Life Beyond Earth

Life beyond earth

[00:00:45] Jai Guru Deva. Welcome to my podcast, The Vedic Worldview. I’m Thom Knoles.

SEETI – The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

[00:00:54] Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about life beyond earth, and the fascination that we humans have with such a topic, and the fascination we have with related topics.

[00:01:10] The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, S-E-E-T-I, Seeti, is in fact, a major program that has been quite well funded in the United States, at least for many years, and has attracted a tremendous amount of international attention, and also fanciful attention of the movie-making world, and the television-series-making world.

[00:01:39] Why are we so fascinated with life elsewhere? Now, this is a particular interesting question. Since it is considered by most biologists—a biologist is somebody who studies bios, studies life—it’s considered by most biologists that we hardly know anything about the already existing life forms that are extant on this little blue ball that we call the Earth.

[00:02:09] We’re just so fascinated by the possibility of anything living anywhere else other than the Earth, so fascinated that we don’t even want to pay attention to the infinite number of life forms that are already extant right here, or the ways in which our behaviors, by robbing various biological phenomena, creatures, of their habitats, both in the plant world and in the animal world, and bringing about an early extinction for a variety of species.

Our Fascination With People from Outer Space

[00:02:51] And then we have the whole question about the way in which all of these different species interact with each other. Their interactions with each other, the ways in which the biosphere, that’s the world of bios, the world of living things are already in existing interaction and communication.

[00:03:15] New things are being discovered every day, particularly about the relationship between a variety of trees and other plants and the way they commune or communicate with each other in our biosphere.

[00:03:34] So, then why are we so suddenly fascinated with people from outer space? And when I say sudden, this has been something which has grown in fascination since about the mid 1800’s. The first very interesting concepts that were put forward, that there could be others who have come from other places and may visit here or may not, or just exist out there, or the possibility that there are other planets out there that have people living on them and so on.

[00:04:10] This is something that’s a relatively new fascination that humans have had, and accompanying it, the very early and juvenile stages of space exploration that have occurred, starting in the 1950s and sixties, the push to land human beings on the nearest orbiting satellite, the thing called the Moon, and the machinations to push further than that and land somebody on the next rock that could have some interesting prospects to it, on Mars, seems to have captured the public fascination.

Is Our Universe Bio-friendly?

[00:04:56] Beyond that, the sending out of physical materials in spacecraft, the Voyager programs, sending things out into space with the thought that maybe someday, somebody will capture one of these. If they have enough intelligence, and sophistication as a civilization, they might be able to play recordings that we’ve sent.

[00:05:22] Another thing is sending out radio signals randomly into the universe, or pointing them at very specific star groups, and all of this fascination, to what end? Ultimately, we do have a fundamental fascination with whether or not the universe in which we live is bio-friendly.

[00:05:49] I’m using the word bio-friendly and borrowing that term from one of my favorite science writers, and I’m not saying science fiction, is a science writer by the name of Paul Davies. Professor Davies has, for many years, been at the forefront of the examination of the implications of some of the most magnificent discoveries of modern science for human consciousness.

There is Only One Thing

[00:06:18] What does it mean that we can demonstrate in lab science that there are not as many as two things? What does that mean, two things? That there could be a thing, and another thing has been debunked as a concept in modern science.

[00:06:39] What has been demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt is that there is only one thing in the universe. One indivisible, whole Unified Field, one indivisible, whole Unified Field. Let’s look at those words singularly.

[00:06:59] One, that means one. It doesn’t mean two. It doesn’t mean many. There is one thing. It is indivisible. You can’t divide it up, and it is whole. That means it doesn’t have seams in it. It is seamless.

Unified Field and Quantum Mechanics

[00:07:17] Unified Field, there is one thing out of which all of these things are appearing. One ocean, as it were, out of which all of the waves are undulating. The undulations of the ocean, the waves of the ocean in no way are non-ocean. You could have little waves, you could have tsunamis, or you can have very high-crested wind-driven waves.

[00:07:54] And all of these waves, whether they are broad and large magnitude, like a tsunami, or whether they are seismic, or whether they are wind-driven, or whether they’re little ripples, or little bits of chop, every single wave actually is nothing but an undulation of the underlying field through which it propagates. And that underlying field is the ocean.

[00:08:22] There’s no wave that is anything but the ocean, the ocean undulating. Like that, the Unified Field appearing to be many actually is only one thing. This we know from the best and highest, and most successful theory of modern science, quantum mechanics.

[00:08:51] Quantum mechanics is that set of physics theories that describes the movement from Unified Field into that which is apparently particulate. Particles, everybody’s heard about molecules. Molecules are made of atoms. Atoms are made of their nuclei with electrons zooming around them. The nuclei are made of protons, and neutrons. Thus the nucleus of the atom, the protons and neutrons are made of quarks. The quarks are made of leptons or leptoquarks.

Consciousness is a Property of the One Thing

[00:09:25] And as we keep going smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, we’re now millions and millions of times smaller than the point of the sharpest needle that you can conceptualize. Millions of times smaller than that.

[00:09:42] And then we arrive at the fundamental basis. What is all of this coming out of? Where’s all this come from? It comes from one indivisible, whole Unified Field. And we can also demonstrate using just logic that this one indivisible, whole Unified Field also is conscious. It is conscious because consciousness exists, and there’s only one thing.

[00:10:12] If there’s only one thing, all things that exist, all forms, all phenomena are a property of that one thing because there are not two things. There are not things that are not conscious and things that are conscious. We’ve demonstrated in lab, there’s only one thing.

[00:10:32] If there’s only one thing and consciousness exists, then consciousness is a property of the one thing. I am conscious. Presumably, you are conscious. A sunflower using phototropism to follow the sunshine across the sky, as the earth turns, is demonstrating a repertoire of having a response to a stimulus. This is also a form of consciousness. Consciousness exists. If there’s only one thing, then whatever exists is part of the one thing.

[00:11:11] So, now we can say Unified Field, one invisible, whole conscious field. Now, if there’s one indivisible, whole conscious field, and we’re not gonna say if anymore, since there is one invisible, whole conscious field, then we are here, living beings on a little tiny blue dot…

This Makes the Mind Boggle

[00:11:38] The Earth, however big it seems to you, you try to fly all around it, you try to get to know all the different countries in it, all the different cultures on it, and all of that. There seems to be infinite decimal detail into which you could go.

[00:11:51] But however big all of that seems to you, the fact is, it’s a tiny little blue dot going around a relatively small yellow sun that exists and is moving through space within one of the spiral arms of a moderately-sized galaxy that has somewhere between a hundred billion and a trillion stars in it, nobody’s really done in a very official count.

[00:12:18] The stars of our galaxy, which we’ve named The Milky Way, and then there are other galaxies around us, many of which are much larger than the one in which we find ourselves, galaxies with thousands of billions of stars.

[00:12:34] And then, when we look deeper into space with our telescopes, we see billions and billions of galaxies, and we know for certain that there are more galaxies identifiable through our telescopes. More galaxies, each with somewhere between a billion to a trillion stars in it, than there are stars in our own galaxy.

[00:13:02] How many planets must be out there? How many? This makes the mind boggle. And here is the fundamental problem.

The Laws of Physics

[00:13:12] If we want to send anything, a probe or anything else, or we want to send people anywhere, then we’re limited by certain laws of physics. The laws of physics are these.

[00:13:30] First of all, there is no thing, nothing that has mass. What does mass mean? A particle that has a certain amount of density to it that therefore also has its own gravity. Absolutely, everything that exists that has mass has gravity. Earth has a relatively large amount of gravity compared with a rock that you could hold in your hand. But Earth, compared with Jupiter, is not very massive.

[00:14:01] Massive is a word that we’ve colloquially turned into something that means big, but mass does not necessarily mean big; mass could be small but very, very dense and have a lot of gravitation. An extremely dense thing has a lot of dense mass in it, and it’s going to produce a gravitational field around it.

[00:14:25] So we have this little blue dot going around a yellow sun that’s in the spiral alarm of a galaxy. And these galaxies that we see all in space are all in orbit around black holes, which are the most dense thing that there is in our known universe, the most gravitational thing. And we have one indivisible, whole conscious field causing all of this to come into being, everything coming out of that Unified Field of consciousness.

Speed of Light

[00:14:59] Do we live in a universe that is bio-friendly or not? Bio-friendly means, is it just an amazing fluke that life, bios, happens to exist on this one little blue dot in a tremendous amount of variety? Or could there be other little dots around in the universe that also have life on them?

[00:15:30] And we come up again against our obstacle that’s presented to us by the laws of physics. Light is able to travel through space, using statute miles, at 186,000 miles per second.

[00:15:46] Light means photons. Photons have no mass, they’re just pure energy, and they’re able to travel through space, and they do travel through space at an absolute speed, 186,000 miles per second. If we do that in kilometers, it is 300,000 kilometers per second. Light travels at that speed.

[00:16:16] Let’s think of that as The Absolute, it’s the absolute speed at which anything can move, but only light can do it. Light doesn’t really know space or time. And we can go into that in quite a little bit more detail, but light has no mass to it.

Infinite Mass in a Speck of Dust

[00:16:40] If you take a thing, and this is one of the fundamental discoveries that is a product of all of Albert Einstein’s work, you take a thing, whatever it might be. Let’s say a pen with which you write that’s sitting on the table next to you. Or even a tiny, tiny, tiny particle, something the size of a sub-nuclear particle, doesn’t matter how big or small the thing is.

[00:17:06] If you begin moving it through space, as you start to approach the speed of light, you’ll begin to notice that the thing develops weight, mass. It starts to become more massive, not larger, but its gravitational impact grows and grows as a direct percentage of the speed of light. When you move something through space, the speed of light is going to represent the point at which that thing develops infinite mass.

[00:17:45] According to Einstein’s theories, which have been demonstrated again and again and again, and are beyond any reasonable doubt, anything, even a tiny, tiny thing, a speck of dust moving through space, as it moves to 50% of the speed of light, 150,000 kilometers per second, it will now be 50% of the mass of the universe. Infinite mass, 50% of infinite mass. If it were to attain the speed of light, then that speck of dust would now be the entire mass of the universe, infinite mass.

Ancient Light Visible in the Present

[00:18:28] How do you move or propel something through space that has infinite mass? So there is something fundamental built into the laws of Nature that prevent anything from moving at the speed of light.

[00:18:47] When we look out at galaxies, we’re looking at light that has departed from a place in space-time, in many cases, 20, 30 million years ago, or all the way up to a billion years ago, depending on how far out in space we’re looking, that thing that we’re looking at isn’t there anymore in that spot and space.

[00:19:16] So, supposing you could use a super-sensitive telescope to identify a planet orbiting around a sun in a distant part of our own galaxy, which is about as far as we can see with any degree of definition, to say nothing of other galaxies that are on the other side of intergalactic space.

[00:19:40] And that little planet that you’re looking at is, let’s say, 50 million light-years away. That means the light that shone from the sun reflecting on that planet was there in spacetime, 50 million years ago, and that light took 50 million years to get to your telescope.

[00:20:03] Where is it now? We don’t know. We can make predictions using mathematical models, but it’s not in the place that we’re looking at anymore. Because the light that brought information of it here to our eye is already 50 million years old.

Challenging the Assumption of Modern Science

[00:20:22] And so then we have this idea, “Well, do we live in a universe that is bio-friendly? Has it produced life anywhere else? Seems likely that it may have. If so, what does that mean about the nature of our universe? What does it mean about the nature of all things, the one invisible, whole consciousness field? Is it bio-friendly only here on the earth? Or is there a kind of bio-friendly trend in the universe that manifests in other places?”

[00:20:56] If it turns out that the Unified Field, that is The Universe, is itself bio-friendly, this challenges a major assumption of modern science, which is all of this life thing that happened here on Earth happened at random. We don’t need any fundamental intelligence in order for life to have appeared on the Earth.

[00:21:22] But if we see life cropping up in a vast variety of places, either life in very simple forms like viruses, or life in complex forms, like beings that can communicate with each other, and maybe even with us, it might mean something fundamental about the nature of everything. And this is why we’re fascinated by it.

Why Can We See It All?

[00:21:47] Now, we have to ask the question, well, supposing we live in a bio-friendly universe, I, for one, am a subscriber to such an idea, and we can see potential for life, but it’s so far away, there’s no way that any spaceship or any craft could ever get to that place in any conceivable amount of time, millions of years, why is it that we can see it all?

[00:22:14] What’s the purpose behind our being able to look out into space and wonder about all the things we see out there, which basically are, as I’ve said already, ancient history? The light emitting from events that occurred millions of years ago that arrives in our telescopes, and we look at it, and we say, “Wow, that’s there. Or it was there millions of years ago. I don’t know what’s there now.” But aren’t we fascinated by the idea of getting out there and seeing what it is?

[00:22:49] And yet we’re limited by the laws of physics about how fast we can move. A tiny fraction of the speed of light is our limitation. We can’t move any faster than a tiny fraction of the speed of light. And any place that we could go in that amount of time would be so negligibly nearby that it’s unlikely we could even move to the nearest star in anything like multiples of one human lifetime.

The Objective Means of Gaining Knowledge

[00:23:22] So why are we able to see it all? The Veda has an answer, as you might have suspected, this being a podcast on the Vedic worldview, not necessarily just the astrophysics worldview.

[00:23:38] There are two ways of gaining knowledge. The objective means of gaining knowledge. That means, you go out, and you gather things that are interpretable data. They’re interpretable by your senses, your taste, your touch, your smell, your sight, your sound, and then you crunch all that information up with your intellect, use logic and use other kinds of formulae to come up with theories, which then you test and they turn out to be correct, and you discover what your current limitations are of your knowledge base.

[00:24:13] Getting knowledge from other people. Albert Einstein thought of, and other researchers tested these theories about the speed of light and the effect that it has on mass and on time and all of that. And then we get to test all of that and see that it’s true for ourselves. This is the objective means of gaining knowledge.

[00:24:34] You go out to the object world, including other people, find out what they’ve thought about already, read that in books, or hear about it in podcasts or on YouTube or whatever, and then you ingest that knowledge and start figuring out things for yourself. This is the objective means of gaining knowledge.

How Do I Find Out if I’m Living in a Bio-friendly Universe?

[00:24:53] You look through a telescope, and you see vast galaxies, vast numbers of vast galaxies, and you start to arrive at the conclusion that there probably are many Earth-like phenomena out there where the body is close enough to a sun that it’s warm enough, but not too far that it’s freezing because water needs to be liquid in order for there to be life, and water’s band of bandwidth a little bit too hot, and it boils and turns into vapor.

[00:25:27] A little bit too cold, and it freezes, and it’s solid, and it needs to be liquid in order for life to occur. And liquid water is a very narrow band.

[00:25:35] And so, we look in our telescopes, and we see all these things and see all these potential places, and we think, how do we get out there? How do we find out anything? How do we get a message to that place? How do I find out if I’m living in a bio-friendly universe, which is going to change my whole idea about things?

Inner Space – The Subjective Means of Gaining Knowledge

[00:25:54] The Veda says there’s another way, the subjective means of gaining knowledge. Instead of taking your body or an extension of your body, like a probe into outer space, you go into inner space. We’ve already described how science has demonstrated that there’s, in fact, only one indivisible, whole conscious thing, the Unified Field.

[00:26:22] That Unified Field is accessible to human consciousness through technique of transcending. You step beyond space-time every time you go beyond thought. The Unified Field doesn’t have to go anywhere. It already is everywhere. All forms, all phenomena, all space, all time issues forth from the Unified Field. You have access to the Unified Field.

[00:26:57] That means you have access to that, which already is everywhere. Since you have access to that, which already is everywhere, it should be possible for you to go into inner space deep within your own consciousness, step beyond individuality, experience Unified Field consciousness, be one with the Knower of all things; that’s the Unified Field itself. And from there, be able to get an answer to any question. What is it anywhere that exists? And how does it work? And what is it like? And all of that.

The One Caveat – Gaining Knowledge has to be Relevant

[00:27:50] The only one caveat that the Vedic Unified Field theory says is that the gaining of that knowledge has to be, and here we have a really big word, relevant. It’s big, not as a word in size, but it’s big in terms of its pivotal nature.

[00:28:14] You can know anything that it is relevant for you to know through the subjective means of gaining knowledge by transcending your local boundaries of your body, of your individual mind, and letting your mind become one with the Unified Field itself. Anything that is relevant to evolution for you to know can be known by you.

[00:28:42] This is not space travel because space travel means moving through space. This is becoming one with that which is already everywhere. There’s no travel involved. If you have to travel, then you’re limited. You’re an object that has to move through space and you’re limited by the laws of physics that say you can’t go very fast.

Pure Knowingness on the Level of Being

[00:29:11] But on the level of Being, you can have pure knowingness. You can know from the level of that by which all things are known, Unified Field consciousness.

[00:29:25] And so our inspiration that comes from looking through telescopes, or, hey, just walking outside at nighttime and on a clear night, looking up into the sky and seeing all the stars everywhere and naturally wondering there is the stimulus. How do you do anything about it?

[00:29:45] Instead of trying to create all kinds of highly technological trampolines, whereby we can bounce ourselves out of the gravitational field of the earth, travel through airless space for eons, and arrive at someplace in order to find out one tiny bit of information, was it worth it or was it not worth it? We can cut across all of that and learn how to dive deep within ourselves and explore all that is from the place that’s already there, the Unified Field.

[00:30:20] This is the fundamental idea that Unified Field consciousness is able to deliver. The ability to know all about anything, so long as the inquiry for knowledge satisfies the one criterion of it being relevant with regard to the evolution of our species. If it’s relevant, you can know it. You can know what the answer is.

Just Like Einstein

[00:30:54] I believe, from my readings of professor Einstein’s own remarks about his cognitive processes, that he was using his own inner consciousness to come up with his understanding, which was tested many, many times after he came up with it and demonstrated to be beyond reasonable doubt, to be demonstrated with meeting the level of massive scientific scrutiny.

[00:31:27] He was not really a researcher. He did research into consciousness as a field of all possibilities. It’s my belief that Albert Einstein was using some natural innate method of diving deep into his consciousness in order to experience what his Unified Field layer was informing him of. And it was that, that gave him an advantage, which most scientists agree, he was at least 200 years ahead of his time in his ability to conceptualize how the laws of Nature interact and the relevance of those laws of Nature to humanity.

[00:32:11] So, there we have it. Do we live in a bio-friendly universe or not? And, if you think we do, there are ways that you can verify and validate that within your own consciousness. And you can verify and validate it as well by looking at the fact of biology existing in one sphere, which is the geosphere, the sphere of earth itself, the biosphere on the geosphere, biology living on one planet.

The Product of a Bio-Friendly Trend in the Universe

[00:32:40] How did we get here? What are the possibilities of all this happening simply at random? The position of the Moon, the size of the Moon, the angle of the Moon, the facts of the timing of the Earth cooling down at a certain time, the fact of a meteorite impact that eliminated the reptilian dominance on the Earth and allowed certain, very small, at that time insignificant species, which were our ancestors, to evolve and turn into upright neurocentric anthropods that talk to each other and text each other on iPhones and get all insulted by minor claims to offensive thinking and all of that.

[00:33:19] And we all get to be here doing all this stuff like everybody, terribly worried about who’s offending whom and communicating largely about that. How did we get to be here?

[00:33:32] For all of this to have happened simply through a series of random events requires a far more imaginative mind than I possess. For it to be a product of a bio-friendly trend in the universe is a far more plausible, scientific explanation.

[00:33:50] But let me emphasize that we don’t have to travel through massive areas of space in order to arrive at our conclusions. We can experience complete satisfaction by diving into and becoming space-faring, space-faring humans by going into inner space rather than having to power things through space at a fraction of the maximum speed.

[00:34:22] Jai Guru Deva.