24 Jan 2005 @ 09:54, by Beto Hoisel
The understanding of our planet by extraterrestrials would be rather different according to the level of intelligence of them. Let's see some of these views.
The Earth as examined by extraterrestrials
meditation by Beto Hoisel
Nigel Calder, in his excellent book Timescale, makes the judicious observation that, for extraterrestrial researchers that accompany visually the living evolution of the Earth, the true masters of this planet would evidently be the grassy ones – grass, wheat, rice or sugar cane – that progressively and consciously seem to be dominating in a rational way more and more wide spaces of this planet, using for their ends the slave work of other species, including the humans. Calder shows clearly that the more obvious terrestrial configurations for an observer from the space, and that for them could have an intelligent origin, are the enormous planted green areas, many of them delimited by unlikely straight lines and 90o angle corners.
A more careful examination of those green areas will show that the seemingly passivity of the plants is illusory: the grass populations first tamed a race of biped slaves, making them to diffuse their more adaptable species for the most appropriate regions, conquering for them new areas, cutting down forests and installing irrigation systems. To maximize the use of energy for the grass beings, they induced their slaves to tame nutritious manure producing quadrupeds and, further on, to process fossil material to move mechanical equipments destined to their service and also produce more efficient fertilizers. According to Nigel Calder, now the grass species are patiently waiting for their transplantation to other planets, having already suggested their human slaves to develop the necessary techniques for that.
However, for other class of extraterrestrials, capable of a deepened study of the Earth above and beyond the purely visual appreciation of the precedent example, the diagnosis they would emit could be other. The first verification would be of global order: the third planet is different from the others, in the Solar system, and also very different from the great majority of the extra-solar heavenly bodies because the Earth is alive. It doesn't just lives, but lives intensely, in an accentuated contrast with countless planets of other stellar systems that also shelter living forms, but don't have the wealth and the exuberance presented by the Earth, characterizing her, not as a place able to sustain life, rather as a living being in her own right, a wonderful living creature. Feminine, certainly, since it has been fertilized by the action of the Sun and by the sidereal semen, along many eons.
In a fast evaluation, they would see that this planet has its functions permanently regulated in a process of homeostasis, or self-regulation, just as the living beings do. Her atmosphere is not in chemical balance, what would denounce a stagnated, dead, inorganic state. On the contrary, it maintains a proportion among their component gases that would not stay constant for a long time, if there was not an intense biological activity to sustain it in that ideal mixture for the interactions of life. For those extraterrestrials, the entity that lives would be clearly the planet itself and surely each one of the millions of species here existent would have a systemic function in the planetary super-organism. It would continuously be in dynamic balance and would find its evolutionary vector as the resultant of that exuberant diversity, relatively rare among the planets where life settles down.
The exceptional amount of water, the oceans and their superficial and deep currents regulating the temperature in ideal levels, the rain cycle and its distribution via the winds, everything contributes to the sustentation of the forests, of the terrestrial and sea fauna and of all of the organs and systems of the planet in their coordinated operation. The exact levels of solar radiation properly filtered by the atmosphere built, along the eras, a perfect super-organism in its exceptional biological diversification, taking with itself in her trip through the universe an immense family of millions of different species, carrying out each one of them its role in the Goddess's complex physiology. Because, without any doubt, she is a Goddess. A sovereign Goddess, aware of her beauty, floating proudly across the cosmos draped in her wonderful blue and white veil.
However, a more perfect examination by those sharp-minded extraterrestrials would show recent disturbances in a calm harmony, habituated since dozens of millions of years to a calm flow, with gentle transitions in their living communities, in their climate patterns and in the whole planetary ecosystem.
The clearest sign that something is not working well lately is the progressive disappearance of the 3-atom oxygen layer in the superior atmosphere, a protecting film that blocks the solar radiations shorter than those of the visible spectrum that are aggressive and destructive to the living cells that form the terrestrial organisms. From circa of two billion years the terrestrial life has been defended by the 3-atom oxygen layer of the stratosphere that formed a shield capable to filter that penetrating radiation lethal for the cells. Besides, they should observe, there is less than thirty years, that shield has been dilapidated quickly, starting from the polar areas, for molecules of chlorine resultants of the dissociation of other molecules that to very little time didn't exist in the atmosphere of the planet.
Another sign very evident, there are four or five decades, is the growth of the radioactivity levels in located points of the terrestrial surface and in the organisms of many alive beings. Radioactive isotopes of strontium, cesium, iodine and other rare or inexistent in the nature of the planet, started to contaminate animals and plants of the Northern Hemisphere, something that had never happened until then. This tendency, however, seems to be stabilized and tends to return at the normal levels, in spite of late occasional outbreaks in some oceanic islands.
One more point that would interest the extraterrestrial researchers' would be the disappearance, until almost the extinction, of some of the largest and more important alive species of the planet: the gigantic sea mammals with cerebral structure of high complexity, capable to communicate at long distances through resonant language, bearers of intelligence, delicate feelings and intense mental and affectionate activity, qualities that put them among the few terrestrial species endowed with superior spiritual life, recognizable for any other sentient being of the universe. The disappearance of those species would result in lamentable recoil for the spiritual development of the planet as a whole.
Another aspect that certainly would call their attention would be the constant growth of the population of the biped mammals that recently dominated the silicon technology, in contrast with the fast extinction of countless species of the micro and macro-fauna crucial for sensitive balances of local ecosystems. Such upcoming reduction in biodiversity, lately, began to threaten more worldwide systems. That same class of bipeds has been promoting, with its badly applied technology, many different forms of fast environmental alteration, from the destruction of great part of the forest shroud, until the saturation of the electromagnetic spectrum for modulated waves of radio and the dispersion of countless solid debris in low orbits, a little above the atmosphere. Those fragments, of all sizes, constitute space garbage that in a few years will turn the timid incursions of those biped beings outside of the atmosphere a very risky adventure – the extraterrestrial ones will think – "once efficient protection systems against those space projectiles are still out of the reach of their techniques."
Such unsteadiness contrasts clearly with the delicate rhythms of transformation that the planet adopted since the disappearance of the great reptiles, caused by the last of the medium-sized asteroids that hit the planet, 67 millions of years in the past.
They would clearly see the unilateral action of the biped mammals that are promoting drastic deteriorations in subtle ecological mechanisms finely adjusted by nature along millions of years. A few of them are becoming irreversible in some cases. Probably – can deduce those extraterrestrials – the incomplete development of the consciousness in those mammals only allows them to see problems of short period, unable as they are of seeing the consequences of their actions in more lasting periods. More careful researches about the social behavior of those bipeds reveal that a great majority of its individuals suffer of considerable lacks in nutrition, health, and access to technological means, showing that the species explores predatorily not only the environment and other life forms, as well as it attacks itself, groups against other groups, be them located in different areas or inhabiting the same place.
But we can imagine extraterrestrials still smarter, capable of detecting and translating the modulated electromagnetic transmissions of the terrestrials, to tune their communications in and to register and penetrate with large depth in several features of their different cultures. When capturing, processing and analyzing the astonishing shriek that saturates the available electromagnetic channels to convey information, a verification that soon would be astounding to their understanding would be the enormous volume of transmissions in singular contrast with the low quality of the transmitted material, even the seriously noxious character of large part of its contents.
Beside significant technological conquests, especially in the storage, processing and transmission of information assured by the micro-electronics, of the silicon, and the photonics, of the optical diodes, the terrestrials evidence an embarrassing ignorance about themselves, on the meaning of his or her existence and concerning their responsibility on the universal movement of the cosmic evolution. While vast socio-cultural segments of the terrestrials seem to suffer intensely enormous lacks of all types, from alimentary to informative and spiritual, other groups and individuals blindly prepare their own future suffering when allow – and even promote – those lacks in their fellow creatures, behaving as if none were a part of the same plural being, that mutilate itself because of an obtuse discernment of its own nature.
Certainly it will be clear to the perception of those extraterrestrials that, parallel to the technological advancement reached by some segments of the humanity and put to the disposition of most, exists, in a large part of the earthlings, a morbid cult of individual isolationism, of satisfying their urgent ambitions, such as enjoying ridicules and ephemeral sensorial pleasures. They foster the rude superiority feeling of exerting power on the others, showing an absurd ignorance of the inter-subjective connection among all the living forms and of the inevitable consequences of the crimes they commit against their fellow creatures.
For those alien observers, obviously the dominant species of the planet Earth has its individuals socially distributed according to a spectrum that varies from the dominants to the dominated, in a rude stage of spiritual development among the intelligent beings of the Galaxy. In the Earth, each individual of the dominant layers supposes to be isolated of the others and of nature, feeling it's his right to explore others and everything that surrounds him, not hesitating in killing and destroying for the stupid satisfaction of his small ambitions during the short period incarnated in a physical body. For those individuals, the collective face of the spiritual being, in spite of living for all and of constituting the own essence of existence, is oddly ignored or despised, as if he only got to see until the limit of his incarnated life, in spite of all the evidence in contrary.
In a peculiar way, the terrestrial science seems to have as its main purpose the generation of technology that, for its time, it is frequently used for irrelevant or dangerous purposes, when no totally irresponsible and criminal, according to the desires of the dominant groups of some of the many political patches the planet was artificially split. Sometimes, however, when they give in to the pressures of the groups most concerned on the existence, the true nature and the sacred character of life, the segment in charge of technology and scientific research can occasionally turn to the service of positive or noble causes.
Everything indicates, however, that those alien observers will guess the planet Earth is in a dilemma between enlightening the power-holding segments or taking over their power for the conscious groups, since the current situation is unstable and dangerous for the human beings and for the planetary being itself.
The extraterrestrial analysts could understand that the central problem among the terrestrials is that the science producing groups still persist in a limited and distorted vision of what the cosmic totality is, as they deny their own transcendent face. This way, they stay as accomplices of the power-holding groups they ambition to join, when they are not already a minor part of them. This way, would conclude the space analysts, the kernel of the terrestrial conundrum consists of changing the general paradigm of the science they practice, uniting – or better, re-uniting – it with the philosophies and world visions that already exist in the planet and recognize the spiritual world and the psychological being's cosmic dimension as an unquestionable truth.
It is possible that, in a more selective examination of the achieved informative material, our hypothetical observers already have detected a slowly thriving transforming movement among the science professionals, observing the existence of a significant number of scientists who refuse to be mere passive producers of technology. Or just to remain bounded to the physical face of totality, taking its shadow for the real thing – as in the metaphor of a certain Plato, wise earthling that lived there two millennia ago. Among those groups of scientists appear, in growing number, individuals that overcome the limitations of the self-centeredness and, assuming the cosmic being that inhabits in them. So, they begin to work for the next stage of the long history of their native planet, building a global consciousness that no more will admit the shameful stains that impede it of being recognized as a galactic community's legitimate member.
|
|
