by Gerry Zeitlin
from OpenSeti Website

 

The term SETI Incrementalism (see below insert) was introduced on the New Search Strategies page to describe a very powerful determinant of conventional SETI strategy - powerful yet astonishingly unseen and unrecognized.


As explained, SETI Incrementalism is the process whereby incremental advances in human society's technology are said to justify models of ET societies' capabilities, which then reflects on proposed new SETI methodologies.

 

This is done unabashedly, unselfconsciously, and with no small degree of smugness by those presenting their latest brilliant proposals at the SETI meetings and colloquia and in the journals.
 


SETI Incrementalism

 
Here, as an example, is Harvard University Professor Paul Horowitz, speaking at an Optical SETI Conference, providing the justification for a new telescope that will scan for rapid light pulses:

"Using only Earth 2001 technology, we could now generate a beamed laser pulse that appears 5,000 times brighter than our sun, as seen by a distant civilization in the direction of its slender beam.

"In other words, interstellar laser communication is altogether practicable.

"The new Optical SETI Telescope will allow us to search the entire northern sky for such signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy."

I call this SETI incrementalism - tuning the SETI search strategy to match our present capabilities or those envisioned in the relatively near future.

Dr. Raghir Bhathal of the University of Western Sydney provides another example of the use of SETI incrementalism in making a case for optical SETI (Bhathal, 2000).

 

He points out that,

"a Moore’s Law doubling of laser technology over the last 40 years has seen laser power rise exponentially from the milliWatt lasers used in undergraduate laboratories to megaWatt lasers in industry.... [For instance] the National Ignition Facility in the US has produced laser powers in the teraWatt range (1012 Watts), albeit for short periods. These developments give tremendous credence to the search for ETI signals in the form of nanosecond laser pulses...."

Note the application of "Moore's Law" to laser technology only up to the present moment, with not a thought of the future.

In defining and calling attention to this process of building out search strategies to look for targets suggested by our developments at home, I don't wish to detract from the validity of performing the new searches. Prospective search targets should at least reflect our own present or projected technologies.

 

But using this rationale leaves us open to its converse, the fatal flaw in conventional SETI:

If we don't (yet) know how we would do it, then we doubt that anyone else would be able to do it, we shouldn't look, and we should probably dismiss evidence of it if we do find it.


Seen from a different perspective, these proposed advances in search methodologies are a succession of confessions that SETI has up to now gotten it wrong. Should we hope that it will now get it right?

A new, dark side of the process is SETI Decrementalism that projects human society's pathologies onto the ETs, making it necessary to build defensive measures into our search methodologies so that our search systems themselves will not be blown up by those for whom we search.

These dynamics illustrate that, in SETI, we search for ourselves.

Put another way, since we cannot face the truth of an ET presence with whom we are already in contact, we resort to interacting with our alter egos.

It would be much more useful to realize that the true dynamic has always been what we shall call Reverse Incrementalism. Can you think what that might mean? Please pause and try to guess.

Open SETI accepts, as part of its paradigm, that the most intimate contact between human and "ET" exists and has existed from the very beginning. Though sometimes overt and sometimes covert, this connection is a powerful determinant of human development - meaning development of the human form and human society, which includes technologies, institutions, psychology, religions - at least in their major aspects if not down to the detail level.

Reverse Incrementalism is the term used to describe the dynamic, at least on these pages. It may not be very useful outside of our context, but together with the other "-crementalisms" it assists in studying the dynamics we are discussing.

To illustrate, I would like to draw on a very important example that is competently expounded in the book Sight Unseen: Science, UFO Invisibility and Transgenic Beings by Budd Hopkins and Carol Rainey (2003).

Sight Unseen presents a number of high-strangeness UFO contact episodes, well documented, taken from Hopkins' caselog. Each selection suggests the use of a technology verging on what we would call magical - at least at first blush. The book's plan and method is for Hopkins to present the case, and then Rainey - a writer and filmmaker who produces documentaries on medical and scientific subjects - dissects the most puzzling aspects, looking for possible explanations in terms of our latest technological development.

The formula works well only part of the time. Rainey frequently draws on very simple explanations of science and engineering developments intended for the lowest-level audience and at times fails to make proper use of even this basic information. As a result, the explanations of the phenomena described fall far short of plausibility. This is not a surprising result, given that the phenomena are usually considered unbelievable by scientists in the very fields Rainey cites.

Rainey might have done better to seek farther afield. For example, Don Hotson in the Hotson Physics Forum (Topic: Timestorms) on this website suggests a mechanism for time displacement that would support effects described by Jenny Randles in her book Time Storms (2002) as well as cases in Sight Unseen.

That said, in the area of bioengineering, genetics, and particularly transgenics and cloning, Rainey shines: she not only provides for some of us (myself included) a much-needed review of current developments in these fields, but through showing strong parallels with elements of abductee reports taken from earlier years before we had gained our present understanding, she uses current knowledge to verify those cases. And in so doing she sheds much light on the possible programs of the abductors.

It should be clear, incidentally, that rather than ET technology incrementally developing in lock step with ours, as unconsciously implied by SETI proposals, it is we who incrementally develop what ET has already had. Doesn't that make much more sense?

Rainey devotes a good deal of space to the subject of transgenics: the process of transferring genes across species.

 

Recall that the process of gene transfer between species is an important element of strong panspermia, an evolutionary theory that is increasingly discussed and accepted in SETI circles. Rainey shows us that gene transfer not only occurs in nature, and in our laboratories (and industry!) but also in those "laboratories in the sky" known only too well by abductees.

Hopkins and Rainey feel they have enough material on the subject to justify a certain amount of speculation as to the nature of the aims and programs of the abducting entities. One gains some insight into how our own evolution and genetics, and theirs, may have long been intimately intertwined. This is not a pleasant subject to read about, but it does seem worthy of our attention.

Note: The issue of genetic manipulation by aliens is taken under question on the page Gnosticism, Archons/Greys, The Controller Agenda. That page discusses the work of John Lash, who develops the concept that the Gnostics knew our Greys as "Archons", and were fully aware of their wish to genetically change us. However, according to the Gnostics (according to Lash), the Archons could not do it so used deception to cause us to believe that they had.

The question of precisely who has and who does not have the ability to clone is at the core of an extraordinary new work by French author Anton Parks: a set of three books of which the first, Le Secret des Etoiles Sombres, was published in 2005. The second title, Ádam Genisiš, is in final preparation for publication.

 

Our extensive analysis of Parks' work is online at The Chronicles of the Gírků / Notes. Note there, section Who Clones.

According to Parks, most of the beings described as Archons by the Gnostics are indeed incapable of cloning, but they are associated with others who most assuredly are capable, and this has tremendous significance in terms of the history and identity of the human race.

Finally, it needs to be mentioned that there has been information circulating on the Internet concerning putative genetic studies and experiments on captured ETs by our own people. To gain an up-to-the-minute view of this would-be deep black area suggestive of genetic warfare, see Dan Burisch.

 

But Buyer Beware! Information on that subject would not be accessible via a simple Internet search except through a managed or controlled leak. Your mission, if you should accept it, is to read it and to try to guess what truly lies behind it.