Mythology: Ancient Astronauts: An Outline: Part One

Denying the reality of the gods (including God) by attributing to them only mythological (fictional) status is easy. Much harder is to try to accept their reality while stripping them of their supernatural (deity) status. That’s what I try to do here. If that however can’t be done, well the fairy tales involving the ancient Egyptian, Roman, Greek, etc. gods or the Biblical God still make for interesting bedtime stories.

Introduction:

The concept that once-upon-a-time, a time long, long ago, an extraterrestrial civilization’s beings held sway and had influence over humanity has gained stature. We call those ancient beings the ‘gods’, even ‘God’. Collectively, they are now known by the popular phrase ‘ancient astronauts’. While that concept has just about zero credibility with scholars (vested interests perhaps), the general populace has had a far more open mind on the issue, at least judging from the popularity of books, movies, TV shows, documentaries, etc. that discuss the issue. 

Let’s start off with some basic assumptions. Mythology is not purely an invention of the human imagination out of whole cloth. There are grains of truth or reality within the tales. Humans are intelligent enough to separate basic facts from basic fictions, even if the facts are often embellished to make a good tale better, or misinterpreted. The mythological gods (including God) really existed. However, they weren’t really supernatural beings or deities. That’s the misinterpretation part. Tales of the gods have, I’m sure, been embellished as well.

That’s because oral traditions (language) has existed vastly longer than the written record. Thus, there’s a long oral tradition of the ancient astronaut ‘gods’ and their relationships with humans and with each other before it all started to be written down, since language proper first came to the fore less than 100,000 years ago (probably less – more like 50,000 years ago with the development of full behavioural modernity) but writing can only be traced back to roughly 6000 BC. That’s a lot of in-between time for a lot of the details to have been embellished or lost and lost too in the retellings over some 2000 generations!

When it comes to the concept of ‘ancient astronauts’ mythology when coupled with astrobiology, well that combination forms a greater dynamic duo, a more profitable source of material, explaining all relative to that of pure archaeology and related artefacts. Thusly, in dot-point form, here are some central facets to the mythology behind ‘ancient astronauts’.

Astrobiology:

*A few Type-II advanced technological civilizations exist within our Milky Way galaxy. A Type-II civilisation is one that can harness the energy output of an entire star.

*They have subluminal interstellar spaceflight capacity.

*Subluminal interstellar spaceflight violates no laws of physics.

*The time it takes to cross from one edge of the Milky Way galaxy to another is a small fraction of the age of the galaxy even via subluminal velocities.

*It is likely, even highly probable that Planet Earth was discovered by one or more such Type-II civilizations many, many millennia ago. You can’t hide or cloak a star, solar system and planet.

*These Type-II civilized interstellar travelling beings arrived on Earth in one or more spaceships way before humans existed.

Mythology:

*Our advanced extraterrestrials set up shop on Planet Earth as an R&R home-away-from-home, sort of taking dominion over this paradise / nature reserve / national park, perhaps with a view towards eventual long-term colonization. 

*In much the same way as British colonizers of Australia brought with them reminders of home, from plants and crops to cattle and sheep, not to mention rabbits, cats and dogs, so to did the ‘god’s bring with them their menagerie, like say the hydra, chimera, unicorns, Pegasus, and of course dragons.

*This would certainly explain why nearly every pre-Christian human culture independently had dragons as part of that culture. Dragons could be good (The East), or bad (The West) but regardless ‘here be dragons’. So, I suspect that at one time, thanks to the ‘gods’, dragons were anything but mythical.

*There are many other common themes that cut across several cultural mythologies involving the gods. One is that you can be turned to stone (or in the Biblical sense, a pillar of salt perhaps?). ‘Global’ floods are common in the mythological literature, not just in the Bible. Nearly all cultures have trickster ‘gods’. And in creation myths involving the cosmos, there’s nearly always a subdivision between attic (the sky or heaven, etc.); the basement (the underworld); and ground level (Planet Earth). That trilogy is probably not too surprising however since wherever we are there’s always an up, a down, and a sideways. However, the importance of near universal mythological themes between cultures with no contact between them is relatively obvious in an ‘ancient astronaut’ context.

*Such extraterrestrial beings became known collective as the gods or as deities to humans as soon as humans evolved sufficiently to develop (or were given a) language and a reasonable level of intellect. The gods are really an advanced race(s), representing a Type-II civilization(s), but to more simplistic humans, such advanced extraterrestrials were interpreted as deities.

*These advanced extraterrestrial beings will be hereafter referred to as the ‘gods’, because that’s they way humanity perceived them.

*There are numerous creation myths surrounding the ‘gods’. The ‘gods’ created heaven and Earth; living things; other ‘gods’ – you name it, they probably created it.

*’Gods’ are of course usually responsible for creating the human race and beings.

*Humans may have evolved from ‘lesser’ primates, but the ‘gods’ did some artificial selection to assist the process so as to provide the ‘gods’ ultimately with a labour force. This is how the ‘gods’ ‘created’ humanity. That the ‘gods’ created humans is one very common creation tale among many differing cultures. ‘Genesis’ has no monopoly on how the ‘gods’ breathed life into man and woman. 

*This is akin to humans establishing a horse farm say, stocking same with say wild horses and then artificially breeding them for the trait(s) you want.

*The ‘gods’ created humans to do the hard yakka (one good reason why humans, not aliens, built the pyramids and other monumental stoneworks such as cities, as temples, as buildings, as massive statues, etc). 

*If that’s the case, it would give further credence to the comments made many, many decades ago by the late Charles Fort (of Fortean or anomalies fame) that “I think we’re property”.

*The ‘gods’ brought culture, arts and crafts, trades, fire, agriculture and all the other civilized products (i.e. science, writing, language) to early human societies. That might be one reason why the transition from primitive hunter-gatherers to sophisticated settlements and ‘civilization’ was apparently reasonably quick in many, but not all parts of the world. Some African and Pacific cultures (i.e. the Australian aborigines) remained nomadic, but their ‘gods’ and mythologies are also hard to mesh with the European, the subcontinent and Asian cultures. This might be another case of division of labour – this lot of ‘gods’ took sole responsibility for this geographical area; this other lot of ‘gods’ looked after another geographical area. The styles of these differing collections of ‘gods’ might have differed enough to account for why some parts of the world developed ‘civilization’ and some didn’t, even though all parts had ‘gods’.

*As a possible example of advanced knowledge given humans, reinterpreted by mankind in the only way possible given their limited understanding of modern cosmology, we have creation myths involving the ‘cosmic egg’. The basic story generally goes roughly like this: in the beginning there’s this dark void, or an endless dark and still ocean; in this darkness there was an egg, often a golden egg. For reasons unexplained, the egg breaks open and hatches, often associated with an outpouring of light. There’s usually a deity or deities in the egg who then go on to create the rest of, well, creation, including the heavens, the Earth, the underworld, and of course life. Now variations on this basic story will be found in at least ancient Egypt, Greece, India, China, Africa (the Dogon and Mande peoples), Japan, Finland, Tibet, Borneo and Oceania. In the 20^th Century, early cosmologists postulated the Ylem or the primeval atom as the ‘cosmic egg’ equivalent. Today, the ‘cosmic egg’ we’d now call ‘before the big bang’; the hatching would be the big bang; the associated deity or deities would be the natural process of physical, chemical and ultimately biological evolution that created, well, the rest of creation.

*Now humans, not knowing any better when subjected to various natural disasters like local, but intense, floods, were prone to blame the gods for being pissed off at humanity – maybe they were!

To be continued…

Biblical Old Age: An Explanation or Two: Part Two

One of the many anomalies part and parcel of Biblical texts are those “Book of Genesis” genealogies that inform us that various characters in the Bible apparently spend way more time in retirement and collecting pensions and other old age social security benefits than they ever did gainfully employed. Methuselah is often the person cited as king of the pensioners. The question is, are those Biblical old ages fact or fiction? If factual, what are the possible explanations?

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

The Bible itself apparently offers no explanation for these extraordinary life-spans. Therefore, we have open slather when it comes to speculations upon the explanations.

The most probable explanation is that it’s pure Biblical fiction, just more myths and fairy tales for grown-ups, but then if that’s true this essay terminates now. So, indulge my fantasy as I play the ‘what if’ game, as in ‘what if’ a lifespan of 969 was achieved. How and why and what sorts of implications are now gist for the fun-and-games mill that can be speculated on till the cows come home. 

One thing I rule out is more time to be fruitful and multiply. Any normal male over any normal lifespan could potentially father hundreds upon hundreds of offspring. You don’t need a 900+ year lifespan. Re-enforcing this are the observations by the Gershwin brothers in their “Porgy and Bess” song that no gal is going to give in and spread her legs for no man who’s 900 years old!

Now I have speculated elsewhere at long length that God isn’t really a deity, but an extraterrestrial, a Captain of the Starship Heaven. Further, God, and his extraterrestrial colleagues from other starships, the polytheistic ‘gods’, came to Earth with technological powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men (and women), and experimented with mammalian primate stock, ultimately producing, via artificial selection, the human being (which really was a very bad mistake, but that’s another topic).

Now perhaps these Biblical long-lifers were really aliens themselves, aliens with naturally long life-spans, part of Captain God’s Starship Heaven crew who did a lot of the be-fruitful-and-multiply begetting bit (some of those ‘sons of God’ chatting up some of those ‘daughters of men’ scenarios that the Bible relates) designed to improve the stock of the terrestrial species known as Homo sapiens..

Or perhaps this gift of extensive longevity is yet another case of God and/or the polytheistic gods doing a bit of bio-tampering via bioengineering, medical technology, and/or genetic engineering on actual humans – some of God’s chosen ones.  So perhaps if our old-timers were human through-and-through, then you have really got to conclude that clearly, some advanced bio or genetic or medical technology/engineering was employed, and by elimination, the only beings capable of employing such technologies would be aliens, aliens who to humans living way back around the time of the mythological flood were considered deities.

So assuming Methuselah and the rest of the super-pensioners listed above were genetically or medically augmented with all those additional years, what’s the point?

One reason for a long lifespan is if you need to take a long journey. Now that rules out Planet Earth since a normal human lifespan is long enough for you to get from Point A to Point B, even before the invention of the automobile and the airplane, especially given the rather limited geography that was known in Biblical times.

The only journeys that make sense in Methuselah terms would be a journey to the stars, where say Captain God (the E.T.) and crew of the Starship Heaven originally came from – call it a sightseeing tour for God’s chosen few. 

Today, modern humanity with its advanced high-tech civilization can’t manage to get to even the nearest of stellar neighbours. Our spacecraft are too slow; our life-spans too short. But how far could you get if you lived to be over 900 years and had an advanced extraterrestrial’s technology to transport you?

Now when it comes to interstellar distances, things are measured in light-years. One light year is the distance light travels in one year. The speed of light is roughly 186,000 miles per second; a light-year is some 6 trillion miles.

If you could travel at 1% light speed, you’d travel one light-year per every 100 years. So, if you lived somewhat beyond 900 years, you could make it out to roughly 9 light-years one-way, or 4.5 light-years roundtrip. That would bring you to our nearest stellar neighbour, the Alpha Centauri system, and back home again within your 900+ year allotment.

If you celebrated over 900 birthdays, and if you could travel at 10% light speed, you’d travel one light-year every 10 years. So, you could make it out to roughly 90 light-years one-way or 45 light-years if you wanted to touch ground on home turf again before you snuffed it. A radius of 45 light years brings you to distances that incorporate a fair few stars and star systems, some of which are quite Sun-like and prime candidates for hosting some form of alien life.

But if you could travel at close to light speed and taking into account special relativity, you’d boldly go outward bound at a little less than one light-year per year. The catch here is ‘special relativity’. It operates in your favour if you want to explore strange new worlds, etc. very far from home.

So, another possible explanation is that Methuselah (and the others) actually lived normal human life-spans but their interstellar journeys were at such velocities, close to light-speed, that Einstein’s special relativity came into play. The upshot is, the faster you travel, the slower you age. And thus, the case of the ‘twin paradox’ where the stay-at-home twin ages normally (one second per second; one year per orbit around the Sun) according to our norms, but the boldly going traveller, rocketing along near light speed twin, ages way more slowly. Thus, when the boldly going twin returns home and reunites with stay-at-home twin, there will now be vast differences in their ages. Stay-at-home twin has grown a lot older relative to boldly going twin. In fact, stay-at-home twin might have already snuffed it, dying of natural causes – old age – before a reunion happens.

So if Methuselah was boldly going, he might return home to a home now hundreds of years post his terrestrial date-of-birth, but to stay-at-home types, knowing nothing of special relativity, Methuselah would a super-pensioner, having obviously spanned those hundreds of years. Those stay-at-home bodies would record Methuselah lived to a super ultra ripe old age when in reality he aged normally and had a normal life span – no bio, genetic or medical technology/engineering, just special relativity physics.

 

And so in conclusion, Methuselah’s age and those of his super ultra pensioner kind, can be accounted for by 1) assuming the story is total rubbish (and if you were a betting person, that’s the way to bet); 2) they were aliens with naturally lengthy life-spans; 3) they were humans who were artificially augmented by various technological means to keep those grey hairs and wrinkles at bay for hundreds of years; or 4) they had normal terrestrial life-spans, the sort that you or I expect, but they were subjected to the weird physics associated with the Special Theory of Relativity.