Alien Intrusion Page 14

  The most efficient system in the universe

  Everyone recognizes the absurdity of believing that complex machines form spontaneously through chance, random processes. Machines require a blueprint, and blueprints require a designer. In all living things this blueprint is written on DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), the complex double-helix molecule that is present in every living organism. DNA carries the code (or instructions) for every “machine” within the cells, telling them what to make — a horse or a human — and also what type of hair, eyes, or skin you will have, and so on.

  The DNA molecule is the most compact and efficient storage information system in the known universe. For example, the amount of information that could be stored in a single pinhead of DNA would be equivalent to a pile of paperback novels 240 times as high as the distance from the earth to the moon, or 100 million times more information than a 40 gigabyte hard drive could hold in your computer.[1]

  DNA Double Helix

  Even if we could explain the creation of complex coded information by chance, there would be another problem. We would need at the same time to create a mechanism capable of reading and using this coded information; otherwise, the information alone is useless. A fully functional system for writing, reading, and using information is required. This is an example of “irreducible complexity.” That is, to be fully functional, the writing mechanism, the reading mechanism, and the mechanism for using the information must all be present at the very first instance it appears. If one of these components is missing, the system won’t work. Since life is built on a hierarchy of such “irreducibly complex” machines, the idea that natural processes could have made mere chemicals into living systems is untenable. In his best-selling book, Darwin’s Black Box, biochemist

  Dr. Michael Behe describes such biochemical machines:

  … systems of horrendous, irreducible complexity inhabit the cell. The resulting realization that life was designed by an intelligence is a shock to us in the twentieth century who have gotten used to thinking of life as the result of simple natural laws. But other centuries have had their shocks, and there is no reason to suppose that we should escape them.[2]

  In terms of the volume of information that is constantly working at programming, building, and reproducing our bodies, Dr. Carl Wieland asks us to consider:

  … that there are 75 to 100 trillion cells in the [human] body. Taking the lower figure, it means that if we stretched out all of the DNA in one human body and joined it end to end, it would stretch to a distance of 150 billion kilometres (around 94 billion miles). How long is this? It would stretch right around the Earth’s equator three-and-a-half million times! It is a thousand times as far as from the Earth to the sun. If you were to shine a torch along that distance, it would take the light, traveling at 300,000 kilometres (186,000 miles) every second, five-and-a-half days to get there.[3]

  Design … intelligence. Are advanced aliens responsible? Life’s enormous complexity is a serious challenge for the theory of evolution. It cannot account for the origin of the first cells, and the problems mount when you consider the development of higher or more evolved life forms (see later in this chapter). Sir Francis Crick, who received a knighthood and the Nobel Prize for his discovery of DNA, admitted:

  An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.[4]

  Crick reasoned that such seemingly intelligent design could not have occurred from non-living chemicals under any conceivable Earth conditions. As an atheist, he found the idea of “God as Creator” unpalatable. He proposed, instead, that life originated in outer space and came to Earth. This idea is known as “panspermia,” which is from the Greek words pas/pan (all) and sperma (seed).

  {See The Miller/Urey experiment}

  On the probability of something like a DNA molecule forming by chance, the late astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle illustrated the point this way:

  Now imagine 1050 blind persons [that’s 100,000 billion billion billion billion billion people — standing shoulder to shoulder, they would more than fill our entire planetary system] each with a scrambled Rubik cube and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling [random variation] at just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial soup here on Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.[5]

  Life’s origin — from space?

  Crick was not the first person to propose the idea of life from outer space. The original idea is attributed to Nobel prizewinning Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, back in 1907. He published a book called World in the Making after Pasteur had disproved spontaneous generation. His idea was that life had always been present in the universe, and that it traveled from planet to planet as naked bacterial spores. But science fiction writer Isaac Asimov poured cold water on this idea when he pointed out that as far back as 1910, experiments showed that ultraviolet light (UV) would quickly kill such spores. UV is much more intense in space, and in addition, other forms of radiation would kill off any microscopic spores — the problem being accumulated doses over an extended period of time. Around the earth are fields of high-energy particles, which form rings of radiation known as the Van Allen belts (discovered in 1958 by James Van Allen) which would contribute to the radiation dosage.[6] For more complex forms of life, there are additional problems to overcome, such as the nutritional requirements of most organisms, a lack of oxygen, subzero temperatures in space, and the likelihood that any organism larger than one micron in diameter would burn up on re-entry.[7] Recently, there have been discoveries of microbes floating in the stratosphere above the earth, but they appear to be bacteria of Earth origin and not extraterrestrial at all.

  Perhaps to overcome such obstacles, Crick co-authored a book called Life Itself, which proposed the idea that some form of primordial life was purposefully shipped to the earth by ETs in spaceships. He called this idea directed panspermia, but this belief has serious problems, too. Crick reasoned that intelligent life had evolved elsewhere in the universe to produce intelligent beings, and then once again on the earth to ultimately produce people. All this apparently took place following the big bang about nine billion years ago (as was believed in Crick’s day).[8]

  But evolution itself is undirected, random, purposeless, and wasteful. There is no information contained in matter itself that can produce life, let alone produce similar results time and time again on numerous different planets. It is valid to inquire why supposedly intelligent ETs would seed the earth without knowing what the outcome of undirected evolution would be — unless we are regarded as merely “lab rats” in some grand cosmic wait-and-see science experiment. How could the ETs have known that intelligent life would have definitely arisen in a purposeless process? And who or what life form could expect to exist or survive to see the supposed results of the “experiment” some three billion years later? As we discussed in the previous chapter, how would they find a suitable life-sustaining planet among the trillions of stars in the universe anyway? Crick himself eventually conceded the unscientific basis of his theories:

  Every time I write a paper on the origin of life, I swear I will never write another one, because there is too much speculation running after too few facts… .[9]

  In any case, as a materialist, his notion of aliens creating life did not solve the problem of how life first arose. It merely pushed it away to an unobservable planet on which those aliens (or their creators, in turn) must have evolved.

  After several years of writing science fiction books, famous astronomer Fred Hoyle and colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe published a book that brought serious attention to the idea of panspermia. It was called Lifecloud: The Origin
of Life in the Universe. This theory had creatures living and breeding in comets and finding their way to Earth, somehow protected from the perils we mentioned earlier. This is truly science fiction. World-famous comet specialist Fred Whipple commented:

  I am charmed but not impressed by the picture of life forms developing in warm little ponds, protected in their icy igloos from the cruel cold and near vacuum of open space, and falling to primitive Earth at speeds exceeding eleven kilometers per second.[10]

  Undaunted, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe produced a second book in 1981 called Evolution from Space, in which they suggest that genetic material continually enters our atmosphere riding light beams (more accurately, driven by the pressure of light from stars), and that the complex programming for DNA and subsequent evolution had already been “worked out” by a benevolent extraterrestrial intelligence elsewhere. That such famous and learned scientists as Crick, Hoyle, and company can produce such wild speculation is incredible, and highlights yet again that so much of what is called “science” today is merely philosophical guesswork. But their theories are still being discussed to this day and have even gained some credence among others who are also grappling with the origin of the complexity of life. Such fanciful ideas arise because well-informed scientists realize the apparent impossibility of life starting by chance.

  Crick conceded this problem when he suggested that the origin of life appears to be nigh miraculous. The complexity of DNA speaks of a design created by a vastly superior intelligence. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe said they faced the same problem:

  The conclusion is that the complexity of life on Earth cannot have been caused by a sequence of random processes, but must have come from a cosmic intelligence. Life had already evolved to a high standard of information long before the earth was born, so that our planet received life with the fundamental biochemical problems already solved.[11]

  Using the definitions of science that we presented in the last chapter, it is easy to see that such fantastic notions as panspermia are unsustainable. Molecular biologist Michael Denton has also uncovered many serious problems with the evolutionary theory of life forming from non-living matter. In his best-selling book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, he states:

  Nothing illustrates more clearly just how intractable a problem the origin of life has become than the fact that world authorities can seriously toy with the idea of panspermia.[12]

  The universal and accepted law of biogenesis simply states that all life comes from life. No one has ever seen lifeless chemicals arrange themselves into the complex, information-bearing bio-molecules needed for life. There are many evolutionary scientists who readily admit this. Yet by faith they believed that this conversion of lifeless chemicals to organic molecules must have occurred early in the history of our planet. Such an unsupported assertion qualifies as religious belief because it deals with the unobserved origin, and therefore the meaning, of life.

  The concept of panspermia merely shifts the problem of life’s origin further into outer space where it cannot be tested. And did the aliens evolve or were they created? If they were created by other aliens, who created those, and so on? Where does it end, or more importantly, where did it begin?

  {See Mission to Mars (2000)}

  Ockham’s Razor and SETI’s blind spot

  If life cannot arise spontaneously from non-life and the simplest living organisms show irreducible complexity, then such organisms must have been fully formed from the very first instant they appeared. That is, the first life must have been designed and created. This is a straightforward conclusion from the available evidence.

  In science today, it is generally accepted that the simplest explanation is the best. This view is called Ockham’s Razor, and one university website explains it so:

  In order to choose among these possible theories, a very useful tool is what is called Ockham’s Razor. Ockham’s Razor is the principle proposed by William of Ockham in the fourteenth century: “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate,” which translates as “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” In many cases this is interpreted as “keep it simple,” but in reality the Razor has a more subtle and interesting meaning. Suppose that you have two competing theories which describe the same system, if these theories have different predictions than [sic] it is a relatively simple matter to find which one is better: one does experiments with the required sensitivity and determines which one give[s] the most accurate predictions.[13]

  The simplest explanation for the origin of DNA, using the principle of Ockham’s Razor, is that it was designed — somewhat like a computer memory chip — and the original life-information was loaded into it by the designer. Since there is no such designer evident here on Earth it is reasonable to conclude that the designing intelligence lives somewhere else.

  Note that the SETI program is looking for signs of intelligence, although due to its evolutionary stance, it does not believe in any designer(s) for life. It hopes that an alien intelligence is beaming radio waves across space and that we can recognize the intelligence behind such transmissions. But if advanced alien races somehow evolved differently from us, how would “lowly” mankind be able to recognize or decode their messages? (From an evolutionary standpoint, why should languages evolve similarly? Surely the random numbers of evolution would throw out a “mixed bag” of differing life forms and languages?)

  In the DNA of all living things there is already enormously complex coded information that modern technology is only now beginning to decode, such as that revealed in the Human Genome Project (HGP). The simplest living organism known to us has 482 protein-coding genes, or 580,000 letters of information. By comparison, human DNA has three billion (3,000,000,000) letters and all of this information must be precisely arranged. Imagine reading a sentence on this page. If the letters were scrambled, the sentence would cease to carry meaningful information. Similarly, each gene code for a protein is designed to carry out a specific function, and this will not work unless the information is arranged correctly.

  The supposed world leader in searching for intelligent messages from space, SETI appears to have an enormous blind spot. Because it accepts evolution as a fact, SETI is either incapable or unwilling to acknowledge that millions of encyclopedias’ worth of information has already been transmitted to the earth from an outside intelligence — in the DNA of living organisms. If they ever detect signals from space — and determine that the coded information came from an intelligent source — they will shout to the world that they have discovered an extraterrestrial “language.” Yet, the earth already has received tons of coded information, programmed into DNA — a clear sign of such “language” from an outside intelligence!

  Dr. Werner Gitt was a director and professor at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology and is a world leader in the field of information science. In several books on the subject, he has made it clear that science makes one thing absolutely sure: information cannot arise from disorder by chance. It always takes (a greater source of) information to produce information, and ultimately information is the result of intelligence:[14]

  A code system is always the result of a mental process (it requires an intelligent origin or inventor)… . It should be emphasized that matter as such is unable to generate any code. All experiences indicate that a thinking being voluntarily exercising his own free will, cognition, and creativity, is required.[15] There is no known natural law through which matter can give rise to information, neither is any physical process or material phenomenon known that can do this.[16]

  Genetic manipulation by aliens?

  Our look at genetics clearly tells us that genes are designed. Many think that this design is the work of aliens. In his book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994), Harvard University professor John Mack believed that aliens abduct human beings for sperm and egg collection. Their purpose is to create human/alien hybrids for the purpose of transforming human consciousness; that is, to alter our own perce
ptions of ourselves as a species. This “transforming” view is common among abduction researchers and UFOlogists who, over the years, have interviewed thousands of “abductees,” noting that this “breeding program” seems to be rampant. Many abductees also claim that the aliens themselves have told them such things. These common accounts imply that interfering aliens have been “fiddling” with our genes from the beginning and that we might be the playthings of “superior” races. Such a program, if true, would certainly alter mankind’s view of itself.

  But how could aliens and humans interbreed? How could we share common DNA that allows interbreeding if they are from other worlds? Presuming they are the creators of Earth life, they must have created some form of basic DNA, by using some DNA threads from their own bodies or from other creatures on their planet, the theory being that this basic DNA would replicate itself and produce new information and new kinds of creatures. This is similar to Hoyle and Wickramasinghe’s proposal when they suggested that this primordial DNA would have all of the engineering and programming bugs ironed out. There are two ways that aliens could have introduced this DNA on Earth.