with cross-references to some related Correspondence

• To Zecharia Sitchin:  
• To The Editor (Letters for Publication) Radio Times
• To Reverend Father Tissa Balasuriya OMI
• Modern Science is catching up with Ancient Knowledge
• Postword - (a) Fr. Tissa Balasuriya's contributions to “theology in Asia” conflict with modern science and with traditional belief in the Near East, Africa and the Americas
• (b) Ninni, Innin, Inanna, Imini, Ishtar, Eshdar, Astarte, Ast, Ashtoreth, Anat, Isis, Venus, Aphrodite, Athena and Calypso may all be names for the same individual great-grand-daughter of Anu
• (c) Scientific & Human Implications of Ninurta's & Nergal's Detonation of Seven Atomic Bombs in the Sinai Peninsula in 2,024 B.C.
• To Doctor M. A. Zak Badawi
• Christopher Knight & Robert Lomas, The Hiram Key
• Where Is Everybody? - The Search For Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence
• To Zecharia Sitchin

Modern Science is catching up with Ancient Knowledge

“Will cloned sheep pave the way to cloned humans?” That was the question readers of the Home News section of The Tablet (1 March 1997) were invited to confront -

• “As ‘Dolly’, the first clone of an adult sheep, was displayed to the world's media by Scottish scientists this week, fears were raised over the possibility of the future cloning of humans.
• Dr Donald Bruce, who directs the Church of Scotland's Society, Religion and Technology Project in Edinburgh, is well acquainted with the scientists at the nearby Roslin Institute who produced the cloned sheep.
• He told The Tablet that while it would be ‘scare-mongering’ to say that human cloning was on the way, it would also be ‘irresponsible’ not to see the possibilities of the new techniques that are being pioneered on animals.
• Moreover, ‘people of different cultures often have different values’, he pointed out, ‘so what is currently unacceptable in the United Kingdom may not be so in a different culture’.”

That is very true.

• “A scene depicted on a rock carving found in the mountains of southern Elam [figure 1] depicts a seated deity holding a ‘laboratory’ flask from which liquids are flowing - a familiar depiction of Enki. A Great Goddess is seated next to him, a pose that indicates that she was a co-worker rather than a spouse; she could be none other than Ninti, the Mother Goddess or Goddess of Birth. The two are flanked by lesser goddesses - reminiscent of the birth goddesses of the Creation tales. Facing these creators of Man are row upon row of human beings, whose outstanding feature is that they all look alike - like products from the same mold”. (Zecharia Sitchin, The 12th Planet - The First Book of The Earth Chronicles, Stein & Day, 1976…)
• [All figures here referenced (and electronically viewable under somewhat different numbers) are, unless otherwise noted on the figures themselves, reproduced here by kind permission of Zecharia Sitchin from his The Earth Chronicles © series.]

Introducing himself on screen in 1992 to viewers of his 1-hour video-film Are We Alone In the Universe? (Paradox Media Ltd. & Why Not Productions, Switzerland), the author of the passage I have just quoted stated:

• “I am Zecharia Sitchin. I devoted a life-time to the study of ancient civilizations, ancient languages, their art, their beliefs, and the knowledge that they had, and the question is, when you study, when you look at all that: Is it myth? Is it mythology? Or did it really happen? I believe that it all really happened”.

Shaggy ape-men, very likely more closely related to chimpanzees than to apes, clad in leaves, feeding on grass and knowing “neither people nor land”, lived on planet Earth in friendship with the animals (figure 2) long before Enki and Ninharsag, the Chief Scientist and the Chief Medical Officer of the Elohim/gods mentioned in the Bible initially (about 300,000 years ago) as bringing into existence The Adam (figure 3: a hybrid produced by genetic engineering, in vitro fertilization techniques and subsequent implantation into the womb of an at least relatively young female Elohim of the ovum of a young but mature ape-woman appropriately combined with the semen of an Elohim donor whose DNA had the same extra-terrestrial origin but was, perhaps, as many as four million years more evolved in bio-evolutionary terms), but only later (perhaps 60,000 or more years later) as overcoming the need for repeated clonings by fashioning Adam and Eve, our first Neanderthal parents (their grandson Enosh may well have been the first cro-Magnon man).

The available evidence suggests that before and perhaps even after The Adam was, to the accompaniment of joyful celebrations (figures 4 & 5), brought successfully into being, there were a number of less successful attempts at genetic engineering - both attempts to produce a suitable animal that combined the characteristics of more than one species (figure 6), and attempts to combine animal and human characteristics in one and the same being (figure 7).

According to The Tablet's report:

• “The scientists from PPL Therapeutics and the Roslin Institute produced Dolly [figure 8] by removing cells from the udder of an adult sheep, growing those in a laboratory, and transferring the nucleus from those cells to an egg which had had its nucleus removed. The egg was then implanted into a surrogate mother sheep, and was later born as a genetic copy of the sheep from which the udder cells were taken.
• The immediate aim of this work was to develop proteins for use in human medicine. A news release from the Roslin Institute has acknowledged, however, that ‘benefits of the technology could include improvements in conventional animal breeding as well as in the biopharmaceutical industry”.

According to a report by Jeremy Laurance and Michæl Hornsby in The Times (24 February 1997), Dr Patrick Dixon, author of The Genetic Revolution, says the same technique could potentially be applied to human beings… When Solomon said that there is nothing new under the Sun, he clearly knew what he was talking about!

Postword - Fr. Tissa Balasuriya's contributions to “theology in Asia” conflict with

modern science and with traditional belief in the Near East, Africa and the Americas

On 3 February 1997 the secretariat of Catholic Women's Ordination UK (PO Box 197, ROCHESTER, Kent ME2 1ED) issued some “Useful Points towards understanding the theology of Fr. Tissa Balasuriya”, who is quoted as arguing in Mary and Human Liberation (Colombo: Logos Vol. 29 Nos. 1 & 2 March/July 1990, pp. 45-7) that “when analysing a doctrine it is necessary to approach it with a hermeneutic of suspicion… There are different explanations concerning the origin of Eve from Adam, but generally in favour of the priority of the male… The condition of Adam and Eve before the alleged ‘Fall’… is something about which we cannot know anything by reason or experience”.

The Tigris and Euphrates rivers have always been recognised as the rivers Hiddekel and Prath Genesis mentions as flowing out of Paradise along with the rivers Gihon and Pishon which, thanks to satellite photography, can now be identified as today's mainly subterranean Karun and Kuwait rivers (map 1).

Although the Biblical account of the creation first of The Adam and later of Adam and Eve draws upon two earlier Mesopotamian versions of these events, the writers of Genesis completely ignore a third and very likely more ancient version according to which Mankind was fashioned not out of clay but out of the blood of one of the Elohim - as the god Ea/Enki and the goddess Ninti/Ninharsag together “prepared a purifying bath”, Ea commanded “let one god be bled into it; from his flesh and blood let Ninti mix the clay”. Significantly an Aztec version of these events (in Manuscript 1558) also mentions bleeding: Quetzalcoatl (the Aztec name for Ea/Enki) “gathered the precious bones; the bones of man were put together on one side, the bones of woman were put together on the other side. Quetzalcoatl took them and made a bundle”. Then, going to “the place of our origin”, “the place from which we are descended”, he gave the bundle to the goddess Cihuacoatl (the Aztec name for Ninti/Ninharsag), who “ground up the bones and put them in a fine earthen tub. Quetzalcoatl bled his male organ on them”. As the other gods watched, she mixed the ground bones with the god's blood and from this claylike mixture Mankind was re-created. A Nahuatl codex found in the area of the Mixtec tribe (figure 9) depicts a god and goddess mixing an element that flows into a huge flask or vat with the blood of a god as it drips into this flask from which a clearly male Man is shown to be emerging. Also significantly an Ancient Egyptian artist depicts the god Khnemu (yet another name for Ea/Enki) assisted by one of his sons, Thoth (who is elsewhere said to have restored the god Horus to life at the request of Isis), holding up a newly created human being (figure 10).

If Fr. Balasuriya is correct in supposing that all human natural knowledge is nowadays “ideologically” tainted and that, in particular, Christian theologising has developed under the incubus of “an ideology of male domination”, this is neither a peculiarly Western problem nor the result of accepting the Biblical account of our origins. As students of Z. Sitchin's writings will readily appreciate, both polytheism and the macho attitudes detested by Yahweh first began to characterise non-Jewish forms of society when another of Ea's sons, Marduk, rose to power in Babylon after Enlil's son Ninurta and Ea's son Nergal had destroyed Sumerian civilization by detonating seven atomic bombs in the Sinai peninsula and its immediate neighbourhood in 2024 B.C. Millions upon millions of scattered bits and pieces of blackened rock (figure 11) still bear witness to that tragic event.

The serpent symbol associated with Ea, DNA, Ea's son Thoth and Ancient Egypt generally also connotes hidden knowledge/science/wisdom, mining, copper and healing (figure 12a,b,c,d). Ancient cylinder seals portray Enlil's displeasure at serpent-god Ea's successful creation of Adam and Eve, with penis-like fruit on the tree of life (gish-til in Sumerian) and vagina-shaped fruit on the tree of knowledge (figure 13a,b). Prior to 2024 B.C. life and ‘immortality’ were especially associated with the date-palm and Sinai peninsula (figure 14a,b), site of the main post-Flood space-port of the gods (figure 15a,b) which Abraham had at Yahweh's command helped to defend in 2041 B.C.(cf. the date formula for year 7 in the reign of Amar-Sin: MU NE IB.RU.UM BA.HUL, i.e., “year the shepherding-abode of IB.RU.UM was attacked” and a probably related cylinder seal, figure 16a,b). Intercontinental flights of the gods (figure 17a exhibits various stone-age depictions of celestial chariots in the Altamira, La Pasiega and El Castillo caves in Spain, the Font-de-Gaume and Pair-non-Pair caves in France; 17b reproduces an early Chinese image, and 17c is ex-NASA engineer Joseph Blumrich's technical interpretation of the Chariot of Ezekiel) are also associated with finds (figure 18) made during Vatican-sponsored excavations at Tell Ghassul across the river Jordan from Jericho. There are also cylinder seals (figure 19a,b) that confirm ancient familiarity not only with all the planets of our Solar system, including Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, but also with Saturn's rings and the position of the asteroid belt…

Unsurprisingly several insufficiently studied archaic Sumerian depictions of the pyramids of Egypt survive (figure 20a,b,c) since, although Colonel Howard Vyse and his assistants' deliberate forgery of the name of Khufu in 1837 in the till then sealed chambers above the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid at Giza has deceived many, Khufu's own surviving inscription from c. 2600 B.C. (figure 21) describes the adjacent small temple he erected as being dedicated to Isis as Mistress of the Great Pyramid only in succession to its earlier Mistress The Old Cow/Hathor/Ninharsag (co-creator of The Adam 300,000 years ago - “Live Horus Mezdau. To king of Upper & Lower Egypt, Khufu, Life is given! He founded the House of Isis, Mistress of the Pyramid, beside the House of the Sphinx… For his divine mother Isis, Mistress of the Western Mountain of Hathor, he made writing on a stela”. The Pyramid is also portrayed as already existing on one side of the victory-tablet of Pharaoh Menes-NarMer whose forceful unification of Upper & Lower Egypt established the First Dynasty (figure 22 with the relevant detail also enlarged), and the Sphinx is similarly included as a feature in First Dynasty depictions of the king's investiture by Ancient Ones arriving from elsewhere by boat and of his own eventual journey into Afterlife (figure 23a,b). A Mesopotamian cylinder zeal emphasises the post-Flood space-port-related function of the Great Pyramid (figure 24):

• “House bright and dark of Heaven and Earth, for the rocketships put together; E.KUR/Great Pyramid, House of the gods with pointed peak; for Heaven-to-Earth it is greatly equipped. House whose interior glows with a reddish Light of Heaven, pulsating a beam which reaches far and wide; its awesomeness touches the flesh, awesome ziggurat, lofty mountain of mountains - thy creation is great and lofty, men cannot understand it. House of equipment, lofty House of Eternity: its foundations are stones [which reach] the water; its great circumference is set in the clay. House whose parts are skillfully woven together; House the rightness of whose howling the Great-Ones-Who-See-and-Orbit brings down to rest… House which is great landmark for the lofty Shem; Mountain by which Utu ascends… whose deep insides men cannot penetrate”.

A Sumerian cylinder seal (figure 25) portrays Inanna/Ishtar c. 8670 B.C. challenging Marduk/Ra to combat as he defies her from somewhere inside the E-Bih/Great Pyramid, from which Ninurta had not yet removed its capstone nor any of the twenty-seven important crystals and other scientific devices it had been designed to house:

• “She ceased not striking the side of E-Bih and all its corners, even its multitude of raised stones, but inside… the Great Serpent [a reference to Marduk] who had gone in his poison ceased not to spit”.

The Babylonian Section of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania has published a fragmentary text recording Marduk's subsequent trial and sentencing after this Second (300 years after the First) Pyramid War. The important rôles then played, as so often previously, by both Hathor & Ishtar make Fr Balasuriya's ideologically tainted accusations of ancient patriarchal anti-feminine bias utterly incredible. I suspect that what Noam Chomsky wrote on 5 March 1977 (in a personal letter to J. D. Solomon) is also relevant here.:

• “We have a wholly false intuitive sense that we ‘understand’ the structure of language - or how could we use it so easily - and therefore find it difficult to adopt the proper stance of ‘psychic distance’ from which it becomes obvious how much that seems obvious intuitively is really mysterious and demands understanding’

It most certainly applies to the reckless “Hello, Dolly” editorial in The Tablet (1 March 1997):

• “Only in a totally reductionist sense could a human clone be regarded as a copy of another human being. Each would have his or her own individuality, personality, conscience, free will and soul. Each would be shaped quite differently, by upbringing and environment. A genetic clone of Hitler could just as well turn out to have the personality - and sanctity - of another St Francis’.

I suggest that if that is not heretical nonsense, nothing at all ever is!

Ninni, Innin, Inanna, Imini, Ishtar, Eshdar, Astarte, Ast,

Ashtoreth, Anat, Isis, Venus, Aphrodite, Athena and Calypso

may all be names for the same individual great-grand-daughter of Anu

Zecharia Sitchin reminds us that Inanna commuted in time past between her initial distant official domain in Aratta and her coveted abode in Uruk. “She called upon Enki in Eridu and Enlil in Nippur, and visited her brother Utu at his headquarters in Sippar. But her most celebrated journey was to the Lower World, the domain of her sister Ereshkigal. The journey was the subject not only of epic tales but also of artistic depictions on cylinder seals - the latter showing the goddess with wings, to stress the fact that she flew over from Sumer to the Lower World.

• The texts dealing with this hazardous journey describe how Inanna very meticulously put on herself seven objects prior to the start of the voyage, and how she had to give them up as she passed through the seven gates leading to her sister's abode. Seven such objects are also mentioned in other texts dealing with Inanna's skyborne travels: (1) the SHU.GAR.RA she put on her head. (2) ‘Measuring pendants,’ on her ears. (3) Chains of small blue stones, around her neck. (4) Twin ‘stones,’ on her shoulders. (5) A golden cyclinder, in her hands. (6) Straps, clasping her breast. (7) The PALA garment, clothed around her body.
• Though no one has as yet been able to explain the nature and significance of these seven objects,” Zecharia Sitchin feels “that the answer has long been available. Excavating the Assyrian capital Assur from 1903 to 1914, Walter Andræ and his colleagues found in the Temple of Ishtar a battered statue of the goddess showing her with various ‘contraptions’ attached to her chest and back. In 1934 archæologists excavating at Mari came upon a similar but intact statue buried in the ground. It was a life-size likeness of a beautiful woman. Her unusual headdress was adorned with a pair of horns, indicating that she was a goddess. Standing around the 4,000-year-old statue, the archæologists were thrilled by her lifelike appearance (in a snapshot, one can hardly distinguish between the statue and the living men). They named her The Goddess with a Vase because she was holding a cylindrical object (garden77.jpg). Unlike the flat carvings or bas-reliefs, this life-size, three-dimensional representation of the goddess reveals interesting features about her attire. On her head she wears not a milliner's chapeau but a special helmet; protruding from it on both sides and fitted over the ears are objects that remind one of a pilot's headphones. On her neck and upper chest the goddess wears a necklace.of many small (and probably precious) stones; in her hands she holds a cylindrical object which appears too thick and heavy to be a vase for holding water. Over a blouse of see-through material, two parallel straps run across her chest, leading back to and holding in place an unusual box of rectangular shape. The box is held tight against the back of the goddess's neck and is firmly attached to the helmet with a horizontal strap. Whatever the box held inside must have been heavy, for the contraption is further supported by two large shoulder pads. The weight of the box is increased by a hose that is connected to its base by a circular clasp. The complete package of instruments - for this is what they undoubtedly were - is held in place with the aid of the two sets of straps that crisscross the goddess's back and chest.
• The parallel between the seven objects required by Inanna for her aerial journeys and the dress and objects worn by the statue from Mari (and probably also the mutilated one found at Ishtar's temple in Ashur) is easily proved. We see the ‘measuring pendants’ - the earphones - on her ears; the rows or ‘chains’ of small stones around her neck; the ‘twin stones’ - the two shoulder pads - on her shoulders; the ‘golden cylinder’ in her hands, and the clasping straps that crisscross her breast. She is indeed clothed in a ‘PALA garment’ (‘ruler's garment’), and on her head she wears the SHU.GAR.RA helmet - a term that literally means ‘that which makes go far into universe.’ All this suggests to us that the attire of Inanna was that of an æronaut or an astronaut…
• The team headed by Andræ found yet another unusual depiction of Ishtar at her temple in Ashtur. More a wall scultpure than the usual relief, it showed the goddess with a tight-fitting decorated helmet with the ‘earphones’ extended as though they had their own flat antennas, and wearing very distinct goggles that were part of the helmet”. (The 12th Planet, pp.124-7.)

Scientific & Human Implications of Ninurta's & Nergal's

Detonation of Seven Atomic Bombs in the Sinai Peninsula in 2,024 B.C.

1. Despite Enlil's son Ninurta's reported and undoubtedly sincere attempts to dissuade Marduk's brother, Enki's son Nergal from harming human beings in any way when with Anu's permission they detonated seven atomic bombs in the Sinai Peninsula in 2,024 B.C., the immense unforeseen 24-hours-long radioactive whirlwind that ensued is reported in various surviving accounts to have resulted in what was, as far as Eridu, Nippur, Ur, Uruk and the whole of Ancient Sumeria as far North as Babylon and as far East as the Zagros Mountains was concerned, a human catastrophe without parallel:

• A cloud, brownish in colour during the daytime, “covered the land as a cloak, spread over it like a sheet.”
• “A storm, the Evil Wind, went around in the skies”.
• It “enveloped in terror, casting fear everywhere… a great wind which speeds high above, an evil wind which overwhelms the land”.
• “The Sun in the horizon it obliterated with darkness”.
• At night, however, its edges were luminous - “girt with dread brilliance it filleth the broad earth”.
• “The Moon at its rising it extinguished”.
• “Bearing gloom from city to city, carrying dense clouds that bring gloom from the sky”.
• “From the midst of the mountains it had descended upon the land, from the Plain of No Pity it hath come”.
• From the “Mount Most Supreme”, the “Mount of Howling Tunnels”.
• “On that day when heaven was crushed and the Earth was smitten, its face obliterated by the mælstrom - when the skies were darkened and covered as with a shadow”.
• “Causing cities to be desolated, [causing] houses to become desolate; causing stalls to be desolate, the sheepfolds to be emptied; that Sumer's oxen no longer stand in their stalls, that its sheep no longer roam in its sheepfolds; that its rivers flow with water that is bitter, that its cultivated fields grow weeds, that its steppes grow withered plants.”
• “The mother cares not for her children, the father says no ‘O my wife’… the young child grows not sturdy on their knee, the nursemaid chants not a lullaby… kingship has been taken away from the land”.
• “On the Land fell a calamity, one unknown to man: one that had never been seen before, one which could not be withstood”.
• An unseen death “which roams the street, is let loose in the road; it stands beside a man - yet none can see it; when it enters a house, its appearance is unknown”.
• This “evil which has assailed the land like a ghost… the highest wall, the thickest walls, it passes as a flood; no door can shut it out, no bolt can turn it back; through the door like a snake it glides, through the hinge like a wind it blows in”.
• “The people, terrified, could hardly breathe; the Evil Wind clutched them, does not grant them another day… Mouths were drenched in blood, heads wallowed in blood… The face was made pale by the Evil Wind”.
• “Cough and phlegm weakened the chest, the mouth was filled with spittle and foam… dumbness and daze have come upon them, an unwholesome numbness… an evil curse, a headache… their spirit abandoned their bodies”.
• “On that day, on that single day; on that night, on that single night… the storm, in a flash of lightning created, the people of Nippur left prostrate”.
• “The dead bodies, like fat placed in the Sun, of themselves melted away”.

2. Although Anu and Enlil had over-ruled Enki and Ninki when they “determined the consensus” that permitted Ninurta and Nergal with Inanna's full support to use the seven atom bombs Anu had had made some time previously but to detonate them neither in Mesopotamia nor in the sea but only in the Sinai peninsula and in Canaan, none of the Elohim had sufficiently realised how terrible would be the resulting explosion, the results of which are very clearly described in surviving Sumerian and Akkadian texts:

• “The great gods paled at its immensity”.
• “Gigantic rays reach up to heaven [and] the Earth tremble to its core”.
• Ninurta “to Mount Most Supreme set his course; the Awesome Seven without parallel trailed behind him. At the Mount Most Supreme the hero arrived; he raised his hand - the mount was smashed; the plain by the Mount Most Supreme he then obliterated; in its forests not a tree-stem was left standing”.
• Next Nergal “the King's Highway followed. The cities he finished off, to desolation he overturned them. In the mountains he caused starvation, their animals he made perish. He dug through the sea, its wholeness he divided. That which lives in it, even the crocodiles he made wither. As with fire he scorched the animals, banned its grains to become as dust”.
• “Lord, bearer of the Scorcher that burnt up the adversary; who obliterated the disobedient land; who withered the life of the Evil Word's followers; who rained stones and fire upon the adversaries”.
• Ninurta, “he who scorches with fire and [Nergal,] he of the evil wind together performed their evil. The two made the gods flee, made them flee the scorching. [The Spaceport,] that which was raised towards Anu to launch they caused to wither; its face they made fade away, its place they made desolate”.

The resulting huge scar in the Sinai peninsula has been recently photographed by NASA satellites, and in the central plain immediately North-North-East of this the soil remains unnaturally blackened by millions of fragments of rock fragments. The Dead Sea extends further South than it previously did, and remains entirely without marine life. Levels of radioactivity are even today unhealthily high in the locality.

3. Seventy years were to pass before anything like normality could be restored:

• “On the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, only sickly plants grew… In the swamps grow sickly-headed reeds that rot in the stench… In the orchards and gardens there is no new growth, quickly they waste away… The cultivated fields are not hoed, no seeds are implanted in the soil, no songs resound in the fields”.
• “On the steppe, cattle large and small become scarce, all living creatures come to an end”.
• “The sheepfolds have been delivered to the wind… The hum of the turning churn resounds not in the sheepfold… The stalls provide not fat and cheese… Ninurta has emptied Sumer of milk”.
• “The storm crushed the land, wiped out everything; it roared like a great wind over the land, none could escape it; desolating the cities, desolating the houses… No one treads the highways, no one seeks out the road”.

4. As numerous texts indicate, Enki and Marduk gradually cured the afflicted, purified the waters, and made the soil grow edible vegetation once more. In 1953 B.C. Sumer and Akkad were officially declared habitable again, but it was Marduk's Babylon that Anu and Enlil then made “supreme in the world” - until Assyria displaced it… 

The Hiram Key

Pharaohs, Freemasons and the Discovery of the Secret Scrolls of Jesus

SELECTED EXTRACTS WITH CRITICAL NOTES ADDED:

This document may be consulted by bona fide and appropriately qualified students applying to Creativity House.

Where Is Everybody?

“Rather than having generations living and dying on board space colonies bound for nearby stars, we may find ways of allowing those present at departure to be present when the colony arrives at its destination. While space technologists and physicists publish papers on interstellar flight, biologists study the phenomenon of ageing, with the prospect of one day extending the human life span. Already the life spans of small mammals such as mice and rats can be doubled by no more than restricting feeding from birth. Biologists are also working on the biochemistry and physiology of hibernation, on suspending normal metabolism. So could a technique to extend the human life span considerably be linked with a method of hibernation for interstellar travellers?

There may, of course, be better solutions. Some biologists are looking at ways of breeding animals artificially from conception to birth, while people in computer technology are producing artificial intelligence and primitive mobile computers. Most experts in computer science accept that eventually something like a human level of intelligence may be produced artificially. Competent robots could then become as common as washing machines. No household would want to be without its robot. This development - because of the economic pressures to make better computer technology - could come before biologists can find ways of suspending animation or extending the human life span. Thus, given the availability of really intelligent robots, the hibernating or deep-freezing of human interstellar travellers looks like old-fashioned science fiction. With robots available, we could use what might be called ‘terminal conception’. Deep-frozen sperm and ova would be packed aboard the spaceship so that their DNA could be combined when the time was right. The resulting human beings could then grow up and be educated in time for their arrival in the target planetary system, or when a suitable habitat had been built for them in orbit. This process would be managed by the robots, all the way from breeding and caring for the embryos to touchdown training. Suitably rational robots might make good parents for the first generation of a new civiliization. A variation on this theme would be to have intelligent robots who could synthesise the genes necessary to produce that first generation. On the other hand, the robots, having done all the work, might decide to forget about the DNA of their human masters and establish a world fit for robots to live in…”

^{(pp. 128-9.)}

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