Chaitanya Mahaprabhu spent the last eighteen years of his life in the sacred city of Jagannatha Puri. For the final twelve of these years, he was absorbed in spiritual trance and lived in seclusion in a room in one of the houses near the famous temple complex. Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami stated in Chaitanya Charitamrita (madhya-lila 2.8) that although the doors to the house were locked, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu would sometimes be found at night lying unconscious at the main gate to the Jagannatha Puri temple. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu disappeared in 1534, merging into the deity of Krishna on the altar of the Tota Gopinatha temple.
The Search for extraterrestrial intelligence (Seti)
Although supported by credible observational reports, avatars and Marian apparitions are a religious manifestation of the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence, an idea central to my human devolution concept. The idea of extraterrestrial intelligence involved in the origin of the human species can also be approached from another angle—from the angle of modern science.The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a genuine part of modern materialistic science, which assumes that any extraterrestrial intelligence would be connected with a biological form made of ordinary chemical elements. But, as we shall see, if followed carefully to its natural conclusion, there is an eventual convergence between the kind of extraterrestrial intelligence posited by some modern scientists and the kind posited by various religious traditions, which are more extradimensional than simply extraterrestrial.
In the nineteenth century several scientists proposed making huge mirrors or landscaped signs on the earth that would be visible from great distances in outer space, as a means of signaling our presence to extraterrestrial intelligences. These intelligences would then initiate communication with us. Swift (1990, p. 6) noted:“Mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss suggested planting broad bands of forests in Siberia in the shape of a right-angled triangle. Inside the triangle wheat would be planted to provide a uniform color. An elaboration of this basic scheme would have in cluded squares on each side of the triangle, to form the classic illustration of the Pythagorean theorem. . . . Joseph von Littrow, a Viennese astronomer, is said to have suggested that canals be dug in the Sahara Desert to form geometric figures twenty miles on a side.” This is quite interesting, in connection with modern reports of crop circles. Perhaps alien intelligences have decided that placing landscaped signs on the earth is a good way to communicate with us.
The foundations for modern SETI programs began in 1959, when Cornell University physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Phillip Morrison advocated a systematic search for signals from outer space. They proposed that the signals would most likely be radio signals. Starting in 1960, Frank Drake, who had independently arrived at the same conclusion, began using radio telescopes at the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia, to actually search for such signals. His Project Ozma targeted two close stars resembling our sun. Then in
1961, Drake, Cocconi, Morrison, and other scientists, including Carl Sagan, attended a conference on SETI organized by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences at Green Bank (Swift 1990, p. 8). Sponsorship by America’s top national science organization removed extraterrestrial intelligence from the fringes of science and placed it within the mainstream. But for the first years of SETI, there was not much funding, and most radio telescope searches focused on only a few stars and a few radio frequencies. In the 1980s searches increased in scope, expanding to full sky surveys on millions of frequencies. These searches were endorsed by scientific committees and supported by modest U.S. government funding of 1.5 million dollars a year. The government of the Soviet Union was also funding SETI research, to an even greater extent than the American government. The Soviet effort was organized by the Section on the Search for Cosmic Signals of Artificial Origin within the Soviet Council on Radio Astronomy (Swift 1990, pp. 16–17).
In 1992, NASA began a SETI program, funded for 10 years with a budget of 100 million dollars. The program was conducted with two teams. One team, at the Ames Research Center, conducted a “targeted search” focused on 800 stars within 80 light years of the earth. This search was based on the assumption that it was quite likely that human civilizations like ours had arisen many times in our galaxy. A second team, based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, did a wider search called the All Sky Survey. It was based on the assumption that advanced intelligent life forms were not so common and that we should have to search widely for them in the universe. In 1993, the NASA SETI program lost its government funding. The All Sky Survey stopped, but the target search program survived by transforming itself into Project Phoenix, run by the SETI Institute, a nongovernmental organization, which raises private funds (Lamb 1997, p. 224). A recent article in nature (2001, p.
260) reveals that much of the funding for the SETI Institute and other such organizations comes “primarily from wealthy technology pioneers such as William Hewlett, David Packard, Gordon Moore, Paul Allen and Barney Oliver.”
All of these programs assumed the standard materialistic cosmologies of modern science, which involve a universe and life forms composed only of the standard material elements and energies acting according to the known laws of physics. Following these assumptions, scientists calculated in various ways the likelihood of intelligent life forms coming into existence, their likely levels of technological advancement, and the likely times necessary for them to conduct interstellar or intergalactic communication or colonization efforts. Some scientists find a high probability for many extraterrestrial civilizations, some find a low probability that there is even one. I am not going to explore the details of the various calculations different researchers have made, because the fundamental assumptions upon which these calculations are made are flawed. There is more to the universe than ordinary matter and energy (in all their exotic varieties, including dark matter and dark energy). There is more to life than chemicals. And there are more ways to communicate than radio signals.