Recycling the Cosmos

"It has the power to direct how mankind evolves over a very long period of time, potentially in cycles."

In Western society, very little attention is paid to aspects of human consciousness that most people have experienced at one time or another. The existence of dreams in itself is an enigma that usually gets swept under the rug upon waking, as the alarm goes off and our daily routines take over our thoughts.

The storyline we navigate in dreams feels as if it is reality, and in most cases, we do not realize we are in a dream until our eyes open the next morning. It is only then that our personal and societal responsibilities make their way to the forefront, requiring all the emotions and interactions we just processed in our unconscious state to become nothing more than a suppressed memory. No matter how impactful the dreams may have been, there's usually little incentive to mention them to coworkers at the water cooler that afternoon.

Another undeniable human experience is déjà vu. The feeling of having been through your present situation previously is a widespread phenomenon that, like a dream, is also filed away as something not to think about too deeply.

As easy as it may be to ignore the uncanny sensation afterward, it feels extremely obvious at the moment that the situation has already happened at some point in the past. Once the feeling passes, however, most people give it little to no thought and just continue on with their day. Research has shown that two-thirds of individuals have experienced déjà vu at least once in their lives.

A similar enigmatic time-related occurrence is synchronicity. These are coincidences in life that seem too extraordinary to have happened by chance. Thinking about someone a few minutes before they call, or saying a word at the same time as a character on TV are just two small examples.

One of my personal experiences involved my wife's grandmother passing, and a few months later I was assigned her old phone number when I got a new phone with a different plan from another service provider.

The first time I called my wife it appeared as if her Nana was calling her from the other side, when it was just myself asking when she would be home from work. Her side of the family had to change their contacts in their phones from Nana to me, which was a weird thing to ask of them, to say the least.

These experiences are undeniable, yet in society, they play a negligible role in shaping our day-to-day interactions because they are not "real." However, for some cultures, these anomalous events spurred by some mechanism within human consciousness are taken very seriously indeed.

The Australian Aborigines, one of the oldest surviving cultures on the planet, explain the origin story of the universe in an era they refer to as "the Dreaming" or "Dreamtime." These concepts were circulating among these groups over 60,000 years ago and tell of a place where all people existed for all time.

Rock art of Wandjina at Mount Elizabeth, Australia. (Robyn Jay / CC BY-SA 2.0 )

It is not just a past era of existence, but a realm that encompasses all of past, present, and future events. The Aborigines have put stories of this period into art and cultural ceremonies that have lasted millennia.

The age of these beliefs spans vastly longer than those of monotheistic religions of the present day — when a singular God created the universe, and so began the ongoing paradigm of linear time our science currently finds itself in. The wisdom of these ancient peoples is ignored as Western life follows the very concrete model of past, present, and future.

Aboriginal Australians, like many ancient cultures, viewed time in a cyclical manner. The seasons, tides, and stars all displayed a circular existence on our planet, far from the linear interpretation we currently employ today exemplified by milestone constructs such as technological development and Darwinian evolution.

If you really think about it, and as I've argued previously, without our current established societal need to use linear time to organize our lives around certain events, it would seem more rational to view time as cyclical based on observing our environment.

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Recalibrating Reality

The implications of cyclical time for our everyday lives would be disruptive if proven true and incorporated into our scientific paradigm.

A New York Times op-ed written by two leading physicists was even published a few weeks ago, indicating that there may be a fundamental flaw in our understanding of the universe through the standard model-based data accumulated by the James Webb Space Telescope in recent months.

Dr. Adam Frank and Dr. Marcelo Gleiser suggest what we are now learning may force "a radical departure from the standard model, one that may even require us to change how we think of the elemental components of the universe, possibly even the nature of space and time."

There is nothing inherently fishy about these features of the standard model. Scientists often discover good indirect evidence for things that we cannot see, such as the hyperdense singularities inside a black hole. But in the wake of the Webb’s confounding data about galaxy formation, and the worsening problem with the Hubble constant, you can’t be blamed for starting to wonder if the model is out of joint.

A familiar narrative about how science works is often trotted out at this point to assuage anxieties. It goes like this: Researchers think they have a successful theory, but new data show it is flawed. Courageously rolling up their sleeves, the scientists go back to their blackboards and come up with new ideas that allow them to improve their theory by better matching the evidence.

It’s a story of both humility and triumph, and we scientists love to tell it. And it may be what happens in this case, too. Perhaps the solution to the problems the Webb is forcing us to confront will require only that cosmologists come up with a new “dark” something or other that will allow our picture of the universe to continue to match the best cosmological data.

Considering the authors' proposal that a complete reevaluation of the fundamental nature of the universe may be required, could the "new 'dark' something" be related to time? Considering there are already theories of cyclic cosmology based on "phantom dark energy," it doesn't seem too absurd to speculate that a similarly imperceptible "phantom" aspect of the temporal dimension could be involved.

Artist conception of the James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: NASA GSFC/CIL/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez.

After all, mathematical physicist Roger Penrose — perhaps best known to my readers for his Orch OR hypothesis of consciousness developed with Stuart Hameroff — has proposed a theory known as "conformal cyclic cosmology" (CCC). Penrose essentially states that there is no beginning or end to the universe, but instead beginnings and ends of cycles separating blocks of expansion and contraction he calls "aeons."

Fellow physicist Lee Smolin explores Penrose's theory in his book Time Reborn.

He speculates that after some point all the elementary particles with mass, including protons, quarks, and electrons, would decay and only photons and other massless particles would be left. If so, there would be nothing to detect the infinite passage of eternity, because photons, since they travel at the speed of light, don't experience time at all. To a photon, the eternity of the very late universe would be indistinguishable from the very early universe.

…it does predict that there would be fossils of the past universe in remnants of the Big Bang, from which we could glean information about it. While much information is wiped out by the eternity spent in thermal equilibrium, one carrier of information that never is disordered is gravitational radiation. The information carried by gravitational waves also makes it across the bounce in the cycling models and into the new universe.

Considering the cycles observed in nature, a cyclical universe would appear to make sense if we extrapolate our perceptions to the cosmic scale. It also lines up with the view of many ancient peoples, with obvious connections between the Aboriginies' "Dreamtime" and the periods of what Penrose calls "information panspermia" — described as "propagation of life codes" — during the transition of one aeon to the next.

But what does this mean in our current search for extraterrestrial life?

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When is Everybody?

Luckily, Penrose has explored the applications of CCC in the context of SETI — though "extraterrestrial" may not actually be the correct terminology to describe these civilizations.

In a paper titled CCC and the Fermi paradox, Penrose and his colleague Vahe Gurzadyan postulate that extraterrestrial civilizations may not actually be from other planets at all. They postulate that these civilizations may in fact be from different aeons, and that "fossils" of their existence may be imprinted on the cosmic microwave background.

If we are to consider signals from previous-aeon beings, then such regions might well be the most promising places to look, as the CCC-interpretation would be that there might well have been vast numbers of very large galaxies in these places, and consequently a large probability of the development and long-term stability of highly evolved technological societies.

What kind of signals might we expect that such beings could be sending out?

Penrose and Gurzadyan then go on to speculate why a civilization might be transmitting signals to another aeon in the first place, with some rather disturbing propositions.

…What might be a purpose to the previous-aeon beings of possibly deliberately transmitting such signals to beyond their aeon, where we must bear in mind that 2-way communication with us would be impossible in this way? Perhaps those beings might have wished to save the inhabitants of our subsequent aeon from some unpleasant fate that their greater wisdom could help us avoid. Here the purpose would, for one reason or another, simply be the transmission of information from their aeon to ours. Alternatively, there is the idea of information panspermia…i.e. the propagation of the ”life codes” by the use of such signals, like the bit strings of human genome and of other species of terrestrial life.

The physicists' proposition of an "unpleasant fate" — the likely apocalyptic transition to the next aeon — is disconcerting, to say the least.

Penrose postulates that evidence of pre-aeon civilizations could be imprinted on the cosmic microwave background.

Even more concerning is the echoing of this idea from certain individuals who have inside connections to government officials knowledgeable about the UFO phenomenon.

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Around We Go

Tom DeLonge has been rather consistent when conveying what his advisors have told him about UFOs, and what their existence and an apparent increase in activity might mean for the human race.

In one particularly jarring statement to a crowd attending his book release for Sekret Machines, DeLonge goes into detail about what information will be coming out in the future about the intelligence behind these craft.

There’s a very specific way this is going to be framed for you guys, and the world in the coming years, that is understandable. But there is an element that is unknown that is really tricky with this stuff. There’s really smart people in very secretive places debating if the whole thing is steered to prepare us for the universe at large. Or, this whole thing is some type of farm.

It could be for energy, it could be for the resources of another nature, it could be whatever. There are also really smart people in secret places who are saying “Is this where consciousness and quantum mechanics cross over?” Do our brains have the capacity to create these things in the sky by making matter develop?

It’s like when the Native Americans would do rain dancing, and they all concentrate and meditate together, and then it rains. Well, is that happening when we all just go, “bug-eyed green aliens,” and all of a sudden they start to appear? 

They don’t know about some of this stuff. But we do know it has the power to direct how mankind evolves over a very long period of time, potentially in cycles. Because when you look at the Giza pyramids and some of these other places, there are some grand cycles that we’re starting to discover with mankind. We’re kind of going, “Okay, maybe we’re a little bit older than 3000 B.C.”

This loudly echoes the theory put forward by Penrose and Gurzadyan, if not more on a planetary level. DeLonge talks about cycles of mankind and the manipulation of our species' evolution over long periods of time. One can't help but wonder if these cycles and time periods are analogous — or even representative of — these larger aeons hypothesized in the CCC.

The process of information panspermia would allow the genetic code to carry through each crossover, rebuilding the universe from the same basic foundation each time.

Visualization of the cyclic universe theory

If we assume the CCC hypothesis is true, the UFO phenomenon itself must have the ability to transcend these aeons in order to survive and maintain the same consciousness and memory of what has happened before. Perhaps this is also what DeLonge means when he says that UFOs are “from outside of time.”

Perhaps this is also what Lue Elizondo, the former head of the Pentagon's UFO program, is suggesting when he speaks about a species that sees time differently in his burning cigarette analogy.

What if there were things that had the ability to experience…where the present was a much bigger cherry, if you will? A much bigger transition, where more elements of the future and the past are experienced in the present, and [they] can do that also physically, right? So it's not just an idea.

What if there were a species out there that experienced the universe with an extra level of dimension? So you and I are having this conversation right now with your audience, and we're having this conversation right here, right now. But if I were to have the ability to have this conversation right here, five minutes ago or five minutes from now, we would never meet. We'd be like two ships passing in the night.

Is it possible that maybe some of these things — these UAP — have [this] ability? We experience them when they are right here, right now, and every other time we don't because we're simply not intersecting with that extra-dimensional space of time.

There was another aspect of the cyclical essence of nature that Elizondo explored. When asked how we might know what signs to look for if an advanced civilization had left a mark on humanity, he stated that megaliths and even artifacts in orbit would not be enough to last the test of time.

Like Penrose stated the genetic code could be transmitted between aeons, Elizondo suggests that DNA would be the only way to continue a legacy on cosmic timescales.

So, if we’re trying to find some sort of marker, chances are you’re not going to find it buried in the Earth unless it only happened in the last five thousand years or so. Even some of the most dramatic examples of terraforming, let’s look at the example of the meteor impact in Arizona. It happened sixty thousand years ago. That’s already filling in. In another hundred thousand years from now, you may never even know anything ever happened because of the processes of Earth and what this planet does. It’s constantly erasing what’s on the surface. It’s constantly burying what lies beneath deeper and deeper and deeper, until it eventually gets recycled.

That’s a hard question. What would last long enough for us to go back and say, “Wow, this is an indicator of alien life on this planet one hundred thousand years ago?” What would you have to do to achieve that, to accomplish that? It’s a lot harder than one might think. Then again, would you recognize it?

One might say, well, DNA. DNA is a perfect example. If you wanted to do something that was enduring for humanity, where we could look back a hundred thousand years and say, “Yes, that was absolutely manipulated by an intelligent life form,” deoxyribonucleic acid may be one way to do it. You could put coding and sequencing in there that will perpetuate over time. And yes, you will have some degradation over generations, but in essence you could do something that way. Basically it’s a biological marker.

So we have to be careful when we say we have to look for evidence, because evidence isn’t necessarily a spearhead found in the Bighorn Mountains eleven thousand years ago. It’s not necessarily a pyramid sitting in the middle of a desert. It could be far more sophisticated than that. You said put it in orbit, right? What if, rather than put it in orbit, we put it in the human body?

So if both the genetic code and UFOs can transcend these aeons — each essentially residing outside of time as we understand it — perhaps these crossovers represent the ultimate cycle of the universe.

Perhaps the reported rise in UFO sightings might also signal the coming of the next aeon, with these craft potentially collecting data on the human genome to transmit these records in the process of information panspermia.

Perhaps this is what Elizondo means when he refers to "mankinds," that there are cycles that wipe the slate clean for the next iteration.

Perhaps this is the Wheel of Time.

And ultimately, perhaps, this is reincarnation.