Enrico Fermi was having lunch with Edward Teller, Herbert York, and another famous scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. It was 1950. The newspapers and broadcast media were full of UFO reports at the time. The men were sharing their views about extra-terrestrial civilizations, when Fermi suddenly exclaimed, “Where are they?” He scribbled out a series of calculations on a napkin (well … maybe) to show that Earth should have already been visited.
Since that moment, the Fermi Paradox has been defined as the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations. (Professor Drygalski at http://antarcticaedu.com/bio2027.htm)
Scientist Steven Soter of New York University examined this question in an essay for Astrobiology magazine in 2005. “Where are all those alien civilizations? Why haven’t we seen them? … Many answers have since been proposed, including (1) ours is the first and only civilization to arise in the Milky Way,” also known as “the First Come First Serve” hypothesis. A second hypothesis is the extra-terrestrials are here among us (also in The Urantia Book, The UB), and (3) they have already been here and we are their descendants.
Fermi’s famous outburst in the Los Alamos lunchroom, “Where are they?” inspired the title of Stephen Webb’s 2002 book “Where is Everybody?” Webb considers fifty proposed solutions to the Fermi Paradox, but leaves out the explanation perhaps most interesting to readers of The UB, what Steven Soter calls “the Cosmic Quarantine Hypothesis.”
http://www.astrobio.net/topic/deep-space/alien-life/seti-and-the-cosmic-quarantine-hypothesis/
In The UB we read, “With this broadcast of the fact of rebellion in Satania the system was isolated, quarantined, from her sister systems. There was "war in heaven," the headquarters of Satania, and it spread to every planet in the local system.” (67:3.1) The war in heaven, best known from the Bible’s Book of Revelation 12:7-13, was also described in vivid detail by British poet John Milton in “Paradise Lost” (Ch. 6).
Soter’s article mentions cosmologist Edward Harrison’s conclusions (1981), “Any civilization [of] such an aggressive nature would be unstable in combination with the immense technological powers required for interstellar travel. Such a civilization would self-destruct long before it could reach for the stars. … The most evolved civilizations in the galaxy [Harrison] suggested, would notice any upstart world that showed signs of launching a campaign of galactic conquest, and they would nip it in the bud.”
This is quite like the story told in the 1951 film, “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” a sci-fi tale about the mission of Klaatu and Gort, his “police” robot. Klaatu warns a gathering of world leaders that if they cannot persuade governments to end war and adopt a path of peace, “We have an organization for the mutual protection of all planets and for the complete elimination of aggression. … Your choice is simple: join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration.”
As Soter went on to say in his article, “Advanced intelligence might regard any prospect of the exponential diffusion throughout the Milky Way of self-replicating colonies very much as we regard the outbreak of a deadly viral epidemic. They would have good reason and the ability to suppress it as a measure of galactic hygiene.”
Of course, Hollywood’s threat of “obliteration” in Klattu’s script is really our own Earth-bound cowboy and Indian fantasy projected as a pop-fiction battle between planets. It is a solution that would never be considered by the “universe government” as we understand it in The UB.
Preventing aggressive missions of planetary conquest and colonization is also not like the reason The UB gives for the “cosmic quarantine,” but Soter’s thesis at least speaks metaphorically about the consequences of Lucifer’s rebellion and his attempted overthrow of the universe rulers that we live with every day. In truth, we can choose to be free of the rule of the Lucifer manifesto.
“Concerning God's presence in a planet, system, constellation, or a universe, the degree of such presence in any creational unit is a measure of the degree of the evolving presence of the Supreme Being: It is determined by the en masse recognition of God and loyalty to him on the part of the vast universe organization, running down to the systems and planets themselves. Therefore it is sometimes with the hope of conserving and safeguarding these phases of God's precious presence that, when some planets (or even systems) have plunged far into spiritual darkness, they are in a certain sense quarantined, or partially isolated from intercourse with the larger units of creation. And all this, as it operates on Urantia, is a spiritually defensive reaction of the majority of the worlds to save themselves, as far as possible, from suffering the isolating consequences of the alienating acts of a headstrong, wicked, and rebellious minority.” (3:1.10)
Students of The UB learn, “The universe broadcast is extended to all inhabited worlds regardless of their spiritual status. Planetary intercommunication is denied only those worlds under spiritual quarantine.” (33:6.5, pg. 371) Some say the affairs of the Lucifer rebellion have been adjudicated, resulting in considerable debate about whether the universe broadcasts have been re-opened.
There is an intriguing instruction Jesus gave to his apostles during questions that followed his discourse on prayer and worship: “As prayer may be likened to recharging the spiritual batteries of the soul, so worship may be compared to the act of tuning in the soul to catch the universe broadcasts of the infinite spirit of the Universal Father.” (144:4.8)
In one sense then, in spite of the “spiritual quarantine,” and the termination of literal interstellar communication, we have never been isolated from the universe broadcasts emanating from the Isle of Paradise.
