You Have to Read It to Believe It

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A writer is a man who has taught his mind to misbehave Anonymous

What comes in when daylight leaves is a kind of certainty: that beneath the skin there is a secret, some mystery both black and bright. You feel this mystery in every breath, you see it in every shadow, and you expect it to plunge into every turn of a step. Stephen King

Physics was the first natural science to become fully modern and highly mathematical. Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child lagged far behind. Even in the time of Newton and Galileo, men knew more about the moon and other heavenly bodies than they did about their own. It was not until the late 1940’s that this situation changed .The postwar period ushered in a new era of biological research, spurred by the discovery of antibiotics. Suddenly there was both enthusiasm and money for biology, and a torrent of dis poured forth: tranquilizers, steroid hormones, immunochemistry, and the genetic code. By 1953 the 1st kidney was transplanted and by 1958 the 1st birth control pills were tested .It was not long before biology was the fastest growing field in all science; it was doubling it’s knowledge every ten years. Farsighted researchers talked seriously of changing genes, controlling evolution, regulating the mind – ideas that had been wild speculation years before. For centuries men had known that cholera was a fatal disease, and that it caused severed diarrhea, sometimes producing as much as thirty quarts of fluid a day. Men knew this, but they somehow assumed that the lethal effects of the disease were unrelated to the diarrhea; they searched for something else: an antidote, a drug, away to kill the organism .It was not until modern times that cholera was recognized as a disease that killed through dehydration primarily; if you could replace a victim’s water losses rapidly, he would survive the infection without other drugs or treatment. Hence: Cure the symptoms and cure the disease. I have to point out that all men, no matter how scientifically objective, have several built-in biases when discussing life .One is the assumption that complex life was larger than simple life and that is certainly true on earth .As organisms became more intelligent they grew larger, passing from single-celled stage to multicellular creatures, and then to larger animals with differentiated cells working in groups called organs .On earth, the trend had been towards larger and more complex animals. But, this may not be true elsewhere in the universe. In other places, life might progress in the opposite direction – towards smaller and smaller forms. Just as modern human technology has learned to make things smaller, perhaps highly advanced evolutionary pressures led to smaller life forms and there is certainly a distinct advantage to smaller life forms: less consumption of raw materials, cheaper space-flight, Fewer feeding problems… Perhaps the most intelligent life form from a distant planet is no larger than a flea or may be it’s no larger than a bacterium. It seems to be obvious – an organism, from another planet or galaxy, which had the protection to survive the extremes of temperature and vacuum that existed in space. There was no doubt that organisms could survive – there was, for instance, a class of bacteria known as thermophilic that thrived on extreme heat, multiplying enthusiastically in temperatures as high as 70 degrees. Further, it was known that bacteria had been sealed for thousands of years. These bacteria were still viable. The secret lay in the bacteria’s ability to form spores, ,molding a hard calcified shell around themselves . This molding enabled the organism to survive in freezing or boiling and if necessary thousands of years without food. It combined all the advantages of a space suit with those of suspended animation. There is no doubt that a spore could travel through space, so it is also possible that bacteria might have left the surface of the earth eons ago, when life was just beginning to emerge from the oceans and hot baked continents. Such bacteria would depart before the fishes, before the primitive mammals, long before the 1st ape man. The bacteria would head up into the air and ascend until the were literally in space. Once there, they might evolve into unusual forms, perhaps even learning to derive the energy for life directly from

the sun instead of requiring food as an energy source. These organisms may be capable of direct conversion of energy to matter. The analogy of the upper atmosphere and the depths of the sea as equally inhospitable but equally viable. In the deepest, blackest regions of the oceans, where oxygen is poor and where light has never reached, life-forms were known to exist in abundance, so why not in the far reaches of the atmosphere? True, oxygen is scarce. True, food hardly existed. But if creatures live miles beneath the surface, why could they not live 5 miles above it? And if there are organisms out there, and if they had departed from the baking crust of the earth long before the first men appeared, then they would be foreign to man. No immunity, no adaptation, no antibodies would have been developed. They would be primitive to modern man, in the same way that the shark, a primitive fish, unchanged for a 100 million years, was alien and dangerous to modern man invading the oceans for the 1st time. George Thompson, the British Biochemist called enzymes ‘the matchmakers of life’. It’s true; enzymes act as catalysts for all chemical reactions, by providing a surface for 2 molecules to come together and react upon. There are thousands perhaps millions of enzymes, each existing solely to aid a single chemical reaction, without enzymes; there could be no chemical reactions. Without chemical reactions there could be no life. Or could there? Biology, as George Wald had said was a unique science because it could not define it’s subject matter. Nobody has the definition of life. The old definition “An organism that showed ingestion, excretion, metabolism, reproduction and so on – are worthless. One can always find an exception, For example: A black cloth in sunlight converts radiant energy into heat ,it is merely passive energy absorption. One may argue that it’s not conventional and is not purposeful, but how does a person know whether it is purposeful or not? The Messenger Theory – John. R. Samuels Let us say that a culture wishes to see the universe ,they wish to have a “coming – out party” on a galactic scale, formally to announce their existence ,they wish to spew out information , clues to their existence ,in every direction what is the best way one can do it? radio? Hardly – radio is too slow ,too expensive and decays too rapidly. Strong signals weaken within a few billion miles. TV is even worse. Light rays are fantastically expensive to generate .Even if one learned a way to detonate whole stars , to explode a sun would be as a kind of signal would be too expensive. Besides expense all these methods suffer the traditional drawback to any radiation, namely decreasing strength with distance ,A light bulb may be unbearably bright at a distance of 10 feet ; it may be powerful at 1000 feet ; it may be visible at 10 miles .But at a million miles it’s completely obscure ,because radiant energy decreases according to the 4th power of the radiation. A simple ,unbeatable law of physics. So one cannot use physics to carry a signal .So you use biology to create a communication system that does not diminish with distance ,but rather remains as powerful a million miles away as it was at the source. In short you device an organism to carry your message .The organism would be self-replicating , cheap and could be produced in fantastic numbers. For a few dollars , one could produce trillions of them and send them off in all directions into space. They would be tough ,hardy bugs, able to withstand the rigours of space and they would grow and duplicate and divide. Within a few years ,within a few years there would be countless number of these in the galaxy, speeding in all directions waiting to contact life. And when they Do?? Each single organism would carry the potential to develop into a full organ or a full organism .They would upon contacting life begin to grow into a complete communicating mechanism .It’s like spewing out millions of brain cells ,each capable of re-growing into a complete brain under proper circumstances .The newly grown brain would then speak to the new culture – informing it of the presence of the other and announcing ways in which contact might be made.

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