A Table Comparing 5 Studies of Near-Death Experiences

Sudden cardiac arrest is a major cause of death, suddenly killing about 350,000 each year in the United States alone. Of those who experience sudden cardiac arrest outside of a hospital, few survive. 

A big recent study on what goes on in near-death experiences is now available in preprint form. It is the study "Psychometric evaluation of the Danish Near-Death Experience Content scale in a sample of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survivors," which you can read here. 

The study by Tobias Anker Stripp MD and someone else used as its starting point 2,785 people who survived out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. They were asked, "A life-threatening situation or illness (such as an accident, cardiac arrest, or cancer) can cause some people to lose or experience an altered sense of consciousness. Some may subsequently recount memories from the time when they had lost, or experienced an altered state of consciousness, whereas others cannot remember anything. Do you have any memories from such an experience?” Those responding "yes" or "don't know" were sent out a survey about near-death experiences, and according to page 10 of the preprint, 738 answered this survey. This gives a response pool much larger than the other surveys summarized in the table below, as those other surveys all involve fewer than 100 respondents. 

Let's compare the results of this study with the results of similar studies. The papers mentioned in the table below are these:

Study 1: The phenomenology of near-death experiences,” 78 subjects (link), a 1980 study, producing results similar to a smaller study group year 2003 in-hospital study by one of its co-authors. 

Study 2: "Qualitative thematic analysis of the phenomenology of near-death experiences,” 34 subjects (link), a 2017 study on people who survived cardiac arrest. 

Study 3: "Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands," a 2001 study of 62 subjects who were known to have suffered cardiac arrest and survived it, and who also reported a near-death experience (a subset that was 12% of a larger group of cardiac arrest survivors), link. The average duration of cardiac arrest was 4 minutes. 74% were interviewed within 5 days of their cardiac arrest. 

Study 4: "Different Kinds of Near-Death Experience: A Report on a Survey of Near-Death Experiences in Germany," 82 subjects (link).

Study 5: "Psychometric evaluation of the Danish Near-Death Experience Content scale in a sample of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survivors," 738 subjects (link).  This involved a scale in which you could answer between 1 and 5, with "0 – not at all; none”, “1 – slightly”, “2 – moderately”, “3 – strongly; equivalent in degree to any other strong experience”, and “4 – extremely; more than any other time in my life."  Only responses of 2 or greater are included in the percentages listed in the "Study 5" column below. So in the "Study 5" column below I give the mathematical sum of the right-most 3 columns of particular rows in Table 1 of this study, which appears after the main text of the paper. 

In the table below, blank squares occur whenever the survey had no question corresponding to the question on the left side of the row. Blank squares do not mean that 0% answered "yes" to a question.  

The recent study described in the Study 5 column gives results similar to those of previous studies on near-death experiences. (Those reading this page on a smartphone will need to finger swipe to the right to see the columns for Study 4 and Study 5.)

	Study 1	Study 2	Study 3	Study 4	Study 5
Seeing a light or “unusual visual phenomena” such as lights or auras	48%	74%	> 23%	40%	17%
Meeting other beings	55%	44%	32%	48%	14%
Positive emotions or intense feeling of well-being	37-50%	29%	56%	50%	40%
“Hyper-lucidity” or thoughts speeded up		41%			36%
ESP during the near-death experience	39%	12%			23%
"Awareness of being dead" or awareness of dying		26%	50%		23%
Distortion of time	79%	47%			38%
Celestial landscape or other realm of existence	72%		29%	51%	19%
Contact or communi-cation with the dead	30%	23%	19%	16%	14%**
Out-of-body experience	75% (27%?)*	35%	24%	31%	20%
Having some sort of non- physical body separate from the physical body	58%
Passing through tunnel or similar structure	31%	26%	31%	38%	13%***
Reaching a border or point of no return	57%		8%		12%
Life reviewed or relived	27%	15%	13%	44%	13%

*Study 1 says, "The impression or feeling of seeing oneself to be out-side the physical body, an 'out-of-the-body experience,’ was reported by 75% of our respondents." But the study's Table 1 gives a different figure of only 27%. 

** In Survey 5 the question was, "You encountered a presence and/or an entity (who might be deceased)."

*** In Survey 5 the question was, "You saw or entered a gateway (for instance a tunnel or a door)."

The recent study (Study 5) getting results for so many survivors of sudden cardiac arrest provides powerful new evidence against all attempts to naturally near-death experiences. During sudden cardiac arrest, the electrical system of the heart malfunctions, and the result is a stopping of the heart that produces a flatlining of brain signals (called asystole) within 15 or 20 seconds after the heart stops. We cannot explain near-death experiences in such people by imagining that they were hallucinating. A flatlining brain that has electrically shut down cannot hallucinate. 

Below is part of Figure S1A from the supplemental information of a 2023 paper. We see the brain waves of the dying Patient One in blue (EEG readings), and we see in the last row a red ECG reading that is a  measure of heart activity.  The brain waves flatline very quickly after the heart stops beating. 

The term "isoelectric" or iso-electric in reference to brain waves means a flat-lining equivalent to no electrical activity in the brain, as measured by EEG readings. The paper here states, "Within 10 to 40 seconds after circulatory arrest the EEG becomes iso-electric." Figure 1 of the paper here says that such an isoelectric flat-lining occurred within 26 seconds after the start of ventricular fibrillation, the "V-fib" that is a common cause of sudden cardiac death, with "cortical activity absent." Also referring to a flat-lining of brain waves meaning a stopping of brain electrical activity, and using the term "ischemia" meaning a lack of blood to the heart, another scientific paper says, "several studies have shown that EEG becomes isoelectric within 15 s [seconds] after ischemia without a significant decrease in ATP level (Naritomi et al., 1988; Alger et al., 1989)."  Another paper tells us this about brain waves and infarction (obstruction of blood flow), using CBF to mean cerebral blood flow, and the phrase "the EEG becomes isoelectric" to mean a flat-lining of brain electrical signals:

"When normal CBF declines, the EEG first loses the higher frequencies (alpha and beta bands), while the lower frequencies (delta and theta bands) gradually increase. When the CBF decreases further towards an infarction threshold, the EEG becomes isoelectric." 

Similarly, another paper refers to blood pressure, and tells us, "When flow is below 20 mL/100 g/min (60% below normal), EEG becomes isoelectric," meaning that brain electrical activity flat-lines. The 85-page "Cerebral Protection" document here states, "During cardiac arrest, the EEG becomes isoelectric within 20-30 sec and this persists for several minutes after resuscitation." Another scientific paper states this, using the term "isoelectric" which means flatlining. 

"Of importance, during cardiac arrest, chest compliance is not confounded by muscle activity. The EEG becomes isoelectric within 15 to 20 seconds, and the patient becomes flaccid (Clark, 1992; Bang, 2003)."

Attempts to naturally explain near-death experiences tend to ignore this reality that such experiences typically occur during cardiac arrest when the brain has flatlined, a reality excluding a hallucination explanation. 

I normally think of The Conversation as being a materialist web site, given the type of articles it so typically publishes. So I was surprised to recently read an article at that site favorably covering near-death experiences and candidly discussing some of their currently inexplicable features. In the article we read this:

"A subset of out-of-body experiences involve verifiable perceptions. In other words, the patient recalls perceiving something they should not have while unconscious (beyond simple memory reconstruction). The International Association of Near Death Studies published a compilation of more than 100 cases in the second edition of The Self Does Not Die in 2023. These include descriptions of objects in places that were out of reach to those in the room, even if they were trying to look. For example, 'a 1985 quarter lying on the right-hand corner of the eight-foot-high cardiac monitor,' which a physician found upon climbing a ladder. Another example is a 12-digit serial number on top of a seven-foot respirator, referred to by a patient with obsessive-compulsive disorder. In this case, the serial number was confirmed by a technician."

My post here summarizes many of the best cases of this type published in that book. 

Science News BS Heat Map, June 12, 2026

         

Science News Article	BS Rating	Comment
Mitochondria directly interact with the nuclear pore complex		---
"Dark triad personality traits carry distinct physical signatures in the brain"		This low-quality study follows a defective plan followed by many brain scan studies: (1) you identify about 24 people with some particular mental characteristics; (2) you then brain scan them and brain scan about 24 control subjects; (3) you then look for brain differences (being free to look anywhere in the brain), and claim these differences as "brain signatures" of the mental characteristic.  The fallacy is that any two randomly selected groups of people will always have some differences in their brains, no matter how identically they think and behave. A convincing study of this type would require a pre-registered hypothesis, with a comparison made of only some specific area or type of brain difference that previous research had suggested, along with a much larger study group size; and no claim of discovering anything would be justified until there were repeated replications of the reported brain differences, replications in pre-registered studies.**
"The first complex cells had genes from a complex mix of species"		The article refers to eukaryotic cells far more complex than much simpler prokaryotic cells, believed to have existed first. But even the simplest self-reproducing prokaryotic cells are enormously complex units, requiring hundreds of specialized proteins. Article titles like this mislead us by describing eukaryotic cells as "the first complex cells." All cells are enormously complex.
"An Early Step on the Long Strange Road to Photosynthesis"		Quote: "However, the set of chemical reactions we call photosynthesis has bewitched and befuddled scientists for generations. It requires the coordination of dozens of proteins and hundreds of pigments that harvest photons, all embedded in a cellular structure less than one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Electrons pinball across membranes and between compounds to drive molecular turbines that rebuild air and water into sugars to provide the energy and raw materials that cells need to grow." The article  tries to suggest the beginnings of an evolutionary account for this mechanism with a very high functional threshold, but fails to tell any credible tale of how it could have arisen through any gradual process. But at least there's a good explanation of the vast complexity of photosynthesis.
Bumblebees can solve complex puzzles like chimpanzees and elephants, study finds		When wonders of cognition like this occur in insects with almost no brain cells, it is more evidence against the "brains make minds" dogma that neuroscientists keep senselessly parroting.
"A study by IRB Barcelona and the BSC rethinks the origin of our cells as a story of microbial alliances"		"The study challenges the idea that cellular complexity emerged from a single evolutionary encounter, pointing instead to a gradual process of interactions among different microorganisms that lasted for millions of years." The ridiculous "standard story" tall tale of eukaryogenesis is rightly challenged, but the suggested replacement is equally unbelievable.
"How the brain regulates learning on a cellular level: 3D maps reveal synapses reorganizing in real time "		The press release is promoting a study that  electrically zapped dead brain tissue from rats, something that does nothing to explain how learning occurs in living humans who are not electrically zapped. For more on the press release and its study, read here.
"Ancient genome duplications laid the foundations of complex brains"		We have an attempt to explain a huge number of new genes required for the appearance of the first brains, an attempt that very implausibly appeals to "genome duplications." Innovative new types of genes cannot credibly be explained by appealing to duplications. We read, "The data analyses were mind-bogglingly complicated." That should cause us to suspect shaky, dubious analysis.
A unicellular relative links aggregative multicellularity to animal origins		We have the confession, "How animals evolved complex multicellularity from their unicellular ancestors remains unanswered." But if you don't understand that, what confidence can you have that any descent or ancestry from unicellular life ever occurred? The suggested solution is the same old "clumping" aggregation explanation that utterly fails to explain how we got the very complex anatomical innovations used by visible life forms. *

*"Big picture, we want to understand how initially dumb clumps of cells, cells that are one or two mutations away from being single-celled, don’t really know that they’re organisms — they don’t have any adaptations to being multicellular, they’re just a dumb clump — how those dumb clumps of cells can evolve into increasingly complex multicellular organisms, with new morphologies, with cell-level integration, division of labor, and differentiation amongst the cells. Just like, we want to watch that process of how do these simple groups become complex. And this is, like, one of the biggest knowledge gaps in evolutionary biology. I mean, in my opinion.....We don’t really know the process through which simple groups evolve into increasingly complex organisms."-- Biologist Will Ratcliff (link). 

** The paper authors basically confess the low value of what they have produced, by saying, "Our exploratory whole brain analysis revealed significant results in hypothesized regions, that did not survive correction for multiple comparison and therefore did not reach significance in the regions-of-interest analysis." Those very familiar with neuroscience and statistics will recognize this as basically a confession of having produced nothing convincing.

The Troubling Findings of a Survey of Science Journalists

The Kavli Foundation awards million dollar prizes for science research.  The foundation has done a survey of science journalists. One of the questions asked was "In your opinion, can science journalists be neutral about the subjects they cover?" We will never know what the response was, because the slick document presenting the research results gives us two conflicting answers. 

On page 23 the report says, "Asked whether science journalists can be neutral about the subjects they cover, 57% of survey participants answered no, and 35% answered yes (Figure 19). Nine percent said they don’t know." But the bar graph presenting the response (which is actually Figure 11 on page 24, not Figure 19) says that 57% answered "yes," and 35% answered "no." 

Regardless of which answer is correct, the result is a troubling one. Apparently at least one third of science journalists do not believe in the principle of journalistic neutrality. The result is very unsurprising. It has been all too apparent that very many science journalists act as uncritical cheerleaders for the researchers they are covering. 

A bit later in the report we have this example of stupidity and carelessness:

The carelessness comes in the misspelling of "certainties," similar to the misspelling of "publication" that occurs in the caption of Figure 13, and the misspelling of "sources" that occurs in the caption of Figure 18.  The stupidity comes from the 16% of the science journalists who answered that scientific findings should be reported as certainties. In today's world of science research, very many or most of the reported research findings will fail to be replicated or fail to stand up to further scrutiny. So it is inane to have a policy of "reporting scientific findings as certainties." 

Another rather troubling result comes when we see Figure 15 on page 27. Asked about coverage of retracted papers, only 65% of the science journalists said that you should mention that the paper was retracted. 21% thought that you only need to mention that the paper was retracted if there was some "major reason" such as fraud. 

Another rather troubling result comes when we see Figure 16 on page 29. Asked about correction of errors in coverage, 17% of the science journalists said that "you only correct the errors if you consider them major errors." So apparently a large number of science journalists are failing to correct errors they have heard about in science stories they have written, while using the excuse that they were not "major errors."

Another troubling result comes when we see Figure 18 on page 31. Asked about "selection of sources," 73% of the science journalists agreed that "you look for the most important scientists in the field." This is an indication of some kind of authority-kneeling that is contrary to the true spirit of science. A good answer to the question might be something like "you look for the scientific paper with the largest study group size" or "you look for the claims that are best supported by many strong observations." Who is or is not one of "the most important scientists in a field" is a subjective opinion subject to the whims of popularity trends. 

Another troubling result comes when we see Figure 23 on page 36. Asked about whether it is acceptable for science journalists and their scientist sources to become friends,  66% of the science journalists said that is okay. But why should we expect that a science journalist will report objectively when reporting on work done by one of his friends?

It helps if the science journalist is a scientist's pal

Another troubling result comes when we see Figure 24 on page 37. Asked about whether it is acceptable for science journalists to receive gifts and paid trips to cover conferences, 36% said that it was acceptable "if they can maintain independence in their coverage," with only 27% saying it is not acceptable for a science journalist to receive such gifts or paid trips.  We get here a clue as to the kind of backdoor bribery that must be frequently occurring. Science journalists are getting freebies to cover science conferences, things such as paid trips to exciting locations (with also possibly free meals and free lodging).  Such benefits make it more likely that the science journalists will report favorably on the research results reported at such conferences. 

We get a similar dismaying result when examining Figure 25, which reveals that a large fraction of science journalist think it is okay to cover institutions that have paid the science journalist. 

We get a troubling result displayed in Figure 28 on page 40. The science journalists are asked about ethical problems in their field. 52% of science journalists list political or corporate spin as a problem. It is an enormous problem. For example, corporations often fund scientific studies designed to promote pills or medical devices they manufacture, with such corporations pressuring science journalists to provide favorable press coverage of the resulting study (often a low-quality affair providing no robust evidence).  56% of science journalists list "Fake News" as an ethical problem. They are referring to fake news produced in articles and press releases written by science journalists themselves (or the PR departments of corporations or universities writing research-related press releases). 58% of science journalists list "pressure to provide news that attracts audience" as a problem. This is the problem of clickbait that I have discussed many times. Nowadays science news is all entangled with economically motivated clickbait which leads internet users to click on enticing but misleading headlines leading to news articles filled with ads that make money for the party running the website. 

Also troubling is this quotation from the report

"To those who answered yes to this question, we asked if their country’s journalism association has a code of ethics for science journalism (Figure 31). In this case, 45% of journalists said they did not know. Another 33% answered yes, and 23% said no."

This gives us the impression that a large fraction of science journalists have no great interest in ethics, and were too uninterested to check whether their country has a code of science journalism ethics they should be following. 

All in all, this survey provides us many reasons for distrusting the stories appearing on sites that are supposedly science news sites. Science journalists are part of the profit complex described below, where many may act wrongly for personal profit or personal benefit. 

There is actually a Society of Professional Journalists in the United States. It has a code of ethics you can read on the page here. One of its stated principles is "Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and avoid political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility." But in the result quoted above, a large fraction of science journalists seemed to be oblivious to this principle. The same code of ethics states, "Seek sources whose voices we seldom hear." This principle is not well-followed by science journalists, who are always parroting  dubious boasts from the same old overconfident academia authorities, while rarely asking for quotes from reasonable and highly studious critics of such boasts. A large fraction of all science journalists write only the most one-sided articles telling us only the materialist account, while parroting old dubious speech customs, giving us coverage of science research and science issues about as "fair and balanced" as the press coverage of North Korean journalists. 

The same code of ethics states, "Take special care not to misrepresent or oversimplify in promoting, previewing or summarizing a story." Very many science journalists these days flagrantly violate this principle, by producing sensational-sounding articles that misrepresent low-quality scientific studies, making them sound like breakthroughs or important insights that they are not. 

The production of misleading "science news" stories has a very strong economic incentive. Web sites are regularly publishing misleading science-mentioning headlines. When people click on such headlines, they go to pages filled with ads, and such pages make money for whoever publishes the web site. This is the problem of clickbait, which these days is the gravest problem for the integrity of science articles. Nowadays clickbait is an out-of-control epidemic on the Internet. A recent example of misleading clickbait is discussed here, a case in which a study electrically zapping dead tissue extracted from rats was misleadingly described to create the impression it had provided insights into how memory works in living humans who do not get such electrical zaps. 

A Google Gemini infographic

An Error-Filled TV Episode on the James Webb Telescope

 When I go to the series The Whole Story With Anderson Cooper on HBO Max, and look up some episodes on science topics, I get science journalism bungling right off the bat. In an episode entitled "The James Webb Telescope: Are We Alone?" (Season 2, Episode 15), Cooper says this early on: "The data and images from the Webb are helping some of our smartest scientific minds answer some of the most intriguing questions of our time: like where did we come from? Is time travel possible? And are we alone?" No, actually, the James Webb Telescope is not helping scientists answer any of those questions. The telescope is doing nothing to tell whether time travel is possible. The telescope has done nothing to detect life in space, so it is not answering the question of whether we are alone in the universe. And the telescope is doing nothing to clarify human origins. 

At the 2:17 mark we hear some scientist saying this about the James Webb Telescope: "Hopefully we'll be able to see a reflection of ourselves and to learn more about where we came from." That sounds pretty silly. You don't see anything whatsoever like "a reflection of ourselves" by peering into deep space. And there is no disagreement about where we came from, which is this planet.  The disagreement is about how we got here. 

At the 4:58 mark astronomer Dan Millisavljevic is asked why is it important to study the origin of stars, and he answers "We all want to know where we came from and how we got here on Earth." For real insight on that question, we should not be studying astronomy, but the topic of morphogenesis and human development. Where you came from is a speck-sized zygote existing inside your mother after your mother's egg cell was impregnated by a sperm from your father. How you got here was the nine-month process of morphogenesis and human development. That was a miracle of  organization light-years beyond any credible explanation of scientists, partially because every adult body is a wonder of engineering vastly more organized than any space telescope humans have ever built.  To help cover up the "big as the distance between the Sun and Alpha Centauri" shortfall in understanding such a matter, scientists told us the phony myth that there is a blueprint for making  a human being in each of our cells. That is not true, as many scientists have confessed. 

Scientists don't want you to focus on the question of morphogenesis, because it will help clarify how physical science utterly fails to explain the origin of any adult human body. So scientists like to convert the "how did you get here" question into some story involving supernova explosions. That is not actually any story of "how did you get here?" It is instead a shaky narrative trying to answer a much different question, the question of how did Earth's elements get here? I call this a shaky narrative because the extreme rarity of supernova explosions and the enormous distance between stars makes the narrative highly  questionable. As I explain in my post here, a rough calculation leads to the conclusion that less than two ten-thousandths of the galaxy should have been seeded with heavy elements from supernova explosions. 

At the 5;23 mark in the TV show scientist Ori Fox repeats one of the most misleading mantras of astronomers, Carl Sagan's enormously false claim that "we are all stardust." No, a human body is not dust. A human body is an information-rich state of vast hierarchical organization packed with systems very rich in mutually interdependent fine-tuned components, each requiring a special arrangement of very many parts. That is quite the opposite of the state of disorganization that is dust, which has no organization.  Astronomers mislead us very badly when they say "we are all stardust."  

Giving us an almost equally misleading statement, Millisavljevic says around the 5:47 mark, "It is because of these stellar explosions that we are here today."  A sensible thing for him to have said might have been, "Supernova explosions are one of very many prerequisites in nature for the existence of human beings." Astronomers believe that supernova explosions helped to create some of the heavier elements such as iron, and that such elements eventually winded up in clouds of gas and dust that formed into planet Earth. 

But as the infographic below illustrates, scientists think that elements as heavy as iron (with a symbol of Fe)  can arise from regular stellar nucleosynthesis, which does not require supernova explosions. And elements heavier than iron are probably not needed for the existence of organisms like human beings, although they are convenient for civilizations such as ours. Human bodies use copper, zinc, selenium, and iodine, all elements heavier than iron. But organisms like humans probably could have existed without such elements. So it is dubious  for Millisavljevic to have said, "It is because of these stellar explosions that we are here today."  We do not even know that the existence of organisms like humans required supernova explosions. And given the great rarity of supernova explosions, and the gigantic distances between stars, supernova explosions are a questionable explanation for the origin of Earth's heavy elements. 

At the 7:26 mark we hear an astronomer refer to the earliest stages of the universe's history and say "Webb will be able to access those earliest stages." This is not exactly true, because the James Webb Telescope is unable to access the first 380,000 years of the universe's history, the time before the Epoch of Recombination when the universe was 380,000 years old and the first atoms formed. And it will forever be impossible to create any telescope capable of accessing those first 380,000 years, because the density of matter and energy was so great that any rays or waves of light or any type of energy must have been hopelessly scattered so badly that observation of them will be forever impossible. 

The misstatement is one that has been constantly occurring with the James Webb telescope. Again and again astronomers said something like the telescope would be able to "look back to the beginning of Time," even though they knew that this was not the case, and that the telescope would not be able to see the first 380,000 years of the universe's history. 

At the 9:07 mark of the TV episode the journalist (Kristin Fisher) interviewing these scientists promises falsely that we will "meet a team of scientists close to finding life a billion years away." The promise is a false one. No one is close to finding life elsewhere else in our solar system. At the 9:37 mark some authority says that the wonderful thing about the Webb telescope is that it is "open to anyone all over the world." That is not true. There's merely some kind of program allowing scientists to request use of the James Webb telescope. 

Around the 14:41 mark we learn about how the photos released as images from the James Webb Telescope have been jazzed-up with various color "enhancements" to make them look more striking. We hear of black-and-white images which people like Judy Schmidt made into stunningly colorful images, by using Photoshop. Schmidt brags around the 15:31 mark that she can take images and "rotate them and then give it some color." Rather than anyone confessing about color fakery going on, we hear this  from an astronomer at the 15:48 mark:

"These images are representations of these energies that are coming in the infrared. So we assign each energy filter a color and we put them together to produce these beautiful images."

Gee, that sure sounds like color-faking to me. But I'm rather surprised that Kristin Fisher around the 16:02 mark does not talk like a typical fawning pushover science journalist, and asks this tough question:

 "What would you say to people who see these images and say these aren't real? These are fake. These are photoshopped." 

We get someone who answers most incorrectly, "Well, I mean, they have to be photoshopped, or you wouldn't see them." That's not true at all. People can see black and white images. 

Around the 18:38 mark we see an example of the astronomer Carl Sagan shoveling the BS he was so guilty of shoveling for decades. Sagan says this: 

 "People know that out there is a million other civilizations. They all look fabulously ugly and they're all a lot smarter than us."

No, people never knew any such thing. In this essay, Sagan referred to astronomers, and said, “When we do the arithmetic, the number that my colleagues and I come up with is around a million technical civilizations in our Galaxy alone.” The statement is nonsensical. First, it implies a consensus on the topic, when no such consensus ever existed, with estimates of the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy ranging from 0 to a billion. Second, there was never a sound basis for drawing such a conclusion. Suppose we calculate the odds based on the difficulties of a chance appearance of the most simple type of life (requiring cells, DNA, a genetic code, and very many types of proteins, which are each exceedingly unlikely to appear by chance), without assuming some special cosmic teleology that might improve the odds. Then the answer you get is that we should expect no other life form to have arisen anywhere else in the galaxy. That's not even considering the difficulties of intelligence appearing after life has appeared.

Around the 19:00 mark, NASA administrator Bill Nelson says he believes there is life in outer space. He is asked whether the Webb telescope will prove that there is life in space, and he says at the 19:32 mark, "At least it will get us closer to the answer." The James Webb telescope has been running now for about 4.5 years, and it has not got us any closer to answering whether there is life in space. It has not produced any evidence yet for the existence of life on other planets. 

At the 24;22 mark we have some person claiming the element phosphorus is "what makes life possible," which is a very misleading thing to say, given that the requirements for even the simplest one-celled life are very many, and mostly things gigantically more organized than mere phosphorus, such as many types of fine-tuned protein molecules that do not have any phosphorus. 

Around the 24:40 mark we hear of two scientists who are excited about getting a little observation time on the James Webb telescope, which will allow them to look at Saturn's moon Enceladus. The show tries to make it sound like some "they might find life" deal, but it's no such thing. There is no chance that life on Enceladus could be discovered with the James Webb telescope. 

At the 25:27 mark the show's narration gives us this bit of nonsense:

"So where is the finish line for finding life on Enceladus or anywhere else in the universe? It may be right here on Earth at the bottom of the ocean."

That sounds like someone saying you can prove there's life on Pluto by checking out the soil in Mexico. 

Around the 28:17 mark we have an astronomer describing images of supernova remnants from the James Webb telescope, saying, "We just were really surprised with these ring-like or bubble-like structure." How can that possibly be, given that for well over 50 years photos of such objects from regular Earth telescopes have shown exactly such "ring-like or bubble-like structure"? It sounds like someone saying, "I was really surprised that my photo of the clouds showed things white and fluffy-looking."

Next we see an astronomer getting all excited about a James Webb Telescope photo showing the supernova remnant called Cas A. We may wonder: why is he so excited? The image looks just like old images of that object, from decades ago. Around the 31:00 mark and the 32:00 mark an astronomer tries to make it sound like something has been learned from the Webb image of Cas A, but he fails. Everything he mentions was something already known before the Webb telescope was launched. The image shown at the 32:51 mark has a phony look to it, as it has lots of green, not actually corresponding to what you would see by looking at such an object from a spaceship near it. 

Asked at the 33:47 mark what he has learned about Cas A that he did not know before, we get a "sounds like nothing" answer from the astronomer, referring to "a new understanding of how this explosion produces and destroys dust." We already knew long ago that stellar explosions produce remnants that end up as interstellar dust. And we already knew before of how such dust production works. 

At the 39:36 mark we strangely have Ori Fox saying that the James Webb telescope gives him a sense of hope and optimism, because so many people worked together on the James Webb Telescope "to increase our knowledge and to make the planet a better place." That does not make sense. The James Webb telescope is not making the planet a better place. 

At around the 40:39 mark planetary scientist Geronimo Villanueva says he had "this philosophical moment" in which he was "in this telescope in the middle of the desert" in Chile. He says "you feel so insignificant because you understand that you are a speck of dust in this humongous universe." Once again, the nonsense of scientists deceiving us by comparing us to dust. Far from being a speck of dust, a human being physically is a work of enormously organized engineering vastly more impressive than any telescope humans have ever built. Humans know how to make big telescopes and big skyscrapers, but there is not a nation or corporation in the world that could build a living human body from its chemical raw materials. 

The James Webb telescope was designed partially to help find extraterrestrial life. But so far it has failed to do that. Scientists look all around for billions of light-years, and fail to see any sign of life. So why would such search failures cause any reasonable person to "feel so insignificant" or "understand that you are a speck of dust"?  To the contrary, search failures of this type should make us all the more prone to appreciate our own significance, and how our bodies are marvels of fine-tuned hierarchical organization vastly more impressive than anything we see with our telescopes.