by Michael Salla

Honolulu Exopolitics Examiner
February 23, 2010

from Examiner Website

In the film version of the book "2010" written by Arthur C. Clarke, 2010 - The Year We Make Contact, this year marks the beginning of a new era for humanity - official discovery of extraterrestrial life.

Towards the end of 2009, a number of sources and articles began appearing claiming that official disclosure of advanced extraterrestrial life was imminent. Late 2009 and early 2010 witnessed an unprecedented number of events that continue to suggest official disclosure of some kind is imminent. While predictions of official disclosure by early 2010 have so far not proved accurate, a preparatory process nevertheless appears to be well underway.

The world public is being prepared for such an announcement by a series of scientific meetings concluding that discovery of extraterrestrial life is inevitable. In what appears to be a carefully calibrated process, Great Britain is playing a leading role in simultaneously preparing the world for an inevitable announcement concerning the discovery of primitive extraterrestrial life, while dampening down expectations about the visitation of technologically advanced extraterrestrials in UFOs.

From January 25-26, 2010, London’s Royal Society, Britain’s equivalent of a national academy of sciences, held a two day meeting on the topic: "The detection of extraterrestrial life and the consequences for science and society."

The meeting involved some of the world’s foremost scientific authorities in the search for extraterrestrial life. Leading the field were astrobiologists arguing the inevitability of biological evolutionary process taking off on exoplanets with similar conditions to Earth.

Professor Simon Conway Morris, a Cambridge University evolutionary biologist, said:

Contrary to most neo-Darwinian thinking at the moment, evolution is much more predictable than people think. In short, under the right conditions of a "biosphere" such as those present on Earth, the molecules necessary to form complex and intelligent life are already available; Darwinian evolution will do the rest.

The conclusions of the conference over the inevitability of extraterrestrial life being eventually discovered was affirmed by Lord Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society.

In a Daily Telegraph news report released on Monday February 22, he said:

They could be staring us in the face and we just don’t recognize them. The problem is that we’re looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology…

 

I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there as aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.

 

 

 

A meeting of astrobiologists in Rome sponsored by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences from November 6-11, 2009, also largely agreed that discovery of primitive extraterrestrial life was inevitable given the existence of life bearing conditions found on other planets in our solar system.

Jesuit Father Jose Funes, head of the Vatican Observatory, said:

“Discoveries of life in very inhospitable conditions on Earth, such as rock-eating microbes living deep beneath the ocean floor, show that different life forms may exist on other worlds.”

On February 18, three weeks after the Royal Society meeting, Britain’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) released a further six thousand pages of UFO files on top of earlier releases.

One 1997 report concerned six witnesses of a UFO hovering over the home of then British Home Secretary, Michael Howard. In what has become a familiar response, the MoD downplayed the significance of the UFO reports saying there was no evidence of them being a security threat.

This has become the standard response used by the MoD in dealing with UFO sightings as noted by one reporter:

“Unless there is evidence of a potential military threat, and to date no UFO report has revealed such evidence, we do not attempt to identify the precise nature of each sighting reported to us.”

Indeed, the lack of a military threat was cited by the MoD as the main reason for its decision to dismantle its five decades long UFO study desk on December 1, 2009.

The Royal Society’s recent astrobiology conference and Lord Rees’ comments yesterday, together with the latest MoD UFO release, have worked to further prepare the British and world publics for an inevitable announcement concerning discovery of primitive extraterrestrial life.

This preparatory process appears to be a carefully calibrated one where the issues of primitive extraterrestrial life and advanced life associated with UFOs are separated. The MoD’s December 2009 announcement closing its UFO desk was intended to signal that the UFO issue is not worthy of serious military or scientific scrutiny, despite widespread reports of UFOs throughout the British Isles.

Consequently, a formal announcement of the discovery of primitive extraterrestrial life is inevitable; and, to begin with, will be separated from the UFO issue. Such a 'discovery' appears imminent with the rise in astrobiological conferences, supportive statements by leading astronomers, and rapidly growing media interest in scientific debate over the existence of extraterrestrial life.

As Clarke presciently wrote in 1984, 2010 may very well be the year that the world is notified that extraterrestrial life, at least in a primitive organic form, is officially ‘discovered’.