"Mirror Life" Risk Means You Just Might Get Killed by a Mars Sample Return Mission

 Scientists and doctors have a long history of paying inadequate attention to very serious risks that are hard to quantify. Here are some examples. 

• When the first atomic bomb was being developed,  there were concerns that its explosion would cause an uncontrollable chain reaction that would set the Earth's atmosphere on fire. Anyone familiar with the way in which an atomic chain reaction occurs may understand why such a concern was reasonable. A nuclear chain reaction occurs in a way roughly comparable to how a fast-spreading virus spreads, with the reaction passing on very quickly between nearby units, which themselves cause the same reaction to be passed on to other nearby units, and so on and so forth. It was reasonable to fear that an atmosphere filled with oxygen molecules might allow a nuclear chain reaction to pass on endlessly from one molecule to the next. Chapter 17 of Daniel Ellsberg's book The Doomsday Machine makes quite clear that physicists still thought there was a significant chance of such a planet-killing event when the first atomic bomb was exploded in July, 1945. At one point Enrico Fermi estimated the chance at 10 percent, according to one source. Scientists basically shrugged off the risk that the whole atmosphere might burn up when the first nuclear bomb exploded, and approved the first atom bomb test. It was like playing Russian roulette with the survival of mankind. 
• After nuclear weapons were invented, there were all kinds of concerns about the testing of nuclear weapons. Critics said that the tests were creating radioactivity that would increase the cancer risk for very many people. Scientists assured us incorrectly that the risks were very small. This post  states that there were between 340,000 to 690,000 US deaths caused by atomic testing. The result was probably more US deaths than from the bombs dropped on Japan. 
• Many people pointed out the hazards of scientific experimentation modifying the genomes of viruses and bacteria. But scientists recklessly kept up "gain of function" experiments.  Three US intelligence agencies have concluded that the COVID-19 epidemic surging in early 2020 was caused by a lab leak from a laboratory doing gain-of-function research. 
• A health resource web page states this: "For over two decades, the United States has experienced a crisis of substance abuse and addiction that is illustrated most starkly by the rise in deaths from drug overdoses. Since the year 2000, over 1 million people died from drug overdoses in the United States. The annual number of drug deaths exceeded 100,000 for the first time in 2021, beginning a disturbing trend that has continued in both 2022 and 2023." How did this happen? For many years, doctors not paying adequate attention to the risks of opioid medicines went about casually writing prescriptions for such drugs, acting like they were blind to the risks of overdoses and prescription drug addiction. 
• The radiation hazards of CT scans were obvious from the beginning. But countless millions were encouraged to get such scans, often where there was no clear medical necessity for such a scan. Referring to CT scans in the United States, a scientific study stated, "The 93 million CT examinations performed in 62 million patients in 2023 were projected to result in approximately 103, 000 future cancers." Extrapolating, we can assume that millions of people worldwide have got cancer because of unnecessary CT scans. 

Scientists have recently discussed a type of risk that few have imagined previously. It is the risk called "mirror life."  To understand the idea, you have to understand the important idea of homochirality. 

A protein molecule typically has hundreds of amino acids. Chemicals such as amino acids and sugars can be either left-handed or right handed. A left handed amino acid looks like a mirror image of the right-handed amino acid, and a right-handed sugar looks like the mirror image of the left-handed sugar. Homochirality is the fact that in living things essentially all amino acids are left-handed, and all sugars in DNA are right-handed. But when such things are synthesized in a laboratory, or produced in experiments simulating the early Earth, you see equal amounts of left-handed and right-handed amino acids and equal amounts of left-handed and right-handed sugars.

But what if life had arose on Mars long ago? Such life might have a type of homochirality the exact opposite of the type we see in earthly life. For Mars life it might be that all proteins used right-handed amino acids, and all sugars were left-handed.  Such a theoretical form of life is called "mirror life." Recently articles have pointed out a great danger in trying to create such mirror life through laboratory experiments. If such mirror life escaped a lab, it might act like an unstoppable virus. Theoretically if mirror life were unleashed in the earthly biosphere, it might wipe out all or a large fraction of earthly life. 

So there is a danger in returning samples from Mars that might contain life. Such life might be mirror life. And if such mirror life escaped the lab, it might act like some unstoppable virus. The result might be a pandemic that might make the COVID-19 pandemic look like "a walk in the park" in comparison. 

The possibility I am mentioning is not some weird speculation I dreamed up myself. The possibility of a mirror life pandemic was raised recently in an article published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The article had the title "Black swans from the Red Planet—Could NASA bring back 'mirror life' from Mars?" The subtitle read this:

NASA and the European Space Agency plan to bring samples back from Mars. Could they harbor a type of life that scientists warn could trigger mass extinctions on Earth? 

Later in the article we read this: "With perhaps a 50-50 chance that any Martian life developed from a mirror biology, the return of samples from Mars has transformed from a scientific opportunity to a potential existential risk."

The possibility of a mirror life pandemic after a Mars sample return mission is another reason why such a mission should not be funded. The main reason is the very low likelihood of detecting life or traces of dead life, given that no type of amino acid has ever been detected on Mars. Amino acids are the building components of protein molecules, which (along with protein complexes)  are the building components of the simplest one-celled life. 

A more intelligent approach would be to send to Mars robotic instruments with whatever equipment is sufficient to detect life, if it exists. Or, simply wait until a manned expedition reaches Mars, a mission including a competent biologist with all the tools needed to detect whether life on Mars exists or ever existed. 

Oops, it was deadly "mirror life"

Trying to Explain Human Development, Physicists Offer Only the Emptiest Hand-Waving

 The marvel of human development is a miracle of organization a thousand miles over the head of today's scientists. Somehow a speck-sized zygote existing just after impregnation progresses to become something a trillion times more organized: the internally dynamic structure of the human body. Scientists have long told a childish lie to try to explain this wonder so very far beyond their understanding: the tall tale that human bodies grow because there occurs a constant reading of a specification for how to make a human body, one stored in DNA or its genes. Such a specification has been called a blueprint, a recipe or a program. This tall tale is a lie because no such specification for how to make a human body exists in DNA or its genes. Instead of having a blueprint or recipe or program for building a body or any of its organs or any human cell, DNA and its genes merely have very low-level information such as which amino acids make up a protein. 

The very childish nature of the "DNA blueprints build bodies" tall tale may become clear to you once you realize that even if such a blueprint were to exist inside DNA, it would never explain how a human body gets built, for the simple reason that blueprints don't build things. Dump a blueprint for a house and the construction materials at a vacant lot, and that will never cause a house to get built. Things get built with the help of blueprints only when there are intelligent agents around smart enough to read blueprints and get ideas about exactly how to build things. A human body is so enormously organized and has such fantastically intricate biochemistry and internal dynamism that any blueprint for making a human body would be a specification so complex that only a superhuman mind could understand it. There is in the human womb nothing like a mind capable of interpreting and understanding instructions so complex, if they happened to exist in DNA and its genes, where there is no such specification for building a body or any of its organs or cells. 

There is therefore an ocean-sized explanation shortfall in explaining the physical origin of any full human body. Strip them of their lies about what is in DNA and its genes, and our developmental biologists stand empty-handed before us, "with their pants down." To make it look like the explanation shortfall is not so enormous, discussions of morphogenesis sometimes appeal to physics.  The maneuver is futile. Physics does pretty much nothing to explain the origin of a human body. 

In Quanta Magazine in late 2025 there was an example of one of the misleading articles we get when someone is trying to persuade us that physics does much of anything to explain human development. We have an article entitled "Genes Have Harnessed Physics to Help Grow Living Things." 

Early on the writer states this:

"Typically, biologists try to characterize growth, development and other biological processes as the result of chemical cues triggered by genetic instructions. But that picture has often seemed incomplete."

We get no explanation of why "that picture has often seemed incomplete." The reason is that genes do not give any instructions more complex than instructions for how to build a polypeptide sequence (a chain of amino acids) that is the beginning of a protein molecule. But constructing a human body requires many types of higher level organization such as building protein molecules into protein complexes, building protein complexes into organelles, building organelles into cells, building cells into tissues, building tissues into organs, and building organs into organ systems consisting of an organ and many other parts.  Genes cannot explain how such building occurs, because genes have no instructions on how to perform such operations. 

The writer's next sentence starts to tell us the very misleading story of "mechanical forces" that "steer" human development, saying, "Researchers now increasingly appreciate the role of mechanical forces in biology: forces that push and pull tissues in response to their material properties, steering growth and development in ways that genes cannot."  The story is baloney. You cannot explain any of the marvels of the construction of a human body by appealing to blind "mechanical forces" and the claim that such forces are "steering." Constructing a human body is a task almost infinitely harder than the simple task of steering a car.  And blind mechanical forces don't do steering anything like the steering that occurs when a driver with vision and an idea of a desired destination is steering a car. 

There is almost always the same kind of misleading word trickery in discussions of this type. They include the following:

(1) There is the extremely misleading trick of trying to shrink the problem of explaining the arising of a human structure to a mere problem of explaining a shape. Within a human body is the most enormous organization of matter, a degree of organization that dwarfs the level of organization inside an automobile or computer. The problem of morphogenesis or human development is the problem of explaining how so gigantically organized an arrangement of matter arises. Such a problem is more than a billion times greater than a mere problem of explaining a human shape. 

(2) There is the extremely misleading trick of trying to speak as if a mere "sculpting" or "shaping" could explain the origin of a human body, which is just another way of trying to make an explanation problem look a billion times easier than it is. Any action of "sculpting" or "shaping" could merely explain a shape, not an internal structure that is vastly organized.  So it is always misleading to speak as if some kind of "sculpting" or "shaping" action could explain the arising of a human body or any of its cells or organs.

(3) There is extremely misleading personification language in which mindless and blind mechanical forces are described as "steering" or "sculpting" as if such mindless and blind mechanical forces were intentional agents who could see and will.

(4) Here and there there are sprinkled a few references to mechanical forces such as pulling or pushing or stretching. Using "give me an inch and I'll take a mile" tactics, some attempt is made to make such references sound like mechanical forces are helping to explain the origin of a human body, something that is not true in any substantial way. 

The Quanta Magazine article employs all of those misleading tricks. Nothing of any real substance is discussed in explaining how blind mechanical forces can help explain the miracle of the arising of a gigantically organized human body having a special arrangement of parts far more impressive than the special arrangement of parts in an automobile or a jet aircraft. All that we have is the emptiest of hand-waving, combined with a few gossamer threads of speculation, which (even if true) would explain no more than a thousandth of the marvel of the origination of a human body. 

We have in the article scientist Alan Rodrigues engaging in very empty hand-waving by saying this: 

" 'What’s really amazed us is that you might be able to get by with a relatively simple amount of instruction from the genetic and molecular level,' said Rodrigues. 'Because you have additional emergent processes and properties happening at other levels.' ”

No, you can't "get by" with a "relatively simple amount of instruction" from DNA and its genes merely telling low-level chemical things like which amino acids make up a protein. Constructing something as enormously organized as a human body (with so many layers of organization and so many interdependent components) requires a causal reality enormously greater, which cannot be mere "instruction," because instructions don't engineer things. 

See here for more on this issue

In articles such as these in Quanta Magazine, we almost always see photos of smiling, confident-looking scientists, having some "I got this" look on their face. Were such scientists to be photographed with appropriate body language matching the limits of their knowledge, the photos would show them looking like this:

And were such scientists to give quotes matching how little they know, we would read quotes such as this:

I don't understand this stuff. It's all a mystery a thousand miles over my head. How do proteins ever form very complex three-dimensional shapes needed for their function, shapes not specified by DNA or its genes? I don't understand that. Why do proteins constantly form into just-right functional teams of proteins: protein complexes so well-engineered they are often called "molecular machines," complexes that sometimes use literal motors, forming the most astonishingly well-arranged machines? I don't understand that. How do organelles ever form from proteins and protein complexes? I don't understand that. How do cells of such enormous complexity ever form? I don't understand that. How do cells ever find the right positions in human bodies, with the right types of cells ending up in the right type of organs? I don't understand that. How do cells ever reproduce, something as astonishing as one automobile splitting up into two functional automobiles? I don't understand that. How do cells ever form into organs and organ systems as complex as the human cardiovascular system? I don't understand that. I don't understand these things, and neither do any other scientists. 

Very rarely we will get the truth on this matter from scientists, such as in the quotes below:

• "Yet while these are several examples of well-understood processes, our study of animal morphogenesis is really in its infancy." -- David Bilder and Saori L. Haigo1, "Expanding the Morphogenetic Repertoire: Perspectives from the Drosophila Egg." 
• "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms." -- Timothy Saunders, developmental biologist (link).
• "An adult human body is made up of some 30 to 40 trillion cells, all of which stem from a single fertilized egg cell. The process by which the right cells appear to arrive in their right numbers at the right time at the right place -- development -- is only understood in the roughest of outlines." -- Five scientists (link). 
• "Our understanding of how our organs form is still in its infancy" -- A research project abstract written by scientists (link). 
• "Biochemistry cannot provide the spatial information needed to explain morphogenesis...Supracellular morphogenesis is mysterious...Nobody seems to understand the origin of biological and cellular order."  -- Six medical authorities (link).  "
• "Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how these individual actions coordinate over a macroscopic number of cells to grow complex structures with exquisite functionality is unknown." - Five scientists (link). 
• "However, our understanding of the molecular and physical basis of morphogenesis in plants or in any other eukaryotic system [e.g. mammals] is still in its infancy due to the complexity and non-linearity of processes involved in morphogenesis dynamics (or Morphodynamics)." -- A description of a 2017-2021 scientific project, presumably written by scientists (link). 
• "Understanding morphogenesis in vertebrate tissues in development and disease poses one of the most significant challenges in the life sciences. Despite the impressive technical advances aimed at cellular and subcellular characterization and manipulation over the past half century, a clear picture of how form is created still remains in its infancy." -- Four scientists in 2025 (link). 
• "We don't know what dark matter is, we don't understand how the brain works or consciousness, we don't understand morphogenesis, we don't understand the origin of life." -- Physics PhD Michael Nielsen (link). 
• "You start off as a sperm and an egg, and nine months later [your body has been built], through a magical process of morphogenesis, which we don’t understand." -- Donald Hoffman, Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine (link). 
• "We take it for granted that we go to bed with two sets of fully functional kidneys and that we wake up with them the next morning but we don't understand the fundamental processes that give rise to this very well choreographed maintenance of an organism's form and function." -- Scientist Sanchéz Alvarado (link). 

Postscript: It seems I am not the only one who realizes the severity of this Missing Specifications Problem.  On this day I read of a long essay  by developmental biologist Michael Levin, entitled "Platonic space: where cognitive and morphological patterns come from (besides genetics and environment)." Levin makes use of Plato's theory of the Eternal Forms (or a theory like it), claiming that physical systems are "pointers to patterns in that Platonic space."  Plato basically said that each man is an instantiation of an eternal Idea of a Man, and each  house is an instantiation of an eternal Idea of a House, and each rock is an instantiation of an eternal Idea of a Rock. Long ago I read every one of Plato's many dialogues, but I cannot recall him ever credibly explaining how such instantiations of transcendent forms could occur for anything that is as complex as a human body.  And we get the same failure in Levin's essay, which has some tangled metaphysics, but does not do anything to explain how cell specifications and protein complex specifications and organelle specifications and organ system specifications could ever have arisen in some "Platonic space" of eternal transcendent forms. In his essay, Levin makes the severe error of claiming that "we, ourselves, are patterns." While the behavior of someone can follow a pattern, you are not a mere pattern or a pointer, but something gigantically more, both physically and mentally. 

The Latest Example of an Expert Group Thinking Stupidly

 I have published a series of 29 short videos on the topic of the errors of experts, which you can view by using the link here.  

My best post on this topic is my post "Disastrous Blunders of the Experts," which you can read here. The post discusses the following examples in which experts produced the most disastrous blunders:

Expert Fiasco #1: The Bay of Pigs Invasion

Expert Fiasco #2: The Vietnam War

Expert Fiasco #3: Eugenics

Expert Fiasco #4: The Housing Bubble of 2005, and Financial Meltdown of 2008

Expert Fiasco #5: Blunders of the Psychiatrists

Expert Fiasco #6: The Iraq War

Expert Fiasco #7: Vioxx

Expert Fiasco #8: The Opioid Overdose Epidemic

Expert Fiasco #9: Nuclear Weapons

The post also discusses quite a few other cases of the most disastrous blunders by experts, including the atomic testing fiasco (in which we were assured by experts that atomic testing was safe, with as many as 500,000 people dying from cancer caused by radiation from such testing), and also the COVID-19 blunders that probably resulted in more than 300,000 unnecessary deaths because of incompetent responses.  It is an open question whether the entire COVID-19 pandemic that killed millions was the result of overconfidence by gene-fiddling biology experts recklessly monkeying with viruses. 

It is not hard to find recent examples of blunders by experts.  One example is all the US military and US foreign policy experts who have unwisely supported providing super-destructive bombs to the State of Israel as it has engaged in an appalling bombing campaign in Gaza, resulting in more than 70,000 civilian deaths, mostly deaths of women and children, with innumerable other women and children being maimed or crippled, and as many as 500,000 put at risk of starvation, homelessness, severe malnutrition or severe lung damage from breathing dust from all the destroyed buildings.  With the help of such a blunder the appalling horrors of the October, 2023 Hamas attack have been dwarfed by a savage slaughter fifty times bloodier. Another example can be found in the recent World Economic Forum meeting. 

The World Economic Forum provides an annual report on global risks. After a meeting in Switzerland two years ago, this expert group  released its 2024 report on global risks.  Early 2024 was a time when the situation in the Middle East seemed like some time bomb that might explode, leading to a new world war, with the situation in Ukraine posing a similar danger. So what did the World Economic Forum list as the biggest current economic risk in early 2024?  The group of experts decided that the biggest global risk over the next two years was: misinformation and disinformation. 

Below is a visual from the 2024 report.  We see "misinformation and disinformation" at the top of the list of 2-year global risks.

Here is the report's description of this "misinformation and disinformation" risk, which fails to make it sound like anything to lose much sleep over:

"Misinformation and disinformation (#1) is a new leader of the top 10 rankings this year. No longer requiring a niche skill set, easy-to-use interfaces to large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) models have already enabled an explosion in falsified information and so-called ‘synthetic’ content, from sophisticated voice cloning to counterfeit websites. To combat growing risks, governments are beginning to roll out new and evolving regulations to target both hosts and creators of online disinformation and illegal content. Nascent regulation of generative AI will likely complement these efforts. For example, requirements in China to watermark AI-generated content may help identify false information, including unintentional misinformation through AI hallucinated content. Generally however, the speed and effectiveness of regulation is unlikely to match the pace of development." 

This sounds like nothing much to worry about, compared to threats such as nuclear war, pandemics arising from labs engaging in reckless gene-splicing, and global warming. So what on Earth were these experts thinking when they decided to proclaim "misinformation and disinformation" as the #1 global risk? In early 2024 Eve Ottenberg speculated about a possibility:

"The assorted billionaire geniuses and official intellectual luminaries who gathered in Davos Switzerland January 15-19 proved, for those who doubted, that neither singly nor as a group could these...find their way out of a paper bag. Weighing the world’s fate in their well-manicured fingers, did they seem concerned about the Ukraine War morphing into nuclear catastrophe, or ditto for a wider Middle East war? They did not. Did they tear their beautifully coiffed hair and rend their designer ensembles over the prospect of the earth heating up like a pancake on a griddle due to uncontrolled climate change? A disaster caused by rich countries gobbling up and belching out burnt fossil fuels? Or did they mouth vague platitudes about extreme weather? Yes, bromides were their plat du jour.

The most immediate threat to humanity, according to this assemblage of well-groomed ... (who paid $52,000 apiece to join the World Economic Forum and then $19,000 each for a ticket to the Davos shindig), is misinformation or disinformation – you pick. After all, these bigwigs can take to their pate de foie gras-stocked bunkers if the planet succumbs either to nuclear winter or high temperatures inhospitable to human life. So of course, they regard speech, that is, free speech, as the main threat to their luxurious creature comforts. After all, someone might say something bad about these oligarchs! "

After a meeting in Switzerland in January of this year, this same expert group recently released its 2026 report on global risks.  A long-standing nuclear arms treaty between Russia and the United States has recently expired, raising the threat of a nuclear arms race. Very many are worried about the health, stability and judgment of the frequently-ranting man whose finger is on  the nuclear button of the United States, who has made a long series of outrageous-sounding statements, threats and decisions that have caused many to wonder if he is fit for the grave responsibilities of being US president. 

So what has the World Economic Forum listed as the biggest current global risk?  The group of experts has decided that the biggest global risk over the next two years is: geoeconomic confrontration. 

What are they talking about by using such a term? We get an inkling in one part of the report:

"In highlighting Geoeconomic confrontation, respondents are indicating a deepening and broadening of their concerns: after a year of heightened uncertainty over trade policy there is now a growing recognition of the escalating use of other economic and political instruments, from sanctions and regulations to capital restrictions and weaponization of supply chains, as tools of geoeconomic strategy."

Figure 24 of the report has a big font boldface caption of this: Executive perceptions of Geoeconomic confrontation (sanctions, tariffs, investment screening etc.), Later in the report we have this definition of "geoeconomic confrontation." 

"Deployment of economic levers by global or regional powers to reshape economic interactions between nations, restricting goods, knowledge, services or technology with the intent of building self-sufficiency, constraining geopolitical rivals and/or consolidating spheres of influence. Includes, but is not limited to: currency measures; investment controls; sanctions; state aid and subsidies; and trade controls."

What did the group of experts list as the second most worrying global risk over the next two years? It was "misinformation and disinformation." Unbelievably (as shown in Figure 2 on page 8 of the report), the percentage of experts who listed "geoeconomic confrontation" as an economic risk was 18 times greater than the number who cited "biological, chemical or nuclear weapons or hazards" as an economic risk, and 18 times greater than the number who listed "infectious diseases" as a risk, and 9 times greater than the number who listed "critical changes to Earth systems" as a risk. And the number of experts who listed "misinformation and disinformation" as a risk was 7 times greater than the number who listed "biological, chemical or nuclear weapons or hazards" as an economic risk, and 7 times greater than the number who listed "infectious diseases" as a risk.

Once again, prestigious elite experts have acted in a way that makes us suspect that they are blind, bungling and biased, less likely to judge correctly than high-school dropouts.  

Asked to name the biggest global risk in the next two years, experts have stated a worry that only some fat-cat investor or some hopelessly out-of-touch clique member might list as his biggest worry. Our World Economic Forum experts have spoken as if they were vastly more worried about some red tape than about oceans of red blood being spilled. Our group of experts has utterly failed to perceive the severity of the biggest risk facing the world: a risk of nuclear war that helped cause the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to recently set its famous doomsday clock to be only 85 seconds before midnight.  

Experts tend to exist in "echo chambers" where groupthink and herd effects may predominate. Often involving way-too-narrow and way-too-specialized fields of study (sometimes called silos), such echo chambers can be found in the ivory towers of academia or the ideological enclaves that are the Pentagon and the White House. Within such an echo chamber people will tend to hear only people who belong to the same belief community, people who share the same ideology. Existing in such an ideological enclave, absurd or immoral or unwarranted opinions may be voiced, and may be regarded as great wisdom by anyone who looks around and sees other members of the belief community nodding in agreement. 

In 1923 an Editor of Scientific American Confessed the Reality of Telepathy and Mind Over Matter

Nowadays it seems that whenever the leading publication Scientific American discusses the topic of telepathy, we get statements by ESP denialists, despite centuries of evidence for the reality of psi phenomena such as extrasensory perception (ESP) and clairvoyance. But it wasn't always this way. In earlier years the editors of Scientific American confessed that telepathy was proven. 

In my post "In 1941 the Editors of Scientific American Confessed That Telepathy Was Proven," which you can read here, I documented how the editors of Scientific American had publicly confessed that telepathy was a proven fact. 

On this same page of the April 1941 Scientific American, we had a box describing an offer of the magazine to pay $15,000 for proof of the paranormal. Here is part of that box:

Note well item 6 in the list of conditions. We read, "Since experiments by Dunninger and others have proved telepathy to an acceptable degree, demonstrations of this nature are not eligible for the award."  That is a confession that the reality of telepathy had been proven. At the time this was written, the person who had done the most to prove telepathy was Duke University professor Joseph Rhine (whose laboratory experiments are discussed here), and other researchers such as Professor Riess (whose enormously convincing experiment is discussed here). Later researcher Louisa Rhine documented very many cases of telepathy outside of laboratory settings, in her book Hidden Channels of the Mind, which may be read here. Sally Rhine Feather documented very many other cases of telepathy outside of laboratory settings, in her book The Gift: ESP, the Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People, which can be read here.

So why in so quite a few decades after the 1940's have Scientific American writers and Scientific American editors misled us by claiming that there is no good evidence for ESP? Nothing happened to warrant such a change. To the contrary,  experiments after 1941 using the Ganzfeld protocol provided extremely well-replicated evidence for the reality of ESP. A paper on the Cornell Physics Paper server gives this summary of the telepathy evidence from the ganzfeld experiments run in recent decades, in which the success rate expected by chance is 25%:

"From 1974 to 2018, the combined ganzfeld database contained 117 studies. Of those, studies using targets sets with 4 possible targets included 3,885 test sessions, resulting in 1,188 hits, corresponding to a 30.6% hit rate. With chance at 25%, this excess hit rate is 8.1 sigma above chance expectation (p = 5.6 × 10^-16). Analysis of these studies showed that similar effect sizes were reported by independent labs, that the results were not affected by variations in experimental quality, and that selective reporting biases could not explain away the results. The Bayes Factors (BF) associated with the last 108 more recently published ganzfeld telepathy studies was 18.8 million in favor of H1 (i.e., evidence favoring telepathy). Given that BF > 100 is considered 'decisive' evidence, this outcome far exceeds the 'exceptional evidence' said to be required of exceptional claims.[48,49] By comparison, in particle physics experiments effects resulting in 5 or more sigma are considered experimental 'discoveries.' ”

The probability of 1 in 5.6 × 10^-16  cited is a likelihood of less than 1 in a quadrillion. 

Researching old newspaper articles, I found an earlier confession by an editor at Scientific American that telepathy had been proven.  The confession occurs in the 1923 newspaper article you can read here. 

In an article entitled "Spirit Messages Declared Frauds," we read the opinion of J. Malcolm Bird, who the article describes as "editor of Scientific American."  Bird declares that he does not believe in messages or manifestations from spirits after investigating them. But he casts doubt upon his qualifications as an objective judge of this topic, by confessing that he has an "emotional preference against the idea that spirits come back and produce physical effects upon our physical plane.”

But later in the article we read this confession from Bird:

"He concedes, first, that what scientists call subjective phenomena, under the head of which come hypnotism and telepathy, do occur, and he cites instances in support of the belief. He concedes, also that he has been impressed with objective phenomena, such as objects moving about at high velocity, weaving themselves, in dark rooms, in and out of chandeliers and other furnishings without contact. His theory is that, with the brain giving off energy, with other brains as the receiver, it is possible also to reach the point of concentration where physical objects may also be the receivers and may be controlled by the brain. If such is true, he holds, It is an entirely human process and not spirits working through the medium."

The underlined part of the statement is a confession of the reality of telepathy. The other part of the statement amounts to a confession of the reality of mysterious movements of matter seeming to be what is called psychokinesis, telekinesis or mind-over-matter. The Scientific American editor Byrd attempted to account for these incredibly spooky movements of matter (including "objects moving about at high velocity, weaving themselves, in dark rooms, in and out of chandeliers and other furnishings without contact") by advancing a theory that remote objects can be moved around by brains giving off energy. 

We know of no energy from a brain that can explain mysterious movements of matter outside of a person's body. We should have a low opinion of Byrd's attempt to create a mechanistic theory to account for the spooky movements of matter he saw. But at least we got from Byrd a confession of the reality of mind over matter, something like psychokinesis or telekinesis. 

In the news article we then read this statement from the Scientific American editor:

"In support of his admission that telepathy is existent, Mr. Bird points to the case of a Scottish woman. Her husband was a seafaring man and at the time was at sea and not expected home for several weeks. She was observed to rush out of the door of her house, with her arms extended, and to walk thus a distance of about one hundred yards on the moor In front of her cottage. She suddenly folded her arms as if about an object and fell In a faint. When she revived, she said, 'my husband is dead.' It was later established that at about that exact moment her husband had been drowned at sea."

We then read in the newspaper article about Bird's interaction with a British medium of the early twentieth century (Gladys Osborne Leonard), who seemed to produce psychic or paranormal results so impressive she was often called "the British Leonora Piper."  (Piper's prowess is discussed here.) The most impressive existing record of the results of Gladys Osborne Leonard is the 1916 book Raymond, or Life After Death by Sir Oliver Lodge, which can be read online for free here. The book is a meticulous account of interactions Lodge had with mediums after the death of his son Raymond, which occurred on September 14, 1915. The book has transcripts of quite a few sessions Lodge had with mediums such as Leonard.  

We read this about how the Scientific American editor Bird had two seemingly paranormal encounters with Gladys Osborne Leonard:

"In one of his sittings with the clairvoyant medium, Mrs. Leonard, she told him that he had booked passage on two separate ships when he left America for England. Mr. Bird had told no one in England of this, but as a matter of fact, he had done so as a precaution.

Through her 'control' (the spirit working through the medium’s
mouth), she told him also of the existence of a picture of three women, taken by the seashore. One of the women, now a spirit, was supposed to be communicating with him through the medium. Mr. Bird recalled no such picture at the time, but upon his return to America his mother verified its existence. It was a picture of his grandmother and two of his woman relatives taken by the seashore. He attributed this to the workings of telepathy, the explanation being that the medium had taken in through this source the workings of his subconscious mind."

Here Bird is not merely assuming the reality of telepathy, but actually assuming the existence of a kind of super-super-telepathy, in which a mind reader cannot merely detect what you are thinking at the current moment, but also kind of dive into your memories, extracting things you may have seen, but are not currently thinking about, and cannot even currently remember. We have here an example of the infinite explanatory flexibility of those trying to explain away evidence of some mysterious spirit beyond their ken. It kind of goes like this. 

Cannot explain what you saw? Try to explain it as thought-reading and maybe also brain-caused telekinesis.

That still is not enough? Explain the results as super-telepathy involving the ability of someone to read not just your current thoughts but also your memories. 

That still is not enough? Explain the results as super-super-telepathy involving the ability of someone to read not just your current thoughts and also your memories but also something locked in your subconscious mind that you cannot remember if you try. 

Bird seems to have failed to ever convincingly back up his claim that one of the mediums he investigated was involved in fraud.  You can read about the case using the links here, here and in another account you can read below. 

What seems to have happened is that Bird and his Scientific American committee got baffling results while testing Josie K. Stewart, results that originally impressed them (as described in the article above). Later Bird and his men devised a theory of fraud to explain away the results. But none of the later news stories seem to discuss any convincing evidence to back up such a theory of fraud. The accusation was vigorously denied by Stewart.  

We read in the article here some claim of a measurement backing up the claim of fraud. But it does not sound like very reliable evidence at all, as it hinges upon a supposed difference of paper thickness reported as being merely two ten-thousandths of an inch. With a difference that small, the possibility of measurement error is too high, particularly when someone making a measurement may be motivated to get some particular result. 

Postscript: On the morning of this post's publication, I observed a spooky effect I have seen more than 28 times, in addition to another spooky effect, both of which I discuss in my post here. The effects  may suggest some "mind over matter" interaction going on. 

Technofascism and Materialism Will March Arm-in-Arm

Advances in high technology create a new possibility of oppression: the specter of technofascism. 

A recent article you can read here is entitled "How Epstein Channelled Race Science and ‘Climate Culling’ Into Silicon Valley’s AI Elite." It is based largely on emails very recently released as part of the release of documents of Jeffrey Epstein. The subtitle of the article says, "The Epstein files expose how racial hierarchy, genetic 'optimisation' and even climate-driven population culling circulated inside Big Tech circles." 

Here are some excerpts from the article, which includes references to ideas about "population thinning" or "population culling," apparently ideas that certain groups regarded as "inferior" or "less useful" should be allowed to die, for the sake of improving humanity's genetic stock. The article also references an Edge.org web site and series of books I discuss in my post here.  

"Taken together, the Bach correspondence and the longtermist ideas circulating in this environment show that human hierarchy, population thinning and genetic destiny were not fringe provocations, but part of the ambient intellectual air inside the circles designing the next generation of AI....As previously reported in Byline Supplement, Bostrom would go on to openly advocate in utero selective breeding to enhance population IQ; total global surveillance by artificial intelligence to prevent human extinction; and the idea that sacrificing a billion lives today might be worth it to improve the chances that ten to the fifty-fourth power (septendecillion) people exist in the future.

In 2009, the same year he joined Edge and became a regular contributor to the network, Bostrom co-founded the World Transhumanist Association (now known as Humanity+). Two years later, Jeffrey Epstein donated a total of $120,000 to Bostrom’s organisation....Epstein’s underwriting of Edge gave him extraordinary access and trust with men who were already building the systems – cloud platforms, AI architectures, digital-asset networks – that now underpin political and economic power.

Threaded through that infrastructure was a worldview that Epstein helped architect: the elevation of a self-defined cognitive aristocracy; rising scepticism toward democratic accountability; an obsession with racial and gender hierarchy, and genetic 'optimisation'; machine intelligence as the inevitable future of humanity, if it survives extinction; the legitimacy of population culling to root out inferior groups; all rooted in a hyper-reductionist, technocratic (and arguably unscientific) view of existence as a computer simulation in an amoral multiverse of simulations.

It was a worldview Epstein not merely recognised but was actively cultivating, as it conformed to his own horrific moral choices."

You could use the term "technofascism" to describe such ideas, and you could get quite a lot of justification for the use of that term from the long paper "Technofascism: AI, Big Tech, and the new authoritarianism" by Mark Coeckelbergh, which you can read here. Coeckelbergh describes quite a few parallels between the activities of some players in Big Tech and the activities of fascism. Here is an excerpt from that article:

"The leaders of Big Tech and their advisors spread ideologies that say that the development of AI will accelerate dramatically: artificial general intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence are around the corner and will radically transform society and humanity. Influenced by thinkers such as Bostrom and MacAskill, Big Tech further promotes narratives about the long-term, cosmic future of intelligence. MacAskill (2022) has argued for longtermism: the long-term future takes priority, ethically speaking. This future is imagined as one in which humanity spreads to other planets: trillions of people living with advanced AI. But transhumanists such as Bostrom (2014), Kurzweil (2005), Yudkowsky, and Sanders go further and imagine a vast number of superintelligence beings as mergers of humans and AI. These narratives invite and support the self-regulated development of AI in the hands of Big Tech and puts tech kings such as Musk and Altman (and the thinkers who advise them) in the role of heroes and leaders in a longer term narrative of cosmic proportions: they will lead humanity on the way to the new Brave New Future, in which AI transforms everything. And this has consequences for ordinary mortals such as you and I. We might not matter so much anymore in the light of the New Brave World in the making. Today, we better follow the tech leaders. And in the future, we might well become obsolete. As Torres (2021) has warned, Silicon Valley is influenced by, and spreads, ideologies that are apocalyptic and predict doom: ends times are near and current humans might no longer be needed on the way to a transhumanist and longtermist future, where we will make way to superintelligent entities. Like the ideologies of historical forms of fascism, these tech ideologies spread a death cult and a leadership cult."

You may be baffled by these references to simulation theory and longtermism. I explain how they are related in my post "Longtermism Is Fueled by a Goofy Belief in Computer-Generated Lives," which you can read here. Simulation theory started out as Nick Bostrom's very silly speculation that we may all be merely parts of a simulated reality created by extraterrestrials. It is an enormously stupid idea based on false materialist assumptions.  What is called "longtermism" is a futurist philosophy centered upon speculations that in the future humans will be able to create gigantic numbers of artificial human lives by using computers to artificially generate something like human lives. 

Such ideas are pretty much the worst kind of nonsense, and it is all totally dependent on the false assumptions of materialism. If you believe that a human mind arises solely from a brain, you may believe that there is some way for a computer to recreate a "brain makes mind" mechanism, opening the door to computers creating something like human lives. But if you have done enough study of the endless very strong reasons for rejecting "brains make minds" ideology, reasons discussed at the greatest length in the posts of my blog here, you will reject such a possibility. 

The reasons for rejecting materialism (and the simulation theory and longermism that are based on materialism) are many, including these:

• the fact that there are many dramatic cases in the medical literature of people who had more or less normal minds even though large fractions of the brain (or most of their brains) were destroyed due to injury or disease, including super-dramatic cases of people with good minds but less than 15 percent of their brains;
• the fact that there is no scientific understanding at all of how brains or neurons could be producing consciousness, thought, understanding or abstract ideas (mental things that are very hard or impossible to explain as coming from physical things);
• the fact that there is no plausible account to be told of how brains could possibly be storing memories that last for fifty years, given the high protein turnover in synapses, where the average protein only lasts a few weeks;
• the fact that there is no scientific understanding at all of how brains or neurons could produce any such things as choices or decisions;
• the fact that there is no understanding of how brains could achieve the instantaneous recall of distant, obscure memories that humans routinely show, given the lack of any coordinate system or indexing in a brain that might allow some exact position of a stored memory to be very quickly found;
• the fact that there is no understanding whatsoever of how concepts, visual information, long series of words, and episodic memories could ever be physically stored by a brain in any way that would translate all these diverse types of information into synapse states or neuron states;
• the fact that the microscopic examination of very many thousands of brains of recently deceased people (and the microscopic examination of endless samples of brain tissue extracted from living people) has never produced the slightest trace of learned information, something that would have been discovered in brains 50 years ago if brains stored memories and brains are the source of the human mind;
• the fact that human brains (all very severely handicapped by cumulative synaptic delays and unreliable synaptic transmission) are way too slow and way too noisy to explain the wonders of human best mental performances, which include endless wonders of blazing fast calculation, blazing fast precise recall, blazing fast memorization,  and the recitation with perfect accuracy of very long bodies of text consisting of hundreds of pages;  
• the fact that for more than 50 years numerous people have reported vivid near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences occurring after their hearts stopped and their brains were inactive, during times when they had no brain waves, and they should have had no consciousness at all (under "brains make minds" assumptions), with many of the observation details they reported seeing during such brain-inexplicable should-have-been-utterly-unconscious experiences being independently verified (as described here);
• the fact that humans have very many types of well-documented experiences that are inexplicable under any claim that the brain is the source of the human mind.  

In the opinion article here, the Émile Torres mentioned above has some pointed criticisms of the thought of Nick Bostrom. Torres says, " Many of the same racist, xenophobic, classist and ableist attitudes that animated 20th-century eugenics are found all over the longtermist literature and community."  Torres also says, "It should be clear at this point why longtermism, with its transhumanist vision of creating a superior new race of 'posthumans,' is eugenics on steroids." 

If technofascism arises to stomp a boot of oppression on our heads, such technofascism will march arm-in-arm with materialism. There was a previous form of fascism that marched arm-and-arm with the materialist ideology of Darwinism: the twisted horror that was Nazism. 

Back in the Nazi days

The famed British medical journal The Lancet created a commission to examine the role of medical professionals in the Holocaust. The commission issued a long report entitled "The Lancet Commission on medicine, Nazism, and the Holocaust: historical evidence, implications for today,teaching for tomorrow." You can read the report here. The report details that medical professionals were some of the key players in the Nazi slaughter of millions. Below is an excerpt from the report:

"The obsession with race and heredity helps to explain why Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess could describe National Socialism as applied biology, and why medicine came to occupy such a significant place in Nazi Germany, which has been described as a biopolitical dictatorship.  Medicine’s role was to purify and strengthen the German national body (Volkskörper) and to prepare it for its historical mission to build an empire that would last a thousand years (a concept borrowed from Christian theology). The creation of a Nazi version of medical ethics was part of this endeavour. A core element of medicine’s role was so-called race hygiene (Rassenhygiene). Developed in the early decades of the 20th century and based on darwinian terms of selection and struggle and Herbert Spencer’s concept of survival of the fittest, race hygiene describes a set of assumptions, ideological beliefs, and practices that were intended to create a strong national body by fostering the procreation of desirable elements and eradicating those considered racially undesirable or genetically unfit. Implementation of race hygiene, which overlapped considerably with the field of eugenics, became the central pillar of public health during the Nazi period."

On the beginning of page 5 of the same commission report, we read about how natural  selection ideas were at the core of eugenics ideology. The Lancet commission report is 73 pages of double-column fine print, detailing in the most explicit detail how the medical and biology authorities of Nazi Germany were enormously complicit in the immense crimes of the Nazis, providing enthusiastic crucial support at every stage. The reported results are of the greatest importance to anyone who has ever doubted mainstream biology claims about unguided evolutionary origins and "brains make minds" tenets, while asking, "Could it really be that the majority of medical and biology authorities in my country might be wrong about an important teaching?" The answer to that question (as demonstrated by the Lancet commission report) is: not only can the leading medical and biology authorities of a nation be wrong in some of their main teachings,  but they can also be enthusiastic co-participants in the most horrible crimes slaughtering millions. 

Totalitarianism uses "ends justify the means" apologetics to try to justify its crimes. Under Nazism people would say that bloody horrors of mass human slaughter were justified because they would help achieve the glorious result of a thousand-year empire. Under Soviet communism, people would say that bloody horrors of mass human slaughter were justified because they would help achieve the glorious result of the worldwide triumph of communism or the establishment of a worker's paradise. Technofascism theorists are now claiming that "population culling" may be justified in order to help achieve the glorious result of a future in which trillions or quadrillions of artificial lives are generated by computer server farms (maybe solar-powered computer server farms floating in space or existing on the moon). 

It's all the craziest kind of nonsense, and once you adequately study brains and minds you may realize why it is simply impossible. Minds like humans have can only arise from top-down causation such as transcendent causation. Nothing in the slow, very noisy, address-free and index-free high-molecular-turnover meat of a brain and nothing in any electronics of a computer can ever give you a thinking, knowing, believing, loving, caring, planning, questioning, seeing, hearing, creating, imagining, willing, speaking, reading, aspiring, instantly learning, instantly recognizing, striving, enjoying, suffering and comprehending unified self like yourself, a person capable of insight, compassion, morality, self-introspection, instant recall, philosophical inquiry, appreciation and spirituality. 

Bostrom-inspired ideas have always hinged on the silliest word trick unworthy of any serious thinker. It's a word trick in which you start out by claiming that computers can simulate lives (referring to reality such as video games in which human actions are simulated). You then leap to the utterly unwarranted claim that human lives can be produced by computers, using the same term "simulation" to refer to such a production, switching the definition of "simulation" without announcing your switch. It's the same type of equivocation sophistry and word trickery nonsense that would be going on if you first referred to the fact that Taylor Swift is a star, and then said that this proves that Taylor Swift can heat our planet if the sun disappears, because stars are huge luminous bodies emitting enormous heat. (In English the word "star" has a double meaning, referring to popular entertainers and also objects like the sun.)

Once we move towards intelligent ideas about how we got here -- by the action of a causal reality enormously greater than ourselves -- we can move beyond the morally toxic "survival of the fittest" ideas of Darwinism, and embrace a moral viewpoint in which each human mind and each human body is to be treasured and respected, a viewpoint in which humans are never regarded as some animals to be culled.