We Are the Children of the Stars (5 page)

Starmen as the “missing link” of Man's baffling evolutionary history! Despite its rather “romantic” flavor (and with little factual data to back it up), no other statement could express so briefly and succinctly what this book is about and will attempt to prove viable in a scientific way.

2

T
HE PREVIOUS CHAPTER reviewed the various shortcomings of Darwin's theory in regard to explaining Man – the “misfit” of Evolution – and investigated the strong evidence that Man may be a star-crossed hybrid of two worlds.

Now we take up the second part of the theory – that mankind is a colony. And that we humans are a colony of the starmen by conscious design or plan that is still being withheld from Earth people.

Why the colony and the secrecy?

Perhaps it would be best to explain with a brief tale:

Many millions and perhaps billions of years ago – and no human on Earth knows how many light-years away – Man evolved on a distant planet. They were people as human as we are. In a short space of time, say 100,000 years after his early ancestors, Starman arrived at our present state of development. For something like one to five hundred thousand years more, he continued to develop socially, politically, and scientifically.

Then, in time, his planet became too small, too cold or too crowded for him, and he colonized one or more young nearby planets. Eventually, perhaps millions of years later, he had to move again. His planet was losing its atmosphere, or perhaps population pressure was the cause.

But then came the saving discovery: Starman's mind was marvelous and highly developed, far beyond the capabilities of our present-day Earthling minds. At the same time, unfortunately,
Starman's body was totally inadequate for pioneering jobs on other planets.

This discovery forced Starman to make a momentous decision.

Mankind, as a race, would henceforth be divided into two branches, as a means, the only means, of preserving the race. There would be the ancestral race, the keepers of wisdom and knowledge, the pursuers of scientific inquiry. And the other race, the hybridized colonial race, would always be physically more able, but also always mentally inferior to the ancestral race.

And so, time passed while the starmen spread. Planet after planet was colonized, then discarded in the course of time as its atmosphere drifted away or as it became cold or otherwise unsuitable. Many millions of years passed. The system of colonizing became standardized and very successful.

Scientific progress continued. The search for ever stronger physical specimens with which to colonize the planets gradually grew into the system we are partly aware of here on Earth today, which we call “Evolution” but which is in reality, a part of colonization: namely
, planned Evolution through artificial hybridization
.

Contact between the ancestral race and each interstellar colony was never permitted in the beginning, in the sense that no colony was ever allowed to know it had been created. However, when the colony evolved into a sufficiently mature form and ventured into space under its own impetus, conscious contact was at last permitted.

The reason for this apparently unreasonable procedure of secrecy was as follows:

Man learns best that which he learns for himself, in his own good time. (And this is just as true for the Earth today and its problems as it is for one of our youngsters growing up.)

So the colonies on other worlds grew politically, scientifically, philosophically, and in other ways important to the ancestral race. They grew along these paths by trial and error, learning and gaining mental stature, just as we have done for several thousands of years here on Earth.

When the time arrived for the colony to become aware of the presence of other intelligences throughout the universe, and to begin the process of probing outward to meet or communicate with these other people (
we are close to that position today
), then at last the first knowing contact could be made between the ancestral race and the colony.

From then on, for some period of time, the new world gasped in wonderment at the seemingly endless succession of marvels that came to bless its scientific and cultural life.

Gradually, the purpose of the colony became clear to its inhabitants.

The colony was to act as a host to the ancestral race. A willing host, because, in return for doing the spadework desired by the ancestral race, the colony was given the marvelous superscientific knowledge gleaned through eons of time – the philosophical wisdom, the social achievements, the political astuteness, and all such finer benefits.

Thus, the colony fulfilled its destiny and became one more of the endless succession of planets chosen to be the home of original interstellar Man. And there the tale ends.

This is not meant to be an authentic version of how original Man – or Starman – spread through the universe. Naturally, it must be mainly guesswork. But certain fundamentals are presented that we believe are true – that Man evolved elsewhere in space, that he in time colonized many other worlds, and that on each he used some form of crossbreeding or biogenetic manipulation literally to create rational life ahead if its slow, evolutionary time.

We now see that this second, colonization part of the theory, along with the first, hybrid part, offers explanations for all the topic headings in
Chapter 1
.

It would be wise to note that the main attraction of this story and the theory it gives rise to, is that it reinforces mankind's strong feelings of “special destiny,” his sense of “preordained superiority” among living things.

Therefore, this theory tends to be relatively compatible with Darwin's work, at the same time partly removing the one feature of his theory the public found repulsive in the extreme: that “Man has descended from monkeys.”

This hybrid theory proposes that Man is not quite as bestial as that phrase implies. And, in fact, that Man
ascended
from the apes, through the crossbreeding program of the wise, ultra-intelligent planet-hoppers who visited Earth long ago.

Further, not quite as obvious but equally as important, is the implication that if we can only get out into space, meet our ancestors, acquire their knowledge and their timeless, surpassing wisdom, then perhaps “Peace on earth, good will to Man” can be ours forevermore.

But all of the preceding, of course, hinges on one looming question –
is
there life and intelligence elsewhere in the universe? Is the rest of the cosmos filled only with dead planets whirling around their fierce suns? Or are there other worlds propitious to life, where living things sprang up as they did on Earth?

And where does life come from in the first place, on any ripe planet?

Did the primeval atmosphere of Earth, containing several gases – hydrogen, methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide, among others – act as a giant chemical laboratory and accidentally toss together atoms to make molecules? Did these molecules shuffle around in violent waters under fierce heat and radiation until they formed the first organic compounds? Then, finally, did those compounds further unite to form amino acids, the basic units of protein – which is living matter?

Such is one theory of life's genesis on Earth.

And it could happen on any other world similar to Earth and with comparable conditions.

In fact, biologists and biochemists almost unanimously agree that such Earthlike planets could not remain sterile. That life must spring up on them, given sufficient atoms and molecules that are basic to life – hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, carbon dioxide – and billion-year stretches of time for
random forces to juggle them together into the first bits of living protein.

More importantly, the process can no longer stop there, by theory.

It continues until the first primitive one-celled creatures are formed in the condensing seas of the planet, making an “organic soup.” Now the classic process of Evolution – building up of lifeforms – takes over, and the tiny single cells form larger aggregates that become increasingly complex as nature stirs the brew. Invertebrates, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals – it may all be a sort of inevitable “pattern” that occurs on any and all Earthlike worlds.
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However, another theory of life's origins has recently sprung up, tied in with cosmology, so that the Evolution of the material universe and of life itself become strangely interwoven.

This theory is, in reality, a revival of a concept a century old, when Svante Arrhenius, the famed nineteenth-century chemist, propounded his theory of
panspermia.
In brief, he envisioned tiny life-buds, or virus-like spores, that were wafted through space by the pressure of light waves from star-suns. If they landed on a “ripe” world ready for life, the spores came out of their suspended animation and formed one-celled life, which then again launched the whole climb of species up the evolutionary ladder.

Oddly enough, this seemingly “way-out” theory has recently been taken up and expanded upon by serious scientists. John A. Ball of Harvard brings forth a peculiar fact, well known to evolutionists, that spontaneous generation of new life has utterly stopped for ages, as if evolution itself had come to an abrupt halt.
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He then offers an astounding conjecture: “Most evolutionists believe that it [life] was generated long ago
but perhaps it never was
.” (Italics added.) “Perhaps the Earth was infected from elsewhere [in the beginning].”

Two other leading lights in biological science published a paper in which they suggest that living spores did not merely drift through space, but came as colonies of microorganisms sent in
a protective (unmanned) spacecraft by intelligent beings elsewhere, and deliberately aimed at Earth.
³

There are two strong points favoring this concept. One is that all life on Earth has a uniform genetic code in its most basic DNA form, from amoeba to man. If life had formed spontaneously on Earth, it seems more than likely several kinds of genetic codes would have arisen.

The universal genetic code, say the scientists, could be compatible with the idea of a
single ancestral source
– such as ancient microorganisms dumped on Earth by a spacecraft, thus “seeding” our planet with life.

The second odd point is that molybdenum, a very rare metal, plays an important role as a trace element in the physiology of all Earth creatures. It is surprising, therefore, that life so dependent on a rare metal should arise on a molybdenum-poor world like Earth, rather that on some world rich in that metal – a world from which, perhaps, the “microseeding” originated.

What has excited astronomers and cosmologists in the past ten years is the amazing discovery of
organic gases
in “empty” space, existing as gigantic clouds along with dust and debris between the stars. They are extremely attenuated gases, so that space is still almost “empty,” but our galaxy is so huge in volume that the total aggregate of the scattered atoms and molecules runs into staggering tons almost beyond count.

Radio-telescopes were the first to detect the spectral lines of hydrogen gas in the open areas of space, thus opening a new branch of science called
molecular astronomy
.

As of May 1974, some twenty-nine different substances had been detected in outer space.
⁴
There will probably be more by the time you read this. Among the detected substances are such organic radicals (parts of organic molecules) and pre-organic molecules (which make up living matter) as water, ammonia (NH
³
), formaldehyde (H
²
CO), methyl alcohol (CH
³
OH) and acetaldehyde (CH
³
CHO).

Biochemists must be utterly astounded that such complex organic substances can exist in the cold, empty reaches of space
itself. For by a variant of the panspermia theory, organic chemicals rather than spores can descend on any planet whirling through the space cloud to have its seas saturated with the building blocks of protoplasm.

“The discovery of an increasing number of organic molecules in interstellar space,” reports
Science News
, “has led a number of scientists to suggest that the first chemical steps in the evolution of life may have taken place in the interstellar clouds.”
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