There are a number of theories as to why it is that we have no contact with extraterrestrial races.  Two common theories that persist today are that such races are short-lived and hence rare, or that they are around but do not care enough to go to the trouble of contacting us.  However, both of these theories assume that the problems we have in our society with unwise and outright unethical behaviours are unsolvable.  In other words, for a race to be short lived it must fail to develop the wisdom necessary to make the decisions necessary to become long lived and for a race not to bother contacting us they must not care about the suffering and evil of our world and hence would have to lack an ethical nature.  Now, although there has been a lack of evidence that the problems of wisdom and ethics can be solved within a race, failure to develop such solutions to date does not constitute proof that such solutions do not exist.  As such, such theories are purely idle speculations in the absence of sufficient evidence.  The only other significant theory that supports the failure for extraterrestrials to contact us is that the number of planets that can support life is exceedingly small, however until astronomy can give an accurate assessment of this number, nothing can be said about this possibility.  All of these possibilities rely on the idea that interaction between the races is either difficult or impossible, that there simply are no extraterrestrials around to speak to us or that their motivation to contact us is insufficient to make them overcome the difficulties.  There is another possibility, one that says that extraterrestrials would not contact us even if travel to our world was a simple affair and despite their having a perfectly developed ethical society.

            Now, this theory is closely related to the problems we have all been exposed to through science fiction concerning temporal contradictions, and so I’ll start by discussing such contradictions in greater detail.  There are three reasonable theories as to how time avoids contradiction.  Many science fictions have story lines in which contradictions occur, however these are pure nonsense and as such are unworthy of consideration.  The first theory is that only the present exists, that the past goes out of existence and the future comes into existence as time flows.  In this view, time travel is impossible since there is no place for a time traveller to go to.  Since time travel would not exist, temporal contradictions could not exist.  The only evidence that exists that would appear to support this theory is the lack of contradictions in the universe, that if other times existed then time travel would have to be possible and if such were possible then temporal contradictions would have to exist, so since contradictions do not exist, other times must not.  If it could be shown that a single non-temporal potential contradiction exists then this would show that the non-existence of other times is not the cause of the non-contradictory nature of our universe and would hence render this theory complete speculation.  The second view of how temporal contradictions are avoided is the parallel universe, and its cousin, the split timeline theories.  In this view, when a contradiction occurs, both resultant universes exist, the event going one way in one universe and the other way in the other.  In this way, if a time traveller were to try to kill their father before their conception an individual in one parallel universe would see them leave but never return, an individual in the other universe would see the time traveller appear but would have no clue who they are since they were never born in that universe, some mysterious stranger having killed their father, and so never existed to travel back in time.  The problem with this theory is that it demands the existence of an infinity of nearly identical universes and also that time act on the individual to force them into the correct, non-contradictory universe.  So, superficially this theory looks like a good answer, however it demands a complexity and structure to time that there is no justifiable reason to believe exists.  The third theory is that the universe simply exists in a non-contradictory state.  That when the time traveller traveled back to kill their father before their conception, that the only universe that exists, the one we live in, is the one in which the time traveller failed.  So, the universe we live in would be the one in which there existed a banana peal in the path of the time traveller so that as they approached their father they would slip and break their neck.  Any conceivable universe in which such a banana peal did not exist would have resulted in a contradiction and so would not exist.  Now, since we can conceive of the possibility of such a universe existing, of there being nothing that blocks a potential contradiction from occurring, (a universe without that banana peal) the fact that the contradiction is always blocked would produce the illusion of a force.  In other words, it would appear as though the universe acted to move the banana peal into the path of the time traveller.  However, it would not be that the banana peal moved, rather, any universe in which the peal was in the wrong location would have been blocked from existence.  Unlike the previous two theories which have little or no evidence supporting them, this view of temporal non-contradiction leads to a fundamental explanation of psychic phenomena, consciousness and spiritual ethics, as I discuss in my theory of psi.

            Now, there are two basic categories of temporal contradiction.  The first is the deliberate contradiction presented previously in which an individual intentionally acts to counter something they know happened, such as preventing their own birth.  The second contradiction is the contradiction of non-beginnings.  Although the evidence suggests that matter, in its most fundamental form, does not require a beginning, the form of that matter does have to originate at some point.  One temporal contradiction of this type is that of the man who travels back in time to conceive himself.  The genes that dictate this person’s physical form have to evolve, however since they are conceiving themselves their genes have no connection to evolution and hence have no beginning.  A second contradiction is of the individual who takes an invention they learn about and travel into the past to become its inventor.  Since they did not invent the invention, and since they removed the ability of the original inventor to invent it, the result is that the invention is denied a beginning.  It is this contradiction of non-beginning that leads to an understanding of the behaviours of time travellers and extraterrestrials.  In the case of time travel, a time traveller would have to ensure that no science or technology were to travel back in time to anyone who did not already possess such knowledge.  This would include any evidence that such science could, at a future time, exist.  If people where to find out that time travel existed, even if they did not acquire the technology to, themselves, travel in time, this knowledge would prevent the individual who discovers that such things are possible from making that discovery.  The result would be that a time traveller would have to hide everything they did.  This would be necessary not just to prevent people from seeing that time travel existed, but also to hide every aspect of their motivation so that the reasons for their actions could ultimately be discovered and developed.  The consequence of a time traveller ignoring the necessity of preventing these contradictions would be that the universe would have to exist in a form where these contradictions do not exist, the universe would have to exist in a form where the time traveller crosses paths with the previously mentioned banana peal.  However, this form of contradiction is not just restricted to temporal contradictions, a contradiction of non-beginning also becomes an issue within an infinitely old universe.  Say we were to acquire our knowledge and technology from another, older race.  On the surface, this would not seem to produce any problems, however if it were acceptable for us to take this shortcut and acquire all our knowledge from such a race, it would be just as acceptable for them to acquire their knowledge from an even earlier race.  Any and all races that have to acquire their knowledge from scratch would suffer do to the lack of wisdom and understanding necessary to solve their races social problems, and so all such races would be motivated to take the shortcut and bypass this period.  As such, if we were to attempt to acquire our knowledge from a previous race then that race would likewise have attempted to acquire its knowledge from an even older race, and this even older race would have acted to acquire its knowledge from an even older race.  In an infinitely old universe this sequence would go on forever, thereby preventing this knowledge from having an origin.  Now, beyond this, if a race develops its own knowledge, in an infinitely old universe, there must always be another race before it, a race with its own knowledge that it had to have developed at a previous time.  However, this earlier race would itself be proceeded by an even earlier race.  This creates an infinite sequence in which each race that develops its own knowledge is proceeded by an earlier race that develops its own knowledge.  As a result, in order for an infinitely old universe to be non-contradictory it is necessary for there to be an infinite number of races which each develop their own knowledge and technology independently of any other race.  This line of reasoning is important to understand since on the surface it would appear that if a body of knowledge were developed at a past time then acquiring that knowledge would not create a contradiction of non-beginning, that this knowledge would have a beginning.  However, in order to prevent a contradiction of non-beginning it is not only necessary for there to be a beginning to the knowledge, there must, in fact, be an infinite number of such beginnings.  Since this infinite number of beginnings has to fit within the universe and since there is no special point in time for all of these beginnings to come ahead of, there would have to be as many beginnings of knowledge in the future as in the past.  Therefore, in order to prevent a contradictory universe, extraterrestrial races would have to act by ensuring that such future beginnings of knowledge occur, they would have to actively withhold their knowledge from at least some of the new races that develop.  Any race that were to ignore this responsibility would find that barriers would appear in their path, forcing them to be unable to transfer their knowledge.  Therefore, any wise race, any race that does not want to find its power restricted, would have to act by meeting such a responsibility.

            Now there are two final points that should be brought up.  First of all, this theory is dependent on the universe being infinitely old, however the big bang theory predicts that the universe is only about 15 billion years old, which is far less than infinity.  Although the big bang theory has become highly popular there are, in fact, two camps on this matter.  Those who hold onto the evidence say that since the universe is expanding the universe must have originated at a specific point in time.  However, those who hold onto logic point out that the concept of a finitely old universe, a universe with a beginning, is illogical, that non-existence cannot lead to existence, and that therefore any theory that predicts such a universe must be incorrect.  Despite the strength of the logical argument, science never lets go of a theory unless a better theory is developed to replace it; however, this second group has yet to present an alternate theory to explain the expansion of the universe.  Without such a counter theory the scientific community will never accept the possibility that the big bang interpretation of the expansion of the universe may be incorrect.  As it would happen such a counter theory does exist, however this theory is too extensive to be presented here.

            The second point that needs to be brought up is that this non-temporal potential contradiction is compatible only with the third of the three solutions discussed earlier for preventing temporal contradictions.  As mentioned earlier, the first of these theories, that only the present actually exists, says that time travel is impossible and that this is the reason no contradictions exist.  If it could be verified that non-temporal potential contradictions exist, that knowledge cannot be freely exchanged between extraterrestrial races, then this theory would be incapable of preventing all contradictions and so would fail to be a valid solution to the non-contradictory nature of the universe.  The second solution, that parallel universes exist, is dependent on an individual who attempts to produce a temporal contradiction, being transported into a parallel universe during the act of time travel.  However, a non-temporal contradiction would not involve time travel, and therefore there would be no process during which a hypothetical jump into a parallel universe could be conceived to occur.  So, only the third of these solutions, that the universe we live in is the one of all those conceivable that was devoid of contradictions, is possible in an infinitely old universe.

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