Snow Crash is a science fiction novel by American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson's novels, it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics and philosophy.

The book presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain. According to characters in the book, the goddess Asherah is the personification of a linguistic virus, similar to a computer virus. The god Enki created a counter-program which he called a nam-shub that caused all of humanity to speak different languages as a protection against Asherah (a re-interpretation of the ancient Near Eastern story of the Tower of Babel).

Did we evolve from apes, or are we all descendants of Adam and Eve? Why is the “missing link” still missing? Is the dumb luck of natural selection valid?

Piecing together the protohistory of humanity through anthropology, genetics, paleolinguistics, and indigenous traditions, Susan B. Martinez offers an entirely original alternative to Darwin’s evolution: Modern humanity did not evolve but is a mosaic of mixed ancestry, the result of eons of cross-breeding and retro-breeding among different groups, including Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, hobbits, giants, and Africa’s “Lucy” and “Zinj.” Martinez shows that there were multiple “Gardens of Eden” and how each continent had its own blend of races prior to the Great Flood, which caused the diaspora that brought a renaissance of culture to every division of the Earth.

Shows that Earth was visited by an extraterrestrial race who bioengineered modern man in its image and taught man how to construct the pyramids

• Examines the flaws in Darwin’s theory of evolution and presents startling new evidence of intelligent intervention.
• Reveals the messages coded in the pyramids left by the ancients concerning impending Earth changes at the end of the Mayan calendar.

For millennia the development of humanity showed a consistent homogenous pattern. Then suddenly, around 3000 B.C.E., great civilizations sprang up around the globe. All the creation myths of these civilizations tell of gods who came down to Earth and fashioned man in their own image, teaching them the arts of agriculture and civilized life. In addition, the dominant architectural design in Egypt, Sumeria, Peru, Mexico, and China was the pyramid, though science has never been able to explain why or where these peoples obtained the advanced technological knowledge to construct such edifices. The abruptness and similarities of these evolutionary leaps calls into question the Darwinian theory of evolution, given that there are no traces of any intermediate evolutionary forms.

Now, using the most current research on DNA, Will Hart shows that these gods were actually visitors from other worlds who genetically engineered modern humanity from the beings that then inhabited the planet. He also suggests that the Bible and other creation stories have been interpreted falsely as myth when they should have been read as history. The structures left by our ancestors were designed in accordance with precise astronomical and geodetic alignments to make them visible from outer space and to survive for thousands of years with the intent of communicating information relating to physical and temporal events. Humanity’s current stage of development has finally reached the point where the secret messages of these structures can be decoded to reveal the fate of humanity in the coming Earth changes.

Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, which Gurdjieff regarded as the essence of his teaching, is over twelve hundred pages long. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, undoubtedly the best summary of Gurdjieff’s ideas, is over four hundred. Even for the intelligent and well-disposed reader, this represents a considerable problem. According to Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, it is an inescapable problem. The length demands from the reader a certain effort which is indispensable if the ideas are to be grasped and digested, rather than merely swallowed whole.

Yet Ouspensky’s own book amounts to a compromise with his original position, that the ideas could only be conveyed directly, from teacher to pupil, and that any attempt to convey them in writing would dilute their very essence, and so falsify them.

What bothered Ouspensky was the modern tendency to simplify important ideas for popular consumption: Relativity Made Easy, Kant for Beginners. But he was overlooking a vital point: that such books are not necessarily for the lazy. If you intend to try to learn about Kant or relativity from scratch, you would undoubtedly do better to start with a simplified account rather than trying to plunge direct into The Critique of Pure Reason or Einstein’s collected mathematical papers.

With this in mind, then, let us see whether it is possible to make the approach to Gurdjieff less formidable.

In this fascinating journey to the edge of science, Vidal takes on big philosophical questions:

• Does our universe have a beginning and an end or is it cyclic?
• Are we alone in the universe?
• What is the role of intelligent life, if any, in cosmic evolution?

Grounded in science and committed to philosophical rigor, this book presents an evolutionary worldview where the rise of intelligent life is not an accident, but may well be the key to unlocking the universe's deepest mysteries.

• Vidal shows how the fine-tuning controversy can be advanced with computer simulations.
• He also explores whether natural or artificial selection could hold on a cosmic scale.
• In perhaps his boldest hypothesis, he argues that signs of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are already present in our astrophysical data.

His conclusions invite us to see the meaning of life, evolution and intelligence from a novel cosmological framework that should stir debate for years to come.  [From: Amazon]