How Well Do ET Visit Theories Plug the Holes in Mainstream Scientist Explanations?

To casual students, the explanations of mainstream scientists may seem like mighty edifices. But a closeup inspection of the pillars holding up such edifices may leave you shaking your head in doubt. 

There are many grave shortfalls in the explanations of mainstream scientists, which are far more serious than our overconfident authorities admit. To help plug some of these gaps, some appeal to the idea that Earth received extraterrestrial visitors in the past, and possibly also the present. The most influential exponent of this view is probably the long-running television series Ancient Aliens. How well do theories of visiting spaceships plug the giant holes in the explanations of mainstream science? Let's look at some specific problems, and consider to what degree they can be alleviated by evoking the possibility that extraterrestrial spaceships visited Earth in the past or present.

Problem #1: The Problem of the Origin of Life

Mainstream science has failed to offer a credible explanation for the origin of earthly life. Even the simplest form of microscopic life is such a high level of organization that we would never expect it to appear by chance from chemical processes even once in the history of the universe.  The concept of abiogenesis (the chance appearance of life from mere chemicals) is a concept which has not been supported by any experiments realistically simulating the early Earth. We merely have a long history of scientists making unfounded statements insinuating progress on this topic. 

To some it might seem that the problem of explaining the origin of earthly life is one that we can greatly alleviate by assuming extraterrestrial visitors. As the universe is about 13 billion years old, it is conceivable that life might have arisen on some other planet as early as 8 billion years ago, that intelligent life may have arisen as early as 4 billion years ago, and that intelligent visitors from other planets may have come to our planet as early as 3 or 4 billion years ago. So we can imagine some extraterrestrial visitors planting the first life that appeared on Earth.

Such a scenario may offer as much as a billion-fold reduction in the improbability of earthly life naturally appearing. Let us suppose that the probability of life originating on any planet orbiting in a star's habitable zone is 1 in X, where X is some very large number. If we suppose that such an event could have been caused by extraterrestrial visitors coming from any of a billion planets in our galaxy, which has perhaps as many as a billion planets in the habitable zones of sun-like stars, then it might be that the probability of earthly life appearing may have been as high as 1 in X times 1,000,000,000. A multiplier of more than 1,000,000,000 should not be used, because we should be excluding visitors from other galaxies, which are too far away to be credible spots where visitors to Earth may have originated.

Such a billion-fold improbability reduction may seem like a very big deal. But if you make a really realistic estimate of the probability of life accidentally originating from chemicals, it would seem that such a billion-fold improbability reduction is not very significant. The problem is that a realistic estimate of the probability of a chance appearance of life from non-life will give you a probability such as 1 in 10 to the thousandth power.  If you increase such a probability by a billion fold, you still are left with a probability that is something like 1 in 10 to the thousandth power. So while imagining visiting extraterrestrials could help explain the appearance of life on our planet, imagining such a thing does not help explain how life could have ever appeared in our galaxy.  With or without visiting extraterrestrials, we have no credible theory of the natural origin of life in our galaxy. 

Problem #2: The Problem of the Origin of Visible Earthly Organisms

Mainstream science fails to credibly explain the origin of visible earthly organisms, contrary to the unwarranted boasts on this topic made by current and past biology professors. One reason for this failure (not by any means the only reason) is that mainstream science fails to offer a credible explanation for the origin of the protein molecules used by visible earthly organisms. Such protein molecules are fine-tuned arrangements of hundreds of amino acid parts. In the natural world there are billions of different types of protein molecules, each one a different complex invention.  We would never expect any new type of protein molecule to appear by chance, such a thing being as unlikely as sea shells on a beach accidentally spelling out a useful message of hundreds of words.  Confessing how current theory fails to explain protein molecules, a science paper says, "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown." 

It might seem that we can plug this explanatory hole by imagining extraterrestrial visitors in the past. We can imagine such visitors doing genetic tinkering or genetic engineering that might have originated countless different proteins partially specified in the genomes of many different organisms. But what about the problem that apparently these proteins originated not at one time, or in one geological era, but in multiple geological eras? We can get around that by simply imagining multiple extraterrestrial visits occurring during many different eras. Extraterrestrial spaceships could have come to our planet thousands of times in the past, and in many of these visits, there might have been tinkering with the DNA of earthly organisms 

But unfortunately, this does not solve the problem of explaining the origin of visible earthly organisms. The problem is that you can never explain the origin of a dramatically new earthly life forms by simply imagining some change in DNA.  This is because contrary to the misstatements that are so are often told on this topic, DNA does not specify anatomy. DNA does not specify how to make bodies, organs, skeletal systems or even cells. DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information.  You can read many scientific authorities confessing such a reality in the quotes I list in this post. 

So how did Earth get so many types of large organisms? We can't explain that through Darwinian explanations, since such explanations are limited to changes in DNA.  It seems we also cannot explain the origin of large earthly organisms by imagining purposeful additions or rearrangements of DNA by visiting extraterrestrials.  There are no changes in DNA that can explain the appearance of large new types of life. 

Problem #3: The Problem of Explaining Ordinary Human Minds

One of the biggest shortfalls of mainstream science is its utter failure to credibly account for the ordinary capabilities of human minds.  Scientists try to explain all human mental activity as simply being caused by brains. But neurons and synapses have properties which make them unsuitable as an explanation for human mental activity. 

Neurons and synapses are:

Very slow	Synaptic delays, synaptic fatigue and the slower transmission speed of dendrites should prevent brain signals in the cortex from traveling at much more than a snail's pace of about a centimeter per second (conversely, humans can recall very obscure rarely remembered facts instantly).
Very volatile and unstable	Synapses and dendritic spines are made of proteins with lifetimes of only a few weeks or less, and individual synapses and individual dendritic spines don't last for years, unlike memories lasting decades.
Very noisy	There are many types of noise in neurons and synapses which should strongly inhibit reliable signal transmission.
Not addressable	There is no position location system in the brain by which some exact neural location could be looked up by using its address, to achieve fast recall.
Signal-suppressive	A synapse in the cortex will transmit a signal with a likelihood of between .1 and .5, which means brain signals are constantly being suppressed.
Disorganized	Neurons are like the spaghetti mess in a huge cafeteria pot, and are not highly grouped into organizational units like letters in a book or computer components.
Indistinct	No one has discovered any distinctive marks or signs of encoded information in neurons or synapses other than the DNA information about the same in every cell.
Neither readable nor writable	No one has been able to specify how episodic memory information could be written to or read from neurons or synapses.
Largely dispensable	There are many medical cases of people suffering little damage to their minds or memory even though they lost very much of their brains, as much as 50% or 75% or more.

Given such characteristics of neurons and synapses, there is no credibility in attempts to explain human mental activity as being caused by brains.  Does the hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitations help with this explanatory problem? Not at all.  On the Ancient Aliens show, the speakers are constantly hypothesizing that extraterrestrials tinkered with human DNA.  But since there is nothing in either the human DNA or the human brain that can explain the main impressive features of ordinary human mentality, such a hypothesis does nothing to help with this explanatory problem. 

Problem #4: The Problem of Explaining Paranormal Psychic Phenomena

There is a wealth of evidence for paranormal psychic phenomena. For example, a significant percentage of the population reports having near-death experiences, and very many of them report out-of-body experiences. To give another example, very many humans have reported apparition sightings, often reporting an apparition of someone appearing at the time that person died, before the person's death was known to the person seeing the apparition. Does the hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitations help explain such things? No, it does not.

Problem #5: The Problem of Morphogenesis

A great problem that mainstream science miserably fails to explain is the problem of morphogenesis. We may define this as the problem of explaining how it is that a fertilized egg is able to progress to become a full-grown organism. For many years important figures in mainstream science have suggested a solution to this problem that is utterly false: the baloney explanation that such a progression occurs because there is a reading of a blueprint or recipe for making an organism, stored in the DNA of the organism. No such blueprint or recipe exists in DNA. DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information, not high-level biological structural information. 

The claim that full-grown organisms arise because a DNA blueprint is read is a claim that is both false and very childish, like a very small child's claim that astronauts first got to the moon by riding a big balloon.  Just as a balloon built to reach the moon would never get there (not rising after it left the atmosphere), if there existed in DNA a blueprint for building humans it would not give rise to organisms, because blueprints don't cause things to be built. Construction only occurs by means of a blueprint because there is a construction crew that reads and understands the blueprint instructions, and carries them out. We know of nothing below the neck of a female that could read and understand and execute fantastically complicated instructions for building hierarchically-organized humans if such instructions happened to exist in DNA, which actually only contains low-level chemical information, not instructions for constructing anatomy.  

So how is it that a fertilized egg is able to progress to become a full-grown organism? We absolutely do not understand this great mystery. This is one of the supreme explanatory shortfalls of modern science. The mystery only deepens when we consider the fantastic degree of hierarchical organization in full-sized organisms.  

Subatomic particles are organized into atoms, which are organized into relatively simple molecules such as amino acids, which are organized into complex molecules such as proteins, which are organized into more complex units such as protein complexes and cell structures called organelles, which are organized into cells, which are organized into tissues, which are organized into organs, which are organized into organ systems, which (along with skeletal systems) are organized into organisms.  The end result of a human body is something more organized and functionally complex than anything that humans have constructed with their hands. Humans know how to put together an aircraft carrier (fully equipped with 80 jet fighters)  piece by piece, but there is no team of scientists that could come anywhere close to putting together a full-sized living human body by some piece by piece assembly of molecules. 

It is rather obvious that the theory of extraterrestrial visitations in the past cannot help us with this difficulty. The morphogenesis of organisms is something happening right now, all over the world. Unless you want to imagine extraterrestrials on almost every street in the world, it is hard to imagine any way in which extraterrestrials can help us with this problem of explaining the progression from a tiny speck-like ovum to a large full-grown organism.

Problem #6: The Problem of the Universe's Origin

A great problem that mainstream science miserably fails to explain is the problem of how the universe originated. It is believed that the universe suddenly appeared about 13 billion years ago, in the mysterious event called the Big Bang.  Because such an event is believed to have occurred billions of years before any planets formed and before any life existed, postulating extraterrestrials or extraterrestrial visitors is of no use in explaining the universe's origin.

Problem #7: The Problem of the Origin of Language

Mainstream science lacks any credible theory of the origin of language. You can read in this post about this shortfall.  Part of the problem is that it seems inconceivable that any language could get started in a community unless there was some teacher or teachers that already had a language. 

You could apparently plug this hole fairly well by imagining extraterrestrial visitors. We can imagine spaceships landing, and extraterrestrial visitors emerging, with such visitors teaching humans how to speak some language. 

Problem #8: The Problem of Our Lucky Solar System

Our solar system seems to be an exceptionally good place for hosting life and intelligent life.  You could hardly ask for a luckier arrangement than to have a planet like Earth with a moon such as it has, a moon that some people think helped play a role in aiding life's appearance.  The arrangement of planets in the solar system aids the habitability of Earth.  Very large planets like Jupiter and Saturn help to attract passing asteroids or comets (by means of the gravitational fields of such planets), making it relatively unlikely that Earth will get hit by such objects. A recent study suggests that solar systems with planets allowing photosynthesis may be very rare, another reason for thinking there's something special about our solar system.  Thousands of extrasolar planets have been detected, but the study says, "So far, we have not observed terrestrial planets comparable to Earth in terms of useful photon flux, exergy, and exergetic efficiency." .Another recent study says, "A modest axial tilt, like Earth's, helps increase the production of oxygen, which is vital for life as we know it - and planets with tilts that are too small or too large might not be able to produce enough oxygen for complex life to thrive."

Can we help explain such improbable luck by imagining visitors from other planets? Conceivably.  A civilization capable of traveling to other solar systems might have god-like powers over matter that might be sufficient for it rearrange the planets in a solar system, making some arrangement more suitable for the appearance and long-term survival of life.  Visitors from some other solar system might be capable of doing something such as turning a dry planet into a wet planet, by causing lots of icy comets to land on the dry planet. 

Problem #9: The Problem of Fine-Tuned Fundamental Constants 

Our universe has some fundamental constants that seem to have just the right values for allowing life to exist.  For example, the electric charge on each proton is the very precise opposite of the electric charge on each electron. This very exact match of the absolute values of the proton charge and the electron charge is a match that is necessary both for biochemistry and for stable planets.  There are quite a few other cases of fundamental constants with just the right values for the universe to be compatible with life. 

Can we imagine that extraterrestrials from other planets help produced this fine-tuning? No, we cannot.  No one has any idea of how any civilization could change any of the fundamental constants, no matter how great their technological power. That would seem to be as impossible as changing the value of pi so that instead of being 3.14 it was instead 7.84.  We also cannot imagine extraterrestrials arising in a universe that was not compatible with life, and such extraterrestrials then changing such a universe to be compatible with life; for if the universe had started out being incompatible with life, such extraterrestrials could never have existed.    

Conclusion

My answer to the question posed by this post's title is: "not very well."  A few of the holes in mainstream scientist explanations can be plugged or partially plugged by imagining extraterrestrial visitors. But most of the more gaping holes in mainstream scientist explanations cannot be plugged by imagining such visitors.  We need something a lot more than visiting spaceships to get us out of our biggest explanatory shortfalls.  

Last night I dreamed of a book with the title 100 Secrets of Eternity. In such a book might be the answers to some of the problems I have mentioned, answers never imagined by today's experts.