Why We Should Have No High Confidence in Astronomy Professors Estimating the Number of Extraterrestrial Civilizations

Nowadays academia professors tend to be people with limited knowledge concentrated in one particular field. It is a mistake to assume that people who have concentrated their studies in one narrow area are knowledgeable about many related topics. For example, a professor of medieval history may have little knowledge of modern history. 

Google Gemini infographic on scientist overspecialization

People often make the mistake of assuming that some very complex question involving many fields of knowledge will be well-handled by some person who specializes in only one of those areas of knowledge. Consider the important question: how high will the temperature grow later in this century because of global warming? It is a mistake to think that someone is well-equipped to answer that question merely because he calls himself a climate scientist. This is because the question involves many questions involving things other than just  earth science and the atmosphere, including these:

(1) How high will the human population be later in this century? Fossil fuel use may be proportional to the number of people, but it is hard to predict the future population because of factors such as falling birth rates in many countries. 

(2) How much progress will humans make in reducing fossil fuel use, by using alternate technologies such as solar power, wind power and nuclear power?

(3) Will there be some nuclear fusion breakthrough that greatly reduces the amount of fossil fuel use?

(4) Will fossil fuel use tend to dramatically drop off not mainly because of human concerns over global warming, but because of a Peak Oil scenario under which it becomes more and more expensive to extract oil from underground?

(5) Will there be technological breakthroughs that allow geoengineering efforts to roll back the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

A climate scientist may have no expertise allowing him to give good answers to these questions very relevant to judging how high the average temperature will be later in the century. Expertise in one narrow subject does not mean you will give a good answer on a question involving very many subjects. 

 A type of article that pops up in the press every now and then is an article in which some astronomy professor tries to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy or in our universe. The average person probably thinks that an astronomy professor can be trusted to give a reliable answer on that question. But such an opinion may be misguided, because the question involves so much more than just astronomy. 

The question of the likelihood of extraterrestrial civilizations appearing involves all of these questions, almost all of which are outside of the domain of astronomy:

(1) How many planets not-too-big and not-too-small exist in the habitable zones of stable long-lived stars?

(2) What is the chance of life accidentally appearing on some suitable planet?

(3) What is the chance of life with simpler cells (prokaryotic cells) ever progressing to become life with far more complex cells (eukaryotic cells)?

(4) What is the chance of one-celled life ever progressing so that there exists on a planet large organisms with limbs and organs?

(5) What is the chance that there ever would appear on some planet with life some species with limbs capable of manipulating tools?

(6) What is the chance that a planet with life would ever produce intelligent creatures smart enough to use language and build a civilization?

(7) What is the chance that a technological civilization would destroy itself before long, so that it would not be available to communicate with other planets?

(8) Is it true that mere brain evolution explains the appearance of intelligence, or are there reasons for thinking that the existence of thinking, reasoning, and instantly recalling conscious creatures such  as us cannot be explained by mere brain activity?

(9) Do we have reasons for thinking that we already have evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, in the form of UFO sightings that cannot be explained without assuming extraterrestrial spacecraft?

(10) Are there reasons for believing that there exists some cosmic designer who might be interested in having intelligent life exist on many planets, so that the chance of extraterrestrial civilizations appearing might be greatly increased?

How many of these questions involve astronomy? Only one. So why do we think that astronomy professors are well-qualified to be addressing such questions?

The record of astronomy professors in estimating the number of extraterrestrial civilizations is a poor record. Moreover, in discussing some of the questions relevant to such an estimate, astronomy professors have long been guilty of misspeaking about some of the relevant factors in making such an estimate. 

An example of such an astronomer who made great mistakes at such a task was Carl Sagan. Eager to promote the idea that extraterrestrial cultures were abundant  in our galaxy, Sagan again and again misled his readers and those who listened to him in interviews.  Making a grotesque misrepresentation of the complexity of the bodies of human beings, Sagan endlessly repeated the slogan "we are all star stuff." Human bodies are enormously organized marvels of fine-tuned functional complexity that are the opposite of "stuff" (a word meaning something disorganized). Sagan also repeatedly misled his readers and listeners by making the false claim that "the stuff of life" is scattered throughout the universe. The truth is that the lowest building components of living things are amino acids, which have been found in only the tiniest trace amounts in outer space, such as 1 part per billion on comets or interstellar molecular clouds. 

In his book Intelligent Life in the Universe, Sagan dogmatically proclaimed on page 418 that "The number of extant civilizations substantially in advance of our own in the Galaxy today appears to be perhaps between 50 thousand and one million." The claim was as arbitrary and poorly established as Senator McCarthy's claims about there being 205 registered communists in the US State department. Just as McCarthy kept changing his estimate about the number of communists in the State Department, Sagan kept changing his estimates of the number of civilized planets in our galaxy. He would repeatedly claim that there were a million civilizations in our galaxy, and many of the times he made such estimates, he would try to suggest that whatever estimate he made was the estimate made by most astronomers, although he never gave any evidence to back up such a claim about a  majority of astronomers agreeing with him, and never even backed up any claim that a large fraction of astronomers agreed with him. 

A Scientific American article appearing a while ago gives us another example of why we should have little confidence in astronomy professors estimating the number of extraterrestrial civilizations. The astronomy professor author starts out by making the fallacious "many chances equals some successes" argument, the reasoning that extraterrestrial life must exist because there are so many chances for it to arise. There are maybe a billion trillion planets in the observable universe, but if the chance of the accidental origin of life on any planet is less than 1 in a billion trillion, it should be unlikely that life would ever accidentally appear elsewhere in the observable universe. And there are strong reasons for thinking that the chance of life accidentally appearing on any particular planet is less than 1 in a billion trillion, because of the very great organization needed for even the simplest self-reproducing cell.  It is not generally true that many chances equals some successes or even a single success in any case where the probability of success per trial is very low. 

The same astronomer gave no sign at all that he understands the huge levels of functional complexity, component interdependence and information richness in organisms such as humans. It's par for the course. The astronomer seemed to show no grasp of how fine-tuned a hierarchical organization of matter a human body is, but why should we think that he would?  Astronomy is not biology. 

A thorough study of all of the factors relevant for estimating the chance of extraterrestrial intelligence would include the study of whether brains are a credible explanation for human mental phenomena. Such a study would involve a very thorough study of the human brain and its physical shortfalls suggesting it cannot be the source of the human mind and human memory, and also a very thorough study of the human mind and human mental experiences, both common and extraordinary. That would be a type of study that few astronomers have done. 

The Explanatory Timidity at the Core of the "Ancient Aliens" Series

The History Channel's Ancient Aliens TV series is now in its nineteenth season. Some may think that the show has been very bold from an explanatory standpoint, willing to stick its neck out by engaging in outlandish-sounding speculation. We do see on the show a discussion of history and folklore that boldly attempts to suggest extraterrestrial intervention throughout human history. An example was an episode that discussed the British legend of Merlin, the teacher of King Arthur, reputed to have magic powers. The show suggested that maybe Merlin's suite of magic powers was some extraterrestrial technology Merlin was using.  A similar type of suggestion has occurred a hundred times on the "Ancient Aliens" show, such as a show trying to suggest that the Ark of the Covenant was some machinery built by extraterrestrials, and a show suggesting the Vikings had extraterrestrial help in forging metal, and that Valhalla was an extraterrestrial spaceship.  A standard formula of the show is to discuss some ancient or medieval marvel or legend, and to try to suggest that it arose because of some kind of mysterious interaction humans had with extraterrestrials.  For example, at the 39:35 mark of the Season 5 Ancient Aliens episode "The Monoliths," we hear David Childress saying this:

"And then we have these ancient obelisks that were at one point apparently, all around the world.  It would seem that there was a worldwide system similar to a wireless broadcasting system. These obelisks would broadcast power into the atmosphere,  and remote locations around the world could pick up that power, much like a radio today, or a television set, or a satellite phone, or a computer. This seems to be the system that was set up by extraterrestrials thousands of years ago on this planet, and incredibly, they didn't just do it on planet Earth."  

The episodes that use this formula may have a certain amount of speculative boldness. But the core explanation offered by the "Ancient Aliens" show is actually an example of explanatory timidity. I have been watching this show for many years, and I have noticed no real progression in its core explanation.  For more than a dozen years the show has been pushing the same central explanation for human beings, one that does not work to explain who we are and how we got here.  The core explanation offered by the show is that at one or more points in the past, extraterrestrials altered human DNA. 

We had a presentation of this core explanation at the 38:55 mark in the  "Alien Operations" episode of Season 6, which you can see on Netflix. At the 38:55 mark we had this presentation:

 Klemens Hertel, molecular genetics phD: "What we don't know about humans in terms of evolutionary genetics is based on what we don't know about genetics nowadays. For example, we do not know the genetic basis of the thought process.  We don't know memory. We cannot create any ideas of how changes occurred to evolve the human brain to the functional being that it is right now."

Narrator: Could this incredible map [of the human genome] eventually solve the great mystery of human evolution? Might it help explain why humans, unlike any other living species, can think, reason and have the power of speech, or why they can create art, music, and spend time contemplating the reason for their own existence?

Graham Hancock: "It's not until about 40,000 years ago that you get a very radical change in human behavior.  Our hunting strategies get better.  Our tools and our weapons get better. It's as though some untapped faculty of the human brain and of the human imagination switched on."

Narrator: "Is it possible that the reason humans suddenly evolved from primitive beasts to sentient humans is due to otherworldly intervention? According to ancient astronaut theorists, the answer is a profound yes." 

Gorgio A. Tsoukalos: "One of the basic tenets of the ancient astronaut theory suggests that a long time ago, our DNA was artificially changed by extraterrestrials. And we can see that this is exactly what happened,  because all of a sudden we made a giant intellectual leap, and all of a sudden we became Home sapiens sapiens. "

David Childress: "This was the time when the very first extraterrestrial genetic engineering took place. And in some ways, this was like phase one in the creation of modern humans beings as we know them."

Narrator: "Did extraterrestrials deliberately alter Homo sapiens DNA?"

You can summarize the typical explanations of today's Darwin-venerating biologist like this: "Evolution explains DNA; DNA explains bodies; bodies explain minds."  Every part of that explanation is wrong. Evolution in the form of Darwinian natural selection does not offer a credible explanation of what we see in human DNA: about 20,000 genes that correspond  to more than 20,000 human protein molecules.  Each a repository of fine-tuned information representing a functional sequence of hundreds or thousands of well-arranged amino acid parts, such genes are too hard-to-achieve through an accumulation of random mutations as imagined by Darwinists. DNA does not explain human bodies.  Contrary to the myth so often told by biologists and chemists, DNA is not any specification for how to build a human body or even any of its organs or cell types. DNA does not even specify how to make the main components of cells: organelles and protein complexes. All that DNA specifies is very low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up particular proteins. Very many scientists have confessed this reality, and at the post here you can read a list of more than 25 scientists and doctors who tell us that DNA is not a specification, blueprint or program for making a human.  

As for the claim that bodies make minds, it is false. There are very many reasons (discussed in the posts of the blog here) why the human brain fails to be an explanation for the human mind and human memory. Ironically, the molecular geneticist quoted above on the Ancient Aliens show actually pointed us a bit in the right direction by saying this:

"For example, we do not know the genetic basis of the thought process.  We don't know memory. We cannot create any ideas of how changes occurred to evolve the human brain to the functional being that it is right now."

Yes, and neuroscientists do not have any substantive idea of how a brain could cause someone to think or remember.  A very thorough study of the many physical shortfalls of the brain will lead to the idea that the brain cannot be the cause of human mental phenomena such as very fast thinking and instant recall and the lifetime preservation of memories. 

What does the Ancient Alien series offer as a correction to the bungled explanations of typical biologists? You could explain it like this:

Bad old thinking: "Evolution explains DNA; DNA explains bodies; bodies explain minds."

Bad new thinking, "Ancient Aliens" style: "Evolution and gene-tinkering by extraterrestrial visitors explains DNA; DNA explains bodies; bodies explain minds."

What the Ancient Aliens series gives us is just a rather timid tweak on the old nonsensical explanations of 1960's biologists. So instead of the idea that we got the wonders of DNA by only blind unguided processes, we now have the idea that some of human DNA is the result of purposeful interventions by visiting extraterrestrials. That might be a move in the right direction towards a more credible theory of how we got human DNA.  But a huge problem is the show's continual speaking as if some suitable DNA explains how we got humans.  You cannot explain humans by the arising of suitable DNA. DNA does not explain the origin of the human body. And neither DNA nor human bodies explain the origin of the human mind. 

DNA does not explain the origin of any human body because DNA merely specifies very low-level chemical information such as which amino acids constitute a protein.  So we are left with the gigantic unanswered question: how is it that a speck-sized zygote in a newly impregnated woman is able to progress to become the vastly more organized state of hierarchical dynamical organization that is a full-sized human being? There is nothing in DNA and nothing known to biology that explains this progression, which is a miracle of organization a million times more impressive than a hotel-sized sandcastle with 100 ramparts and 20 turrets arising only from the wind and water at the edge of a beach. There is no hypothesis about visiting extraterrestrials that can do anything to explain this marvel of hierarchical organization that is at the center of biology. 

Neither DNA nor anything in the brain explains the wonders of human memory and the wonders of the human mind.  DNA does not explain the arising of any human body, any human organ or any type of human cell, none of which is specified in DNA. So it does not work to claim that we got the marvels of our minds and memories because visiting extraterrestrials did something to alter our DNA. There is nothing in either our DNA or our brains that explains the main wonders of our minds. 

To explain the wonders of the human body and the wonders of the human mind, we need ideas far bolder than the rather timid idea that visiting extraterrestrials tinkered with human DNA. It is very strange that we seem to never get from the Ancient Aliens series the kind of reasoning that would best support its main explanatory claim. Such reasoning would require educating TV viewers about the stratospheric levels of fine-tuning and functional complexity of genes and protein molecules, and the mountainous heights of dynamic hierarchical organization in the human body. TV viewers would get an explanation of why the average gene is something as unlikely to arise by unguided processes as a well-written useful grammatical paragraph of 100 or 200 words. TV viewers would get an explanation of why you cannot credibly explain the origin of such repositories of functional information by imagining an accumulation of random mutations. TV viewers would be educated in the relevant probability mathematics, and fundamental principles such as that the chance of the accidental origin of a functional structure skyrockets in a geometric and exponential fashion whenever there is a simple linear increase in the number of well-arranged parts needed for such a structure. After such an education, the viewers could be told that it is just too improbable that unguided Darwinian evolution could have produced such wonders of functional complexity, and that we must postulate some guided assistance, which could have occurred by extraterrestrial intervention. 

But such a presentation seems to never occur on the Ancient Aliens show. Instead the show seems to spend the vast majority of its time trying to persuade us that various wonderful-seeming things (in history or in legend) are things suggesting extraterrestrial visitors in the past. The results rarely sound convincing, although the show does serve as an entertaining vehicle for educating us about facts and aspects of human history and bygone human culture. 

You may realize there's a kind of explanatory timidity of the Ancient Aliens series when you consider that the main idea advanced by the show is the idea that extraterrestrials engaged in gene splicing long ago; and gene splicing is a technology that humans already possess.  Knowing that intelligence could have arisen on other planets any time in the past billion years, and could easily be many millions of years older than mankind, astronomers have assumed that any extraterrestrial civilization reaching our planet would have god-like powers dwarfing our own. But you're not imagining any god-like power if you imagine visiting extraterrestrials doing some fiddling with human DNA. Humans already know how to fiddle with DNA. 

Part of the problem is the show's title. The show should have had some title that did not chain it to one particular explanation. With a title such as "Human Origins: Contrarian Ideas" the series would have been free to move beyond its "von Daniken straightjacket." But with the title "Ancient Aliens" the TV series is chained to the same old explanation, year after year.  It's rather like how the typical biology professor stays chained to the same old bad explanations decade after decade, parroting a "same old same-old" origins storyline reminding us of the 19-year run of the Ancient Aliens series. Just as the Ancient Aliens series clings religiously to the same old conventions year after year (such as lamely trying to validate speculations by claiming that "ancient astronaut theorists" believe them, and by pronouncing the word "extraterrestrial" in a way emphasizing the "res" syllable), our biologists cling to the same old dubious conventions year after year, such as promulgating the legend that vast wonders of biological organization not yet discovered in the 19th century were explained by someone who died in that century (which is kind of like claiming that smartphones or tablet computers are explained by something in the writings of Plato). 

Imagining gene-splicing ancient extraterrestrial visitors does not really help in origins problems.  Each a very complex functional invention requiring hundreds or thousands of well-arranged parts, the fine-tuned genes and protein molecules in the human body are so mathematically improbable to arise by unguided processes that we should expect none of them to arise by unguided processes in the history of the observable universe, even if there are a billion trillion planets in such a universe.  You don't help that problem by imagining that such miracles of luck occurred on a nearby solar system, helping to give rise to extraterrestrials who came to Earth to tinker with human genes.  That's kind of like "robbing Peter to pay Paul," just moving the "unbelievable 20,000 miracles of luck" from one solar system to another one.  It's kind of like someone answering the objection "a house of 52 well-arranged cards could never arise by someone throwing a deck of cards into the air with his left hand" by saying "I didn't use my left hand to throw the deck of cards into the air; I threw the deck of cards with my right hand."  

For the truth about the bad old thinking discussed above, see my long post "Evolution Does Not Explain DNA, DNA Does Not Explain Bodies, and Bodies Do Not Explain Minds."

The Data of the "Starship Smithereens" Paper Shows That Nothing Very Odd Was Found

Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb somehow got the idea that a  2014 meteor (the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor) may have been an interstellar spacecraft that blew up high in the sky. Loeb has recently finished his million-dollar oceanic expedition looking for what he hoped would be remnants of a crashed extraterrestrial spaceship, an expedition he organized.  He found no sign of anything looking like a spaceship or any of its parts. Loeb claims to have found tiny round specks only about a millimeter in size. All that he recovered were some tiny metal specks. The metal specks he found are just like metal sea specks found all over the world.  But it seemed like Loeb was trying to convince the press that he discovered smithereens of a starship. 

 The result was stories such as a CBS News story story entitled "Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he's found fragments of alien technology." Analyzing such stories it seems hard to pin down Loeb as explicitly stating that he believes the sea specks he found are starship smithereens, specks of an extraterrestrial spaceship. But clearly Loeb was doing very much to raise such an idea in the minds of the press, and he was doing nothing to correct story titles like the CBS News story title.

Now finally Loeb's team has released a preprint of a scientific paper on the tiny sea specks that were dredged up.  It seems that Loeb's grand claims have been ramped down very much. The paper makes no explicit claims to have discovered any traces of an interstellar spaceship. It merely claims that traces were discovered that "likely" have some interstellar origin.  The paper mentions a purely natural origin, saying, "We suggest that the 'BeLaU' abundance pattern could have originated from a highly differentiated magma ocean of a planet with an iron core outside the solar system or from more exotic sources." The first part refers to a purely natural origin (such as a meteor from another solar system), and the "more exotic sources" may refer to all kinds of other possibilities, such as an extraterrestrial spaceship.

Is there any justification for these claims that the sea specks recovered by Loeb's expedition likely came from beyond our solar system? There is not.  The paper presents no good evidence that the dredged-up sea specks came from beyond our solar system. The paper is also guilty of a "hide the bad news" presentation, where it's like the authors are trying to make it very hard for readers to discover the relevant facts behind their central claim. 

Referring to the path of a meteor that exploded in the sky, and referring to "spherules" that are tiny round specks dredged up from the ocean, the paper claims this: "Mass spectrometry of 47 spherules near the high-yield regions along IM1’s path reveals a distinct extra-solar abundance pattern for 5 of them, while background spherules have abundances consistent with a solar system origin." This claim about a special status of 5 of the 47 speck-sized spherules is false, and we should immediately be suspicious upon hearing this claim of "a distinct extra-solar abundance pattern." Humans have not well-studied the compositions of objects known to have entered our solar system from beyond the solar system. So there could never be a match in which someone found some particular chemical composition in a rock or sphere or spherule, and said, "Yes, that matches the characteristics of interstellar objects."  In fact, the five supposedly special speck-like spherules Loeb refers to have the same composition as countless other such spherules scattered all over the world. 

In Section 7.6 of the paper, the authors make this incorrect claim: "The spherules with enrichment of beryllium (Be), lanthanum (La) and uranium (U), labeled 'BeLaU', appear to have an exotic composition different from other solar system material." To try and back up its claim about five of its tiny sea specks, the paper refers us to its graphs 12, 13 and 14. Those are extremely confusing graphs that use a logarithmic scale, and fail to tell us what is the elemental composition of the five supposedly special specks.  

It is as if the paper was tying to prevent us from easily discovering the composition of these five supposedly special specks. To clearly display their composition would be very easy to do. The paper could have had five nice clear pie charts, that anyone could have easily read to discover the composition of these  five supposedly special specks. Instead we have graphs that seem like that they were designed to be as confusing as possible. The appendix of the paper reveals the composition of the these  five supposedly special specks, but in a way that is hard to decipher. There is a table that gives the data. The table appears in landscape mode, meaning you have to tilt your head to read it.  Also, violating the rules of clear data presentation, each column of element abundances is stated using a different scale.   

             Part of Appendix A,  rotated to make reading easier

Laboriously jumping through hoops to read this data, you can get to the bottom of the matter. The six supposedly special specks (labeled with a subclass of BeLaU) appear at the top of the Appendix 1 table, on page 28 of the paper. At first it looks like some of these specks have lots of Beryllium, but that isn't the case. If you look at the Beryllium column header (labeled Be), we see that the Beryllium numbers are stated in fractions of parts-per-million, fractions of .025 parts per million. So when we see 4587 as the  Beryllium abundance of one of the BeLaU specks, the biggest Beryllium abundance of any of the specks Loeb dredged up from the sea, that merely means a Beryllium abundance of 4587 times .000001 times .025, which equals a Beryllium abundance of 0.00011, about 1 part in 10,000. 

Similarly, if you look at the Lanthanum column header, on page 29 of the paper, you see that the Lanthanum numbers are in fractions of parts-per-million, fractions of .235 parts per million. So when we see 1108 as the Lanthanum abundance of one of the BeLaU specks, the biggest  Lanthanum abundance of any of the specks Loeb dredged up from the sea, that merely means a  Lanthanum  abundance of  1108 times .000001 times .235 which equals a Lanthanum abundance of 0.00026, only about 2 parts in 10,000.

Similarly, if you look at the Uranium column header on page 30 of the paper, you see that the Uranium numbers are in fractions of parts-per-million, fractions of .0081 parts per million. So when we see 1892 as the Uranium abundance of one of Loeb's specks, the biggest Uranium abundance of any of the specks Loeb dredged up from the sea, that merely means a  Uranium  abundance of  1892 times .000001 times .0081 which equals a Uranium abundance of 0.000015, only about 15 parts in a million. 

The table below summarizes the data, showing the strangest things Loeb was able to find in his little specks, after exhaustively looking for any strange thing. The fractions displayed are simple abundance ratios (so, for example, .000001 means 1 part in a million, and .0001 means one part in 10,000). 

Element	Highest amount in any of  Loeb's spherule specks	Amount in meteorite (reported before 2023)	Amount in rocks (reported before 2023)	Amount in tiny spherules (reported before 2023)
Beryllium	.00011	.000000386	.000003 .000049 to .000200	Never reported?
Lanthanum.	.00026	?	.0000038 .0000095 .000297 to .000920 (in Finland)	Never reported?
Uranium	.000015	.00000017 .00000022	.000090   (in Chinese phosphate rocks) .000090   (in rocks from various countries)	Never reported?

Two papers I link to in the last row refer to uranium levels of about 90 milligrams per kilogram in earthly rocks, which is an abundance of about .000090.

The results shown above are the strangest bit of strangeness that the Loeb "starship smithereens" expedition has to report. And it's nothing very strange at all. It is merely that in one of the 70+ tiny spherules that were analyzed, there was maybe a tiny bit more beryllium and  maybe a tiny bit more lanthanum than you might have expected to find, based on previous analytic reports analyzing these elements in meteorites and rocks.  The reported Beryllium level of Loeb's sea speck with the most Beryllium did not even match the highest level of Beryllium reported in igneous rocks, being only half of the Beryllium  level of 200 parts per million reported in the paper here. The reported Lanthanum level of Loeb's sea speck with the most Lanthanum did not even match the highest level of Lanthanum reported in Finnish rocks, being three times smaller than the Lanthanum level of 920 parts per million reported in the paper here. The uranium level of the spherule with the most uranium is not even remarkable, and many earthly rocks have uranium levels far greater.  Does that mean something very  remarkable was found? No, it doesn't. Traces of rare elements are found in various concentrations that may easily vary by a hundred times from sample to sample. You could explain the whole difference under the simple idea that Loeb was using state-of-the-art equipment that is better at finding trace concentrations than the older equipment used to get the numbers in the right column above. 

A story in the tabloid press is claiming this about Loeb's spherules: "The lanthanum and uranium were 500 times more plentiful than in earthly rocks and beryllium hundreds of times so."  That is not at all correct. My table above shows that the highest level of lanthanum in any of Loeb's spherules was three times smaller than a level reported in Finnish rocks (920 parts per million), and that the highest level of beryllium found in any of Loeb's spherules was only half of a level of beryllium reported in some igneous rocks. There was no real uranium anomaly, since earthly rocks mined for uranium have even higher levels of uranium than in any of the specks (in parts per million). The average amount of lanthanum and uranium and beryllium found in the full set of Loeb's spherules was not more plentiful than in earthly rocks. 

Nothing very unusual has been found from Loeb's million dollar expedition. Loeb's paper has made the groundless claim that five of the tiny specks gathered by the mission "reveal a distinct extra-solar abundance pattern."  The data gathered by Loeb does not even suggest that the specks came from outer space. A 2001 scientific paper ("Magnetic spherules: cosmic dust or markers of a meteoric impact?") reports that tiny magnetic spherules have been found all over the world:

"In the past hundred years, magnetic spherules were found in various geological environments, namely in the Antarctic and Greenland ice and glacial sediments, in deep-sea floor cores, in meteorite fall areas...in volcanic and ..metamorphic rocks. Magnetic spherules found in recent sediments and oceanic floor around the industrial centers may also be the products of air pollution (probably over 99%)." 

When science is done properly, you wait for a decent amount of data justification before you go announcing grand conclusions such as visitations from outside of the solar system. You don't go drawing conclusions based on tiny irregularities in only five speck-sized things. And it's pretty ridiculous to take something that's probably the result of mere pollution and to claim that it came from another solar system. It's rather like someone in Los Angeles saying today's smog came from Alpha Centauri.  

Loeb recently made the groundless claim that some of his tiny sea specks came from the 2014 CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor, which has been inappropriately given a name of IM1, standing for "interstellar meteor 1." We do not actually know that this meteor came from beyond the solar system.  Referring to the sea specks I discuss above, on his blog Loeb recently made this groundless claim: "Five of these millimeter-size marbles originated as molten droplets from the surface of IM1 when it was exposed to the immense heat from the fireball generated by its friction on air on January 8, 2014."   At www.space.com we read some reasons for rejecting all such claims:

"Matthew Genge, a planetary scientist at Imperial College London who specializes in meteorites, said that connecting the spheres with the 2014 fireball — or any meteorite fragments with any other meteor — is impossible. 'Meteorite ablation debris has been found, but not from an instrumentally observed fireball,' Genge told Space.com via email. 'There never has been a micrometeorite derived from a specific fireball event, and never will be, since it is an impossibility.' Peter Brown, an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario, agreed with Genge. If the meteor did in fact enter Earth's atmosphere at the speeds reported, Brown said, it would have been vaporized into fragments much smaller than the spherules Loeb's expedition discovered.  'There has never been a meteorite recovered from any object that hits the atmosphere moving at more than 28 kilometers a second [62,600 mph],' said Brown, who studies meteors and small solar system bodies such as asteroids. 'Any solids that would remain would be essentially aerosol-size.'  (In a 2022 paper in The Astrophysical Journal, Loeb claimed that IM1 was moving between 52 and 58 km per second, or 116,000 to 130,000 mph.)"

In the same blog post Loeb makes this simply untrue claim: "Five unique spherules... showed a composition pattern of elements from outside the solar system, never seen before." No, there was nothing very unusual about the element composition of the five strangest of Loeb's spherules, and the main irregularities are those I list in the table above, which are unimpressive. 

In a NY Post article we seem to have Loeb trying to create the misleading impression that the government estimated something with 99.999% confidence. We read this: "No less an unimpeachable source than the US Space Command went on to confirm, with '99.999 percent confidence' that the tiny spherical objects were interstellar, he said."  The government has said nothing at all about Loeb's sea-speck spherules.  Loeb is referring here to a letter from a government official who cited a '99.999 percent confidence'  estimate made by Loeb himself, not by the government. That estimate wasn't about any spherical objects Loeb recovered, but about whether the IM1/CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor was interstellar.  No one at the government made any confidence estimate about either Loeb's IM1/CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor or Loeb's recovered spherical objects.  The letter from someone in the government is shown in Loeb's post here.  When that letter refers to a 99.999 percent confidence estimate, it is merely referring to Loeb's own estimate, not a government estimate. 

In that NY Post article Loeb says, "The composition of uranium is 1,000 times what you find on earth.”  This is very untrue. The spherule speck that had the most uranium of all the sea specks Loeb recovered and analyzed had a level of uranium of 0.000015, several times less than the level found in earthly rocks mined for uranium. Such rocks have a level of about 90 milligrams of uranium per kilogram, as reported here, which is a level of 0.000090.

A very recent article in Science magazine gives us this quote about the paper I analyze above:

"But others are dismissive of the preprint, which has not been peer reviewed. Although the geochemical analysis of the debris is solid, the conclusions that Loeb and his colleagues hang on them are 'nonsense,' says Martin Schiller, a cosmochemist at the University of Copenhagen. 'I’m surprised anyone would take it seriously.' Larry Nittler, a cosmochemist at Arizona State University (ASU), calls it 'very weak sauce.' "

In the same Science article we read a reason for doubting Loeb's continued claims that the IM1/CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor was interstellar, based on supposed confirmation from a government satellite: 

"A new study out this month in The Astrophysical Journal examined 17 known fireballs captured by both classified U.S. sensors and independent observations. The study showed that the government sensors often overestimated speed, with the errors getting worse the faster things got. 'A third of the time, the numbers are just way off,' says Steve Desch, an ASU astrophysicist."

During the Middle Ages for centuries there was a great enthusiasm for collecting the relics of saints. For centuries people would dig up bones or teeth (often just little bits of bone), and claim that they had magnificent healing powers on the grounds that they belonged to a canonized Catholic saint. Such relics would be displayed in churches, and people would make pilgrimages to see them. Such relic pitchmen remind me of Loeb's antics in trying to glorify his tiny sea specks that are probably mere specks of pollution. The difference is that the medieval relic stories actually seemed to do some good. Possibly because of a placebo effect, countless people would report cures after touching or seeing the alleged relics of some Catholic saint. But Loeb's sea speck antics seem to do very little good other than help sell more copies of his latest book.  

Here is the latest tabloid headline sounding like something that we might hear from a carnival barker:

"EXCLUSIVE: Truth about my 'alien' encounter... How I found bombshell interstellar objects a mile beneath the sea - and their limitless potential for life on Earth, by scientist AVI LOEB."

If you gave some specks of smudge pried from the bottom of your shoes the kind of "royal treatment" given to Loeb's sea specks -- that of analyzing the abundance of all of their elements -- you would probably be able to find some tiny bit of strangeness somewhere about as impressive as the strangest thing reported in the "starship smithereens" paper I discuss above. There no evidence of "starship smithereens" in Loeb's paper and no evidence of anything from beyond the solar system, but merely evidence of pareidolia in which a scientist claims to see some trace of something he is longing to see. No strong evidence has been provided that Loeb's spherule specks even came from beyond Earth. It reminds me of things I mention in my post "When Scientists Claim to See Things They Never Saw." 

Postscript: A co-author of the paper  (Charles Hoskinson) issued a tweet claiming, "We discovered spherules that appear to be from a different solar system due to their ultra high abundance of Beryllium, Lanthanum, and Uranium (thus BeLaU)."  But as shown above, none of the abundances were greater than 2 parts in 10,000, and all of the levels were similar to previously reported levels of such elements in some earthly rocks.  So what on Earth was Hoskinson doing using the phrase "ultra high abundance"?  Another scientist points out that 67 atomic bomb tests were done by the US between 1946 and 1958 within a few hundred kilometers of where Loeb's spherules were recovered, a fact that could account for minor element irregularities in such sea specks. 

In an October, 2023 paper Avi Loeb repeats his untrue claim that the US government made a  99.999% estimate about the likelihood of an interstellar origin of a meteor. In the paper he incorrectly states, "In 2022 the US Space Command issued a formal letter to NASA certifying a 99.999% likelihood that the object was interstellar in origin."  This statement has a reference to the document here, which merely mentions a 99.999% likelihood  made by Loeb himself, not the US government. The careless repetition of this misstatement by the press is an example of the kind of "hook, line and sinker" science journalism that goes on these days. 

Loeb states this:

" Mass spectrometry of 47 spherules near the high-yield regions along IM1’s path revealed a distinct extra-solar abundance pattern for 5 of them, while background spherules showed abundances consistent with a solar system origin. The unique spherules showed an excess of Be, La and U, by up to three orders of magnitude relative to the solar system standard of CI chondrites."

The claim of a "distinct extra-solar abundance pattern" for five of the tiny specks is groundless.  In the second sentence Loeb gives us two  examples of objectionable speech. First, he makes a comparison between his metal specks and "CI chondrites," which are primarily stony meteorites. Of course, if you compare two types of different things, there will be some discrepancy in the elemental abundances.  Also Loeb engages in the trick of claiming a difference of "up to three orders of magnitude,"  a very imprecise phrase that could refer to any difference between about 10 and about 1000.  The use of imprecise,  vague or misleading language such as this is an indication that we do not have an example of robust science, which is characterized by precise and accurate statements. 

In his latest October, 2023 paper Loeb suggests a non-technological explanation for his little sea specks, coming up with some wild speculation of weird natural events in some other solar system. But since the element content of the sea specks is not very unusual, and since there's no reason to think that specks have anything to do with CNEOS 2014-01-08, and since the case that CNEOS 2014-01-08 was from another solar system is weak,  this wild speculation has little credibility.   

With his typical dogmatism, Ethan Siegel has an article entitled "Harvard astronomer’s 'alien spherules' are industrial pollutants." It would have better to say that the stranger spherules have an element abundance similar to those of industrial pollutants.  Siegel mentions the new paper here, finding that the levels of Beryllium, Lanthanum, and Uranium in Loeb's strangest spherules are similar to those in coal ash pollutants. A later article by Siegel has more debunking of Loeb's spherule claims. 

Reasons for Doubting Claims the US Got Technology From Crashed ET UFOs

Many people are talking about a recent article on the web site The Debrief with the headline "INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS SAY U.S. HAS RETRIEVED CRAFT OF NON-HUMAN ORIGIN."  Being touted as some major revelation, the article by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal does not seem to qualify as good evidence for any paranormal claim. The problem is that the article does not give any eyewitness account of anyone seeing anything, nor goes it give any photos or documents. 

The article claims that a former intelligence officer named  David Grusch has claimed that the US government is in possession of "retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin." But the article fails to quote anyone saying he saw such a craft.  Apparently Grusch has come to believe that such craft exist, not on the basis of something he saw himself, but on the basis of something he was told by other people. Who exactly were these people? We are not told. What exactly did they see? We are not told. 

The evidence level here seems poor. It seems about the same evidence level as if someone told you that he believes in Bigfoot, based on what he has heard about other people claiming that they saw Bigfoot, without mentioning who those people are or what they saw. As we say here in New York City, that and $2.75 will get you a ride on the subway.  All that we seem to have here is some intelligence officer passing around an unsubstantiated rumor.  The article includes another vague quote from some other authority named Christopher Mellon, one saying, “A number of well-placed current and former officials have shared detailed information with me regarding this alleged program, including insights into the history, governing documents and the location where a craft was allegedly abandoned and recovered." But that's nothing specific, and sounds like more rumor spreading. 

We should not at all assume that the claims of Grusch on this topic are believable merely because he has had a distinguished career in the military. In writing the posts of this blog, I have encountered innumerable cases in which authorities such as professors have confidently made untrue, unreasonable or poorly substantiated claims. There are 101 reasons why some authority may confidently make some claim that is not true or is not plausible.  It is a huge mistake to think that some claim is true because it seems to believed by some distinguished authority. 

At the link here we have a transcript of a recent interview with  Grusch. After being asked "We have spacecraft from another species?" he answers "We do? Yeah." Grusch suggests the craft may be from other dimensions, saying "We know there’s extra dimensions due to higher high energy particle collisions, etc." No, humans do not know that there are extra dimensions, and high energy particle collisions do not do anything to establish them. There is a physics theory called string theory which requires extra dimensions, but there is no evidence that string theory is true.  Later in the interview Grusch claims there is "a well established fact at least mathematically and based on empirical observation and analysis that there most likely are physical, additional spatial dimensions." No one has done anything to establish the likelihood of additional spatial dimensions. And if something is merely "likely" it is not a fact and certainly not a well-established fact. Facts are things that are certain, not just likely. 

Asked about whether he has seen spacecraft, Grusch makes this vague and not-very-compelling claim: "I’ve seen some interesting photos. And I’ve read some very interesting reports."  You could summarize the interview by saying Grusch has come to believe there have been crashed UFOs because of some-sort-of-something he was told and some-sort-of-something he saw, but he fails to give any specific account of a particular person seeing a specific thing, and when pressed to give details, he says I can't tell you because it's classified. 

Claims like these recent claims have long been made. The biggest claimant was the late Phillip J. Corso, who wrote a book entitled The Day After Roswell. Corso was a military intelligence officer who claimed that the United States government had recovered a crashed vehicle of non-human origin. Early in the book, on page 2, Corso makes the doubtful claim he knew that "key aspects of American foreign policy were being dictated from inside the Kremlin." On page 4 he states that the "seeds for the development" of technologies such as integrated circuits and lasers were "found in the crash of the alien craft at Roswell" in July, 1947. We then read from Corso a very detailed description that purports to tell us exactly what happened when the Roswell incident occurred. The narration we get is like the text of a novel. It's rather suspicious that we hear lots of dialog including many exact quotes of what people said. How could you know exactly what people said at such a time? Back then there were no portable tape recorders. And presumably there was no stenographer walking around and jotting down what everyone said as they said it. 

By page 32 Corso is telling us that he unpacked a crate to find the coffin of what looked to him like a gray-skinned alien with four fingers,  and a lightbulb-shaped head. He says he found a document describing the creature as an inhabitant of a vehicle that crashed earlier that week. This seems to be about all the relevant "what I personally saw" details we get from Corso, and what is described is something that possibly could have been a human body distorted from a crash and a fire. The clip here summarizes some of the claims in the book. 

On page 122 Corso makes this statement about extraterrestrial biological entities (EBEs):

"We didn't know what the EBEs wanted at first, but we knew that between the cattle mutilations, surveillance of our secret weapon installations, reports of abductions of human beings, and their consistent buzzing of our unmanned and manned space launches, the EBEs weren't just friendly visitors looking for a polite way to say, 'Hello, we meant you no harm.' They meant us harm, and we knew it."

This rather sounds like unhinged paranoia. Corso has linked together very diverse observational reports, none of which involve harm of humans or killing of humans, and has cited these as evidence not merely that extraterrestrials are visiting us, but that they are hostile to us. None of the items mentioned justify a claim of hostile visiting extraterrestrials, and claiming "we knew" of such hostility seems absurd. Corso sounds very much here like someone who does not know what he does not know, someone who mistakes scattered suspicions for knowledge.

On page 267 Corso gives us this little bit of speculation, which sounds rather "off the wall":

"These creatures weren't benevolent alien beings who had come to enlighten human beings. They were genetically altered humanoid automatons, cloned biological entities, actually, who were harvesting biological specimens on Earth for their own experimentation."

You got it? According to Corso, the ETs were "actually" kind of like cloned robotic gene-spliced half-human cow-mutilating zombies. Is it any wonder why not too many people believed Corso's story?

I will give some reasons below why I don't believe Corso's claims that some important US high technology was derived from technology recovered from a crashed vehicle from another planet. Before discussing such reasons, let me state two background assumptions:

Background assumption #1: An extraterrestrial civilization would probably be vastly older than ours. I can explain why scientists presume that if an extraterrestrial civilization existed, it would be very much older than humanity. The universe is believed to be about 13 billion years old, and if intelligent life were to arise on some other planet, such a thing might have occurred at any time in the past billion years. Human civilization is less than ten thousand years old.  So mathematically it seems far more likely that civilized life arising on some other planet would have arisen very many thousands or millions of years before civilized life first appeared on planet Earth.  Since a billion years is a length of time 100,000 times longer than 10,000 years, it would seem to require about a 1 in 100,000 coincidence for Earth to be visited by some extraterrestrial civilization that was only a few thousand years more advanced than ours. It would seem to be vastly more likely that a visiting spacecraft would come come from a civilization very many thousands or millions of years older than ours.   

Background assumption #2: Traveling from a civilized planet in one solar system to a civilized planet in another solar system would require technology vastly beyond anything humanity has. Any type of travel between stars would require technology vastly greater than anything humans have. While the distance to the planet Saturn is almost a billion miles, the distance to the nearest star is about 23 trillion miles, a distance 25,000 times farther than the distance to Saturn. Traveling such a distance would require some technology vastly beyond what humans have. Moreover, there is every reason to suspect that travel between two different solar systems that independently evolved intelligent life would require journeys far greater than the distance between our solar system and the nearest solar system. There are all kinds of reasons for thinking that the appearance of life and intelligent life should be rare blessings rather than something we would expect to find in every solar system. So a spaceship from another solar system would probably have to travel a distance many times greater than 23 trillion miles.  This would be all the more reason for assuming that such a journey could only be made by some civilization vastly more advanced than ours.  

Having given such background assumptions, I can explain two reasons for doubting that humans could get a technological boost by studying crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft. 

Reason #1: It Would Be Very Unlikely That a Technology Vastly Greater Than Ours Would Produce Spacecraft That Would Crash

Compared to the enormous technical difficulty of traveling between solar systems containing civilizations, it would seem to be "child's play" to develop crash-proof spacecraft that could explore a planet without any risk of crashing. We can presume that humans will invent crash-proof cars and crash-proof aircraft within a few centuries, and we can presume that some extraterrestrial civilization would have invented crash-proof craft for exploring a planet very long before it mastered the vastly harder feat of being able to successfully travel the vast distances between different solar systems containing civilizations. Therefore, claims that humans recovered bodies or technology from crashed extraterrestrial spaceships seem to be intrinsically implausible. (In the interview mentioned above, Grusch claims that earthly authorities have "quite a number" of alien spacecraft, and that "some are landed and some are crashed," giving the additional implausible idea that the government stole ET spacecraft which had not crashed.) 

Reason #2: It Would Be Very Unlikely That Humans Could Use a Crashed Extraterrestrial Spacecraft as a Springboard to Technological Advances 

In general it is hard for one group to benefit from accidentally getting or seeing an example of some technology beyond their technology, unless the gulf between the two technologies is relatively small.  An example was the famous visits Steve Jobs and Apple engineers made to the XEROX Parc facility, where they saw a mouse-driven computer graphical user interface. The visits were beneficial because Apple had already developed a personal computer, and had some idea of what needed to be done to make the leap to a GUI computer like the one seen in the visits. 

But if you had given an Apple iPad to, say, Thomas Edison, he would have been unable to use it as an inspiration for new inventions. Advanced ideas such as a computer operating system and software applications would have been utterly foreign to him, and he wouldn't know where to begin in reverse-engineering an Apple iPad. There is a chain of technological innovation lasting 80 years, stretching from World War II machines like those that cracked the Enigma code, to the big refrigerator-sized computers of the 1960's, to the first personal computers of the 1970's and early 1980's, to the first computers with graphical user interfaces (such as the Macintosh), and finally leading to a device like the iPad. Edison would not have been able to imagine that chain of innovation, and if he were given an iPad it would seem like mysterious black magic that he could never reproduce. 

If humans were to discover some crashed vehicle created by visitors from some other solar system, it would in all likelihood be some technology we could make no use of, because it would be so far above our own technology that we could never figure out how it worked. Similarly Leonardo da Vinci would not have been able to make any progress in electronics or computer software if he had been given an iPad early in his career and if he had tried to pry it open and figure out how it worked. 

Postscript: A general reason for doubting sensational claims from intelligence officers such as Corso and Grusch may be that government intelligence agencies such as the CIA and the KGB sometimes deliberately put out false information to confuse people, and send them in the wrong direction. This is sometimes done to minimize the chance that people will discover information that such agencies wish to keep secret. A famous historical example of this was Operation Bodyguard, which involved creating false impressions that the D-Day landing would occur using the shortest invasion route rather than the longer route leading to Normandy. 

The post here speculates about a reason why the US government might want to put out false stories about technology obtained from recovered crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft: simply to make foreign adversaries more likely to fear the US military's technology, and be less likely to attack the US. 

On July 26, 2023 Grusch testified before a congressional committee, with two other people. But he failed to give us any reasons for believing his previous claims. His testimony was the same kind of claims he previously made: statements that he believes the US has one or more recovered non-human vehicles, based on things he has been told by others. He failed to give any specifics on who it was who told him these things, and what it was he was told  So thus far all we have is what could be mere rumor-mongering. Grusch made the very vague claim that "non-human biologics" have been recovered from crashed vehicles, but that term could apply to living matter from non-human earthly organisms. When Grusch is asked to supply specifics, he often says something like "I can only say so much to the general public," or some such evasive phrase suggesting classified information. I suppose secrets have to be kept, but so far Grusch's statements should convince no one, because of their lack of specificity. 

"Ancient Aliens" Mixes Marvels, Mysteries and Misconceptions

The long-running TV series "Ancient Aliens" has long been a strange mixture of the daring, the dazzling and the dubious. On the positive side, the show often draws our attention to interesting anomalies worthy of our attention, anomalies that have too often been wrongly swept under the rug by mainstream scientists.  Also on the positive side, "Ancient Aliens" often raises objections to doubtful dogmas of academia that should indeed be questioned. On the negative side, "Ancient Aliens" often pushes its owns doubtful dogmas, along with speculations that are not very credible.

The show sometimes suggests ETs had something to do with Stonehenge

Such strengths and weaknesses were shown in a recent episode of "Ancient Aliens" entitled "The Human Experiment," one that was a weird smorgasbord of interesting journalism, unbelievable speculations, weighty considerations well-worth pondering, and untrue claims. The episode was mainly devoted to advancing an  unbelievable claim constantly repeated on the show: that humans became humans because extraterrestrials tinkered with our DNA. 

The reason why this claim is unbelievable is not because of some impossibility that extraterrestrials visited us in the past. The two main reasons why this claim is unbelievable are these:

(1) There are no conceivable modifications in DNA that can explain the physical origin of human bodies, because DNA does not specify anatomy, contrary to the mythical claims to the contrary that have often been made by scientists and science writers. DNA uses a system called the genetic code in which chemicals in DNA (called nucleotide base pairs) stand for amino acids that make up proteins. But under such a system there is only a very limited capacity for specification. DNA (and the genes that make up DNA) can only specify low-level chemical information such as  the amino acids that make up proteins, and the contents of RNA molecules. When scientists discovered the genetic code used by DNA, they only discovered an extremely limited coding scheme completely incapable of specifying complex three-dimensional structures such as the layout of a human body or the structure of an eye or the layout of the human reproductive system or even the structure of any cell.  Read the posts here, here and here for more on why DNA cannot be a specification of anatomy. In the post here you will read quotations from more than twenty biologists, chemists and doctors who say that DNA is not a blueprint or a recipe or a program or an algorithm for building a human body. 

(2) Things such as the origin of language and the origin of the human mind cannot possibly be explained by extraterrestrials tinkering with human DNA.  Because DNA does not specify anatomy, DNA changes cannot explain the physical structure of the brain. Also, the brain does not explain the human mind or the capabilities of human memory, for reasons abundantly explained in the posts of the site here.  In short, DNA does not explain brains, and brains don't explain minds. So the idea that humans got their advanced minds and language by extraterrestrials modifying our DNA is unbelievable. 

I would describe the "ancient astronaut theorists" constantly evoked on the "Ancient Aliens" program as being half-rebels or quarter-rebels. On one hand, such theorists are willing to rebel against the silly origins dogmas of academia, by pointing out that human minds and human culture appeared on the scene too quickly to be explained by any ideas of mainstream professors.  On the other hand, such ancient astronaut theorists seem to accept "hook, line and sinker" some of the least believable ideas of mainstream professors. Our ancient astronaut theorists seem to uncritically accept incorrect ideas that DNA is some "explain-it-all" molecule that can explain human minds and anatomy. It is no such thing, but merely a piece in the grand puzzle of human origins.  Such ancient astronaut theorists also seem to accept "hook, line and sinker" unwarranted claims that human minds can be explained by brains. 

In the recent "Ancient Aliens" episode on DNA, we had several misstatements about DNA.  The narrator claimed that DNA is a molecule that defines every creature on Earth. DNA is no such thing, but merely a very important chemical database used by living things.  The structure of cells is not specified by DNA, nor is the anatomy of organisms.  We had a statement by biologist Kirsten Fisher, making this give-us-the-wrong-idea  claim: "The DNA code is essentially like a language consisting of genes that confer particular traits like eye color, hair color, all these traits basically that we recognize." DNA is only a code by which nucleotides stand for amino acids, and is not "essentially like a language," because it has nothing but the tiniest vocabulary  consisting only of about 25 nouns (each an amino acid), no verbs except "stop," no adjectives, and no grammar. 

DNA has no power to specify things three-dimensional arrangements of parts the way languages do.  While DNA may be important in determining eye color and hair color, it is very false indeed to claim that it confers "all the traits basically that we recognize." DNA does not specify human anatomy or even the anatomy of cells, nor does it specify human intellectual traits such as the ability to think, consciousness, morality, the ability to form memories, the ability to recall memories,  and so forth.  For example, the traits that we have ten fingers and ten toes and two eyes and one nose and one mouth are not specified by DNA. So it is very false to claim that DNA confers "all these traits basically that we recognize." The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, noting "it doesn't encode some specific outcome.""DNA cannot be seen as the 'blueprint' for life," says Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, who says, "It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times."  

We should have suspected that we were being given the wrong idea by biologist Fisher by the fact that she only gave the specific  examples of eye color and hair color as traits conferred by DNA.  When she said, "The DNA code is essentially like a language consisting of genes that confer particular traits like eye color, hair color, all these traits basically that we recognize," it sounded like some male suitor saying, "I'm so rich: I have a pencil and a small jar of coffee and every other thing a man could possibly dream of having."

We then hear another scientist (Adam Siepel) making the  also untrue statement that "in a sense DNA is a program that gets run by the computer, and the computer is a cell." No, DNA is not a program, and it lacks the essential characteristic of a computer program, which are conditional logic statements such as "if/then" statements.  The correct computer analogy for DNA is to compare to not to a program but to a primitive database -- not a modern relational database which can include logic in the form of stored procedures, but merely the simplest databases that merely have data.  Although cells are vastly more complex than molecules (way too complex to be explained by anything in DNA), cells are not computers that run programs. 

Beware of biologists using phrases such as "essentially like," "basically" and "in a sense." Alarms bells should go off in our minds when we hear such words, and we should be suspicious that at best someone is saying something that is not literally true, and that at worst someone is starting to shovel baloney. 

In the "Ancient Aliens" episode I am discussing someone claims that DNA is "essentially digital." That is untrue.  Information either is digital or is not digital, and calling something "essentially digital" is like saying someone is "essentially pregnant." When information is digital, it consists of sequences equivalent to ones and zeros, sequences such as 1010101001111100010101.  None of the information in DNA is digital. 

The "Ancient Aliens" episode unconvincingly tries to cite human genetic engineering with CRISPR as something that helps supports claims that aliens tampered with human DNA. It is suggested that "DNA knots" are evidence of extraterrestrial tampering. We have a rather ridiculous attempt to persuade us that some short slightly winding symbol found in ancient Egyptian art is a depiction of the double helix, something we are told "cannot be by chance." Someone describes the DNA double helix co-discoverer Francis Crick as someone who promoted the idea that extraterrestrial visitors were the origin of "human DNA." But in his paper on the topic, Crick merely spoke vaguely of extraterrestrials being the origin of "terrestrial organisms," and said "the scientific evidence is inadequate at the present time to say anything about the probability."

We hear the very strange suggestion that humans are smarter than chimps because we have two fewer chromosomes than chimps. After a long attempt to convince us that humans arose because extraterrestrials modified our DNA, the episode went into a discussion of other topics. There was a discussion of people claiming that they were abducted by extraterrestrials,  people such as Betty Hill and Barney Hill. We hear an interesting account from a woman who claimed that her pregnancy ended when extraterrestrials extracted the growing 4-month-old child from her womb. 

The "Ancient Aliens" episode then has some noteworthy footage of blindfolded children apparently demonstrating powers of clairvoyance.  The demonstration seems persuasive, because the large completely opaque blindfolds are very solid material maybe twice as large as large sunglasses, extending way below the eyes; and the children are looking straight ahead at targets two meters away at eye level, without tilting their heads backwards (ruling out the "looked through the bottom crack of the blindfold" objection made by skeptics).  The footage is from the film "Superhuman: The Invisible Made Visible" by Caroline Cory.  

I strongly suspect that neither cheating nor faking is going on here, because of the factors mentioned above and because similar clairvoyance results by children have been very well documented in the Soviet Union and China, as discussed in my post here, entitled "EHF: Reports of Chinese Kids With Paranormal Powers."  I asked only one person from China whether she had ever heard of such reports, without any reason to think that she had. She said that she had a relative who had demonstrated such powers as a child  (including the power to see inside a closed box), and that this relative was brought to Beijing to be tested by the government.  

The fact is that we have nearly two hundred years of well-documented evidence for human clairvoyance, from all over the globe, provided by a host of reliable witnesses. The evidence stretches back all the way to the report of the French Royal Academy of Medicine issued in 1831, one finding in favor of clairvoyance. Clairvoyance has been well-documented by esteemed authorities such as Professor William Gregory, a chemistry professor at the very prestigious University of Edinburgh who documented at very great length his observations of clairvoyant subjects.  The written nineteenth century evidence and early twentieth century evidence for clairvoyance during states of hypnotism and trance is extremely abundant, and clairvoyance was well-demonstrated in a host of public exhibitions and experiments.  The fact that so many contemporary professors deny the existence of clairvoyance is one of the most outrageous modern examples of denying solid evidence, typically made by people who never studied the original source evidence (such as the cases discussed here). 

The fact that the "Ancient Aliens" episode on DNA has presented some modern evidence for clairvoyance is commendable. But in the same episode we are shown the filmmaker Caroline Cory who has filmed this evidence, participating in a panel discussion with ancient astronaut theorists. Perhaps to fit in with all of their talk about extraterrestrials tinkering with human DNA, Caroline suggests that extraterrestrials might have upgraded our DNA to give humans the power of clairvoyance.  Caroline not only suggests this idea, but says "I guarantee you" that extraterrestrials are modifying our DNA. 

This explanation makes no sense at all.  Clairvoyance and other psychic phenomena such as telepathy and near-death experiences can never be explained by anything in DNA, nor can they be explained by anything in human brains. Such phenomena can only be explained by ideas such as the hypothesis that humans have souls, or some spiritual capability that is the equivalent of having souls.  This is very probably why materialists have for so long stubbornly refused to accept almost two hundred years of very convincing evidence for clairvoyance: because they know that once you admit the existence of clairvoyance, the existence of something like a human soul is all but certain. 

There is no evidence that people who score higher on ESP tests or clairvoyance tests have different DNA than average people. There is no evidence that anyone has DNA much different from average people, with the exception of people with birth defects.  Contrary to clickbait headlines exaggerating small changes, human DNA has changed very little over the past two thousand years, with the main changes being mainly related to not-very-important things such as eye color, hair color and lactose digestion. So genome analysis does not support a claim that extraterrestrials are modifying our DNA.  

It's rather a shame that the "Ancient Aliens" show originally chose the title of "Ancient Aliens." That title is kind of a ball-and-chain that its writers are tied to, a kind of prison that limits them. It would have been better if the show had a more noncommittal title, something like perhaps "Mysterious Beginnings" or "Contrarian Theories." That way, the show could have progressed beyond its Erich von Daniken beginnings. But with the title "Ancient Aliens" the show is kind of chained to an original hypothesis, not very free to move out to more credible theorizing. Conversely, I am glad that I chose for this blog the noncommittal title of "Future and Cosmos," along with a subtitle ending with the phrase "...and other weighty topics." With such a title and subtitle I have felt free to move in whatever direction I felt was most consistent with what I have learned during years of study on a very wide variety of topics, without having to feel that I have to stay consistent with some box-me-in title. If you ever start a new blog detailing your thoughts on philosophy, politics, science or religion, I advise picking some blog title that does not box-you-in to some position you may later move away from. 

Postscript: On the Travel Channel's UFO Witness show, we have an account by one of the people claiming an alien abduction experience. We are told the account arose after "hypnotherapy." But accounts told under hypnosis are suspect, because under hypnosis subjects can be extremely suggestible. This was reported by Professor William Gregory as far back as the nineteenth century, on the page here, where he indicates that hypnotized people can be made to believe almost anything suggested.  To judge the reliability of the "abduction account," we would need to read a transcript of what the hypnotist and patient said.  Did the account of extraterrestrials arise after such an idea was suggested by the hypnotist? Or did it arise when the hypnotist acted neutrally, asking something like "Tell me about what happened on the night when you were puzzled by what happened"?