“The Perimeter system is very, very nice,” he says. “We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military.” He looks around again.

Yarynich is talking about Russia’s doomsday machine. That’s right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called “the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination.” Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.

Chart source: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Natural Resources Defense Council

The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn’t matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.

The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand. It was built 25 years ago and remained a closely guarded secret. With the demise of the USSR, word of the system did leak out, but few people seemed to notice. In fact, though Yarynich and a former Minuteman launch officer named Bruce Blair have been writing about Perimeter since 1993 in numerous books and newspaper articles, its existence has not penetrated the public mind or the corridors of power. The Russians still won’t discuss it, and Americans at the highest levels—including former top officials at the State Department and White House—say they’ve never heard of it. When I recently told former CIA director James Woolsey that the USSR had built a doomsday device, his eyes grew cold. “I hope to God the Soviets were more sensible than that.” They weren’t.

The system remains so shrouded that Yarynich worries his continued openness puts him in danger. He might have a point: One Soviet official who spoke with Americans about the system died in a mysterious fall down a staircase. But Yarynich takes the risk. He believes the world needs to know about Dead Hand. Because, after all, it is still in place.

The system that Yarynich helped build came online in 1985, after some of the most dangerous years of the Cold War. Throughout the ’70s, the USSR had steadily narrowed the long US lead in nuclear firepower. At the same time, post-Vietnam, recession-era America seemed weak and confused. Then in strode Ronald Reagan, promising that the days of retreat were over. It was morning in America, he said, and twilight in the Soviet Union.

Part of the new president’s hard-line approach was to make the Soviets believe that the US was unafraid of nuclear war. Many of his advisers had long advocated modeling and actively planning for nuclear combat. These were the progeny of Herman Kahn, author of On Thermonuclear War and Thinking About the Unthinkable. They believed that the side with the largest arsenal and an expressed readiness to use it would gain leverage during every crisis.

Illustration: Ryan Kelly

You either launch first or convince the enemy that you can strike back even if you’re dead.

The new administration began expanding the US nuclear arsenal and priming the silos. And it backed up the bombs with bluster. In his 1981 Senate confirmation hearings, Eugene Rostow, incoming head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, signaled that the US just might be crazy enough to use its weapons, declaring that Japan “not only survived but flourished after the nuclear attack” of 1945. Speaking of a possible US-Soviet exchange, he said, “Some estimates predict that there would be 10 million casualties on one side and 100 million on another. But that is not the whole of the population.”

Meanwhile, in ways both small and large, US behavior toward the Soviets took on a harsher edge. Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin lost his reserved parking pass at the State Department. US troops swooped into tiny Grenada to defeat communism in Operation Urgent Fury. US naval exercises pushed ever closer to Soviet waters.

The strategy worked. Moscow soon believed the new US leadership really was ready to fight a nuclear war. But the Soviets also became convinced that the US was now willing to start a nuclear war. “The policy of the Reagan administration has to be seen as adventurous and serving the goal of world domination,” Soviet marshal Nikolai Ogarkov told a gathering of the Warsaw Pact chiefs of staff in September 1982. “In 1941, too, there were many among us who warned against war and many who did not believe a war was coming,” Ogarkov said, referring to the German invasion of his country. “Thus, the situation is not only very serious but also very dangerous.”

A few months later, Reagan made one of the most provocative moves of the Cold War. He announced that the US was going to develop a shield of lasers and nuclear weapons in space to defend against Soviet warheads. He called it missile defense; critics mocked it as “Star Wars.”

To Moscow it was the Death Star—and it confirmed that the US was planning an attack. It would be impossible for the system to stop thousands of incoming Soviet missiles at once, so missile defense made sense only as a way of mopping up after an initial US strike. The US would first fire its thousands of weapons at Soviet cities and missile silos. Some Soviet weapons would survive for a retaliatory launch, but Reagan’s shield could block many of those. Thus, Star Wars would nullify the long-standing doctrine of mutually assured destruction, the principle that neither side would ever start a nuclear war since neither could survive a counterattack.

As we know now, Reagan was not planning a first strike. According to his private diaries and personal letters, he genuinely believed he was bringing about lasting peace. (He once told Gorbachev he might be a reincarnation of the human who invented the first shield.) The system, Reagan insisted, was purely defensive. But as the Soviets knew, if the Americans were mobilizing for attack, that’s exactly what you’d expect them to say. And according to Cold War logic, if you think the other side is about to launch, you should do one of two things: Either launch first or convince the enemy that you can strike back even if you’re dead.

Perimeter ensures the ability to strike back, but it’s no hair-trigger device. It was designed to lie semi-dormant until switched on by a high official in a crisis. Then it would begin monitoring a network of seismic, radiation, and air pressure sensors for signs of nuclear explosions. Before launching any retaliatory strike, the system had to check off four if/then propositions: If it was turned on, then it would try to determine that a nuclear weapon had hit Soviet soil. If it seemed that one had, the system would check to see if any communication links to the war room of the Soviet General Staff remained. If they did, and if some amount of time—likely ranging from 15 minutes to an hour—passed without further indications of attack, the machine would assume officials were still living who could order the counterattack and shut down. But if the line to the General Staff went dead, then Perimeter would infer that apocalypse had arrived. It would immediately transfer launch authority to whoever was manning the system at that moment deep inside a protected bunker—bypassing layers and layers of normal command authority. At that point, the ability to destroy the world would fall to whoever was on duty: maybe a high minister sent in during the crisis, maybe a 25-year-old junior officer fresh out of military academy. And if that person decided to press the button … If/then. If/then. If/then. If/then.

Once initiated, the counterattack would be controlled by so-called command missiles. Hidden in hardened silos designed to withstand the massive blast and electromagnetic pulses of a nuclear explosion, these missiles would launch first and then radio down coded orders to whatever Soviet weapons had survived the first strike. At that point, the machines will have taken over the war. Soaring over the smoldering, radioactive ruins of the motherland, and with all ground communications destroyed, the command missiles would lead the destruction of the US.

The US did build versions of these technologies, deploying command missiles in what was called the Emergency Rocket Communications System. It also developed seismic and radiation sensors to monitor for nuclear tests or explosions the world over. But the US never combined it all into a system of zombie retaliation. It feared accidents and the one mistake that could end it all.

Instead, airborne American crews with the capacity and authority to launch retaliatory strikes were kept aloft throughout the Cold War. Their mission was similar to Perimeter’s, but the system relied more on people and less on machines.

And in keeping with the principles of Cold War game theory, the US told the Soviets all about it.

Great Moments in Nuclear Game Theory

The first mention of a doomsday machine, according to P. D. Smith, author of Doomsday Men, was on an NBC radio broadcast in February 1950, when the atomic scientist Leo Szilard described a hypothetical system of hydrogen bombs that could cover the world in radioactive dust and end all human life. “Who would want to kill everybody on earth?” he asked rhetorically. Someone who wanted to deter an attacker. If Moscow were on the brink of military defeat, for example, it could halt an invasion by declaring, “We will detonate our H-bombs.”

A decade and a half later, Stanley Kubrick’s satirical masterpiece Dr. Strangelove permanently embedded the idea in the public imagination. In the movie, a rogue US general sends his bomber wing to preemptively strike the USSR. The Soviet ambassador then reveals that his country has just deployed a device that will automatically respond to any nuclear attack by cloaking the planet in deadly “cobalt-thorium-G.”

“The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret!” cries Dr. Strangelove. “Why didn’t you tell the world?” After all, such a device works as a deterrent only if the enemy is aware of its existence. In the movie, the Soviet ambassador can only lamely respond, “It was to be announced at the party congress on Monday.”

In real life, however, many Mondays and many party congresses passed after Perimeter was created. So why didn’t the Soviets tell the world, or at least the White House, about it? No evidence exists that top Reagan administration officials knew anything about a Soviet doomsday plan. George Shultz, secretary of state for most of Reagan’s presidency, told me that he had never heard of it.

In fact, the Soviet military didn’t even inform its own civilian arms negotiators. “I was never told about Perimeter,” says Yuli Kvitsinsky, lead Soviet negotiator at the time the device was created. And the brass still won’t talk about it today. In addition to Yarynich, a few other people confirmed the existence of the system to me—notably former Soviet space official Alexander Zheleznyakov and defense adviser Vitali Tsygichko—but most questions about it are still met with scowls and sharp nyets. At an interview in Moscow this February with Vladimir Dvorkin, another former official in the Strategic Rocket Forces, I was ushered out of the room almost as soon as I brought up the topic.

So why was the US not informed about Perimeter? Kremlinologists have long noted the Soviet military’s extreme penchant for secrecy, but surely that couldn’t fully explain what appears to be a self-defeating strategic error of extraordinary magnitude.

The silence can be attributed partly to fears that the US would figure out how to disable the system. But the principal reason is more complicated and surprising. According to both Yarynich and Zheleznyakov, Perimeter was never meant as a traditional doomsday machine. The Soviets had taken game theory one step further than Kubrick, Szilard, and everyone else: They built a system to deter themselves.

By guaranteeing that Moscow could hit back, Perimeter was actually designed to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis. The point, Zheleznyakov says, was “to cool down all these hotheads and extremists. No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge. Those who attack us will be punished.”

And Perimeter bought the Soviets time. After the US installed deadly accurate Pershing II missiles on German bases in December 1983, Kremlin military planners assumed they would have only 10 to 15 minutes from the moment radar picked up an attack until impact. Given the paranoia of the era, it is not unimaginable that a malfunctioning radar, a flock of geese that looked like an incoming warhead, or a misinterpreted American war exercise could have triggered a catastrophe. Indeed, all these events actually occurred at some point. If they had happened at the same time, Armageddon might have ensued.

Perimeter solved that problem. If Soviet radar picked up an ominous but ambiguous signal, the leaders could turn on Perimeter and wait. If it turned out to be geese, they could relax and Perimeter would stand down. Confirming actual detonations on Soviet soil is far easier than confirming distant launches. “That is why we have the system,” Yarynich says. “To avoid a tragic mistake. ”

The mistake that both Yarynich and his counterpart in the United States, Bruce Blair, want to avoid now is silence. It’s long past time for the world to come to grips with Perimeter, they argue. The system may no longer be a central element of Russian strategy—US-based Russian arms expert Pavel Podvig calls it now “just another cog in the machine”—but Dead Hand is still armed.

To Blair, who today runs a think tank in Washington called the World Security Institute, such dismissals are unacceptable. Though neither he nor anyone in the US has up-to-the-minute information on Perimeter, he sees the Russians’ refusal to retire it as yet another example of the insufficient reduction of forces on both sides. There is no reason, he says, to have thousands of armed missiles on something close to hair-trigger alert. Despite how far the world has come, there’s still plenty of opportunity for colossal mistakes. When I talked to him recently, he spoke both in sorrow and in anger: “The Cold War is over. But we act the same way that we used to.”

Yarynich, likewise, is committed to the principle that knowledge about nuclear command and control means safety. But he also believes that Perimeter can still serve a useful purpose. Yes, it was designed as a self-deterrent, and it filled that role well during the hottest days of the Cold War. But, he wonders, couldn’t it now also play the traditional role of a doomsday device? Couldn’t it deter future enemies if publicized?

The waters of international conflict never stay calm for long. A recent case in point was the heated exchange between the Bush administration and Russian president Vladimir Putin over Georgia. “It’s nonsense not to talk about Perimeter,” Yarynich says. If the existence of the device isn’t made public, he adds, “we have more risk in future crises. And crisis is inevitable.”

As Yarynich describes Perimeter with pride, I challenge him with the classic critique of such systems: What if they fail? What if something goes wrong? What if a computer virus, earthquake, reactor meltdown, and power outage conspire to convince the system that war has begun?

Yarynich sips his beer and dismisses my concerns. Even given an unthinkable series of accidents, he reminds me, there would still be at least one human hand to prevent Perimeter from ending the world. Prior to 1985, he says, the Soviets designed several automatic systems that could launch counterattacks without any human involvement whatsoever. But all these devices were rejected by the high command. Perimeter, he points out, was never a truly autonomous doomsday device. “If there are explosions and all communications are broken,” he says, “then the people in this facility can—I would like to underline can—launch.”

Yes, I agree, a human could decide in the end not to press the button. But that person is a soldier, isolated in an underground bunker, surrounded by evidence that the enemy has just destroyed his homeland and everyone he knows. Sensors have gone off; timers are ticking. There’s a checklist, and soldiers are trained to follow checklists.

Wouldn’t any officer just launch? I ask Yarynich what he would do if he were alone in the bunker. He shakes his head. “I cannot say if I would push the button.”

It might not actually be a button, he then explains. It could now be some kind of a key or other secure form of switch. He’s not absolutely sure. After all, he says, Dead Hand is continuously being upgraded.

Senior editor Nicholas Thompson (nicholas_thompson@wired.com) is the author of The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War.

From Wired Magazine

Stewart Brand: Save the Slums

By Douglas McGray 09.21.09

Some people see a squatter city in Nigeria or India and the desperation overwhelms them: rickety shelters, little kids working or begging, filthy water and air. Stewart Brand sees the same places and he’s encouraged. The pioneering environmentalist, technology thinker, and founder of the Whole Earth Catalog has written a new manifesto, Whole Earth Discipline, in which he defends genetic engineering, nuclear power, and other longtime nemeses of the green left as good for the planet. Brand also makes a counterintuitive case that the booming slums and squatter cities in and around Mumbai, Nairobi, and Rio de Janeiro are net positives for poor people and the environment. Wired asked him to elaborate.

Nils Christie: Empty the Prisons

Thorkil Sonne: Recruit Autistics

Most occupations require people skills. But for some, a preternatural capacity for concentration and near-total recall matter more. Those jobs, entrepreneur Thorkil Sonne says, could use a little autism.

For the rest of the ideas, which I didn’t like so much, go to Wired Magazine

By Amanda Gefter for the NewScientist

For a start, Ellis’s celebration at the University of Oxford lasted
for three days and the guest list was made up entirely of
physicists, astronomers and philosophers of science. They had
gathered to debate what Ellis considers the most dangerous idea in
science: the suggestion that our universe is but a tiny part of an
unimaginably large and diverse multiverse.

To the dismay of Ellis and many of his colleagues, the multiverse
has developed rapidly from being merely a speculative idea to a
theory verging on respectability. There are good reasons why.
Several strands of theoretical physics–quantum mechanics, string
theory and cosmic inflation–seem to converge on the idea that our
universe is only one among an infinite and ever-growing assemblage
of disconnected bubble universes.

What’s more, the multiverse offers a plausible answer to what has
become an infuriatingly slippery question: why does the quantity of
dark energy in the universe have the extraordinarily unlikely value
that it does? No theory of our universe has been able to explain it.
But if there are countless universes out there beyond our cosmic
horizon, each with its own value for the quantity of dark energy it
contains, the value we observe becomes not just probable but
inevitable.

Despite the many virtues of the multiverse, Ellis is far from alone
in finding it a dangerous idea. The main cause for alarm is the fact
that it postulates the existence of a multitude of unobservable
universes, making the whole idea untestable. If something as
fundamental as this is untestable, says Ellis, the foundations of
science itself are undermined.

Comparing infinities

One of the guests at Ellis’s party doesn’t see it that way. Raphael
Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley, has also been
grappling with the multiverse, and in the past few months he has
found a way round the troubling problem of unobservable universes.
At a stroke, he has transformed the multiverse from a theory so
problematic that it threatens to subvert science, into one that
promises predictions we can test. His insights are steering
physicists along the path to their ultimate goal of uniting quantum
mechanics and gravity into one neat theory of everything.

Bousso’s achievement is all the more impressive because he has
succeed where so many others have tried and failed. The problem they
all encountered boils down to this: like quantum mechanics and
thermodynamics, multiverse cosmology is an exercise in statistics.
Given a universe within the multiverse, you cannot predict what its
key characteristics will be–how much dark energy it contains, say.
The best you can do is calculate the probability that it looks the
way it does based on how likely it is that a universe with its
particular set of characteristics will occur in the multiverse.
Calculating probabilities, though, requires a “measure”–a
mathematical tool that tells you how to define relative
probabilities. And finding the right measure for the multiverse is
far from easy.

The trouble is that in an infinite multiverse, everything that can
happen will happen–an infinite number of times. In such a set-up,
probability loses all meaning. “How do you compare infinities?” asks
Andrei Linde of Stanford University in California.

Prior to Bousso’s work, the favoured approach was to pick a snapshot
of the multiverse at a particular time and calculate the
characteristics of all the bubble universes inside, noting how many
different values for the amount of dark energy crop up. From there,
you extrapolate the relative probabilities to the multiverse as it
develops over time with its infinite number of bubble universes.

Unfortunately, there’s a nasty hole in this approach, in the shape
of the phrase “at some particular time”: according to Einstein’s
theory of relativity, it renders the whole exercise utterly
meaningless. The problem arises from Einstein’s insight that clocks
run differently for different observers. Two events that are
simultaneous for me are not simultaneous for you, so there are an
infinite number of ways you can slice up the multiverse. None is
more “true” than any other, so there’s no reason to choose one time
slicing over another–and different slices can yield dramatically
different results.

Implicit in previous approaches was the idea that the multiverse can
be described from an observerless, God’s-eye-view, and Bousso
realised that this was what lead to all those intractable
infinities. So he decided to calculate probabilities based on what
any one observer can see from within their own universe.

Quantum mechanics tells us that the vacuum of space is not empty;
instead, it crackles with energy. It also tells us that, sooner or
later, any given universe will decay spontaneously into another one
with lower energy. Indeed, most cosmologists envisage our big bang
as precisely such an event, during which the vacuum we live in
emerged from a higher-energy vacuum that constituted a universe
before ours. What matters here, though, is that there are a plethora
of possible universes that can be produced in this way–each one
with its own probability. By adding up these probabilities, Bousso
was able to work out the various probabilities of the observer
ending up in a universe with a particular set of characteristics.

Using this approach, Bousso was able to derive probabilities for
things like the amount of dark energy in any particular universe,
without ever have to resort to a God’s-eye point of view, or
speculation about what might be happening in disconnected bubble
universes beyond our view. He calls this approach the causal patch
measure, and the important thing is that it works. He has used it to
predict the value of the dark energy we ought to see in our own
universe, and it turns out to be remarkably close to the observed
value (arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0702115)

The search for success has spawned a motivational industry worth millions of pounds and libraries full of self-improvement books.

From the Times Online by Steven Swinford

It is practice, however, that makes perfect, according to the sociologist whose books have become required reading within the Conservative party. The best way to achieve international stardom is to spend 10,000 hours honing your skills, says the new book by Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best-selling The Tipping Point.

The greatest athletes, entrepreneurs, musicians and scientists emerge only after spending at least three hours a day for a decade mastering their chosen field.

Ability, according to Gladwell, is just one factor in success. Work ethic, luck, a strong support base and even being born in the right year play a far larger role.

Just as the Beatles rose to fame with the explosion of pop culture in the 1960s, so Bill Gates’s fascination with the ASR-33 Teletype that he used at school in 1968 placed a shy boy on track to become one of the world’s richest men.

“No one – not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires and not even geniuses – ever makes it alone,” writes Gladwell in Outliers: The Story of Success.

Gladwell became one of the world’s most influential sociologists with the publication of The Tipping Point in 2000, which described how small actions could trigger social epidemics.

His new book argues that there is no such thing as a “self-made man”. Instead, the years spent intensively focused on their area of expertise place the world’s most successful people above their peers.

“What’s really interesting about this 10,000-hour rule is that it applies virtually everywhere,” Gladwell told a conference held by The New Yorker magazine. “You can’t become a chess grand master unless you spend 10,000 hours on practice.

“The tennis prodigy who starts playing at six is playing in Wimbledon at 16 or 17 [like] Boris Becker. The classical musician who starts playing the violin at four is debuting at Carnegie Hall at 15 or so.”

The obsessive approach is particularly evident in sporting icons. Jonny Wilkinson, the rugby player, Tiger Woods, the golfer, and the Williams sisters in tennis have all trained relentlessly since they were children.

Much of Britain’s Olympic success is down to a combination of natural ability and sheer dedication. Victoria Pendleton’s emphatic gold in the women’s sprint cycling in Beijing came only after humiliating defeat in Athens four years ago. After training for four hours a day, six days a week the 27-year-old finally reaped the rewards. Rebecca Adlington, the 19-year-old swimmer who won two gold medals at the Beijing Games, has put in an estimated 8,840 hours of training since the age of 12.

Bill Furniss, her coach, said: “When I first saw her, what stood out was the fact that she was so willing to take the pain and make sacrifices.”

Such dedication is also apparent in musicians. Maxim Vengerov, 34, is one of the world’s greatest violinists. He was born in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and, after being given a miniature fiddle at the age of four, displayed outstanding aptitude.

His talent was matched by an immense work ethic. He practised seven hours a day, giving his first recital at the age of five and winning his first international prize at 15. Vengerov said: “My mother would get home at 8pm, cook dinner and then teach me the violin until four in the morning. As a four-year-old boy it was torture. But I became a violinist within two years.”

On a wider scale, Gladwell says that Asians excel at mathematics because their culture demands it. If other countries schooled their children as rigorously, they would produce similar results.

Being in the right time and place is also crucial, as the possibility of success comes from “the particular opportunities that our place in history presents us with”.

Such “demographic luck” can be critical in business. According to Gladwell, being born in the 1830s or 1930s benefited future entrepreneurs.

In those decades, a combination of an economic boom and low birth rates led to smaller class sizes and companies on the lookout for talent.

Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, said those who put in many hours of practice effectively make their own luck: “They work relentlessly hard, which means when their luck comes they are ready for it.”

Father Gabriele Amorth said people who are possessed by Satan vomit shards of glass and pieces of iron.

By Nick Squires in Rome from The Telegraph

He added that the assault on Pope Benedict XVI on Christmas Eve by a mentally unstable woman and the sex abuse scandals which have engulfed the Church in the US, Ireland, Germany and other countries, were proof that the Anti-Christ was waging a war against the Holy See.

“The Devil resides in the Vatican and you can see the consequences,” said Father Amorth, 85, who has been the Holy See’s chief exorcist for 25 years.

“He can remain hidden, or speak in different languages, or even appear to be sympathetic. At times he makes fun of me. But I’m a man who is happy in his work.”

While there was “resistance and mistrust” towards the concept of exorcism among some Catholics, Pope Benedict XVI has no such doubts, Father Amorth said. “His Holiness believes wholeheartedly in the practice of exorcism. He has encouraged and praised our work,” he added.

The evil influence of Satan was evident in the highest ranks of the Catholic hierarchy, with “cardinals who do not believe in Jesus and bishops who are linked to the demon,” Father Amorth said.

In a rare insight into the world of exorcism, the Italian priest told La Repubblica newspaper that the 1973 film The Exorcist gave a “substantially exact” impression of what it was like to be possessed by the Devil.

People possessed by evil sometimes had to be physically restrained by half a dozen people while they were exorcised. They would scream, utter blasphemies and spit out sharp objects, he said.

“From their mouths, anything can come out – pieces of iron as long as a finger, but also rose petals,” said Father Amorth, who claims to have performed 70,000 exorcisms. “When the possessed dribble and slobber, and need cleaning up, I do that too. Seeing people vomit doesn’t bother me. The exorcist has one principal duty – to free human beings from the fear of the Devil.”

The attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II by a Turkish gunman in 1981 and recent revelations of “violence and paedophilia” committed by Catholic priests against children in their care was also the work of the Devil, said Father Amorth, who has written a book about his vocation, Memoirs of an Exorcist, which was published recently.

Father Amorth, who is the president of the Association of Exorcists and fought as a partisan during the war, has previously claimed that both Hitler and Stalin were possessed by the Devil.

In an interview with Vatican Radio in 2006, he said: “Of course the Devil exists and he can not only possess a single person but also groups and entire populations.

“I am convinced that the Nazis were all possessed. All you have to do is think about what Hitler and Stalin did.”

He also condemned the Harry Potter books, saying they were dangerous because they dabbled in the occult and failed to draw a clear distinction between “the Satanic art” of black magic and benevolent white magic.

Former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke’s BREAKPOINT novel, set in the year 2012, is based on emerging technologies. “Globegrid,” a high-speed global network, links supercomputers worldwide. Combined with advanced AI software, it promises to reverse-engineer the brain, revolutionize genomics, enable medical breakthroughs, develop advanced human-machine interfaces, and allow for genetic alterations and even uploading consciousness. But it spurs a terrorist-fundamentalist Luddite backlash against transhumanists, as hackers take down the power grid, and destroy vital international data and telecom links, communications satellites, and biotech firms.

Author’s Note:

It may read to some like science fiction, but it is based on emerging technologies that are the subject of research today

In The Scorpion’s Gate, I projected a world in 2010, with the United States and China competing politically and economically for a dwindling supply of increasingly expensive oil and gas. That competition naturally took them to the Persian Gulf, where the largest oil deposits remained.  The Persian Gulf of 2010 was unstable, with the United States threatening Iran, and fundamentalist Islamic forces emerging in Saudi Arabia.  Corruption and giant corporations made Washington a political battleground.  While I noted at the time of publication that the work was not meant to be predictive, many of the trends in the novel have developed and are dominating the news.

by Richard A. Clarke

Breakpoint, set in 2012, is meant to be predictive, at least about technology.  It may read to some like science fiction, but it is based on emerging technologies that are the subject of research today.  Scientists and engineers differ in their views about when the research will result in deployed technology, but their differences are most often a discussion of “when,” not “if.”

This novel is intended to project you a few years ahead, to start readers thinking now about the political, social, and economic changes that technology is about to create. Those changes could be wrenching, creating tensions in our society.  A woman’s right to choose, the teaching of evolution, and stem-cell research have already created social and political discord in the United States.  The coming technological events may make these current controversies seem like a practice round, a warm-up.  For the next debate may be about “what is a human”: Should humans change the species with human-machine interfaces and genetic alterations?

The opening rounds have already occurred.  The Transhumanist movement is real and has regular meetings around the country.  In 2002, the National Science Foundation issued a stunning report, “Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science.” The report, which overall has an upbeat and optimistic tone, concludes that connections between the human brain and computers will transform the way humans work, other technologies will eliminate disabilities and diseases that have plagued the human condition for centuries, and human creativity will flourish due to both improved understanding of the human mind and enhancements to the brain. A year later, the President’s Council on Bioethics issued its report, “Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness” which took a somewhat dimmer view of using technology to enhance human beings. Chaired by Leon Kass, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the commission included conservative political figures such as Francis Fukuyama and Charles Krauthammer. They believe that genetic science should not be used to enhance human performance, only to fix mistakes that make some humans less healthy than the norm.  In 2004, Californians voted on a referendum on stem cell research and approved funding for research.  Court fights have delayed the spending of state monies.

As to some of the specifics in Breakpoint:

– The concept of Globegrid arises from the fact that supercomputers in Japan, the United States, and Russia have already been linked through Internet 2, a new high speed networked being developed by a consortium of 207 universities.  U.S. and European labs are actually engaged in a project to reverse engineer the human brain.

– Living Software does not yet exist, but companies like Watchfire Fortify, Coverity, and others are already developing software to test software for human error.

– Very Light Jets (VLJs) have been approved by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and are in manufacture. They are four-to-six seat aircraft meant to operate like taxis.  Eclipse Aviation’s Eclipse500 and Citation’s CJ-1 are among the first deployed VLJs.

– Intelligent video surveillance, in which the software and cameras (not people) recognize aberrant behavior, are already being deployed by companies such as DVTel and Vidient in subways, airports, and other facilities.

– Exoskeleton suits are already in the prototype phase. The U.S. Army has teamed with the University of California at Berkeley to develop the prototype, which will allow soldiers to carry 180 pounds while feeling as if they were lugging five. Plans on the drawing board at the Army’s Natick Labs in Massachusetts show soldiers being able to run, jump, and throw the way they are described in the baseball game in Breakpoint. The other capabilities that make up the full suite of technologies in the exoskeleton suits (night vision, network connections, GPS, remote cameras, and vital-system monitoring) are all part of a program called the Objective Force Warrior Ensemble, set to be deployed by 2010.

– People in the United States will be driving Chinese-manufactured cars like the Chery product line in 2007-08.  Cars powered by ethanol derived from switch grass exist today.

– Driven by the large number of U.S. casualties in Iraq, Marine and Army amputees are now receiving prosthetics far more advanced than what is available in the civilian community. Known as sea legs, these new prosthetics are driven by microprocessors at each joint. They use innovative new materials and techniques to respond to signals from the human brain to straighten a leg or flex a muscle. Servicemen and women who once would have been unable to lead normal civilian lives are now able to return to the battlefield.

– Human nerves have already connected artificial ears directly to the brain. Paralyzed patients are today using their thoughts to move computer mouse devices.  Some patients suffering from severe depression and other disorders already do have miniature wires leading to parts of their brain and do have battery packs implanted behind their collarbones. Other Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs) are in development.

– Artificial retinas for people suffering from blindness caused by diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa or macular degeneration are in the development phase and have already seen some success in restoring limited vision in clinical trials. The devices work by implanting a small chip at the back of the eye that stimulates retinal neurons. They are powered by solar receptors fed by the light that enters the eye. Replacing the full eye with a silicon-based optical unit may be feasible, but is also likely that the ability to regenerate or transplant an eye may happen sooner and be more appealing.

– The state of cyber security described in the novel is, unfortunately, not fiction. Identities (name, date of birth, Social Security number, credit-card number) are bought and sold in cyberspace hacker chat rooms.  Software coding errors are regularly used by hackers to enter networks and computers.  Scientists at U.S. government national laboratories have demonstrated the possibility of taking down the power grid through hacking.

–The company iRobot has sold large numbers of robots to clean floors. Asimov, the robotic dog, could easily be a reality in the near term. Sony’s Aibo already can mimic the actions of a “real” dog. Moving from Aibo to the fictional Asimov will require adding voice recognition technology, a wireless web link, limited artificial-intelligence capabilities, and advanced motor devices to power its arms and legs. In some form or another, these technologies all exist today.

– Performance-enhancing pharmaceuticals (PEPs) is my own name, but  the concept is not fiction. For memory enhancement, a compound known as CX717 has proven effective in boosting the brain chemical glutamate, the substance that is key in learning and memory. Studies have shown it effective in treating narcolepsy and ADD. It has also proven effective for otherwise healthy individuals who need to stay focused over longer periods without sleep. For sports, regulatory authorities are fighting an uphill battle, with gene doping and performance enhancing pharmaceuticals becoming more sophisticated, more effective, and safer than steroids.  The Pentagon is developing drugs that will allow soldiers to go for long periods without sleeping

– Cellular regeneration of organs and other body parts is in its infancy but will likely yield real-world results by the end of this decade. Embryonic stem cells are thought to hold the most promise for treating a wide range of maladies, from cancer to spinal injuries. Human adult stem cells are already used to treat a variety of ailments. Fixing retinas, cloning hair for baldness, and regrowing teeth are all showing promise.  Progress on stem cell research has slowed due to the Bush administration’s unwillingness to fund research on embryonic stem cells. This decision has slowed progress and shifted much work overseas, where governments have embraced the promise of this research. It is quite possible the United States will be left behind in what will be the most pivotal medical advance since the decoding of the genome.

– Aircraft without onboard pilots are already in use.  I fought a bureaucratic battle with CIA in 2000 to get them to use the unmanned Predator to hunt for terrorists and in 2001 to arm the Predator with missiles. When Predator finally was used to attack terrorists in Afghanistan and Yemen, it was probably the first time a robot intentionally killed a human. The U.S. Air Force is now developing UCAVs, unmanned combat aerial vehicles, fighter planes whose pilots will sit safely on the ground hundreds or thousands of miles away from the aircraft. Lockheed has plans for an unmanned version of the F-35.

– The laser gun depicted in Breakpoint is a technology set to emerge sometime within the next decade, depending on the prioritization it receives in Pentagon budget negotiations. The Airborne Laser is being built by Boeing to mount a laser on a 747 for use against ballistic missiles. When the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) was first put on the drawing board in 2001, plans called for a solid-state laser as an offensive weapon.  Although it has been delayed, The Lightweight Tactical Laser weapon  may now be incorporated in the F-35 block 30.

– The initial mapping of the human genome was complete in 2000. Detailed mapping of the individual chromosomes is under way, with most of the existing human chromosomes already mapped. The first genetic therapy was approved to treat patients in 1990. Today, genetic therapy is used to fix flaws in some human coding, including sickle-cell anemia, Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis and hemophilia.

– Nanotechnology is already in use in cosmetics, tennis racquets, paints, and fabrics. The National Nanotechnology Initiative is the largest new federal science project in recent years. Researchers have successfully used gold nanoparticles to deliver DNA molecules safely into cancer cells as part of a program to defeat cancer.

– The field of Synthetic Biology is also real and has resulted in the creation of Bio Fab plants, named to sound like the plants (called Fabs) that made silicon-based computer chips. Synthetic Biology has created bacteria that seek and invade tumor cells, yeast that produce the anti-malarial drug precursor artemisinic acid, and biological sources of renewable energy.

Sometimes you can tell more truth through fiction.

*****

Originally published in Breakpoint, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, January 2007. Reprinted with permission on KurzweilAI.net May 21, 2007. Richard A. Clarke will be featured in Ray Kurzweil’s movie, “The Singularity is Near, A True Story about the Future,” due for release in Spring 2008.

The Project’s goal is for free and open Congressional hearings of all data regarding UFOs, including the large amount of information they claim is being hidden, and for release of the technology they claim is being suppressed, particularly free energy sources.

Personally I am ambivalent about UFO. It seems almost inconceivable that there are no extra-terrestrial lifeforms in the universe, but whether or not they have made contact I have no idea. Whether its for the sake of hearing UFO believers’ side of the argument, or simply for some light entertainment, this letter to President Obama is worth a read. As with any decent conspiracy theory, for the believers no proof is necessary and for the doubters no proof is possible…

SPECIAL PRESIDENTIAL BRIEFING
FOR
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

THIS BRIEFING CONTAINS SENSITIVE INFORMATION INTENDED FOR POTUS

BRIEFING DEVELOPED BY
STEVEN M. GREER MD
DIRECTOR of THE DISCLOSURE PROJECT
WWW.DISCLOSUREPROJECT.ORG

“Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.” Robert F. Kennedy 1966 Speech

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” Albert Einstein

Since the mid-1950s, classified projects connected to extraterrestrial matters have operated outside of constitutionally required oversight and control by the President and Congress. This constitutes a grave and ongoing threat to US national security and global security and peace.

The implications of this subject are such that no aspect of life on Earth will be unaffected by its Disclosure. We are acutely aware that this subject is highly controversial and suffers from great social opprobrium within certain elite circles and within the mainstream media.

Indeed, secrecy on the subject has, in part, been maintained by a carefully orchestrated psychological nexus of ridicule, fear, intimidation and disinformation that makes it difficult for any public figure to openly address the matter.

Moreover, the ‘bubble’ of security and access restrictions that surround the Office of the President makes it very difficult for POTUS to receive accurate information and advice on the subject. The consequences of this secrecy, combined with the psychological aspects mentioned above, have ensured that none of your predecessors have been able to effectively manage this problem. This has led to an unacknowledged crisis that will be the greatest of your Presidency.

Because of this misguided secrecy, the wondrous new sciences related to advanced energy generation, propulsion and transportation have been withheld from the people. These advances include the generation of limitless clean energy from the so-called zero point energy field and quantum vacuum flux field from the space around us, and propulsion that has been termed (incorrectly) anti-gravity. The field of electromagnetic energy that is teeming all around us and which is embedded within the fabric of space/time can easily run all of the energy needs of the Earth – without pollution, oil, gas, coal, centralized utilities or nuclear power.

The disclosure of these sciences and their wise application during your first term as President is the most pressing matter before you. These sciences will create a true new energy economy allowing mankind to solve our most pressing problems of global warming, poverty and resource depletion.

The constellation of problems that include global warming, biosphere degradation, air pollution, energy security, Mid-East policy, a collapsing geo-economic order, growing disparity between the poor and rich of the world, over-population and human sustainability on Earth, to name but a few, are all interconnected and directly affected by the secrecy surrounding this subject. The solutions lie not in old thinking and technologies but in a new consciousness applying new sciences. These sciences were born in the late 19th and 20th centuries but were abandoned and suppressed due to the lust for power, greed and out of fear of unsettling the status quo.

It is time for a new Emancipation Declaration – one that frees all of humanity from the shackles of economic slavery that results from secret centralized power, corruption and global economic hegemony. The world will not find justice and peace so long as half of the world’s population lives in poverty while the other half cannibalizes the Earth to maintain its standard of living. This dire situation can and must be transformed into a world of abundance, clean and plentiful energy and genuine sustainability. On this foundation, with these new sciences, technologies and a new consciousness, we can move forward as a people, united and in peace. Then and only then will we be welcome amongst the other civilizations of the cosmos.

That we are not alone in the universe is now a scientific given. That we have been visited already by advanced civilizations – whose interests here are likely ancient – is controversial. However, in my discussions with European, Vatican, Canadian and other leaders around the world, a growing consensus exists that we have been visited and the time for disclosing this information is long past due. More importantly, an appropriate diplomatic initiative is needed to communicate with these extraterrestrial visitors within a framework of universal peace, free from the past dominance of militarism and paranoia.

Insofar as upwards of 80% of the American people think that ‘UFOs’ are real, and that some aspect of the government is lying to them about it, continued secrecy redounds only to the benefit of the precious few who profit from such secrecy. This secrecy undermines the credibility of the US and other governments, and allows the cancer of unchecked covert power – forewarned by President Eisenhower in his last address to the nation – to metastasize throughout the world. It now threatens the very life of Earth.

Moreover, there exists a secret, ‘unacknowledged’ operation that has used very advanced electromagnetic weapon systems to track, target, and on occasion, but with increasing accuracy, down extraterrestrial vehicles. This reckless behavior constitutes an existential threat to all of mankind and must be reined in immediately.

The so-called MJ-12 or Majestic group that controls this subject operates without the consent of the people, or the oversight of the President and Congress. It functions as a transnational government unto itself, answerable to no one. All checks and balances have been obliterated. While as a governing entity it stands outside of the rule of law, its influence reaches into many governments, corporations, agencies, media and financial interests. Its corrupting influence is profound and, indeed, it has operated as a very powerful and embedded global RICO whose power to date remains unchecked.

Upwards of $100 billion of USG funds go annually into this operation, also known as the ‘black budget’ of the United States – enough to provide universal health care to every man, woman and child in America.

When I first briefed Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey on this matter in December of 1993, only a third of this governing group was in favor of what we were recommending: Disclosure of the fact that we are not alone in the universe and the careful release of advanced energy generation systems that would replace oil, gas, coal and nuclear power. Sources now inform me that upwards of two-thirds of this group now support such an initiative.

Interests in Europe, the Vatican and Asia, especially France and China, are urging Disclosure. If the United States does not move forward, these other interests will, and America will be left behind and become increasingly irrelevant in the world. This cannot be allowed to happen.

The European and Asian arenas will move with or without US involvement at some point in the very near future, as well they should. Six decades of secrecy is enough.

We are also morally obliged to warn you of an existing highly secretive plan to use advanced technologies to hoax an ‘alien attack’ on Earth. There exists within the direct control of this Majestic group assets capable of launching such a false flag operation and virtually every person on Earth, as well as most leaders, would be deceived by it. Components of this operation have been tested on the public over the past 50 years and include, but are not limited to:

• Alien Reproduction Vehicles (ARVs) – these are advanced anti-gravity aircraft that have been fully operational since at least the late 1950s to early 1960s. Many so-called UFO reports by civilians and military personnel are of such ARVs. They constitute an unacknowledged or ‘black’ Air Force and these ARVs are capable of extraordinary speed, maneuverability and lift/hover. By 2009, these technologies had gone through many generations of refinement and, if deployed, could easily hoax or simulate an Extraterrestrial Vehicle (ETV). (Note that a UFO is a nonspecific term and could be either an ARV or an ETV.)
• Programmed Life Forms (PLFs) – these are well-crafted alien-appearing creatures that, while completely manmade, often deceive unknowing people as ‘aliens’. The stagecraft, genetics and other sciences associated with these creatures are beyond the scope of this brief, but are very well developed. I have personally been briefed by multiple independent corroborating sources regarding the development and deployment of PLFs. These creatures, used in conjunction with ARVs, have convincingly launched the pop culture fervor over ‘alien abductions’. Victims of such paramilitary human-controlled abductions genuinely believe that they have been abducted by ‘aliens’ and often have physical stigmata and ‘implants’ to prove it. These implants are also manmade and we have information about the laboratory and corporation making these items. (See attached documents)
• Chemical, optical and electromagnetic systems to assist with creating an alteration in awareness are components of the ’stagecraft’ used to hoax an ‘alien’ event.

The vast majority of information in the public domain on the UFO subject is, therefore, carefully orchestrated disinformation designed to prepare the populace, as well as our leaders, for a non-existent ‘alien threat’. The psychological warfare implications of this were described in the 1950s in CIA documents and are further elucidated by other documents and testimony. No less a figure than Wernher Von Braun warned of this cosmic deception.

The objective of such a false flag operation is the creation of an enemy in space that would unite the world behind a global military power against such an ‘alien threat’. President Reagan and other leaders have been targeted with such disinformation, which is designed to secure their silence or cooperation with the agenda of secrecy and space weaponization. The President needs to be careful to avoid being similarly deceived.

After very careful review of all data and documents and after interviewing hundreds of top secret witnesses, we have concluded that the actual extraterrestrial presence is distinctly non-hostile. In light of the reckless and aggressive nature of many of our covert military actions and the extraordinarily advanced technologies that permit interstellar travel by these extraterrestrial civilizations, if they were hostile, human civilization would have been dealt with decisively at the dawn of the nuclear era.

These visitors, however, appear to be very concerned with unchecked human hostility, war-making and weapons of mass destruction, combined with our early potential for space travel. The tendency for people to engage in anthropocentric projection leads many to assume a threat where none exists. It is more likely that humanity may be seen as a threat to the cosmic order, insofar as we have failed to restrain the expansion of weapons of mass destruction while attempting to push farther and farther into space. Moreover, we have failed to initiate an enlightened and peaceful diplomatic mission to these extraterrestrial visitors. This needs to change immediately.

Disclosure of this subject must be very carefully planned and positioned as a hopeful and elevating moment in human history. A poorly positioned Disclosure that demonizes these visitors or frightens the public may prove more harmful than secrecy.

As you may know, my uncle was the senior project engineer who worked on the Lunar Module that took Neil Armstrong to the moon. The reason we were not welcome in space then is because the passport to traverse the universe is a stable peaceful world civilization that will go into space united and in peace.

In this regard, world peace and universal peace are two sides of the same coin. Once we vow to live peacefully on Earth and go into space only in peace, we will be welcome with open arms. Until then, a type of cosmic quarantine exists – rightly – around the Earth.

Unfortunately, the media and movie industry are highly penetrated by interests loyal to the Majestic group, which has used the media to, in turns, ridicule the subject and present terrifying images of ‘alien invasion’. In short, the populace is almost thoroughly brainwashed on the matter, and this presents a further hurdle that must be carefully taken into account when planning Disclosure.

Nevertheless, the status quo can no longer hold and fundamental change is urgently needed. To this end, we urge the President to undertake a number of initiatives as soon as possible. We recommend that the President:

• Appoint a Special Presidential Task Force to investigate this matter, identify covert facilities and assets (see attached summary) and reassert Executive control over these projects;
• Identify and immediately stand-down operations that are covertly targeting Extraterrestrial Vehicles, weaponizing space and engaging in rogue disinformation projects;
• Develop response plans to minimize the risks related to potential false flag operations that intend to hoax a hostile ‘alien’ presence, including preparations with military, intelligence and international institutions;
• Form The Council on Interplanetary Relations to coordinate a peaceful, forward looking and non-militarized response to the extraterrestrial presence. The Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (see www.CSETI.org) has an 18 year ongoing project to establish such contact and can assist with this process. CSETI, working with other governments and world figures, will form such a Council if the US government decides not to do so within the next 12 months;
• Immediately fund the study, development and careful release of those new energy technologies that can quickly replace fossil fuels and nuclear power. (See www.TheOrionProject.org). Note that these technologies, since they acquire energy from the zero point energy field of space/time, will allow for the retirement of the electric energy grid. We are in possession of documents and information regarding key facilities and assets connected to these technologies (see attached documents). We recommend that the propulsion and transportation aspects of these technologies (electro-magneto-gravitic systems) be released at a later time when the world security situation has improved;
• Establish high-ranking liaisons with Congress, the UN and other governments to coordinate these projects and the release of the new energy technologies;
• The National Security Council needs to form a section specifically addressing the international, interplanetary and macroeconomic implications of this disclosure and urgently prepare for the release of these technologies;

The Orion Project (www.TheOrionProject.org) has identified key scientists to assist with the development of these new energy technologies. They have agreed to work with us, but are being prevented from doing so, one by a compartmented operation (TS SCI) to which he is assigned. We request an action by the Office of the President to specifically permit them to work with us with the full support and protection of the President. We cannot over-emphasize how important it is that these people be assigned to this critical task: In less than 1 year, we would have new energy generators developed to run America free from oil, gas, coal or nuclear power.

President Obama, we stand ready to assist you and your Administration with these and other tasks, and pledge to you our full support. I will personally fulfill any request from your office with the utmost integrity, discretion and confidentiality.

Please be assured of my heartfelt prayers on your behalf for your guidance, protection and success as you begin your historic role as President of the United States.

Respectfully,

Steven M. Greer, MD
Director
The Disclosure Project

Read world-renowned psychiatrist and author Stanislav Grof’s full article by clicking on the link below:

2012

Gardner’s book, The Intelligent Universe, examines the past and future of the universe and proposes that the universe might end in intelligent life, one that has acquired the capacity to shape the cosmos as a whole.

by James N. Gardner from KurzweilAI

There is a time machine clearly visible right outside your front door. It’s easy to see–in fact, it’s impossible to overlook–although its awesome powers are generally ignored by all but a discerning few. The unearthly beauty, the ineffable grandeur, and the ingenuity of construction of this time machine are humbling to every human being who makes an effort to probe into the enigma of its origin and the mystery of its ultimate destiny. The time machine of which I speak is emphatically not of human origin. Indeed, a few venturesome scientists are beginning to entertain a truly incredible possibility: that this device is an artifact bequeathed to us by a supreme intelligence that existed long, long ago and far, far away. All knowledgeable observers agree that the scope of its stupendous powers and the sheer delicacy of its miniscule moving parts seem nothing short of miraculous.

A second amazing but incontrovertible fact confronts those trained in the science of cosmology: We human beings are living our daily lives in the midst of extraterrestrial entities. These entities are everywhere–in the air we breathe, in the food we eat, in the ground beneath our feet, and inside our bodies. These extraterrestrials have made an incredible journey from the venue of their birth to reach planet Earth. Their epic migration, spanning millions of light-years, dwarfs the fictional interstellar voyages of the starship Enterprise. They are the real star trekkers, with more mileage on their odometers than we are capable of imagining. And perhaps most astonishing, we could not possibly survive without their constant presence, and the unfailing exercise of their special powers.

Could the existence of this purported time machine be anything but outrageous science fiction? And how could there be extraterrestrials among us that we have never noticed? Surely not even an inebriated television producer would find these ideas sufficiently credible to weave into an X-Files plot!

Yet I can assure you that both propositions are correct. Indeed, they are indisputable.

The time machine is the universe itself. We see its local features every night in the starry sky above us. The firmament we observe is not a picture of the stars and galaxies as they exist today, but rather a kind of cinematic image of our corner of the cosmos as it existed years ago–in the case of the great galaxy Andromeda, millions of years ago. Because starlight travels through the immensity of interstellar and intergalactic space at a finite pace, and because of the inconceivable vastness of the cosmos, we look backward in time with every glance at the nighttime sky.

With powerful spectacles to aid our vision–massive instruments such as the telescopes that dot the peak of Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope–we can extend our gaze incredibly far back into the past, indeed virtually to the moment of the Big Bang. And with even more sophisticated observational instruments, such as the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational- Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the space-based Big Bang Observer (BBO) that NASA hopes to deploy by 2025, there is hope that we will be able to glimpse the moment of cosmic creation itself–the very genesis of space and time.

What about those extraterrestrials? They are the atoms that combine to form the molecules from which our bodies and virtually everything else in our world and the solar system are made. These extraterrestrials were not, for the most part, born ex nihilo in the fireball of the Big Bang. Instead, they were hammered into existence in the forges of supernova explosions–rare conflagrations that release more energy in a flash than the normal output of the billions of ordinary stars in a typical galaxy.

Of all these extraterrestrial entities, the one with the most unusual birth story is carbon, the essential foundation of life as we know it. The peculiar process of stellar alchemy by which elemental carbon is coaxed into existence is so delicate and improbable that it prompted a giant of British astronomy, Sir Fred Hoyle, to utter the most famous and controversial remark of his storied career:

Would you not say to yourself, “Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule?” Of course you would…. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.1

Hoyle’s remark is the inspiration for The Intelligent Universe. The book is the story of an idea, and the idea is quite simple: The best way to think about life, intelligence, and the universe is that they are not separate things, but are different aspects of a single phenomenon. To take liberties with a popular ballad, “We are the world, we are the people, and we are the universe.” To state this proposition from the opposite perspective, the universe is coming to life and waking up through the processes of our lives and thoughts, and, very probably, through the lives and thoughts of countless other beings scattered throughout the cosmos.

One startling implication of this idea is that the true story of the origin of the human species is longer than the saga of terrestrial evolution conceived of by Charles Darwin and his intellectual progeny. Thanks to the discoveries of Hoyle and other cosmologists, it is now beyond dispute that the life history of humanity includes the entire history of the cosmos itself. Why? Because an inconceivably ancient and immense universe is needed to create even one species of minuscule living creatures on a single planet orbiting a nondescript star in the outer reaches of an ordinary galaxy.

If the cosmos were not so old and large, multiple generations of stars could not have formed, burned brightly for billions of years, and then blown themselves to pieces in titanic supernovae explosions, thereby synthesizing all the higher elements in the periodic table. Absent those elements (especially carbon and oxygen), there could be no life anywhere amid the countless galaxies that fill the universe.

A second implication of this concept is that if extraterrestrial life and intelligence should exist, it will inevitably be related to mankind. No, I am not talking about a government-suppressed history of alien visitation and cross-breeding, or even the slightly more plausible scenario outlined by Nobel laureate Francis Crick of directed panspermia.

Directed Panspermia

In ‘Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature’ 2 Nobel laureate Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, put forward a hypothesis about the origin of life on Earth that many of his scientific colleagues viewed as outlandish, even scandalous. The essence of Crick’s scenario was that, contrary to Darwin’s speculation that the first living things may have emerged spontaneously in a warm little pond, terrestrial life was deliberately seeded by an advanced alien race billions of years ago. Crick’s ideas built on those of Swedish physicist Svante August Arrhenius, who suggested in the late 19th century that life did not get started on Earth, but was seeded by microorganisms drifting in from outer space under the gentle pressure of ambient starlight.

A perceived weakness of Arrhenius’s theory–called simply panspermia, which translates literally as seeds everywhere–was that it was thought unlikely that spores or microorganisms could survive the harsh radiation of space for the decades, centuries, or even millennia that would be required for bacteria to slowly waft from even the nearest stars to our solar system.

Crick sought to remedy this weakness in Arrhenius’s theory by proposing that the transplanted extraterrestrial microorganisms had actually traveled to Earth within the protective hull of an alien spaceship! As Crick put it:

Life started here when these organisms were dropped into the primitive ocean and began to multiply. 3

Why would this obviously serious-minded and gifted scientist put forward such a seemingly eccentric proposal? Essentially, Crick was attempting to take seriously the logical implications of what he recognized as “the very high degree of [the] organized complexity [of living things] we find at every level, and especially at the molecular level.”4 In order for even the simplest living creature to metabolize and reproduce, a vast array of incredibly complicated and interdependent molecular machinery must function, at a nanoscale level, with a degree of flawless precision that makes the operations of a Boeing 747 look downright primitive by comparison. As Crick put it in a candid and colorful remark that has become a key talking point for the Intelligent Design crowd:

The origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. 5

But if life originated on an alien world and was later transported here by a race of intelligent aliens, then the probabilistic resources available to explain a random origin of life’s organized complexity can be expanded exponentially. The major conceptual weakness of Crick’s directed panspermia scenario is that it merely postpones the ultimate question: How did life originally get going, either on a distant planet or in that proverbial warm little pond right here on Earth?

I am asserting that wherever and however life and intelligence may exist elsewhere in the cosmos, it will have originated and evolved from a universally shared substrate: the chemical elements of the periodic table and the basic forces and parameters of physics. As far as anyone can tell, these elements, forces, and parameters appear invariant throughout the visible universe. They can be thought of as a kind of “deep DNA”–a universal genetic code inscribed far below the level of terrestrial genomes. At this fundamental level, everyone and everything that exists in the universe, whether animate or inanimate, is intimately related. And because all of this living and not-yet-living stuff owes its ultimate origin to a common genesis event (the Big Bang), we are all related in a family way. With apologies to Saint Francis of Assisi, we can confidently state that Earth’s satellite truly is Sister Moon, and that the life-giving star 93 million miles away is genuinely Brother Sun.

A third implication of the concept is that because the vast preponderance of the lifetime of the universe lies in the distant future rather than in the past, the historical achievements of life and mind are meager foreshadowings of the starring role that intelligent life is likely to play in shaping the future of the cosmos. Indeed, this new way of looking at the intimate linkage of life, mind, and the cosmos suggests a novel way of thinking about the ultimate destiny of our universe.

Traditionally, scientists have offered two bleak answers to the profound issue of how the universe will end: fire or ice. The cosmos might end in fire–a cataclysmic Big Crunch in which galaxies, planets, and any life forms that might have endured to the end time are consumed in a raging inferno as the universe contracts in a kind of Big Bang, but in reverse.

Or the universe might end in ice–a ceaseless expansion of the fabric of spacetime in which the thin soup of matter and energy is eternally diluted and cooled. Under this scenario, stars wither and die, constellations of cold matter recede further and further from one another, and the vast project of cosmic evolution simply fades into quiet and endless oblivion.

The Intelligent Universe proposes a third possibility: that the universe might end in intelligent life. Not life as we know it, but life that has acquired the capacity to shape the cosmos as a whole, just as life on Earth has acquired the ability to shape the land, the sea, and the atmosphere. As Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson puts it:

Mind, through the long course of biological evolution, has established itself as a moving force in our little corner of the universe. Here on this small planet, mind has infiltrated matter and has taken control. It appears to me that the tendency of mind to infiltrate and control matter is a law of nature. (6)

My first book, Biocosm, (7) was one long argument that the cosmos possesses a utility function (some value or outcome that is being maximized) and that the specific utility function of our cosmos is propagation of baby universes exhibiting the same life-friendly physical qualities as their parent-universe. Under this scenario, the mission of sufficiently evolved intelligent life in the universe is essentially to serve as a cosmic reproductive organ, spawning an endless succession of life-friendly offspring that are themselves endowed with the same reproductive capacities as their predecessors. The fact that our universe seems queerly hospitable to carbon-based intelligent life–an astronomically improbable oddity that many leading scientists have identified as the deepest mystery in all of science–emerges in the context of this hypothesis as a predictable outcome (a falsifiable retrodiction, in the jargon of science).

Falsifiable Retrodictions

Traditionally, scientists insist that new hypotheses generate falsifiable predictions of experimental results in order to qualify as genuine science. However, there are some fields of science–especially archaeology and cosmology, which involve events that occurred in the distant past or in physically inaccessible regions–that cannot generate predictions susceptible to laboratory testing. Although a few purists regard these fields as intrinsically unscientific, most scientists concede that it is appropriate for so-called “historical” sciences, such as geology, evolutionary biology, cosmology, paleontology, and archaeology to rely on retrodiction as an alternate means of testing a scientific hypothesis. A retrodiction essentially compares previously gathered observational evidence (for instance, the fossil record, in the case of evolutionary biology) with the implications of a scientific hypothesis (such as Darwinian natural selection). If the observational evidence agrees with the implications of the hypothesis, the hypothesis is said to retrodict the evidence. A detailed discussion of retrodiction as a tool for testing scientific hypothesis is contained in Appendix A.

Though The Intelligent Universe reprises some of the key themes of Biocosm, its primary objective is different. Unlike Biocosm, the purpose of this book is not to lay out a scientific hypothesis but rather to tell an extraordinary story–the story of the probable future of the universe. In telling this story, I am going to introduce you to some very unusual and interesting people.

You will meet a senior NASA official whose passion is investigating the probable impact on religion of the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence. You will encounter a computer scientist who is coaxing software to undergo a special kind of Darwinian evolution, thus becoming more adept and financially valuable over time. And you will meet a technology prophet who, in my view, is the true contemporary heir to Darwin’s intellectual legacy.

You will also meet a fascinating cast of nonhuman players likely to have leading roles on tomorrow’s cosmic stage. They include: (1) super-smart machines capable of out-thinking humans without breaking a sweat; (2) speedy and cost-efficient interstellar probes that will consist of nothing more substantial than elaborate software algorithms capable of “living” in the innards of alien computers they may encounter on far-off planets; and (3) intelligent extraterrestrials, which SETI researchers have not yet discovered but whose probable existence is strongly predicted by my Biocosm hypothesis.

The Intelligent Universe, then, is a kind of projected travelogue–an imagined future history–of the cosmic journey that lies ahead. The foundation for that projection is a vision of the deep linkage between the three ostensibly separate phenomena previously mentioned: the appearance of life, the emergence of intelligence, and the seemingly mindless physical evolution of the cosmos. In discussing these topics, the book will not only provide news dispatches from the frontiers of cosmological science, but also offer musings about the philosophical implications of emerging scientific insights for our self-image as a species.

Some skeptics and traditionalists will doubtless protest that such philosophizing is out of place in a book that seeks to chronicle the latest scientific thinking about the nature of the universe. In rebuttal, I offer the timeless words of Galileo:

Philosophy is written in this grand book–I mean the universe–which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the characters in which it is written.

In the spirit of Galileo, I invite you to gaze into this grand book–I mean our cosmos–and begin to learn the language and the characters in which it is written. As we shall see, the grand book is not only a tale of the past, but also a story about our tomorrows. Above all, it is a book that, carefully deciphered, foretells the incredible journey that intelligent life will make across the vast expanse of the cosmic future and the projected consummation of that voyage–the emergence of the biocosm.

1. Hoyle, Fred. “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections.” Engineering & Science magazine (November, 1981): 8-12, quoted in Owen Gingerich, “Foreword” to Simon Mitton, Conflict in the Cosmos: Fred Hoyle’s Life in Science. Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2005: xi.

2. Crick, Francis. Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981.

3. Ibid., 15-16.

4. Ibid., 49.

5. Ibid., 88.

6. Dyson, Infinite in All Directions. New York: Harper Perennial Library, 1988; 118.

7. Gardner, James. Biocosm–The New Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life Is the Architect of the Universe. Makawao, Maui, Hawaii: Inner Ocean Publishing, 2003.

© 2007 James Gardner

Ray Kurzweil is a fervent believer in the Singularity,  and a proponent of  various outlandish predictions, based on his own Law of Accelerating Returns, which states that the development of technology has been increasing exponentially since the beginning of time. We have a lot to look forward to apparently, and sooner than you think.