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Chapter One
The Cycles Of Time
It is said that Augustine of Hippo, the bishop in Roman Carthage (A.D. 354-430), the greatest thinker of the Christian Church in its early centuries, who fused the religion of the New Testament with the Platonistic tradition of Greek philosophy, was asked, "What is time?" His answer was, "if no one asks me, I know what it is; if I wish to explain what it is to him who asks me, I do not know."
Time is essential to Earth and all that is upon it, and to each one of us as individuals; for, as we know from our own experience and observations, what separates us from the moment we are born and the moment when we cease to live is TIME.
Though we know not what Time is, we have found ways to measure it. We count our lifetimes in years, whichcome to think of it is another way of saying "orbits," for that is what a "year" en Earth is: the time it takes Earth, our planet, to complete one orbit around our star, the Sun. We do not know what time is, but the way we measure it makes us wonder: would we live longer, would our life cycle be different, were we to live on another planet whose "year" is longer? Would we be "immortal" if we were to be upon a "Planet of millions of years" as, in fact, the Egyptian pharaohs believed that they would be, in an eternal Afterlife, once they joined the gods on that "Planet of millions of years"?
Indeed, are there other planets "out there," and, even more so, planets on which life as we know it could have evolved or is our planetary system unique, and life on Earth unique, and we, humankind, are all alone or did the pharaohs know whatthey were speaking of in their Pyramid Texts?
"Look up skyward and count the stars," Yahweh told Abraham as He made the covenant with him. Man has looked skyward from time immemorial, and has been wondering whether there are others like him out there, upon other earths. Logic, and mathematical probability, dictate a Yes answer; but it was only in 1991 that astronomers, for the first time, it was stressed, actually found other planets orbiting other suns elsewhere in the universe.
The first discovery, in July 1991, turned out not to have been entirely correct. It was an announcement by a team of British astronomers that, based on observations over a fiveyear period, they concluded that a rapidly spinning star identified as Pulsar 1829-10 has a "planet-sized companion" about ten times the size of Earth. Pulsars are assumed to be the extraordinarily dense cores of stars that have collapsed for one reason or another. Spinning madly, they emit pulses of radio energy in regular bursts, many times per second. Such pulses can be monitored by radio telescopes; by detecting a cyclic fluctuation, the astronomers surmised that a planet that orbits Pulsar 1829-10 once every six months can cause and explain the fluctuation.
As it turned out, the British astronomers admitted several months later that their calculations were imprecise and, therefore, they could not stand by their conclusion that the pulsar, some 30,000 light-years away, had a planetary satellite, By then, however, an American team had made a similar discovery pertaining to a much closer pulsar, identified as PSR 1257 + 12 a collapsed sun only 1,300 lightyears away from us. It exploded, astronomers estimated, about a mere billion years ago; and it definitely has two, and perhaps three, orbiting planets. The two certain ones were orbiting their sun at about the same distance as Mercury does our Sun; the possible third planet orbits its sun at about the same distance as Earth does our Sun.
"The discovery stirred speculation that planetary systems not only were fairly common but also could occur under diverse circumstances," wrote John Noble Wilford in The New York Times of January 9, 1992; "scientists said it was most unlikely that planets orbiting pulsars could be hospitable to life; but the findings encouraged astronomers, who this fall will begin a systematic survey of the heavens for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life."
Were, then, the pharaohs right?
Long before the pharaohs and the Pyramid Texts, an ancient civilization Man's first known one-possessed an advanced cosmogony. Six thousand years ago, in ancient Sumer, what astronomers have discovered in the 1990s was already known; not only the true nature and composition of our Solar System (including the farthest out planets), but also the notion that there are other solar systems in the universe, that their stars ("suns") can collapse or explode, that their planets can be thrown off course-that Life, indeed, can thus be carried from one star system to another. It was a detailed cosmogony, spelled out in writing.
One long text. written on seven tablets. has reached us primarily in its later Babylonian version. Called the Epic of Creation and known by its opening words Enuma elish, it was publicly read during the New Year festival that started on the first day of the month Nissan, coinciding with the first day of spring.
Outlining the process by which our own Solar System came into being, the long text described how the Sun ("Apsu") and its messenger Mercury ("Mummu") were first joined by an olden planet called Tiamat; how a pair of planets Venus and Mars (" Lahamu " and "Lahmu") then coalesced between the Sun and Tiamat, followed by two pairs beyond Tiamat Jupiter and Saturn ("Kishar" and "Anshar") and Uranus and Neptune ("Ann" and "Nudimmud"), the latter two being planets unknown to modem astronomers until 1781 and 1846 respectively yet known, and described, by the Sumerians millennia earlier. As those newly-created "celestial gods" tugged and pulled at each other, some of them sprouted satellites moonlets, Tiamat, in the midst of that unstable planetary family, sprouted eleven satellites; one of them,...