Cosmic Womb

Cosmic Womb
Author: Chandra Wickramasinghe, Ph.D.
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 540
Release: 2017-12-19
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1591433088

Compelling evidence that life, intelligence, and evolution on Earth were seeded by comets and cosmic intelligence • Explains how life first came from interstellar dust and comets and how later arrivals of cosmic dust and comets spurred evolution • Explores the possibility that universal knowledge may be stored in human DNA and how ancient cultures may have known a way to retrieve this knowledge • Reveals new discoveries about the dimensions of the Great Pyramid of Giza All ancient cultures link humanity’s origins to the heavens. The Egyptians, for example, were adamant that their ancestors came from the stars of Orion and Sirius. Today, however, religion and science assert that life arose spontaneously here on Earth. Did the ancients know our true cosmic origins? Have they left us clues? Expanding on the panspermia theory developed with the celebrated astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle--namely that the building blocks of life were imported to Earth by comets in the distant past--Chandra Wickramasinghe and Robert Bauval explore the latest findings in support of a cosmic origin for humanity. They detail the astrobiological discoveries of organic molecules deep in space, how microbes are incredibly resistant to the harshest conditions of space--enabling the transfer of genes from one star system to another, and the recent recovery of microorganisms from comets still in space. They argue that the universe was “born” and preset with the blueprint of life and that the cosmos must be teeming with lifeforms far older and perhaps far more developed than us. They show how life arrived on our planet in the form of interstellar dust containing alien bacteria approximately 3.8 billion years ago and how later comets, meteoroids, and asteroids brought new bacterial and viral genetic material, which was vital for evolution. Using the latest advances in physics, cosmology, and neuroscience, the authors explore how universal knowledge may be stored in human DNA and cells, and they postulate that ancient cultures, such as the pyramid builders of Egypt and the temple builders of India, may have known a way to retrieve this knowledge. Sharing new discoveries from experienced architects, engineers, and mathematicians, they show how the Great Pyramid is a three-dimensional mathematical equation in stone, bearing a potent message for humanity across time and space about who we are and where we come from.

First Contact

First Contact
Author: Marc Kaufman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2012-03-13
Genre: Science
ISBN: 143910901X

Kaufman details the incredible true story of science's search for the beginnings of life on Earth and the probability that it exists elsewhere in the universe.

The Island at the Center of the World

The Island at the Center of the World
Author: Russell Shorto
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2005-04-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400096332

In a riveting, groundbreaking narrative, Russell Shorto tells the story of New Netherland, the Dutch colony which pre-dated the Pilgrims and established ideals of tolerance and individual rights that shaped American history. "Astonishing . . . A book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past." --The New York Times When the British wrested New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, the truth about its thriving, polyglot society began to disappear into myths about an island purchased for 24 dollars and a cartoonish peg-legged governor. But the story of the Dutch colony of New Netherland was merely lost, not destroyed: 12,000 pages of its records–recently declared a national treasure–are now being translated. Russell Shorto draws on this remarkable archive in The Island at the Center of the World, which has been hailed by The New York Times as “a book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past.” The Dutch colony pre-dated the “original” thirteen colonies, yet it seems strikingly familiar. Its capital was cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic, and its citizens valued free trade, individual rights, and religious freedom. Their champion was a progressive, young lawyer named Adriaen van der Donck, who emerges in these pages as a forgotten American patriot and whose political vision brought him into conflict with Peter Stuyvesant, the autocratic director of the Dutch colony. The struggle between these two strong-willed men laid the foundation for New York City and helped shape American culture. The Island at the Center of the World uncovers a lost world and offers a surprising new perspective on our own.

Weird Life: The Search for Life That Is Very, Very Different from Our Own

Weird Life: The Search for Life That Is Very, Very Different from Our Own
Author: David Toomey
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2013-02-26
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0393089940

“Weird indeed, and not a little wonderful.”—Nature In the 1980s and 1990s, in places where no one thought it possible, scientists found organisms they called extremophiles: lovers of extremes. There were bacteria in volcanic hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, single-celled algae in Antarctic ice floes, and fungi in the cooling pools of nuclear reactors. But might there be life stranger than the most extreme extremophile? Might there be, somewhere, another kind of life entirely? In fact, scientists have hypothesized life that uses ammonia instead of water, life based not in carbon but in silicon, life driven by nuclear chemistry, and life whose very atoms are unlike those in life we know. In recent years some scientists have begun to look for the tamer versions of such life on rock surfaces in the American Southwest, in a “shadow biosphere” that might impinge on the known biosphere, and even deep within human tissue. They have also hypothesized more radical versions that might survive in Martian permafrost, in the cold ethylene lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan, and in the hydrogen-rich atmospheres of giant planets in other solar systems. And they have imagined it in places off those worlds: the exotic ices in comets, the vast spaces between the stars, and—strangest of all—parallel universes. Distilling complex science in clear and lively prose, David Toomey illuminates the research of the biological avant-garde and describes the workings of weird organisms in riveting detail. His chapters feature an unforgettable cast of brilliant scientists and cover everything from problems with our definitions of life to the possibility of intelligent weird life. With wit and understanding that will delight scientists and lay readers alike, Toomey reveals how our current knowledge of life forms may account for only a tiny fraction of what’s really out there.

Sky Woman Falling

Sky Woman Falling
Author: Kirk Mitchell
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2004-11-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101143584

She’s an FBI Special Agent and Modoc Indian. He’s a Bureau of Indian Affairs Investigator and Comanche. Together, Anna Turnipseed and Emmett Parker have proven to be “a memorable literary pair” (Publishers Weekly). Now, they’re called upon to tackle a case thousands of miles from their home-sweet-home on the range... On the New York reservation of the Oneida, the team finds the broken body of Brenda Two Kettles, a community elder, in a cornfield. From what Turnipseed and Parker can see, she wasn’t attacked. Instead, it seems Ms. Two Kettles—much like the woman in the Oneida creation myth—simply fell out of sky. But it’s a land dispute that has claimed Ms. Two Kettles’ life—one that threatens to ground Turnipseed and Parker in facts far stranger than fiction...

Ancient Alien Ancestors

Ancient Alien Ancestors
Author: Will Hart
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2017-07-18
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1591432545

Explores evidence for the theory of directed panspermia--that life on Earth and the landscape of Earth itself was engineered by extraterrestrials • Details how the Earth was terraformed through a sophisticated geo-engineering program, providing clear examples such as the precise mathematical longitude configurations of the Great Pyramid of Giza with the major rivers on Earth • Shows how our spectrum of blood types supports the theory of panspermia while directly contradicting the conventional “out of Africa” theory of evolution • Examines the strongest modern UFO accounts, including the Russian Roswell case, as well as the suppressed UFO sightings of NASA astronauts In the early 1970s, Nobel Prize-winning DNA co-discoverer Sir Francis Crick and his colleague Leslie Orgel proposed that in the distant past, an extraterrestrial race sent a spacecraft loaded with microorganisms to seed the Earth with life. Now, more than 40 years later, the fields of space research and biotechnology have advanced to the point where they can back up Crick and Orgel’s claims about our ancient alien ancestors. Sharing scientific evidence of alien involvement with life on our planet and with the very landscape of Earth itself, Will Hart refines the theory of directed panspermia--that life was intentionally seeded on Earth by extraterrestrials--to reveal that the same ET agency also created humans and generated civilization. He shows how the Earth was terraformed through an engineering program so sophisticated and vast that it has escaped our attention so far--for example, the major rivers on Earth are precisely aligned through geo-engineering with the Great Pyramid of Giza. Revealing the Great Pyramid as an alien message in stone, the author explains how the Giza pyramids could not have been built by the ancient Egyptians and examines the extraterrestrial energy technologies used to move the pyramids’ massive stone blocks, methods later rediscovered by Nikola Tesla and the builder of Coral Castle, Edward Leedskalnin. He details how an advanced race implanted the basic genome on Earth as well as genetically engineered the human race and shows how our spectrum of blood types supports the theory of panspermia while directly contradicting the conventional “out of Africa” theory of evolution. Investigating how the extraterrestrial agency behind the origin of civilization is still working behind the scenes today, the author examines the strongest modern UFO accounts, including the Russian Roswell case and the suppressed UFO sightings of NASA astronauts. He shows that this advanced ET civilization is not an alien race in the way we normally think of “aliens”--they are our ancestors and as human as we are.

The Seed Keeper

The Seed Keeper
Author: Diane Wilson
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021-03-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1571317325

A haunting novel spanning several generations, The Seed Keeper follows a Dakhóta family’s struggle to preserve their way of life, and their sacrifices to protect what matters most. Rosalie Iron Wing has grown up in the woods with her father, Ray, a former science teacher who tells her stories of plants, of the stars, of the origins of the Dakhóta people. Until, one morning, Ray doesn’t return from checking his traps. Told she has no family, Rosalie is sent to live with a foster family in nearby Mankato—where the reserved, bookish teenager meets rebellious Gaby Makespeace, in a friendship that transcends the damaged legacies they’ve inherited. On a winter’s day many years later, Rosalie returns to her childhood home. A widow and mother, she has spent the previous two decades on her white husband’s farm, finding solace in her garden even as the farm is threatened first by drought and then by a predatory chemical company. Now, grieving, Rosalie begins to confront the past, on a search for family, identity, and a community where she can finally belong. In the process, she learns what it means to be descended from women with souls of iron—women who have protected their families, their traditions, and a precious cache of seeds through generations of hardship and loss, through war and the insidious trauma of boarding schools. Weaving together the voices of four indelible women, The Seed Keeper is a beautifully told story of reawakening, of remembering our original relationship to the seeds and, through them, to our ancestors.

Whole Earth

Whole Earth
Author: John Markoff
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2022-03-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0735223955

Told by one of our greatest chroniclers of technology and society, the definitive biography of iconic serial visionary Stewart Brand, from the Merry Pranksters and the generation-defining Whole Earth Catalog to the marriage of environmental consciousness and hacker capitalism and the rise of a new planetary culture—the story behind so many other stories Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” Steve Jobs’s endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live. The contradictions are striking: A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a through line of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was “Access to Tools”; with rare exceptions he rejected politics for a focus on direct power. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world. Brand's life can be hard to fit onto one screen. John Markoff, also a great chronicler of tech culture, has done something extraordinary in unfolding the rich, twisting story of Brand’s life against its proper landscape. As Markoff makes marvelously clear, the streams of individualism, respect for science, environmentalism, and Eastern and indigenous thought that flow through Brand’s entire life form a powerful gestalt, a California state of mind that has a hegemonic power to this day. His way of thinking embraces a true planetary consciousness that may be the best hope we humans collectively have.