You might be familiar with the works of Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato due to their contributions as early Greek scholars. Have you ever heard about Anaximander, the first philosopher to make massive changes to the astronomical world and natural philosophy?

He was a pre-Socratic philosopher, predating the typical study of Greek scholars. That’s probably why you never heard of him.

When studying ancient Greek thinkers, it is natural to place them in specific categories including philosopher, astronomer, biologist, or physician. Two thousand years ago these distinctions didn’t exist. The great minds of the ancient world seldom limited themselves to a specific topic of study, as we do today. For them, there was no distinction between what we now call “science” and “philosophy.”

The line between science and philosophy can often be a blurred one. The difference is that science depends on observations and experimentation, and it produces a “result,” whereas philosophy depends on logical arguments and doesn’t necessarily have to produce a “result.”

Anaximander of Miletus, a thinker of the pre-Socratic era, is a remarkable figure in the history of philosophy and astronomy. Living around 610-546 BCE in the ancient Greek city of Miletus, Anaximander made profound contributions to cosmology, biology, and metaphysics.

His philosophical ideas laid the foundation for a more rational and systematic approach to understanding the natural world, marking a significant shift from mythological explanations to early scientific thought.

In the 2017 essay collection Anaximander in Context: New Studies on the Origins of Greek Philosophy, Dirk Couprie, Robert Hahn, and Gerald Naddaf describe Anaximander’s mind as “one of the greatest minds in history.” Couprie goes on to state that he considers him on par with Newton.

Anaximander is the first scholar to write a book on Natural Philosophy, which paved the path for many contemporary philosophers. His book “On Nature” argued for the concept of the Aperion. 

The apeiron concept is his most enduring contribution to philosophy. He postulated that an underlying, boundless, and indefinite principle was the source of all things. According to Aristotle and Theophrastus, the first Greek philosophers were looking for the “origin” or “principle” (the Greek word “archê” has both meanings) of all things. Anaximander identified it with “the Boundless” or “the Unlimited” (Greek: “Apeiron,” that is, “that which has no boundaries”).

“Everything has an origin or is an origin. The Boundless has no origin. For then, it would have a limit. Moreover, it is both unborn and immortal, a kind of origin. For that which has become has also, necessarily, an end, and there is a termination to every process of destruction”.

Most of this book is unidentified as the fragments are lost in time. A primary source is his successor, Theophrastus, who referenced some parts of “On Nature” and was a follower of Anaximander’s accounts of Geography, Biology, and Astronomy.

Anaximander never fully or clearly explained explain what he meant by “the Boundless.” More recently, authors have disputed whether the Boundless should be interpreted spatially or temporarily without limits, perhaps as that which has no qualifications or as inexhaustible. Some scholars have even defended the meaning as:

“That which is not experienced” by relating the Greek word “Apeiron” not to “peras” (“boundary,” “limit”) but to “perao” (“to experience,” “to apperceive”).

The Greeks in those days were familiar with the idea of the immortal Homeric gods. Anaximander added two distinctive features to the concept of divinity:

        • Boundless is an impersonal something, and
        • Boundless is not only immortal but also unborn.

“All the heavens and the worlds within them” have sprung from “some boundless nature.”

This concept directly challenged prevailing mythological explanations for the origins of the cosmos.

Anaximander’s life and background are essential for understanding his philosophical contributions. Born in Miletus, a thriving city of Ionia, he was a contemporary of Thales, another prominent pre-Socratic philosopher. His background likely included exposure to the cosmopolitan culture of Ionia and its connection to the broader Mediterranean world. 

Anaximander is credited as the first Greek geographer to attempt the map of our world, at least according to ancient observers. It was not unusual to use regional maps in the olden times. However, the thought of mapping out the whole globe was much more novel. Only after Anaximander started this endeavor, Hecataeus of Miletus, who was a traveler, attempted making the perfect map out of his predecessor’s creation while improving on it. 

He did not restrict his thinking to astronomy and geography. Anaximander extended his philosophical inquiries into the realm of biology. He theorized about evolution, concluding that life first arose in wet rather than dry conditions.  He sought to explain the origins and development of life, suggesting that humans and animals evolved from simpler forms. His ideas were among the earliest precursors to the theory of evolution.

Anaximander developed a unique cosmological model that challenged traditional beliefs about the Earth’s centrality in the cosmos.

He proposed a universe where the Earth was not at the center but a celestial body in its own right. Three propositions, which make up the core of Anaximander’s astronomy, are a tremendous jump forward and constitute the origin of our Western concept of the universe. His astronomical speculations are as follows:

Celestial bodies make full circles and pass beneath the Earth.
The Earth floats free and unsupported in space.
The celestial bodies lie behind one another.

The idea that the celestial bodies, in their daily course, make complete circles and thus pass beneath the Earth – from Anaximander’s viewpoint – is so self-evident to us that it is hard to understand how daring its introduction was.

That the celestial bodies make full circles is not something he could have observed but a conclusion he must have drawn. 

 

 

His cosmological ideas laid the foundation for future astronomers and philosophers to explore the universe’s structure.

Among many of his other inventions, Anaximander was also responsible for introducing the gnomon and sundial into Greek culture. He traveled to Sparta to set up a gnomon, a simple pillar that is fixed straight over markings on the ground, representing a dial. Based on the shadows cast by the pillar and their interaction with the markings, one could accurately tell the time.

His philosophical ideas left a lasting imprint on the development of Greek thought and Western philosophy. He was crucial in the transition from mythological explanations to a more systematic and rational approach to understanding the natural world.

Anaximander of Miletus stands as a foundational figure in the history of philosophy. His ideas on the apeiron, cosmology, and biology challenged traditional beliefs and paved the way for future generations of thinkers to explore the mysteries of the universe.

His legacy survives as a testament to human curiosity, intellectual courage, and the timeless quest for understanding the world in which we live.

He is our latest ECG Hall of Fame Library addition.

Sources:

World History Encyclopedia – Joshua J. Mark

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Wikipedia

 

Spotlight on Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin:

Johannes Kepler was born December 27, 1571, in Weil der Stadt, Württemberg [Germany]. He died November 15, 1630, Regensburg)

Kepler was a German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and writer on music. He was a key person of influence in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution.

Kepler is best known for his laws of planetary motion, and his books Astronomia nova, Harmonice Mundi, and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae. 

His work was of great influence on Isaac Newton and many others. Kepler provided the foundational theory of universal gravitation. The variety and impact of his work made Kepler one of the founders of modern astronomy, the scientific method and natural science in general. 

Kepler’s God was a dynamic, creative being whose presence in the world was symbolized by the Sun’s as the dynamic force that continually moved the planets. The natural world was like a mirror that precisely reflected and embodied these divine ideas.

Inspired by Platonic notions of the soul, Kepler believed that the human mind was ideally created to understand the world’s structure.

“I used to measure the heavens,
now I shall measure the shadows of the earth.
Although my soul was from heaven,
the shadow of my body lies here”.

Kepler was not alone in believing that nature was a book in which the divine plan was written. He differed, however, in the original manner and personal intensity with which he believed his ideas to be embodied in nature. One of the ideas to which he was most strongly attached was the image of the

Christian Trinity as symbolized by a geometric sphere. The visible, created world, was literally a reflection of this divine mystery (God the Father: center; Christ the Son: circumference; Holy Spirit: intervening space).

One of Kepler’s favorite biblical passages came from John (1:14).

 

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”

For him, this signified that the divine archetypes were literally made visible as geometric forms that configured the spatial arrangement of tangible entities.

Kepler was the astronomer who discovered the three major laws of planetary motion. 

1. 1. Planets move in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one focus.
   2. The time necessary to traverse any arc of a planetary orbit is proportional to the area of the sector between the central body and that arc (the “area law”).
   3. There is an exact relationship between the squares of the planets’ periodic times and the cubes of their mean distances from the Sun (the “harmonic law”). 

Kepler himself did not call these discoveries “laws”. It became the customary term after Isaac Newton derived them from a new and different set of general physical principles. He regarded them as celestial harmonies that reflected God’s design for the universe.

Kepler’s discoveries turned Nicolaus Copernicus’s Sun-centered system into a dynamic universe. He discovered that the Sun is actively pushing the planets around in non-circular orbits. It was Kepler’s notion of a physical astronomy that fixed a new problem for other important 17th century world-system builders, the most famous of whom was Newton.

Among Kepler’s many other achievements, he provided a new and correct account of how vision occurs. He developed a novel explanation for the behavior of light in the newly invented telescope.

The history of the telescope can be traced to before the invention of the earliest known telescope, which appeared in 1608 in the Netherlands. A patent was submitted by Hans Lippershey, an eyeglass maker. Although Lippershey did not receive his patent, news of the invention soon spread across Europe. The design of these early refracting telescopes consisted of a convex objective lens and a concave eyepiece. Galileo improved on this design the following year and applied it to astronomy.

In 1611, Kepler described how a far more useful telescope could be made with a convex objective lens and a convex eyepiece lens. By 1655, astronomers such as Christian Huygens were building powerful but unwieldy Keplerian telescopes with compound eyepieces.

Kepler discovered several new, semi-regular polyhedrons. He also offered a new theoretical foundation for astrology. The list of his discoveries, however, fails to convey the fact that they constituted for Kepler, part of a common body of knowledge. His matrix of theological, astrological, and physical ideas from which his scientific achievements emerged is unusual and fascinating in its own right.

The highly original nature of Kepler’s discoveries requires an act of intellectual empathy for modern science to understand. How could have such lasting results evolved from such an unlikely complex set of ideas. He is considered by the modern scientific community as a bit of a scientific enigma.

Although his scientific work was centered primarily on astronomy, it was classified as part of a wider subject of investigation called “the science of the stars.”

The science of the stars was regarded as a mixed science consisting of a mathematical and a physical component. It bore a kinship to other like disciplines, such as music (the study of ratios of tones) and optics (the study of light). It also was subdivided into theoretical and practical categories.

Kepler believed the theoretical principles of astrology had a corresponding practical part that dealt with the making of annual astrological forecasts about individuals, cities, the human body, and the weather. Within this framework, Kepler made astronomy an integral part of natural philosophy, but he did so in an unprecedented way.

There was no “scientific community” as such in the late 16th century. All schooling in Germany, as elsewhere, was under the control of church institutions. This was primarily Roman Catholic or Protestant. Local rulers used the churches and the educational systems as a means to consolidate the loyalty of their populations.

One means to this end was a system of scholarships for poor boys who, once having been trained in the schools of the duchy (territory of the duke), would feel strong loyalty to the local ruler. 

Kepler came from a very modest family in a small German town called Weil der Stadt and was one of the beneficiaries of the ducal scholarship. This made possible his attendance at the Lutheran Stift, or seminary, at the University of Tübingen, in 1589. It was expected that the boys who graduated from these schools would go on to become schoolteachers, ministers, or state functionaries. Kepler had planned to become a theologian.

 People have always named things after people who have done great things. Most people with an interest in science and Astronomy have heard of the Kepler telescope (image on left) launched by NASA in 2009 but is no longer in service today. Here is a list of just some of the many other things that were named after Kepler out of respect for his contributions to Science and Astronomy:

Kepler conjecture    Kepler triangle      Kepler–Bouwkamp constant    

Kepler–Poinsot polyhedron

Kepler’s laws of planetary motion 

Kepler’s equation      Keplerian elements   Kepler problem   

  Kepler problem in general relativity

Kepler space telescope   Kepler Launch Site

Kepler photometer   Keplerian telescope   Kepler refractor   Johannes Kepler ATV

Kepler (lunar crater)   Kepler (Martian crater)   Kepler Dorsum   1134 Kepler

Kepler orbit   Kepler Object of Interest   Kepler-11   Kepler-22     Kepler-22b

Kepler’s Supernova   Kepler Follow-up Program        Kepler Input Catalog

Kepler scientific workflow system   Kepler Mire   Kepler Museum   Kepler Track

Kepler College   Johannes Kepler University Linz     

Kepler clearly made his mark on the scientific community. The ECG is proud to include Johannes Kepler in our Hall of Fame Library

Sources:

Wikipedia

The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica

I have authored two books on the subject of extraterrestrial (ET) communication. Extraterrestrial Communication Code was published in February of 2021. The other, Angel Communication Code, will be published before the end of 2023. Each book demonstrates that it is possible for wormholes to appear at a specific location on the earth during equinox events.

This how it is possible to close the gap in time and distance necessary to establish ET communication. It is also how ETs have been able to come and go from earth for hundreds if not thousands of years.

 

ET communication is one of the primary motivators in why we continue to experiment and explore the universe.

The problem is that the existence of wormholes in the universe remains a theoretical construct based on the equations of Einstein.

“Wormholes” are cosmic tunnels that can connect two distant regions of the universe. They have been popularized by the dissemination of theoretical physics and by works of science fiction. 

By using present-day technology, it would seemingly be impossible to create a gravitational wormhole. The field would have to be manipulated with huge amounts of gravitational energy, which no one knows how to generate. In electromagnetism, however, advances in metamaterials and invisibility have allowed researchers to put forward several designs to achieve this.

Scientists in the Department of Physics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona have designed and created, in the laboratory, the first experimental wormhole. They actually connected two regions of space magnetically. The experiment consisted of a tunnel that transferred a magnetic field from one point to the other while keeping it undetectable and invisible all the way.

Researchers used metamaterials and metasurfaces to build the tunnel experimentally, so that the magnetic field from a source, such as a magnet or an electromagnet, appears at the other end of the wormhole as an isolated magnetic monopole.

This result is strange as magnetic monopoles or magnets with only one pole do not exist in nature to the best of our current knowledge. The overall effect is that of a magnetic field which appears to travel from one point to another through a dimension that lies outside the conventional three dimensions. [1]

Science has long believed that:

1. Magnetism and magnetic fields could somehow be involved in how space craft can traverse lightyears of distance.

2. Wormholes are a necessary construct for (physical) intergalactic space travel.

3. ET spacecrafts are probably constructed of materials not known to us on earth or “metamaterials”.

One of the hurdles in going universal with this wormhole creation idea is the need for huge amounts of gravitational force in conjunction with the metamaterials and huge magnetic field. Perhaps the huge magnetic field problem can be solved via the changing magnetic field of the earth during equinox events.

We have used the earth’s gravity to launch space craft since the beginning of human space travel. It is called the slingshot effect.

An equinox is an event in which a planet’s subsolar point passes through its Equator. The equinoxes are the only time when both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres experience roughly equal amounts of daytime and nighttime.

On Earth, there are two equinoxes every year: one around March 21 and another around September 22. Sometimes, the equinoxes are nicknamed the “vernal equinox” (spring equinox) and the “autumnal equinox” (fall equinox), although these have different dates in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.[2]

The vernal equinox is a time when cracks are known to open in Earth’s magnetic field. Researchers have long known that during weeks around equinoxes fissures form in Earth’s magnetosphere. Solar wind can pour through the gaps to fuel bright displays of Arctic lights.

During these displays, streams of solar wind barely graze Earth’s magnetic field. At these times of year, that’s all it takes. Even a gentle gust of solar wind can breach our planet’s magnetic defenses.

This is called the “Russell-McPherron effect,” named after the researchers who first explained it. The cracks are opened by the solar wind itself.  South-pointing magnetic fields inside the solar wind oppose earth’s north-pointing magnetic field. The two, N vs. S, partially cancel one another, weakening our planet’s magnetic defenses.

This cancellation can happen at any time of year, but it happens with greatest effect around the equinoxes. A 75-year study shows that March is the most geomagnetically active month of the year, followed closely by September-October as direct result of “equinox cracks.”

NASA and European spacecraft have been detecting these cracks for years. Small ones are about the size of California, and many are wider than the entire planet. While the cracks are open, magnetic fields on earth are connected to those on the sun.

Theoretically, it would be possible to pick a magnetic field line on the ground and follow it all the way back to the solar surface. There is no danger to people on earth because our atmosphere protects us, intercepting the rain of particles. The afterglow of this shielding action is called the “aurora borealis.” [3]

We have all seen pictures and video of the Aroura from earth. This is what it can look like from outer space. Looks a lot like a wormhole does it not?

Click the arrow to toggle the video on / off.

Earth’s magnetic field creates a ‘bubble’ around Earth that helps protect our planet from some of the more harmful effects of energetic particles streaming out from the sun in the solar wind. Some of the earliest hints of this interaction go back to the 1850s with the work of Richard Carrington, and in the early 1900s with the work of Kristian Birkeland and Carl Stormer.

That this field might form a type of ‘bubble’ around Earth was hypothesized by Sidney Chapman and Vincent Ferraro in the 1930s. The term ‘magnetosphere’ was applied to magnetic bubble by Thomas Gold in 1959. It wasn’t until the Space Age, when we sent the first probes to other planets, that we found clear evidence of their magnetic fields (though there were hints of a magnetic field for Jupiter in the 1950s, due to observations from radio telescopes).

The Voyager program, two spacecraft launched in 1977, and successors to the Pioneer 10 and 11 missions, completed flybys of the giant outer planets. They became the implementation of the ‘Grand Tour’ of the outer planets originally proposed in the late 1960s. The Voyagers provided some of the first detailed measurements of the strength, extent and diversity of the magnetospheres of the outer planets.

The visualizations below present simplified models of these planetary magnetospheres, designed to illustrate their scale, and basic features of their structure and impacts of the magnetic axes offset from the planetary rotation axes.

For this Earth visualization, note that the north magnetic pole points out of the southern hemisphere. For these visualizations, the magnetic field structure is represented by gold/copper lines. Some additional glyphs are provided to indicate some key directions in the field model.

• The Yellow arrow points towards the sun. The magnetotail is pointed in the opposite direction.
• The Cyan arrow represents the magnetic axis, usually tilted relative to the rotation axis. The arrow indicates the NORTH magnetic pole (convention has field lines moving north to south as the north pole of bar magnet (and compass pointer) points to the south magnetic pole).
• The Blue arrow represents the north rotation axis. It is part of the 3-D axis glyph (red, green, and blue arrows) included to make the planetary rotation more apparent.
• The semi-transparent grey mesh in the distance represents the boundary of the magnetosphere.

Click the arrow to toggle the video on / off.

Earth’s magnetosphere near the time of the equinox.

Earth’s magnetosphere near the time of the summer solstice

Earth’s magnetosphere near the time of the winter solstice

It certainly appears that the bulk of the ingredients necessary for a wormhole to occur are all around us every day. Putting all of it together in just the right portions seems to be the issue. To find the wormhole, we must look in the right places and at the right times, in the right direction.  Knowing all this certainly strengthens the methodology presented in my books.  It is clearly possible that during equinox events, at certain locations on earth, everything comes together that makes a wormhole open.

[1] SciTechDaily. Physicists Create a Magnetic Wormhole for the First Time. By Universitat Autònoma  de    Barcelona. September 3, 2015

[2] National Geographic. Encyclopedia Entry: Equinox

[3] Spaceweatherarchive.com. “Equinox Cracks” Forming in Earth’s Magnetic Field. Dr. Tony Phillips. March 2018

 

For centuries, women have made significant contributions to science. They’ve discovered life-saving remedies, devised world-altering inventions, and produced far-reaching research. In many cases their invaluable advances are minimized or neglected.

Women have always made significant contributions specifically to the study of astronomy throughout history. Unfortunately, they have not often been recognized for their achievements with the same publicity and reward received by male scientists throughout history.

 At ECG we offer the recognition, respect, and appreciation these women deserve for their important contributions. 

Spotlight on Marie Curie:

Maria Salomea Skłodowska (November 7, 1867 – July 4, 1934)

Astronomy and Astrology are recognized in the scientific community as “the first Science” of humanity. At ECG we recognize some of these “Hall of Fame” astronomers of all time and the contributions they have made to our modern understanding of the universe. Please visit our library as we continue to develop our roster of the great ones.

Spotlight on Hipparchus: (c. 190 – 120 BC)

• Fields of study: Astronomy, Mathematics, Geography
• Accomplishments and legacy: the Founder of Trigonometry, Greatest Astronomer of Antiquity

Hipparchus of Nicaea was a very well-known Greek astronomer. He made great contributions in the fields of mathematics and geography. He is the founder of trigonometry and is considered by many the “greatest astronomer of antiquity.” He has also been called the father of astronomy (as have others).

Hipparchus was known for his astronomical observations in Rhodes where he applied mathematical techniques for accuracy. Through them, he was able to compile the first extensive star catalog.

Hipparchus was the first mathematician known to have produced a trigonometric table. He used these tabulated values to compute the eccentricity of the Moon and Sun’s orbit. By comparing the position of stars with the observations of Timocharis of Alexandria 150 years earlier, Hipparchus discovered the precession of the equinoxes. In addition, he also devised a method to predict solar eclipses.

Only very little of the works of Hipparchus has survived through time. In geography, it is said that he was the first one to have used the geographic coordinate system in determining latitude on Earth from star observations. His star catalog and works in geography, among others, became the basis of other astronomers after him, like Claudius Ptolemy.

Source – The Planets.org

For centuries, women have made critical contributions to science and to the field of Astronomy specifically.

At ECG we bring these women into the spotlight in an effort to offer the recognition, respect, and appreciation these Women of Science deserve for their important contributions. 

Spotlight on Hypatia (355 CE— March 415, Alexandria)

Hypatia was a mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who lived in a very turbulent era in Alexandria’s history. She is the earliest female mathematician of whose life and work reasonably detailed knowledge exists.

Hypatia was one of the most eminent mathematicians and astronomers of late antiquity. Scholars traveled from around the classical world to learn mathematics and astronomy at her school.

She was the first known female mathematician and scholar. Hypatia is known as a symbol of feminism to date. The manner of her death marked the beginning of the end for Alexandria as a center of academics. 

Her philosophy was Neoplatonist and was therefore seen as “pagan” during a time of bitter religious conflict between Christians, Jews, and pagans. Her Neoplatonism was concerned with the approach to the One. The One was an underlying reality partially accessible via the human power of abstraction from the Platonic forms, themselves abstractions from the world of everyday reality. Her philosophy also led her to embrace a life of dedicated virginity.

One day when Hypatia was traveling through the city, a violent Christian mob attacked her and dragged her out of her carriage, brutally murdering her and dismembering her body.

Hypatia’s death was a turning point in the politics of Alexandria. In the wake of her murder, philosophers, Greek and Romans fled the city, and the city’s role as the center of learning declined. She was being called a ‘martyr of philosophy’.

Hypatia was one of the last great thinkers of ancient Alexandria. She was one of the first women to study and teach mathematics, astronomy and philosophy. Despite these achievements, she is mostly remembered more for her violent death. Her life is a fascinating lens through which we may view the plight of science in an era of religious and sectarian conflict.

“To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world is just as base as to use force.”

Why do we explore space and the universe? Perhaps the answer to this complicated both theological and scientific question can be found in the words offered by a poet. 

T.S. Elliot in his work entitled Little Gidding (1942) wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 1948 “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry”. He probably did not have space exploration in mind in 1942. His sentiment, however, poetically captures one of the most important reasons we explore space.

Little Gidding is the fourth and final poem of Eliot’s “Four Quartets”. Four Quartets is series of four poems by Eliot, published individually from 1936 to 1942. The book form compilation is considered Eliot’s masterpiece. Each of the quartets has five “movements.” Each is titled by a place name as follows.

Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry, Salvages (1941), Little Gidding” (1942).

Little Gidding is a series of poems that discuss time, perspective, humanity, and salvation.  It focuses on the unity of past, present, and future.  It claims that understanding this unity is necessary for salvation.¹

Little Gidding refers to a small Anglican community in Little Gidding of Huntingdonshire, England. It was first established by Nicholas Ferrar in the 17th century.

According to Elliot, humanity’s flawed understanding of life and turning away from God leads to a cycle of warfare. This, however, can be overcome by recognizing the lessons of the past.

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England family.

Eliot was first educated at Harvard University. He did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne College, Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford.

Eliot settled in England, where he was for a time a schoolmaster and a bank clerk. He eventually became the literary editor for the publishing house Faber & Faber. Eliot later became their director. 

Eliot founded and edited the exclusive and influential literary journal Criterion (1922-1939). In 1927 he became a British citizen and about the same time entered the Anglican Church. 

Eliot’s insights into the cyclical nature of life are expressed through themes and images creatively woven throughout the Four Quartet poems. The work addresses connections and the very nature of the human experience. It is considered Eliot’s clearest exposition of his Christian beliefs.²

NASA’s exploration of the universe reveals humanity’s place in nature in the broadest possible sense. That view of ourselves has changed dramatically over the centuries. 

The ancients thought the earth was the center of the cosmos. Everything out there revolved around our earth.  

Then we figured out that our known universe, our solar system, revolves around our sun. After that, we came to believe that our solar system is part of a galaxy (Milky Way), which we believed to revolve around our solar system. Then that understanding changed again based on new discoveries.

One hundred years ago, most astronomers considered the universe to be about 3600 light years in extent, less than a billion years old, and with our solar system near its center.

This is an incredible historic repetition of thought process with respect to our need to think it all revolves around us at some level. It is the height of arrogance. Today science now believes that this is not the case.  

Astronomers today have seen objects 13 billion light years away in a universe 13.7 billion years old containing hundreds of billions of galaxies.

Nothing has been more revolutionary than the idea that the entire universe is in a state of constant and random evolution.  This chronology of the life of the universe, and our place within it, is known as cosmic evolution.

Cosmic evolution is the study of the many varied developmental and generational changes in the universe. Changes in the assembly and composition of radiation, matter, and life throughout all space and across all time.

These changes have produced our galaxy, our sun, our earth, and us. The result is a grand evolutionary synthesis bridging a wide variety of scientific specialties. It is a genuine narrative of epic proportions extending from the very beginning of time to the present, from the Big Bang to the birth humankind. ³

The cosmic evolutionary story has evoked a wide range of responses in the Christian religious domain. Its cosmic narrative of growth and change, its apparent fine-tuning for living beings, and possibilities for abundant life. These things raise long-standing religious questions of Divine Creation.   

On the one hand, cosmic evolution has clearly presented a deep challenge for some conservative Christians.

The apparent absence of a divine creator is not consistent with the literal readings of Genesis.

This perceived conflict mobilized some creationists into political action in the arena of public education. This is a cause more recently and aggressively pursued by the Intelligent Design movement.

On the other hand, many in the religious community view cosmic evolution as compatible with belief in a God. God who created it all and still acts in the universe. They hold positions which range from the more conservative “progressive creationism” to the more liberal “theistic evolution”.

Most mainstream and liberal theologians and laypersons, fall into the latter category. Typically, they endeavor to explore common ground with science by examining traditional religious concepts of divine action. The concepts of natural theology, design, cosmic purpose and God’s relation to the world in the light of the new cosmology. ^[4]

The cosmic evolution idea has roots in the 19th century. It was occasionally invoked in the first half of the 20th century by astronomers such as George Ellery Hale. It really came into its own only in the modern Space Age.

In 1958, in his classic book Of Stars and Men, Harvard College Observatory Director Harlow Shapley wrote that the Earth is “on the outer fringe of one galaxy in a universe of millions of galaxies. Man becomes peripheral among the billions of stars in his own Milky Way. According to the revelations of paleontology and geochemistry he is also exposed as a recent, and perhaps an ephemeral manifestation in the unrolling of cosmic time.“

In his 1967 essays Beyond the Observatory, Shapley wrote, “Nothing seems to be more important philosophically than the revelation that the evolutionary drive, which has in recent years swept over the whole field of biology, also includes in its sweep the evolution of galaxies and stars, and comets and atoms, and indeed all things material.”

Cosmic evolution has become the guiding principle for modern astronomy. The science programs of the world’s space agencies may be seen as filling in the details in this story of the history of the universe.

The very idea was spread during the 1970s and 1980s by NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program. It was also spread by NASA’s broader Astro biological seek and find efforts.

For the last decade, NASA’s Origins program has had cosmic evolution as its focus. When the program began in 1996, it was viewed as “Following a 15-billion-year long chain of events.” A chain that begins with the Big Bang and travels through the mysterious formation of all of the elements and energy that cradles life on Earth.”

Cosmic evolution has several possible outcomes. Its endpoint may be planets, stars and galaxies. We observe these and know they exist, and the result is what we might call the “physical universe,” magnificent in and of itself.

Alternately, cosmic evolution may result in a profusion of life, either microbial or intelligent, throughout the universe. This outcome, the Holy Grail of SETI and astrobiology programs around the world, would constitute a “biological universe.”

A third possible outcome, rarely discussed, is a universe in which cultural evolution is taken into account.

If intelligent life is millions or billions of years old, then cultural evolution may have resulted in a “post-biological universe.” A universe in which flesh and blood intelligence has been superseded by artificial intelligence (IA). We can see that happening here on earth today. It is dangerous territory, and we must proceed with great wisdom and caution with IA development. 

Carnegie Mellon AI pioneer Hans Moravec has famously postulated a post-biological earth in the next few generations. Given the time scales of the universe, it seems much more likely to have already happened in outer space.

All of these outcomes have implications for our human destiny. It may be our destiny to populate the universe, or to interact with its flesh-and-blood intelligence in many forms. In the post-biological universe, we may have to interact with IA.

There are more immediate implications as well. Sir Arthur Peacocke, a British biochemist and Anglican priest, has called cosmic evolution “Genesis for the Third Millennium.” He suggested that it must be incorporated into religious doctrines.

Reverend Michael Dowd has taken that sentiment to heart in a DVD called “Evolutionary Christianity.” In it he incorporates “the entire history of the universe and the emergent complexity of matter, life, consciousness, culture and technology.”

Space programs can get bogged down in technical details, politics, theological concerns, and funding controversies. We should not lose sight of the longer-term implications. Although its practical benefits are many, space exploration has no higher calling than this search for our place in the universe. ^[5]

In both space and time, the study of cosmic evolution allows us to see the universe as it really is, to reflect on our place in it, and to “know the place for the first time.” At the end of the day, this is what we seek and why we explore the universe.

 

[1] Wikipedia, Little Gidding Poem.

[2] Britannica, Four Quartets

[3] Cosmic Evolution, State of the Science, Eric J. Chaisson, 2009

[4] Omnilogos, Cosmic Evolution: Christian Perspectives, Kate Grayson         Boisvert, Greenwood Press, 2008

[5] NASA, Beyond Earth, Expanding Human Presence into the Solar System, July 21, 2005, Steven J. Dick- NASA Chief Historian

I have authored two books about extraterrestrial communication. One is published.

Extraterrestrial Communication Code: 

The second, Angel Communication Code, will be available to the public before the end of 2023.

This subject is very real and very fascinating. The theme of the books is that ETs left us a message to decode and repeat back to them. If we can demonstrate we understand their message, the lines of communication will open. That is the theory I put on the table along with the logic and evidence that built the theory.

Communicating with another species is probably not going to be easy. Consider how difficult it is already for humans from one culture and language to be understood by those from another. Now we are trying to achieve meaningful communication with ETs. Their bodies, minds and habitats are likely to be far different from humans on earth.

The scientific community recognizes the issue. An artist-led team created a mock message from the stars to test us Earthlings. On May 24, 2023, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter beamed the note from Mars toward Earth.  

Three observatories detected the transmission 16 minutes later.  The Medicina Radio Observatory in Bologna, Italy; the Allen Telescope Array in northern California; and the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.

This is an on-going interplanetary art project, called A Sign in Space.  Nobody has deciphered the May 24 message, but many continue to try. You can actually find the message and download it from several websites. A Sign in Space

Only three people in the world know what A Sign in Space’s message means. First among them is Daniela de Paulis, the project’s founder. She is an artist in residence at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute. She also serves at the Green Bank Observatory. De Paulis and two other co-authors created the mock alien message after consulting with poets, scientists, programmers and philosophers.

Their challenge in creating the message was not just to think like an extraterrestrial but also to neutralize Earth’s regional biases. Her team immediately ruled out language-based communication. She will not however, confirm or deny whether the message contains any text. Her team even agonized over the using of mathematics. Although the fundamental concepts are universal, different societies may think about and represent math differently. “It was really very heavy work to dismantle our Western-centric thinking,” she says.

De Paulis struggled with the message for years after she conceived the project in 2019. A breakthrough came in late 2022 when she contacted artist and computer programmer Giacomo Miceli. He suggested that she draw inspiration from the short story “A Sign in Space” in Italian writer Italo Calvino’s collection Cosmicomics.

A month before the transmission deadline, astronomer Roy Smits joined the pair. He added a mathematical component to make the message “more universal, so to speak,” de Paulis says. It also made it and much harder to crack because it looks nothing like what humans use in our daily conversations.

We have been sending messages to ETs out into the stars for decades with no response to date.  In 1974, scientists shot a radio message into the universe using the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico. It was a 1,679 string of 1’s and 0’s. When translated graphically, it consists of crude representations of a human, the Arecibo Telescope’s dish and the DNA double helix, and more.

The likelihood of this “Arecibo message” ever being understood by extraterrestrials is slim at best. Its composer, the late astronomer Frank Drake, gave the Arecibo message to his colleagues to interpret for fun, and not one of them figured it out.

That project, as well as the new experiment, illustrates just what a tall order true understanding between species is. “The beauty of A Sign in Space is to make us reflect on just how it is more frustratingly difficult and ultimately a much more profound sort of contact than Hollywood would ever portray,” says Douglas Vakoch. He is the president of the organization METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) International, who was not involved in the project.

One of the project’s more than 4,700 subscribers on Discord is Gonzalo José Carracedo Carballal. He is a 34-year-old Ph.D. student in astrophysics at the Complutense University of Madrid. A radio astronomy devotee, he fills his spare time working on radio wave projects. His lab in a room littered with instruments and parts. A satellite dish peeks from his balcony. Tattooed on his right triceps is an excerpt from the etchings on the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes’ plaque. These were other 1970s attempts by Earth scientists to introduce our species to ETs that might encounter the craft.

Carracedo Carballal was part of the first group of people to extract the raw message from the ExoMars orbiter’s broadcast. The message was a 40-gigabyte string of numbers describing the waveform of the telemetry data, interwoven with the alien message. Unlike a real extraterrestrial note, which would arrive unannounced, this signal came in at a precisely scheduled time. Comparing the arrival timing with previous transmissions the telescopes received, the amateur code breakers identified a data packet in the radio signal that was more active and sizable than usual.

A week’s effort of filtering the data segment, which Carracedo Carballal likens to peeling layers off an onion, eventually led to an 8.2-kilobyte bitmap image of five speckled clusters set against a blank background. (Shown below)

Soon after Carracedo Carballal and his colleagues found the raw message, speculations on its meaning erupted. Perhaps the message was hinting at the aliens’ appearance, Morse code, cellular automata or the genetic secrets of E.T.

One user enlisted ChatGPT to reverse engineer a first contact appropriate message as a starting point. Several users suggested that the image was a star map broadcasting the civilization’s location. Others proposed that the dots represented constellations of a much smaller scale: molecules, perhaps the bio signatures of the foreign home world.

The raw message looked too random to be comprehensible. Decoding was necessary to wrangle it into a more intelligible form. However, where to start was the critical question. Every attempt would be a stab in the dark. “You start to see patterns,” Carracedo Carballal says of the process. “You have to stop and think whether something is actually there, or you’re just projecting.”

Whenever Ivi Hasanaj, a 32-year-old software engineer based in Germany, starts to work on decoding A Sign in Space’s message for the day, he opens up the raw image on his computer and stares. He stares, and stares some more until an idea occurs to him, and he writes code to manipulate the image.

Hasanaj does not think aliens, or A Sign in Space’s organizers, are the sadistic sort who would make message recipients bang their head for nothing more than their amusement. Messages are meant to be understood. Although he had not thought much about the problem of extraterrestrial communication before this project, He has solved many puzzles on the gamified coding platform Codewars, and this experience comes in handy. For one, he recognizes the difference between decryption and decoding.

Decryption is the process of making sense of a concealed message for which only the intended recipient has a key, or a translation hack, to understand it. This kind of code breaking is much more difficult than decoding: the biggest hurdle is guessing the missing key.

On the other hand, a message with the key already embedded inside lends itself to decoding. When decoding, the user should not introduce new information into the message. Any operation on the raw file, such as a rotation or an overlay, should come from instructions that the reader has managed to extract from the message. Otherwise, it would be like arbitrarily rearranging the letters of a word to arrive at a new anagram.

Hasanaj is not sure of the true content of A Sign in Space’s message, but his own best guess is a numerical system that counts from one to five. He uncovered this from observing a recurring pattern among the brightest pixels in the image.

Hasanaj has not been able to account for the remaining flecks, which constitute the majority of the signal. Perhaps other kinds of information beyond math lurk in the message. He thinks no part of the already slim communication is redundant.  Aliens would probably make every pixel count. He says he will know the correct answer when he sees it.

The community is still trying to decode the message, pursuing 30-some ideas for how to do so, before even attempting to interpret its full meaning. For this process, participants can take a less technical approach to making sense of the message, as they might do for an abstract painting. For now, the signal is still too random to be interpretable.

Watching their efforts unfold, de Paulis thinks these scattershot efforts may be distracting users from exploring each idea to the full. “They can’t focus on one particular decision,” she observes. “I think that’s the main problem.” If the public remains stuck on the decoding process, she says her team will likely organize an online hackathon later in August.

Humanity’s best shot at understanding an extraterrestrial message is to throw a consortium of diverse expertise at it, Vakoch says. A Sign in Space is a shining example of what that may look like. 

In the event of a real extraterrestrial signal reaching Earth, the public is not likely to be invited to help with the decoding process. In 1989, the International Academy of Astronautics established a post detection protocol that largely emphasizes secrecy. The guidelines have had little updating since. “An international committee of scientists and other experts should be established to serve as a focal point for continuing analysis, and also to provide advice on the release of information to the public,” the protocol decrees. “Parties to this declaration should not make any public announcement of this information” until the extraterrestrial, origin is verified.

“The world has changed a lot since the 1980s,” says Franck Marchis, a senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute and an outreach and education coordinator for A Sign in Space. Many more radio aficionados have rigged their own telescopes and trained them toward the skies. There is also social media, which spreads news like wildfire. “The public will know no matter what,” Marchis says.

A Sign in Space is a dress rehearsal for scientific organizations to iron out the technical challenges of message sharing and telescope mobilization to confirm signal detection. More idealistically, it is an experiment for sharing an extraterrestrial signal with members of the public and getting them involved. In that sense, A Sign in Space is the ultimate citizen science project, one on a planetary scale. De Paulis calls the participants on Discord her “co-creators.”

Marchis says he would love to make extraterrestrial communication and translation a more democratic affair. “I’d make the data available right away to the entire community of the world,” Marchis says, rather than having it “on the internal network of some random scientists.” That is what drew him to A Sign in Space in the first place. “I’m hoping that this is going to be the way we’re going to move forward in the future,” he says.

In construing the meaning of an extraterrestrial dispatch, those who give it a go often try to anticipate what the message might be trying to say. The go-to answer is often science and math, given that these concepts hold up anywhere in the universe. The movie Contact posits that space aliens will hail us with numbers, throwing us a sequence of primes that look unnatural enough to make humans sit up and take notice.

It is one thing to flag a different species’ attention but another to converse meaningfully across the vast reaches of space. “I think an alien would send information that gives us an idea of who they are and the level of complexity that they have reached,” Marchis says—something that may even give recipients a glimpse of the alien society and its evolution.

This is where art comes in. Art is a creator’s self-expression and a cross-cultural conversation with its beholder. Perhaps the true meaning of an alien’s message is the composer’s original intent plus what the recipients make of it. Interpreting such a message requires not only technical skill but also an artistic, philosophical thread. Thus, communicating with aliens is both a science and an art.

A Sign in Space recognizes the near futility of extraterrestrial communication and turns it into an endeavor that is much more open-ended. “If we ever receive a message from an extraterrestrial civilization, I can imagine that there will never be an agreement over the cultural interpretation,” de Paulis says. “I think there would necessarily be some miscommunication.” [1]

[1] Scientific American. Can You Decode an Alien Message? Shi En Kim August 3, 2023

 

Extraterrestrial Communication Group’s podcast interview by The Mysterious Radio Program was broadcast on May 19, 2023.  Mysterious Radio Interview

Our debut book, Extraterrestrial Communication Code, was the primary interview subject.  Our sequel book, “Angel Communication Code”, was also explored.  We hope to publish it by the end of the year. Other relevant extraterrestrial communication topics were discussed as well.  

The summary below (italic print) is transcribed directly from the Mysterious Radio Website:

Mysterious Radio is the place to go for mind-expanding, thought-provoking content at its finest.

We are dedicated to exploring the mysteries of this world and taking our listeners on a journey to uncover shocking revelations with top scientists, bestselling authors and renowned journalists.

Our top-rated podcast provides exceptional analysis of extraordinary events, ancient history, supernatural places, true crime, UFO contact and unexplained phenomena. This makes us one of the leading sources for uncovering never before heard information.

Our mission statement is “To inform and empower people through knowledge”. We strive everyday toward a vision that seeks mental enlightenment for all who seek it receiving millions of downloads yearly. Mysterious Radio is proudly produced by an independent podcast team.

Mysterious Radio has approximately 500,000 formal subscribers and millions of regular listeners on several continents around the globe.

This is a big step for our Extraterrestrial Communication Group project. Our Extraterrestrial Communication Group has reached the 3,600-follower mark as of the date of this post and is growing every day. 

It is our expectation that the Mysterious Radio podcast interview exposure will boost that number quite a bit and boost it quickly. Less than 12-hours after the broad cast, the ECG experienced the highest number of visitors in any single day since the website went live in 2021, and the day is not over.