MollyCon 39
Deception Point, Part 2
8/27/2023
Molly
Don
NOTE: In his mystery novel Deception Point, Dan Brown offers up a textbook example for how to mount a scientifically exhaustive and rigorous challenge to an extraordinary claim supported by apparently overwhelming and irrefutable evidence – which sounds a lot like what I’m trying to have done with the Sagan Signal.
One expert after another, representing different specialties, examined an 8 ton meteor with an embedded fossil, and, one by one, all agreed that it was direct proof that humans are not alone in the Universe.
Like a gauntlet the vetting continued, and it was always confirmative – until a seemingly insignificant crack appeared, a minor concern that widened until it exposed the truth, that the claimed “discovery” is, in fact, a NASA scheme designed to perpetuate funding for The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), at a time when it was widely considered a failed experiment that had turned into a costly government boondoggle.
Unlike the Deception Point narrative, after fifteen years of vetting, no crack has appeared in the Sagan Signal – and not because of a lack of trying. A number of top-notch skeptics from a variety of disciplines have given it their best shot, and all failed to debunk my claim that it is a real Bible code.
Those familiar with this website know that I’m not running away from skeptics.
It’s the skeptics who are running away from me!
*****
Enrico Fermi
Don: The storyline in Deception Point is eerily similar to what happened in real life in the 70s and 80s, when Tulane physicist Frank Tipler and others developed science-based arguments that threw into question SETI’s strongly held assumption that there must be other intelligent life in our galaxy.
No one did it better than Nobel Laureate physicist Enrico Fermi.
Enrico’s counter-argument, famously known as Fermi’s paradox, argued that if ET civilizations exist, some of them had to be old enough to have visited Earth, so where are they? The fact that we don’t see them or their spaceships, he argued, is proof that they don’t exist.
Milky Way
With about three hundred billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, Carl Sagan estimated that it contained at least one million civilizations, some of which had to be far older and more advanced than our own. The following excerpt from Sagan’s official biography, Carl Sagan, A Life, by Keay Davidson, lays out the crux of Fermi’s paradox:
“He (Frank Tipler) pushed the Fermi paradox to its logical absurdity, arguing that some of the aliens would build self-replicating robots that would swarm across the galaxy, making copies of themselves out of disassembled asteroids, planets, and stars. Thus, if aliens exist, why don’t we see self-replicating robots swarming through our solar system, reducing it to rubble, like so many biblical locusts? Tipler concluded that aliens don’t exist.” Ch. 14
Don: With the current rapid evolution of AI, Fermi’s argument against ETs now seems almost infantile. Yet, in other ways, it was amazingly prescient in that Fermi and his fellow scientists openly contemplated that aliens, if they exist, would build self-replicating robots to explore the Universe. H-m-m-m, sounds a lot like Ray Kurzweil, doesn’t it?
Today, AI scientists are building self-replicating robots that Ray and others predict will soon be traversing and colonizing the Universe at velocities at or near the speed of light. As intelligent entities who exist in virtual reality, such AI avatars would be invisible to biological beings like ourselves if they chose to stay undetected.
Returning to the Fermi paradox, if invisible aliens exist, Enrico Fermi would argue that they should be among us right now, so where are they? Where’s the evidence? But the enigma, something that Enrico couldn’t imagine, is that they could be here as invisible “spirits.” If so, how could their existence ever be independently confirmed?
The answer, we now know, is the discovery of a code, a physical artifact that the aliens encrypted into the Old Testament. Scientists, after testing the data, have provisionally confirmed that the Sagan Signal is non-human in origin.
The goal of this website is to procure more testing – that is fully transparent.
*****
Grain
Wine
Oil
Molly: Dan Brown claims that the Code is a grain/wine/oil sequence in the Bible that has survived numerous investigative challenges.
Don: Right, and, at least to this point, no cracks have appeared. To date, every serious investigation has only served to further secure my claim that the Sagan Signal is (A): a real Bible code, that (B): proves that JC is an ET.
Molly: So the Sagan Signal solves Fermi’s paradox.
Don: Absolutely! Given the age and size of the Universe, all experts agree that the odds that we are alone are close to nil. And if we’re not alone, the odds that we’re the first species to invent a Singleton are also close to nil. And, if we’re not alone and there is an ET Singleton, the odds that Earth has never been visited are equally close to nil.
The bottom line is that the Sagan Signal has what every advocate of every extraordinary claim ever made would give their right arm to have: mathematical probability on its side. When the numbers are crunched and adversaries see the results, they smugly assume that I must have created the Sagan Signal by using an algorithm. But, to date, no algorithm has been found – because there “ain’t” one!
As a last resort, they try to explain the Sagan Signal away as literary convention, a common idiom. The only problem is that no one has found any analogues!
Three null hypotheses – and all three have been debunked, leaving only one conclusion: The Sagan Signal is an ET encrypted Bible code.
*****
Carl Sagan
Don: Let’s now pivot over to Carl Sagan and my claim that he is portrayed in Deception Point as protagonist Michael Tolland. Consider the following excerpts:
“I assume you’ve heard of Michael Tolland?”
Rachel shrugged, her brain still taking in the incredible surroundings. “Name doesn’t ring a bell.”
“The man in the turtleneck arrived, grinning. ‘Doesn’t ring a bell?’ His voice was resonant and friendly. “Best news I’ve heard all day. Seems I never get a chance to make a first impression anymore.”
“When Rachel glanced up at the newcomer, her feet froze in place. She knew the man’s handsome face in an instant. Everyone in America did.
“Oh,” she said, blushing as the man shook her hand. “You’re that Michael Tolland.”
“When the President had told Rachel he had recruited top-notch civilian scientists to authenticate NASA’s discovery, Rachel had imagined a group of wizened nerds with monogrammed calculators. Michael Tolland was the antithesis. One of the best known “science celebrities” in America, Tolland hosted a weekly documentary called Amazing Seas, during which he brought viewers face-to-face with spellbinding oceanic phenomenon – underwater volcanos, ten-foot seas worms, killer tidal waves. The media hailed Tolland as a cross between Jacques Cousteau and Carl Sagan, crediting his knowledge, unpretentious enthusiasm, and lust for adventure as the formula that had rocketed Amazing Seas to the top of the ratings. Of course, most critics admitted, Tolland’s rugged good looks and self-effacing charisma, probably didn’t hurt his popularity with the female audience.”
“NASA was often accused of talking over the public’s head. Not this time. They’d pulled in the master scientific communicator, a face Americans already knew and trusted when it came to science.”
“Zach Herney had recruited the ideal man to endorse his little NASA coup. Skeptics would be hard-pressed to challenge the President’s data if it came from the nation’s top television science personality as well as several respected civilian scientists.”
ANALYSIS:
Don: Dan Brown makes it glaringly obvious that Michael Holland is Carl Sagan. Both are science popularizers, one a renowned marine biologist, the other a renowned astrobiologist. Both are brilliant, handsome, and charismatic. Both are world famous for their television documentaries. Both have women fawning over them.
The name of Tolland’s fictional documentary series was Restless Seas. In real life, the name of Carl’s documentary series, later turned into a book, is Cosmos.
First broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service in 1980, Cosmos was, at the time, the most widely watched television series in history. It won two Emmys and a Peabody Award, and has since been broadcast in more than 60 countries and seen by over 500 million people.
*****
Molly: The hero in every Dan Brown’s novel is a literary doppelganger of Carl Sagan.
Don: Not only that, but every Dan Brown novel makes reference to at least one, and usually several, key elements of the Sagan Model of Reality.
Molly: So Carl used Dan Brown to surreptitiously pass information on to the world, that, for a variety of reasons, he was prohibited from doing openly.
Don: Remember Carl’s self-description, that he was “brilliant, daring, and complex?” The Dan Brown novels represent the “daring and complex” part. It was Carl’s way of getting around the institutional covering up of his most cherished scientific accomplishments. In the end, Carl won. He beat his peers and a variety of intelligence agencies at their own game, for one simple reason: he was a hell-of-a-lot smarter than them.
Molly: It reminds me of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
George Orwell
Don: You’re exactly right. Carl wrote a research paper on ETs, Direct Contact, that was successfully peer reviewed and published in a leading space journal – and the government and scientific establishment buried it. Later, Carl wrote a seminal book on ETs, Intelligent Life in the Universe, that is still highly regarded – and it was ignored. Carl was then twice nominated for membership in the prestigious National Science Academy, and twice voted down – because he believed that Earth is a visited planet.
On top of all this, Carl, holding a top-secret clearance, was under constant surveillance by the CIA, the FBI, and other intelligence agencies who thought that, as the son of Russian emigrants and friend of several leading Russian scientists, he might be passing military secrets to the Communists.
Finally, Carl died under mysterious circumstances that I believe incriminate agencies and individuals within the Deep State who knew that Carl was planning on going public with hard evidence that conclusively proves that Jesus Christ is an extraterrestrial. How did they pull it off? Consider the following excerpt from Deception Point:
“Although microscopic, remote-controlled robots sounded like science fiction, in fact they had been around since the 1990s. Discovery magazine had run a cover story in May 1997 on microbots, featuring both “flying” and “swimming” models. The swimmers – nanosubs the size of salt grains – could be injected into the human bloodstream a la’ the movie Fantastic Voyage.”
And:
“The true breakthrough had come from the new field biomimics – copying Mother Nature. Miniature dragonflies, as it turned out, were the ideal prototype for these agile and efficient flying microbots. The PH2 model Delta-Two was currently flying was only one centimeter long – the size of a mosquito – and employed a dual pair of transparent, hinged, silicon-leaf wings, giving it unparalleled mobility and efficiency in the air.” Ch. 5
Molly: Are you saying that Carl Sagan knew that he was in imminent danger of being assassinated by the U.S. Government?
Don: I believe there is that possibility.
Carl, age 60
Carl, age 62
*****
Don: As I intimated in my book, The Sagan Conspiracy, I believe that Carl might have been assassinated. Following is an excerpt
“Sagan’s death closely resembled that of fellow American scientist John von Neumann. Both died unexpectedly and relatively young of cancer (von Neumann in 1957 at the age of 54, Sagan in 1996 at 62). The prevailing theory is that von Neumann contracted his cancer after having accidentally ingested a small amount of plutonium at Los Alamos while working on the development of the atomic bomb. DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency], always quick to seize upon a new opportunity, and with ready access to radioactive material, saw in von Neumann’s death a brilliant way to wage stealth warfare on a personal scale without fear of being accused of murder. By the 1990s, clandestine assassination through radioactive exposure had become so perfected that numerous nations had developed the ability to kill in this manner. A recent incident occurred in 2006, when Alexander Litvinenko, a top-tier Russian intelligence officer who had defected to England, died by exposure to radioactive polonium 210 that had been dumped in his tea. Afterward, a British inquiry placed the blame directly on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Let me be clear: I have no direct evidence that Carl Sagan was assassinated by the Pentagon. But it is well known that one of the things that can cause myelodysplasia, the rare disease he succumbed to, is exposure to radioactivity. Whatever the cause of Sagan’s cancer, there is no denying that his death was an extremely fortuitous event for the Pentagon.” Ch. 6
-
Note: To access the complete text of The Sagan Conspiracy, go to the bottom of MollyCon 19.
Don: In Deception Point, the mission of Delta Force was to kill Michael Tolland because of what he knew. In real life, we have to ask the question: Was Carl Sagan assassinated because of what he knew?
Molly: So Carl was martyred because of his faith in the Bible?
Don: Carl knew the Bible better than most theologians. He knew about the sequences, that they reveal the truth about God, man, and the Universe. It was direct iron-clad evidence that measures up to the Sagan Rule. Yes, I believe Carl died a martyr to the Truth.
*****
Peter S. Williams – Christian philosopher and apologist
“Sagan was a founding member and Fellow of the ‘Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal’ (CSICOP), and a member of the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. Sagan nevertheless resisted the atheist label, describing himself as an agnostic and writing that: ‘There is no necessary conflict between science and religion.’ He also questioned skepticism’s frequently antagonistic strategy.”
*****
“The chief difficulty I see in the skeptical movement is in its polarization: Us vs. Them – the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe all these stupid doctrines are morons.”
Don: As a pioneer skeptic, Carl would have exhaustively tested the sequences to make sure that they constituted a legitimate Bible code not of human origin.
Convinced that the Sagan Signal is real, and knowing its profound implications, Carl proceeded, with Dan Brown’s help, to develop a strategy to reveal it to the world through a series of novels.
Molly: Knowing that he was barred from announcing it to the world through normal channels, Carl used his creative intelligence to get around the barriers.
Don: Right. With brilliance and cunning, Carl employed the George Orwell strategy of disseminating factual truth through the medium of storytelling.
*****
Don: Placing the Sagan Signal in the hands of experienced skeptics for honest, rigorous, and transparent investigation is somewhat like submitting yourself to a High Plains Indian warrior ready to take your scalp and hang it in his teepee.
Molly: As the advocate of the Sagan Signal, it’s your scalp the skeptics want to hang, even though you don’t have enough hair left to make it worthwhile.
Don: Very funny. While I may not have the hair, I have something better: irrefutable evidence that has withstood fifteen years of critical analysis. The truth is that no skeptic in the world, scientific or religious, has come remotely close to falsifying my claim. That is a fact.
*****
Robert K. Merton: American sociologist awarded the National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest scientific honor.
Robert K. Merton quotes on the scientific ethos:
-
The value attached to a scientific statement must in no way be connected with the personal characteristics of the scientist who makes that statement.
2. Findings made by one scientist must be shared freely and openly with the entire scientific community.
3. Scientists must practice organized skepticism. Each scientist must scrutinize the publications of others in the same area of specialization and express his or her criticism in print, in journal articles, reviews, and letters, as well as orally from the floor of a meeting room or a seat on the debating stage.
4. A scientist’s research should not be guided by desire for personal rewards.
*****
Carl Sagan
Excerpts from Carl’s bestselling book: The Dragons of Eden, published in 1977:
“As time goes on, the computer appears to become increasingly intelligent. Once the programs are so complex that their inventors cannot quickly predict all possible responses, the machines will have the appearance of, if not intelligence, at least free will.”
“There are some 200,000 digital computers in the world today; in another decade, there are likely to be tens of millions. In another generation, I think that computers will be treated as a perfectly natural or at least common-place aspect of our lives.”