by David B. Trout
Exploration of other star systems requires not only the ability to construct a craft capable of attaining speeds approaching that of light, but also a species with an extremely long lifespan. After all, what good is an expedition if, upon their return, all of their contemporaries are dead? Therefore, for interstellar travel to be feasible, the average lifespan of the species must be at least long enough for an expedition to reach its objective, perform studies, and return with the information and/or resources within a single generation. Given the vast distances between stars and the likely rarity of life-supporting planets, such a super long lifespan would certainly need to be at least an order of magnitude greater than our own. I believe the Bible records such an expedition to our planet. The reason behind this expedition can only be speculated, but the textual evidence appears overwhelming.
(See Eric Stetson’s long essay on UFOs and the Bible for specifics.)
The Bible speaks of gods and angels, but words written in ancient times should not necessarily be taken literally. As Gerald L. Schroeder explains in Genesis and the Big Bang,
“We all have an emotional stake in religion. Be it pro or con, our psyches will resist changes in our perceptions of the Bible’s meaning.
“Perceptions of this information require an interpretive understanding of the text.
“An analogy of such interpretation might be a layman reading a text written in scientific notation. For example, statement 103 could be read as a typographical error for 103. To the trained scientist, it is obvious that 103 is read as 1000. The information held within the biblical text, but beyond the literal reading of the words, was as obvious to those versed in biblical interpretation as the fact that that, to anyone who knows scientific notation, 103 means 1000 and not 103.”
Now that we know more about the universe, we can interpret the Bible in terms of extraterrestrial visitation. The immortality of “God’s messengers” might be real only in relative terms.
The Bible’s Old Testament very carefully records the chronology of several generations of beings from Adam through Ishmael. The average lifespan of these beings, at least for the first ten generations recorded, is well over 900 years – plenty long enough for interstellar exploration to be feasible. From the eleventh generation (Shem) on through the twenty-first generation (Ishmael), the lifespan drops dramatically to less than 200 years. If one draws a timeline chart from this information, several interesting things come to light.
The first is that we are unable to plot an accurate timeline for Enoch, since (according to Genesis 5:21-24) when he was 365 years old, “[He] walked with God; and he was not, for God took him.”
Where was Enoch taken?
The second interesting thing to note is the average age each was upon becoming a father. Up until Noah, each generation of men became fathers when they were 100 to 200 years old. Not so with Noah. Noah waited until he was 500 years old before fathering Shem. Is it just coincidence that at this age Enoch would have been over 900 years old? Could Noah have been waiting for Enoch to return from wherever he had gone with “God”?
The third interesting thing to note is how life spans steadily drop each generation after Shem. Could this have anything to do with the crossbreeding that took place between these superhuman beings and our earthly evolutionary ancestors as recorded in Genesis 6:2-3: “the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair, and they took to wife such of them as they chose”; and more explicitly in verse four: “when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them”? Or maybe they didn’t have any choice in the matter because there weren’t enough of them remaining after the flood to make breeding among their own species possible?
Couple these speculations with the fact that the so-called evolutionary “missing link” has never been found, as well as the quite sudden appearance of modern Man 40,000 years ago (editor’s note: recent evidence pushes the date back even farther), and it becomes all too clear as to where our real “roots” lie. Consider this quote from Genesis and the Big Bang:
“Three million years ago in a region of Hadar, Ethiopia, and in Laetoli, Tanzania, animals that walked upright with a smooth and erect bipedal stride first appeared. This means that for three million years a type of animal moved about with hands-free for grasping and using objects. Yet during almost this entire period, the manufacture of tools evolved only slightly, being confined to the making of stone cores and flint blades… at the start of the final 1 percent of the time that bipeds have been roaming the Earth, tools diversified at a rate far in excess of anything seen during the previous 99 percent of their tenure.”
Could it be that extremely advanced, long-lived beings from space discovered our planet long ago and established their own colonies, eventually mixing their genes and knowledge with the ape-men? This explanation fits all the facts.