The Sirius Headache

Just finished and oh my word what a slog it was, the Sirius Mystery by Robert Temple. It’s the updated version of the book originally published in 1976. The general thrust of the book is that, based on the oral traditions of the Dagon tribe in Africa which show knowledge of Astronomy that is a bit startling, namely that Sirius is a double star (actually a triple star) and that their tradition is that gods came down from heaven and gave them their civilization. He melds this with the Sumerian tradition of some kind of half man/half fish demon as the being who gave them their civilization and he comes up with the hypothesis that Amphibian Aliens from a planet in orbit around Sirius arrived on the earth and brought civilization to mankind.

Most of the book is a fairly tedious look at the place of Sirius in early Middle East and Greek mythology, with dizzying links to other topics such as the place of the number fifty and the like. It’s quite a slog and I’m not sure I a) got the point and b) do I care if I got the point.

Anyway it seems that the Dagon know something more about Sirius than they should given they were a tribe in Africa and didn’t have things like Einstein and Telescopes. They apparently held that Sirius was a system of 3 stars an idea that was only recently proven to be true, which I’d say is a point for Him. However he didn’t mention this much in the 76 material which suggests he was a little unsure of that. Which considering the wild nature of his central thesis I can understand.

But even granting the Dogon’s knowledge (and per the web there is some controversy over that ) I have a lot of trouble with this idea. Reasons follow.

While I am not totally opposed to the idea of space gods coming to earth and jump starting civilization, it doesn’t really scan for me. For one, while it’s possible, it’s extremely unlikely. We’ve been looking for signs of intelligent life in the universe for about 30 years now. We’ve seen squat. There are a lot of reasons that could be 1) We’re not looking in the right place, 2) we can’t recognize the footprints of a truly advanced civilization – like they really would be using radio waves 3) they are keeping us in the dark 4) they are too far away – the Galaxy’s a big place and 5) there is nobody out there.

I personally favor #5 or #4 – The earth is such a rare bird – a planet orbiting a single stable yellow sun, large moon, large planet like Jupiter to suck up a lot of the incoming comets, that it seems likely the number of like worlds would be rather small – at least when compared to the size of the Galaxy. And while it looks like life is hard wired into physics of the universe in some way the number of planets where life can take hold is limited. Then looking at the history of life on this earth some 4 billions years – an intelligence advanced to the point of civilization (cities, farming, rockets) has happened exactly once. Us.

The Galaxy may indeed be teeming with life but it could mostly in the form of bacterial mats.

Okay there is that, my, I admit, presumed, rarity of intelligence in the Galaxy, which leads to my second problem: our record when we’ve come into contact with more primitive folks is pretty dire. Even when we’ve gone in with all good intentions things get ugly fast. Hell there is little guarantee that aliens wouldn’t find us delicious rather than trying to build up our civilization. It seems such a new wave idea that, while aliens may indeed turn out to be Yoda like creatures with a desire to benefit all life, they could just as well regard us as finger food.

But what really kills this for me is the idea of Amphibian Aliens going through space and coming to earth. Several big problems with this.

1) Water bound creatures – water is heavy, a lot heavier than air. The energy required to toss an Apollo capsule full of water into orbit is staggering compared to a capsule full of air and look at the size of the Saturn Five, and the Shuttle rockets. I guess you could get around that by putting the passengers into suspended animation until they arrive at their location but in that case you’d have to be damn sure there was water there.

2) metallurgy - The history of civilization (on this planet anyway) is, in addition to things like the development of agriculture and writing, is the history of the use of metals – from copper to bronze to iron, to steel – all of which require heat -lots of it. We get that heat from fire – tin melts at a low temperature, copper is higher, and Iron requires a lot of heat and steel even more to make – there are other factors as well – I’m not a metallurgist – never mind aluminum, titanium and all the exotic alloys that go into aircraft and space ships. Now Temple cites the Dogon as saying the gods came in what he calls rocket ships (The word blood in the story interpreted as fire – not a bad idea really.) How in blue blazes does Temple suggest our amphibian friends got to do metallurgy?

3) The Dagon’s (to use one of Temple’s terms) biology. In a pretty staggering moment he suggests that the dagons were air breathers – since dolphins and whales are smart I guess and sharks aren’t – however this undercuts his hypotheses about life on Sirius – that it is a water covered planet. Dolphins and Whales (along with the extinct giant reptiles that swam the waters of the dinosaur era) are the descendants of land animals that returned to the sea. The reason they are air breathers is that their ancestors developed lungs from their gills and once you do that, you can’t go back – so they were stuck breathing air. They adapted very well but still air breathing is a handicap. Which when you start thinking space going you have even more of a problem – not only will you need water - you need air as well. There is a reason we shot monkeys and dogs into space first not dolphins.

Temple also tries to explain the apparent (I’ll leave it at that – this is too long anyway) rain water erosion of the sphinx by suggesting that the Gaza plaza was flooded to give the Amphibian Aliens a place to swim or something as they were also giving Egypt their civilization. It’s a pretty lame answer but it was probably the best he could do since he is stuck with a time line that doesn’t allow for the simplest explanation of water erosion – that the sphinx was built when it was raining in Egypt of a regular basis about 10,500 b.c. or so.

That’s about all I want to do on this – I’ve spent too much time and my head hurts. There was more I wanted to say but my motivation to do so is just not what it was.