Psychic Experiences in the News, Part 2

 Here is the second in a series of videos I am making about news accounts of ESP,  precognition, out-of-body experiences, prophetic dreams and other paranormal experiences. If you have any difficulty viewing this video, try the link here. 

To see another video as long as this one, with the same type of newspaper clippings, see Part 1 of this video series using the link here. 

Why Accidents Cannot Produce Very Complex and Useful Instruction Information

Darwinist materialism is built upon the idea that accidents of nature can produce dazzling works of biological construction.  In this post I will explain a small part of the reason why this idea is irrational and utterly unbelievable. Part of the reason is that accidents cannot produce very complex instruction information. By very complex instruction information I mean the type of information you would need to construct some complex thing such as a house, a car, a cell or even a large protein molecule with a specific biological function. 

Let us start with a simple case of probability calculation. What is the chance that a random string of five English characters would produce a five-letter word in the English language? To calculate this, you need to answer two questions:

(1) How many random combinations of five English characters would result in a word in the English language?

(2) How many possible five-character strings of letters could you produce from random combinations of characters?

A Google query of "number of five letter words in English" will give you the answer to the first question. The answer is that there are roughly 100,000 to 120,000 five-letter words in the English language. 

The second question can be answered using the mathematical rule that the number of possible combinations of a sequence of characters or digits is roughly equal to the number of possible values in each position of the sequence multiplied by itself a number of times equal to the length of the sequence.  So, for example:

• There are 10 possible digits between 0 and 9, so the total number of possible decimal digit sequences with a length of 5 is roughly equal to 10 multiplied by itself 5 times, which equals 100000. (I say "roughly equal" because the exact number is all the numbers between 10,000 and 99,999, which is 99,000 numbers.) 
• Counting only lowercase letters and digits (a to z and 0 to 9), there are 36 possible characters that can exist in any position in a five-character sequence. The total number of possible five-character character sequences is roughly 36 multiplied by itself five times, which is 60,466,176. 

So what is the chance of a random set of five characters being a word in the English language? The answer is roughly 120,000 divided by 60,466,176, which is 0.00198.  This is roughly about 1 chance in 500. 

Now, imagine we want to calculate the chance of a long series of randomly typed characters producing nothing but words in the English language. To keep things simple, we can calculate this random typing as being a series of five random characters, each followed by a space. If we want to calculate a series of x randomly typed groups of five characters all being words in the English language, we will have to multiply .000198 by itself x times. 

So, for example, the probability of typing 100 consecutive random five-letter sequences and having them all be words in the English language is roughly 1 in 500 (or .000198) to the hundredth power. You can calculate things like this using what is called a large exponents calculator. Using such a calculator, we find that 1 in 500 to the hundredth power is roughly equal to 1 in 10 to the 269th power. 

The large exponents calculator above for some reason prefers to work with integer numbers rather than decimal numbers such as .000198. But since .000198 is very close to 1 in 500, and we are only interested in getting an answer roughly correct, we can simply type 500 in the first input slot above, and remember to divide by 1 the total produced. 

We see that the probability of you typing 100 random five-character sequences and having them all be words in the English language is roughly 1 in ten to the 288th power. This is a number so low that it is prohibitive. Things with this improbability would never occur in the entire history of the universe. 

But what about the probability of you randomly typing 100 random five-character sequences and producing some complex and useful instruction information such as how to build a complex and useful building or invention, or at least one of its parts? Would it be less or greater than the incredibly low probability calculated above? It would surely be very much less, because the calculation above does not even take into account the need to arrange the words in a meaningful order. It is much, much more improbable for randomly generated output to produce a useful instruction sentence such as "use a hammer and nails to hammer together all the wood two-by-fours" than it is is for random words to produce a meaningless but correctly spelled sentence such as "house smart green taste works south quick." So given the previous calculations we are safe in assuming that typing 100 five-character sequences of randomly typed text will produce a useful instruction sentence with a probability very much less than 1 in ten to the 288th power. 

Now, let us consider the instruction information in biology. In biology we have the most gigantic "missing specifications" problem described in detail here. This is because contrary to the false claims that have so often been made, nowhere in DNA or its genes has anyone discovered anything like the instructions needed to build a body or any of its organ systems or any of its organs or any of its cells.  DNA and its genes do not even specify how to build any of the organelles that are the main building components of cells. But we do know that DNA does contain a huge repository of instruction information. The DNA in humans contains more than 20,000 genes. Each of those genes tells how to make a particular polypeptide chain that is the starting point for a particular protein molecule. Such a polypeptide chain is a sequence of amino acids. 

In terms of complexity and functional usefulness, there is a great deal of similarity between a gene and the 100-word instruction sequence I previously imagined.  Simplifying things, I previously imagined 36 possible values at each position in the random sequences I was imagining. For a gene we have a similar situation. A gene specifies a sequence of amino acids, usually hundreds and sometimes thousands. There are twenty amino acids that are used by living thing. Any position in a gene can specify any of twenty amino acids. 

So the math we have with genes is similar to the math previously imagined.  I was previously imagining a sequence of 500 random characters (100 words each consisting of five random characters). The average length of a human gene is a size needed to specify about 450 amino acids. Human protein molecules are in eukaryotic cells, and the scientific paper here says, "Eukaryotic proteins have an average size of 472 aa [amino acids]." And just as the chance of you making a useable English instruction sentence from about 500 random characters is incredibly low (less than 1 chance in 10 to the 288th power), the chance of you getting a useful gene from a random sequence of nucleotide base pairs specifying a random sequence of amino acids is incredibly low. To be functional, a protein molecule half-specified by a gene requires a very special three-dimensional structure, that uses a very hard-to-achieve effect called folding. A functional gene and a corresponding functional protein molecule requires a very special arrangement of amino acids, as special as the arrangement of characters in a functional instruction sentence. 

The fact that protein molecules require very rare and special sequences of amino acids is shown by how sensitive protein molecules are to small changes. Below are some relevant quotes by scientists:

• "It seems clear that even the smallest change in the sequence of amino acids of proteins usually has a deleterious effect on the physiology and metabolism of organisms." -- Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, "The triple helix : gene, organism, and environment," page 123.
• "Proteins are so precisely built that the change of even a few atoms in one amino acid can sometimes disrupt the structure of the whole molecule so severely that all function is lost." -- Science textbook "Molecular Biology of the Cell."
• "To quantitate protein tolerance to random change, it is vital to understand the probability that a random amino acid replacement will lead to a protein's functional inactivation. We define this probability as the 'x factor.' ...The x factor was found to be 34% ± 6%."  -- 3 scientists, "Protein tolerance to random amino acid change." 
• "Once again we see that proteins are fragile, are often only on the brink of stability." -- Columbia University scientists  Lawrence Chasin and Deborah Mowshowitz, "Introduction to Molecular and Cellular Biology," Lecture 5.
• "We predict 27–29% of amino acid changing (nonsynonymous) mutations are neutral or nearly neutral (|s|<0.01%), 30–42% are moderately deleterious (0.01%<|s|<1%), and nearly all the remainder are highly deleterious or lethal (|s|>1%).” -- "Assessing the Evolutionary Impact of Amino Acid Mutations in the Human Genome," a scientific paper by 14 scientists. 
• "An analysis of 8,653 proteins based on single mutations (Xavier et al., 2021) shows the following results: ~68% are destabilizing, ~24% are stabilizing, and ~8,0% are neutral mutations...while a similar analysis from the observed free-energy distribution from 328,691 out of 341,860 mutations (Tsuboyama et al., 2023)...indicates that ~71% are destabilizing, ~16% are stabilizing, and ~13% are neutral mutations, respectively." -- scientist Jorge A. Villa, "Analysis of proteins in the light of mutations." 2023.
• "Proteins are intricate, dynamic structures, and small changes in their amino acid sequences can lead to large effects on their folding, stability and dynamics. To facilitate the further development and evaluation of methods to predict these changes, we have developed ThermoMutDB, a manually curated database containing >14,669 experimental data of thermodynamic parameters for wild type and mutant proteins... Two thirds of mutations within the database are destabilising." -- Eight scientists, "ThermoMutDB: a thermodynamic database for missense mutations," 2020. 

Genes contain very complex and useful instruction information. But getting such information by chance is very roughly as improbable as getting useful instruction information from randomly generated text. A gene tells much of what is needed to construct a particular type of complex invention: a protein molecule. A protein molecule is a very special arrangement of hundreds or thousands of amino acids, which have to be just right for that particular type of protein molecule to perform its function.  Human DNA has roughly 20,000 genes, each of which largely tells how to make a different type of complex invention in your body: a particular type of protein molecule with hundreds or thousands of well-arranged parts. The extreme sensitivity and fragility of protein molecules (discussed in the bullet list above) tells us how very special is the required arrangement that must occur in every human gene. 

The likelihood of random mutations producing a novel type of gene that could serve as instructions for how to make a new type of functional protein is roughly the same as the likelihood of 500 randomly typed characters producing a useful and very complex instruction. The chance of both of these things is so very low as to be prohibitive. The chance of some accident or series of accidents producing from scratch either a new useful type of gene or protein or a new useful 100-word instruction is basically zero, so low that we would never expect it to ever happen in the history of the universe. 

From such realities we can derive the very general principle that accidents cannot produce very complex and useful instruction information. This principle matches our intuitions. If someone ever claimed that he spilled a big box of 500 Scrabble letters, and that they fell on the floor and accidentally produced a 100-word complex instruction that was very useful, you would never believe such a tale. 

 But what about all the biologists who tell us that all of the millions of types of genes and millions of types of protein molecules in the animal kingdom are the result of accidents of nature, mere random mutations? They are believing the worst type of nonsense. Believing in such a thing is as illogical as believing that all of the books in a huge public library were written by mere ink splashes, rather than the purposeful intention of authors. 

What happened was that between 1875 and 1925 Darwinism became a sacred dogma of the conformist belief communities that reside in the biology departments of universities. In the next decades scientists discovered how mountainous is the organization and information richness of living things. Biologists discovered around the middle of the 20th century that humans require an information richness and level of hierarchical organization vastly beyond anything they had ever been  imagined. At that time all claims of understanding the origin of species and the origin of humans should have been abandoned. 

But by then biologists had already made Darwin their Jesus or Buddha, and had made Darwin's boasts of explaining biological origins some sacred dogma that was not to be questioned. So the groundless boast that biologists had explained human origins and the origin of other species continued to be taught, just like some religious dogma that continues to be taught even after facts have discredited it. The biologists made it clear they despised the fundamentalists who clung to the idea that mankind was only about 6000 years old. But by clinging to the discredited explanation boasts of Darwinism, such biologists were acting in the same way as such fundamentalists, clinging to a discredited belief tradition rather than updating their  claims to fit the observed facts. 

And what if you somehow had an explanation for the accidental origin of all the genes in the human body, despite all the reasons discussed above for thinking such a thing is impossible? Then you still wouldn't have a tenth of an explanation for how there arose human bodies, because DNA and its genes do not specify how to make human bodies or any organs or any cells or even any of the organelles that are the building components of such cells. And you also would not have an explanation for human minds and their capabilities, because neither genes nor brains explain such capabilities, for reasons discussed at great length in the posts on my site here. 

You might try to  defeat some of the reasoning above by appealing to possibilities such as lower functional thresholds (such as rare types of protein molecules that might be functional in half form).  Such attempts could easily be demolished by a discussion of facts arguing far more strongly in the opposite direction, such as the fact that most types of protein molecules produce no survival benefit or reproduction benefit by themselves, but only are beneficial when they act as team members in biological components of far greater complexity, such as protein complexes requiring many types of proteins to be useful. A proper study of functional thresholds and interdependent components always undermines the explanatory boasts of biologists rather than supporting them. 

Psychic Child Marvels of Yesteryear

 Below are some interesting clips from old newspaper articles, all describing children who seemed to have astonishing paranormal powers. We may start with Eugenie Davis, who around 1922 attracted wide attention in the press:

You can read about her using the link below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045774/1922-02-26/ed-1/seq-74/

At the link below we read of the psychic powers of 10-year-old Beulah Miller:

https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=twh19130301-01.1.2&srpos=33&e=-------en-20--21--txt-txIN-%22psychic+marvel%22---------

Here is the first part of the newspaper story:

Here is the second part of the newspaper story:

Below is another news article about Beulah Miller:

A long article on the psychic powers of Beulah Miller is found in the "Girl of Two Worlds" article on page 110 of the periodical here.  Below are some excerpts:

" In a recent interview Miss Bailey said to the writer:...'Beulah turned her back to me and described books which I picked up, and correctly named other objects I held in my hand. She also stated words I wrote on the blackboard. I’m positive that no information was conveyed to the child by the mother through the ordinary channels of communication.'

My next call was on Dr. Henry W. Hopkins, who was called by Mrs.  Miller during the absence of her regular physician. 'I  had heard that Beulah could see and describe objects apparently invisible to normal vision,' Dr. Hopkins told me, 'and concealing a small pencil in my hand. I asked the little girl if she could tell what I was holding. Beulah raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘P-e-nc-i-1' she said after a few seconds thought, spelling the word slowly, letter by letter. ' I wonder if you can tell me the number of my car?' I then asked, and again in the same slow, methodical way she spelled it—‘One-six-seven-three-R-one' which was correct. She then gave me correctly the number of my other car, then in my garage—‘One-five-eight-one-R-one.' "

The 1909 newspaper account below tells of psychic powers of 13-year-old Bess Comer:

You can read the story here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1909-01-31/ed-1/seq-17/

Later in the same year we another report on the same Bess Comer, who by then was 14:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1909-01-30/ed-1/seq-18/

The photo here also refers to Bess Comer:

You can find the article here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1909-01-31/ed-1/seq-18/

Next is a newspaper story of a young boy with telepathic abilities (Jackie Merkle):

You can read the story below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026749/1934-12-13/ed-1/seq-19/

In another story about the same person we have these examples of his telepathic prowess:

You can read the full story below: 

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85053106/1935-03-01/ed-1/seq-3/

A later news story in 1940 refers to the 11-year old Jackie Merkle as a clairvoyant, and notes that a then well-known show business figure (Rudy Vallee) was sponsoring him on a tour of theaters. 

The 1972 news story below tells of a boy whose psychic power seemed to save his mother from death:

You can read the story here:

https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3A2962767?solr%5Bquery%

The newspaper account below strongly suggests that a young boy had clairvoyant powers that had checked out after examination by many authorities. 

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn93065779/1936-06-08/ed-1/seq-3/#date1=1756&

At the link here, we read of the tragic death of a young child called a psychic. We read this: "The parents of three-year-old Cassandra Wickenden maintain she could make objects move just by looking at them and that she had a ghost for a playmate." 

Theoretical Physicists Are Great at Math, But They Cannot Put Two and Two Together

There's a rather ridiculous custom that prevails in almost all published scientific papers: the custom of trying to present the appearance of a single story and a single set of assertions that all of the authors agree with.  So in 97% of all published scientific papers, you will get a narrative and a series of assertions, without any indication that there is disagreement among the authors about some of the claims.  We virtually never see any "minority report" section in which some of the authors state opinions different from that of the main text of the paper. 

This is very suspicious given that so many scientific papers present dubious causal claims, dubious factual claims, and dubious interpretations of the data that was gathered, and also given that in many fields it is common to have many authors of a paper. So when a paper with quite a few authors makes controversial claims, or makes  claims that do not obviously follow from the reported facts and observations, we should ask: is there really going on some unanimity of thought? Or is it that one author (perhaps the lead author) kind of forces everyone to sign off on his subjective opinions and interpretation? 

Very rarely, a scientific paper will defy this convention, and we will see a paper in which different authors are free to state their own opinions, with different sections of the paper listed as having different authors. So it is in the interesting recent paper "The sounds of science—a symphony for many instruments and voices: part II." The paper includes a very bad section by one author, and a very good section by another author. 

The very bad section is a section 12 entitled "How big is nature, and how much of it can we explore?" by Roland Allen. Allen attempts to sell us the Fake Physics that is multiverse theory. The Multiverse is some idea that there are some gigantic or perhaps infinite number of other universes. Allen refers to a Multiverse classification scheme offered by Max Tegmark. Here are the first three levels of the classification scheme:

Multiverse 1: Just an extension of our universe, and not some other universe with different laws or fundamental constants.  Calling this "Multiverse 1" or "Multiverse Level 1" is therefore misleading. 

Multiverse 2:  A vast number of other universes that each has a different set of physical laws and physical constants. 

Multiverse 3: The madness of Everett's "many worlds" theory, the idea that there are an infinite number of copies in you and every one else, each different, in some infinity of parallel universes.  This is the morally poisonous nonsense of Everettism. 

Allen's attempt to lure you into believing in the multiverse starts with trying to get you to accept Multiverse 1, which isn't actually a multiverse at all, but just a universe like ours, in which we can't see everything with our telescopes. The misleading word trick here is comparable to the misleading word trick by which people are lured into believing in unbelievable dogmas of Darwinism, by using multiple definitions of "evolution."  Here's how that scam works:

Darwinist:  You know one of the definitions of evolution is just "gene pool change over time." Now I'm sure you believe in that, right? It can't be that the human species has exactly the same gene pool it had 5000 years ago, right?

Darwinism resister:  Well, sure I believe in evolution in that tiny sense.

Darwinist: Okay, great, so you've accepted evolution. It's nice to know you believe that all earthly life arose from only random natural processes.

Darwinism resister: No, I didn't say that. 

Darwinist: But you said you believe in evolution, and what I just said is one of the definitions of evolution. 

Darwinism resister: No, I only said I believe in a little microevolution, not some "this explains it all" theory of macroevolution. 

What we have here is a trick of equivocation. The trick involves starting out by using a word in one way, and then switching the definition of the word to mean something different. It's the same kind of nonsensical trickery involved if you get someone to agree that Taylor Swift is a star, and then say, "Okay, I'm glad you agree that Taylor Swift is a massive self-luminous spherical body in outer space." And similar trickery is going on with Allen's appeal to a "Multiverse 1" by which he merely means a universe like ours but bigger than we can see with our telescopes. The "Multiverse 1" of Allen and Tegmark isn't a multiverse at all. 

As for the "Multiverse 3" that Allen wants you to believe it, is is just moral and intellectual madness. It's the completely nutty Fake Physics fiction of an infinite number of parallel universes in which there are infinite copies of you, each different, what is called the Everett "many worlds" theory.  Allen's idea of trying to support this idea is to appeal to a little opinion poll taken at a conference led by multiverse enthusiast Max Tegmark. This is about as convincing as trying to prove the truth of the dogmas of Hindu fundamentalists by referring to a poll taken about belief in such dogmas, in which the people polled are all Hindu fundamentalists. 

You should never have any moral trust in anyone believing in the Everett "many worlds" theory. Since such a person believes there are an infinite number of copies of himself that will have every possible variation of behavior, with each variation repeated an infinite number of times, we should never expect such a person to act morally or honestly. Someone who believes in the Everett "many worlds" theory will tend to be thinking something like, "There's an infinite number of copies of me that act in every possible way, so it doesn't matter how I act; there will still be an infinity of my selves who do right, and an infinity of my selves who do wrong." Never trust your children to the care of persons believing such madness, and never trust such people with your money. And never expect them to speak honestly or fairly in anything they write. 

But one of the authors of the paper does talk straight to us. That person is physicist Jim Baggott. Here are some choice quotes from his section of the paper (Section 11), which begins on page 21:

"Contemporary foundational theoretical physics is largely broken. It offers nothing in which experimentalists can invest any real confidence. Theorists have instead retreated into their own fantasy, increasingly unconcerned with the business of developing theories that connect meaningfully with empirical reality.

About forty years ago particle theorists embarked on a promising journey in search of a fundamental description of matter based on the notion of ‘strings’. Lacking any kind of guidance from empirical facts, forty years later string theory and the M-theory conjecture are hopelessly mired in metaphysics, a direct consequence of over-interpreting a mathematics that looks increasingly likely to have nothing whatsoever to do with physical reality. The theory has given us supersymmetric particles that can’t been found. It has given us hidden dimensions that may be compactified at least 10 [to the 500th power] different ways to yield a universe a bit like our own. And at least for some theoretical physicists who I believe really should know better, it has given us a multiverse – a landscape (or swampland?) of possibilities from which we self-select our universe by virtue of our existence...

I’m pretty sure there was a time in which this kind of metaphysical nonsense would have been rejected out-of-hand, with theorists acknowledging the large neon sign flashing WRONG WAY....Alas, instead we get a strong sense of the extent to which foundational theoretical physics is broken....

In the meantime, popular science periodicals feature an endless stream of multiverse stories, pandering to an audience that may no longer be able to differentiate science from fringe science or pseudo-science. The very credibility of science is under threat, at a time when public trust in science and scientists is needed more than ever."

What biologists and biochemists should be doing (but are not) is giving us straight talk about the implications of what they have found out about how enormous is the purposeful hierarchical organization, information richness and component interdependence throughout large living organisms, and the accidentally unachievable functional thresholds of the systems of such organisms. What physicists should be doing (but are not) is giving us straight talk about the implications of what they have found out about how sensitive our universe is to tiny changes in its laws and fundamental constants.  Here are some relevant quotes:

• "We conclude that a change of more than 0.5 % in the strength of the strong interaction or more than 4 % change in the strength of the Coulomb force would destroy either nearly all C [carbon] or all O [oxygen] in every star. This implies that irrespective of stellar evolution the contribution of each star to the abundance of C or O in the ISM would be negligible. Therefore, for the above cases the creation of carbon-based life in our universe would be strongly disfavoured." -- Oberhummer, Csot, and Schlattl, "Stellar Production Rates of Carbon and Its Abundance in the Universe."
• "The cosmological constant must be tuned to 120 decimal places and there are also many mysterious ‘coincidences’ involving the physical constants that appear to be necessary for life, or any form of information processing, to exist....Fred Hoyle first pointed out, the beryllium would decay before interacting with another alpha particle were it not for the existence of a remarkably finely-tuned resonance in this interaction. Heinz Oberhummer has studied this resonance in detail and showed how the amount of oxygen and carbon produced in red giant stars varies with the strength and range of the nucleon interactions. His work indicates that these must be tuned to at least 0.5% if one is to produce both these elements to the extent required for life."  -- Physicists B.J. Carr and M.J. Rees, "Fine-Tuning in Living Systems." 
• "The Standard Model [of physics] is regarded as a highly 'unnatural' theory. Aside from having a large number of different particles and forces, many of which seem surplus to requirement, it is also very precariously balanced. If you change any of the 20+ numbers that have to be put into the theory even a little, you rapidly find yourself living in a universe without atoms. This spooky fine-tuning worries many physicists, leaving the universe looking as though it has been set up in just the right way for life to exist." -- Harry Cliff, particle physicist, in a Scientific American article.
• "If the parameters defining the physics of our universe departed from their present values, the observed rich structure and complexity would not be supported....Thirty-one such dimensionless parameters were identified that specify our universe. Fine-tuning refers to the observation that if any of these numbers took a slightly different value, the qualitative features of our universe would change dramatically. Our large, long-lived universe with a hierarchy of complexity from the sub-atomic to the galactic is the result of particular values of these parameters." -- Jeffrey M. Shainline, physicist (link). 
• "A mere 1 percent offset between the charge of the electron and that of the proton would lead to a catastrophic repulsion....My entire body would dissolve in a massive explosion...The very Earth itself, the planet as a whole, would crack open and fly apart in an annihilating explosion...This is what would happen were the electron's charge to exceed the proton's by 1 percent. The opposite case, in which the proton's charge exceeded the electron's, would lead to the identical situation...How precise must the balance be?...Relatively small things like atoms, people and the like would fly apart if the charges differed by as little as one part in 100 billion. Larger structures like the Earth and the Sun require for their existence a yet more perfect balance of one part in a billion billion." -- Astronomy professor emeritus George Greenstein, "The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos," pages 63-64. 

• "The overall result is that, because multiverse hypotheses do not predict the fine-tuning for this universe any better than a single universe hypothesis, the multiverse hypotheses fail as explanations for cosmic fine-tuning. Conversely, the fine-tuning data does not support the multiverse hypotheses." -- physicist V. Palonen, "Bayesian considerations on the multiverse explanation of cosmic fine-tuning."

• "The evolution of the cosmos is determined by initial conditions (such as the initial rate of expansion and the initial mass of matter), as well as by fifteen or so numbers called physical constants (such as the speed of the light and the mass of the electron). We have by now measured these physical constants with extremely high precision, but we have failed to come up with any theory explaining why they have their particular values. One of the most surprising discoveries of modern cosmology is the realization that the initial conditions and physical constants of the universe had to be adjusted with exquisite precision if they are to allow the emergence of conscious observers. This realization is referred to as the 'anthropic principle'...Change the initial conditions and physical constants ever so slightly, and the universe would be empty and sterile; we would not be around to discuss it. The precision of this fine-tuning is nothing short of stunning. The initial rate of expansion of the universe, to take just one example, had to have been tweaked to a precision comparable to that of an archer trying to land an arrow in a 1-square-centimeter target located on the fringes of the universe, 15 billion light years away!" -- Trinh Xuan Thuan, Professor of Astronomy, University of Virginia, “Chaos and Harmony”  p. 235.

There is an obvious and straightforward conclusion that follows from such findings: that our universe was purposefully designed to have the incredibly rare and  enormously-hard-to-achieve special conditions needed for there to exist creatures with our type of physical organization and physical dependencies.  Reaching a conclusion so obvious is a case of putting two and two together (to use an English expression meaning to reach an obvious conclusion).  But it seems that while our physicists are very good at math, they just can't bring themselves to put two and two together.

Eight Questions to Ask After You Observe Something That Seems Spooky

Observing something spooky that seems hard-to-explain is an extremely common human experience. By "something spooky" I mean here very broadly anything that seems to defy your assumptions or anything that seems hard-to-explain. A spooky observation may or may not be something that seems paranormal. For example, if you see your spouse taking cash from some mysterious stranger, or if you see your doctor or teacher ingesting some strange-looking substance, that may qualify as something spooky. 

When a certain type of person observes something that looks spooky, he will ask himself only one thing: how can I sweep this under the rug? But it is better to ask yourself a series of questions after you see something that seems spooky. 

Question #1: should I make a record of what I saw?

The answer to this question is usually a "no-brainer." Almost always after observing something spooky, you should write down exactly what you saw. What you saw could be a hint of some important reality, and if that is true, you want to have as reliable a record as possible of your observation of the spooky thing you saw.  The smaller the time gap between your observation of the event and the time you wrote down what you saw, the more reliable your account will be.  For example, your account of an apparition sighting written ten minutes after it occurred is more credible than if you wait months to write down what you saw. It is always a good idea to write down the time and date when you saw something spooky.

The type of record I am referring to here is simply a private record such as something written down on a sheet of paper, something written down in a text file saved on your computer, tablet device or smartphone, or something as simple as a text message that you can send yourself. If what you saw has any type of legal ramifications or is something that might have any relevance to a court case or a law suit or a divorce proceeding or a custody dispute, you will be in much better shape if you write down an account of what you saw as soon as possible. One particularly convincing way to make a record of  what you saw is to use your smartphone to take a video of you telling about what you saw, as soon as possible after you saw it, while mentioning the time and date. 

Question #2: is there a credible and commonplace explanation for what I saw?

This is always a good question to ask, particularly before you publish any report of the spooky thing you saw. To give a simple example, you may be in your kitchen and hear mysterious-seeming spooky-sounding voices. Before spending any appreciable time thinking about such a thing, you should check to see whether anyone nearby was using some device (such as a TV or smartphone) that might have been the cause of such a spooky sound. Often you may be able to discover or think of such a credible and commonplace explanation, and that will be the end of the matter. But sometimes you may not, and you may then need to ponder the remaining questions on my list. 

Question #3: should I publish an account of the spooky thing I observed? 

My question refers to things such as social media posts. The question can be a difficult question with no easy answer. In a very healthy society there would be no penalty for anyone publishing any account of some spooky thing he saw. But in our not-very-healthy society there often may be some penalty for someone publishing an account of some spooky thing he saw, and listing himself as the author. The penalty might include things such as ridicule or decreased likelihood of getting a job or assignment or grant or college admission. 

For the sake of establishing the reality of a spooky phenomenon or event, it is always good to publicly report the event using your full name. But sometimes your self-interest may outweigh what is best from the standpoint of establishing the reality of something. If you are worried about suffering some penalty from publicly reporting the spooky thing you saw, there are two ways to reduce the chance of that:

(1) You might consider publishing your account under a pseudonym, although you will reduce the evidence value of your account by doing so. 

(2) You might be cautious in interpreting what you saw or speculating about a cause of what you saw. 

Question #4: is this spooky thing I observed similar to or possibly related to other things I observed?

This is always a great question to ask after seeing something spooky. By asking the question you ask yourself: is the spooky thing I saw a one-of-a-kind observation unlike anything I have ever seen, or is it something similar to or possibly related to other things I saw? 

For example, you may observe something that seems spooky on the day a relative dies, or shortly thereafter. The thing you observed may at first seem like some one-of-a-kind event. But you might be able to search your memory or records, and find that similar spooky things happened at about the time that other of your relatives died. Now you have not just a one-off event, but a pattern. 

Similarly, you may see some strange thing in a photo you cannot explain. But looking at previous photos you took, you may see that such an anomaly has appeared multiple times in your photos. 

                             See here for the recurrence examples

Or, you may observe some person acting in a very unusual way. The event may seem one-of-a-kind, but then you might be able to remember that the person acted in the same strange way on multiple different occasions. By then you may have detected a pattern that suggests something important about that person. 

Question #5: is this spooky thing I observed similar to or possibly related to other similar things that other people observed? 

After observing some spooky thing, you may feel kind of isolated. You may say to yourself, "People just don't see things like I saw." But maybe other people do observe such things. Maybe very many people observe such things. And maybe many people have been observing such things for a long time. 

It's not enough to just ask such a question. You also should try to answer such a question, by doing the relevant research. That may take a lot of time, but the effort may be a very rewarding one, one that leads you to discover important observations you never learned about, or never studied in any depth. 

A good place to start in trying to answer such a question might be my long post "120+ Types of Paranormal or Anomalous Experiences," which you can read here. I describe most of the types of paranormal experiences that people report, and in almost every case I gave links to online pages or web sites where you can find more information about such topics. Other good resources to use in trying to answer such a question are my posts here and here. 

Types of paranormal phenomena

6. Is there some important possibility that this observation might suggest? 

When you observe some spooky-seeming thing, it is always good to ask yourself about what possibilities may be implied by your observation. An example is an out-of-body experience. As discussed here, very many people report being out of their bodies, and observing their own bodies from a viewing position away from their bodies, typically about two meters away. What does such an observation suggest? It suggests a philosophical conclusion of the greatest importance: that your mind is something not generated by your brain, and something that will survive the death of your brain. 

7. Is there some important belief or assumption that this observation might tend to discredit?

When you observe some spooky-seeming thing, it is always good to ask yourself about what possibilities may be discredited by your observation.  For example, you may believe that nothing survives death; but on the night your relative dies at some distant location, at a time you did not know that the relative was sick or in danger, you may see an apparition of your relative. Such a thing has been reported by very many people, as discussed in my series of posts you can read below:

An Apparition Was Their Death Notice

25 Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

25 More Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

Yet Another 25 Who Were “Ghost-Told” of a Death

Scientific American's Very Lame "Ghost Explanations"

They Also Were "Ghost Told" of a Death

More Accounts of Veridical Apparitions

Even More Cases of Veridical Apparitions

When Apparitions Serve as Announcements

Still More Cases of Veridical Apparitions

When Apparitions Act as News Bulletins

They Too Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

They Seemed to Ghost-Learn of Someone's Death

It Seemed Her Suicide Was Not Her End

Veridical Apparitions Are Not Very Rare

What important belief or assumption do observations of this type tend to discredit? They tend to discredit claims that you are merely a brain whose existence will end when your brain dies.

Apparitions seen by more than one

I could give many other examples in which spooky observations may discredit or cast doubt on long-held beliefs you have held. For example, you may hold the belief that physical effects inside a room with closed doors can only be produced by things inside that room or inside that house, with the exception of rare natural events such as earthquakes or tornadoes.  You may one day observe some inexplicable motion of an object that causes you to doubt such a belief. In such a case, your observation may be of very great importance. Such an observation may be a very important clue telling that reality does not obey one of the rules that you thought it obeyed. 

8. Is this observation sufficient to cause an opinion revision, or should I wait until more observations of this type occur?

Some types of observations of the spooky may be so dramatic that they may warrant an immediate revision of your opinion on some topic. For example, if you have an out-of-body experience or a near-death experience or if you see vividly an apparition, this may well warrant an immediate revision of your opinion about the nature of your mind or your opinion about life after death.  But it is often best not to let a single observation of something spooky revolutionize your opinion about a topic. Typically what is best is to note to yourself that the observation may tend to support some particular possibility you were unsure about,  or may tend to put in doubt some assumption that you previously held. Then keep any eye out for other observations of the same type, which may occur to you or other people. Also, search for other people who have observed similar things. 

Once Again, We Get Building-Block Bamboozled

The building components of even the simplest one-celled life are proteins. Even the simplest one-celled life requires hundreds of different types of proteins. No trace of such proteins can be found anywhere in space. But scientists do make some attempts to look for the building components of the building components of life, by looking for relatively simple molecules such as amino acids. Such searches never find anything more than negligible amounts of such amino acids. 

But people announcing such results have long followed a trickster algorithm to fool people into thinking that their basically-nothing observational results are very important.  Below are the elements of this trickster algorithm:

(1) A press release will be released, using the misleading phrase "building blocks of life." Such a term is always misleading when describing mere amino acids. Cells are not made from things so simple that they can honesty be called "building blocks." Cells are made from hundreds of types of very highly organized components, different types of protein molecules. Amino acids are merely the building components of the building components of life; and the building components of life are very complex protein molecules, not amino acids.  And since amino acids have to be very specially arranged to make a functional protein molecule, in a way as hard-to-achieve by chance as the letters in a long well-written paragraph, it is very misleading to call amino acids "building blocks of life," thereby implying that a living thing can be made by some "any sequence works" method, like how any sequence of building blocks can make a wall.   

(2) The press release will make no mention at all of the abundance level of the chemical found, which is always some negligible trace amount such as a few parts in a billion. 

(3) The press release will make no mention of how possibilities of earthly contamination make all reports of very tiny trace amounts of chemicals retrieved from space unreliable and not-to-be-trusted, because the reported amounts are so small they are less than the expected amounts to be produced by earthly contamination. 

What will then happen is that the mainstream media will fall "hook, line and sinker" for the misleading press release. All or almost all of the resulting news stories will repeat the misleading headline of the press release. None or almost none of the resulting news stories will report the abundance levels reported in the scientific paper, which will be only the tiniest trace amount.  All or almost all of the resulting news stories will fail to tell us that only the tiniest trace amounts were found. None or almost none of the resulting news stories will discuss the very high possibility or likelihood that the detected trace amounts are due to earthly contamination. 

The latest example of this in that in January 2025 the journal Nature published a paper by D. Glavin and others, analyzing  a sample retrieved from the asteroid Bennu sample, the paper "Abundant ammonia and nitrogen-rich soluble organic matter in samples from asteroid (101955) Bennu." The sample was retrieved by the OSIRIS-REx mission. As shown in Extended Data Table 3, which you can see here, the most abundant protein-related amino acid found (glycine) was found at a level of only 44 nanomoles per gram, a negligible amount of only about .00000004 moles per gram.  All other protein-related amino acids were found at a level of less than 5 nanomoles per gram. 

Scientists use methods to prevent contamination when analyzing samples from space, but there is no reason to believe that such efforts are entirely effective.  There are two potential sources of contamination. A spacecraft may contain trace amounts of amino acids from Earth when it lands on another planet or asteroid.  Once  a sample is returned to Earth, there are endless possibilities for contamination, because amino acids are everywhere on Earth. You cannot easily decontaminate by mere sterilization, because sterilization just kills microbes, without removing all amino acid traces. 

The paper here ("OSIRIS-REx Contamination Control Strategy and Implementation") tells us about methods to prevent microbes and amino acids from existing on the Osiris/REx spacecraft that gathered the sample from the asteroid Bennu. It claims, "To return a pristine sample, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft sampling hardware was maintained at level 100 A/2 and <180 ng/cm² of amino acids and hydrazine on the sampler head through precision cleaning, control of materials, and vigilance."  This is a mention of some standard of cleanliness that was a target level, and we have no guarantee that such a target level of cleanliness was actually obtained. Moreover, the standard of cleanliness mentioned is less than 180 nanograms per square centimeter.  Under such a standard, we might expect that you would get tiniest trace amounts results as reported by Glavin  (no better than 44 nanomoles per gram) from trace amounts from Earth that were left on the spacecraft when it reached the asteroid Bennu. Or, if such a standard had been followed after samples had been returned, we might have easily got the tiny trace amounts of amino acids reported by Glavin, purely from earthly contamination after the samples had been returned. 

Extended Data Table 4 of the paper (which you can see here) gives us some estimates of the ratio of left-handed to right-handed amino acids in the amino acids reportedly found. The main part of the table is below.  If you have a reliable measurement that amino acids are in equal amounts left-handed and right-handed, that can be an indication that the amino acids are not from earthly contamination. (Earthly amino acids used in life are almost all left-handed). The columns marked  L_ee are the degree of uncertainty in the measurements.   

Unfortunately, because the numbers in these uncertainty columns are so high, and because the reported amounts of amino acids are so tiny (no greater than 44 nanomoles per gram), we can have no confidence that any of the reported amino acids actually come from the asteroid Bennu.  The reported nucleobases found (uracil, thymine, cytosine, adenine and guanine) are all reported to have been found at a level of less than 1 nanomole per gram (Extended Data Table 6, which you can see here). This is a negligible trace amount, an amount so small we can have no confidence that the result is from the asteroid Bennu itself, rather than from earthly contamination. 

Reporting on these results, a story on Reuters gives has the misleading headline "Building blocks of life found in samples from asteroid Bennu."  This is the deception that has gone on for so many decades in origin-of-life news reports.  Amino acids are not "building blocks of life" but instead building components of the building components (proteins) of the simplest living things (one-celled life). Since proteins require very special arrangements of amino acids (as special and as hard-to-achieve-by-chance as the arrangements of letters in well-written paragraphs), and since even the simplest living things cannot be made directly from amino acids, it is deceptive to call amino acids "building blocks of life."  Building blocks are things that can be assembled in any order, not things like letters and characters and amino acids that have to be placed in a very special order that chance would not produce. 

In the Reuters article scientist Danny Glavin speaks in a misleading way.  Failing to tell us about how negligible are the reported amounts of amino acids and nucleobases, and misleadingly calling amino acids "building blocks of life," Glavin says, "The detection of these key building blocks of life in the Bennu samples supports the theory that asteroids and their fragments seeded the early Earth with the raw ingredients that led to the emergence of life."  No, it sure does not, given the negligible amounts detected, and given the high chance that most or all of the life-relevant amounts were due to earthly contamination. And you don't get life by the mere deposit of "raw ingredients" -- even the simplest life requires an incredibly special arrangement of matter gigantically unlikely to occur by chance.  Glavin also falsely claims that "these chemical building blocks of life...are widespread throughout the solar system." No, they are not. No one has found protein-related amino acids or nucleobases on Mars, and no one has found protein-related amino acids or nucleobases in either asteroids or comets, except in negligible amounts such as those reported in Glavin's paper. Glavin says not a word about the very large earthly contamination possibilities that cast all studies such as his into doubt, saying only, "We can trust these results." 

Almost all of the mainstream news reports on this paper have been as misleading as the Reuters article. It seems none of these science journalists are doing their jobs decently, by reporting on the levels detected, which are negligible, and so low they are what we would expect from earthly contamination.  

The Glavin paper does not seem to adequately address the issue of potential earthly contamination. It uses the word "contamination" only a few times, in mere passing references. The 2020 paper "Concerns of Organic Contamination for Sample Return Space Missions" tells us this about the earthly contamination of samples returned from space:

"Organic contamination is to some degree inevitable. Contaminants can potentially be accrued during the design and construction of the spacecraft and associated components, on the course of the mission, during the sample recovery and curation processes, and/or during sample characterisation after their dissemination to analytical teams. For example, the lunar samples returned by the Apollo missions were found to contain amino acids derived from terrestrial biological contamination...... Preflight monitoring of the nitrogen-purged sample cabinet desiccator box by the OSIRIS-REx team also showed a steady increase of volatile compounds although at very small amounts (Dworkin et al. 2017)."

There are two other reasons for thinking that the possibilities for contamination may have been high:

(1) There was an unexpected glitch in which NASA scientists spent three months fiddling with the Bennu sample container top that resisted opening, before finally getting the top open. That may have had who-knows-what effect on whatever contamination prevention protocol was in effect. 

(2) An article at the site Salon tells us that when a soil sample was analyzed from the asteroid Ryugu, under conditions supposed to prevent contamination, the sample was contaminated not merely by amino acids but by something many times larger: microbes. We are referred to a paper entitled "Rapid colonization of a space-returned Ryugu sample by terrestrial microorganisms." We read this:

"The population statistics indicate an extant microbial community originating through terrestrial contamination. The discovery emphasizes that terrestrial biota can rapidly colonize extraterrestrial specimens even given contamination control precautions."

If entire microbes (millions of times bigger than amino acids) can get through the contamination prevention measures of scientists analyzing samples from asteroids, then can we have any confidence that most of the amino acids detected at the tiniest trace amounts of only 44 nanomoles per gram (or less) actually came from an asteroid rather than from terrestrial contamination? No, we cannot.