Becker Skillfully Critiques Grandiose Schemes of Hi-Tech Visionaries

 In the series of posts of here I have made many critical comments about the work of science journalists, who all too often these days act like pushovers who treat with kid gloves groundlessly boasting scientists, while failing to apply critical scrutiny to the dubious claims of such scientists. So I was rather surprised to read a recent book by a science journalist who uses an impressive amount of critical scrutiny when discussing claims in the technoscientific sphere.  The very readable and informative book is called "More Everything Forever," and its author is Adam Becker. The subtitle is "AI Overlords, Space Empires and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity." 

Becker is someone with a PhD in astrophysics, but the book's dust jacket describes him as a science journalist. Some of his astrophysics background comes in handy when he gets around to criticizing some of the schemes and dreams of hi-tech titans that he examines. 

We read about hi-tech titans such as Sam Altman who are predicting there will soon be "AGI" or "Artificial General Intelligence." The term "AI" stands for artificial intelligence. Strictly speaking, there does not really exist any such thing as artificial intelligence. So-called AI is mainly merely computer programming and data processing. There has been very much progress in computer programming and data processing. But no such progress ever justified the use of either the term AI (artificial intelligence) or the term AGI (artificial general intelligence). 

What happened is a massive abuse of language similar to the massive abuse of language that occurred around so-called "natural selection" (which is not really any such thing as selection, because "selection" means a choice by a mind, and blind unguided unnatural processes do not make choices). Back around 1988, the term "artificial intelligence" was just a kind of aspirational term used for software toolkits that could be used to try to make progress at producing artificial intelligence. In the following years more and companies realized that it was very profitable to just stop talking in aspirational terms, and to start pitching whatever product they had as an example of "artificial intelligence." It was a deceitful escalation of hype, and the public fell for it. 

By now we have examples of computer programming and data processing that are much more impressive than anything existing around 1988. But no such examples qualify as "artificial intelligence," using a good definition of "intelligence." The Merriam Webster dictionary defines "intelligence" as "the ability to learn or understand things or to deal with new or difficult situations : reason." The American Heritage Dictionary defines "intelligence" as "the ability to acquire, understand, and use knowledge." The Oxford English Dictionary defines intelligence as "The faculty of understanding; intellect." Computer systems do not understand anything, so they are not intelligent. So-called AI systems such as OpenAI and Google Gemini are not minds and not intellects. They understand nothing. 

You may start to realize what a swindle the term Artificial Intelligence is when you realize that you cannot have an intellect and you cannot have intelligence until you first have experience, which means a mind that is living a life. Given a mind that is living a life, there may be some understanding of some concept by that mind. But where there is no experience and no life, there can be no understanding. Computer systems do not have experiences, do not have lives, and do not understand anything. 

How do you infer that other people are living a life, that other people have experiences, and that other people understand things? Well, it works rather like this. You know for certain that you have a life, that you have experience, and that you understand things. And you know what kind of being you are, from viewing your body and seeing yourself in the mirror; and you know that other people around you look and move pretty much the same as you look and move. So it is entirely logical to infer that other people you see have real lives like you do, that they have experiences like you do, and that they understand like you do. But no such inference would ever be justified when thinking about a computer. 

If you were a robot having experiences and living a life and understanding things, and you looked down to see a robot metal body below your eyes, and you saw other metal robots looking like yourself, then you would be justified in inferring: robots have lives, robots have experiences, and robots understand things. But you would never, ever be justified in making such a conclusion if you had only lived as a person of flesh and blood. 

Around page 14 Becker starts to discuss longtermism. It's a philosophical approach in which various extravagant proposals are justified by means of dubious calculations in which someone tries to quantify the goodness of supposedly good things that can happen over extremely long time spans. So, for example, someone engaging in longtermism might justify spending billions on an interstellar expedition, because that expedition might be the beginning of a colonization of the galaxy that might result in 1,000,000,000,000,000 humans existing over the span of a million years. The longtermism reasoner will say things like this: "You must support my plan to launch the mission, because if it is not launched, that will be like killing 1,000,000,000,000,000 future inhabitants of the galaxy!"

As I point out in my post here, entitled "Longtermism Is Fueled by a Goofy Belief in Computer-Generated Lives," longtermism is centered upon the unreasonable cheat of assuming that there can exist computer-generated lives. In an article describing longtermism, we read this:

"Longtermism is a quasi-religious worldview, influenced by transhumanism and utilitarian ethics, which asserts that there could be so many digital people living in vast computer simulations millions or billions of years in the future that one of our most important moral obligations today is to take actions that ensure as many of these digital people come into existence as possible. In practical terms, that means we must do whatever it takes to survive long enough to colonize space, convert planets into giant computer simulations and create unfathomable numbers of simulated beings. How many simulated beings could there be? According to Nick Bostrom —the Father of longtermism and director of the Future of Humanity Institute — there could be at least 10⁵⁸ digital people in the future, or a 1 followed by 58 zeros."

Such calculations are nonsense, largely because of the impossibility of using computers to generate a life. Computers do not and can never produce experience or lives.  What happened is that people got interested in Nick Bostrom's senseless theory that we could be living in a computer simulation created by extraterrestrials, a theory predicated on the utterly irrational and groundless idea that computers can generate lives like the lives we are living. The same people who had got interested in Bostrom's nonsensical theory then kind of reasoned: "Well, if the extraterrestrials can generate computer-generated lives, then we can too!" So they started estimating that future humans with far more powerful computers will be able to generate far more lives than the flesh-and-blood lives that now exist on planet Earth -- maybe billions or trillions or quadrillions of times as many lives. 

This was all the worst kind of nonsense, nonsense as bad as Bostrom's original speculation that we are living in a computer simulation. Computers cannot generate experience. Computers cannot generate lives. So we cannot be living in a simulation created by extraterrestrials. And we will not be able to create lives by having computer systems generate lives.  And you will not be able to obtain immortality by downloading your mind into a computer. But that's no reason to be sad. The very reasons for concluding the impossibility of mind uploading into computers are part of the very many reasons for having confidence that your mind is something that cannot be produced by a brain, and something that will survive the destruction of your body. 

Believing that progress in computer systems will one day lead to computers being able to generate lives is a kind of error similar to the error of thinking that progress in improving the resolution of TV sets justifies the claim that one day we will have TV sets that cause animals and people to literally jump out of the TV screen, allowing you to hold them or touch them. 

Around page 39 to 47 Becker discusses the Singularity claims of Ray Kurzweil. It starts out on page 39 with a creepy discussion by Kurzweil about hi-tech means to "resurrect" his dead father. On page 39 the book quotes him as saying this about his father:

"We can find some of his DNA around his grave site...AI will send down some nanobots and get some bone or teeth and extract some DNA and put it all together. Then they'll get some information from my brain and anyone else who still remembers him...[They'll] just send nanobots into my brain and reconstruct my recollections and memories." 

This is creepy nonsense, both because of the impracticality of nanobots doing such a task, and also because brains do not actually store memories. Many brains of the recently deceased have been examined with very powerful microscopes, as has recently extracted tissue from living people. But such microscopic examination of brain tissue has never discovered the slightest trace of anything a human ever learned -- not a single word, not a single letter, not a single image and not a single pixel. No scientist has a credible account of how a brain could learn or recall anything, given the known physical shortfalls of all brains (which neuroscientists senselessly ignore). 

Becker's critique of Kurzweil's claims is not as strong as it could have been. He fails to make a list of incorrect predictions that Kurzweil previously made. A list of some of those predictions can be found in my post here. Becker also fails to criticize the incorrect assumptions about minds and brains that are a foundation of Kurzweil's claims about a Singularity. But Becker does make a good criticism of the flaws in Kuzweil's claim about a law of accelerating returns, the claim that progress is increasing exponentially. He points out that a pillar of such an idea (Moore's Law, that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years) no longer holds true. 

Today's user of the Internet should laugh hard at the notion that progress is increasing exponentially.  More and more times that I go to some web site I used without any hassle in the year 2021, I find that the website is no longer functional for anything other than viewing headlines. Upon clicking on one of these headlines, I so often get a screen telling me I cannot view that article without paying for a subscription. The web pages that I go to are very often very badly cluttered up with ads, both on the sides and in the main text. So reading is rather like this:

4 or 5 sentences of the article. 

An ad. 

6 or 7 more sentences of the article. 

An ad. 

4 or 5 more sentences of the article. 

An ad. 

A typical user of the Internet should laugh hard at claims of a law of accelerating progress, and maybe complain that the Internet worked better in the year 2000. Ask some so-called AI system some of the most important questions, and you will often get some very unwise or very false answers. What often happens is that materialist misconceptions and dubious socially-constructed triumphal legends of academia are being sucked up by web-crawling AI systems, with the errors and dubious dogmas being repackaged and regurgitated as AI slop. You might call the resulting answers "Artificial Stupidity." 

Around page 70, Becker criticizes Kurzweil's claims that there would be exponential progress in brain scanning that would help allow computers to become as smart as people. He points out that such progress in brain scanning has not occurred, saying that "the maximum resolution of noninvasive human brain scanning in 2024 is not appreciably better than in 2000." 

Becker's argumentation around this point misses the mark. He argues along the lines of "it's hard to exactly reproduce the brain electronically." He should have studied brain physical shortfalls, and argued "it's futile to try to reproduce the brain electronically." The real problem here is that no amount of brain scanning or brain emulation will do anything to help build superintelligent computers. Brains do not produce minds, and brains bear no real resemblance to computers or devices for storing or retrieving memories. No neuroscientist can give any credible explanation of how a brain could produce a thought or imagine anything or learn anything or recall anything. When neuroscientists talk about such things, they give us only the emptiest of hand-waving, or suggest ideas that cannot possibly be true given what we have learned about the physical shortfalls of brains and the rapid turnover and short lifetimes of their components such as protein molecules, dendritic spines and synapses. 

Thus far the study of human brains has done absolutely nothing to help produce advances in computing and software. There has been progress in various types of software that are wrongly called "neural nets." But such software does not bear any close resemblance to anything going on in the brain.  In so-called neural nets, information is passed along with 100% reliability. This bears no resemblance to the physical reality of the brain, in which electrical signals have to pass through endless numbers of synapses, each of which transmit a signal with a reliability of less than 50%.

Around page 223 Becker criticizes aspirations to colonize space by building the type of space colonies imagined by Gerard O'Neill. He says the scheme depended on the existence of a "mass driver" that would eject raw materials from the moon, but that "the technological advances that O'Neill was hoping would enable the mass driver simply didn't work out."

O'Neill's original proposal was for massive rotating cylinders which would give the inhabitants a magnificent view of a large landscape. His later proposal was for space colonies offering no such view, and we might ask, "Who would want to live in such a colony?"

Around page 226 Becker's background in astrophysics comes in handy, as he criticizes the impracticality of schemes such as Elon Musk's proposed scheme to colonize Mars. He criticizes the "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" of Marc Andreesssen, something I criticized in my post here. 

Although he misses some opportunities to make a stronger critique, Becker has shown lots of ability to effectively criticize unwarranted ideas of powerful figures in the hi-tech field. It would be great to see Becker write another book making a critique of grandiose but unwarranted claims, with the focus being on the grandiose but unwarranted claims of today's biologists. 

He Tries to Revive Interest in the Already-Falsified Theory of Cosmological Natural Selection

Scientists have long been bothered by why the physical conditions, laws and fundamental constants of the universe seem to be so fine-tuned to allow the existence of planets such as ours and living beings such as us. On page 235 of his book Chaos and Harmony, a University of Virginia professor of astronomy (Trinh Xuan Thuan) stated this:

"The evolution of the cosmos is determined by initial conditions (such as the initial rate of expansion and the initial mass of matter), as well as by fifteen or so numbers called physical constants (such as the speed of the light and the mass of the electron). We have by now measured these physical constants with extremely high precision, but we have failed to come up with any theory explaining why they have their particular values. One of the most surprising discoveries of modern cosmology is the realization that the initial conditions and physical constants of the universe had to be adjusted with exquisite precision if they are to allow the emergence of conscious observers. This realization is referred to as the 'anthropic principle'...Change the initial conditions and physical constants ever so slightly, and the universe would be empty and sterile; we would not be around to discuss it. The precision of this fine-tuning is nothing short of stunning. The initial rate of expansion of the universe, to take just one example, had to have been tweaked to a precision comparable to that of an archer trying to land an arrow in a 1-square-centimeter target located on the fringes of the universe, 15 billion light years away!"

One excellent book is the rather poorly titled book “Modern Physics and Ancient Faith” by Stephen M. Barr, a physics professor at the University of Delaware (which doesn't at all brush away religious thinking as an ancient relic, despite the title). In that book there is an interesting discussion of “anthropic coincidences” that are necessary for our existence. One example given is that of a parameter called v. On pages 126-127 the book makes these interesting comments:

"The long technical name of the parameter v is 'the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field.'....The value of v is a great puzzle to particle theorists; in fact, it is one of the central puzzles of physics. What is puzzling is that in reasonably simple theories v seems to want to come out to be, not 1, but a number like 10¹⁷, i.e, 100,000,000,000,000,000...As far as the possibility of life emerging in our universe is concerned, it would be a disaster for v to be 100,000,000,000,000,000. It would also be a disaster if it were 100,000,000,000,000, or if it were 100,000,000, or if it were 100,000, or if it were 100. Indeed, it would be a disaster if it were 10, or 5, or even 1.5. It would probably be a disaster if v were even slightly different from the value it happens to have in the real world."

So nature “hit the bullseye,” a very distant bullseye, it would seem. This is only one of many astonishing “coincidences” required for our existence. Barr lists seven other such cases, one of which is even more dramatic: the fine-tuning of the cosmological constant. As Barr puts it on page 130 of his book:

"In order for life to be possible, then, it appears that the cosmological constant, whether it is positive or negative, must be extremely close to zero – in fact, it must be zero to at least 120 decimal places. This is one of the most precise fine-tunings in all of physics."

It would be very hard to overestimate how thoroughly all major objects in our universe depend upon the fundamental constants being just right. It is not merely that the existence of extremely organized things such as mammals depends on a fine-tuning of fundamental constants. It is also that the existence of objects such as stars and planets depend on such a fine-tuning.  On pages 64-65 of his book "The Symbiotic Universe," astronomer George Greenstein (a professor emeritus at Amherst College) said this about the equality of the proton and electron charges (which have precisely the same absolute value): 

"Relatively small things like stones, people, and the like would fly apart if the two charges differed by as little as one part in 100 billion. Large structures like the Earth and the Sun require for their existence a yet more perfect balance of one part in a billion billion." 

In fact, experiments do indicate that the charge of the proton and the electron match to eighteen decimal places. Because of the dependency of stars on a very delicate fine-tuning of fundamental constants, you can state it this way: a random universe would be both lifeless and lightless. 

In an attempt to explain such things, physicist Lee Smolin long ago  advanced a groundless theory he calls  cosmological natural selection, a theory it seems few other scientists endorsed.  It's a theory of a cyclical universe in which the laws of the universe change in each cycle. At the center of the theory is black holes. 

 In his book Time Reborn, Smolin describes the theory as follows:

"The basic hypothesis of cosmological natural selection is that universes reproduce by the creation of new universes inside black holes. Our universe is thus a descendant of another universe, born in one of its black holes, and every black hole in our universe is the seed of a new universe. This is a scenario within which we can apply the principles of natural selection."

Smolin claims to have a theory of how the physics of the universe could evolve through natural selection. But how on earth can we get anything like natural selection out of the idea of new universes being created by the formation of black holes? Smolin gave the following ridiculously strained reasoning: (1) he claimed that the physics that favors a habitable universe are similar to the physics that favor the production of black holes; (2) he claimed that a new universe produced by a black hole might have slightly different physics from its parent universe; (3) he claimed that random variations in physics that would tend to produce universes that produce more black holes would cause such universes to produce more offspring (more universes); (4) he claimed that as a result of this “increased reproduction rate” of some types of universes, we therefore would gradually see the evolution of physical laws and constants that tend to favor the appearance of life and also the production of black holes.

The speculations described above hinge upon the linchpin claim that a new universe can be produced from the collapse of a huge star to form a black hole. Some analysts let Smolin get away with making this claim, but there is no reason why that should be done. The idea that a new universe can be produced from the collapse of a black hole is a complete fantasy, with no basis in fact. We have no observations to support such a theory. Nor is there any physics or mathematics to support such a theory. There is no way to write an equation in which you put a new universe on the right side of an equal sign. 

The idea of universes being produced from black holes is a very silly one. A typical black hole arises from the collapse of a star with only about 20 solar masses. A universe like ours has a mass-energy of at least 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 solar masses. Claiming a new universe can arise from a black hole is like claiming a planet can arise from a grain of sand. Black holes don't create universes; they are instead something that arise when the biggest stars die. 

Also contrary to observations is Smolin's groundless speculation about a black hole collapse causing a local fluctuation in fundamental constants of a universe, a speculation essential to his theory.  Our universe has plenty of black holes. But we see no local fluctuations in the fundamental constants of the universe anywhere. 

Smolin claimed that one advantage of his theory of cosmological natural selection is that it makes a falsifiable prediction. In a 2004 paper (page 38) he lists one such prediction:

“There is at least one example of a falsifiable theory satisfying these conditions, which is cosmological natural selection. Among the properties ...that make the theory falsifiable is that the upper mass limit of neutron stars is less than 1.6 solar masses. This and other predictions of CNS have yet to be falsified, but they could easily be by observations in progress.”

But by now this prediction has proven to be incorrect. In September 2019 a science news story reported on observations of one of the most massive neutron stars ever found. We are told, “The researchers, members of the NANOGrav Physics Frontiers Center, discovered that a rapidly rotating millisecond pulsar, called J0740+6620, is the most massive neutron star ever measured, packing 2.17 times the mass of our Sun into a sphere only 30 kilometers across.” A 2021 story lists the mass of this neutron star as 2.14 solar masses. 

Later there was a science news headline of "Black Widow Pulsar Sets Mass Record." A Sky and Telescope story  tells us this: 

"The pulsar PSR J0952-0607, which is some 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Sextans, already holds the title of second-fastest-known rotator, spinning around its axis 707 times per second. Now, it has also shattered the record for most massive neutron star known, weighing in at 2.35 solar masses."

 A CNN story confirms; it states, "The PSR J0952-0607 star is 2.35 times the mass of the sun." 

So the theory of cosmological natural selection has been falsified. Its creator Smolin told us exactly what observations would falsify it; and just such observations occurred. The theory of cosmological natural selection has attracted very little attention from physicists, and a search for the term on the Cornell physics paper server produces only five matches, none published later than 2013. Smolin (the creator of the theory) rather seems to have lost interest in it. A search for his papers on that same server shows none in the past 13 years that advocate for the theory. Smolin has moved on to some other theory he calls "biocosmology," one I discuss in my post here. 

But recently there appeared an article trying to revive the dead horse that is the theory of cosmological natural selection. It's an article by Jeff Shainline, one entitled "The universe is fine-tuned for technology, not just life."

Shainline confesses this:

"There are problems with CNS [cosmological natural selection] as Smolin originally formulated the idea, since it states that parameters should be optimized to maximize production of black holes made by stars. Empirically testing the claim suggests that this is probably not the case. The parameters of the universe don’t appear especially finely tuned to maximize black-hole production via stars."

But then Shainline tries to offer an "epicycle" to patch up the already falsified theory. He refers us to the 2008 paper "POSSIBLE IMPLICATIONS OF THE QUANTUM THEORY OF GRAVITY: An Introduction to the Meduso-Anthropic Principle" that you can read here. It's a paper that starts out like this: "If we assume that the constants of nature fluctuate near the singularity when a black hole forms (assuming, also, that physical black holes really do form singularities) then a process of evolution of universes becomes possible."  Such a statement should have been something like this:  "If we assume that the constants of nature fluctuate near the singularity when a black hole forms (assuming, also, that physical black holes really do form singularities) -- and if we also assume senselessly that a black hole destroying a star would create a new universe, and we also senselessly assume that such a new universe would have some fluctuations of the universe's fundamental  constants arising at just one spot in the old universe merely because some black hole had formed -- then a process of evolution

of universes becomes possible." 

The quotation below from the paper gives a passage that seems laughable:

"The conjecture which I believe modifies Professor Smolin’s conclusions is the following: 

SUCCESSFUL ADVANCED INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATIONS WILL EVENTUALLY CREATE BLACK HOLES. 

The synthesis of this with Smolin’s two conjectures is what I call the meduso-anthropic principle. Before exploring the implications, let us consider the plausibility of this conjecture. 

SUBCONJECTURE 1: SUCCESSFUL ADVANCED INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATIONS WILL EVENTUALLY WANT TO MAKE BLACK HOLES

 and 

SUBCONJECTURE 2: SUCCESSFUL INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATIONS WILL EVENTUALLY BE ABLE TO PRODUCE BLACK HOLES. 

It is fairly clear, at least, that the conjecture follows from the two subconjectures. (This paper is not on the mathematical level of rigor)."

No, it does not make sense at all to think that successful advanced industrial civilizations would want to make black holes. Black holes do not serve any purpose. And the creation of a black hole would be beyond the power of any civilization. It would require gathering up and concentrating twenty solar masses, which is the same amount of matter as in about 600,000 Earth-sized planets. That would be beyond the reach of any imaginable technology. 

The paper Shainline has referred us to is nonsense. But at least Shainline has got one thing right. His title is, "The universe is fine-tuned for technology, not just life." And that is correct. 

My diagram below illustrates the point. A barely habitable universe (allowing only the simplest of life, and only short-lived organisms) requires much less fine-tuning than a moderately habitable universe. And a luxury-permitting universe like the one we live in requires much more fine-tuning than a universe that is merely moderately habitable. 

Our universe is not just a universe that allows some type of life. It is a universe allowing the existence of high-tech technological civilizations, and creatures that have long lifetimes in stable environments. That type of universe (allowing the existence of elements such as gold, silver, iron,  copper and the "rare earth" elements used in computers) requires much more fine-tuning than a universe merely allowing the simplest life and organisms with short lifetimes. 

For an in-depth discussion of why luxury results such as we have in our universe defeat all multiverse explanations of our universe's habitability, read my post "Our Luxury Results Debunk the Multiverse As an Explanation." 

With a speculation such as Smolin's, you cannot simply start out by imagining a universe like ours with black holes, and then speculate that when such black holes are created, they produce other universes. To explain cosmic fine-tuning by appealing to black holes, you would have to first start out with some random universe that has no fine-tuning.  Then you might ask yourself: would such a random universe ever have black holes in the first place? The answer is: no, it would not. 

Just as living beings require a universe with incredibly high fine-tuning, black holes themselves require a universe with incredibly high fine-tuning. Study the infographic visual at the beginning of this post (discussing how black holes are formed), and also study Greenstein's quote about the fine-tuning needed for the existence of stars. Black holes only arise when stars much more massive than the sun finish burning up their nuclear fuel. But the existence of such stars requires very special physics fine-tuning fantastically unlikely to exist by chance.  As I once stated in another post, random universes are both lifeless and lightless. 

So what would happen if you started out with a random universe? There would be no stars brightly burning by thermonuclear fusion (which requires very precise fine-tuning), and no black holes arising when such stars entered the last stage of their lifetimes. So Smolin's phantasmagorical sequence of events could never get started. 

The reasoning above is based on assumptions of black holes forming as they form in our universe, from the collapse of super-massive stars. But there's another way to get black holes in random universes. If the  vacuum energy density can have random values in random universes, then you would have universes in which empty space would be far denser than steel, because of a cosmological constant gigantically many times larger than the convenient "almost nothing" cosmological constant we have. In such universes, black holes might be forming all the time, because of the collapse of super-dense concentrations of matter. The problem is that once you consider this way of forming black holes, then you destroy a crucial pillar of Smolin's theory of cosmological natural selection -- that universes producing black holes would be like universes compatible with life. 

Trying to recruit black holes to explain the universe's fine-tuning is like trying to recruit a rock to be your university's next physics professor. 

A theory of a physicist may be very much a "castle on a cloud"

Astronomers Keep Using Bad Reasoning About Extraterrestrial Life

 For many decades scientists have been asked about the possibility of extraterrestrial life.  Again and again they have been posed these questions:

• Are we alone in the universe?
• Is there life on other planets?
• Is there intelligent life on other planets?
• Do extraterrestrial civilizations exist?

It seems that a large fraction of the time that scientists are asked these questions,  they reply by giving a fallacious argument. One such argument may be called the "many chances equals many successes" argument. The argument may be stated like this:

"There are billions of planets in our galaxy, so there must be many planets on which life exists."

"There are billions of planets in our galaxy, so there must be many planets with extraterrestrial civilizations."

"There are a vast number of planets in our universe, so life must have arisen many times."

"There are a vast number of planets in our universe, so there must be very many civilizations on other planets."

"There are a huge number of planets in our universe, so there must be many other extraterrestrial civilizations."

A very similar  argument may be called the "many chances equals some successes" argument. The argument may be stated like this:

"There are billions of planets in our galaxy, so there must be some  planets on which life exists."

"There are billions of planets in our galaxy, so there must be some planets with extraterrestrial civilizations."

"There are a vast number of planets in our universe, so life must have arisen on some other planets."

"There are a vast number of planets in our universe, so there must be some other civilizations on other planets."

"There are a huge number of planets in our universe, so there must be some other extraterrestrial civilizations."

We have an example of such a fallacious argument right at the beginning of the Netflix TV show "The Hunt for Planet B." We hear MIT scientist named Sara Seager say this:

"Well let me just say that in our own Milky Way galaxy there are a hundred billion stars and we now believe in our universe we have more than a hundred billion galaxies. So if you just do the math, the chance that there's a planet like earth out there with life on it is very high."

This is fallacious reasoning. You do not "do the math" by merely computing the total number of chances for an unlikely event to occur.  That's not "doing the math," but doing only half of the math.  Unless you have also estimated the chance of success on any one trial, you have only done half the math.  Seager follows her junk reasoning with the extremely false claim that "scientists never like to speculate." 

We also had an example of such a fallacious argument, stated by some British astronomer (Dame Maggie Aderin–Pocock). In the Daily Mail we read this:

"'In the whole of the universe there are approximately 200 billion galaxies,' Dame Maggie told the Daily Mail. 'And so although certain conditions were in place for life to start here on Earth, and this is the only example we have of life, I'm absolutely convinced that there's life out there, because with so many stars, so many planets, why would it just occur here?'

Such reasoning is completely fallacious. It is not at all true in general that "many chances equals many successes." It is also not at all true in general that "many chances equals some successes" or even that "many chances equals at least one success." If the probability of something happening is sufficiently low, then we should expect many chances to yield zero successes.  So "many chances" does not necessarily equal "many successes," and "many chances" does not necessarily equal "some successes" or even one success. For example:

• If everyone in the world threw a deck of cards into the air 1000 times, that would be almost 10 trillion chances for such flying cards to form into a house of cards. But we should not expect that in even one case would the flying deck of cards accidentally form into a triangular house of cards. 
• If a billion computers around the world each made a thousand attempts to write an intelligible book by randomly generating 100,000 characters, that would be a total of a trillion chances for an  intelligible book to be accidentally generated. But we should not expect that even one of these attempts would result in the creation of an intelligible book. And we should not even expect that even one of these attempts would result in the creation of a single well-spelled paragraph of more than 200 words. 
• If you buy a million tickets in a winner-take-all lottery in which the chance of winning is only 1 in 100 million, you should not expect that any one of those tickets will succeed in winning such a lottery. 

Below are some very general observations about probability:

• It is not necessarily true that many chances (also called trials) will yield many successes. 
• It is not necessarily true that many chances (also called trials) will yield some successes or even one success. 
• If the chance of success on any one trial multiplied by the number of trials gives a number less than 1, we should not expect that even one of the trials will produce a success.
• If the chance of success on any one trial multiplied by the number of trials gives a number greater than 1, we should  expect that at least one of the trials will produce a success.

Aderin–Pocock's language quoted above is very unwise. She has used a fallacious "many chances equals some successes" argument, and told us that because of this kind of reasoning she is not merely persuaded of a likelihood of extraterrestrial life but "absolutely convinced."

The origin of life from unguided processes is exactly the type of very-low-probability event that we should never expect to occur accidentally, even given a universe of 200 billion galaxies, each stacked with billions of planets. Below are some quotes from scientists and a doctor. 

• "The transformation of an ensemble of appropriately chosen biological monomers (e.g. amino acids, nucleotides) into a primitive living cell capable of further evolution appears to require overcoming an information hurdle of superastronomical proportions (Appendix A), an event that could not have happened within the time frame of the Earth except, we believe, as a miracle (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1981, 1982, 2000). All laboratory experiments attempting to simulate such an event have so far led to dismal failure (Deamer, 2011; Walker and Wickramasinghe, 2015)." -- "Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic?," a paper by 21 scientists,  2018. 
• "Biochemistry's orthodox account of how life emerged from a primordial soup of such chemicals lacks experimental support and is invalid because, among other reasons, there is an overwhelming statistical improbability that random reactions in an aqueous solution could have produced self-replicating RNA molecules."  John Hands MD, "Cosmo Sapiens: Human Evolution From the Origin of the Universe," page 411. 
• "The ongoing insistence on defending scientific orthodoxies on these matters, even against a formidable tide of contrary evidence, has turned out to be no less repressive than the discarded superstitions in earlier times. For instance, although all attempts to demonstrate spontaneous generation in the laboratory have led to failure for over half a century, strident assertions of its necessary operation against the most incredible odds continue to dominate the literature." -- 3 scientists (link).
• "The interconnected nature of DNA, RNA, and proteins means that it could not have sprung up ab initio from the primordial ooze, because if only one component is missing then the whole system falls apart – a three-legged table with one missing cannot stand." -- "The Improbable Origins of Life on Earth" by astronomer Paul Sutter. 
• "Even the simplest of these substances [proteins} represent extremely complex compounds, containing many thousands of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in absolutely definite patterns, which are specific for each separate substance. To the student of protein structure the spontaneous formation of such an atomic arrangement in the protein molecule would seem as improbable as would the accidental origin of the text of Virgil's 'Aeneid'  from scattered letter type." -- Chemist A. I. Oparin, "The Origin of Life," pages 132-133.
• "The expected number of abiogenesis events is much smaller than unity when we observe a star, a galaxy, or even the whole observable universe." -- Scientist Tomonori Totani, "Emergence of life in an inflationary universe," a paper confessing we would not expect one natural origin of life (abiogenesis) even in the entire observable universe (link).
• "The advent of life from prebiotic origins remains a deep and possibly inexplicable scientific mystery." -- Scientist Stephen Mann (link). 
• "The origin of cells is shrouded in near-total mystery." -- A recent biology textbook written by scientists (link). 
• "We now know not only of the existence of a break between the living and non-living world, but also that it represents the most dramatic and fundamental of all the discontinuities of nature. Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological system, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive." --  -- Michael Denton, MD and biochemistry PhD, "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," page 250.
• "Thus, the chances of getting the right sequence of amino acids in a protein of 100 amino acids in length by random chance is 1 in 60¹⁰⁰ or 1 in 6.53 × 10¹⁷⁷. In the vernacular, that would be considerably less than 'slim to none.'  But that is just the odds of selecting the amino acids in the correct order; we still have some chemistry to do to combine them in the proper way via peptide bonds. Making proteins via undirected chemical reactions is beyond hard. Based upon these odds, it is impossible." -- Chemist Ed Peltzer, discussing the luck required to get only one of the many proteins needed for an accidental origin of life (link). 
• "Now people will argue that given the tremendous size of the ocean and the time involved, there is a tremendous resource for the many possibilities. I would argue that it does us no good to have the essential proteins scattered about the ocean and millions of years apart. We need all of them simultaneously and in the same spot. And that spot is tiny. A typical bacterial cell is very small. They range in size from 0.2 to 2.0 μm in diameter and 2 to 8 μm in length or 63 atto-L to 25 femto-L (63 × 10-18 L to 25 × 10-15 L) in volume.  So, time and chance are of no help here....Abiogenesis needs an external source of information that random undirected chemical reactions can never provide." -- Chemist Ed Peltzer,  (link).
• "Over the past few decades biologists have further unravelled the mind-blowing complexity of life at the molecular level and consequently laid bare its super-astronomical information content. Such a complexity is manifest for instance in the arrangements of amino acids in crucial enzymes, or nucleobases in DNA. The precise 'information' contained in enzymes— the arrangements of amino acids into folded chains—is transmitted by way of the coded ordering of the four nucleotide bases (A,T,G,C) in DNA. In a hypothetical RNA world, that some biologists think may have predated the DNA-protein world, RNA is posited to serve a dual role as both enzyme and transmitter of genetic information. If a few such ribozymes are regarded as precursors to all life, one could attempt to make an estimate of the probability of the assembly of a simple ribozyme composed of 300 bases. This probability turns out to be 1 in 4³⁰⁰, which is equivalent to 1 in 10¹⁸⁰, which can hardly be supposed to happen even once in the entire 13.9-billion-year history of the canonical Big Bang universe. And this is just for a single enzyme. In the simplest known bacterium M. genitalium with some 500 genes coding for enzymes the improbability escalates to a super-astronomical scale." -- 3 scientists (link).  
• "There is absolutely no evidence that life began on Earth. The problems with an Earth-centered abiogenesis can be summed up as follows: A) Complex life was present on Earth almost from the beginning. B) ...There was not enough time to create a complex self-replicating organism. C) DNA and complex organic molecules would have been destroyed by the environment of the early Earth. D) All the essential ingredients for creating life were missing on the new Earth. E) There is no evidence that life has been or can be produced from non-life on this planet." -- 2 scientists (link). 
• "The mathematical likelihood of finding RNA elsewhere in the universe is basically zero,” -- Lee Cronin, an expert in prebiotic chemistry (link). 

Below is a screen shot from a page showing the curriculum requirements to get a Master's Degree in astronomy at the University of California at San Diego. There is no course in probability mathematics. There is no course in biology. There is no course in chemistry. So why would anyone think that an astronomer is qualified to competently estimate the likelihood of life arising by unguided processes on other planets, by accidental chemical events?

It is possible that there is life on many other planets, but only if some purposeful agency is involved, some transcendent causal factor that overcomes the otherwise insurmountable odds of the accidental origin of life. 

The latest example of zany talk by astrobiologists is discussed in a recent post by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb promoting a nutty-sounding proposal for looking for signs of extraterrestrial life:

"A detailed preprint, posted recently here, suggests a new path in the search for technological signatures of extraterrestrial civilizations. The idea is to analyze a cubic meter of lunar regolith and look for sub-micron dust particles that might be relics from long gone technological structures of past civilizations in the Milky-Way galaxy. Such particles may survive over billions of years in their journey through interstellar space and eventually land on the lunar surface."

Science at its wackiest

Precognitive Amnesia and the Notifying Apparition

In 1896 a newspaper published the very interesting news article below (which you can read here). You might call this a case of precognitive amnesia. I have never heard before of that combination. 

In the article above (in the area I highlighted in red) we read this astonishing claim about Franklin Hart developing an extraordinary power after he tried to kill himself by gassing himself:

" 'While Franklin's physical condition is
so good that he will be able to leave the
hospital in a day or two,' writes Hart,
'his mental state startles me. His mental
vision is supernaturally perspective [i.e. precognitive ], instead of being retrospective, and the physicians here tell me that there is no
parallel case on record in any part of the
civilized globe. They claim that the 
phenomenon demonstrated in my son's
mentality is one of the many hidden
forces in human nature. In ordinary conversation

Franklin is as lucid as ever, yet it is difficult for him to recall past events without hard study. For instance, when I referred to his Portland visit and his departure from there, it took him two days to recall the more important events, as they had altogether passed from his memory since the almost tragic affair at the Palmer House."

"The writer adds that the phenomenon in his son's mind consists of his mental anticipation of events as, for instance, the day prior to Mr. Hart's arrival in Chicago Franklin repeated almost verbatim to the doctor attending him the conversation he had with his father eight hours later. The singular and  unheard-of metamorphosis of young Hart's mental vision consists of its power to read all manner of events, even of the most trifling import, forty-eight hours in advance, with the same distinct clearness that the healthy, normal mind conjures up the past."

Not many years earlier, another source had used the same "mental vision" phrase we read in the quote above. On page 205 of the 1888 Revue Philsophique which you can read here, we have an article entitled "MENTAL VISION OR DOUBLE SIGHT IN INDUCED AND SPONTANEOUS SLEEPWALKING."  The article by a Dr. Dufay is about clairvoyance in someone while that person is in a hypnotic trance. Such a phenomenon was very widely reported during the 19th century. The account is in French, but I used Google Translate to produce the translations below. 

On page 209 we have an account of a woman named Marie who seems to have clairvoyant powers. We read of a strange power of this Marie, a type of medical clairvoyance she had under hypnosis. In the passage "put Marie to sleep" the author refers to hypnotizing someone:

"Dr. Girault had several times witnessed me perform very curious experiments on this girl, whom he magnetized [hypnotized] almost every day. When he was called to the countryside, he would put Marie to sleep before leaving and question her about the condition of the patient he was going to visit, so that, he said, he knew positively—let's just say approximately—what medications he should take with him."

On the same page and the next page we read that this Marie seemed to know through hypnotic clairvoyance of the death of a person whose death was unknown to her through normal means. The reference to "the sleepwalker" is a reference to Marie while she was in a hypnotic trance.  We read this:

"Then, with the speed of lightning, the comedy turned into drama: the poor sleepwalker was overcome with suffocation, her tears flowed, a cold sweat wet her forehead, and she called Mr. Girault for help.

 'What's the matter with you, Marie?... What's your pain, my daughter?'

'Ah! sir... Ah! sir... How awful! He's dead!'

'Who's dead? Is it one of my patients?'

'The son of Father Limoges, the ropemaker... you know... In Crimea... He's just died. Poor people! Poor people!'

'Come, come, my child, pull yourself together; it's no doubt a dream, a bad dream you've had.'

'A dream!... But I'm not asleep [that's the pretension of all sleepwalkers]. I see him... He's just breathed his last... Poor boy! Look at him.'

And her eyes wandered to a point in the apartment she pointed to with her hand. She wanted to flee, but, barely getting up from her chair, she fell back, her legs unable to support her.

It took a long time for calm to return, and when M. Girault woke Marie, she was still in the grip of a great malaise... which she attributed to indigestion, having no memory of what had happened.

What had she suddenly thought of the young soldier about? It was known in the village that the father was worried; he had no news of his son. Was she concerned about him out of sympathy for the family, or out of a more tender feeling that the idea of ​​Mademoiselle de S.'s marriage would have rekindled in her at that moment?

In any case, Father Limoges was informed some time later of his son's death, which had occurred in Dalmate (was that the name of a French ambulance?) near Constantinople, on June 15, 1855, that is, the very day Marie had had the vision.

This recalls the account of Gregory of Tours, according to which Saint Ambrose, having fallen asleep while saying Mass in the church of Milan, dreamed that Saint Martin had just died in Tours, which happened precisely on that day, and at the hour of Mass."

On page 211 we read that the same Marie was subjected to tests in which she was asked to tell the contents of sealed envelopes.  The author (Dr. Dufay) says he took an envelope containing a letter from a military man telling of his dysentery illness; and the author says he put the letter back in the envelope, and enclosed that envelope inside another envelope. We read this:

"The ten or twelve people gathered in Mrs. D.'s living room were stunned by what they had just seen. The sleepwalker [Marie] had unmistakably recognized the contents of several packages they had prepared themselves, as I had done. But I left mine in my pocket to avoid the monotony of the experiments, merely slipping my letter into the hand of one of the assistants, signaling to her to pass it to Mr. Girault. He received it without knowing it came from me, and placed it in Marie's hands.

I didn't note whether her eyes were open or closed, but that, as you can imagine, was of no importance in such a case.

'What do you have in your hand?' asked Dr. Girault.

'A letter.'

'To whom was it addressed?'

'To Mr. Dufay.'

'By whom?' 

'By a military gentleman I don't know.'

'What is he talking about in his letter, this military gentleman?'

'He's sick; he's talking about his illness.'

'Is it an illness you could name?'

'Oh! Yes, very well;... it's like the old woodcutter's in Mesland, which hasn't yet subsided...'

'Very well, very well, I understand,... dysentery. Listen, Marie, I think you would give Mr. Dufay great pleasure if you went to see his friend the officer, to bring him back some reliable news.'"

Marie seemed to have correctly identified that the double sealed letter was from a military man with dysentery. 

On later pages (pages 213 and 214) we read of a man who was accused of murder, and who committed suicide in prison, hanging himself with his own tie. The article author (Dufay) says he took the tie, and wrapped it in several sheets of paper, giving it to Marie. She correctly identified the package as containing something that was used to kill a man, and that the package contained a tie. She also said the person who was killed by the contents was someone who threw his murder weapon at a particular spot in a pond. A search revealed a matching weapon at that spot. 

On page 215 in the same article we read of an extraordinary sleepwalker named Janicaud Théophile. We read in the next pages that Janicaud seemed to make clairvoyant mind trips in which he found out little details about distant persons that were only later verified as true. For example, on page 217 we read this:

"The following night, he said that he saw on the road to Glény the body of a man who had drowned while bathing in the Creuse, and that he was being brought back to Guéret in a car. The next morning I went to check the news and learned that a resident of the town had indeed drowned the day before in Glény and that his body had been brought back to Guéret during the night. However, no one in the establishment, or even in the town, had been aware of this accident the day before."

The accounts of Marie's ability to detect the contents of sealed packages and sealed envelopes is similar to many accounts in the literature of parapsychology, documenting such a skill in others such as Alexis Didier.  You can read many similar accounts in my posts here and  here and here. To read many posts discussing accounts of apparitions that seemed to act like a death notification, see my series of posts here, continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom right. 

If the topic of this post interested you, check out my free book "Psychics and Paranormal Phenomena," available on www.archive.org using the link here. Using the native www.archive.org file viewer in single-page mode (after clicking the [] icon at the bottom of the book viewer),  you can conveniently read the whole book by finger swiping. Scholars who are interested in following the links may prefer to download the book as a PDF file, which will allow opening links by right-clicking on a link.