Escape to the Wet Planet: A Science Fiction Story

"Mommy," asked young Carsa, "why do I have to eat you and Daddy next year?"

"I'm surprised to hear you ask that," said Alara, Carsa's mother. "I thought I had gone over that several times before."

"Please explain it all for me one more time," said Carsa.

"Okay, I'll do that," said Alara. "Let's start with some basic facts of life. Our family is one of only seven families living on a very dry planet with only a tiny, tiny amount of water. So the Supreme Rule of our tiny society has always been: not a single drop of water should ever be wasted."

"Yes, I know that," said Carsa. "That's why if anyone washes his  body, it's a crime punishable by death."

"Now consider two parents like me and Daddy," said Alara. "Once we have had a child, and raised that child to be be old enough to take care of herself, then our job in life is pretty much finished, and it's silly to be spending very precious drops of water to keep us living. Rather than consuming more and more of our very precious water drops, it's much better if me and Daddy give up our bodies, to provide more precious water and food material for children. That's why it is a rule of our society that when parents reach the age of 25, they must allow their bodily food and water to be recycled for consumption by their children."

"Oh, I remember," said Carsa. 

"So next year, Daddy and me will give up our bodies for recycling," said Alara. "That will happen except in the very unlikely event that Scorus wins the election."

"Who is Scorus?" asked Carsa.

"He's a candidate in next month's election for Big Leader," said Alara. "He has a kind of crazy plan to completely change our way of living. Scorus says that we should gamble everything on a risky plan to abandon our planet, and take everyone to Planet Three."  

Carsa and Alara lived on Planet Four in their solar system. It was widely believed that Planet Three in the system was a planet with a great abundance of water.

"Do you think Scorus will win the election?" asked Carsa.

"I think that is as unlikely as water ever falling from the sky," said Alara. 

But the next month against many predictions Scorus was elected as Big Leader.  That made him the dictator of the tiny society on the dry, dry world. 

"We will gamble everything on building a spaceship that can go to Planet Three," commanded Scorus. "The spaceship will be big enough to take all thirty-one people on this planet to Planet Three."

Scorus gave commands on how to implement his risky plan. All the metal irrigation tubes used to move precious water around would be recycled, to use as metal in building the spaceship. Various sticky fluids on the planet's surface would be modified to make the rocket fuel.  Oxygen tanks would be built to allow the passengers to have oxygen during the journey from the fourth planet to the third planet. 

Carsa was very happy about all this. The thought of going to a new planet excited her tremendously. But her mother Alara was very worried that the rocket might fail, and that everyone would die when the rocket attempted to lift off into the air. 

Aboard the rocket ship before it lifted off, Alara told Carsa to say goodbye to every place she had known on her planet, telling her that for sure she would never see such places again. 

"Good bye, and good riddance!" said Carsa. "I'm sick of this dry dust bowl of a world."

The rocket lifted off successfully. Eventually everyone found themselves floating around in the spaceship as it reached outer space.

"We must have all died!" said Carsa. "I've heard stories of this, that when you die your soul kind of floats around in the air."

"No, we're not dead," said Alara. "This is just some weird thing they call zero gravity." 

"How long will it take to get to Planet Three?" asked Carsa.

"Sixty days," said Alara. "But it will only seem like a single day because we will now begin to hibernate." 

The mission plan was followed to the letter. After the ship was set on a course to the third planet, everyone on the spaceship except the pilot began to hibernate.  No special drugs or equipment were needed for such hibernation.  The race that Alara and Carsa belonged to had long ago mastered the skill of hibernation, which was needed to help them survive during periods when water was very short. 

Eventually the pilot guided the spaceship into orbit around the third planet. He woke up all of the thirty other passengers. They looked out the window, and were stunned by the beauty of the planet beneath them. 

"Look at the size of those clouds!" said Alara. "They're gigantic!" On the planet she had come from, seeing a cloud was as rare as seeing a rainbow.

"What are all those blue areas?" asked Carsa.

"Those are giant areas of water," said the pilot. "On this planet there's water all over the place."

There then came a crucial part of the mission. All of the thirty-one passengers crammed into the landing capsule at the front of the spaceship. The capsule detached from the spaceship, and plunged into the atmosphere of Planet Three.

"What happens now?" asked Carsa. "Won't we all die when this capsule smashes into the ground?"

"Pray to the gods for luck," said the pilot. "We're now going to try some new invention that may slow down our speed.  It's like some big sheet with lots of strings attached." 

The parachute was deployed, and the pilot was rather amazed that it worked. The plunging capsule slowed down to a moderate speed.  After a while all the passengers felt a jolt, as the capsule landed safely on the ground. 

Exiting the craft, the passengers were astonished. As far as their eyes could see was green vegetation. On the planet they had left, plants were as rare as gold. 

"We can probably squeeze some of these plants to get water," suggested Alara. 

"I have a better idea," said Scorus. "Let's start walking, and maybe we'll find a lot of water -- maybe even a whole big puddle." 

"That would be insanely lucky," said Alara.

They all started walking.  Scorus walked a little ahead of the group. After a long walk he came to a high spot, and looked at a wonderful sight below. 

"I don't believe it!" said Scorus. "It's just too glorious!"

They all ran ahead to see what he was talking about. Now they were all on the bank of something they had never seen before: a river. None of them had previously seen a pond, a river or even the tiniest stream. 

"It's impossible!" said Carsa. "I must be dreaming. How can there be so much water?"

"There's only one way to find out if it's real," said Alara. "Follow me!"

They all ran down to the river, and began to jump into it. It was joy like they had never felt before. The planet had never had such ecstatic splashing.  

"Water!" cried Carsa. "It's real water! More than we could ever drink in a lifetime!"

"We have no word for this act of hitting water with your hands to make noise," said Alara, splashing the water joyously. "We'll have to invent a word for that." 

"Oh no, I just remembered something," said Carsa. "Washing in water is a crime punishable by death!"

"Don't worry about that -- with all this water, we can change our laws and customs," said Scorus. "From now on, parents will be able to live for as long as they can. We can stop recycling parents for food and water when they reach age 25."

"Did you hear that?" said Carsa. "Maybe you and Daddy will even live long enough to see me raising my own child one day."

"That would be so amazing!" said Alara. "I've never heard of any parent ever seeing their own child's child."

Alara went up to Scorus, and thanked him for his brilliant plan. 

"What we did was the thing any race would do eventually," said Scorus. "Moving from a very arid world to a water-rich world made perfect sense."

"But imagine if there were some people who had always lived on a water-rich world," said Alara. "Do you think they would ever do the opposite of what we did, and try to send people to a planet with so little water?"

"Not unless they were crazy," said Scorus. 

"Chimera" Charade Was Just Kooky Injections

There are many serious problems plaguing the people advancing the claim that all organisms share a common ancestor.  One of the biggest problems is the appearance in natural history of some types of organism without any clear evolutionary path that might explain their appearance. For example:

• Almost all animal phyla (the main divisions of animals) appear suddenly in the fossil record at the time of the Cambrian Explosion about 540 million years ago, without any known antecedents that were very much like them.
• Birds appear suddenly in the fossil record, without any known antecedents that were very much like them.
• Flying insects and flying dinosaurs appear suddenly in the fossil record, without any known antecedents that were very much like them.
• Humans appear suddenly in the natural history record about 100,000 years ago, when we first start to see signs of the symbolic activity that is the true hallmark of humans (fossils long before that are often called human fossils without warrant, in cases where there is no corresponding evidence of symbolic activity). 

Darwinists have long had a strategy for dealing with such problems, the strategy of trying to assert that one group of organisms "really is" just an example of some other group of organisms that preceded it.  This strategy hasn't been used in connection with the first item on the bullet list below, there being almost nothing in the way of known animal predecessors of all the animal types appearing in the Cambrian Explosion. But the strategy has been used very much on the last three items on that list. Specifically:

• The nonsensical claim has often been made that "birds are dinosaurs."
• The nonsensical claim has sometimes been made that "insects are crustaceans."
• The nonsensical claim has often been made that "humans are apes" or that "men are really just apes."

You can call this type of talk Darwinist Equivalency Nonsense, and you can call the people who advance such nonsense DENiers. That seems like an appropriate term, since advancing Darwinist Equivalency Nonsense is very much a case of denying facts.  The facts are that there are a great many dramatic physical differences between birds and dinosaurs, that there are some huge physical differences between crustaceans and insects (particularly flying insects), and that there are a host of physical and mental differences between apes and men. The absurd claim that "humans are apes" or that "men are really just apes" has always been a claim that facilitated racism, because once a man believes that some other men are "just apes" or "just animals," he may be more likely to abuse other humans on grounds that "their race is more apelike" or to abuse or destroy such men, thinking that such actions are not much different from slaughtering cattle. 

It is easy to see the reason why Darwinist Equivalency Nonsense occurs. When you have a giant leap you can't credibly explain, it helps to try to portray the leap as no leap at all. So if you want to maintain that a  heap of auto parts naturally and accidentally transformed into a working car, it sure helps if you can say, "a heap of auto parts is a working car," or "a working car is just a heap of auto parts." And if you want to maintain that some dinosaurs transformed into birds, it helps if you can say "birds are really dinosaurs," a phrase that is a classic example of ivory tower inanity. 

One of the strangest DENiers was a Soviet biologist named Ilya Ivanov who developed plans to secretly inseminate women in French Guinea with chimp sperm, under the guise of a physical examination. He hoped that this would result in a chimp-man hybrid.  The French governor did not permit this. 

Later Ivanov actually got five women to agree to be inseminated with chimp sperm.  You can only wonder what was going on in their minds. Maybe some zealot sold them on the need to prove the claim that men are really just apes, by having a baby that was half-chimp.  Nothing resulted from Ivanov's nutty schemes. But it is rather obvious what his motivation was. A New Scientist story says, "When Ivanov put his proposal to the Academy of Sciences he painted it as the experiment that would prove men had evolved from apes."

Recently there was something in the science news that made me say "shades of Ivanov." Some scientists injected some human cells into some very early monkey embryo. Only 25 human cells were injected into each such very early monkey embryo, which is not a visible amount. This was reported with news headlines such as "Scientists generate human-monkey chimeric embryos."  But such headlines suggested that something was going on much bigger than what actually occurred. 

When you think of an embryo, you visualize something with at least a shape a little like that of a baby.  But no, all we see at the end of the video provided in the scientific paper is a formless round blob.

The scientists injected only 25 human cells into each monkey embryo blob grown in a lab. Most of these tiny embryo blobs died before 20 days, but some lasted 20 days, never developing beyond a round blob-like shape.  The press coverage and the scientific paper avoid telling us how big these blobs were, and we may presume they were barely even visible. Calling such things "chimeras" is quite misleading. They are properly described as monkey embryos injected with a tiniest trace of human cells.  A wikipedia article on biological chimera says " animal chimeras are produced by the merger of multiple fertilized eggs," but that was not done in this case, so the press stories calling these wacky blobs "chimeras" are not accurate. 

Why on Earth did the scientists perform such a stunt? Perhaps so that the DENiers could have a new talking point.  We can imagine how they will enthuse about this result:

"Didn't we tell you that humans are just apes or monkeys? Why now they've even made something that is part-monkey and part human. That shows we were right all along."

But such reasoning would be baloney. You probably could have done the same silly stunt with monkeys and sharks, injecting some shark cells into a monkey embryo, to get a mangled blob of cells that might survive for a few weeks.  But that would do nothing to show that monkeys are really sharks.  And putting some human cells into a mangled monkey embryo living for a few weeks does nothing to show that humans are really just apes or monkeys, just like a man getting some intestinal worms does not show that men are kind of worms.  

Everytime someone brings up the topic of embryonic development in the connection of Darwinism, they should be reminded of the most important relevant truths:

• There is no specification or blueprint or recipe for making an  adult human being in DNA or the fertilized egg that is the beginning of the process of embryonic development (contrary to the untrue statements that Darwin enthusiasts often make about such a topic, statements many biologists and professors have refuted by reminding us that DNA has only low-level chemical information, not anatomical specifications). 
• The progression of such a speck-sized cell to a full grown human with so many levels of stunning hierarchical organization is therefore a miracle of origination utterly beyond the understanding of today's scientists, no more understandable than a tornado passing through a lumber yard and hardware store, and creating from its materials a large house with working electricity and plumbing. 
• Lacking any such understanding of how the body or the mind of a single adult human being arises from a speck-sized egg cell, there is no basis for claiming that we understand the vastly harder problem of the origin of the human race, or that random  changes in DNA can explain the origin of species, since their anatomy is not specified by DNA. 
• Because there are a host of dramatic differences between the minds and behavior of humans and the minds and behavior of apes, statements such as "humans are just apes" are nonsensical and are violently contrary to a multitude of human observations.  

The tactic of claiming that "men are apes" is an example of what we may call shrink-speaking. Shrink-speaking is when someone describes some reality as being vastly less than what it actually is. Below are some examples of shrink-speaking, all absurd examples of reductionism: 

"Mentally you are just a bundle of sensations."

"Humans are just apes."

"The United States is just a bunch of addresses."

"A human body is just a heap of cells."

"Living your life is just hanging around."

"History is just some lines on pages."

"Earth is just a rock with a little extra gas and water." 

"You're just some nerve impulses bouncing around in a brain, like pinballs bouncing around in a pinball machine."

Shrink-speaking is one of the the main tactics of a certain type of thinker, a thinker who also uses very often an opposite type of technique we may call humbug hype. Humbug hype is when some thing small or relatively insignificant is trumpeted as if it were something extremely important. Nowadays our science news sites are overflowing with humbug hype, as such sites (financially motivated to maximize their web page hits to increase advertising revenue) give us a constant stream of stories in which insignificant, unimpressive or flawed and poorly designed studies are heralded as if they were major breakthroughs. 

Through a combination of shrink-speaking and humbug hype, many on-the-wrong-track thinkers try to persuade us that they are on the right track.   Their general strategy is often kind of like this: try to verbally shrink something or someone to a mere shadow of itself or himself, and then hype up some crummy little thing until it sounds like it might explain such a shadow.  Combining shrink-speaking and humbug hype is kind of the "rinse and repeat" of some people. 

Weird Convoluted Rules of the Self-Described "Scientific Thinker"

During the Middle Ages, you could shut down many a conversation by simply claiming that believing some particular thing wouldn't be Christian. Around 1930 in Russia you could shut down many a conversation by claiming that some particular idea was "counter-revolutionary." Nowadays, when a particular possibility is raised, someone may try to exclude such a possibility by saying, "Yes, you could believe that, but to think that wouldn't be scientific." But what are the thought rules of people who describe themselves as "scientific thinkers"? It turns out they do not have any straightforward rules of thought. 

The  word "scientific" can be defined in many different ways. A stringent way to define "scientific" is "based on or limited to that which has been observed." But clearly our self-described "scientific thinkers" are not limiting themselves to that which has been observed. The world of academic scientists is an extremely speculative world in which many professors seem to spend as much time speculating about things as they do rigorously observing things. Our self-described "scientific thinkers" give their blessing to a host of speculative ideas such as extraterrestrials, abiogenesis, the evolution of dramatic new biological innovations by random mutations, the multiverse, string theory, dark matter, dark energy and so forth.  So it is clear that when they describe themselves as "scientific thinkers" such people do not mean "limited only to what has been observed." 

Could it be that by calling themselves "scientific thinkers" certain people mean that they accept all that has been established by reliable observations? No, because such people tend to reject or avoid studying huge numbers of observations reported by reliable witnesses,  particularly any observations suggesting ideas such as paranormal abilities or a soul or life after death.  Such people may pay lip service to a "believe according to the evidence" principle, but do not follow it, often believing in things supported by no robust evidence, while disbelieving in things supported by mountains of robust evidence. 

Could it be that by calling themselves "scientific thinkers" certain people mean that they restrict their claims purely to claims about physical things? It seems not, for such people will frequently try to advance explanations of things that are mental, such as thought, memory, feeling, consciousness and so forth.  Could it be that by calling themselves "scientific thinkers" certain people mean that they base their opinions on data, and not on authority? No, apparently not, for such people seem to very much kowtow to the authority figures of academia and one or more authority figures of the past. 

Could it be that by calling themselves "scientific thinkers" certain people mean that they restrict their claims purely to claims about the physical and the human, excluding all claims about superhuman power? No, because such people have no hesitation about evoking god-like superhuman powers. They sometimes claim that the galaxy is filled with extraterrestrial god-like powers, the idea being that there are beings from civilizations that appeared many thousands or millions of years ago. We are told that such beings may have powers that may  seem to us just like magic, because of the "law" proposed by Arthur C. Clarke that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.  The same person wrote a science fiction novel describing extraterrestrials evolving into creatures of pure energy, and those who believe in mind uploading may think of a mind as mere patterns of energy that do not necessarily have to stay chained to a body.  So it seems our self-described "scientific thinkers" are quite ready to believe in god-like immaterial powers that might influence mankind (although they would scold anyone using the word "spirits" to describe such powers that sound like spirits). 

Could it be that by calling themselves "scientific thinkers" certain people mean that they exclude all claims of immortality? No, such people sometimes express interest in the idea that people will one day be able to attain immortality by uploading their minds into a computer. 

Could it be that the real hallmark of people calling themselves "scientific thinkers" is that they believe that the origin of Earth life and human life was purely natural, without any design involved? No, because such people seem quite ready to believe in something called directed panspermia, under which earthly life is explained as being planted here by extraterrestrials. 

Could it be that the real hallmark of people calling themselves "scientific thinkers" is that they believe only in things that are mathematically probable? No, because such people tend to believe in a great abundance of fantastically improbable miracles of luck involving random mutations causing great wonders of biological organization, events that seem as mathematically improbable as someone throwing a deck of cards into the air, and the deck forming into a house of cards.  

Could it be that the real hallmark of people calling themselves "scientific thinkers" is that they completely trust the observations of distinguished scientists? No, because there are very many such observations they refuse to believe in, such as observations of the paranormal by distinguished scientists such as Sir William Crookes, Alfred Russel Wallace, Camille Flammarion, Professor Joseph Rhine and Professor William Gregory. 

Could it be that the real hallmark of people calling themselves  "scientific thinkers" is that they believe only in recently formulated ideas of reality, rather than ideas originated long ago? No, such thinkers tend to be inordinately addicted to the ideas of nineteenth century biology, ideas that remind us of notions of random accidental human origins that are thousands of years old, such as the ideas of Democritus and Lucretius. 

Think of the strange rules of such people claiming to be "scientific thinkers." In their social circles you will be applauded if you suggest that some super-advanced extraterrestrials (belonging to some  civilization millions of years old) are trying to communicate using radio dishes (a twentieth-century technology their civilization would have developed millions of years ago). But you will be condemned the moment you suggest that such god-like beings might have developed the power to transmit thoughts directly to our minds. You will be blessed if you say we should spend more money looking for radio signals from extraterrestrials (despite the complete failure of countless well-funded attempts), but condemned if you suggest that radio signals might come from a mysterious realm that could be a realm of the dead (despite Raudive's reported success at such an attempt).  In their social circles you will be condemned if you believe there is a single unseen realm of existence inhabited by spirits, but you will be applauded if you believe in some multiverse infinity of unseen universes.  

In their social circles no one will object if you suggest that maybe visiting extraterrestrials might communicate by sending see-through holograms into our homes, but you will be fiercely criticized if you suggest that see-though human forms may arise from some source other than visiting extraterrestrials.  In their social circles no one will object too much if you believe that all observed matter is just a computer illusion generated by extraterrestrials simulating our existence, but you will be scorned if you simply suggest that all such matter truly physically exists but that it cannot explain our minds or human origins. In such social circles you will be warmly applauded if you speculate about design being the cause of some slightly odd distant speck in telescopes, but bitterly condemned if you suggest some almost infinitely-harder-to-naturally-explain biological wonders in all of us are the product of design.  In their social circles you will be scorned if a great body of evidence compels you to say that you will have some future life after you die, but you will not be scorned if you claim that you are currently living some infinity of lives because of all the copies of you in parallel universes (an extremely silly idea favored by some professors despite no evidence for it). 

Looking for some overriding thought principle of those describing themselves as "scientific thinkers," no such principle can be found.  Their only thought principle seems to be: you can believe in or speculate about anything that a certain favored group of people (mainly certain cocksure male professors and their followers) like to believe in or speculate about these days, but you should scorn and disbelieve in any ideas that enrage such people (particularly any ideas suggesting that there exist souls or spirits or some purpose to the universe, ideas which they particularly scorn and despise). Trying to firmly grasp what such people mean by "scientific thinking" is like trying to grasp a handful of moonlight.  

It seems that the term "scientific" has become so socially entangled and conformist and political and wobbly that nothing very clear is stated when you claim that your thought is "scientific." So rather than having the goal of being a "scientific thinker," it might be better to have goals such as being able to truthfully make statements like this:

"My statements are accurate, well-reasoned and mathematically reasonable."

"My assertions are well supported by observations."

"My claims are not discredited by any observations."

Birth of a typical self-described "scientific thinker"

"Red Lights Everywhere": Why Brains Must Be Way Too Slow for Instant Recall and Fast Thinking

Claims that brains store memories and produce thinking are not well-established scientific facts, but mere speech customs of neuroscientists who belong to a belief community as dogmatic as the communities of organized religions. Such neuroscientists tend to pay shockingly little attention to the implications of the low-level findings neuroscientists have made about brains.  Replacing its proteins at a rate of about 3% every day, brains are neither stable enough nor fast enough to explain things such as the instant accurate recall of 50-year-old memories.  

People who write about the brain frequently use a trick to make you think that brains are very fast. Such people will tell you that brain signals can travel up to 100 meters per second. But this is the speed when signals pass through the fastest tiny parts of the brain. This is the speed of signals when they travel through what is called a myelinated axon. The mylein sheath around the axon (with a white color) is what makes it so fast. It is interesting that the site here says, "The axons of grey matter are not heavily myelinated, unlike white matter, which contains a high concentration of myelin." Axons without much of a myelin sheath are believed to transmit brain signals about 5 times slower.  According to the diagram here, signals travel across myelinated axons at speeds between about 20 and 120 meters per second (depending on the thickness of the axon), and signals travel between unmyelinated axons between about 5 and 25 meters per second.

But citing a speed of meters per second for the speed of a brain signal is very misleading. It is as misleading as saying that you can drive through New York City very quickly, on the grounds that you can reach a speed of 30 or 40 miles per hour.  Considering only such a maximum speed is misleading, because when you travel through  New York City, you will be slowed down by many red lights.  Similarly, while some microscopic parts of the brain allow a fast transmission of signals, there are very many microscopic parts of the brain which very much slow down brain signals.   You might figuratively put it this way: the brain has billions of red lights all over the place, and each of those spots will slow down the speed of a brain signal.  So while the maximum speed of a brain signal during any millionth of a second may be as high as meters per second, the average speed of a brain signal is much, much slower, something on the order of one centimeter per second or slower. 

The schematic diagram below illustrates the point. We see a diagram of a neuron, one of the billions of cells that make up the brain. Protruding from the main part of the neuron are dendrites. The transmission of signals through dendrites is slow, so next to the dendrites is a snail icon representing how slow such units are. According to neuroscientist Nikolaos C Aggelopoulos, there is an estimate of 0.5 meters per second for the speed of nerve transmission across dendrites (see here for a similar estimate). That is a speed 200 times slower than the nerve transmission speed commonly quoted for myelinated axons.  Such a speed bump seems more important when we consider a quote by UCLA neurophysicist Mayank Mehta: "Dendrites make up more than 90 percent of neural tissue."  Given such a percentage, and such a conduction speed across dendrites, it would seem that the average transmission speed of a brain must be only a very small fraction of the meters-per-second transmission in axons. 

In the diagram above, we see a chain-like unit in the middle. That part is a myelinated axon, which can transmit a brain signal quickly. So I have put a rabbit icon next to that part, to indicate the relatively speedy signal transmission of that part. 

The bottom right part of the diagram shows some axon terminals that have synapses at their ends. Synapses are a serious "speed bump" for signal transmission in a brain. So I have put a snail icon at the bottom right of the diagram to indicate that slowness. 

How much of a "speed bump" are synapses? There are two types of synapses: slow chemical synapses and relatively fast electrical synapses. The parts of the brain allegedly involved in thought and memory have almost entirely chemical synapses. (The sources here and here and here and here and here refer to electrical synapses as "rare."  The neurosurgeon Jeffrey Schweitzer refers here to electrical synapses as "rare."  The paper here tells us on page 401 that electrical synapses -- also called gap junctions -- have only "been described very rarely" in the neocortex of the brain. This paper says that electrical synapses are a "small minority of synapses in the brain.")

We know of a reason why transmission of a nerve signal across chemical synapses should be relatively sluggish. When a nerve signal comes to the head of a chemical synapse, it can no longer travel across the synapse electrically. It must travel by neurotransmitter molecules diffusing across the gap of the synapse. This is much, much slower than what goes on in an axon.

Diffusion across a synaptic gap

There is a scientific term used for the delay caused when a nerve signal travels across a synapse. The delay is called the synaptic delay. According to this 1965 scientific paper, most synaptic delays are about .5 milliseconds, but there are also quite a few as long as 2 to 4 milliseconds. A more recent (and probably more reliable) estimate was made in a 2000 paper studying the prefrontal monkey cortex. That paper says, "the synaptic delay, estimated from the y-axis intercepts of the linear regressions, was 2.29" milliseconds. It is very important to realize that this synaptic delay is not the total delay caused by a nerve signal as it passes across different synapses. The synaptic delay is the delay caused each and every time that the nerve signal passes across a synapse. 

Such a delay may not seem like too much of a speed bump. But consider just how many such "synaptic delays" would have to occur for a brain signal to travel from one region of the brain to another. It has been estimated that the brain contains 100 trillion synapses (a neuron may have thousands of them).  So it would seem that for a neural signal to travel from one part of the brain to another part of the brain that is a distance away only 5% or 10% of the length of the brain, that such a signal would have to endure many thousands of such "synaptic delays" resulting in a cumulative synaptic delay of quite a few seconds of time.

The problem is that we know humans can instantly recall obscure pieces of information, and instantly do complex calculations.  We see this on TV shows such as Jeopardy,  where people again and again give correct answers after a delay of only about 1 second when being presented surprise pieces of very obscure information such as "Works of this Nobel Prize winner include Song of Solomon and Beloved," and "This was the city where King Louis XIV died." It is well known that certain people (some called autistic savants) can do things like instantly tell you the day of the week for any day you select in the century. There are some math calculation prodigies who can actually calculate faster than any person using a hand calculator. It is impossible to account for such speed under the theory that your brain stores your memories and your brain produces your thoughts. 

Here are all the time factors we would need to account for under a theory of neural memory storage:

(1) The time needed to find where a memory was in the brain.  Since the brain has no indexing system, no addressing system, no coordinate system, and no position notation system, we can only assume that this would be a very long time, like the time required to find a needle in a haystack. 

(2) The time needed for an encoded memory stored neurally to be decoded and translated into a thought ending up in your mind.  That would take quite a while. We know that it takes quite a while (many seconds) for the brain to do the only type of decoding known to occur in it, the decoding of genetic information stored in DNA (a type of decoding incomparably simpler than the fantastically complex decoding that would be needed to decode some memory encoded as neural states or synapse states). 

(3) The time needed for signals to travel around in your brain. That would take quite a few seconds, because signals would have to travel across thousands of synapses, each of which would produce a synaptic delay (and also thousands of dendrites that would slow down things). 

In short, there are multiple redundant reasons why you would never be able to recall something instantly if memories were stored in your brain.  The slowness of brain signals also means very rapid thinking cannot be a brain effect. An example of rapid thinking is that when asked in a competition what was 869,463,853 times 73, Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash correctly gave the answer of 63,470,861,269 in only 26 seconds. Similarly, Scott Flansburg added a randomly selected two-digit number (38) to itself 36 times, in only 15 seconds. Such calculations could never occur that quickly if it were performed by a brain with "red lights all over the place."

I'll give an example of a type of question no one would be able to answer in a short time if recall and thinking were the products of the brain. Consider the question: which Broadway composer may remind you of a children's TV show? Many people my age can answer such a question fairly quickly. But think of how much mental activity it involves:

(1) Scanning through your very diverse memories of the names of Broadway composers.

(2) Scanning through your very diverse memories of the names of children's TV shows.

(3) Looking for some kind of fuzzy match (not an exact match) between the two different groups of items. 

The correct answer is: Rodgers, because the great Broadway composer Richard Rodgers has a name sound-matching the name in the once-famous children's TV show "Mr. Roger's Neighborhood." It would take you hours or days to answer such a question if you had to use slow synapses and slow dendrites to solve it, searching through a brain without any indexing system or coordinate system; but many people my age could answer such a question in a few seconds. 

It would be very incorrect to suggest that when humans remember, they always only use some memory acquired at one time.  For example, ask a man to describe the difference between modern living and ancient living, and someone might quickly say something like this:

"We use cars not chariots, and fight with armored divisions not legions. We message with emails not carrier pigeons.  We read using  smartphones not scrolls, and wear trousers not togas. We pray to Jesus not Jupiter. We are paid with direct deposits, not coins."

Such a simple response could easily occur in a few seconds, but if brains store our memories, it would require finding, retrieving, understanding and intelligently using information stored in a dozen different little spots in a brain (a brain without an addressing system or indexing allowing fast retrieval). So it would take a long time, and could never occur instantly. 

A scientific paper suggests that neuroscientists are not paying proper attention to signal delays when calculating the speed of brain signals. It says, "Despite their inevitable physiological significance in living systems, propagation delays are usually overlooked in mathematical models, presumably to avoid further complexity."  That's as silly as calculating the time it would take you to drive through the middle of New York City without taking into account the time spent at traffic lights.  

Focal seizures in the brain propagate at a speed of about 1 millimeter per second. We read the following in one paper about the speed of seizures:

"The spread of activity through cortical circuits has been studied in experiments by means of electrical registrations and optical imaging [1–3], and high-density microelectrode arrays [4]. Experiments show slow propagation of an ictal wavefront and fast spread of discharges behind the front [3] [5]. The ictal wavefront progresses through the cortical area at a pace of < 1 mm/s, which is consistent with propagation speeds measured with electrodes and imaging in brain slice models [1, 2, 6–9] and in vivo (0.6 mm/s in [10] with two-photon microscope and 0.5 mm/s in [11] with widefield imaging in mouse neocortex)."

There is no particular reason for thinking that information-transmitting brain signals in the cortex would travel very many times faster than this low speed of about 1 millimeter per second.  The surface area of the brain is about 2500 square centimeters (about 2,500,000 square millimeters), about the size of a pillow case.  The brain can fit in the skull because of extensive folding, rather like a pillow case folded up to fit inside your coat pocket. If brain signals travel about as fast as seizures, it would take something like 1500 seconds (or 25 minutes) for some thought to travel from the middle of one brain half to the middle of another. 

A 2020 paper was entitled "Kilohertz two-photon fluorescence microscopy imaging of neural activity in vivo." It used some fancy new technology to clock the speed of brain signals in a living mouse, a "latest and greatest" technology that takes thousands of snapshots every second. The paper has only one exact mention of a speed: supplementary Figure 5 of the paper refers to a calcium propagating speed of about 25 microns per second, which is a very slow speed of only about 0.0025 centimeters per second (about .02 millimeters per second). If human brain signals travel at anything like such a speed, the brain must be way, way too slow to be the cause of instant recall and fast problem solving. 

We do not think at anything remotely like the speed of brains. We do not recall at anything remotely like the speed of brains. We think and recall at the speed of souls.