Posthuman Blues

Whitley Strieber's back with a fresh deluge of weirdness. Even if you don't buy what he's saying -- and I certainly have reservations -- he plays with ideas so rich in speculative potential that they're never less than enjoyable.

Missing Time and the Future

All the years I had with the visitors have fairly well convinced me that they actually LIVE across time and outside of time. I think that they arrived here, in a synchronous present, about sixty years ago. My guess is that they found a very different earth from the one we know.

The instant they arrived, they spread across our entire timeline, probably creating the entire array of life on earth, even going back into the past to actually set up this solar system as a life-sustaining machine. If Jupiter wasn't out there absorbing blows like the recent Shoemaker-Levy comet, the inner solar system would be a ravaged mess, and if the moon wasn't rotating at just the right point, and the earth just the right distance from the sun, there would be no life here. Statistically, it's really all but impossible that this particular set of circumstances would occur by accident. So, lets assume that it didn't.

What I suspect that the visitors found here was a planet something like Mars, without a moon. They saw what Jupiter was doing and realized that with the fairly minimal effort -- for them -- of moving back a few billion years and setting up the moon, they could re-create the earth moon system as a life-making machine.

So our entire half a billion year history of evolutionary change is, in their objective time, only a few decades old! But for us, it's all taken the millions of years that we see in the fossil record!

But if the "visitors" arrived sixty years ago, what do we make of reports of "little people" engaged in suspiciously "alien"-like activity for the last several thousand years?

The modern era of UFO sightings began approximately sixty years ago, which makes the idea that they arrived here in the late 40s superficially attractive. But a recent arrival fails to account for the phenomenon's duration -- unless, as Strieber muses, they colonized the entirety of our timeline . . .

We generally think of aliens in terms of vast gulfs of space. The idea of a nonhuman intelligence that can casually transcend time is even more unsettling. Perhaps, in addition to searching for megascale artifacts in space, we should be on the lookout for temporal anomalies that signal the activity of entities determined to explore (or modify) cosmic history.