How, Why?
Chris’ thoughts
Alan and I live a five hour round trip apart so we tend to work by means of a constant flow of emails punctuated by phone calls and the occasional video call. It works very well for us and whilst we have some animated discussions, we have never had an argument or a cross word. I guess it’s because we both share a hunger for searching out the truth and we are happy to have our own ideas fully pressure tested, and we regularly discard ideas that don’t quite stack up.
Our approach to research is definitely unusual in that time and money aren’t important to us, so we can spend many years on an investigation; more than 20 years on this topic. If we were commercially driven we would have had to publish more books than we do and if we were in an academic department we would have time constraints, and pressures to comply with prevailing theories. We also are able to be highly multi-disciplinary compared to a university department where it is normally frowned upon to be become involved in a subject outside of one’s own specialism.
In many respects we are able to act with the freedom of 18th century ‘gentlemen polymaths’ - threading together ideas from archeology, astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics and all of their many subsets. We do however have the incredible benefit of the access to almost limitless information that is available via the internet as well as good, old-fashioned books and journals. I suppose our role is as questioners and synthesisers, searching out the great work of a range of experts and putting them together to reveal challenging possible solutions.
We have, what I believe to be, a healthy caution about accepting existing conventional ideas and paradigms at face value, and we are admirers of those leading experts who have been brave enough to change their minds as the evidence changes. It is when we can line up the latest great work from different disciplines that new possibilities present themselves.
For example it is well reported that the Earth must have received multiple impacts to create the Moon, that there must have once been a sizeable planet where Ceres now sits, and that Ceres is largely made of material from elsewhere. Add to that that the Moon is essential for the Earth to have produced advanced life forms, that DNA arrived in the form of highly complex bacteria in what experts suggest is ‘directed panspermia’. Who can blame us for putting these gems of expert opinion together and to form a broad scenario that makes sense of them all? After all the individual conclusions of cutting edge experts do not exist in a vacuum and they are not likely to be unrelated events. And when we describe the astonishing reoccurring number patterns around conspicuous ratios of solar system bodies it is downright perverse to pretend that something of monumental importance is not happening.
It was around 2003 when Alan and I started to consider who or what the UCA might have been - or even still is. The obvious first candidate was some alien species from far away that maybe had a mission to seed life across the entire cosmos. This had to be the first consideration because that is what just about all science fiction is based upon, and aliens are what SETI clearly believes exist. The well known ‘Drake Equation’ has gone through many complex iterations to arrive at an estimate of advanced civilisations across the universe, and, by virtue of the sheer, unimaginable scale of creation, it ends up with some very big numbers. However the ‘Fermi Paradox’ raises an issue. It observes that a civilisation lasting for tens of millions of years could be able to spread throughout the galaxy, even at the speeds we can currently envisage for space travel. However, no confirmed signs of civilisations or intelligent life elsewhere have been found, in our Galaxy or in the observable universe of around 2 trillion galaxies. According to this line of thinking, the tendency to fill all available territory seems to be a universal trait of living things, so the Earth should have already been colonised, or at least visited, but no evidence of this exists. Hence physicist, Enrico Fermi put forward the unavoidable question "Where is everybody?"
Our joint view was that aliens was a credible explanation but not one to be taken for granted. And whilst it is impossible to know, given the unbelievable complexity and improbability of life coming into existence at all, I would personally not be in the least surprised if it turns out that life on Earth is unique. A cosmic one-off.
Our next thought about the identity of the UCA concerned God. Could a deity, of the sort described in Judah-Christian, Islamic or Hindu tradition have undertaken this project to grow intelligent life on Earth? As we have already discussed, this seemed unlikely to us - although the original creation known as the Big Bang, could be argued to have a theological causation. At the instant of creation at least 13.7 billion years ago (and maybe double that), the entire universe is thought to have arrived, first as a singularity - a point smaller than a subatomic particle - before instantly exploding into everything. This included all of the exotic and frankly beautiful laws of maths, chemistry, physics and everything else. We now know that the entire universe and its key laws are built around the number 1 divided by 137 - (0.00729735256). Known as the ‘fine structure content’ it defies any explanation, yet it is the essence running through completely unrelated area after area.
The third option occurred to me when considering an Occam’s Razor approach. The only known potential culprit anywhere is humankind. I recall that when I first put it to Alan that maybe the UCA could be people from our own future, he went very quiet before he politely tried to convince me that it was a daft idea. He pointed out that it was a circular argument to say that the future created the past so that the present would lead to that future. I drew his attention to the fact that all leading experts agree that time travel is not forbidden by any of the known laws of physics - and that it being counter-intuitive was not a reason to reject the idea. Within a couple of weeks of reading around the subject Alan was fully on board with time travellers as a possible solution.
Slowly but surely the ‘loop in time’ explanation for the identity of the UCA grew to be the most probable of the two options left. The case for aliens from afar became harder and harder to support and the apparent arguments for the only other answer grew stronger and stronger.
One of the problems with accepting that humans will eventually devise a way to travel in time (either themselves or through the use of drones or robots) is how one defines the concept of ‘now’. What is the past and what is the future?
It is universally accepted that we are all travelling in time; second by second as we all move at the same rate into our future. Except of course when an individual physically travels at a greater speed that everybody else - when Einstein’s theory of relativity come into play. According to Einstein's theory, an observer travelling at high speed will experience time passing more slowly that an observer at rest. This has led to astronauts returning to Earth being very slightly younger that they would otherwise have been. Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov holds the record for the most days spent in space when he was onboard Russia's Mir space station for 437 days, which meant his watch was almost 2.5 seconds out compared to his colleagues on the ground. The same theory states that position in gravitational field also changes time. Atomic clocks, which use the quantum jump of electrons as a virtual pendulum, can easily measure the difference in time between a building’s ground floor and its penthouse.
However, if major, instantaneous movements across time can happen we surely have to designate a position in time as being ‘point zero’ - a moment when we can refer to a before and an after. A kind of base-camp where everyone can return to. In much the way that there is a notional moment in the Christian dating system, which has a before and and after - namely ‘Before Christ’ (BC) and ‘After Christ’ (AD). In this case instead of being the birth of a special infant, it would be the moment the first time traveller makes a jump.
Alan and I have tried hard to keep this book based on very accurately defined numbers and on the best evidence and opinions of leading scientists - and then made careful extrapolations of what it means and what should happen next. However, in this personal epilogue section I feel that I can be rather more philosophical. I wonder whether travelling backwards in time is achievable but the reverse, moving forward to a time that has not yet existed for the person or object concerned, is not possible.
If one assumes that events are fixed in both directions from a point that we call ‘now’, the future has to be as predetermined as the past. Meaning that there is no such thing as free will; whatever we do we have to follow the ‘script’. Indeed, according to a substantial number of philosophers and scientists, who have a variety of different reasons for their view, free will is definitely an illusion. Some, like evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne believe that the entire notion is contrary to the laws of physics - and other psychologists such as Steven Pinker, Paul Bloom and the late Stephen Hawking agree, along with numerous prominent neuroscientists, including VS Ramachandran, who called free will “an inherently flawed and incoherent concept”.
So, if these leading thinkers are right the future is as fixed as the past and the whole of creation is like a movie playing itself out - and there is nothing anyone can do to change events. Time travel would be just like fast-forwarding or reversing a movie on your laptop. In this case there would be no motivation for the inhabitants of our future to go backwards in time to create the Earth-Moon system to nurture life as it is all going to happen anyway. At the risk of sounding flippant, it does make me wonder what kind of smart-arse would have written such a weird script! The whole situation becomes incredibly nihilistic and therefore pointless. Alan Butler and I are no more meaningful that the movie character ‘KC Houseman’ who was based on us but constructed out of Roland Emmerich’s imagination.
However, the situation can become far more interesting if we introduce the concept of a multiverse; an infinite set of universes that are described as ‘parallel universes’ or ‘alternate universes’. There is a widespread view that this assumed multiverse is essentially a "patchwork quilt of separate universes all bound by the same laws of physics that we see. Some supports of the ‘anthropoid principle’ have suggested that each of these universes might have different physical laws, which would explain the utterly impossible fine-tuning within our own universe that allows for conscious life.
There is also what is known as the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) that considers how the mathematics used in quantum mechanics relates to physical reality. It asserts that the universal wave-function is objectively real, and that there is no wave function collapse, such as described in the quantum-mechanical ‘Schrödinger's cat’ paradox. In this interpretation, every quantum event is a branch point; the cat is both alive and dead, even before the box is opened, but the "alive" and "dead" cats are in different branches of the multiverse, both of which are equally real, but which do not interact with each other. This implies that all possible outcomes of quantum measurements are physically realised in some parallel world or universe.
At the core of all this thinking sits the key role of observation. As an observer in the case of the box being opened to reveal either the healthy or deceased status of Schrödinger's cat. At that moment of awareness for an individual observer the wave function collapses and only one of the possibly outcomes enters their reality. It might be different for any two observers - who would then have diverged from each other into separate but equally real futures. In this quantum way history does matter and futures are not guaranteed.
This seems to me to be a very likely truth of consciousness within quantum physics - and as such would mean that we are all surfing the waves of unfolding reality, moment by moment. Like an ocean surfer maybe tiny shifts in balance, millisecond by millisecond can determine how our lives unfold. Those with innate skill ride into the best universe, whilst others are less fortunate.
If the strangeness of quantum mechanics does play out in this real-world way, it seems like the branching of every subatomic particle is part of an infinite array of universes in a touch-point of probability. As such the patchwork quilt of realities contact constantly with each other and Schrödinger's cat is dead in one and alive in another. This would mean that scientists like Coyne, Pinker, Bloom and Hawking are right about any one universe being a fixed story like a movie - but we are all capable of shifting to a near-identical universe where things have different endgames. This could be compared to a sophisticated computer game that has splendidly realistic CGI effects; it looks like a movie but the person playing it has ongoing options to change the actions of the characters, and therefore effect outcomes.
Such a situation would mean that the manipulators from the future have to take active steps to ensure that they are in the version of the multiverse where life began on Earth and prospered to be sure that they exist. If they fail to do so they could end up in a universe where they don’t exist.
Whilst current thinking in science doesn’t know how or why DNA life arrived, the people from our future know exactly what they did, and therefore what they have to do. And they need to alert us in this, the third decade of the third millennium.
In this book Alan and I have called for a team of 81 talented people to unravel a message that many thinkers have considered likely to be implanted in our DNA. Maybe slowly, or perhaps very quickly the world will pay attention to what we say here and begin the process of interrogation of DNA to receive instructions regarding what we have to do next. My guess is that by 2030 we will have closed the loop, whereby we establish ‘point zero’ through creating a time shift, and the four and a half billion years of development will be complete.
Personally, my job right now is to ensure that I somehow manage to move into the part of the multiverse where Alan and I succeed in persuading the world’s leading thinkers and influencers that we need to interrogate DNA in order to receive the information we need to complete the order of life upon Earth. I need to surf the ‘live’ option or I fear we will all be as dead as Schrödinger's cat… possibly.
Postscript
One last thought. When we finally unlock the ‘Encyclopedia Galactica’ contained in DNA, we will have instructions on how to proceed. What we will not know is whether the message was placed there by our biological offspring or by some AI intelligence that will soon be brought to fruition by humans.
My feeling is that it doesn’t really matter as long as the best aspects of the human soul are passed on to any non-biological life form, and that the many evil aspects of the human character don’t make it into the higher aspects of the multiverse.