The Von Däniken Storyline Was Entertaining, But Not Very Illuminating

The Swiss writer Erich von Däniken recently died at the age of 90 from natural causes. Many millions bought his books promoting a theory that Earth had been visited by astronauts in the past. Very prone to try to diminish contrarians outside of its intellectual "ruling class," the New York Times has an obituary on von Däniken with a subtitle claiming that his 1968 book "Chariots of the Gods?" sold "hundreds of thousands" of copies. But a Yahoo article tells us that von Däniken's books sold 70 million copies. And a 1970's version of "Chariots of the Gods?" claims that there are 4,000,000 copies of it in print. 

The approach taken by von Däniken in his first best-selling book "Chariots of the Gods?" was not anything obviously unreasonable. Again and again he would discuss very impressive examples of ancient engineering or ancient architecture or ancient inventions. He would suggest that such works of engineering or architecture or invention were beyond the very limited capabilities of the humans living at the time, and he would suggest that this may be evidence that humans received assistance from extraterrestrial visitors. He would also draw attention to ancient artwork or ancient literary passages that could be interpreted as suggesting visitors from the sky. 

There were many subsequent books by von Däniken and others that expounded on these ideas. Mainstream authorities noticed all the book sales of  von Däniken, and expressed hostility. Much of that hostility can be explained as jealousy. I remember in the 1970's watching mainstream astronomer Carl Sagan on the Tonight Show denouncing  von Däniken and his claims. There were two reasons for  not trusting Sagan's criticisms. The first is that von Däniken's books dealt mainly with archaeology, and Sagan was no scholar of archaeology. The second reason was that Sagan himself had advanced speculations similar to those in von Däniken's books, a few years before the publication of  von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods? book. In the pages preceding and following these two pages in his 1966 book Intelligent Life in the Universe, Sagan spent quite a bit of time speculating in the style of von Däniken. Maybe Sagan was jealous that von Däniken had made millions from a speculation that Sagan had earlier advanced, while Sagan had not profited from the idea. 

A huge boon for the ideas of  von Däniken occurred around 2009 with the premier of the Ancient Aliens TV show, which ran for many years. The show introduced many millions to his ideas, and he was frequently seen on the show promoting his theories. The theory that extraterrestrial visitations helped produce various ancient wonders was a good fit for a TV series. We got very many travelogue-type shows in which some series host would appear at some exotic world location, and speculate about how extraterrestrial visitors might have helped produce the ancient wonders at the visited site. This made watchable TV footage. 

In his 1968 book "Chariot of the Gods?" von Däniken never mentioned DNA or genes. But an idea involving genes became a key part of the Ancient Aliens TV series. For more than a dozen years the show pushed the same central explanation for human beings, one that does not work well to explain who we are and how we got here.  The core explanation offered by the show was 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?"

The books of von Däniken contain similar speculations about DNA and genes. On this page and the next page of his 1976 book "Miracles of the Gods," von Däniken erroneously refers to DNA as containing "all the hereditary information and cell building plans of living creatures," a claim that is inaccurate because DNA does not have any plan or specification of how to build any cell or any of its organelles.  On page 218 of the same book,  von Däniken dogmatically states the shakiest of speculations, telling us, "Homo sapiens became intelligent only after the visit by extraterrestrial beings." On the same page he refers to "the extraterrestrial beings who made us intelligent by artificial mutations," referring most speculatively to gene tinkering of humans by visitors from some other planet. 

On the page here of the same book, von Däniken speaks as if he fully believes in "brains make minds" dogma.  On the page here of the same book, he says "when they 'grafted' their own genetic characteristics onto hominids," using "they" to refer to extraterrestrials, and hominids to refer to humans or human ancestors. Strangely, in the same sentence he claims that extraterrestrials transferred ESP powers from themselves to humans, by genetic manipulation. The speculation sounds like folly, because the well-established reality of telepathy and ESP has no neural or genetic or bodily explanation (which is part of the reason why materialists refuse to accept the strong evidence for ESP). 

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 unguided Darwinian natural selection does not offer a credible explanation of what we see in human DNA: about 20,000 types of 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 30 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 (and von Däniken in the 1976 book Miracles of the Gods) 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"/von Däniken  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 over nine months to become the vastly more organized state of hierarchical dynamical organization that is a full-sized human being? There is nothing in DNA and its genes 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 extraterrestrials visiting long ago that can do anything to explain this ongoing 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 arising from an ink splash. 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. 

Erich von Däniken had a very erroneous conception of the nature of DNA and its genes, and a very erroneous conception of the nature of brains and memory.  For example, on page 48 of his book Gods from Outer Space, he falsely stated, "Today it is an accepted scientific fact that memories are stored in memory molecules and that RNA and DNA molecules transport memory molecules." No such thing was ever established by scientists. On page 23 of the same book he falsely stated, "DNA contains genetic information for building the cells, as well as all the other hereditary factors." On page 24 he just as falsely stated, "DNA is the perfect punched card for the structure of all life." On page 49 he falsely stated, "We know that the nucleus of the gene contains all the information needed for the construction of the organism." 

Containing only low-level chemical information, DNA and its genes do not specify the structure of bodies, organs or cells, and do not have instructions for how to build such things (as I discussed in 2016 and in many other posts on this blog). We cannot blame von Däniken for these misstatements, because we was simply parroting misstatements that were being made by many scientists at the time he wrote. It is ironic that von Däniken was condemned by scientists such as Carl Sagan, when it was a situation where von Däniken was building a "castle in the clouds" of speculation largely based on DNA myths that scientists such as Sagan had been guilty of promoting. 

For very much more on why the bad old thinking discussed above really is bad thinking, see my long post "Evolution Does Not Explain DNA, DNA Does Not Explain Bodies, and Bodies Do Not Explain Minds."

We should give some credit to von Däniken, despite his overconfident dogmatism and many errors. He was a very diligent person whose books sold in gigantic numbers, and you have to be doing some things right for that to happen. We can credit von Däniken with being smart enough to recognize that the standard account of human origins was not credible. But unfortunately von Däniken's scholarship of biology, brains, minds and human mental experiences was much weaker than his scholarship of archaeology. Having started out in the late 1960's with a weak theory attempting to fix the gigantic shortfall of scientific explanations of human origins, he stuck with that theory all of his life, never realizing that to bridge that ocean-sized shortfall you need a reality gigantically greater than just some extraterrestrial spaceships visiting long ago. 

Tischner's Clairvoyance Experiments

 The 1925 book Telepathy and Clairvoyance by Rudolf Tischner (which can be read using the link here) is one of innumerable published works providing evidence for clairvoyance. The best evidence the book prevents is test results in experiments involving the reading of text written on triple-folded slips of paper. 

Upon mentioning such a technique, a typical skeptical reader will probably be thinking something along the lines of: "Oh, I bet I know what was going on -- the person being tested discreetly unwrapped the paper to see the text." But according to Tischner there was no possibility of such a thing. The tests occurred in good lighting, with the testers sitting right next to the person being tested. We read that the subject being tested held the triple-folded slips of papers in his hand, typically looking away from it, and never holding the slips up to his eyes. 

On page 53 Tischner describes the technique used to test a person named Re, using slips of paper 3/4 of an inch by 1 inch:

"Re stood with his back to me watched by Mr. R., while I stood 15-17 ft. from him and wrote several slips with a soft pencil, rubbing the back of the slip with my thumb-nail every time, then folding it three times, making the fold in the middle of the long side every time, so that each fold was at right angles to the previous one and the folded slip similar to a postage stamp in shape and about half its size. I knew Hennig’s paper on the possible tricks used in reading slips, having recently reviewed it, so I took all the necessary precautions to prevent Re from practising any of them. I did not give Re a chance of seeing the writing-pad at a distance of less than 9 feet, and always locked it up in my desk immediately after writing. I mixed the slips several times and threw them up into the air, thus obviating sources of error due to my knowing the contents of the slip. Mr. R. also wrote some slips, using his pocket-book as a pad—and putting it back into his pocket as soon as he had finished writing : I watched Re carefully all the time. Re generally holds the slips between thumb and index finger, but he sometimes holds them in the hollow of his hand, with arm stretched out horizontally to one side or obliquely in front of him. It is rarely that he holds a slip to his forehead, in fact, he mostly turns his head away from the hand holding the slip and avoids looking in that direction. He will try holding the slip in the other hand if the visualization is long in coming ; this he may repeat several times, but there is nothing suspicious about the procedure, the change of hands being effected quite low down, not level with his face."

We read a long series of pages discussing individual tests. Page 185 summarizes the results in a series of tests in which the subject Re attempted to guess what was written on the triple-folded slips of paper. The first column gives what was written on one of the triple-folded slips, and the second column gives the corresponding guess. The third  column gives what was written on one of the triple-folded slips, and the fourth column gives the corresponding guess. 

These are obviously results way, way too accurate to be achieved by chance. 

In the latter part of the book Tischner answers some objections that such results might have been obtained without clairvoyance:

Page 151: 

"Henning states that it is possible to read the contents of slips written in pencil by the impression left on the pad. Experiment showed me that this was only possible when thin paper was used and the writer had a heavy hand, but I think that this would hardly be a source of error, as even the most simple and uncritical of experimenters would suspect something if the medium were to investigate the writing pad. I eliminated this possibility in my experiments. In no case was the medium able to see the writing pad ; it was either left in a room the medium did not go into, or it was locked up in a writing table, previous to his entering the room, or else the slips were written on the cover of a pocketbook, which was immediately pocketed....Henning goes on to say that it is possible for the medium to read the writing by following it with his fingers on the back of the slip as if it were Braille type. I wrote my slips with a very soft pencil, to obviate this possible source of error ; then I smoothed the back of -the paper with my thumb nail. In the cases when I wrote only one word or a figure I took care that the written part should not be on the outer layers of the folded slip."

Page 152:

"It is an experiment worth trying, to unfold a slip with one hand, and try to read it, in such a way that persons standing by your side and watching you all the time, never see you do it. It is too much for my credulity to think that this is possible. Even Henning does not pretend that it is possible to unfold a slip completely unobserved even when the observations are being done by the typically simple-minded and credulous observer he has in his mind’s eye. He says it might be possible to peep into the slightly opened slip as into an uncut book. I have mentioned previously that I folded my slips with the writing quite in the middle, so that it would be impossible to read them in this way, hence this objection cannot logically be brought up against my experiments."

Page 154:

"It was my endeavour to take into account all the precautions and objections hitherto suggested, and not only did I fail to detect any fraud (that would mean little), but neither I nor any of my co-workers ever had the faintest impression that there might be a trick of any sort in any part of the experiments. The course of the experiments is so clear and natural and so little suspect, that it would seem quite as logical to suspect that someone who was sitting there talking to me should be committing a murder that very moment."

Page 164: 

"As already mentioned, all the persons present during the experiments, including the members of the Medical Commission, were of the opinion that fraud was impossible under these conditions, and that any voluntary or involuntary exchange of signals was out of the question in the experiments, where no one present knew what the object was; the only remaining alternatives were chance of supernormal faculty of some kind."

On page 134 Tischner correctly states this : "Attention may be drawn to the fact that materialism is completely disproved if telepathy and clairvoyance cannot be explained by physical theories." On page 170 Tischner states this:

"These experiments alone would suffice to prove the existence of clairvoyance. So we must recognize that such different series of experiments performed with different mediums are a very much more conclusive proof. Trickery, chance, and guesswork, the favourite loopholes of the sceptic, are useless against such evidence ; we cannot but accept the fact of clairvoyance."

Tischner has done a good job of responding to objections he has read about experiments of the type he did. Doing something in the same vein, I can try to imagine a thought process of someone making such objections, and explain the invalidity of his thought process. 

I can imagine how a skeptic named Tristan might reason:

"We know from science that the mind is just the brain, or a product of the brain. And something like telepathy or clairvoyance could only occur if that was wrong. So from an experiment claiming to give evidence for some result overthrowing the scientific consensus, we should demand absolute perfection.  It would have to be the most perfect evidence, such as someone detecting what is inside locked steel boxes, while being videotaped the whole time. Any evidence less perfect than that we can throw away."

There are some fallacies in this reasoning. The first is that we do not at all know that the mind is just the brain, or a product of the brain. Such a claim is merely a belief dogma of materialists. Most of the evidence advanced to support such a claim is bad evidence,  such as the evidence typically appearing in today's neuroscience papers, which are a cesspool of Questionable Research Practices such as way-too-small study group sizes, bad measurement techniques such as "freezing behavior" judgments, a lack of a decent blinding protocol, and cherry-picking data. There is actually to be found in the findings of neuroscience itself the strongest reasons for rejecting all claims that the mind is the same as the brain, or the mere product of the brain. I refer to things discussed in the posts of my blog here. The evidence that the mind cannot be the same as the brain and cannot be a product of the brain includes this evidence:

1. As shown in the many examples given here, here, here, here and here, contrary to the predictions of materialism, human minds can operate very well despite tremendous damage to the brain, caused by injury, disease or surgery. For example, removing half of a person's brain in the operation known as hemispherectomy often produces little change in memory or cognitive abilities. There have been quite a few cases of people (such as Lorber's patients) who were able to think and speak very well despite having lost more than 60% of their brain due to disease. Such cases argue powerfully that the human mind is not actually a product of the brain or an aspect of the brain.
2. Although it is claimed that memories are stored in the brain (specifically in synapses), there is no place in the brain that is a plausible storage site for human memories that can last for 50 years or longer. The proteins that make up both synapses and dendritic spines are quite short-lived, being subject to very high molecular turnover which gives them an average lifetime of only a few weeks. Both synapses and dendritic spines are a “shifting sands” substrate absolutely unsuitable for storing memories that last reliably for decades.
3. It is claimed that memories are stored in brains, but humans are able to instantly recall accurately very obscure items of knowledge and memories learned or experienced decades ago; and the brain seems to have none of the characteristics that would allow such a thing. The recall of an obscure memory from a brain would require some ability to access the exact location in the brain where such a memory was stored (such as the neurons near neuron# 8,124,412,242). But given the lack of any neuron coordinate system or any neuron position notation system or anything like an indexing system or addressing system in the brain, it would seem impossible for a brain to perform anything like such an instantaneous lookup of stored information from some exact spot in the brain.
4. If humans were storing their memories in brains, there would have to be a fantastically complex translation system (almost infinitely more complicated than the ASCII code or the genetic code) by which mental concepts, words and images are translated into neural states. But no trace of any such system has ever been found, no one has given a credible detailed theory of how it could work, and if it existed it would be a “miracle of design” that would be naturally inexplicable.
5. Contrary to claims that minds are merely an aspect of brains or a product of brains, we know from near-death experiences that human minds can continue to operate even after hearts have stopped and brains have shut down. As discussed here, such experiences often include observations of hospital details or medical details that should have been impossible if a mere hallucination was the cause of the experience.
6. If human brains actually stored conceptual and experiential memories, the human brain would have to have both a write mechanism by which exact information can be precisely written, and a read mechanism by which exact information can be precisely read. The brain seems to have neither of these things. There is nothing in the brain similar to the “read-write” heads found in computers. 
7. We understand how physical things can produce physical effects (such as an asteroid producing a crater), and how mental things can produce mental effects (such as how a belief can give rise to another belief or an emotion). But no one has the slightest idea how a physical thing could ever produce a mental effect. As discussed here, no one has any understanding of how a brain or neurons in a brain could produce anything like a thought or an idea.
8. We know from our experience with computers the type of things that an information storage and retrieval system uses and requires. The human brain seems to have nothing like any of these things. 
9. As discussed here, humans can form new memories instantly, at a speed much faster than would be possible if we were using our brains to store such memories. It is typically claimed that memories are stored by “synapse strengthening” and protein synthesis, but such things do not work fast enough to explain the formation of memories that can occur instantly.
10. As discussed here, human brains do not show signs of working harder during thinking or memory recall, contrary to what we would expect if such effects were being produced by brains.
11. Contrary to the idea that human memories are stored in synapses, the density of synapses sharply decreases between childhood and early adulthood. We see no neural effect matching the growth of learned memories in human.
12. There are many humans with either exceptional memory abilities (such as those with hyperthymesia or HSAM who can recall every day of their adulthood)  or exceptional thinking abilities (such as savants with incredible calculation abilities). But such cases do not involve larger brains, very often involve completely ordinary brains, and quite often involve damaged brains, quite to the contrary of what we would expect from the “brains make minds” assumption.
13. Results from the animal kingdom are inconsistent with claim that minds are made from brains and memories stored in brains. For example, animals such as crows with very small brains (and no cerebral cortex) perform astonishingly well on mental tests; elephants with brains four times larger than ours are not nearly as smart as us; and flatworms that have been taught things and then decapitated can still remember what they learned, after regrowing a head. Contrary to claims that the brain is the source of human thinking and memory recall, a full analysis of the signal delaying factors in the human brain (such as synaptic delays and synaptic fatigue) shows that signals in the brain cannot be traveling fast enough to explain human thinking and human memory recall which can occur instantaneously.
14.  The human brain experiences extremely severe levels of signal noise, so much signal noise that we should not believe that it is the brain that is producing human memory recall that can occur massively and flawlessly for people such as Hamlet actors and Wagnerian tenors. 

So, contrary to Tristan's reasoning above, we do not at all know that the mind is the product of the brain, or the same thing as the brain; and we actually have very many very strong reasons for rejecting such a claim.  So an observational result such as clairvoyance is not actually any such thing as an unexpected result. If our minds arise from some mysterious process different from neural origination, then "all bets are off" about the limits of the mind, and we have no basis for claiming that observations of clairvoyance are even something we should regard as unexpected. 

The second flaw in Tristan's reasoning is that it treats each result supporting clairvoyance or telepathy as if it were the only result supporting such things.  Such a treatment might be reasonable if there was little or no evidence for clairvoyance or telepathy.  For example, there is zero observational evidence that elephants can fly. So if someone were to try to submit evidence that elephants can fly (such as producing an eyewitness report), you might be justified in claiming that such a piece of one-of-a-kind evidence so unique would have to be bulletproof for us to believe in flying elephants. But the situation with clairvoyance and telepathy is totally different. There is nearly two hundred years of written evidence in support of claims of the reality of telepathy and clairvoyance, very much of it written by distinguished scientists and doctors.  

So, in fact, every time a new piece of evidence for clairvoyance or telepathy is examined, you never find yourself in any situation of "this goes against everything that has been observed up until now." Instead, the situation is the opposite. It is "this is consistent with a giant mountain of evidence that has already been gathered." Of course, such evidence goes unstudied and unexamined by skeptics such as Tristan. So with each new case in which they are examining evidence for clairvoyance or telepathy, they cry "this goes everything that has been observed so far." False claims like that only show what lazy scholars such people are.

What should actually be occurring when we examine some previously unexamined evidence for clairvoyance and telepathy is a reaction such as this:  "This is consistent with a huge body of evidence already gathered that establishes the reality of clairvoyance and telepathy, and it is also consistent with a huge body of facts already gathered which suggest that the brain cannot be the same as the human mind or the source of the human mind."

The photo below shows a slip of paper that I prepared, using the same process described by Tischner.  I wrote on a small piece of paper in pencil the name Zacharias, folding the paper three times, with the second fold at a right angle to the first, and the third fold at a right angle to the second. We see both sides of the resulting slip of paper. You can see that you cannot even read a single letter when a paper has been folded in such a way. 

Philosophers Prefer "Design" Over "Multiverse" As an Explanation of Cosmic Fine-Tuning

Prior to Darwin, William Paley made a famous analogy in his book Natural Theology, the analogy of a someone walking along a beach and finding a watch. Paley argued that it would be unreasonable for any such person to deny that such a thing (with so purposeful an arrangement of so many parts) was a product of design; and that it is just as unreasonable to deny that the purposeful arrangement of parts we see so abundantly in biological organisms is the product of design. The phony legend arose that Darwin did something to answer Paley's argument; but he did not. Darwin never mentioned Paley's famous analogy in any of his chief writings. Darwin never credibly explained how some fine-tuned arrangement of very many parts to meet a particular function end could be naturally achieved. Darwin's paid almost no attention to the huge fine-tuned complexity and component interdependence in organisms. 

In the twentieth century, the evidence for what looks like purposeful design in organisms increased enormously, as scientists discovered the enormous organization and component interdependence of hundreds of types of humans cells and thousands of types of protein molecules, very high levels of functional complexity Darwin knew nothing about. In the late twentieth century, it began to become clear that there was a second gigantic basis for believing in design in nature: the fine-tuning of the universe's fundamental constants and laws. It turns out that the universe must be very specially arranged for there to be any possibility of there being creatures such as human beings and civilizations such as our civilization. The table below helps to show some of the requirements. The color coding helps to show how the same things recur as requirements for multiple things. 

I will now explain why each item has the requirements I have listed.

Row 1 (Higgs field): The Higgs field (related to the Higgs boson) is said to give mass to other particles. Scientists are puzzled by why the Higgs field has the strength it has, and they say that it seems to require fine-tuning to 15 decimal places. This is a problem called the hierarchy problem or the naturalness problem. It is discussed in this scientific paper entitled The Higgs: so simple yet so unnatural. As a Daily Galaxy article put it, “Using theory as it currently stands, the mass of the Higgs boson can only be explained as the result of a random fine-tuning of the physical constants of the universe at a level of accuracy of one in one quadrillion.”

Row 2 (up quarks and down quarks, electrons): The particles in the nuclei of atoms (protons and neutrons) are made up of smaller particles called up quarks and down quarks. A requirement of the large-scale existence of up quarks and down quarks (and also electrons) is what scientists call matter/antimatter asymmetry (a situation where matter is vastly more abundant than antimatter). This is a puzzle to scientists, because the standard model of physics seems to predict that matter and antimatter should have existed in equal amounts at the time of the Big Bang, which would have caused both types of particles to collide with each other and convert into energy, leaving almost nothing but energy in the universe. A requirement for electrons is the Higgs field, and on this page a physicist says that the electron would not have mass without the Higgs field. 

Row 3 (protons, neutrons): The simple requirement is that there be up quarks and down quarks, discussed in the previous paragraph.

Row 4 (hydrogen atoms): The requirement for a hydrogen atom is that you have one proton and one electron, and also the electromagnetic force, the force of attraction between a proton and an electron. Without that force, electrons would not have any tendency to orbit a nucleus.

Row 5 (galaxies): Galaxies are huge collections of stars. There are many requirements for the formation of galaxies after the Big Bang. The universe had to begin with a fine-tuned expansion rate, as a slighter higher rate would have caused an expansion too fast for galaxies to form, and a slightly slower rate would have caused all matter to collapse into superdense black holes. Scientists also say that numerous other things had to be just right (the other items listed in this row). One requirement is primordial density perturbations greater than .000001 and less than .0001, as explained here. One particularly severe requirement seems to involve dark energy, which is regarded pretty much the same as the cosmological constant. Cosmologists conclude that the level of dark energy seems to have been fine-tuned to something like 1 part in 10⁶⁰ or one part in 10¹²⁰. The issue, called the vacuum catastrophe, has been fretted over by many physicists. This paper refers to the “tremendous, unsolved naturalness problem” posed by the cosmological constant.
 
Row 6 (carbon atoms): This row refers to the abundant existence of carbon atoms, something which ends up having lots of requirements. Besides the previously mentioned requirements for the hydrogen atom (protons, electrons, and the electromagnetic force), there are the additional requirements of the neutron and the strong nuclear force (the two of them allow you to have a carbon nucleus that holds together, despite the mutual repulsion between the protons). There is also the requirement that you have a law of nature called the Pauli Exclusion Principle, something that is quite necessary for both solid matter and complex carbon bonds. Then there is an additional requirement for something called nuclear resonances, which assures that carbon is produced in abundant quantities by stars through a process called the triple alpha process. Without this additional requirement, there would not be enough carbon (which wasn't produced in the Big Bang). This point has been widely discussed by scientists such as Hoyle, and in this scientific paper stating that a 0.4% change in one parameter would have left us without a universe abundant in both carbon and oxygen. An additional requirement that I had no space to list in my table is the requirement that the neutron mass be higher than the proton mass.

Row 7 (oxygen atoms): Oxygen atoms have all the same requirements of carbon atoms, including the same special requirement involving nuclear resonances, necessary for oxygen to be produced by stars in abundant amounts. The scientific paper here argues that there would not be much oxygen without the weak nuclear force, so I have also listed that as a requirement. 

Row 8 (Heavier atoms): By heavier atoms I mean all atoms than have more than about 25 protons (which includes copper, lead, silver, gold, zinc, tin, and probably also iron). These types of atoms have most of the same requirements of carbon atoms and oxygen atoms, except that to have these atoms in abundance you don't need nuclear resonances but instead the stellar explosions called supernovae explosions (explosions of stars that produce heavy elements such as lead and iron). These supernovae explosions require a tiny particle called the neutrino and a force called the weak nuclear force.

Row 9 (Sunlike stars): I may define sunlike stars as those that are white, yellow, or orange (or some combination of those colors). Sunlike stars require galaxies (since if galaxies had not formed, there would be no stars). Sunlike stars also require a very delicate fine-tuning of some of the most fundamental constants of nature. The physicist Paul Davies says on page 73 of The Accidental Universe: “If gravity were very slightly weaker, or electromagnetism very slightly stronger (or the electron slightly less massive relative to the proton), all stars would be red dwarfs. A correspondingly tiny change the other way, and they would all be blue giants.” Blue giants are too-short lived for life to evolve near them, and red dwarf stars are not believed to be as favorable for life's evolution as sunlike stars. 

Row 10 (water): Water requires oxygen atoms and hydrogen atoms, as we can tell from its formula H₂0. Because of its remarkable features that make it unique among liquids, there are probably additional requirements for water, but I haven't listed them.

Row 11 (stable planets): One requirement for stable planets is gravitation, the force that holds planets and stars together. But there is another very interesting requirement: that the electric charge of the proton exactly match the electric charge of the electron, to many decimal places. Electromagnetism (the fundamental force involving electric charges) is roughly 10³⁶ times stronger than gravitation, the weakest of the fundamental forces by far. Consequently a very slight mismatch between the charge of the electron and the proton would cause electromagnetism (roughly a trillion trillion trillion times stronger than gravitation) to completely overwhelm the gravity holding the planet together. In his book The Symbiotic Universe, astronomer George Greenstein (a professor emeritus at Amherst College) says this about the equality of the proton and electron charges: "Relatively small things like stones, people, and the like would fly apart if the two charges differed by as little as one part in 100 billion. Large structures like the Earth and the Sun require for their existence a yet more perfect balance of one part in a billion billion." In fact, experiments do indicate that the charge of the proton and the electron match to eighteen decimal places. 

A curious coincidence

Row 12 (nucleotides): Nucleotides are molecules that are the building blocks of RNA and DNA, molecules essential for life. Nucleotides require three types of atoms mentioned above (carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms), as well as phosphorus atoms. They also require physics to be arranged in a way that allows for atoms to combine to make molecules consisting of multiple atoms.

Row 13 (genetic code): The genetic code is a semantic framework used by DNA and RNA, one in which particular combination of nucleotides stand for particular amino acids. The genetic code could roughly be called the software used by DNA and RNA. The origin of this code is one of science's great mysteries. We do not know how this code (required for all biological evolution) appeared from mere chemicals. This is the “code from chemicals” problem described in this blog post.

Row 14 (RNA): RNA is one of the two main molecules used by all living things, and it is believed to have preceded the more well-known and more complicated molecule DNA. It requires nucleotides (from which RNA is built), as well as the genetic code and water (as a substrate).

Row 15 (DNA): DNA requires nucleotides (from which it is built), as well as the genetic code and water. I also list RNA as a requirement since it is believed that RNA was a necessary predecessor of DNA.

Row 16 (Proteins, cells): Proteins are made by DNA and RNA using the genetic code. Requirements include water and amino acids (which I didn't list in the table for space reasons).

Row 17 (Photosynthesis): Photosynthesis is the process by which plants convert sunlight to chemical energy. Recent studies suggest that photosynthesis uses exotic quantum effects.

Row 18 (Civilizations near sunlike stars): Now we come to the last and most important row, which mentions civilizations such as our civilization. There are many requirements for such a civilization. All of the items on the 17 previous rows on the table are indirect or direct requirements of civilizations near sunlike stars. The well-understood direct requirements of such civilizations are heavier atoms (needed so that the civilization can have the metals needed for technology), sunlike stars, stable planets, proteins, cells, and photosynthesis (the last one being necessary even if the beings in a civilization ate nothing but meat, because they would still rely on a food chain that would require photosynthesis).

There are probably quite a few additional requirements for organisms such as humans and technological civilizations. The table does not even mention the requirement that the universe's initial entropy be enormously smaller than expected, one that cosmologist Roger Penrose has cited as being vastly improbable by chance, while mentioning on this page a "chance of a universe allowing intelligent life" probability of about 1 in 10 to the 10 to the 124th power (less than the chance of you correctly guessing the phone numbers of everyone in your neighborhood). The table does not even mention homochirality, an unexplained characteristic of earthly life (seemingly impossible by chance) that may require additional special physics fine-tuning to explain. The table does not mention protein-folding, the unexplained phenomenon (necessary for our existence) in which chains of amino acids form quickly into very complex just-right 3D structures needed for the existence of functional protein molecules. That may also require  additional special physics fine-tuning. We have no idea of how proteins are able to form so quickly into the very many types of protein complexes needed for our existence (often called "molecular machines"), and such ever-occurring purposeful-seeming assembly (seemingly inexplicable under our current understanding)  may also require  additional special physics fine-tuning. And those who think that brains give rise to minds often end up appealing to special fine-tuned physics to try to explain the arising of minds. 

Another way to visualize cosmic fine-tuning is to imagine a slot machine with a big handle on its right. The slot machine can produce the jackpot of cosmic habitability (a universe allowing creatures like us), but only on something like 1 try in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 -- because each of its rows has to have a special match that is very unlikely to occur. 

Below are some quotes by scientists on this topic of cosmic fine-tuning, quotes in which scientists confess to its reality. 

• "The universe appears designed." -- Stephen Hawking, in a statement to physicist Thomas Hertog (link). 
• "The laws of nature form a system that is extremely fine-tuned, and very little in physical law can be altered without destroying the possibility of the development of life as we know it.” -- Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow,  The Grand Design (page 161),
• "The simple FLRW-based ΛCDM lambda cold cark matter] model has been so successful in fitting data. However one of its ‘simple’ parameters is the Cosmological Constant Λ which, interpreted as the energy density of the quantum vacuum, would require fine-tuning of two unrelated terms to at least 60 decimal places to enable the Universe to exist in its present form. It is clear that simplicity is in the eye of the beholder." -- Four scientists, "Colloquium: The Cosmic Dipole Anomaly" (link). 
• "Of all the universes that could exist, ours is spectacularly well configured to bring forth life....The universe’s biofriendliness, it turns out, concerns the laws of physics themselves. There are numerous features in these laws that render the universe just right for living things...But the density of vacuum energy seems to be 10¹²⁰ times lower than physicists expect based on theory. If the vacuum energy density of the universe were just a tad larger, however, its repulsive effect would be stronger and acceleration would have kicked in much earlier. This would have meant that matter was so sparsely distributed that it couldn’t clump together to form stars and galaxies, once again precluding the formation of life. The laws of physics and cosmology have many more such life-engendering properties. It almost feels as if the universe is a fix – a big one." -- Physicist Thomas Hertog (link).
• "We conclude that a change of more than 0.5 % in the strength of the strong interaction or more than 4 % change in the strength of the Coulomb force would destroy either nearly all C [carbon] or all O [oxygen] in every star. This implies that irrespective of stellar evolution the contribution of each star to the abundance of C or O in the ISM would be negligible. Therefore, for the above cases the creation of carbon-based life in our universe would be strongly disfavoured." -- Oberhummer, Csot, and Schlattl, "Stellar Production Rates of Carbon and Its Abundance in the Universe."
• "From 1953 onward, Willy Fowler and I have always been intrigued by the remarkable relation of the 7.65 Mev energy level in the nucleus of ¹²C [Carbon 12 isotope] to the 7.12 Mev level in ¹⁶O [Oxygen 16 isotope]. If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you have to fix, and your fixing would have to be just where these levels are actually found to be. Another put-up job? Following the above argument, I am inclined to think so.  A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature."  -- Astronomer Fred Hoyle, "The Universe -- Past and Present Reflections" (link). 
• "The cosmological constant must be tuned to 120 decimal places and there are also many mysterious ‘coincidences’ involving the physical constants that appear to be necessary for life, or any form of information processing, to exist....Fred Hoyle first pointed out, the beryllium would decay before interacting with another alpha particle were it not for the existence of a remarkably finely-tuned resonance in this interaction. Heinz Oberhummer has studied this resonance in detail and showed how the amount of oxygen and carbon produced in red giant stars varies with the strength and range of the nucleon interactions. His work indicates that these must be tuned to at least 0.5% if one is to produce both these elements to the extent required for life."  -- Physicists B.J. Carr and M.J. Rees, "Fine-Tuning in Living Systems." 
• "The Standard Model [of physics] is regarded as a highly 'unnatural' theory. Aside from having a large number of different particles and forces, many of which seem surplus to requirement, it is also very precariously balanced. If you change any of the 20+ numbers that have to be put into the theory even a little, you rapidly find yourself living in a universe without atoms. This spooky fine-tuning worries many physicists, leaving the universe looking as though it has been set up in just the right way for life to exist." -- Harry Cliff, particle physicist, in a Scientific American article.
• "If the parameters defining the physics of our universe departed from their present values, the observed rich structure and complexity would not be supported....Thirty-one such dimensionless parameters were identified that specify our universe. Fine-tuning refers to the observation that if any of these numbers took a slightly different value, the qualitative features of our universe would change dramatically. Our large, long-lived universe with a hierarchy of complexity from the sub-atomic to the galactic is the result of particular values of these parameters." -- Jeffrey M. Shainline, physicist (link). 
• "The overall result is that, because multiverse hypotheses do not predict the fine-tuning for this universe any better than a single universe hypothesis, the multiverse hypotheses fail as explanations for cosmic fine-tuning. Conversely, the fine-tuning data does not support the multiverse hypotheses." -- physicist V. Palonen, "Bayesian considerations on the multiverse explanation of cosmic fine-tuning."
• "A mere 1 percent offset between the charge of the electron and that of the proton would lead to a catastrophic repulsion....My entire body would dissolve in a massive explosion...The very Earth itself, the planet as a whole, would crack open and fly apart in an annihilating explosion...This is what would happen were the electron's charge to exceed the proton's by 1 percent. The opposite case, in which the proton's charge exceeded the electron's, would lead to the identical situation...How precise must the balance be?...Relatively small things like atoms, people and the like would fly apart if the charges differed by as little as one part in 100 billion. Larger structures like the Earth and the Sun require for their existence a yet more perfect balance of one part in a billion billion." -- Astronomy professor emeritus George Greenstein, "The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos," pages 63-64. 
• "What is particularly striking is how sensitive the possibility of life in our universe is to a small change in these constants. For example, if the constant that controls the way the electromagnetic field behaves in a vacuum is changed by four percent, then fusion in stars could not produce carbon....Change the cosmological constant in the 123rd decimal place and suddenly it's impossible to have a habitable galaxy." --  Marcus Du Sautoy, Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, "The Great Unknown," page 221. 
• "The evolution of the cosmos is determined by initial conditions (such as the initial rate of expansion and the initial mass of matter), as well as by fifteen or so numbers called physical constants (such as the speed of the light and the mass of the electron). We have by now measured these physical constants with extremely high precision, but we have failed to come up with any theory explaining why they have their particular values. One of the most surprising discoveries of modern cosmology is the realization that the initial conditions and physical constants of the universe had to be adjusted with exquisite precision if they are to allow the emergence of conscious observers. This realization is referred to as the 'anthropic principle'...Change the initial conditions and physical constants ever so slightly, and the universe would be empty and sterile; we would not be around to discuss it. The precision of this fine-tuning is nothing short of stunning. The initial rate of expansion of the universe, to take just one example, had to have been tweaked to a precision comparable to that of an archer trying to land an arrow in a 1-square-centimeter target located on the fringes of the universe, 15 billion light years away!" -- Trinh Xuan Thuan, Professor of Astronomy, University of Virginia, “Chaos and Harmony”  p. 235.
• "If we are indeed simply requiring suitable conditions for the evolution of intelligent life just here, then the figure of ~ [1 in 10 to the 10 to the 124th power] that  we appear to find for the improbability of the universe conditions that we actually seem to find ourselves in is ridiculously smaller than the much more modest figure needed just for ourselves."  -- Cosmologist Roger Penrose,  "Fashion, faith and fantasy in the new physics of the universe," page 313 (link).

One way to gauge whether a "deliberate design" interpretation of cosmic fine-tuning is intellectually respectable is to look for how many philosophers accept such an interpretation.  Before answering that question (giving an answer supplied by a poll), I must give some background information on the current academic environment of philosophers.  Professors of philosophy work in a conformist academia environment in which atheistic ideas are predominant. Departments of philosophy have long been havens for those with a tendency towards secularism, atheism and materialism. 

According to the paper here, " The 2020 PhilPapers Survey surveyed around 2000 philosophers on 100 philosophical questions." Here is one of the questions that the survey asked about: 

Cosmological fine-tuning (what explains it?)
Design	140	17.3
Multiverse	122	15.1
Brute fact	259	32.1
No fine-tuning	175	21.7
Other	144	17.8

The first number column is the number of philosophy department faculty members giving a particular answer, and the second number column is what percentage gave that answer. 

The most popular answer of "Brute fact" amounts to saying "There is no explanation." In philosophy a "brute fact" is something that exists without any explanation. Whenever anyone claims that something is a brute fact, it is a confession of explanatory bankruptcy. The man who says "it's a brute fact" is someone saying, "I have no explanation, and there is no explanation." "Brute fact" as an answer to this question has no credibility. 

Also with no credibility is the "no fine-tuning" answer given by 17% of the respondents. It is obvious from the information and quotes above that cosmic fine-tuning is a very substantial reality. 

The "multiverse" answer refers to attempts to explain cosmic fine-tuning by postulating some infinity or near-infinity of universes. So desperate an explanation has no credibility, for reasons discussed in my posts here and here. An important relevant point is that you do not do anything to increase the chance of any one universe being habitable by imagining the existence of other universes. 

It is very interesting that in the poll above, the interpretation of "design" (endorsed by 17.3 % of the polled philosophers) scored higher than the interpretation of "multiverse" (endorsed by 15.1 % of the polled philosophers). Clearly atheists are telling a phony story when they claim that it is no longer intellectually respectable to claim that nature shows signs of a cosmic designer. Such an interpretation (one assuming a cosmic designer) is supported by a decent fraction of philosophers, despite such philosophers working in an environment in which such an interpretation is discouraged and stigmatized and frowned upon. And any interpretation supported by a decent fraction of philosophers (some of the smartest people in colleges and universities) should be regarded as very intellectually respectable. 

New Paper Implies Europa Clipper Is a "Snowball's Chance in Hell" Mission

 On October 15, 2024 I published a post entitled "NASA Just Launched a $5,000,000,000 'Snowball's Chance in Hell' Mission," which you can read here. I started out the post like this:

"Hurricane Milton delayed the launch of NASA's Europa Clipper mission, which occurred  on Monday. It's too bad nature can't whip up some time warp that would allow going back in time to cancel the ill-conceived mission, which will almost certainly be a waste of 5 billion dollars that won't produce any very important scientific results."

A new scientific study (discussed in the article below) suggests that my negative assessment of the Europa Clipper mission was correct. 

The Europa Clipper mission is heading for Europa, a moon of Jupiter. In the post I explained why there is no need for a basic investigation of this moon. Europa has already been photographed by previous space missions, and we already know what it looks like. The surface of Europa has no very interesting features, because it is solid ice. Below is a photo of Europa. 

Europa (Credit: NASA)

The diagram below shows a cutaway view of Europa, which has a liquid salty ocean underneath a layer of solid ice that is at least 6 miles (10 kilometers) thick. 

In my post I described the wacky "throw ink at the wall and hope it spells correctly" gamble that is at the center of the Europa Clipper mission:

"But NASA scientists have a loony kind of 'bet all your retirement savings on a 9-digit lottery number' idea about how the Europa Clipper spacecraft might detect life. The scientists hope that it might be able to fly through a water geyser erupting on Europa, and sniff signs of life in water vapor. A NASA video told us that Europa 'might be erupting plumes of water,' and that 'if that's true, then we could fly through those plumes with the spacecraft.'  There are two reasons why there is virtually no hope that such a thing would ever succeed in detecting life."

I discussed the first reason, which is the gigantic improbability that life could accidentally arise from non-life. I then discussed the second reason, which is the gigantic improbability of Europa Clipper detecting life on Europa even if it exists in Europa's ocean under its ice. I wrote this:

"There is another reason the 'sniff life from a water geyser's vapor'  would have virtually no chance of succeeding. The evidence that water plumes even occur on Europa is only borderline, with some research casting doubt on the evidence. If water plumes occur on Europa, they seem to occur only very rarely and for a short time. The paper here suggests plume 'ballistic timescales of only 1000'  seconds, making the chance of a spacecraft flying through a plume incredibly unlikely (less than the chance of me dying from stray gunfire).  Europa's suspected ocean (the only place where life could exist) is 10 to 25 kilometers below a layer of ice, making it all but impossible that geysers could shoot out microbes through such an ice layer." 

Recently there was published a new paper suggesting I was right on the topic. In a recent press release we read this:

"A new study led by Paul Byrne, an associate professor of Earth, environmental, and planetary sciences, raises doubts about whether Europa’s ocean could support life at its base. By analyzing the moon’s size, the composition of its rocky interior, and the gravitational pull it experiences from Jupiter, the research team found little evidence that Europa has the kind of active geology thought to be essential for life. Their results suggest the moon lacks tectonic movement, hydrothermal vents, and other forms of underwater activity that could supply energy to living systems.

'If we could explore that ocean with a remote-control submarine, we predict we wouldn’t see any new fractures, active volcanoes, or plumes of hot water on the seafloor,' Byrne said. 'Geologically, there’s not a lot happening down there. Everything would be quiet.” On a frozen world like Europa, he added, a still and inactive seafloor could mean the ocean is lifeless.' ...But we don’t see any volcanoes shooting out of the ice today like we see on Io, and our calculations suggest that the tides aren’t strong enough to drive any sort of significant geologic activity at the seafloor.”

According to Byrne, the lack of energy at Europa’s seafloor makes the presence of modern life unlikely. 'The energy just doesn’t seem to be there to support life, at least today,' he said."

In the paper here, Byrne states, "These results strongly indicate that models of Europan habitability reliant on present-day volcanism at its sea floor are implausible." His 2026 paper here reaches a similar conclusion. 

One of the NASA pages describing the Europa Clipper mission makes clear that NASA's decision to launch the mission was based on the assumption that something called "tidal heating" might have provided enough energy for life to form and for water plumes to be shooting out of Europa's ice. That NASA page states this:

"The third component is an energy source. As Europa orbits around Jupiter, Jupiter’s strong gravity tugs and pulls on it. It actually stretches out the surface. And it produces a heat source called tidal heating. So it’s possible that hydrothermal systems could exist at the bottom of Europa’s ocean, and it’s possible that those could be locations for abundant life."

It is just such a "tidal heating" possibility that Byrne dismisses in the quote above, by saying that "our calculations suggest that the tides aren’t strong enough to drive any sort of significant geologic activity at the seafloor."

NASA's Europa Clipper mission was always based on a crazy "snowball's chance in hell" idea: the idea that while orbiting Europa, the spacecraft might be so lucky as to pass near a hoped-for plume of water gushing out of Europa's thick layer of ice. The hope was that if so improbable a stroke of luck occurred, that sensor instruments on the spacecraft might "sniff" some sign of life in the water being ejected from the ocean miles below the ice. This was always an idea as silly as someone on a camping trip to a cold spot waiting outside his tent in the cold for hours, hoping for a bolt of lightning that might start his campfire. 

Europa was long observed by multiple spacecraft missions to Jupiter, including several flyby missions, and two missions orbiting Jupiter for years (the Galileo mission that orbited Jupiter for eight years, and the Juno mission that orbited Jupiter for more than nine years).  No type of plumes have ever been observed coming from Jupiter's moon Europa. although there are some studies trying to suggest such a thing, studies that are probably just cases of "Jesus in my toast" pareidolia. Referring to such plumes from Europa, the 2025 paper here (published by an ardently pro-NASA group called the Planetary Society) confesses that "visible imaging data taken during spacecraft flybys do not reveal clear indications of ongoing activity." It also refers to "the lack of a confirmed plume detection to date." 

The new paper by Byrne and his co-authors suggests that such water plumes do not ever rise up from the at-least-six-miles-thick ice of Europa. NASA has wasted 5 billion dollars on a mission with a design almost as silly as a mission to Africa trying to search for diamonds dropped by unicorns, unicorns that have never even been observed. It seems I was right in late 2024 in saying that the Europa Clipper mission has a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding. 

The Europa Clipper affair makes a case study in the sociology and psychology of the public's fawning acceptance of nonsensical statements by science authorities.  The design of the Europa Clipper was always very bad nonsense, predicated on the occurrence of some all-but-miraculous stroke of luck that no one could reasonably believe would have a decent chance of occurring. But  5 billion dollars of funds for the mission were approved, because people are too timid to tell scientists they are speaking nonsense when they speak nonsense, as many scientists often do. There are very many other cases in which the public should be saying to scientists and science teachers "that would not have a snowball's chance in hell of happening"  or "that would not have had a snowball's chance in hell of happening." But such BS denouncing rarely occurs, because we have been conditioned all our lives to mind-kneel to science authorities, and accept their proclamations no matter how nonsensical they sound. 

Postscript: A new scientific paper announced in January 2026 estimates the thickness of Europa's ice at 29 kilometers (18 miles). It is a thickness even more than the estimates above. The greater the thickness of that ice, the smaller the chance that Europa Clipper will find anything notable. The thicker the ice, the smaller the chance that a geyser could shoot up water through the ice, in a way allowing Europa Clipper to sniff something interesting.