Erich Daniken - Miracles of the Gods

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[*] A light year is the distance travelled by light in a year, about 6,000,000,000,000 miles.

[+] Electromagnetic waves between 10 and 100 cm wavelengths (3 x 10 9 and 3 x 10 8 Hz).

---- Even for the present-day postal service that's a bit too long to wait!

The stars Riegel and Canopus, to name two more addresses, are 900 light-years away. If we were to take the trouble 'to transmit', we should not even know whether our two stellar 'comrades' still existed.

'Their' light which hits us today is already 900 years old. Meanwhile a great deal can (and will) have happened on those stars! Why should we call them up? Even if they are still in the best of health and possess an adequate technical civilization, an echo could not reach us for 1,800 years. Who would be interested in that? New different systems of interstellar communications must be invented, for even higher frequency astronomy which sends and receives with gigantic parabolic reflectors to observe celestial objects is unsuitable. So far no one knows the right wave-length! In that case is any form of communication possible between such widely separated intelligences?

Yes, through visions.

The first intelligence was formed sometime and somewhere in our galaxy. Astrophysicists know that solar systems incomparably older than ours exist and therefore presumably much older intelligent beings, too. The earliest intelligences began to ask questions in order to extend their knowledge.

Before these intelligent extraterrestrial beings planned space travel, they engaged in astro-physical and astronomical research (as our own experts did before they sent the first rockets into the atmosphere).

When they began to build spaceships their mathematicians and ballistic experts got together and calculated that, given the high velocity of the spaceship, time was different for the launching planet and the crew of the spaceship.

Inconceivable?

It has long been scientifically proved that different times hold good on interstellar flights at high speed.

Time dilation, as this time shift is called, was first 'discovered' in our day, but it is an 'eternal' law, which was equally valid for the first space-travelling intelligences. What am I to do, says Zeus? was the question Friedrich Schiller asked in his poem 'Dividing the Earth'. What are we to do? was also the question the extraterrestrial beings asked themselves. How were they to realize the goal of their expedition, namely increasing their knowledge, if millennia would have passed when they returned from their journey into space? If there was no one left alive at home who could evaluate and benefit from the fruits of their voyage?

Time and space could only be conquered, said the extraterrestrial academics, if they arranged for descendants at various times in as many places in the cosmos as possible -naturally 'in their own image'! So the astronauts were trained and given the mission during the long journey to make for all the planets apparently similar to their home planet and land on them. Having thoroughly explored a planet they had to separate the most advanced form of life and make it intelligent by a deliberate artificial mutation. (*) After what pattern? Obviously 'in their own image'.

Thus time was overcome by a fairly simple trick. From then on intelligent groups of their 'kind' - formed in their 'image' -existed at various times on various planets like their home star. The chronological building up of the planned breeding made it possible to hand on acquired experience and knowledge in a quasi-endless relay race, despite the time shift. The expedition's goal of increasing knowledge was assured.

It would be absurd to claim that human intelligence is unique and alone in the cosmos. There may be millions and millions of forms of intelligence in the universe, but envoys with a different form of intelligence from that to which we owe our development have not sought out our planet. What business would a Jupiter intelligence have on Mercury, if conditions similar to his own did not exist? We can find the extraterrestrials' recipe in Homer's Odyssey:

It's always the same,

A god keeps company with his peers!

Intelligence similar to ours exists in our galaxy because the extraterrestrials carried out their mission and performed artificial mutations on existing life at several strategic points. Even though we do not yet know it, there are other intelligences in our galaxy that think, act and feel like ourselves. These cosmic families, that are closely related to us, have brains that function like ours; after all they have the same origin, being built in the 'image' of the alien cosmonauts.

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[*] Lat. 'change'. Discontinuous variation or sudden inheritable divergence from ancestral type.

---- These brains produce the same reaction to external stimuli as our much under worked thinking apparatuses. Do they ignite the first spark of visions?

Why, someone will ask, has the 'lord of Creation' not become intelligent through Darwinian natural selection, evolution, (*) and mutations, as the anthropologists say? Because the whole of the remaining monkey family (our forefathers!) still live in the jungle! Because they had exactly the same period of time at their disposal in which to evolve. Because the number and shape of their chromosomes (+) is not identical with ours!

Our forefathers, the hominids, had 48 Y chromosomes; we have 46 XY chromosomes. I beseech some geneticist to explain to me (and the anthropologists!) how 48 Y chromosomes turned into 46 XY

chromosomes and how products of the coupling of different numbers and shapes could multiply successfully? I expect I shall be told that two Y chromosomes grew up together by chance and produced an X chromosome. Why not? There is an obvious snag. The being to which this genetic defect happened, whether male or female, could never mate again with any other hominid because of the disparate chromosome numbers.

In order to accept this quite illogical explanation I would have to swallow the mathematical impossibility of this purely chance chromosome defect repeating itself at approximately the same time, and of this second 'spontaneous mutation' also having met up with the first one by chance! A pair has two parts. If it wants to reproduce itself, both parts must be of the same nature. It is asking too much to offer such a 'solution' to the problem. If you are in the habit of asking awkward questions like this, you often get answers of the same quality.

With regard to the subject of becoming intelligent, the British geneticist Francis Harry Crick, who won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for research into the chemical bases of heredity (DNA), published in the periodical Icarus [23] his conviction that life on our earth had become active by extraterrestrial genes.

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[*] The doctrine according to which higher forms of life have gradually arisen out of lower.

[+] Rod-like portions of the chromatin of a cell-nucleus, performing an important part in mitotic celldivision and in the transmission of hereditary characters. Each species has its own particular number and shape of chromosomes.

---- As I have been attacked from many quarters because of this very hypothesis, I must admit that this article by such a world-famous geneticist made me very happy.

Before I continue outlining my hypothesis that the extraterrestrial origin of our intelligence is the explanation of genuine visions, I must get rid of the most important objection to my cosmonaut theory.

Eminent astronauts and exobiologists such as Professor Carl Sagan, New York, say that the concept of an extraterrestrial visit to our planet is impossible because, given the vast number of potential planets, the extraterrestrial beings could not have predetermined the Now, the point when man became intelligent out of the whole history of human evolution. So if the earth had been visited by extraterrestrial beings say three million years ago, accounts of the event could not have been incorporated into mythology as I claimed in my books. The extraterrestrial beings could not a) have known that our planet was a worthwhile goal, nor b) that hominids had just achieved intelligence on their evolutionary path.