Nomad Codes

believes that the ETs only make sense when you see them against a larger backdrop, which Firmage calls the Kairos moment. “We are at a point of history where we are on the cusp of the grandest possible discoveries of human history,” he says. “Five thousand years ago most of us were living in caves and huts, today our spacecraft are leaving the solar system. There is an undeniable trajectory there. Modern science seems to have its head in the sand believing, like every generation before it, that that trajectory somehow stops at the end of the second millennium.”
    Firmage’s own trajectory blasts full speed ahead, into the potent vacuum of space. He believes we are on the cusp of learning how to tap the ZPE from the quantum vacuum, a cup of which has enough energy to boil the oceans of the earth. As you might expect, this opinion is not universally held among modern physicists. Even if you grant the possibility of exploiting zero-point energy—a notion that already sends the eyebrows of most physicists to the roof—you still have to build the damn thing. “There are plenty of physically possible mechanisms that are practically impossible,” explains Andrew Jaffe, a Researcher at the Center for Particle Astrophysics at UC Berkeley. “And there are many more mechanisms that are impossible today but are still likely to be much simpler than dealing with vacuum energy!”
    Such sentiments do not deter Joe Firmage, because he is the sort of man who can frankly utter statements like “modern physics is full of shit.” According to The Truth , the ZPE breakthrough will happen soon, and will provide us with an essentially free source of energy that will eradicate our toxic addiction to fossil fuels. Firmage’s book also argues that with ZPE in hand, we will be just a hop, skip, and a jump away from engineering gravity. In other words, warp drive, on demand.
    In Firmage’s mind, the feasibility of gravity propulsion devices destroys the only convincing scientific argument against UFOs (the lack of physical evidence doesn’t seem to bother him). Moreover, our own imminent ZPE breakthrough also explains what all these alien tricksters are doing here in the first place. “If the child beings to climb out of the crib, parents get interested,” Firmage says. “Its just like Star Trek: First Contact . You see a warp signature, and you know that the children have climbed out of the crib.”
    To his credit, Firmage does not claim to have a bead on the exact origins, identity, or purpose of the extraterrestrials, but he does know one thing: some of them wear white hats. At a time when many abductees report horrible little almond-eyed Dr. Mengeles armed with anal probes, Firmage has resurrected the Space Brothers optimism of the 1950s. Firmage believes that the aliens in our midst are teachers, here to help us strap on the psychological shoes that we’ll need for our birth as galactic citizens. He even holds that the founding myths of world religions were created by these teachers in order to seed human culture with the ethical memes we’ll need for our ultimate graduation into space. For proof, Firmage suggests rereading the New Testament, replacing the words heaven with space , and angel with teacher . “The book ceases to have the mythical quality and it begins to have anthropological sensibility. It begins to say to you, ah, this is how you take a chimpanzee and turn him into a space traveler.”
    By plugging spirituality into a galactic framework, Firmage hopes to keep the ethical and mystical core of religion alive in a world ruled by naturalism. It is his own fantastic attempt to heal the rift between science and religion, a rift that he believes must be sutured if we are to avert the environmental catastrophes that loom all about us. Indeed, the most moving and convincing passages of The Truth bristle with Firmage’s informed passion for the physical world, and his perfectly reasonable pessimism about the present course of things. As Firmage puts it, “Y2K is a gnat compared to the seriousness of the damage we are inflicting on the biosphere.”
    Firmage’s ultimate faith is not that the aliens will save us, but that the stone-cold truth about their existence will trigger a massive transformation of human culture. “It will indelibly mark in the consciousness of an entire species that the cosmos is coherent, that the majestic and sweeping history of human art and science, of war and peace, had a point,