Astronomers May Sometimes Fail to Speak With Accuracy and Candor

We tend to think of astronomers as people who speak and write very accurately, maybe because astronomy is a business requiring great precision. But it seems that astronomers sometimes fail to speak with accuracy and candor. 

A recent CBS News story has the incorrect title "Mysterious dark matter seen in new high-resolution map of distant galaxies." No actual dark matter was seen. All that was observed was gravitational lensing, a "bend light" phenomenon that can be produced by any type of matter, either regular matter or so-called dark matter. The scientific paper makes clear that the boasts are all based on observations of "weak gravitational lensing," which involves seeing a bending of light, not seeing dark matter. 

In the article  we read this:

"Wherever we see a big cluster of thousands of galaxies, we also see an equally massive amount of dark matter in the same place. And when we see a thin string of regular matter connecting two of those clusters, we see a string of dark matter as well," said astrophysicist Richard Massey, a coauthor of the study."  

No actual dark matter was observed. Massey is simply inferring dark matter based on some theory of dark matter, and observations that failed to show any dark matter, which (according to scientists such as Massey) is invisible. Using the term "we see" in the statement above rather than "we infer," Massey has failed to speak with accuracy and candor. The same misstatement is made by  Diana Scognamiglio on a NASA page. Scognamiglio boasts about "seeing the invisible scaffolding of the universe in stunning detail," a statement that is obviously untrue, because you cannot see things that are invisible.  What Scognamiglio should have said is that she inferred something that she failed to see. 

The scientific paper of these claimants is entitled "An ultra-high-resolution map of  (dark) matter."  The title is inaccurate. The paper has figures, and none of them is labeled as a map of dark matter. The term "dark matter" is not even used in any of the captions of the paper's figures. We have here another case of what is so common these days in science literature: citation-hungry scientists giving their papers titles that do not match what is in the paper. 

During much of my life the most well-known US astronomer was Carl Sagan, a man who was guilty of many very misleading statements about very important topics, as I document in my post here. Here is a quote from that post:

"Sagan frequently spoke and wrote on the topic of the origin of life, but seemed to never deal with it candidly or honestly by discussing the fantastically intricate fine-tuned arrangements of matter needed to get life started.  His 'just add energy' idea that so gigantically improbable an arrangement of matter was 'spurred by ultraviolet light from the sun and lightning' was goofy talk, like saying that a lightning storm or wind storm could cause the scattered pebbles on a beach to assemble into a long meaningful message....On page 253 of his book Billions and Billions, Sagan told us this gigantically grotesque lying boast about DNA:  'The most significant aspect of the DNA story is that the fundamental processes of life now seem fully understandable in terms of physics and chemistry.' To the contrary, scientists lack any credible explanation of so simple a thing as how human cells are able to reproduce; they lack any credible explanation of the most basic mental processes such as thinking and memory; and since DNA is not a specification for making a human or any organ, cell or organelle, scientists lack any credible explanation for the progression from a speck-sized zygote to an adult human."

Astronomer Adam Frank seems to be a more careful speaker than Sagan was, although at times his posts seem to display shortfalls of candor and accuracy. An example is a post Frank wrote in November, 2024 discussing some US Congress hearing on strange unidentified things in the sky (UFOs and UAP).  Frank describes science as "organized skepticism." That is not a candid and accurate description of today's science academia. An accurate description would be to say that nowadays science academia consists of organized skepticism about anything that scientists do not want to believe in, combined with organized credulity about anything that scientists wish to believe in. So whenever they are dealing with their cherished beliefs such as the belief that life and humans arose accidentally and their belief that minds are made by brains, scientists leave their skepticism at the door, and display the most childlike trusting credulity. 

Another misstatement in Frank's post comes at the end. Inaccurately insinuating that the investigation of UFOs and UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) is not "real action," Frank states this: "Meanwhile, the public will miss the real action — the action starting right now as astronomers begin searching distant alien worlds for hard evidence, evidence that all can see, of distant alien life."  Frank makes the untrue claim that the search for distant alien life is "starting right now." To the contrary, it has been going for on more than 60 years, without any success. 

I could see how Frank would want to make this huge misstatement. It is very embarrassing for astronomers such as him that the 60-year search by astronomers for extraterrestrial life has produced no successes. So it is very convenient for an astronomer to tell the whopper that such a search is just beginning.  Similarly, if you are a husband who has spent 40 years of married life in a fruitless attempt to create a perpetual motion machine, then if your wife complains about the waste of time and money, it would be convenient to tell the lie that you are "just beginning" your efforts. 

Somehow Adam Frank won a $25,000 prize for his essay "The Second Copernican Revolution," an essay which features lots of crowing Sagan-speak, along with lots of mentions of a not very well-established Gaia theory. The essay makes numerous appeals to an inaccurate concept of "planetary intelligence." Planet Earth is not intelligent, and the billions of intelligent people on this planet do not make up any such thing as a "planetary intelligence." The essay makes inaccurate claims such as this: "Thus, a mature technosphere would be autopoietic. In becoming so, it must manifest what the supporting biosphere established billions of years earlier: planetary intelligence." There is no "planetary intelligence" today, and it is even more obvious there was not "planetary intelligence" billions of years ago.

Talking about biology, the essay has frequent appeals to "self-organization."  When scientists have no decent explanation for how wonders of biological organization arose, their last resort is to make conceptually empty appeals to "self-organization."  Theorists have been speculating about  theories of self-organization for quite a while, but no one has come up with any substantial theory of self-organization explaining impressive degrees of functional order (although the term "self-organization" is sometimes applied to minor things we already knew about such as crystallization). 

Frank gives us this not-at-all candid statement:

"Complex adaptive systems are built from nested hierarchies of smaller subsystems. Think of an animal built from organs that are built of cells that are built from proteins and so on down to the 'fundamental' units of their atoms and constituents. Through these hierarchies of organization, complex systems manifest their most important feature: They self-organize. They create the processes and products necessary for their own ongoing existence."

Rather than making so vacuous an appeal to "self-organization," what Frank should have said is something like this: "Living organisms such as humans have the most enormous fine-tuned hierarchical organization featuring complex systems built of complex systems built of complex systems built of complex systems, with an abundance of interdependent components everywhere; and we don't understand how so many layers of interdependent organization arose." 

Frank fails to clarify things when he says this about the membranes of cells:

"But these processes and products are the very means by which they produce themselves. A concrete example is the cellular membrane. It is the membrane that allows the cell to endure. Needed chemicals are let in while harmful compounds are kept out. This is what allows the membrane itself to be assembled and maintained. Thus, it is the membrane that allows for the existence of a membrane." 

How vacuous and circular such an account is. It's as vacuous as trying to explain the manufacture of cars by saying, "Well, parts are let into the cars, and this is what allows the cars to be assembled." The membranes of human cells are enormously complex systems. According to this page of the Human Protein Atlas, there are more than 2000 different types of proteins used in the membranes of human cells. Each of these proteins is its own complex invention requiring hundreds or thousands of well-arranged parts. Some of the complexity is shown in the diagram below, but the actual complexity is enormously greater than what we see in the diagram. 

Frank might instead have pointed us in the right direction here by saying something like "the vast complexity of cell membranes gives us an inkling of how vast is the organization of human cells."

Astronomer Carl Sagan made many misstatements suggesting structural components of life are common in outer space, something that is not at all true.  Sagan-style baloney and BS on this topic continues. Quanta Magazine had a story with the groundless headline "The Cosmos Teems With Complex Organic Molecules," with the false subtitle of "Wherever astronomers look, they see life’s raw materials."  

The article gives the asteroid Ryugu as an example of such claimed abundance. The truth is that amino acids (the smallest components of living things) have only been detected in space in the tiniest trace amounts.  The only biologically relevant amino acids reportedly found in Ryugu were three of the simplest amino acids (glycine, alanine and valine), which were reportedly found at a level of only about 1 part per billion; and whenever levels that small are reported, the reported detection is very questionable (partly because of the very high chance of earthly contamination of retrieved samples). Senselessly the Quanta article describes molecules containing only 20 atoms as "very complex." That isn't a complex molecule from the perspective of biology.  A typical protein molecule has about 8000 very well-arranged atoms in it.  No protein molecule has ever been found in space. 

Those wishing to push unbelievable ideas of accidental biological origins engage in different types of misspeaking.  Most commonly they engage in a kind of misspeaking in which great marvels of vast organization are described as if they are things not complex. So, for example,  they may falsely describe a human body (something with sky-high levels of organization) as a mere "bundle of atoms." But when it comes time to sell the groundless notion that life can accidentally originate, then their language is entirely different. Suddenly they are trying to persuade us that molecules of merely 20 atoms are "very complex."  

In the article we have a quote by an astronomer speaking in a misleading way. Referring to an interstellar cloud, Harvard astronomer Alice Booth says, "You can build complexity without much going on in just a cold, dark cloud."  But why not speak honestly and candidly? Why not tell people that the "complexity" you are talking about is something like an almost-never-arising molecule with only about 20 atoms, which is much less than a hundredth as complex as the complexity of the protein molecules needed for life?  And why not tell people the truth, that such protein molecules require such a special arrangement of amino acids that we would never expect to get even one functional protein molecule from all the random interactions of molecular clouds occurring throughout all of the universe's galaxies over the entire course of the universe's history? 

Perseus molecular cloud (credit: NASA/JPL)

Appendix: Below are some of the SETI searches that have occurred over the past 65 years (some of the observation time figures are taken from the source here):

• The SERENDIP I project, which from 1979 to 1982 surveyed a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 4 of the paper here, a project which a Sky and Telescope article tells us surveyed "many billions of Milky Way stars."

• The Southern SERENDIP project lasting 1998 and 2005, which surveyed for some 60,000 hours a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here.

• The SERENDIP II project from 1986 to 1988, involving some 17,000 hours of observations. 

• The All-Sky Search at Ohio State University from 1989 to 1996 (Childers, Dixon and Bolinger), involving 60,000 hours of observations, 

• The Astropulse and Fly's Eye SETI projects surveying a significant portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here. 

• The SETI@Home project, which according to the source here covered 20% of the full celestial sphere, and 67% of the sky area observable from the Arecibo observatory. 

• The Harvard BETA all-sky SETI survey discussed here, which operated continuously for more than four years (1995-1999), scanning the whole part of the sky observable from Massachusetts, USA, and doing 35,000 hours of observations. 

• Years of SETI searches using the Allen Telescope Array, involving 12 hours a day of SETI searches, 7 days a week, for years (such as 2007 to 2010), resulting in 95,000 hours of observations (discussed here). 

• An optical search for extraterrestrial intelligence, searching 577 nearby stars that might have habitable planets, looking for laser signals.

• All of the optical searches for extraterrestrial intelligence listed on the three pages you can view here, including three searches each involving more than 7000 hours of telescope time, and one search involving 200,000 objects and other searches involving thousands of stars. 

• The two-year southern sky SETI search discussed here, which observed for 9000 hours and "covered the sky almost two times."  

• The five-year META SETI project discussed here, which between 1988 and 1993 spent about 80,000 hours of telescope time searching for extraterrestrials. 

• A META II SETI project between 1990 and 2010, involving 9000 hours of observations of the southern sky.

• All of the radio telescopes searches listed on the seven pages of search results you can review at the link here, including a Dixon, Ehman and Raub search from 1973 to 1986 involving 100,000 hours of telescope time, 

• A failed search of 10 million stars using what in 2009 was the latest and greatest technology.

• A SERENDIP III project from 1992 to 1997, involving 40,000 hours of observations, and surveying 30% of the sky. 

• Extensive SETI searches carried out by the 500-meter FAST radio telescope in China. 

• The ASTROPULSE project discussed here, involving 21,000 hours of observations from 2006 to 2010. 

• The SETI-Italia project discussed here, involving 30,000 hours of observation from 2006 to 2010.

• The Breakthrough Listen project described here, which began in 2015, and has run for 10 years with 100 million dollars in funding, involving thousands of hours each year of dedicated SETI searching, on two of the world's largest radio telescopes.

• A failed search of 1300 galaxies, reported in 2024, using low frequencies and the  Murchison Widefield Array (MWA).

Scientist Flubs and Flops #15

 

 

Fine-Tuning Denialism Can Lead to Largely Wasted Careers in Science

It seems that throughout his career, cosmologist Ethan Siegel has been the epitome of an "old guard" scientist -- someone dedicated to defending old speculative theories of physicists and cosmologists, mostly theories that have never been well-supported by observations. Year after year, Siegel keeps making the case for theories that somehow got popular among little cliques of physicists or cosmologists, but which never got any good evidence in their favor: theories such as supersymmetry (SUSY), primordial cosmic inflation, and dark matter. Don't be fooled by the hype of the latest "dark matter map" claim, discussed here; we still have the situation that no one has seen dark matter. 

Reading Siegel's posts is rather like reading some old monk argue for the old dogmas of some old organized religion, very much a kind of "you must keep believing as they taught me in college four decades ago" affair. A 2024 post by Siegel tries to explain why scientists have not given up on a theory they spent decades on, but which was never supported by any observations: the theory of supersymmetry (SUSY). For quite a few years around 2010, physicists were publishing about 1500 papers per year on this theory. 

The post by Siegel begins with a silly-sounding statement: "One of the greatest ideas in all of physics, regardless of whether it turns out to be a true idea that reflects reality or not, is that of supersymmetry, or SUSY for short." How unwise to think that a theory is "one of the greatest ideas in all of physics" regardless of whether such an idea is true or false. 

Although having a title of "The one reason that physicists won’t give up on supersymmetry," Siegel's post fails to explain what that reason is, in any way that the average reader will be able to follow.  I can explain more clearly the real reason why some physicists have not given up on the theory of supersymmetry, despite the lack of any evidence for it: it is that such a theory serves as an atheist analgesic pill, helping slightly to relieve the pain that atheist physicists feel when encountering the enormous fine-tuning within the universe's physics and biology. 

The supersymmetry theory arose as a speculative attempt to explain away (or kind of sweep under the rug) a case of cosmic fine-tuning that bothered scientists. The issue of the fine-tuning of the Higgs mass (the mass of the Higgs boson) was skillfully explained by physicist Ben Allanach in an  article at the Aeon site: 

"Behind the question of mass, an even bigger and uglier problem was lurking in the background of the Standard Model: why is the Higgs boson so light? In experiments it weighed in at 125 times the mass of a proton. But calculations using the theory implied that it should be much bigger – roughly ten million billion times bigger, in fact....Quantum fluctuations of ultra-heavy particle pairs should have a profound effect on the Higgs boson, whose mass is very sensitive to them....One logical option is that nature has chosen the initial value of the Higgs boson mass to precisely offset these quantum fluctuations, to an accuracy of one in 10¹⁶. However, that possibility seems remote at best, because the initial value and the quantum fluctuation have nothing to do with each other. It would be akin to dropping a sharp pencil onto a table and having it land exactly upright, balanced on its point. In physics terms, the configuration of the pencil is unnatural or fine-tuned. Just as the movement of air or tiny vibrations should make the pencil fall over, the mass of the Higgs shouldn’t be so perfectly calibrated that it has the ability to cancel out quantum fluctuations. However, instead of an uncanny correspondence, maybe the naturalness problem with the Higgs boson could be explained away by a new, more foundational theory: supersymmetry."

In an article in Symmetry magazine, we have a similar explanation:

"To understand what’s fishy about the observable Higgs mass being so low, first you must know that it is actually the sum of two inputs: the bare Higgs mass (which we don’t know) plus contributions from all the other Standard Model particles, contributions collectively known as 'quantum corrections.' The second number in the equation is an enormous negative, coming in around minus 10¹⁸ GeV. Compared to that, the result of the equation, 125 GeV, is extremely small, close to zero. That means the first number, the bare Higgs mass, must be almost the opposite, to so nearly cancel it out. To some physicists, this is an unacceptably strange coincidence."

How big a coincidence? The Symmetry article later quotes physicist Lawrence Lee Jr. as saying “the conundrum with the Higgs mass, which would require fine-tuning on the order of 1-in-10³⁴,” which is a coincidence like the coincidence of you correctly guessing the full phone numbers of three consecutive strangers. 

Scientists should have just accepted this case of very precise fine-tuning in nature.  But instead, many of them made a long, quixotic, futile attempt to overthrow it (like someone trying to overthrow the observation that the sun is hot, with some elaborate theory trying to explain how the sun isn't really hot).  Why did they do that? Because they had a motivation, an ideological motivation rather than the motivation of simply discovering truth. Their ideological motivation was related to a belief that the universe should not be anything that looked like a product of design. This ideological motivation is clearly stated in a Symmetry article by physicist Lee, who states it as follows: “In general, what we want from our theories—and in some way, our universe—is that nothing seems too contrived.” If you want for the universe to not "seem too contrived," then you may twist yourself into knots trying to explain away cases of apparent fine-tuning in the universe. 

An article makes it rather clear that the supersymmetry theory was mainly motivated by a desire to get rid of a case of fine-tuning, and make the universe look like it was a little less lucky, a little less  providentially blessed. We read this:

"For example, the small mass of the Higgs boson is notoriously difficult to explain—its calculation requires subtracting two very large numbers that just happen to be slightly different from each other. 'But if you add supersymmetry, this takes care of all these cancellations such that you can get a light Higgs mass without needing to have such luck,' says Elodie Resseguie, a postdoc at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory."

The small mass of the Higgs boson is one of only very many cases of fine-tuning in nature.  There are many very precise examples of fine-tuning needed for our universe to be habitable, such as the very precise matching of the absolute value of the proton charge and the electron charge needed for planets and stars to be able to hold together (explained by the astronomer Greenstein here).  There are many times more cases of fine-tuning in biology, such as the endless thousands or millions of different types of very precisely fine-tuned protein molecules, with functional thresholds so high they cannot be credibly explained by Darwinian evolution.  A functional threshold is a particular amount of arrangement of parts that must exist for something to have any functional value.  With protein molecules, the functional threshold is typically so high it involves thousands of very well-arranged atoms. 

The visual below depicts a scientist who clings to some old, failing theory trying to explain some of this fine-tuning:  

The old theory serves as an atheist analgesic, helping slightly to relieve the irritation the scientist feels when encountering the endless examples of fine-tuning in nature:

Below is an interesting graph I got after using the Google Ngram viewer to search for references in Google Books for the terms "supersymmetry" and "fine-tuning."  We see that supersymmetry theory had its peak around 1980, and has been in decline since then. But we have ever-more references to fine-tuning, very many of them references to fine-tuning in physics and biology.  It seems that the efforts of scientists to sweep under the rug fine-tuning are not succeeding. 
 

Siegel's 2024 post that I discussed above is entitled "The one reason that physicists won’t give up on supersymmetry." But a recent article in Quanta Magazine does not tell any such "sticking to their creed" story. That article instead rather has a kind of "hubris has been humbled" ring to it, with kind of a "they're fumbling around and losing their confidence" sound to it. The article is entitled "Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard?" We have a quote from one guy saying, "I think that it’s kind of irrelevant what we plan on a 10-year timescale, because if we’re building a collider in 10 years, AI will be building the collider; humans won’t be building it." Anyone familiar with how utterly enormous is the physical work involved in the building of a giant particle collider may realize how inane this statement is. 

Looking Back at My Blogging Activity, Part 2: The Year 2014

This is the second in a series of rarely-appearing posts in which I will look back at my blogging activity during some previous year (the first in this series can be read here). In this post I will look back at my blogging activity in the year 2014, my second year of blogging activity.  

In January 2014 I wrote my post "Nature Seems to Love the Number Three," a post that has repeatedly appeared (on and off) in my widget on this blog showing the posts with the most recent readership. The post now has more than 21,000 views. Below is a visual from it. 

My February 2014 post "The Receptacle Hypothesis: Could Your Mind Have Come From an External Source?" is one of the first posts I published questioning typical accounts that brains produce minds. Later on in my blogging career I would accumulate very much more evidence backing up the suspicions I stated in this post. Below is an interesting visual from the post, one illustrating its reasoning. The visual holds up very well after 12 years.  I now have very many strong reasons (discussed at my site here) for believing that the claim that  brains make minds is as erroneous as the little girl's claim that flowers make bees. Some of those reasons were mentioned in a later post I wrote in February 2014. 

In March 2014 there occurred a very remarkable example of scientist overconfidence and unfounded scientist boasting. On March 17, 2014 a group of cosmologists involved in the BICEP2 project did a press conference claiming that they had discovered evidence for what are called primordial b-modes, and that this proved the long-standing theory of primordial cosmic inflation, a theory that has existed since about 1980.  Not to be confused with the simpler Big Bang theory (that the universe suddenly began about 13 billion years ago), the theory of primordial cosmic inflation is a theory that the universe for an instant underwent a very strange type of expansion unlike any we have ever observed -- a super-fast exponential expansion. 

Credulous science journalists "went crazy" over this unfounded boast about a claimed discovery of primordial b-modes. In March 2014 the science news stories were filled with stories crowing about how an epic accomplishment had been made.  An example of the groundless boast press coverage we got was the error-ridden CalTech press release here. To paraphrase John Kennedy's comment about the advice he got about the Bay of Pigs invasion ("The advice of those who were brought in on the executive branch was unanimous, and the advice was wrong"), in March 2014 the news coverage of the BICEP2 announcement was unanimous, and the news coverage was wrong. No actual discovery of primordial b-modes had occurred, nor had anyone made an observation backing up the theory of primordial cosmic inflation. 

In the midst of all of this unanimous press coverage boasting about a discovery that was not really made, I stuck my neck out and produced my March 18, 2014 post "BICEP2 Study Has Not Confirmed Cosmic Inflation."  I stated in the post "there are several reasons why the BICEP2 study does not confirm cosmic inflation or even provide substantial evidence for it." I followed that post with several additional posts in the next few months encouraging disbelief in the claims of the BICEP2 scientists, such as my March 20, 2014 post "More Doubts About BICEP2: The Dubious Part of Their Main Graph," and my April 5, 2014 post "Double-Fudging Their Way to the BICEP2 'Breakthrough' ” and my May, 2014 posts here and here, both of which encouraged disbelief in the claims of the BICEP2 scientists. 

When I wrote my March 18, 2014 post it seemed no one had publicly expressed skepticism about the boast of the BICEP2 scientists (or at least I had read no one who did). The next day cosmologist Peter Coles expressed skepticism about their boast, in his post here. 

It was basically me (and maybe a handful of others such as Peter Coles) against the scientific consensus, because in the early spring of 2014 the scientific consensus (repeated in innumerable mainstream science articles) was that the BICEP2 scientists had made an epic breakthrough of the utmost importance, and I was  saying it was pretty much all groundless boasts and hot air which did not show anything. Later in the year 2014 the dust settled, and it became clear who was right. 

It was me and the handful of others who were right about this topic, not the cosmologist scientific consensus of March, 2014. 

In the second half of 2014 we started to see more and more scientists producing statements doubting the claims of the BICEP2 scientists, and claiming that their results could be explained by mere dust. Confidence in the boasts of the BICEP2 scientists crumbled gradually in the second half of 2014. In January 31, 2015 a post of mine noted this:

"It's finally official. Today the online version of the journal Nature (an authoritative source for scientists) has an article headlined 'Gravitational Waves Discovery Now Officially Dead.'  "

Gravitational waves of a different type were later discovered, but not the type of primordial gravitational waves claimed by the BICEP2 team. In this context "primordial" means "coming from the very early universe."  It is now pretty much universally admitted by cosmologists that the BICEP2 team did not find evidence to support the theory of primordial cosmic inflation, and did not find evidence of primordial b-modes or primordial gravitational waves. In fact, members of the team that made the triumphant announcement in March 2014 eventually admitted they had goofed. One of them wrote a book with the title "Losing the Nobel Prize," and it was basically an "oops, I got people all excited over nothing" confession. 

The BICEP2 affair and my posts relating to it tended to strengthen my belief in a principle I have stuck to ever since: decide based on the facts, observations and reason;  and if that leads to a heretical conclusion that defies some claimed  mainstream consensus, then do not let such a factor swerve you from following what is dictated by the facts, observations and reason.  I would follow the same principle for the rest of my blogging career, particularly when I in 2018 started a heretical blog entitled "Head Truth" with a contrarian byline of "The huge case for thinking minds do not come from brains," a site which now has more than 370 posts of mine.  

In April 2014 I published an interesting post entitled "The SAGE Hypothesis, or Why Mankind Might Not Be So Inferior."  SAGE is an acronym standing for Simultaneous Appearance of Galactic Extraterrestrials. The hypothesis attempts to account for Fermi's Paradox, the paradox that despite all of the planets in our galaxy, we can observe no signs of extraterrestrials. The SAGE Hypothesis is that there are many extraterrestrial civilizations, which all have appeared at about the same time.  The hypothesis will be rejected by anyone thinking that man arose by unguided processes; but the hypothesis is credible to those thinking that intelligent species such as humans arise by transcendent causation. The visual below illustrates the idea. 

My three 2014 posts below discussed the topics of cosmic fine-tuning that I have frequently written about. 

“Vacuum Catastrophe” Should Be Called the Vacuum Miracle

Early Universe Had “Enormous Amount of Fine-Tuning,” Says New Scientific Paper

One Insanely Eerie Thing About the Neutron

My July 14, 2014 post "Half of the Blueprint for You May Be Stored Outside of Your Cells"  was possibly the first post I published on an issue I later judged to be of the utmost philosophical importance: the issue of whether DNA or its genes have any such thing as a blueprint, recipe or specification for making a human body. In that post I stated this:

"Another difficulty is related to the fact that genes are really very simple things. A gene is just a recipe for making a particular protein in the body. So how is it that genes can explain even half of the most advanced characteristics of human beings? For example, humans have abilities or characteristics such as altruism, philosophical insight, wonder, spirituality, esthetic appreciation, amazing mathematical abilities, and an astonishing 'built-in' language ability. How can such things be entirely explained in terms of us having the right proteins?

The alphabet used by genes is basically a 4-letter alphabet, which is not exactly a very rich alphabet for the deepest expression. The 4 letters in a gene's alphabet are A, C, T, and G. It is hard to imagine some combination of those 4 letters being responsible for each of the more subtle and refined characteristics of human nature.

Given these issues, it may be time to consider a rather drastic possibility – the possibility of dethroning the gene. We could start thinking along these lines:

Genes are a very important determinant of human nature. But as they are merely recipes for making proteins, we cannot at all explain all the exquisite features of human nature by assuming that the secrets of human nature are all stored in merely 23,000 genes. There may well be some completely undiscovered information storehouse that also is crucial in determining human nature – an unknown noncellular 'dark genome.' When a human body and a full human mind comes into existence, it may require information from cellular genes and this mysterious noncellular 'dark genome.' ”

 

Later in the same post I wrote this:

"If such an undiscovered dark genome exists, where might it exist? We don't know. It could exist in cells, in some undiscovered part outside of chromosomes. Or, more likely, it could exist entirely outside of cells. Such a dark genome might be stored in some larger cosmic information system. As I explain here, here, and here, there are strong reasons for believing that there may be some cosmic information system that has helped to facilitate the universe's astonishing evolution, its improbable transition from the ultra-hot density of the Big Bang to its current orderly state. Such an information system would have three basic required elements: programming, a database engine, and a computing engine. A tiny fraction of the data within such a database system may be an undiscovered dark genome storing instructions on how to make a human being and a human mind, instructions too complicated to be written in the simple 4-letter language used by the genes in our cells."

This 2014 post was the beginning of a realization that would deepen, leading me later to write my 2016 post "The Gigantic Missing Link of Biological Life" and my 2023 post "Why We Were Told So Often the Huge Lie That DNA Is a Specification for Building Humans."  In those posts I would explain much more fully why DNA and its genes cannot possibly be a blueprint, recipe or program for making a human body. I would also in those posts include a large list of 40+ scientists or doctors who confessed that DNA and its genes are no such thing as a blueprint, recipe or program for making a human body.  

I now consider this issue to be of the highest philosophical importance.  One reason is that mainstream claims that humans are the result of accidental evolutionary processes are claims that are utterly discredited once we realize that DNA and its genes have no such thing as a blueprint, program or recipe for making a human body or any of its cells. 

Below is a diagram showing what I call the 7 Main Clues About Reality (which I discuss at great length here). Each is a clue of the utmost importance in leading us towards the true nature of reality. The third pillar is the very important clue that there is "No DNA Specification of How to Make Anatomy or Hugely Organized Cells." My July 14, 2014 post "Half of the Blueprint for You May Be Stored Outside of Your Cells" was the first evidence in my writings of starting to realize this very important clue. 

In July 2014 I wrote the science fiction story "Funeral for a Civilized Species," which I regard as one of my best science fiction stories. 

My August 2014 post "Is Kepler-78b a Sign of Astronomical Engineering?" was a speculative post that discussed a very hard-to-explain planet in another solar system. I did not express any great confidence in my speculation about the planet. Oddly enough the post led to a television appearance in which I discussed my speculation about the planet's strange position (extremely close to its star) possibly being a result of deliberate astronomical engineering. 

A post of mine in November 2014 was entitled "Why Machines Will Not Soon Be as Intelligent as Men." I disputed a 2014  news article incorrectly claiming "Computers will soon become more intelligent than us.” The post of mine holds up very well after 11 years. There is no sign of any real intelligence in computers. So-called "artificial intelligence" (AI) is a misnomer.  AI is just computer programming and data processing. Given that AI systems have spent years crawling the internet, and gobbling up a billion questions and answers written by humans, it is no surprise that you can ask an AI system a question and get an intelligent answer. The intelligent answer is just a modification or amalgamation of intelligent answers written by humans, not any evidence of intelligent computers. 

By this time my posts were starting to show my studies of parapsychology, and in December 2014 I wrote two of my better posts on this topic:

When Rhine and Pearce Got “Smoking Gun” Evidence for ESP

They Seemed to Know of Deaths They Should Not Have Known Of