Weird Science: Plants as Interplanetary Communication Devices

Science Fiction has been described as the literature of ideas, and one of the most bizarre ideas is that grass is an artificial computing device. This strange notion appears in Clifford Simak’s 1965 novel, All Flesh Is Grass. This is about a small American town that finds itself completely enclosed beneath a forcefield. The town is on a nexus linking our world and its counterpart in a parallel universe. Investigating the force field and the strange disappearance years earlier of a mentally handicapped lad, the hero finds himself transported to this alternative Earth, where he meets the missing boy, now grown up. He also encounters a group of mysterious travellers from yet another universe, who have come to the world simply to listen to music and dance. Returning to our Earth, he finds that the force field has been put around the town by intelligent extradimensional aliens. There is a series of alternative Earths, who have come together to form some kind of interdimensional federation. These wise, enlightened beings wish to help humanity. They are skilled physicians, and show their good intentions by healing the town’s sick free of charge. It’s revealed that grass is some kind of intelligently engineered device, which was used by an alien race for information storage thousands of years ago.

As with many of the stranger ideas in literature, whether Science Fiction or not, you wonder where the idea came from. Some clue is perhaps given in the 1973 Erich Von Daniken book In Search of Ancient Gods: My Pictorial Evidence for the Impossible. Beginning on page 192, the world’s most notorious author on ancient astronauts discusses how two American scientists suggested that plants could be extraterrestrial communication devices. He writes

So far all attempts to capture signals from the cosmos with the aid of electromagnetic waves have failed. Dr George Lawrence of the Ecola Institute in San Bernardino, California, hit on a fantastic new way to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligences. Lawrence wondered if plants connected to an electronic control system would be suitable for communication with the universe. It is known that plants possess electrodynamic properties, indeed their capacity to assimilate tests and react in a binary way like a computer is sensational. Lawrence closely observed the semiconductive and general electromotive capacities of plants. He asked himself the following questions as part of his programme:

1. Can plants be integrated with electronic apparatuses in such a way that they yield usable data?
2. Can plants be trained to react to specific objects or events?
3. Is the assumption that plants have the capacity for exception perception provable?
4. Which of the 350,000 kinds of plants is most suited for the test. (p. 192)

Von Daniken then goes on to describe how plants respond to electric stimulation, and how Dr Clyde Backster, an expert in lie detectors, observed similar responses in 1969 during experiments in which he believed his test plants responded telepathically, at first to himself lighting a match, and then to a bucket of shrimps being plunged into boiling water. This response became known, apparently, as the Backster effect. Von Daniken continues

Dr Lawrence next tried to use plants for electromagnetic contact with the cosmos. A series of experiments, christened Project Cyclops, was organised over a distance of seven miles in the Mojave Desert, near Las Vegas. On 29 October 1971 at the same fraction of a second the measuring sets attached to the plants registered heightened curves which were transferred to the tape by an amplifier. What was going on? Was something underground stimulating the plants? Were there torrents of lava, earthquakes, magnetic influences? New sets were made, the plants were protected in lead boxes and Faradaic cages. The result was the same! Observed over a long period of time, curves and notes showed a certain synchronicity. The plants seemed to be communicating. Plants cannot think: they can only react. Every conceivable kind of magnetic wavelength was tried. At the moment of the different reactions, nothing could be heard. Could the process be connected with the fixed stars, with quasars or radiation? A new series of experiments clearly showed that the cause came from the cosmos. Radioastronomers with their gigantic antenna could pick up nothing, but plants showed violent reactions. Obviously a wavelength that functioned biologically was involved. This brought the experimenters into a territory whose existence has been suspected, but which is not measurable so far – telepathy. A biological contact took place in a way unexplained to date, but during the detour via the cells it became measurable. Dr George Lawrence said on the subject:

Obviously biological interstellar communication is nothing new. We have only 215 astronomic observatories in the world, but about a million of the biological type, although we call them by other names such as churches, temples and mosques. A biological system (mankind) communicates (prays) to a far distant higher being. Biological understanding is also the order of the day in the animal kingdom; we have only to think of dogs and cats which find their way home again by instinct. A fascinating feature of the experiments in the desert is the realisation that these biological contacts with the cosmos are connected with the speed of light.

The suspicion is growing stronger that the plants are called up by someone in the constellation Epsilon Bootes at a hundred times the speed of light. That is also why radioastronomers could not register the transmissions. Why use a big drum when a kettledrum is available? Perhaps we have investigated interstellar contacts with the wrong instruments, the wrong wavelengths and the wrong spectrum until now. (p.194-5).

This is clearly very fringe science, if not actually pseudoscience of the type likely to get Richard Dawkins grinding his teeth. It also merges into a kind of New Age pantheism, in which the cosmos itself may be some kind of God or supreme intelligence. It’s all very different from what I was taught in secondary school that grass was a monocotolydon. That means, it only has one leaf. I also note that the experiments started in 1971, some six years after Simak published his novel. But scientists and novelists were discussing plant intelligence from the 1950s onwards, including the idea that they could feel pain. It’s now been found that plants do communicate biochemically, and there was an article in the papers last week stating that they do feel pain. Perhaps Lawrence’s ideas, or ideas similar to them, were being discussed several years before Lawrence conducted his experiments, and influenced Simak when he wrote his book.

Secular Talk on Donald Trump Holding All Muslims Responsible for Terror Attacks

This is another great piece from Secular Talk’s Kyle Kulinski taking apart some disgusting anti-Muslim comments uttered by the Trumpenfuehrer on ITV’s Good Morning show. Trump had asked rhetorically why Muslims don’t report the terrorists in their communities. Kulinski here demolishes this by showing that they do. He presents these facts:

* In 2013 a Canadian imam prevented a terrorist attack on a train by reporting the terrorists planning the attack to Canada’s finest.

* In 2015 Kenyan Muslims aboard a bus gave their hijabs to the Christian passengers to wear to prevent them from being butchered by al-Shabaab.

* During the French terror attacks last year, a Muslim waiter saved two women from being killed by leaping in front of them when the gunman was firing. He was killed, but the two ladies survived.

* Indonesia’s largest Muslim organisation, comprising 50 million people, has roundly condemned terrorism.

* The Muslim community had a collection for the victims of the San Bernardino shooting that was raising $1,000 an hour at one point.

Trump is wrong. Very wrong. Kulinski points out that his default position is that all Muslims are somehow responsible for terrorism or sympathise with it. Now Kulinski says here that he believes that there is a problem with fundamentalist, Salafi Islam, beyond the terrible abuse of the Muslim world through the West’s foreign policy. But he makes the point that to condemn all Muslims, including people, who have had nothing to do with these attacks, like the Ahmadiyya, the Shi’a, Sufis – and so on, is bigoted.

Here’s the video.

Over here, I have a feeling that a number of potential terror attacks have been averted, because of information given from members of the Muslim community. And Some of the radical mosques full of the preachers of hate carried on, not because they weren’t denounced by concerned members of the congregation to the authorities, but because the authorities decided they didn’t want to act. I’ve got a feeling that the infamous mosque at Finsbury Park was one of these.

Trump’s talking populist rubbish. And the fact that he mouthed it on British television to my mind gives weight to the argument that he should be banned from coming to our great country.