About The Book – The Infinity Option
This fact based book informs us that danger awaits Earth. On December 31, 2009, NASA’s Voyager interstellar space probe reported a hydrogen cloud through which we will be plunged into for what may be tens of thousands of years.
This cloud threatens all life on earth because hydrogen neutral and positive particles will pass through the solar system’s protective magnetic barrier, cause solar flares, and when reaching earth’s atmosphere, explosively combine with oxygen to create worldwide floods.
Irene Morreau, PhD, formerly of the Voyager program and a small group of scientists propose a defense that requires worldwide cooperation. Neuroscience’s recent discoveries that Buddhist meditative practice produces human brain gamma waves, which in turn produce compassionate impulses, creativity, and alpha waves that produce thinking. A Buddhist neuroscientist, Shinjiro Miroku teams up with Morreau, and these recent scientific discoveries create a thrilling, educational, and inspiring story.
Book Review from The Evening Book Sentinel
By Cherlyn Templeton
Underlying a thrilling story about the danger and upcoming challenge to humanity of an ominous hydrogen space cloud that NASA’s Voyager space probe has discovered in real-life just outside the solar system and in the path of the solar system’s orbit around the Milky Way galaxy, is a story involving two mixed marriage families, one secular couple, and one family with a sick child whose lives are anything but mundane.
Owen Glass is a black athlete whose determination took him from an apartment complex controlled by the Cripps and Bloods into the arms and heart of Iris Nausbaum, daughter of a Rabbi, and into the NFL. They marry and all goes seemingly well until their children show Owen that he has been imperfect as the head of the household and father figure all along.
Zeke Hawkins was born with a gift. His singing voice was impeccably like a bell, clearly resonating. It stayed that way throughout his adult years, and the world enjoyed listening. Penny O’Shay married him. Zeke’s success and character flaws led him off the path of marital fidelity into intrigue and possibly murder—and guilt—as Penny dies, knowing of his infidelity. He knows she knows. And she holds the information like a Damocles’ sword over his head to the grave.
Shinjiro Miroku, a Buddhist, and Jennifer Long, a Christian, fall in love because of their religious differences as they are always discussing and debating their respective preferences, embracing each other’s hearts.
Early in their marriage, Andrew and Sylvia Merkin both were involved in infidelity. But the tragedy of their sick daughter brings them back together.
Shinjro Miroku has the opportunity to proselytize the others into Buddhist meditative chanting because of a deal he makes with an extraterrestrial being. As the novel comes to its end, the proselytes have new perceptions that may portend to improve their lives.
Multi-faceted, the work by Howard Prager invokes a rare genre, the “faction.” It presents factual discoveries by NASA’s Voyager interstellar space exploratory project of a vast hydrogen cloud headed for collision with our solar system and the dangerous implications for Earth with a fiction encompassing an extraterrestrial being, scientists in their discovery of the Voyager findings’ dangers, their formulation of possible defenses for Earth, all the while the extraterrestrial being is intent on killing sixty thousand humans to possess human DNA to reestablish humanity on a planet that will be more hospitable since the extraterrestrial being considers the destruction of Earth’s life-supporting habitat a foregone conclusion.
Scientist Irene Moreau with a few collaborating scientists tries to alert the world to the danger and propose a defense against the cloud. They met at the XIII International Conference on Cyclotrons sponsored by Office of High Energy and Nuclear Physics of the U.S. Department of Energy. They observe from the record of operations of the world’s cyclotrons revealed at the conference that colder than historic temperatures accompany the operation of cyclotrons, encircling them for hundreds of miles, altering local climates wherever cyclotrons operate. The proposal involves moving the enormous magnets of the Large Hadron Collider cyclotron experiment in Cern, Switzerland, and installing a worldwide network of cyclotrons, which the group believes will fend off the radiation from the cloud.
Dr. Moreau gets unexpected validation from an other-worldly entity named IS, but IS proposes an altogether different solution to the problem. IS will “save” sixty thousand humans and transport them to another, more hospitable planet. “Saving” may be a misnomer because IS intends to kill these humans and transport the special DNA it obtains from their brain stems to save the specie homo sapiens from extinction.
Meanwhile another string of the plot involves a dedicated Buddhist neuroscientist and psychiatrist, Shinjiro Miroku, whose emigration to the United States and education the book follows. IS has an appetite for gamma waves produced by the human brain, and Miroku’s Buddhist meditative practice, as proven by recent studies in neuroscience, produces floods of these brain waves with the result that human’s compassionate instincts are improved as well as their creativity and ability to produce more alpha waves, which are associated with strictly intellectual endeavors.
Prager, a Buddhist, teaches us the history, some of the philosophical underpins, the practice of Nichiren Buddhism and recent factual discoveries in neuro science establishing laboratory evidence of brain-improvement by means of practicing Buddhist meditation.
Moreau and Miroku find themselves on the same commercial airplane flight along with the novel’s remaining cast of characters. IS communicates with not only all the passengers on the flight, but tens of thousands of people on the ground, including the media, by extrasensory means. When Miroku realizes IS plans to kill everyone aboard as well as the sixty thousand selected humans, mostly children, Miroku also realizes IS is affected by the gamma waves generated by the meditative practice that involves the chant, Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, so he persuades the people aboard the flight to chant it and thereby flood IS with gamma waves.
This helps to cause IS to reconsider how to obtain the specimens in a manner that will ensure the survival of the people. In order to obtain the agreement to do so from IS, Miroku has to promise to proselytize to everyone on the plane as well as dedicate his life to proselytizing, so that humanity will provide IS with more gamma waves. The chanting will also improve the chances of Earth’s survival because it will improve humanity’s ability to work more creatively and cooperatively than it otherwise could, especially when it comes to dealing with the challenges the cloud presents. The other characters’ lives are strings in this book, the relevance of which is only disclosed in the final chapters. The book ends with chapters that reveal how their adoption of Buddhist meditation alleviated their previous karmic problems by changing their perspectives, which the reader can only suppose will change each one’s respective destiny.
