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by
Lloyd Pye
Extracted from
Nexus Magazine
Volume 10, Number 1 (Dec ’02-Jan 2003)
Contents
An overlooked explanation for why the fossil record shows primitive
and complex life appearing suddenly on Earth, with no predecessors,
is extraterrestrial intervention.
Since writing my first essay for NEXUS in mid-2002 [see 9/04], I’ve
been bombarded by emails (nearing 200) from around the world, many
offering congratulations (always appreciated, of course) and many
others requesting more instruction or deeper insight into areas
discussed and/or not discussed.
Let’s face it: nearly everyone is interested in Darwinism,
Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the new kid in town,
Interventionism. Because of length constraints, this essay must be
in two parts. Here, in Part One, I’ll go over the basics currently
known about the origin of life on Earth. Later, in Part Two, I’ll
discuss what is known and what can be safely surmised about the
origin of humanity.
We begin by understanding that Charles Darwin stood on a very
slippery slope when trying to explain how something as biologically
and biochemically complex as even the simplest form of life could
have spontaneously generated itself from organic molecules and
compounds loose in the early Earth’s environment. Because that part
of Darwin’s theory has always been glaringly specious, modern
Darwinists get hammered about it from all sides, including from the
likes of me, with a net result that the edifice of "authority"
they’ve hidden behind for 140 years is crumbling under the assault.
Imagine a mediaeval castle being pounded by huge stones flung by
primitive, but cumulatively effective, catapults. Darwinism (and all
that term has come to represent: natural selection, evolution,
survival of the fittest, punctuated equilibrium, etc.) is the
castle; Darwinists man the battlements as the lobbed stones do their
work; Intelligent Designers hurl the boulders doing the most damage;
Creationists, by comparison, use slings; and the relatively few
(thus far) people like me, Interventionists, shoot a well-aimed
arrow now and then, though nobody pays much attention to us yet.
Remember, a well-aimed (or lucky--in either case, the example is
instructive) arrow took down mighty Achilles. Darwinists have heels,
too.
LIFE, OR SOMETHING LIKE IT
In Charles Darwin’s time, nothing was known about life at the
cellular level. Protoplasm was the smallest unit they understood.
Yet Darwin’s theory of natural selection stated that all of
life--every living entity known then or to be discovered in the
future--simply had to function from birth to death by "natural laws"
that could be defined and analyzed. This would of course include the
origin of life. Darwin suggested life might have gradually assembled
itself from stray parts lying about in some "warm pond" when the
planet had cooled enough to make such an assemblage possible. Later
it was realized that nothing would likely have taken shape
(gradually or otherwise) in a static environment, so a catalytic
element was added: lightning.
Throughout history up to the present moment, scientists have been
forced to spend their working lives with the "God" of
the
Creationists hovering over every move they make, every mistake,
every error in judgment, every personal peccadillo. So when faced
with something they can’t explain in rational terms, the only
alternative option is "God did it", which for them is unacceptable.
So they’re forced by relentless Creationist pressure to come up with
answers for absolutely everything that, no matter how absurd, are
"natural". That was their motivation for the theory that a lightning
bolt could strike countless random molecules in a warm pond and
somehow transform them into the first living creature. The "natural"
forces of biology, chemistry and electromagnetism could magically be
swirled together --and voilà!, an event suspiciously close to a
miracle.
Needless to say, no Darwinist would accept terms like "magic" or
"miracle", which would be tantamount to agreeing with the
Creationist argument that "God did it all". But in their
heart-of-hearts, even the most fanatical Darwinists had to suspect
the "warm pond" theory was absurd.
And as more and more was learned about the mind-boggling complexity
of cellular structure and chemistry, there could be no doubt. The
trenchant Fred Hoyle analogy still stands: it was as likely to be
true as that a tornado could sweep through a junkyard and correctly
assemble a jetliner.
Unfortunately, the "warm pond" had become a counterbalance to "God
did it", so even when Darwinists knew past doubt that it was wrong,
they clung to it, outwardly proclaimed it and taught it. In many
places in the world, including the USA, it’s still taught.
TOO HOT TO HANDLE
The next jarring bump on the Darwinist road to embattlement came
when they learned that in certain places around the globe there
existed remnants of what had to be the very first pieces of the
Earth’s crust. Those most ancient slabs of rock are called cratons,
and the story of their survival for 4.0 billion [4,000,000,000]
years is a miracle in itself. But what is most miraculous about them
is that they contain fossils of "primitive" bacteria! Yes,
bacteria,
preserved in 4.0-billion-year-old cratonal rock. If that’s not
primitive, what is? However, it presented Darwinists with an
embarrassing conundrum.
If Earth began to coalesce out of the solar system’s primordial
cloud of dust and gas around 4.5 billion years ago (which by then
was a well-supported certainty), then at 4.0 billion years ago the
proto-planet was still a seething ball of cooling magma. No warm
ponds would appear on Earth for at least a billion years or more. So
how to reconcile reality with the warm-pond fantasy?
There was no way to reconcile it, so it was ignored by all but the
specialists who had to work with it on a daily basis. Every other
Darwinist assumed a position as one of the "see no evil, speak no
evil, hear no evil" monkeys. To say they "withheld" the new,
damaging information is not true; to say it was never emphasized in
the popular media for public consumption is true.
That has become the way Darwinists handle any and all challenges to
their pet theories: if they can no longer defend one, they don’t
talk about it, or they talk about it as little as possible. If
forced to talk about it, they invariably try to "kill the messenger"
by challenging any critic’s "credentials". If the critic lacks
academic credentials equal to their own, he or she is dismissed as
little more than a crackpot. If the critic has equal credentials, he
or she is labeled as a "closet Creationist" and dismissed. No
career scientist can speak openly and vociferously against Darwinist
dogma without paying a heavy price. That is why and how people of
normally good conscience can be and have been "kept in line" and
kept silent in the face of egregious distortions of truth.
If that system of merciless censure weren’t so solidly in place,
then surely the next Darwinist stumble would have made headlines
around the world as the final and absolute end to the ridiculous
notion that life could possibly have assembled itself "naturally".
They couldn’t even be sure it happened on Earth.
TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE
The imposing edifice of Darwinian "origin of life" dogma rested on a
piece of incontrovertible bedrock: there could be only one
progenitor for all of life. When the fortuitous lightning bolt
struck the ideally concocted warm pond, it created only one entity.
However, it was no ordinary entity. With it came the multiple
ability to take nourishment from its environment, create energy from
that nourishment, expel waste created by the use of that energy and
(almost as an afterthought) reproduce itself ad infinitum until one
of its millions of subsequent generations sits here at this moment
reading these words. Nothing miraculous about that; simply
incalculable good fortune.
This was Darwinist gospel --preached and believed-- until the bacteria
fossils were found in the cratons. Their discovery was upsetting,
but not a deathblow to the Darwinist theory. They had to concede
(among themselves, of course) that the first life-form didn’t
assemble itself in a warm pond, but it came together somehow because
every ancient fossil it spawned was a single-celled bacteria lacking
a cell nucleus (prokaryotes). Prokaryotes preceded the much later
single-celled bacteria with a nucleus (eukaryotes), so the
post-craton
situation stayed well within the Darwinian framework. No matter how
the first life-form came into existence, it was a single unit
lacking a cell nucleus, which was mandatory because even the
simplest nucleus would be much too "irreducibly complex" (a
favorite Intelligent Design phrase) to be created by a lightning
bolt tearing through a warm pond’s molecular junkyard. So the
Darwinists still held half a loaf.
In the mid-1980s, however, biologist Carl Woese stunned his
colleagues with a shattering discovery. There wasn’t just the
predicted (and essential) single source for all forms of life; there
were two: two types of prokaryotic bacteria as distinct as apples
and oranges, dogs and cats, horses and cows, two distinct forms of
life, alive and well on the planet at 4.0 billion years ago.
Unmistakable. Irrefutable. Get over it. Deal with it.
But how? How to explain separate forms of life springing into
existence in an environment that would make hell seem like a summer
resort? With nothing but cooling lava as far as an incipient eye
might have seen, how could it be explained in "natural" terms?
Indeed, how could it be explained in any terms other than the
totally unacceptable? Life, with all its deepening mystery, had to
have been seeded onto Earth.
PANSPERMIA RAISES ITS UGLY HEAD
Panspermia is the idea that life came to be on Earth from somewhere
beyond the planet and possibly beyond the solar system. Its means of
delivery is separated into two possible avenues: directed and
undirected.
Undirected panspermia means that life came here entirely by accident
and was delivered by a comet or meteor. Some scientists favor
comets as the prime vector because they contain ice mixed with dust
(comets are often referred to as "dirty snowballs"), and life is
more likely to have originated in water and is more likely to
survive an interstellar journey frozen. Other scientists favor
asteroids as the delivery mechanism because they are more likely to
have come from the body of a planet that would have contained life.
A comet, they argue, is unlikely ever to have been part of a planet,
and life could not possibly have generated itself in or on a frozen
comet.
Directed panspermia means life was delivered to Earth by intelligent
means of one kind or another. In one scenario, a capsule could have
been sent here the same way we sent Voyager on an interstellar
mission. However, if it was sent from outside the solar system, we
have to wonder how the senders might have known Earth was here, or
how Earth managed to get in the way of something sent randomly (à la
Voyager).
In another scenario, interstellar craft manned by extraterrestrial
beings could have arrived and delivered the two prokaryote types.
This requires a level of openmindedness that most scientists
resolutely lack, so they won’t accept either version of directed panspermia as even remotely possible. Instead, they cling to their
"better" explanation of undirected panspermia because it
allows them
to continue playing the "origin" game within the first boundaries
set out by Charles Darwin: undirected is "natural"; directed is
"less natural".
Notice it can’t be said that directed panspermia is "unnatural".
According to Darwinists, no matter where life originated, the
process was natural from start to finish. All they have to concede
is that it didn’t take place on Earth. However, acknowledging that
forces them to skirt dangerously close to admitting the reality of
extraterrestrial life, and their ongoing "search" for such life
generates millions in research funding each year. This leaves them
in no hurry to make clear to the general public that, yes, beyond
Earth there is at the very least the same primitive bacterial life
we have here. There’s no doubt about it. But, as usual, they keep
the lid on this reality, not exactly hiding it but making no effort
to educate the public to the notion that we are not, and never have
been, alone. The warm pond still holds water, so why muddy it with
facts?
A PATTERN EMERGES
In my book,
Everything You Know Is Wrong, I discuss all points
mentioned up to now, which very few people outside academic circles
are aware of. Within those circles, a hard core of "true believers"
still seizes on every new discovery of a chemical or organic
compound found in space to try to move the argument back to Darwin’s
original starting point that somehow life assembled itself on Earth
"naturally".
However, most objective scholars now accept that the first forms of
life had to have been delivered because:
(1) they appear as two
groups of multiple prokaryotes (archaea and
true bacteria)
(2) they
appear whole and complete
(3) the hellish primordial Earth is
unimaginable as an incubator for burgeoning life
(4) a
half-billion years seems far too brief a time-span to permit a
gradual, step-by-step assembly of the incredible complexity of
prokaryotic biology and biochemistry
Even more damaging to the hard-core Darwinist position is that the
prokaryotes were --quite propitiously-- as durable as life gets. They
were virtually indestructible, able to live in absolutely any
environment--and they’ve proved it by being here today, looking and
behaving the same as when their ancestors were fossilized 4.0
billion years ago. Scalding heat? We love it! Choked by saline? Let
us at it! Frozen solid? We’re there! Crushing pressure? Perfect for
us! Corrosively acidic? Couldn’t be better!
Today they are known as extremophiles, and they exist alongside many
other prokaryotic bacteria that thrive in milder conditions. It
would appear that those milder-living prokaryotes could not have
survived on primordial Earth, so how did they come to be? According
to Darwinists, they "evolved" from extremophiles in the same way
humans supposedly evolved on a parallel track with apes --from a
"common ancestor".
Darwinists contend such parallel tracks don’t need to be traceable.
All that’s required is a creature looking reasonably like another to
establish what they consider a legitimate claim of evolutionary
connection. Extremophiles clearly existed: we have their
4.0-billion-year-old fossils. Their descendants clearly exist today,
along with mild-environment prokaryotes that must have descended
from them. However, transitional forms between them cannot be found,
even though such forms are required by the tenets of Darwinism.
Faced with that embarrassing problem, Darwinists simply insist that
the missing transitional species do exist, still hidden somewhere in
the fossil record, just as the "missing link" between apes and
humans is out there somewhere and will indeed be discovered someday.
It’s simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time.
For as expedient as the "missing link" has been, it’s useless to
explain the next phase of life on Earth, when prokaryotes began
sharing the stage with the much larger and much more complex (but
still single-celled) eukaryotes, which appear around 2.0 billion
years ago. The leap from prokaryote to eukaryote is too vast even to
pretend a missing evolutionary link could account for it. A dozen
would be needed just to cover going from no nucleus to one that
functions fully. (This, by the way, is also true of the leap between
so-called pre-humans and humans, which will be discussed in Part
Two).
How to explain it? Certainly not plausibly. Fortunately, Darwinists
have never lacked the creativity to invent "warm-pond" scenarios to
plug holes in their dogma.
DOING THE DOGMA SHUFFLE
Since it’s clear that a "missing link" won’t fly over the
prokaryote-eukaryote chasm, why not assume some of the smaller
prokaryotes were eaten by some of the larger ones? Yeah, that might
work! But instead of turning into food, energy and waste, the small
ones somehow turn themselves--or get turned into--cell nuclei for
larger ones. Sure, that’s a keeper! Since no one can yet prove it
didn’t happen (Thank God!), Darwinists are able to proclaim it did.
(Keep in mind, when any critic of Darwinist dogma makes a suggestion
that similarly can’t be proved, it’s automatically dismissed,
because "lack of provability" is a death sentence outside their
fraternity. Inside their fraternity, consensus is adequate because
the collective agreement of so many "experts" should be accepted as
gospel.)
To Interventionists like me, the notion of prokaryotes consuming
each other to create eukaryotes is every bit as improbable as the
divine fiat of Creationists. But even if it were a biological
possibility (which most evidence weighs against), it would still
seem fair to expect "transition" models somewhere along the line.
Darwinists say "no" because this process could have an "overnight"
aspect to it. One minute there’s a large prokaryote alongside a
small one, the next minute there’s a small eukaryote with what
appears to be a nucleus inside it. Not magic, not a miracle, just a
biological process unknown today but which could have been possible
2.0 billion years ago. Who’s to say, except an "expert"? In any
case, large and small prokaryotes lived side by side for 2.0 billion
years (long enough, one would think, to learn to do so in harmony),
then suddenly a variety of eukaryotes appeared alongside them, whole
and complete, ready to join them as the only game in town for
another 1.4 billion years (with no apparent changes in the
eukaryotes, either).
At around 600 million years ago, the first multicellular life-forms
(the Ediacaran Fauna) appear--as suddenly and inexplicably as the
prokaryotes and eukaryotes. To this day, the
Ediacaran Fauna are not
well understood, beyond the fact they were something like jellyfish
or seaweeds in a wide range of sizes and shapes. (It remains unclear
whether they were plants or animals, or a bizarre combination of
both.) They lived alongside the prokaryotes and eukaryotes for about
50 million years, to about 550 million years ago, give or take a few
million, when the so-called "Cambrian Explosion" occurred.
It’s rightly called an "explosion", because within a period of only
5 to 10 million years--a mere eye-blink relative to the 3.5 billion
years of life preceding it--the Earth’s oceans filled with a
dazzling array of seawater plants and all 26 of the animal phyla
(body types) catalogued today, with no new phyla added since. No
species from the Cambrian era looks like anything currently
alive--except trilobites, which seem to have spawned at least
horseshoe crabs. However, despite their "alien" appearance, they all
arrived fully assembled--males and females, predators and prey,
large and small, ready to go. As in each case before, no
predecessors can be found.
THE PACE HEATS UP
Volumes have been written about the Cambrian Explosion and the
menagerie of weird plants and animals resulting from it. The Earth
was simply inundated with them, as if they’d rained down from the
sky. Darwinists concede it is the greatest difficulty--among
many--they confront when trying to sell the evolutionary concept of
gradualism. There is simply no way to reconcile the breathtaking
suddenness, the astounding variety, the overwhelming incongruity of
the Cambrian Explosion. It is a testament to the old adage that "one
ugly fact can ruin the most beautiful theory". But it’s far from the
only one.
All of complex life as we understand it begins with the Cambrian
Explosion, in roughly the last 550 million years. During that time,
the Earth has endured five major and several minor catastrophic
extinction events. Now, one can quibble with how an event
catastrophic enough to cause widespread extinctions could be called
"minor", but when compared to the major ones the distinction is apt.
The five major extinction events eliminated 50% to 90% of all
species of plants and animals alive when the event occurred.
We all know about the last of those, the Cretaceous event of 65
million years ago that took out the dinosaurs and much of what else
was alive at the time. But what few of us understand is the
distinctive pattern to how life exists between extinction events and
after extinction events. This difference in the pattern of life
creates serious doubts about "gradualism" as a possible explanatory
mechanism for how species proliferate.
Between extinction events, when environments are stable, life
doesn’t seem to change at all. The operative term is stasis.
Everything stays pretty much the same. But after extinction events,
the opposite occurs: everything changes profoundly. New life-forms
appear all over the place, filling every available niche in the new
environments created by the after-effects of the catastrophe.
Whatever that is, it’s not gradualism.
In 1972, (the late) Stephen J. Gould of Harvard and Niles Eldredge
of the American Museum of Natural History went ahead and bit the
bullet by announcing that fact to the world. Gradual evolution
simply was not borne out by the fossil record, and that fact had to
be dealt with. Darwin’s view of change had to be modified. It wasn’t
a gradual, haphazard process dictated by random, favorable
mutations in genes. It was something else.
That "something else" they called punctuated equilibrium. The key to
it was their open admission of the great secret that life-forms only
changed in spurts after extinction events, and therefore had nothing
to do with natural selection or survival of the fittest or any of
the old Darwinist homilies that everyone had been brainwashed to
believe. It was the first great challenge to Darwinian orthodoxy,
and it was met with furious opposition. The old guard tagged it
"punk eek" and called it "evolution by jerks".
TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES
What Gould and Eldredge were admitting was the great truth that
evolution by natural selection is not apparent in either the fossil
record or in the life we see around us. The old guard insisted that
the fossil record simply had to be wrong, that it wasn’t giving a
complete picture because large tracts of it were missing. That was
true, but much larger tracts were available, and those tracts showed
the overwhelming stasis of life-forms in every era, followed by
rapid filling of environmental niches after each extinction event.
So while parts of the record were indeed missing, what was available
was unmistakable.
Arguments raged back and forth. Explanations were created to try to
counter every aspect of the punk-eek position. None was ever
particularly convincing, but they began to build up. Remember,
scientists have the great advantage of being considered by one and
all as "experts", even when they haven’t the slightest idea of what
they’re talking about. That allows them to throw shot after shot
against the wall until something sticks, or until the target of
their wrath is covered in so much "mud" that it can’t be seen any
more. Such was the fate of the punk-eekers. By the early 1990s,
they’d been marginalized.
One can hardly blame the old-guard Darwinists for those attacks. If
granted any credence, the sudden radiations of myriad new species
into empty environmental niches could have gutted many of the most
fundamental tenets of gradual, "natural" evolution. That idea simply
could not become established as a fact. Why? Because the warm pond
was drained dry, biochemistry was rendering the
"small-eaten-by-large prokaryotes turned into eukaryotes" story
absurd, and the Cambrian Explosion was flatly inexplicable. If
"sudden radiation" were heaped onto all of that, the entire theory
of evolution could flounder, and where would that leave Darwinists?
Facing righteous Creationists shouting, "See! God did do it after
all!" Whatever else the Darwinists did, they couldn’t allow that to
happen.
Speaking as an Interventionist, I don’t blame them. To me, God
stands on equal footing with the lightning bolt. I see a better, far
more rational answer to the mysteries of how life came to be on
planet Earth: it was put here by intelligent beings, and it has been
continuously monitored by those same beings. Whether it’s been
developed for a purpose or toward a goal of some kind seems beyond
knowing at present, but it can be established with facts and with
data that intervention by outside intelligence presents the most
logical and most believable answer to the question of how life came
to be here, as well as of how and why it has developed in so many
unusual ways in the past 550 million years.
So now we come to the crux.
COSMIC ARKS
Darwinists go through life waving their PhD credentials like
teacher’s pets with a hall pass, because it allows them to shout
down and ridicule off the public stage anyone who chooses to avoid
the years of brainwashing they had to endure to obtain those passes.
However, their credentials give them "influence" and "credibility"
with the mainstream media, who don’t have the time, the ability or
the resources to make certain that everything every Darwinist says
is true. They must trust all scientists not to have political or
moral agendas, and not to distort the truth to suit those agendas.
So, over time, the media have become lapdogs to the teacher’s pets,
recording and reporting whatever they’re told to report, while
dismissing out of hand whatever they’re told to dismiss out of hand.
Despite Darwinists’ rants that those who challenge them do so out of
blithering idiocy, that is not always the case. For that matter,
their opponents are not all Creationists, or even
Intelligent
Designers, whom Darwinists labor feverishly to paint into the
"goofy" corner where Creationists rightly reside. So
Interventionists like me have few outlets for our ideas, and
virtually none in the mainstream media. Nevertheless, we feel our
view of the origin of life makes the best sense, given the facts as
they are now known, and the most basic aspect of our view starts
with what I once called "cosmic dump trucks". However, that term has
been justly criticized as facetious, so now I call them "cosmic
arks".
Imagine this scenario: a fleet of intergalactic "terraformers"
(another term I favor) cruises the universe. Their job is to locate
forming solar systems and seed everything in them with an array of
basic, durable life-forms capable of living in any environment, no
matter how scabrous. Then the terraformers return on a regular
basis, doing whatever is needed to maximize the capacity for life
within the developing solar system. Each system is unique, calling
for specialized forms of life at different times during its
development, which the terraformers provide from a wide array of
cosmic arks at their disposal.
With that as a given, let’s consider what’s happened on Earth. Soon
after it began to coalesce out of dust and gas, two forms of
virtually indestructible bacteria appeared on it, as if someone knew
precisely what to deliver and when.
Also, it would make sense that every other proto-planet in the solar
system would be seeded at the same time. How could even terraformers
know which forming planets would, after billions of years, become
habitable for complex life? And guess what? A meteorite from Mars
seems to contain fossilized evidence of the same kinds of nano-
(extremely small) bacteria found on Earth today. All other planets,
if they’re ever examined, will probably reveal similar evidence of a
primordial seeding. It would make no sense for terraformers to do
otherwise.
THE RUST ALSO RISES
So, okay, our solar system is noticed by intergalactic terraformers
as the new sun ignites and planets start forming around it. On each
of the planets they sprinkle a variety of two separate forms of
single-celled bacteria they know will thrive in any environment (the
extremophiles). But the bacteria have a purpose: to produce oxygen
as a component of their metabolism. Why? Because life almost
certainly has the same basic components and functions everywhere in
the universe. DNA will be its basis, and "higher" organisms will
require oxygen to fuel their metabolism. Therefore, complex life
can’t be "inserted" anywhere until a certain level of oxygen exists
in a planet’s atmosphere.
Wherever this process is undertaken, the terraformers have a major
problem to deal with: iron. Iron is an abundant element in the
universe. It is certainly abundant in planets (meteorites are often
loaded with it). Iron is very reactive with oxygen: that’s what rust
is all about. So on none of the new planets forming in any solar
system can higher life-forms develop until enough oxygen has been
pumped into its atmosphere to oxidize most of its free iron. This,
not surprisingly, is exactly what the prokaryotes did during their
first 2.0 billion years on Earth. But it had to be a two-part
process.
The proto-Earth would be cooling the whole time, so let’s say full
cooling takes roughly 1.0 billion years. So the extremophiles would
be the first batch of prokaryotes inserted because they could
survive it. Then, after a billion years or so, the terraformers
return and drop off the rest of the prokaryotes, the ones that can
live in milder conditions. Also, they have to keep returning on a
regular basis because each planet would cool at a different rate due
to their different sizes and different physical compositions.
However many "check-up" trips are required, by 2.0 billion years
after their first seeding of the new solar system the terraformers
realize the third planet from the sun is the only one thriving. They
are not surprised, having learned that a "zone of life" exists
around all suns, regardless of size or type. Now that this sun has
taken its optimum shape, they could have predicted which planet or
planets would thrive. In this system, the third is doing well but
the fourth one is struggling. It has its prokaryotes and it has
water, but its abundance of iron (the "red" planet) will require
longer to neutralize than such a small planet with a non-reactive
core will require to cool off, so it will lose its atmosphere to
dissipation into space before a balance can be achieved. The fourth
planet will become a wasteland.
The terraformers carry out the next phase of planet-building on the
thriving third by depositing larger, more complex, more biologically
reactive eukaryotes to accelerate the oxidation process. Eukaryotes
are far more fragile than prokaryotes, so they can’t be put onto a
forming planet until it is sufficiently cooled to have abundant land
and water. But once in place and established, their large size
(relative to prokaryotes) can metabolize much more oxygen per unit.
Together, the fully proliferated prokaryotes and eukaryotes can spew
out enough oxygen to oxidize every bit of free iron on the Earth’s
crust and in its seas, and before long be lacing the atmosphere with
it.
Sure enough, when the terraformers return in another 1.4 billion
years they find Earth doing well, but the situation on Mars is
unimproved: rust as far as the eye can see. (Mars is likely to have
at least prokaryotic life, because there wouldn’t have been enough
oxygen in the surface water it once had--or in the permafrost it
still has--to turn its entire surface into iron oxide.) Earth,
however, is doing fine. Most of its free iron is locked up as rust,
and oxygen levels in the atmosphere are measurably increasing. It’s
still too soon to think about depositing highly complex life, but
that day is not far off now, measurable in tens of millions of years
rather than in hundreds of millions. For the moment, Earth is ready
for its first load of multicellular life, and so it is deposited:
the Ediacaran Fauna.
Though scientists today have no clear understanding of what the
Ediacarans were or what their purpose may have been (because they
don’t exist today), it seems safe to assume they were even more
prolific creators of oxygen than the eukaryotes.
If, indeed, terraformers are behind the development of life on
Earth, nothing else makes sense. If, on the other hand, everything
that happened here did so by nothing but blind chance and
coincidence, it was the most amazing string of luck imaginable.
Everything happened exactly when it needed to happen, exactly where
it needed to happen, exactly how it needed to happen.
If that’s not an outright miracle, I don’t know what is.
MAKING BETTER SENSE
Assuming terraformers were/are responsible for seeding and
developing life on Earth, we can further assume that by 550 million
years ago at least the early oceans were sufficiently oxygenated to
support genuinely complex life. That was delivered en masse during
the otherwise inexplicable Cambrian Explosion, after which followed
the whole panoply of "higher" forms of life on Earth as we have come
to know it. (The whys and wherefores of that process are,
regrettably, beyond the scope of this essay, but there are answers
that have as much apparent sense behind them as what has been
outlined.)
During those 550 million years, five major and several minor
extinction events occurred, after each of which a few million years
would pass while the Earth stabilized with environments modified in
some way by the catastrophes. Some pre-event life-forms would
persist into the new environments, to be joined by new ark-loads
delivered by the terraformers, who would analyze the situation on
the healing planet and deliver species they knew would survive in
the new environments and establish a balance with the life-forms
already there (the Interventionist version of punctuated
equilibrium).
We’ve already seen the difficulties Darwinists have with trying to
explain the flow of life on Earth presented in the fossil record.
That record can be explained by the currently accepted Darwinian
paradigm, but the veneer of "scholarship" overlaying it is little
different from the divine fiat of Creationists. And it can be
explained by Intelligent Designers, who claim anything so
bewilderingly complex couldn’t possibly have been arrayed without
the guidance of some superior, unifying intelligence (which they
stop short of calling "God", because otherwise they are merely
Creationists without cant).
Considering all of the above, we Interventionists believe the
terraformer scenario explains the fossil record of life on Earth
with more creativity, more accuracy and more logic than the others,
and in the fullness of time will have a far greater probability of
being proved correct. We don’t bother trying to establish or even
discuss who the terraformers are, or how they came to be, because
both are irrelevant and unknowable until they choose to explain it
to us. Besides, speculating about their origin detracts from the far
more germane issue of trying to establish that our explanation of
life’s origin makes better sense than any other.
We will continue to be ignored by mainstream media simply because
the idea of intelligent life existing outside Earth is so
frightening to the majority of those bound to it. Among many reasons
for fear, the primary one might be our unfortunate habit of
filtering everything beyond our immediate reality through our own
perceptions. Thus, we attribute to others the same traits and
characteristics we possess. Another bad habit appears when we
discover new technology. Invariably our first thought is: "How can
we use this to kill more of our enemies?" Collectively, we all have
enemies we want to eliminate to be done with the problem they
present. Like it or not, this is a dominant aspect of human nature.
Because we so consistently project onto others the darkest facets of
our nature, we automatically assume--despite ET and Alf and other
lovable depictions in our culture--that real aliens will want to
harm us. Consequently, we avoid facing the possibility of their
existence in every way we can. (Here I can mention the obstinate
resistance I have personally found to serious consideration of the
Starchild
skull, which by all rights should have been eagerly and
thoroughly examined three years ago.)
So Interventionism is ignored because it scrapes too close to
UFOs,
crop circles, alien abductions and every other subject that
indicates we humans may, in the end, be infinitesimally
insignificant in the grand scheme of life in the universe. There is
much more to say about it, of course, especially as it relates to
human origins, but that has to wait until the second installment of
this essay.
For now, let the last word be that the last word on origins--of life
and of humans--is a long, long way from being written.
But when it is, I strongly suspect it will be Intervention.
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