arXiv:physics/0512062 v2 9 Dec 2005

A Solution to the Fermi Paradox: The Solar System, Part of a

Galactic Hypercivilization?

Beatriz Gato-Rivera

World Mystery Forum 2005, Interlaken (Switzerland)

November 2005
1 Introduction

This talk is about the possibility that the Solar System belongs to the territory of
a hypercivilization spanning our galaxy or a large region of it. I will start introducing
the Fermi Paradox (why we do not see aliens around?) and some of its solutions. Then
I will present my own solution which includes two proposals called the Subanthropic
Principle and the Undetectability Conjecture. This solution states that, at present, all
typical galaxies like ours are already colonized by very advanced technological civilizations
spread through large regions or the whole galaxies, many of them containing primitive
subcivilizations like ours. After discussing some consequences of this solution for our
planet and our civilization I will make some comments on recent, very popular theories
in the scientific community of Particle Physics and Cosmology. These theories, known as
‘brane worlds’, assume that our visible Universe with three space dimensions is embedded
in a much larger Cosmos with more space dimensions. Therefore it would be most natural
if other universes would also exist located along the extra space dimensions. As a result,
these theories open up enormous possibilities regarding the visitation or colonization of
the Solar System by alien civilizations, strengthening the Fermi Paradox. Finally, in the
appendix I have included some questions and answers that came up during this Forum.

2 The Fermi Paradox

In the summer 1950, in Los Alamos, the nuclear physicists Enrico Fermi, Edward
Teller and other colleagues brought up the subject of unidentified flying objects (UFO’s)
while having lunch. This topic was very popular at that time. After a while, when
they had changed subjects Fermi suddenly asked: Where is everybody? Performing fast
mental computations, Fermi had reached the conclusion that alien civilizations should
have been around visiting Earth for many thousands or millions of years. Therefore, why
we do not see them? This is the Fermi Paradox.
Although Fermi never explained how he made his computations, nor gave an esti-
mate of the number of civilizations which should have visited Earth, he had to rely on
arguments like these: In our galaxy there are thousands of millions of stars much older
than the Sun, many of them thousands of millions of years older (in the ‘habitable zone’
of the galaxy they are on average one thousand million years older [1]). Therefore many
civilizations must have arisen in our galaxy before ours and a fraction of them must have
expanded through vast regions or even through the whole galaxy.
Some other arguments pointing in the same direction involve estimates about the

1
lifetime of the second generation stars, inside of which the chemical elements of organic
matter are made, and also involve estimates of the total time necessary for a technological
civilization to colonize, or visit, the whole galaxy. Regarding the second generation stars,
they are formed only two million years after the supermassive first generation stars (these
burn out exploding as supernovae in one million years only and it takes another million
years for the debris to form new stars). Therefore the appearance of organic matter in our
galaxy could have happened several thousands of millions of years before the Sun came
into existence. As to the total time necessary to colonize, or visit, the whole galaxy by a
technological civilization, conservative computations of diffusion modeling give estimates
from 5 to 50 million years [2], which is a cosmologically short timescale1 . Besides these
considerations, the fact that life on Earth started very early supports the views, held by
many scientists, that life should be abundant in the Universe.

3 Solutions to the Fermi Paradox

Many solutions have been proposed to the Fermi Paradox. I classify them as expan-
sionist and non-expansionist. The non-expansionist solutions are based on the assump-
tion that technological civilizations do not expand beyond a small neighborhood of the
galaxy. The most popular of these solutions are the following ones:

• Interstellar travel is not possible no matter the scientific and technological level
reached by a civilization.

• Generically, advanced civilizations have little or no interest in expanding through

large regions of the galaxy.

• Technological civilizations annihilate themselves, or disappear by natural catastro-

phes, before having the chance to expand through large regions of the galaxy.

On the other hand, the most popular expansionist solutions to the Fermi Paradox,
based on the assumption that generically technological civilizations do expand through
large regions of the galaxy, make use of one or more of the following arguments:

• Alien civilizations do visit Earth at present times, for different purposes, and/or
have visited Earth in the past. In this respect it is remarkable the fact that Francis
Crick, one of the discoverers of the DNA structure, proposed in the mid-seventies
1
During this Forum Claudio Maccone, member of the International Academy of Astronautics, has
presented a mathematical model that predicts around 150 million years, which is still a short time.

2
 that life on Earth could have been inseminated on purpose by alien intelligences2 .
Besides, some scientists as well as countless authors of popular books, have specu-
lated that some UFO’s could be true alien spacecrafts whereas some ‘gods descend-
ing from the sky’, abundant in many ancient traditions, could have been just alien
astronauts (see for example [3] [4]).

• Advanced alien civilizations might have strong ethical codes against interfering with
primitive life-forms [5].

• Advanced aliens ignore us because of lack of interest due to our low primitive level.
For example Robert Jastrow, ex-director of Mt. Wilson Observatory, claims [6]
that, on average, advanced civilizations should consider us as larvae due to the fact
that they should be thousands of millions of years ahead of us.... and who would
be interested in communicating with larvae?

• Alien civilizations have not reached us yet because intelligent life is extremely diffi-
cult to emerge. Otherwise alien civilizations would necessarily be here. As a result
we could find ourselves among the most evolved technological civilizations in our
galaxy or we could even be the only one.

Besides these simple solutions there are many more exotic proposals. For example, a
rather drastic expansionist solution is given by the theoretical physicist Cumrun Vafa, at
Harvard University, who thinks that the fact that we do not see aliens around could be
the first proof of the existence of brane worlds: all advanced aliens would have emigrated
to better parallel universes [7].

4 My Solution to the Fermi Paradox

Two years ago I made a proposal for solving the Fermi Paradox [8]. It states that, at
present, all the typical galaxies of the Universe are already colonized (or large regions of
them) by advanced civilizations. In the vast territory of these hypercivilizations a small
proportion of their individuals would belong to primitive subcivilizations, like ours. That
is, I put forward the possibility that our small terrestrial civilization is embedded in a
large hypercivilization unknowingly and this situation should be common in all typical
galaxies.
2
It is less known that several years before Crick, in 1960, the astronomer Thomas Gold suggested,
during a congress in Los Angeles, that space travellers could have brought life to Earth some thousands
of millions of years ago. Curiously, this claim was also made, with a detailed description of ‘the facts’,
by the ‘popular metaphysics’ writer T. Lobsang Rampa in the book The Hermit (1971).

3
 The primitive subcivilizations would know or ignore their low status depending, most
likely, on the ethical standards of the advanced civilization in which they are immersed.
If the standards are low, the individuals of the primitive subcivilizations will be surely
abused in many ways and therefore will be painfully aware of their low status. If the
ethical standards of the advanced individuals are high instead, then they will respect
the natural evolution (social, cultural) of the primitive subcivilizations, treating them
‘ecologically’ as some kind of protected species. In this case, which could well describe
the situation of the terrestrial civilization, most primitive individuals would be completely
unaware of the existence of the large hypercivilization.

Now some remarks follow:

• Needless to say, the primitive individuals would not be considered as citizens of the
hypercivilization and direct open contact would completely destroy the primitive
subcivilization.

• The ‘alien visitors’, from the viewpoint of the primitive individuals, would not
be so from the viewpoint of the advanced individuals from the hypercivilization
because they rather would be visiting, or working in, their own territory. (The
advanced civilizations would surely have underground and/or submarine bases in
their primitive planets for military and scientific purposes.)

• I distinguish between aggressive and non-aggresive advanced civilizations. I do not

believe that advanced civilizations must have ethical codes concerning primitive
life-forms.

• The fact that our civilization has never been attacked by aggressive aliens, as far
as history knows, could well be a clue that we belong to a non-aggressive advanced
civilization which protects planet Earth, as part of its territory.

If this scenario is true for our civilization, then the Subanthropic Principle [8] would
also hold. It states that we are not typical among the intelligent observers from the
Universe. Typical civilizations of typical galaxies would be hundreds of thousands, or
millions, of years more evolved than ours and, consequently, typical intelligent observers
would be orders of magnitude more intelligent than us3 .

One may argue against this principle saying that a much higher level of science and
technology does not necessarily imply a much higher intelligence or brain capacities. My
answer to this objection is that there are two main reasons to think in this way. The
3
This means that, if we ‘score’ 10, then they would score 100 or 1.000 or 10.000, etc.

4
first is simply natural biological evolution as we see it in our planet. The individuals
of our species (homo sapiens sapiens) are more intelligent than our ancestors and these
were more intelligent than their own ancestors, etc. Since there is no reason why this
process should stop with us, it is fully realistic to expect that individuals of much older
civilizations must be genetically more intelligent than us. But there is an even stronger
argument supporting the views that the older the civilization, the more intelligent the
individuals: As the civilizations would reach some mastery in the field of genetic engi-
neering, the general tendency would be to ‘improve’ themselves, that is their own species
(among many others species) giving rise to an acceleration of biological evolution at
unimaginable rates.

Now there is a crucial question. If the Solar System is part of a large hypercivilization,
why we do not detect any signs of civilization from outer space at all? My answer is
related to my views that aggressive advanced civilizations must exist: Generically, all
advanced enough civilizations camouflage their planets for security reasons, because of
the existence of aggressive advanced civilizations, so that no sign of civilization (or any
other form of life) can be detected by external observers, who would only obtain distorted
data for disuasion purposes. This hypothesis I call the Undetectability Conjecture [8].

Observe that this conjecture predicts a rather low probability of success for the SETI
(search for extraterrestrial intelligence) project. The reason is that only primitive civiliza-
tions able to produce electromagnetic emissions would be susceptible to being detected by
the SETI antennas. But after reaching the level of producing electromagnetic emissions
it would take only a few hundred years for a civilization to learn to hide themselves from
external observers, becoming undetectable. As a result, the period of detectability of an
average civilization could be very short and the probability that a primitive civilization,
like ours, detects another primitive civilization would be negligible. For example, it could
have happened that planet Earth received the last TV or radio programs from another
planet 200.000 years ago, for a period of about 500 years.
Observe also that, if the Undetectability Conjecture turns out to be true, then we
cannot be sure whether the terrestrial civilization is the unique civilization inhabitating
the Solar System, as we firmly believe. The reason is that in the astronomical observations
of planets and satellites we scientists assume that there are no intelligent beings there
manipulating the data that we receive, and then we conclude that there is no signal of
intelligent life, as the data prove. But this assumption could turn out to be wrong because
advanced civilizations would be technologically able to fool our telescopes, detectors and
space probes, and would not allow themselves to be detected.

The relevance of this solution to the Fermi Paradox for our planet and, especially, for

5
our civilization, depends strongly on when, how long ago, the Solar System was taken
over by extraterrestrial hypercivilizations (this could have happened more than once since
our galaxy is very old).

• If the Solar System was visited already thousands of millions of years ago: Planet
Earth could have undergone insemination procedures, together with many other
‘promising’ planets, as suggested by Thomas Gold and Francis Crick. As a result,
all terrestrial living beings would have common building blocks of DNA with the
living beings of thousands of other planets which would have undergone similar
insemination procedures with the same bacteria. Consequently, many plants and
animals, including our own species, could have been brought to Earth (at any time
in history or prehistory) and their extraterrestrial origin would be impossible to
detect by any biologist or geneticist. Moreover, at present, we probably would have
countless ‘relatives’ in many planets, what has advantages (possibility of positive,
closer relationships) but also disadvantages (predators). Not to mention the high
probability that many past and present species, including ourselves, could have re-
sulted from genetic manipulation simply as a rutine procedure for the improvement
of the planet. (I am convinced that advanced and not-so-advanced civilizations
widely make use of genetic engineering to improve all the species around, including
themselves, as I mentioned before.)

• If the Solar System was first encountered only when life on Earth was well developed
(for example, a few million years ago): It is still very probable that many present
species would have resulted from genetic manipulation by the ‘owners’ of the Solar
System for the general improvement of the planet; that is, among many other
improvements like getting rid of unwanted species or ameliorations of geological
type. (Observe that the sudden appearance of the homo sapiens sapiens species
some 40.000 years ago is still a complete mystery for science.)

• If the Solar System was first encountered only after homo sapiens sapiens had
appeared: This hypercivilization must have found our species ‘good enough’ so that
they did not try any genetic improvements on us. This does not mean, however,
that they would have adopted a complete non-interference policy with respect to
human affairs.

In fact, if my scenario is correct and the Solar System belongs to the territory of
a non-aggressive hypercivilization, I strongly suspect that this civilization treats us as
a protected species and cares about us. As a result, they could well have decided to
help us, discretely, many times in history and prehistory regarding our social, cultural,
scientific, etc. evolution, apart from protecting us and the planet from several dangers of

6
various types: large meteorites, predators from outer space, nuclear accidents, extremely
devastating earthquakes, etc.
Therefore my solution to the Fermi Paradox is compatible with the speculations that
some UFO’s could be true alien spacecrafts, whereas some ‘gods descending from the
sky’, for the benefit of mankind, could have been alien astronauts. However, I would
not call them alien astronauts but extraterrestrial scientists and extraterrestrial military
personnel instead, since working in their own territory, they would not be truly astronauts
nor aliens.
My solution is also compatible with the possibility of more general close contacts
between individuals of the hypercivilizations and primitive individuals like us, besides
the ‘gods descending from the sky’ issue. I have identified three major causes or rea-
sons which could motivate individuals of advanced civilizations to seek interactions or
relationships with primitive individuals: scientific purposes, entertainment/affection pur-
poses and criminal purposes (for the details see [8]). The ‘gods descending from the sky’
could simply correspond to various scientific teams, assisted by military personnel, sent
by the government in order to help develop the terrestrial primitive civilization.

5 Brane World Cosmologies

To finish I would like to make some comments about brane world cosmologies. In the
last seven years brane world models have been of increasing interest for both Particle
Physics and Cosmology [9] [10]. They put forward the possibility that our Universe
with three space dimensions is located in a subspace (brane) of a higher dimensional
Cosmos. These models allow large, and even infinite, extra dimensions4 and they offer
the possibility to solve, or view from a newly different perspective, many longstanding
problems in Particle Physics and Cosmology (see [11] for brane world reviews).
Brane world cosmologies have the potential to dramatically strengthen the Fermi
Paradox. Namely, if our observable Universe is embedded in a much larger Cosmos there
may exist other universes along the extra spatial dimensions which could be parallel
to our own, or intersecting it somewhere. Then it would be natural to expect that
some of these universes would have the same laws of Physics as ours and many of the
corresponding advanced civilizations could master techniques to travel or ‘jump’ through
the extra dimensions for visitation or colonization purposes. Moreover, one has to take
into account that many of these universes could be very close to ours, even at only one
millimeter distance along an extra dimension.
4
Previously, in theories and models of Particle Physics extra dimensions were only allowed if they
were compactified with a very tiny radius.

7
 This opens up enormous possibilities regarding the expansion of advanced civilizations
simultaneously through several universes with the same laws of Physics, resulting in
multidimensional empires. It could even happen that the expansion to other ‘parallel’
galaxies through extra dimensions could be easier, with lower cost, than the expansion
inside one’s own galaxy. In particular, the ‘owners’ of the Solar System (if they exist)
could have come from another universe and could have created a huge empire with large
pieces of territory in several ‘parallel’ galaxies.
At present we physicists are still in a premature phase in the study of brane worlds
and we do not know whether these ideas are in fact realistic. Nevertheless, the idea of
large extra dimensions and parallel universes is acquiring greater and greater importance
in the scientific community, among both theoreticians and experimentalists. As a matter
of fact, the experimental signatures expected from large extra dimensions, at present
and future colliders, are well understood by now [12] and an intense experimental search
is currently under way. For example, experiments starting in 2007 at the LHC (Large
Hadron Collider) at CERN will be looking, among other things, for signatures of large
extra dimensions.

6 Final Remarks
One final remark. I am convinced that the main feature of the scenario that I propose: the
existence of primitive subcivilizations embedded in large hypercivilizations spanning vast
regions of the galaxies, is true at present and/or has been true in the past and/or will be
true in the future in most or all galaxies in our universe and in any other possible universes
with the same laws of Physics as ours. Whether our terrestrial civilization is actually
a subcivilization completely unaware of the existence of the large hypercivilization is
something to be discovered in the future. This will happen either due to some advanced
technology that would allow us to discard this possibility some hundreds of years from
now (if we do not annihilate ourselves first), or through the decision of our hosts, provided
they exist, of showing their faces openly, which could happen long before.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the organizers of the World Mystery Forum 2005 for inviting
me to this beautiful and interesting place. Finally, I am indebted to my friends Linda
Champion and Maite Fernández for many interesting conversations and also to Linda for
the English corrections to this text.

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Appendix: Questions and Answers

• Why do you say that the open contact with the hypercivilization would
destroy our civilization?
This is very easy to understand. Imagine how we would feel if the citizens of the
hypercivilization happen to live 1.000 years and, in addition, always looking young.
We would feel devastated, right? I can imagine pathetic demonstrations all over
the world demanding ‘our right’ to live 1.000 years as well. What about if they
explain to us that we are allowed to live on planet Earth because of their kindness
and hospitality? Also, we need to believe in ourselves, in our capabilities to make
progress, to build the future. This psychological need would crash in contact with
a far superior civilization and far superior intelligent beings and we would only feel
worthless and stupid, especially scientists, but everybody else as well (for example,
the gap between them and us, regarding brain capabilities, could be bigger than
the corresponding gap between us and the gorillas). Not to mention the shock
we would receive if they had created our species by genetic engineering and they
would tell us. It is difficult to predict who would feel more offended under such
circumstances: the fundamentalist creationists, the intelligent design advocates,
the plain hard-core darwinists or the ecologists.
As for myself, I find this last issue quite harmless in fact because, as I said, I am
completely convinced that advanced civilizations widely use genetic manipulation
on all species around, including themselves. Thus, if an advanced civilization has
created the homo sapiens sapiens, then I am pretty sure that the individuals of this
civilization have also resulted from genetic manipulations of their own ancestors
who in turn have a high chance to have resulted from genetic manipulation by a
much older alien civilization, who in turn were manipulated by their own ances-
tors, etc. It could even happen that at present there is not a single species that
remains ‘virgin’, free of genetic manipulation, in our whole galaxy nor in most typ-
ical galaxies5 . So, regarding the possibility that we have been created by scientists
of an advanced civilization I feel like in that joke where somebody is on the phone:
‘This is a recording. Doesn’t bother me, I’m a hologram’.

• Do you think could it be possible that some of the parallel universes

that you mentioned could be inhabitated by angels and other spiritual
beings?
I must say that I have been asked this question many times already. At the present
stage, our scientific knowledge can neither prove nor disprove the existence of angels
and other spiritual beings described in our traditions. My opinion is that, if these
5
This scenario would constitute the ultimate nightmare for ecologists!

9
 beings happen to exist, I would expect to find them inhabitating parallel universes
with different laws of Physics than ours. The crucial point is the laws of Physics
that hold in a particular universe. Unfortunately we only know one universe and
one set of laws of Physics, which renders our knowledge very limited and ‘provin-
cial’. Nevertheless, we particle physicists assume that if something would enter our
universe from another universe with different laws of Physics then the matter of this
something and the matter of our universe would almost not interact (perhaps only
gravitationally). As a consequence this something would be invisible for most of us
and would go through our ‘solid’ matter (walls, ceilings) effortlessly, as the angels
and other spiritual beings are supposed to do, right? I say ‘most of us’ instead
of ‘all of us’ because the existence of special psychic capabilities, such as telepa-
thy, has not been discarded yet and therefore it could happen that specially-gifted
people could see and/or communicate telepathically with beings coming from such
universes with different laws of Physics than ours. These beings would include,
in particular, plain extraterrestrials (not especially spiritual) coming from other
universes just for scientific or other mundane purposes.
As a matter of fact, a good question for a psychically-gifted person (or for a cat!)6
would be how he/she/it can distinguish ‘who is who’ among the entities he/she/it
is supposed to see. I already asked this question to a reader of my article who
told me that other dimensions and parallel universes truly exist because he can
see, and sometimes communicate with, intelligent beings coming from them. So I
asked him what these beings look like and how he can distinguish among them.
He said: ‘I see different types of entities, including angels, although most of them
are human beings in their ‘astral bodies’ (either alive or dead). I have rarely seen
extraterrestrials, but I don’t know if they were in their physical bodies from another
universe, as you suggest. I have the impression that they were in their astral bodies,
in the same way that astral travellers among us visit other planets as well.7 One
distinguishes these entities by their general appearance: body, face, clothing and
also the aura. In addition, alive beings in their astral bodies have some sort of
‘silvery cord’ that connects them with their physical bodies, although it can be
6
Cats have the reputation of having great psychic powers and of being able to see all kinds of entities
invisible to the human eye. The aforementioned T. Lobsang Rampa even claimed that his book ‘Living
with the Lama’ had been written by one of his cats who dictated the contents to him telepathically, the
introduction being written by another cat.
7
The astral body is supposed to be able to travel many orders of magnitude faster than light. This
would not contradict any known laws of Physics, though, because the astral body would not be made
out of matter/energy of this universe, but out of matter/energy of the ‘astral universes’, which would
have very different laws of Physics. The high speed and low cost of astral travel would not be the only
advantages with respect to exploration of outer space: astral astronauts could also approach stars and
black holes as much as they wanted, and even jump inside, returning back safely without suffering any
damage (the astral body is supposed not to feel gravity, having the tendency to float instead).

10
 very faint and difficult to spot’. Then I asked him whether it would be possible
to confuse an angel or any other ‘spiritual being’ with an extraterrestrial visiting
us from another universe. He said: ‘Yes, it could be possible because angels and
all spiritual beings create their appearance at will with their minds (face, body,
clothing, wings on and off, etc.). Angels like to look like handsome human-like
beings (whether terrestrial or extraterrestrial). For this reason angels watching
over ugly extraterrestrial humanoids also look very ugly, according to our taste,
although very beautiful for them. So, it would be possible to confuse ‘ugly’ angels
with equally ugly aliens, and the other way around, very handsome extraterrestrials
may look like beautiful angels for us’.

• There are many reports of ‘extraterrestrials’ who look like pure-energy

beings of light without bodies. Do you think that all the extraterrestrials
could be in fact disembodied beings? Also, do you think that in the
future we could become like these beings of light, too?
These questions are related to the previous one. First of all, there are also many
reports about extraterrestrials with physical, solid bodies. For example, today
Ed Mitchell, lunar module pilot of Apollo 14, reported that the Roswell incident
was true and one of the aliens on board was still alive when the spacecraft was
found by the USA military8 . So I don’t see any reason to think that all possible
extraterrestrials around (if any!) must lack a physical body. On the other hand,
I do not believe in the existence of disembodied beings at all, although perhaps
there are entities which are visiting our universe and have a body from another
universe with different laws of Physics. This is why we could not see their bodies
and they could go through walls and ceilings! And the other way around, these
beings would not be capable of seeing our bodies either unless they had that psychic
capability, provided this capability exists at all. So, to me this is very simple: all
intelligent beings who happen to exist (be human-like, or animal-like or angel-like,
etc.) have a body (at least one!)9 , no matter from which universe they come, and
these bodies are solid and well visible to the inhabitants of their own universes, or
another universes with the same laws of Physics as their own.
About the second question, if you ask if our biological species could evolve towards
‘pure-energy beings of light’ in this physical universe, the answer is no. I do not
8
In July 1947 the military base near Roswell (New Mexico, USA) issued a press release announcing
that they had captured an alien spacecraft that had crashed nearby. Three days later they retracted
their statement: the alien spacecraft was only an atmospheric baloon.
9
The metaphysical ‘standard model’ says that human beings (terrestrial and extraterrestrial) have
seven bodies: physical, etheric, astral, mental and the three superior bodies, each belonging to a different
universe or ‘plane of existence’. Animals have the four inferior bodies whereas angels and all other
‘spiritually advanced’ beings have only the three superior bodies.

11
 believe that the laws of Physics of this, or any other, universe will ever allow the
emergence of disembodied intelligent beings.
As a matter of fact, your question fits better in metaphysics than in ordinary
science. In the metaphysical ‘standard model’ all conscious beings (human beings,
animals, angels, etc.) are just visitors of the universes they inhabitate. The reason
would be that consciousness cannot be created in any universe, no matter the laws of
Physics. For example, this implies that nobody in any universe could ever construct
a robot or computer that could become conscious. Individual consciousness would
have been separated, not created, from an enormous ocean of consciousness that has
always existed, without beginning and without end, and is the ultimate cause for
the existence of everything else. So, following these views, since our consciousness
cannot emerge from any complex system (such as our brain), it turns out that
we are all aliens in the universes we inhabit and our bodies are nothing but the
astronaut suits necessary to live in these universes. Coming back to your question,
in the metaphysical standard model, we human beings are supposed to live many
lives in ‘physical universes’, where the mind has very little power over matter,
working very hard, and resting in between in ‘astral universes’, where it is always
vacation time because the mind can create all the basic needs: housing, furniture,
clothing,... Now, after many incarnations in the physical and astral universes we can
be promoted to better, more spiritual universes where the power of the mind over
matter is much stronger than in the astral universes. This way, we would become
spiritual ‘beings of light’ without any physical, etheric and astral bodies, although
we would still have the more superior bodies made out of the matter/energy of
the more spiritual universes we would inhabit. These bodies would be invisible
for most inhabitants of the physical universes and also for most inhabitants of the
astral universes.

• Did you have any unusual experiences yourself that motivated the writ-
ing of your article?
Not directly; I have never seen a UFO, nor have I tried to see one or to get in
contact with aliens, as some people do. Indirectly, I had a most unusual experience
more than twenty years ago that has been a source of inspiration indeed, although
the true motivation to write the article was simply to reply to the ideas of the
cosmologist Ken Olum, as I explain in detail in the article.

• What kind of experience did you have? Could you say something about
it?
This is a rather long story. In May 1984 a cousin of mine invited me for coffe
at her place and she also invited an old friend of hers. She warned me about

12
 the possibility of hearing strange statements because her friend was in contact
with extraterrestrials for several years already. At her place the conversation was
revolving around normal matters. He was a completely normal-looking guy with a
normal job. After one hour or so we brought up the subject of summer vacations.
At his turn he said, with a completely normal voice and straight face: ‘I will go with
my friends in July, we have already arranged things. We will be a couple of days
in the bases of the Moon and then they will bring me three weeks to Ganymede10
again. Last summer I spent some days in Confraternity City, where there is a
terrestrial colony of about 12.000 people. They have a very interesting museum
of History of Earth, where you can see the bodies of the prophet Elijah and the
patriarch Enoch. They were living in Ganymede for hundreds of years until they
died’.
Although I didn’t believe a word and I really thought he was crazy, I tried to show
some interest, mainly out of politeness (he was very polite himself), and so I started
asking some questions. I asked how the view of Jupiter was from Ganymede, how
long it takes to travel to the Moon and to Ganymede, how many people inhabit the
satellite and what his friends look like. His answers were: ‘Jupiter is enormous, it
covers almost the whole sky’, ‘The trip to the Moon takes only two or three minutes,
to Ganymede it depends on the spacecraft. In standard ones the trip takes a bit
more than three days whereas in cylinder-shaped motherships the trip takes only
three hours’. ‘There are about two and a half million people in Ganymede, that they
call Morlen, distributed mainly in five cities. In Crystal City is the government of
Morlen as well as the government of the Confederation to which Morlen belongs. It
is a Confederation of the 24 more advanced worlds in our galaxy and the government
is called the Council of the 24 Elderly’. ‘My friends from the bases on Earth are
mainly from Ganymede, although you can meet people from the other 23 worlds
as well. Most of them look similar, although taller or shorter depending on which
world they come from. In general they are very handsome (angel-looking faces) with
long blond hair, white skin and light-colored big eyes (a bit oblique), and most of
them look like 40 years old, although they can be 300, 600, 800 years old since they
can live until 1.200 (terrestrial) years and they master anti-aging technology. The
most impressive-looking ones are the giants from planet Apu, in Alpha Centauri,
who are about three meters tall and in addition wear very long, almost white hair.
My friends from Ganymede are also quite tall: more than two meters’.
At that moment I replied back: ‘So, they are quite similar to us, although taller and
more handsome, and in addition they are the most evolved people in our galaxy.
What a coincidence! How lucky we are that we have such wonderful neighbors!’
Then he said with a serious expression: ‘This is not a coincidence, I am affraid, but
10
Ganymede, one of the moons of Jupiter is also the largest satellite in the Solar System, larger than
the planets Mercury and Pluto.

13
I prefer not to give you the details. You are still too young and you wouldn’t be
able to handle the facts. Just let me tell you that they arrived at this part of the
galaxy: Alpha Centauri, the Solar System, the Pleyades, etc. almost three million
years ago. They established themselves in artificial colonies without any natural
life, so they constructed their worlds completely from scratch. They didn’t bring
animals along and therefore they only have plants and are vegetarian’.
Then I asked him how he got in contact with his friends and how they could
understand each other. He said: ‘They contacted me; I had never been interested
in UFO’s and extraterrestrials’. ‘They have three glands inside the brain that we
don’t have. One of them produces very strong telepathic capabilities, so they do not
speak with the mouth, only by telepathy. It is very easy to understand them because
they speak a ‘universal language’ that is converted inside the receptor’s brain into
his/her mother tongue. For this reason they don’t use technological devices for
communications either, like phones or radios, they communicate exclusively by
telepathy, even from one planet to another’.
Then he gave us the advice that we should never try to get in touch with aliens:
‘There are some very dangerous humanoids, who come from another universe, that
do horrible things to us. Although some groups of people have been lucky and
have entered into telepathic communication with people from the Confederation,
including some of my friends, the risk of getting the wrong extraterrestrials is high’.
Then I asked: ‘What do you mean by another universe, do you mean that they
come from another galaxy? No, I mean another universe. There are 22 dimensions,
not just the three that we know in our universe. For this reason there are lots of
universes. These guys live in a universe nearby. The entrance to our universe is very
close to the Solar System and once they enter they only have to travel for three days
to reach Earth. They are not allowed to come here, of course, but they do it anyway.
So, these guys are a real nightmare for my friends who do their best to chase them
away. In fact, they have crashed more than once during the persecutions because
their technology is far below the technology of the Confederation. Otherwise they
would have taken over the planet and made us their slaves’. Finally I asked him
whether he knew if all the universes are like ours. He said that the universe of the
intruders is like ours, unfortunately, but as far as he had heard, many universes are
different than ours.
I never saw him again (nor did I want to!). I had no doubts that he had a deep
psychiatric illness whereas my cousin defended him saying that she had known him
very well for many years and he was neither a liar nor crazy, therefore the story
had to be true, no matter what.
For the following fourteen years or so I did not think at all about the subject of
extraterrestrial civilizations. Unexpectedly, one day around 1998 the subject came

14
up somehow when talking to my friend Maite at her place. Then she showed me a
couple of curious books about alleged contacts. One of the books, ‘Los Manuscritos
de Geenom (II)’ (The Manuscripts of Geenom (II)) was written by a group based in
Madrid, the Aztlán group, which claimed to be in telepathic communication, once
per week and for about twenty years already, with some citizens of planet Apu (the
communications were supposed to be transmitted from planet to planet). The other
book had for its title ‘Yo visité Ganı́medes’ (I visited Ganymede), by Yosip Ibrahim.
So, suddenly I got ‘teletransported’ back to the coffee session fourteen years earlier.
I read these two books and, for the first time, I realized that I had never spent a
single minute in my life thinking seriously about the subject of extraterrestrial
civilizations, even though I had always been open-minded regarding the possibility
of alien visitors. I became aware that this issue could be much more important and
have much more far-reaching consequences than I, and most open-minded people,
naively could have imagined.
After spending some time thinking about this issue I reached the conclusion that
it was not possible to discard the scenario described by the friend of my cousin,
no matter how strange it seemed to me. There were only two crucial questions
to be answered: Would a civilization, millions of years ahead of us, be able to
colonize places like the large satellites of Jupiter? and, would such a civilization be
able to completely conceal itself from external observers? My answer to these two
questions was undoubtedly positive.
In the following two years Maite and I read a few more books [13] about the
Confederation-Apu-Ganymede affair, for our own records, and that was all. It
never crossed my mind to write an article about primitive versus advanced civiliza-
tions, and even less to try to find the ‘truth’ about the whole issue. However, in
March 2003 the article by Ken Olum [14] appeared in the scientific archives and
triggered my attention again to the subject. He was saying that our small terres-
trial civilization should be part of a galactic civilization spanning a large region of
the galaxy, as followed from his computations, but however we are not part of such
a civilization, as observation confirms. Needless to say, this article provoked deep
feelings in me, even though I didn’t agree with Olum’s arguments. So I started
thinking seriously again about the issue and shortly after I had the ideas of the
Subanthropic Principle and the Undetectability Conjecture. Then I decided to
write an article discussing the possibility that our terrestrial civilization could be
embedded in a large advanced civilization without being aware of it.

15
References
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[2] I. Crawford, ‘Where are they?’, Scientific American, July 2000

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[4] J.W. Deardorff, ‘Possible extraterrestrial strategy for Earth’, Q. J. R. Astron. Soc.,
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[5] W.I. Newman and C. Sagan, ‘Galactic civilizations: Population dynamics and inter-
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[6] R. Jastrow in videos of the series ‘The Universe of Stephen Hawking’, 1996.

[7] C. Vafa, private communication.

[8] B. Gato-Rivera, ‘Brane Worlds, the Subanthropic Principle and the Undetectability
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[9] N. Arkani-Hamed, S. Dimopoulos and G.R. Dvali, Phys. Lett. B429, 263, 1998; Phys.
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[10] L. Randall and R. Sundrum, Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 4690, 1999.

[11] R. Maartens, Living Rev. Rel. 7, 1, 2004.

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[12] G.F. Giudice, R. Rattazzi and J.D. Wells, Nucl. Phys. B 544, 3, 1999.
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[13] Y. Ibrahim, Mi preparación para Ganı́medes, 1975.

J.J. Benitez, OVNIS: SOS a la Humanidad, 1975.
Grupo Aztlán, Los Manuscritos de Geenom (I), 1993.
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[14] K. Olum, ‘Conflict between anthropic reasoning and observation’, gr-qc/0303070

version V1.

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