these organisms, oxygen was a
poisonous gas. Molecular oxygen only started to be formed millions of years later, as a
by-product of photosynthesis, which was introduced by a purple bacteria. After taking at
least one billion years to accumulate expressively in the atmosphere, oxygen's first tasks
were to oxidize all iron that meteorites laid on the surface of Earth and, as long as its
percentage increased, to slowly convert a reducing atmosphere into an oxidizing one.
Although somewhat simple in comparison with the organisms created by evolution through the
following billions of years, the constitution of these ancestral forms of life was
extraordinarily complex in relation to the pre-biotic broth in the primitive oceans. Even
assuming that basic amino acids already existed in that broth, synthesized by the
electrical discharges of the storms that continuously struck the Earth's surface at that
time.
Since its appearance on Earth, or at least since the beginning of the fossil record, life
is based on the chemistry of enzymes and proteins, always reconstructed in each new
generation according to a genetic code able to record detailed information on that
complicated process. But if we take a close look at the astonishing architecture of a DNA
or RNA molecule, it's impossible to avoid a strong suspicion that there was not enough
time for them to have been created on Earth by the random selective forces of evolution.
The distance that separates non-living matter from the genetic code - and also enzymes and
proteins - is enormous, too much so to traverse using the mechanisms proposed by Darwin in
just a few hundred million years - even in billions. Nothing supports the idea that
genetic information could be stored and transmitted by a molecule simpler than RNA.
Intensive scientific research with sophisticated computer models was not able to produce
any viable alternative to the DNA/RNA system - nor of equivalent complexity or simpler.
Additionally, calculations on the oxygenation process of the Earth's atmosphere show that
photosynthesis began 3.9 billion years ago, approximately one hundred million years after
the appearance of life. Such a period of time is much too short for the process of
Darwinian selection to "discover" the molecule of chlorophyll and the mechanism
of photosynthesis. This fact jeopardizes that theory, which proposes that evolution is the
result of random and blind mutations of organisms, with the selection process left to the
environmental pressures in a second stage.
Genetic information favorably modified in a single protein would accumulate too slowly, by
reason of the many possibilities of amino acid arrangements and the high probability of
combination flaws. It can easily be calculated that, to randomly create a single
hypothetical protein with twenty right chemical links in their correct positions, billions
of generations of that organism would be necessary, producing an immense flood of wrong
and useless proteins along the process. Moreover, a protein does not consist of only
twenty chemical links, but of many dozens. This fact exponentially multiplies the
necessity of generations to a number so astronomically high that it would be absolutely
impossible to take place in the lifespan of the Earth - or even that of the Universe since
the big bang, for that matter. And these estimates are in relation to a single protein,
while the simplest life form needs hundreds to function.
In the view of this new century, science considers the Darwinian mechanisms of random
variations, competition and, later, selection, as unsatisfactory to explain the genesis of
life. Such a process of random variation in genetic records is most likely unsuitable to
explain the emergence of new species, restricting itself to triggering the appearance of
varieties in a given species, as has been verified in experiments. In the dawn of this new
millennium arises the luminous perspective of a universe recognized as thriving with life
and consciousness, confirming the intuitions, speculations and consistent insights of men
like Emmanuel Swedenborg, Svante Arrhenius, Camille Flammarion, Francis Younghusband,
Percival Lowell, Fred Hoyle, Chandra Wickramasinghe, Carl Sagan, Lyall Watson and so many
others in different epochs, who sustained their confidence in regards to the plenitude of
life in the Cosmos.
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4 – A cosmos plenty of life
From the clash of paradigms of the 20th century till recently the thesis of a
terrestrial origin of life prevailed, in spite of countering calculations, observations
and facts that show just the opposite. Today the scale tilts to the other side. The notion
that life is an odd and unique phenomenon spontaneously emerging on our privileged planet
is as obsolete as the theory of a catastrophic origin of the Solar System. It proposed
that gravitational attraction of a wandering star passing nearby tore large blobs off the
Sun to form the planets. In such a case, the Solar System would be an extremely rare
feature in the galaxy, maybe unique, by reason of the high improbability of an
interstellar encounter in the enormous distances of the cosmic void.
We know today, and not only by indirect reasoning, that most stars have planetary systems
and that our galaxy is gleaming with life, spreading its seeds in interstellar space
through dust clouds and cometary nuclei, ready to impregnate all fertile environments they
can find. However, the rudeness of scientific prejudice, that has committed countless
ethical aggressions on those who dare to think and propose innovative ideas, has been
acting against all evidence that the biological process did not have its origins on Earth,
but proceeded from a Cosmos teeming with life and spirit, where our planet is not an
eccentric and solitary creature.
What we call interstellar dust is largely constituted of bacterium-sized grains with a
composite structure, bearing a rocky or metallic nucleus covered by pre-biotic molecules -
whose complexity level is not well known yet - coated in a dark husk of organic polymers
and ice. This shell blocks the ultraviolet rays that could damage its inner organic
filling and simultaneously absorbs infrared radiation, warming the grain to some degrees
above zero kelvins, the temperature of interstellar empty space.
In carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, fossils that definitely did not result from
contamination after their fall to the Earth's surface were found. In 1961, George Claus
and Bartholomew Nagy, of New York University challenged the scientific world by publishing
their discovery of clear evidence of filamentary formations similar to microscopic fungi
in two such meteorites. With the only exception of Harold Urey, the first to synthesize
amino acids in vitro, the entire scientific community turned against them, who winced and
retired into discreet silence. More recently, their discoveries were confirmed: a
meteorite collected in Australia was examined with more modern and precise methods by
scientist Hans Dieter Pflug, who found structures similar to the earthly bacterium
Pedomicrobium, equivalent to those identified by Claus and Nagy. Fred Hoyle comments on
Pflug's discoveries this way:
The structure of Pedomicrobium is so characteristic that there is no possibility
of confusion. When Pflug found carbonized samples of that bacteria - true clusters of them
- in the meteorite, the question that until then was controversial started leaning to the
side of Claus and Nagy, so vehemently silenced twenty years before. Finally, clear proof
of the existence of extraterrestrial life could be observed.
In 1996, there was a stir in the press on the news that bacteria were found in a
meteorite fragment ejected from Mars and collected in Antarctica some years before. As
later evidence have shown, nothing essentially new was discovered except by the fact that
the meteorite proceeded from Mars.
More than one hundred tons of extraterrestrial materials enter our atmosphere daily in the
form of meteorites. Around two or three per cent of these are carbonaceous chondrites that
reach Earth's surface bringing evidence that they come from somewhere with plenty of life.
It has been calculated that 0.1 per cent of all meteoric matter has organic origin. This
represents a much higher proportion than the present matter of living origin in the
Earth's crust. Compared with the volume of the entire planet, only one millionth of one
per cent of the Earth's mass has living origin. According to a provocative remark by Lyall
Watson, this is evidence that "carbonaceous meteorites come from a place one million
times more organic than the planet Earth as a whole".
Studies done on the material of a carbonaceous chondrite found in Africa showed that it
contains an aromatic polymer with spectral characteristics equivalent to those of
interstellar dust clouds existing far from the Solar System. These are telltale signs that
reveal the interstellar origins of some of these meteorites, surely older than our
planetary system, and prove that there really exists a cosmic exchange of complex organic
compounds essential to life produced in distant regions of space and later exported,
including to Earth.
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5 – Comets: the inter-stellar
buses
In spite of the fact that most of this interstellar matter, in the form of dust grains
or of larger-sized pebbles and boulders, could travel by their own across the cosmic space
for millions of years, drifting in the stellar winds or propelled by their own inertia,
comets are highly suspected of working as transport vehicles for this cosmic trade of
pre-biotic or living matter.
Until the 1980s, most information about the structure and composition of these wandering
bodies was still obtained through long distance spectral analysis. But when the Halley
comet approached the Sun in 1986, an entire fleet of spaceships was sent to an encounter.
These missions increased our knowledge, and what we already know about comets is enough to
suspect they are directly involved in the biological aspects of interstellar space and the
sowing of life across the stars. Though being survivors of pre-solar ages, when the Sun
and its entourage of planets had not yet formed, comets carry high concentrations of
organic molecules inside their nuclei. We continue to ignore whether these compounds
belong to more complex frozen organisms such as viruses, spores, bacteria or others
waiting to land on some fertile planet to put forth shoots and reproduce. The idea that
epidemics could be provoked by comets flying by is a recurrent belief in many cultures -
including ours, in ancient times and the Middle Ages - and this possibility is all but
discarded.
The number of comets swarming around the Solar System is estimated today in the trillions
- a much larger number than the stars in our galaxy. Such a tremendous population confers
to this comet cloud the status of a miniature universe surrounding our planetary system.
This myriad of comets arranges itself in two spherical halos. The smaller one, named
Kuiper Belt, has a mixed population of comets and asteroids; it begins beyond Neptune's
orbit and extends two or three times that distance. The larger one begins far beyond the
inner belt, as the outermost feature of the Solar System, until one light year or more
from the Sun, one fourth of the distance to the nearest star system, that of Alpha
Centauri.
This outer swarm, gigantic but extremely tenuous, is named Oort's Cloud due to the Dutch
astronomer who discovered it as the outermost feature in the Solar System. The outer
border of Oort's Cloud is undefined, but one can infer that it extends to the limits of
the Sun's gravitational force, where its attraction is extremely weak, making comets
liable to the influence of other stars which occasionally disturb their orbits. These
gravitational fields may throw them inwards to the Kuiper Belt, to the planets, to the Sun
or, instead, steal some of them to the passing star's own cloud. This concept, supported
by observations, calculations and deductions of contemporary astronomy, makes of comets
cosmic carriers, interstellar trucks or buses that have been moving pre-biotic or living
matter throughout the many billion years of the universe's history.
A casual encounter of two stars is extremely unlike. This is not the case with the
overlapping of their comet clouds, which certainly are not a Solar System's privilege. On
the contrary, if we consider that the average distance between stars in our galactic
region is three to five light years, and a sun-like star's comet halo measures two light
years across, we find that comet clouds are in occasional contact and mutual influence.
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6 – The end of cosmic loneliness
Thus, in this moment of transition into a new century and millennium, the seclusion
complex disseminated by 20th century astronomy, based on the enormous distances that
separate the stars, is seriously challenged. We are now aware that the Solar System
doesn't end at Pluto's orbit, and the magnificent halo of trillions of comets around us is
in contact and constant exchange with the equivalent halos of nearby stars. More startling
is the fact that this interchange is of an organic or living nature, which takes us just
one step from the next great discovery, promised to the coming years: that psyche soaks
our galaxy and the entire Cosmos, as already intuited by Swedenborg, James Jeans, Alfred
North Whitehead, Alfred Russell Wallace and most great wise men of all times, although
some of them did not dare to expound this idea ex catedra.
Now I wish to take a leap to the galactic scale, Let's recall the astronomical discovery
that led to the conclusion, in the 1980s, that the morphology of galaxies cannot be
explained simply by the gravitational pull of stars and clouds of dust and gas that we can
see in telescopes. The only way to make sense of the patterns of motion and velocities of
visible galactic components, specially in what seems to be their outer borders, is if they
are immersed in an invisible gigantic ocean of so called dark matter, or hidden mass,
whose nature is not yet known. This dark matter seems to constitute more than 90 per cent
of a common galaxy's mass, and only the gravitational action of this invisible shroud
could explain the peculiar motions observed in the galactic borders of the stars and gas
clouds.
That was another startling discovery because, if these halos of hidden mass really exist,
we see and record only 10 per cent of the universe's matter in our radio-telescopes.
Surrounding the known parts of galaxies with that mysterious dark matter, these invisible
halos are perceived only through their gravitational pull, yet are so large they sometimes
intermingle. As we can see, the same type of contact that exists among stars also happens
between neighboring galaxies with - who knows? - an equivalent exchange of living or
pre-biotic materials. However, in the galactic scale the mystery is much greater. As this
dark matter is undetectable in the visible spectrum or in the radio bands studied up to
now, we don't even know what it could be.
Thus, the physical universe as we understand it at the onset of the new millennium is
rather different than the one we were acquainted with until the last years of the 20th
century. Now we know that stars and galaxies live hand in hand, and the impression of
immense solitude painted by 20th century astronomy, spreading a kind of cosmic agoraphobia
in the most sensitive spirits, is replaced by a much less frightening new image of a
brotherly and solidary universe. This opens the way to the ample consciousness of totality
we all desire.
If we acknowledge these facts, and also recognize that the mechanisms proposed by Darwin
cannot explain the emergence of life in the primordial Earth - nor even in a 20 billion
year old universe -, we find in our hands some clues for the new cosmogonic paradigm of
the 21st century. This exciting view outlines the scientific bases for the new myth which
humanity has so ardently yearned for since the loss of its cosmic roots, during the short
interval of the last two or three centuries, while mechanistic science tried to usurp the
word knowledge for its exclusive property.
At this point of my lecture, as a surprise for many of you, I wish to read a passage from The
World of Life, a book written by Alfred Russell Wallace - Charles Darwin's partner in
formulating the theory of evolution - in the same epoch that The Origin of the Species
was published:
There must exist an invisible world of the spirit that makes changes occur in
the world of matter, and the evolution of this planet has to receive guidance and help
from outside, from invisible superior intelligences to whom the spiritual man is
susceptible. Furthermore, these intelligences very probably exist in beings whose degree
is superior to ours.
The production of amino acids, sugars and other molecules fundamental to life occurs in
fertile galaxies as a spontaneous form of matter organization, whenever favorable
conditions of temperature, pressure, available energy and basic chemical elements are
found. And life itself, as every indication suggests, spreads across space in a process of
cosmic fertilization through dust and wandering asteroids, remnants of ancient systems
where prior life had been established. Billions of trillions of comets behave like
interstellar sperm, ready to sprinkle seeds and spores with their tails shaped by stellar
winds as they approach the planets of some system.
The predisposition of fertile planets to develop biological processes is well illustrated
by the Earth, where life began its evolutionary trajectory only 600 or 700 million years
after its formation, still in its infancy. There is no reason to suppose it should be
different when other suitable planets are submitted to the interstellar system of
fertilization, or to imagine that the Milky Way shouldn't be teeming with life in its
millions of ecospheres.
Science still doesn't know, and maybe never will, how many times the Earth needed to be
impregnated to make biological processes thrive. Until a few tens of million years ago,
many catastrophes had occurred, some of them killing 95 per cent of all living beings. In
the early stages of life development, the environment was much more hostile and unstable
than some billions of years later, suggesting that cosmic sowing was repeated many times,
in light of the highly probable total extinction events provoked by the frequent
catastrophic fall of asteroid-sized bodies at the time. Moreover, recent research show
evidence that such events are recorded in the ancestral memory of all living beings,
particularly in that of humans who, in the depths of their collective unconscious, guard
the printings of human evolution, and the entire Cosmos history.
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7 – Homo sapiens: the
worst predator
The engravings of these events in the unconscious memory explains the recurrence of the
end-of-the-world myths present in many cultures. The Flood and the Apocalypse are
Judeo-Christian examples, bearing meaningful similarities to the extinction scenarios
described by science. Actually, the presence of this concealed unconscious memories seems
to trigger various self-destructive behavior patterns in humans, that show a persistent
determination in causing problematic alterations of the environment, interfering in the
chemistry of the atmosphere, contaminating the seas and extinguishing innumerable species
necessary to the ecological balance of the earthly biosphere.
In the long march since its origins, throughout many thousands of years, humanity comes
accumulating a heavy burden of shame and glory. The vanity of humans, however, emphasizes
with distorted asymmetry their conquests and acts of bravery, which history registers as
glory, and avoids taking a longer look at its deplorable heaps of fault and guilt, at the
heinous crimes man commits against life, against his fellow creatures, against peoples and
races, against his homeplanet herself.
The anatomically modern Homo sapiens appeared one hundred thousand years ago, when their
primate's cranium rounded as a dome to encase a more evolved brain, and their face and jaw
soothed to an expression we could recognize as familiar. However, for 60 thousand years
their tools continued to be crude and no significant cultural evolution appears in
archeological records. The great evolutionary leap towards cultural development was taken
only 40 millennia ago, with the somewhat sudden surge of organized language. It was in
that epoch that appeared Homo sapiens sapiens - actually, this is our full name - this way
autonominated, in a paroxysm of pretentiousness that Greeks used to call hybris.
Armed with the extraordinary tool of language, one of the first tasks of the hero was to
inaugurate the aphorism of technology which says that every tool is also a weapon. So he
headed for conquest, soon becoming the most efficient of predators, feared even more than
the monster carnivores of the Mesozoic era.
Spoken communication of complex ideas developed in the efforts of big game hunting, as
coordinated work is essential. The hunting was predatory: each area occupied by a group
was exploited to the exhaustion of worthwhile prey, then abandoned. Tribes emigrated to
new territories where the extermination would continue. Thus, the intelligent mammal
performed an epic of conquest and slaughter, occupying in only a few millennia all
habitable space on Earth, leaving behind a trail of thousands of extinct species. The most
ferocious, the fastest and those that can fly survived; the others couldn't.
A prominent victim of this ancestral holocaust was our brother, the Neanderthal, whose
image is being rehabilitated by anthropologists after many years of slander promoted by
the worship of our own image. Today, paleoanthropology recognizes that Neanderthals had a
larger brain than ours, buried their deceased with ceremonies and flowers and probably
were more peaceful than we are. Perhaps for that reason they were extinguished 34 thousand
years ago.
After that ferocious conquest of the planet, we invented frontiers, political power, and
military glory. And we proceeded in our task of disturbing the delicate balance of nature,
continuing to exterminate species and destroy forests, polluting rivers and creating
deserts in the place of seas, even poisoning the air we inhale, which is the breath of the
living Earth.
Industrial techniques of production increased environmental damage, and the rising
consumption of fossil fuels now threatens many regions on a scale much greater than in the
previous centuries. Nuclear energy, whose discovery was initially intended to be used as a
mass-destruction weapon in a suicide war that could have exterminated civilization, has
left behind a sequel of radioactive residues in water, air, and in vertebrate's bones - a
process that fortunately seems to be halted.
On the other hand, the sequence of movements of worldwide public opinion was one of the
most promising social phenomena of the second half of the 20th century, which pressed
those in power to give up the mad arms race as a way of achieving world hegemony through
the force of nuclear arsenals. Not only were the nuclear tests and the growing
accumulation of strategic weaponry blocked by popular movements in the 1960s and 1970s,
but also the most serious aggressions to the environment were in a large part reduced by
public opinion pressures in the 1980s and 1990s, primarily in the regions of the world
where the population is better informed and shows more concern.
After the collapse of the authoritarian soviet regime, and the end of tensions of
confrontation between the super powers, humanity, in this moment of transition, can devote
itself to the cleaning of the planet so polluted by the preceding generation's blindness,
and fight the enclaves of intolerance and violence that terrorize many regions of the
world.
In the same way that public pressure banned the nuclear tests and contributed decisively
to the end of the arms race, the same pressures already show their force in the
progressive correction of procedures harmful to the environment. The dismal picture of the
1970s, when the air of the large cities was almost irrespirable, is being reversed little
by little, as much as the rivers and lakes which were dying contaminated by chemical
pollutants are once more becoming clean and healthy.
We know today that nature's capacity of recovering is greater than we thought until a few
years ago, and the greatest part of the environmental damage is reversible. However, a
serious worry persists concerning the reduction of ozone in the upper layers of the
atmosphere, still a controversial issue in spite of the ban on the harmful substances
production. The threat of all-out nuclear war seems to vanish more rapidly than we could
suppose only twenty years ago, but the terrible local wars, of a racial or religious
nature, still blood-stain many regions of the globe, endangering us all with the
treacherous and insane practice of terrorism.
We also know, with ever increasing clarity, that the greatest sources of pollution to be
fought are ignorance and its brother, corruption. Poverty, hunger and violence, resulting
from economical misery and ethical stupidity are the great problems yet to be solved in
this new century. Only the formulation of a new relationship between man and wealth,
extensive education and economic development for all peoples, races and creeds, can
reverse the shameful picture that our planet portrays to the galactic community that
observes us. Only pervasive movements of public opinion all over the world, equivalent to
those that stopped nuclear testing, the arms race and, more recently, are turning the
Earth green and flowering once more with the resurgence of unbound respect for nature can
combat corruption, ignorance and hunger that still ravages humanity.
There is no lack of technical and financial resources. What lacks is a reconceptualization
of what obscenity truly is: wastefulness, misery, hunger, violence and all their
kin, the offspring of corruption and insane selfishness that should not continue to stain
the human species. These blemishes make it impossible for humans to assume their
responsibilities as the conscious segment of this beautiful blue planet we live on, with
her respectable four billion year history.
At the onset of this new millennium, the problems that humankind has to solve are somewhat
different than those of 40 or 50 years ago. The reencounter with its cosmic roots
coincides with an epistemological revolution to recover the true notion of knowledge
and the value of wisdom, which has been disdained and disregarded by materialism.
The outburst of science through new and unexpected paths, as this Symposium certainly will
show, is an irreversible process that will give the human being a new identity in face of
the outer universe and of the inner vastness of himself.
Who answers for planet Earth, if not humanity, when redeemed of the guilt and horror it
still conceals under the mantle of vanity that makes us arrogantly define ourselves as Homo
sapiens sapiens?
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Further reading:
- Balsinger, Hans; Fechtig, Hugo; and Geiss, Johannes. "A Close Look
at Halley's Comet", Scientific American. September, 1988.
- Barrow, John D. and Joseph Silk The Left Hand of Creation – The
Origin and Evolution of the Expanding Universe. New York: Basic Books Inc., 1983.
- Bateson, Gregory Mind and Nature; a Necessary Unity. © by
Gregory Bateson, 1979.
- Boss, Alan P. "Collapse and Formation of Stars", Scientific
American. January, 1985.
- Cairns-Smith, A.G. "The First Organisms", Scientific
American. June, 1985.
- Campbell, Joseph Transformations of Myth through Time. Harper
& Row, Publishers, Inc., 1990.
- Chemas, Ricardo Chequer. "Anamnestic Therapy", In: Annals
of the II International Congress on Alternative Therapies. São Paulo, 1988.
- Chemas, Ricardo Chequer. "An Experimental Approach to Transpersonal
Memory at the Phylogenetic Level: The Theoretical Background" Parts I and II, In: Proceedings
of the International Forum on New Science. Colorado State University, 1989.
- Chemas, Ricardo Chequer. "Additional Experimental Evidence of
Phylogenetic Memory in Homo Sapiens", In: Proceedings of the International Forum
on New Science, Colorado State University, 1990.
- Chyba, Chrystopher "The Cosmic Origins of Life on Earth", Astronomy
Magazine. November, 1992.
- Darwin, Charles The Illustrated Origin of the Species, comm.
introd. by Richard E. Leakey. London: The Rainbird Publishing Group Ltd., 1979.
- Dusen, Wilson van The Presence of Other Worlds: the Findings of
Emmanuel Swedenborg. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.
- Gardner, Martin The Ambidextrous Universe – Mirror Asymmetry and
Time-Reversed Worlds. Penguin Books, 1982.
- Gehrels, Tom "Collisions with Comets and Asteroids", Scientific
American. March, 1996.
- Horgan, John "In the Beginning", Scientific American.
February, 1991.
- Hoyle, Fred Ten Faces of the Universe. San Francisco: W.H.
Freeman and Company, 1977.
- Hoyle, Fred The Intelligent Universe. London: Dorling Kindersley
Limited, 1983.
- Leakey, Richard E. and Roger Lewin Origins. London:
Macdonald and Jane's Publishers Limited, 1977.
- Leakey, Richard E. The Making of Mankind. London: The Rainbird
Publishing Group Ltd., 1981.
- Lovelock, James E. The Ages of Gaia. London: © by Commonwealth
Fund Book Program of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, 1988.
- Luu, Jane X. and David C. Jewitt "The Kuiper Belt", Scientific
American. May, 1996.
- Nash, J. Madeleine "How Did Life Begin?", Time Magazine.
October 11, 1993.
- Orguel, Leslie E. "The Origin of Life on Earth", Scientific
American. October, 1994.
- Rodrigues, Sérgio de Almeida Destruição e Equilíbrio. São
Paulo: Atual Editora Ltda., 1990.
- Sagan, Carl and I.S. Chklovskii Intelligent Life in the
Universe. Holden-Day Inc., 1966.
- Sagan, Carl, Paul R. Ehrlich, Donald Kennedy and Walter Orr Roberts
The Cold and the Dark. Open Space Institute, Inc., 1984.
- Sagan, Carl Cosmos. New York: Random House, 1980.
- Sagan, Carl and Ann Druyan Comet. New York: Scott Meredith
Literary Agency, Inc., 1985.
- Talcott, Richard "Insight into Star Death", Astronomy
Magazine. February, 1988.
- Taylor, Richard L.S. "The Origin of the Moon", Astronomy
Now. September, 1990.
- Toynbee, Arnold Mankind and Mother Earth. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976.
- Wallace, Alfred Russel The World of Life. London: Chapman and
Hall, 1910.
- Watson, Lyall Lifetide. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1976.
- Weinberg, Steven The First Three Minutes. New York: Basic Books
Inc., 1976.
- Weinberg, Steven "Life in the Universe", Scientific
American. October, 1994.
- Wiener, Norbert The Human Use of Human Beings. Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1954.
- Wilson, Allan C. "The Molecular Basis of Evolution", Scientific
American. October, 1985.
- York, Derek "The Earliest History of the Earth", Scientific
American. January, 1993.
- Younghusband, Francis The Living Universe. London: John Murray,
1933.
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