The Moon Barrier

The Frontier Of Life In Space

Were Plato and Aristotle right about life?

In the vast expanse of space, beyond the Earth's atmosphere and the orbit of the Moon, lies an enigmatic barrier. A barrier that has been a subject of philosophical debate for thousands of years. Philosophers Plato and Aristotle believed that life beyond the Moon was impossible, as they saw it as a boundary between the realm of life and the realm of permanence.

As a philosopher of morality and a decades-long defender of free will, I founded GMOdebate.org in February 2022 to defend animals and plants against eugenics.

In 2021, I developed a new theory of the source of life that led me to a question:

How far away from Earth has life traveled in space?

To my astonishment, I discovered that life has never traveled farther than the Moon.

Strangely, despite major investments into space travel and plans to send humans to Mars, science has never tested whether life can survive beyond the Moon.

Mystery

Why did't science test whether life can travel beyond the Moon?

The mystery deepened when I discovered that Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle predicted that life is restricted to a "sublunary sphere" below the Moon. Their theory suggests the possibility that life may not be able to exist in the "superlunary sphere" beyond the Moon.

Could Plato and Aristotle have been onto something? The fact that this question cannot be dismissed even in 2024 is remarkable.

A Key Part of The History of Science

The theory of Plato and Aristotle has played a key role in the history of science. The scientific revolution revolted against the idea that life cannot exist beyond the Moon, which laid at the basis of the transition from Aristotelian physics to modern scientific theories.

For example, Francis Bacon, a key figure in the scientific revolution, rejected the Aristotelian distinction between the sublunary and superlunary spheres. Philosopher Giordano Bruno also sought to discredit the division between sublunary and superlunary regions. The distinction between these spheres was further challenged by the development of new scientific theories and discoveries, such as the work of Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills.

18th century woodcut depicting Bruno's dreams beyond the classical universe.

Virgil (Aeneid, VI.724–727) had described the super- and sublunary regions as animated from within by spiritus, which Giordano Bruno identified in this context with the Universal Soul, and added that they were moved by a Mind diffused throughout their vast mass.

Giordano Bruno was a Renaissance philosopher who questioned the dominant Aristotelian view and proposed an elemental theory that contradicted the Sublunary theory of Aristotle. The Roman Inquisition burned him at the stake for his unorthodox beliefs.

Philosopher Giordano Bruno Source: Wikipedia

The theory of Plato and Aristotle has played a key role in the history of science, which is an additional argument that it should have been tested whether life can travel beyond the Moon as soon as that became possible.

My philosophical background

For decades, I have questioned the foundations of science and the idea that mind is produced by the brain.

My quest began around 2006 through the Dutch critical blog Zielenknijper.com with an investigation into what I categorized as the free will abolishment movement.

The free will abolishment movement is rooted in scientism, the belief that the interests of science weigh higher than human moral interests and free will. This movement has been going on for centuries and my investigation revealed that the movement was the root cause of the Nazi holocaust and eugenics.

The Philosophical Roots of the Holocaust: Psychiatry, Eugenics, Scientism, and the Loss of Morality Source: Zielenknijper.com

In extension of my philosophical research into eugenics, I founded GMOdebate.org in February 2022 to defend animals and plants against eugenics.

Something To Hide?

Throughout history, philosophers and scientists such as Socrates, Anaxagoras, Aristotle, Hypatia, Giordano Bruno, Baruch Spinoza, and Albert Einstein have faced exile for their unwavering loyalty to truth and their pursuit of knowledge that challenged prevailing beliefs and norms, with some, like Anaxagoras, being exiled for asserting that the Moon was a rock, and others, like Socrates, being sentenced to death for questioning the established religious and social order.

Over the years, I have been banned often for questioning sensitive topics such as the Big Bang theory, atheism (as a dogmatic anti-religion) or plant sentience.

I learned very early that proponents of the free will abolishment movement tend to use argument ad hominem (personal attacks) as their primary tactic.

Banned For Questioning The Big Bang Theory

In June 2021, I was banned on Space.com for questioning the Big Bang theory in a post that contained this content.

It was a decent written post about the fact that the Big Bang theory is considered a religion by an increasing amount of scientists. The post had received several serious replies and was deleted for questionable motives. Topics are normally ‘closed’ and remain readable but the moderator deleted the topic. Later my whole Space.com account would be banned and all my posts were deleted.

This thread has runs its course. Thank you to those who contributed. Closing now.

Well-known science writer Eric J. Lerner wrote an article in 2022 in which he said:

“It has become almost impossible to publish papers critical of the Big Bang in any astronomical journals.”

(2022) The Big Bang didn't happen Source: The Institute of Art and Ideas

Academics are barred from doing certain research, which includes criticizing the Big Bang theory.

Before I posted the critical topic about the Big Bang theory on Space.com, I had started a topic to ask the question how far Earth life had traveled in space.

Censored On Other Platforms

My new theory of the source of life that resulted in the question how far life had journeyed away from Earth, was censored on many other platforms, including philosophy platforms.

For example, a related philosophical question on philosophy.stackexchange.com, regarding the idea that life on Earth might be tied to Solar-neutrino energy from the 🌞 Sun, was closed almost instantly, as being ‘off-topic’. On many other forums the question was deleted.

On onlinephilosophyclub.com, the topic is still available:

Censorship or something else?

Philosopher Robert Pirsig (IQ 170), the author of the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974), the most sold philosophy book ever (5m copies), mentioned the following with regard being ignored when making a philosophical case for the concept quality beyond science.

Though a website dedicated to his ideas boasts 50,000 posts, and there have been outposts of academic interest, he is disappointed that his books have not had more mainstream attention. 'Most academic philosophers ignore it, or badmouth it quietly, and I wondered why that was. I suspect it may have something to do with my insistence that "quality" can not be defined,' he says. (2009-2011) Philosopher Robert Pirsig on onlinephilosophyclub.com Source: onlinephilosophyclub.com

Quality and Values... This might be the scope where further philosophical progress is to be sought. A context outside the bounds of repeatable nature but meaningfully relevant.

Materialism

The Western intellectual establishment has embraced materialism and banished the old philosophical metaphysics as a relic of superstitious times. In 2020, philosopher Dr. Bernardo Kastrup wrote a critical article titled Materialism will be mocked in which he argued that materialism has been developed and maintained through deception and trickery.

In truth, materialism has survived thus far not because of magic, but because of tricks.

The idea that life is independent of the Solar System has been culturally ingrained through films such as Star Trek, which caused people to believe that humans will travel through the cosmos as independent biochemical bundles of matter.

Dr. Bernardo Kastrup wrote the following about the potential influence of a cultural momentum to misguide science:

Today we think that materialism is plausible, by mere force of habit and inherited cultural momentum...

Could a dogmatic belief in materialism explain that science neglected to do a simple test?

Scientism

Upon further inspection it is my opinion that materialism cannot be considered an independent cause for dogmatic misguidance of science.

The 'greater good of science' ideology introduced by scientism is the driving force behind the culture shift towards materialism. That shift has been going on for over a century and it resulted in the suppression of philosophy by placing philosophy on a level comparable with religions.

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in Beyond Good and Evil (Chapter 6 – We Scholars) already warned about the start of the development in 1886.

The declaration of independence of the scientific man, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the subtler after-effects of democratic organization and disorganization: the self- glorification and self-conceitedness of the learned man is now everywhere in full bloom, and in its best springtime – which does not mean to imply that in this case self-praise smells sweet. Here also the instinct of the populace cries, “Freedom from all masters!” and after science has, with the happiest results, resisted theology, whose “hand-maid” it had been too long, it now proposes in its wantonness and indiscretion to lay down laws for philosophy, and in its turn to play the “master” – what am I saying! to play the PHILOSOPHER on its own account.

Science has been attempting to rid itself of philosophy and morality.

Science, when performed without morality ('humble observerly'), operates on the basis of a dogmatic belief in uniformitarianism, which involves the idea that the facts of science are valid without philosophy, which results in an ideal to abolish morality.

(2018) Immoral advances: Is science out of control? To many scientists, moral objections to their work are not valid: science, by definition, is morally neutral, so any moral judgement on it simply reflects scientific illiteracy. Source: New Scientist

In the absence of morality, it is seen that corruption emerges as a driving and even dominant force in pursuit of a perceived, dogmatic greater good of science.

In a deterministic world without free will, the greater good is centered around the interests of science, which is scientism.

A growing chorus of scientists and philosophers argue that free will does not exist. Could they be right? By far the most unsettling implication of the case against free will is what it says about morality...(2021) The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion? Source: The Guardian

In a deterministic world without morality, science might have been deceiving humanity about life's ability to travel beyond the Moon. The reason why could be dogmatic corruption.

Conclusion

If life is bound to a region around the 🌞 Sun, humanity's understanding of nature, reality, and space travel would be fundamentally flawed. This realization calls for new philosophical thinking to guide humanity on a path forward for progress and survival. Instead of attempting to escape the Earth, humanity might better invest in protecting the Earth and potentially also the Sun as the source of life.

Why, after all these decades, has science neglected to test if life can travel beyond the Moon? What if Plato and Aristotle were right - and the Moon marks a barrier that life cannot cross?

Update 2024

Since 2021, three years ago, this article has been prominently promoted in over 50 languages on a website for clean mobility that is visited by people from over 200 countries per week on average.

Strangely, nothing changed.

GPT-4: no form of Earth life, including animals, plants, or microbes, has been scientifically tested or sent beyond the Moon.

In December 2023, Iran sent a special capsule with unknown animals into space. Will Iran be the first to do the scientific test?