To understand the meaning of life, you have to have some ideas about the origin of life. If we know how the strange and wonderful process we call ‘life’ came to take place here on Earth, we have a starting place. If it came to exist on Earth as a result of random chance, then there may be no meaning at all to life. If life exists on this planet for some reason—any reason at all—understanding that reason can help us understand the meaning behind it all. This is a simple binary choice: either the events that led to the existence of the human race were random or they were not. Let’s consider a few of the arguments that might cause us to believe the events were NOT random:

Sex

One of the most powerful bits of evidence that life is not the result of random events is the existence of sex. Sexual reproduction is an extremely complex process that requires hundreds of different proteins (the worker molecules of life) working in perfect harmony, to take place.

For sexual reproduction to take place as a result of random chance, it would either have to evolve or appear spontaneously in its current, extremely complex, form. At some point, two different strands of DNA from two different beings must have gotten mixed. All of the enzymes and other proteins needed to disassemble the two different being’s DNA, sort it, and then reassemble it into a new strand of DNA which would lead to a being with at least the same capabilities as existing living things must have been present.

But that, alone, would not be enough. These proteins and enzymes would have to know what to do and do it, perfectly. They would have to realize that their job was to split the DNA and then recombine it into a viable being that mixes the characteristics of the two original beings. For this to happen as a result of random chance, a great many events that were unlikely to the point of near-impossibility would have to take place, sequentially, one at a time, in perfect order. If all of these events happened in perfect sequence, the first sexually-created being would come to exist.

Once the sexually created being existed, it would have to survive to sexual maturity.

Then, it would have had to find another being of the opposite sex to have sex with to make additional offspring. This basically means that the above process would have to have happened at least twice, in close enough proximity that the new beings would find each other, and close enough to the same way for these two to be sexually compatible. For random events to explain what we see, the babies would have had to grow up and find their own sexual partners and made and raised babies of their own. But this, alone wouldn’t be enough: these babies would have to have advantages over the simpler asexual beings that existed before, so that they could produce enough offspring to generate genetic diversity, leading to evolution. There are two conditions that would have to be met to have sexual beings evolve from asexual ones, and the evidence we have shows that neither of them were met:

If sexual reproduction had started out in a very simple form (simple enough to have happened by accident), then evolved, there would have to have been other, much simpler, sexually reproduction methods that the random chance events had put together and worked. These sexual methods would then have to be replaced by superior sexual methods, until we got to the very complex sexual reproduction methods in use by the sexual beings on Earth at this time.

But there has been no change: sexually reproducing that have been around for hundreds of millions of years reproduce exactly the same way as humans do, on a cellular level, with the same enzymes and other worker molecules performing the same tasks the same way, in the same order, at the same speed. If sexual reproduction had evolved into the complex process we see now, some of things that are now alive and reproduce sexually would take advantage of simpler methods of doing things (making proteins differently, for example, or separating the hydrogen bonds that join the double ‘ladders’ of DNA, differently, or folding the linear chains first manufactured by ribosomes into 3 dimensional proteins differently). In fact, on a molecular level, there is no difference between the way the most primitive bacteria (thought to be the first sexually reproducing living things on Earth) split, sort, and splice DNA and the way humans do it. All of the same proteins are involved; all of the same processes take place in the same order at the same speed.

We would have found evidence of evolution on this level. We have not found it. The only logical explanation for this is that the evidence does not exist: there was no change in this process. It operates today exactly as it did for the first beings to use it on Earth. There was no evolution.

The other major problem with accepting that sexual beings evolved from asexual ones involves competition. Natural selection causes MORE capable beings to survive. But sexual reproduction requires immense energy. This energy takes away from energy available for other tasks. Sexual beings are, by their very nature, inferior to asexual beings. If all other things were equal, sexually reproducing beings would not be able to come close to competing in a world with both sexual and asexual beings that were generally similar, other than their reproduction method.

For sexual beings to come to exist from asexual ones through random mutations, all of the required enzymes would have been in the right place at the right time in the exact right proportions at the time of the mutations. Somehow, all of these enzymes would have to come to ‘know’ what to do in reproduction. Then, they would have all had to do their jobs. As enzymes became depleted in the process, the cell must have ‘realized’ this, somehow, and made more. It would have to have done this with great precision, always producing the exact right quantity of enzymes, never too few or too many (this would have crowded out the necessary enzymes).

All the energy for this would have to be provided. This means that the cell would have to have had plenty of extra ATP, available for immediate use. Then, the newborn baby cell would have to have survived. These means it would have to mature pretty fast and learn to do everything needed for survival, in addition to learning the skills needed for sexual activity. Once the sexual being had matured, it would have had to have found a mate that had somehow come to exist as a result of the exact same process and was close enough in proximity and genetic structure to reproduce with the first sexual cell.

The odds of this happening by random chance are so low that we wouldn’t have the ability to estimate them. It would not be scientific to build analysis on the assumption that such an event occurred. If we are to be scientific, we must take this one piece of evidence by itself—the evidence of sexual reproduction—as sufficient to rule out any theory that life came to exist as it is on Earth through random chance.

The Genetic Code

The next argument against random causes involves the genetic code. The DNA in your cells has at least three different coded messages written inside of it. First, there is the four bit ‘reproduction code’ that allows it to reproduce itself with absolute perfection, time after time, making a mistake so rarely that, for practical purposes, you could say there are never any mistakes.

Second, there is the 64 bit ‘codon code.’ Each three links in the DNA ladder makes up one ‘codon,’ a triplet of which there are 64 possible genetic ‘words.’ Although we have not yet deciphered this code (we don’t know exactly what it ‘says’) we do know it is there, because each of the more than 5 trillion cells in your body contain an exact carbon copy of this coded message. For 5 trillion messages, each with more than 1 billion ‘words’ in it, to line up exactly in even 2 cases by random chance would be so unlikely as to be mathematically impossible. For them to line up exactly for each and every one of 5 trillion examples, all happening by random chance, would be so farfetched it seems insane to even consider it.

The third code, however, is the one that provides the strongest evidence against life coming to exist on Earth through random processes. This code matches up the coded messages in DNA to amino acids in proteins (the ‘worker molecules’ of life). The code matching is exact, without a single exception ever having been found. (This means that the same code in DNA always matches with the same amino acid, with no exceptions.)

Why does this provide the strongest evidence against existence as a result of random chance?

This is something that random processes simply do not do: They don’t write coherent, consistent, decipherable coded messages that make total sense to beings with advanced intelligence. To find even one example of such a coded message should be enough to tell us that intelligent design is involved. We find three, and all three are in the same molecule.

The Alpha Helix

In 1948, Linus Pauling, a researcher in X-ray crystallography at Stanford, caught a cold. He had been doodling some diagrams of the atoms of amino acids on paper and, while in bed, he began to fold the papers. He started to realize that the folded papers put the atoms into positions where the bonds made sense, while the unfolded papers didn’t. He folded until he got the best possible bonding properties, and found his paper was folded into a helix.

He had discovered an important reality of all amino acids that was later extended to all proteins (all molecules built on amino acids): they are built in helixes. He called his first model helix Alpha Helix. He won the Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1951.

In his book ‘General Chemistry,’ Pauling explains the idea of helical bonds: The ‘spines’ of amino acids and proteins are long chains of carbon atoms. Carbon has four bonding points that always want to bond as far away from each other as possible, which means they will want to bond in a tetrahedron (a four sided pyramid). It is not possible to stack tetrahedrons at their tips and get a strait line. All of the bonds must be ‘curved.’ He found that the curves were all right hand curves, all with the same angle, and when stacked, made a helix.

If nature was to put a bunch of atoms together randomly, and it had to curve them, we would expect random sets of curves. For example, we might have ‘right, left, right, left,’ or ‘right, right, right, left,’ or ‘left, left, left, right.’

It turns out that every single curve in the helix is to the right. It goes: right, right, right, right, and on and on, for more than 3 billion links in some organic molecules.

If you see something that you would expect to be random but was not random, you would suspect there was some special reason for what you were looking at. Even something as simple as a line implies some sort of design: if you were flying over a featureless desert, and saw something that looked like a straight line, you would think that you were looking at a road or something some humans had built: nature doesn’t normally make perfectly straight lines.

It is easy to calculate the odds for a chain of anything that is a sequence of curves to all curve the same way, provided random forces are arranging them. The odds against a chain of 10 bonds, all turning out the same if arranged by random chance, are 2¹⁰, or 1024 to 1 against. In other words, if you let something with two options happen at random (say tossing a coin), you would have to repeat this an average of 1024 times before you would get one example of all 10 being the same (all ‘tails’ on the coin toss, for example). The same formula can be used for the odds of a longer chain: the odds against 100 choices of a random variable being the same would be 2¹⁰⁰, or 1,267,650,600,228,230,000,000,000,000,000 to 1 against. If you saw a chain of 100 links that could either be left or right, and they were all right links, the odds of this being due to chance would be 1,267,650,600,228,230,000,000,000,000,000 to 1 against.

All links in all proteins can be bonded either to the left or right. (It is possible to make ‘mirror image’ molecules that are identical to existing proteins but have the opposite curvatures. They can exist. There is no quantum mechanical or chemical reason for the bends to be to the right, this just happens to be the way they are made.) Some protein molecules have billions of links, all bonded the same way. (Human DNA, for example, has 57 billion carbon atoms; every single one of them is bonded in conformity with the alpha helix that Pauling discovered.)

How unlikely that all of the 57 billion carbon links in a DNA molecule would be right-hand bonds? The odds are 2^57billion to one against. If converted to numbers in the base 10 system, there are more zeros in the odds against random chance alignment for this one molecule than there are quarks in the universe. All DNA follows this same rule, as does all RNA and all proteins ever analyzed. The alpha helix is a fundamental part of all living things on Earth.

The odds against this kind of alignment of atoms occurring accidentally or through random chance are so high that, for practical purposes, we must rule out random alignment as mathematically impossible.

Mitochondria

Mitochondria have its own DNA, which reproduces a different way than the DNA of nuclei of atoms. Mitochondria are a virtually perfect power-cell configuration and were in this same configuration from the very first beings that used these power cells. There is no need for it to ever change: it was perfect when it first appeared. Evolution can’t make it better.

If you were sending a package to another planet with DNA that you hoped would eventually evolve into intelligent beings, you would need to send down the parts that were already the way you wanted them to ultimately be in separate packages than the DNA that you wanted to evolve. The two packages would have different operating systems: the molecules you wanted to remain the same would reproduce by mitosis, leading to exact copies of the original molecules. This is the way mitochondrial DNA reproduces. The reproduction process is virtually perfect: for all practical purposes, the mitochondria that exists now is the same as the mitochondria that existed 530 million years ago, with the first evidence we have of mitochondria existing. (There are a few minor displacements in atoms that don’t affect the way the molecule works, but all critical parts of the molecule are identical.)

The other DNA, that you would want to evolve, would have to be sent under different conditions and operate in different ways, reproducing by meiosis (creating differentiated cells) and sexual merging of DNA. Since this particular method of reproduction requires enormous amounts of energy, it would need a power system to run it. As we have seen, mitochondria are the power cells that provide the energy needed for all living things that reproduce sexually and use meiosis. Mitochondria can’t operate without unbound oxygen, so you would need to send down cyanobacteria to create unbound oxygen first (unbound oxygen can’t exist in nature due to oxygen’s ability to bond with almost everything else). Then you would have to wait a very long time—perhaps many billions of years—for the cyanobacteria to unbind the oxygen and put it into the atmosphere before the mitochondria and cells that depend on the power mitochondria produce to be able to operate.

If you want to send life a fast distance, you would have to reduce it to a package with the smallest possible size and weight. This would be necessary both to reduce the required energy to a manageable level and to reduce the odds of a collision at high speed (even a collision with an atom would be enough to destroy an object moving at a high speed relative to the speed of light) to a level that would give acceptable odds of arrival. The smaller and lighter you could make the package, the better.

DNA weighs 1 picogram (1 billionth of a gram) per 978 million base pairs. The DNA for mitochondria has 3,700 base pairs, the DNA for cyanobacteria has 137 million base pairs, and the smallest genomes yet found in eukaryotes (sexually reproducing) is about the same size as that of cyanobacteria. This means that all DNA needed to seed life onto another planet could conceivably be put into a package with a weight of less than a billionth of a gram.

It is possible to imagine planners working all this out, putting the package together, and sending it to another world. Since the package could be made quite small, it could be sent long distances at fairly high speeds without violating any laws of physics. (See sidebar for more information.)

What kind of process could make all this happen as a result of random chance? Evolution might explain it, but we can rule out evolution because evolution would have necessarily left large amounts of evidence that has not been found. (Evolution requires change. Mitochondria did not change. The alpha helix did not change. Ribosomes did not change. The genetic code is identical for humans as for the earliest cyanobacteria.)

If there is a process that would allow such alignment of atoms through random chance and do all of the other things necessary for these atoms to come to life and do the things that we can watch living things do, this process has not yet been discovered. If there is no theory to explain it, saying ‘it exists but we just can’t explain it’ is essentially the same as saying ‘an invisible superbeing that lives in the sky created it all; we don’t know why or how.’ It is the same as saying ‘it is magic;’ this is no explanation at all.

This leaves only one conclusion: Life as we know it on Earth is NOT the result of a random process. It is the result of a non-random process. ‘Non Random’ means ‘intentional.’ The only scientific conclusion that has any significant likelihood of being correct is that some beings sent the basic precursors of DNA-based life to this world from another world.

What Does This Imply About The Meaning Of Life?

This book was written to support the ideas and concepts in the book Possible Societies. The theme of Possible Societies is simple: Humans are extremely capable beings. We are capable of organizing our existence in many different ways. Some are destructive; some are not destructive. Our ancestors chose to organize the realities of our existence in very destructive ways. If we remain in the path our ancestors put us in, and continue to play the game of life according to the rules they set, we will not survive as a race. We will cease to exist, and everything we have done in our entire existence will be meaningless.

Why does this matter? Why would anyone care about this?

I have had many people tell me it doesn’t matter at all. Our continued existence, they claim, is meaningless. Either we came to exist as a result of random processes or we were created by a superbeing or beings with magic powers. If we exist because of random processes, live itself is meaningless. If superbeings are responsible, life for each of us may mean something but existence for the human race as a whole is not under our control.

Our individual lives may have meaning because we can use them to prove our devotion to the invisible one(s) and prove ourselves worthy of a good afterlife. But the human race will only continue to exist as long as the magic ones has some reason to allow us to continue to exist. If this is a test to determine how we will be placed after we die, it is most definitely a very cruel test: the testers aren’t even willing to tell us we were being tested, tell us how to act to pass the test, or even allow us to objectively know they exist. We have to guess all of these things and, if the religious people are right, an incorrect guess or even a partially incorrect guess will lead to the most horrible punishment imaginable: an eternity of physical torture without hope for even a second’s respite through sleep or any hope of release by permanent death. If this is a test, as many people believe, the tester is cruel beyond the imagination of humans. Many people who believe this think that there will come a time when the superbeing will realize this test is cruel and discontinue it. This, they believe, will mark the end of the human race and it will be a good thing, because it will allow us all to go to the good afterlife place and not subject any to the need to make guesses to determine their perpetual destiny. They pray for this event—they call it the ‘rapture.’ They say that the existence of the human race is not up to us but, if they have anything to say about it, they would end it as quickly as they could. The magical ones gave us the ability to destroy ourselves when they gave us the ability to build thermonuclear bombs. All we need is an excuse and we can end this horrible experiment by destroying us all.

What if both of these theories about the origin of life and the existence of humans on Earth are wrong?

What if the events weren’t random but there aren't any magic ones either?

What if there is a third option?

What if some group of intelligent beings went to a great deal of trouble to turn the hostile and lifeless planet Earth was when it was first formed, and make it capable of supporting advanced life? What if it sent a terraforming organism like cyanobacteria to this world? What if we are here because they went to even more trouble, sending the DNA needed for mitochondria, to power advanced life, and then sending the DNA for sexually reproducing complex life?

If someone went to this much trouble, then we are not here due to the whims of magic superbeings or random chance. We have a destiny. The scientific evidence overwhelmingly contradicts with the stories of invisible magic superbeings. It overwhelmingly conflicts the premise that ‘its all random.’ The scientific evidence tells us there is a reason for our existence. We don’t know what it is, but the evidence tells us it exists. If we stick around, we will eventually figure it out.

If we simply give up and allow the realities of the game that our ancestors decided to play and pass down to us to destroy us all, we are acting like the senseless lemmings that throw themselves off of cliffs for no reason. To accept death when it is unnecessary is suicide; to accept extinction of our race when it is unnecessary is genocide. I believe that those who pray for the rapture, and work to bring it about by refusing to accept science and advancing the destructive and violent societies built on religious beliefs are among the most immoral beings that can exist. If they want to kill themselves, perhaps, they have this right. But they don’t have the right to take the entire human race with them.

If we were placed here, the ones who went to such trouble to make it happen surely had some projections about how things would turn out. They surely realized that the minds that first had the ability to think on a conscious level would still be primitive in many ways. These primitive minds would come to conclusions that more evolved minds would not accept, and believe in magic beings. They would have realized that the issue of the ‘ownership’ of the world is a complex problem and, if people come up with some of the possible solutions to this problem, this would likely lead to the kinds of conflicts we see all around us on the Earth today. They would have realized that, if the brains had enough capabilities, they would come up with weapons, including nuclear weapons, to use to force others to accept their claims about the ownership and ownability of the world (by nations). They would have realized that this might be the toughest hurdle that would ever be faced by the beings they sent to this planet some 3.58 billion years ago, in their evolution to intelligence. They would have realized that some of these beings would not survive this phase. They would be evolved enough to build the weapons, but not evolved enough to understand why the pressures to build the weapons existed, and not evolved enough to accept that they had control over the variables that would save them.

I am arrogant and proud. My race, the human race, has done wonderful things in the past and we can keep doing wonderful things for a very long time into the future. Perhaps, if we were sent here intentionally, the ones who sent us knew that the odds against any one seeded planet making it would be very high, so, perhaps, they seeded thousands, millions, or even billions of planets. Perhaps, most of them were not expected to make it. Perhaps, they expected only one of these billions of seeded planets to produce a race of intelligent beings that would last long enough to accomplish whatever goal that they had for them.

When I look into the night sky, I am in awe of its magnificence. I have gone to the observatory gazed at the stars and galaxies, in endless wonder.

There is so much there.

Here we are, on this little world, about to kill ourselves over a game that is, by any objective measure, meaningless.

And people are oblivious! They see it, but they aren’t willing to accept that we have control over our destiny and the ability to organize our existence differently.

We are close to the end, BUT WE ARE NOT THERE YET.

There is still hope.

Perhaps billions upon billions of the worlds that we can see at night are inhabited, and perhaps the great majority of them won’t make it through the crisis we are now in, when they get to the point we are at now. But I am arrogant and proud. I love this planet and feel one with every living thing on it. It is worth fighting for. Perhaps only one race will make it through this crisis.

Why can’t it be us?

Four things would required to send life to another planet:

1. The hardware: the DNA itself and all of the proteins needed to allow the DNA to reproduce itself and support a living organism (itself).

2. The power system. Something must provide the energy for the life forces to use for their operation.

3. The Operating system.

4. The bootstrap.

All living things on Earth have exactly the same power source. All of our critical functions run off of electricity. Muscles are electrical devices. If you take a muscle of a dead animal, and apply electricity, it will contract with great force; remove the electricity and it will expand. Many children perform an experiment with frog’s legs in grade school science that help them see how muscles work.

Your brains process information using electricity. You can get an EEG, where the doctors will put receptors on your head in various places that read the electrical activity below. A common legal definition for ‘death’ is ‘the absence of electrical activity in the brain.’ If the electricity is not there, life is not there either. Researchers have shown that electricity powers cell division and DNA replication. DNA even keeps warm-bodied beings warm.

Electricity and the Body

In the video to the right, you can see what happens to the muscles in a frog’s leg when electricity is applied: they contract. The higher the voltage (the more energy supplied) the more force the contractions have. Muscles are electrical devices that do mechanical work. The more electricity they have, the more work they will do.

Qqqq frogs leg video

You can see by the video that the electricity can’t possibly be stimulating the frog’s body to do something that causes the muscle to contract, because there is no frog’s body, just the leg. You can find many videos where the outer covering of the muscles are removed and the muscles are stimulated directly with electricity. The muscles contract. The frog doesn’t have to be alive for this to happen. It is very clear that muscles are electrical devices. There is no magic essence that causes frog muscles to move; science can explain everything that happens.

This is not just true for frogs. It is true for all living things, including you. When you move your arm, your body is sending electricity to the muscles, causing them to contract. When you breathe, your body is sending electricity to the lung muscles, causing them to change their shape in ways that make your lungs larger and smaller. When your heart beats, electricity goes to a variable-speed electrical pump that is capable of reacting within seconds to any additional need for energy or oxygen.

ATP

Where does the electricity come from?

It is made through a rather amazing process.

Inside of each cell of your body are between 1000 and 2000 tiny power cells called ‘mitochondria.’ Each of these power cells starts with very simple ingredients: glucose and oxygen. The glucose contains latent energy that originally came from the sun: it was created by a plant through photosynthesis. The plant broke down the molecules of carbon dioxide from the air and water from rain, and recombined them into glucose.

Glucose is C₆H₁₂O₆ meaning six atoms of carbon, 12 of hydrogen, and 6 of oxygen. The carbon came from carbon dioxide: 6 carbon dioxide molecules were broken down to get the carbon. The hydrogen came from water; 6 molecules of water were broken down. A total of 18 atoms of oxygen came from the water and carbon dioxide. 6 of them became a part of the glucose and the other 12 were released in to the air, in the form of 6 molecules of oxygen.

Energy is required to tear apart the starting molecules and put them back together. This energy comes from the sun.

The mitochondria basically reverse this process, tearing the glucose apart. Each molecule of glucose removed is converted into 6 molecules of carbon dioxide and 6 molecules of water. 12 atoms (6 molecules) of oxygen are needed for this. The oxygen comes from the air. (You breathe it in; the blood transports it to the cell).

The energy that was originally used to make the glucose is now released; it is available for the mitochondria to use. It basically uses this energy to create electricity through the process described below.

This basically means that your bodies, and the bodies of all living things on Earth, run on energy that originally came from the sun. We are ‘solar powered.’

How does this lead to electricity? The electricity comes from chemical reactions between electrolytes. The specific electrolytes, the chemicals that produce the electricity, are phosphates. The system in our bodies produces electricity in much the same way as some of the most advanced batteries that have ever been created, called lithium phosphate batteries.

Why this information?

Many people see the complexity of life and think that magic has to be involved in some way; science can’t explain the things we see. It is true that these matters are complex. But everything we see can be explained scientifically; everything. It is not necessary and was never necessary

The molecule that holds the energy is called ‘adenosine triphosphate’ commonly referred to by its abbreviation ATP. I think it is easier to picture the way ATP works if we think of a capital letter E. The spine of the E is an adenosine amino acid; each of the three legs is a phosphate group. It requires energy to ‘load’ the phosphate groups onto the ‘spine.’ If you want to picture what happens, you could think of a spring on the spine that has to be compressed to ‘load’ a phosphate group. This requires energy. The energy is then stored in the form of the compressed spring. If the body wants the energy, it can release the catch that holds the phosphate group and allow the spring to uncoil and throw the group out. This will release energy and, because of the way it works, this energy will be in the form of an electrical spark.

If the body needs energy in a certain place, it sends ATP to that place. For example, you may move your leg at just about any time, so the ATP needs to be at the base of the muscle all of the time. At a signal from your nervous system, the ATP releases a phosphate group, creating the electricity needed to move the muscle. If the muscle needs to keep moving, more ATP is required. The ATP has three phosphate groups. Normally, it only releases one of them, converting the adenosine triphosphate to adenosine diphosphate (the same molecule with one of the phosphate groups gone; you could think of it as a capital F rater than a capital E). If the demand for electricity is very high—say you are lifting something very heavy or running very fast—the adenosine diphosphate will release another phosphate group, becoming adenosine monophosphate. Each time this happens, small amount of electricity is produced to move the muscle.

ATP is called the ‘energy currency’ of living things on Earth. It is the thing our bodies run on; it is the same energy source that all Earth life—from the simplest algae to the most intelligent humans—runs on.

Living organisms recycle ATP constantly. If electricity is needed, the phosphate groups are allowed to fly off, releasing the electrical energy. The result is adenosine diphosphate and the extra phosphate group. These to materials make their way back to the mitochondria. The mitochondria then use additional glucose (usually from food) and oxygen (from when you inhale; the oxygen is moved to the needed places by blood) to ‘compress the spring’ and put the phosphate group back on. Since your body is always using energy, this is a constant process. It happens everywhere your body needs electricity.

To read this, you will have to focus your eyes: this requires energy. The energy comes from ATP in your eyes. The eye will send electrical symbols down the optic nerve; this requires electricity that comes from ATP in the optic nerve. Your brain will then have to process the information. This requires electricity that will come from ATP in your brain. Your cells will need to make proteins. This requires dividing DNA to make messenger RNA, something that requires energy. Again, this energy comes from electricity and the electricity is produced by the breakdown of ATP. There is only one power source in the human body or in the bodies or sells of any living things on Earth: electricity generated by ATP. We are, literally, electric machines.

How it Works

Let’s trace the energy system of your body from beginning to end:

It starts when you eat food. I want to start with the simplest possible case, so let’s say you are eating something  which breaks down into basically pure glucose, white bread. Say you eat 100 grams of white bread. White bread is basically long chains of glucose molecules that are called ‘starch.’ As soon as the bread hits your mouth, your body introduces an enzyme called ‘amylase’ that breaks the bonds that hold these chains together, releasing 100 grams of pure glucose in to mouth and esophagus. Glucose is a tiny, tiny molecule. It can easily go through the walls of the mouth, esophagus, stomach, and intestine, into the bloodstream. Within about 2 minutes after you eat, your blood glucose level will increase. (You can check this with a blood glucose meter that you can get at any drug store.) The blood glucose level will increase and reach a peak about 20 minutes after you finish eating the bread.

Nearly all of the cells of your body store some glucose. They store it in a kind of protein container called ‘glycogen.’ I like to think of glycogen as a tiny, thin net bag. Each ‘bag’ can hold about 50,000 molecules of glucose. Each of your cells has thousands of these ‘bags of glucose’ (glycogen nodules) in them. These are the stored energy of the cells, to be used when the cells need energy. As you use energy, the mitochondria take glucose out of these bags and use it as needed.

The cell walls don’t normally let more glucose get in. However, when your blood glucose rises above a certain level, the cells that need glucose (to replenish their glycogen supplies) send a signal out to the body to secrete ‘insulin.’ This insulin attaches to insulin receptors on these cells. This basically creates a kind of tunnel from outside the cell to inside the cell that is just big enough for glucose to get in. The glucose will flow into the cell as long as the insulin is attached to the receptors. At a certain point, the cell has enough glucose and signals the receptors to release the insulin. After this point, the glucose can’t get into the cells anymore. If glucose levels remain high, after the cells have all ‘eaten’ as much glucose as they need, the body will signal the liver to start turning this glucose into fat. (The fat is called ‘triglycerides.’ If you have your blood tests done at a physical, they will test your level of triglycerides. They are testing the fat level of your blood. More triglycerides, more fat in your bloodstream. If your triglycerides levels remain high for a long time, the body will start to store the fat in the liver and other places in your body.)

Each of your cells also has several thousand mitochondria. The mitochondria are the power cells. They produce the energy-containing ATP, through a process called the ‘Krebs Cycle,’ after Thomas Krebs, its discoverer.

The cycle is never ending so we need to pick a random place to enter it in order to explain it. We will start at the point where the mitochondria manufacture ATP. They basically take residual of past reactions, which means ADP (adenosine diphosphate, the same molecule with one less phosphate group) and a phosphate group. Then they put them back together to make ATP.

The ATP is electrically unstable. It wants to release a phosphate group and, in the process, release its electrical energy. But various enzymes in your muscle cells act as insulators and put themselves between the ATP molecule and the working nodules within the muscle cell. This prevents the electricity from flowing and prevents the chemical change. (Basically, this is like turning off the switch of a flashlight: the switch creates an air gap that the electricity can’t pass, so the batteries can’t have the chemical reactions that produce electricity.)

Let’s say we are talking about a leg muscle and you decide to move the leg. Your brain sends an electrical signal down to the leg muscle. This signal tells the enzymes that insulate the ATP to move out of the way, and they do so. As soon as your muscle cells get the electricity, they contract, making the muscle shorter. Since the muscle is attached to bones that are jointed, the contraction causes your leg to move.

As the ATP releases its energy, it changes itself to a less-energetic form: it is now one molecule of ADP (adenosine diphosphate) with a phosphate group nearby. The mitochondria now soak up this ADP and phosphate group. The mitochondria take a glucose molecule and some oxygen (which comes to them through the blood from hemoglobin) and use the energy in the glucose to recombine the ADP and phosphate group to form another molecule of ATP. If you want to keep moving your leg (say you are running), this ATP powers the running motion.

Because the manufacture of ATP requires oxygen, as soon as you start moving your muscles your cells will signal your heart and lungs to speed up, to provide the additional oxygen needed to metabolize the glucose. If you operate your muscles for a long time (say you are running a marathon), your cells will go through their stored glycogen in about 20 minutes.

Runners know this and can take steps to make it last longer. One common step is called ‘carbohydrate loading.’ This involves consuming large amounts of glucose-rich food to saturate the cells with glycogen. If you do this, then run until you feel pain, then carbohydrate load again and do it again, and keep doing it, day after day, your cells will start to learn that your normal activities require more than the normal amount of glycogen. They will start to increase the glycogen they store, allowing you to run longer before the pain starts. If you train this way long enough (it make take several years) you will eventually be able to run an entire marathon without any significant muscle pain.

People who have not been through the training won’t be able to do this. Most of us can only run for a few minutes before both the glycogen and ATP are gone. After these things are gone, your muscles will send signals to your brain that tell it that the muscles are being pushed beyond their limits. At this point, there is still energy available however. The adenosine diphosphate still has two phosphate groups attached to its spine. It will begin using this to generate an emergency supply of electricity. Although you will feel incredible pain, as you push to use this energy, the cell still has quite a bit of energy. All of the Adenosine diphosphate can be broken down to adenosine monophosphate.

You might imagine why this rather large reserve of energy is so necessary: if the electrical activity ever stops, the cell is dead and can’t do anything. There will be times when someone will have to run to save her life even past the point of normal human endurance. Even after the adenosine diphosphate has broken down, there is still an energy reserve. The adenosine monophosphate can release its last phosphate group, giving a final burst of energy. When all of the adenosine monophosphate is gone, it is like shutting off a switch. There is no more electricity to run the muscles, no more electricity to run the nerves, no more electricity to transmit the pain signals to the brain. Normally, the first muscle to give out under extreme stress is heart. The heart is nearly all muscle and can use an enormous amount of energy in an extreme situation. The body will try to save it of course. It will pump ATP from other parts of the body to the heart, bring in oxygen as quickly as possible, and pump any excess glucose or glycogen in nearby areas to the heart. But there will come a time when the heart just isn’t getting enough electricity to run at the required speed. It stops providing sufficient oxygenated blood to the most important organ it services, itself, and is no longer able to operate. No amount of will power will allow you to keep going after this happens: you will collapse and, if the heart doesn’t start beating again, you will die.

Each time the mitochondria breaks down a glucose molecule, it gets enough energy manufacture 4 ATP molecules. This basically means it is able to take for of the 'F' configuration adenosine diphosphate molecules and add another phosphate group to turn them into E configuration molecules. It needs 6 atoms of oxygen to make this happen. The oxygen comes from the atmosphere; you breathe it in, it gets into the hemoglobin and is transported to the cells through the blood system. The glucose no longer exists; nothing is left but carbon dioxide and water. The carbon dioxide goes back through the bloodstream to the lungs, where you exhale it into the atmosphere. The water is removed from the blood at the kidneys and sent to the bladder to be expelled from the body as urine.

Normal Metabolism

The glucose normally comes from the food you eat. Most people eat diets that are high in something dietitians call ‘starch.’ Starch is basically nothing but a long chain of glucose molecules. The enzyme amylase breaks down the starch into glucose in seconds. If you eat a high-starch diet, your body can get all of the glucose it needs from this diet, without having to process anything.

What if you don’t eat a lot of glucose?

Normally, this isn’t a problem. Your body can take other food items and convert them to glucose. Through a process called ‘gluconeogenesis,’ the body can turn a wide variety of other organic materials into glucose. Normally, what happens is this: when you eat, the glucose gets into your blood right away. Other foods go into the stomach where they are dissolved by hydrochloric acid to turn them into things small enough to get through the intestinal wall. Proteins are broken down into amino acids. Fats are broken down into fatty acids. These tiny things can get through the intestinal wall into the bloodstream. But the body often doesn’t need them. If the body doesn’t need certain amino or fatty acids, it won’t absorb them. They will be expelled with the feces. If the body needs certain amino acids to make proteins, it will absorb it and send it where it is needed. If it needs certain fatty acids to make fats, it will absorb them.

If you aren’t eating enough glucose to sustain yourself, your body will absorb the amino acids and fatty acids and convert them into glucose, through the process of gluconeogenesis. Gluconeogenesis is a very slow process, often taking many hours to turn the food you eat into glucose. That is why foods high in glucose satisfy you quickly, while foods high in proteins and fats take longer to work but keep you from feeling hungry for a much longer period of time.

What if you don’t get enough glucose and you aren’t eating any proteins or fats either? In other words, what happens if you don’t eat anything?

If you don’t eat for a long period of time, your body will start to consume itself. Your body has certain stored fats. It can break them down and use them to make ATP out of ADP and phosphate groups. It can break down proteins. It can consume critical organs for sustenance. It will try its best to keep you alive, no matter what. While it is consuming itself, it will send you very powerful signals of real pain. You will realize that even the tiniest bit of food will ease the pain and feel pressure to find something to eat. If you don’t eat long enough, there will come a time when the body won’t be able to make ATP anymore. It will use what it has until it is all ADP. It will then use that until it is AMP. It will use the AMP until it is gone and then the electrical activity will stop and you will be dead.

Magic

Note: electricity powers all living things on earth and ATP is the only way this electricity is made; however, not all living things use the highly efficient process of making ATP that takes place mitochondria. Cyanobacteria don’t even have mitochondria. They therefore must make their ATP through ‘anaerobic’ processes that are far less efficient than the process used by your body and all other living things that have mitochondria. The process used by the mitochondria (called the ‘Krebs cycle) is about 98% efficient, meaning that 98% of the chemical energy that is tied up in the glucose is converted into usable electricity. The process used by ‘anaerobic’ beings, including cyanobacteria, is only about 3% efficient. That is one of the reasons that anaerobic beings can’t be very complicated: they don’t have enough energy to run complicated processes.

Humans are electrical machines. The electricity comes from tiny power modules called ‘mitochondria.’ Each of the mitochondria is a self-contained electric generating system. You have several thousand of these power modules in each of your cells. The cells are involved with a lot of electrical activities. They have to have power all the time.

There are certain devices that absolutely need to be powered every single second, without fail, or they will no longer operate. Most computers are like that: they don’t ‘remember’ the operating system; it is programmed into the computer and, if the power goes out, the entire set of instructions is lost. If you restore the power, but don’t reinstall the operating system, the computer is nothing but a bunch of silicon dioxide (sand). It doesn’t do anything. It needs the instruction set restored.

The cells of our bodies are like that. They need power all the time, without a second of interruption. They are built with multiple redundant power systems to make sure they never lose power. If a few of the power modules (mitochondria) should die or stop functioning, this won’t matter. The redundancies are enormous, with thousands of backup power modules. Even the power modules can’t produce enough electricity to supply the cell, this doesn’t matter: the cell has ATP in storage that it can use to generate electricity. Even if all of the ATP is used up, it can begin to use ADP for electricity. If all the ADP is used up, it can use AMP for electricity.

There are thousands of storage pods for glucose in each cell; each of these pods, called a ‘glycogen nodule,’ contains about 50,000 glucose molecules. If the glucose levels get low, the cells can send a signal to bring in insulin and that will open a tunnel and start to usher through more glucose. If there isn’t enough glucose in the blood for this, your body will tell you to eat something, preferably something high in glucose (starch). If you don’t eat, your body can break down triglycerides, the simple fats it uses to store excess glucose that is not inside of a cell (glucose stored in a cell is in the form of glycogen). If you don’t have enough triglycerides, the body will start extracting amino acids and fatty acids from whatever is in the intestine and turn them into glucose. If you stop eating, your body has redundancy after redundancy that it will go through, one at a time, to make sure its cells are always being powered.

It is an amazing system. But it is not magic. Every single reaction conforms exactly to known laws of chemistry and physics.

I suppose it is possible that such a system came to exist as a result of random chance. (It did not evolve, at least not here on Earth: the very first living things on this planet, the cyanobacteria that lived while most of the crust was still molten, used the exact same power system.) But it is incredibly unlikely that such a set of systems would suddenly materialize out of nothing. You might compare this to the likelihood of blowing up a nuclear bomb in a metal rich area and having a brand new Tesla roadster materialize out of the parts, in full working order and will all of the parts polished and beautiful. It is not entirely impossible. But it is so unlikely that we can rule it out as a practical outcome.

What if someone with technology far superior to ours wanted to send life to another world? They would need a power system. The power system would have to be foolproof. Once the first cell was ‘alive,’ the processes of life would have to be powered from then on, with no interruptions, ever. You could let some things just happen through evolution. But the power system could not be left to chance.

The power system has one more important feature that youhave to understand to really appreciate how much work had to have gone into developing it:

Mitochondria have its own DNA. This DNA is totally separate from he DNA of your nucleus. Because mitochondria have its own DNA, and reproduce themselves, your body does not make the ones inside of your cells. They make themselves. They clearly meet the definition of ‘life' so they have life. Their ‘lives’ are independent of your life. You could say that there are trillions of tiny living power cells in your body. These cells reproduce by the process of mitosis, which means that they make exact copies of themselves. Their DNA chains are very short and their DNA is will protected, deep within a cell that is itself within a cell. Because of this, mutations are incredibly rare.

The mitochondria that are in your body now were never really ‘born.' They are living cells that were split off of other living cells without any transition period where they were nonliving. Since the mitochondria in your body now were in the egg that your mother produced that led to you as a person before that egg was fertilized, they were alive before you existed. The mitochondria that were in her egg before you were conceived have a chain of life, through their ancestors, that goes back to before your mother was born and, for that matter, to before she was even conceived. In fact, you can follow this ‘chain of life’ back through the generations for as many generations as you wish. If there was a first woman on Earth, a sort of mother to the current human race, the same mitochondria that are alive in you were alive in her.

In fact, you can go back before that. The same mitochondria that were alive in the first woman on Earth were also alive in the first female mammal. If there is a ‘mother mammal to us all’ you and I and everyone on Earth, together with every other mammal on the planet, share something of her life; a part of what was alive in her is alive in all of us. But it goes back far before that. The mitochondrial DNA is all basically the same, of all beings on Earth, from the first cyanobacteria to the most recently born humans. There can never been a point at which a mitochondria that is now alive was not ‘under power’ and undergoing the life force because mitochondria, like their larger cousins ‘cells,’ need power ever microsecond to keep functioning. If they lose their power, they lose their operating system and become nothing but corpses. This means that there is a part of you, a part of you that is alive, that is shared with every living thing on Earth. This revelation gives new meaning to some of the principles of the American native people as they lived before the conquest, as represented by this passage from Chief Seattle’s letter to Pierce in 1854:

We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the dew in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man all belong to the same family.

A great many things about the operations of living organisms reek of intelligent design. The power system seems to be very much in this category. If it were intelligent design, we would have to give the designers of the power system very high marks for competence.

Of course, they would have to be.

This power system would have to be able to fit into an incredibly tiny package. They would have to work in a virtually foolproof manner, with no shutdowns even for a microsecond. They would have to perform their work continuously over billions of years, without fail. They would have to retain their original integrity even though they were inside of a being that was changing and evolving constantly. They would have to support the power needs of a being as tiny as bacteria, as large as an elephant, and as complicated as the brain of Einstein. These are amazing design requirements and to think that a power source that does all of these things could simply materialize due to a lighting strike in a soup of chemicals seems downright silly. The power system that supports life on Earth had to have been designed by an intelligent being.

If we accept this, we have to accept that life on earth has meaning. Perhaps we may not know what it is, with this information alone. But we can know it is there and can begin looking for it. If we start looking for it, we have a chance of finding it. If we don’t ever start looking for it, we clearly won’t find it. For centuries, accepted there is no reason to look at such things because there is a simple explanation for everything: an invisible being did everything by magic; recently, people have replaced this explanation with a second one, the idea that it is all random chance and there is therefore no meaning and no reason to look for the meaning. We are now at a point where we can look at the realities of human existence with a new perspective. We have sciences that can help us see that it is extremely likely that we are here for a reason. What is that reason? We actually have tools that we can use to help figure this out also.

There is one more issue to be covered:

What is the consciousness?

What is it that is it that makes you ‘you.’

When you wake up in the morning, you see a world around you. It is the same world that was there when you went to sleep. Your clothes are in the place you expect them to be. There is a kind of recorded database of information that the being that you call ‘you’ can access. It goes back, day after day, through your past. Some days were not particularly remarkable; you don’t remember much about them because there isn’t much to remember. Your mental database keeps information selectively, storing the most important events with deep memories, and the less important events with shallow memories that might be reinforced (if you go through a very similar experience to one that you don’t really totally remember again, you will remember it vaguely, an experience called ‘Deja Vú,’ and the memory of the memory will become another memory). Other events are profound and make a deep impression on your mental database. You will remember death, pain, suffering, and certain events of extreme happiness in great detail.

Through it all is a grand conductor: There is something we call ‘our consciousness’ that actually makes the decisions about what to think about and how to think about it.

What is this ‘consciousness?’

Where does it come from? How does it get its power?

Various people have looked at this issue in great depth from several different perspectives. Sir Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the genetic code inside DNA, examined this issue from one perspective in his book ‘the absurd hypothesis.’ Crick believed that science could provide information to help us understand just about anything. DNA based life forms operated in accordance with certain scientific principles: the atoms of DNA join together in certain ways and form a complex coded message; the neurons operate according to certain rules; the electrical pathways of the brain are understandable; we can hook up people to wires, let them think about certain things, and record the location and amount of electrical activity.

Each ‘thought’ is a message. This message is decoded and turned into electricity. In addition to the electrical activity, the neurons change chemically in understandable ways. The neurons are connected together with millions of tiny ‘wires’ that move information from one place to another. If large amounts of information are moving on a specific pathway, the brain will someone realize a larger pathway is required and will either expand the existing pathway’s capacity or build a new path for that same information. Each of these changes can be understood individually with an understanding of the nature of chemical bonds, the energy released or amassed when these bonds break and are assembled, and the quantum mechanical forces that keep everything together.

After Francis Crick won the Nobel Prize, he had plenty of money to do research any way he wanted. He wanted to study the attributes of the brain and of human beings that set us apart from other animals. Humans clearly think differently than other beings on Earth. He wanted to figure out if he could find some structural differences in our minds, our nervous systems, or DNA, or some other physical and structure that scientists could study that might account for the difference. Humans have a self-awareness that other beings don’t have. We have a chain of thoughts that we are able to control; allowing us to make complex plans, build incredibly complicated tools, and communicate in ways that no other animals can match. We can formulate thoughts in our heads, decide what we wish to say to other people, edit it in our heads before we say it (to make sure we are clear and don’t offend the others), and then say exactly what we want to say. No other animals appear capable of these things.

Some people use the term 'soul' to refer to the stream of controllable consciousness that humans have. It is an internal awareness, a kind of homunculus (a word that means ‘little person inside of me’) that makes us consider ourselves to be special and unique; it is a kind of ‘essence’ of us. Crick wanted to study this ‘soul’ to see if he could relate the mental activities that we associate with our self-awareness with any sort of electrical, chemical, or other changes that scientists might be able to study.

He studied the cellular structure of the brain in great detail. He basically found that the brain resembles a truly massive computer, which each of the cells called ‘neurons’ connected to large numbers of other cells with electrical pathways. Each neuron is like a computer processor; it takes certain inputs, processes them in some way, and then creates outputs through several of the connected pathways; these outputs go into other neurons that process them further, and emit outputs that go to other neurons, and so on, to infinity.

Some of the neurons appear to be memory storage devices, able to release their recording with the right combination of stimuli from the input wiring. Others appear to be what computer designers call ‘input output devices;’ they either take in information from the outside world (our eyes, ears, and other senses do this) or send information out to appendages that are remote from the brain, like our legs and arms. Some of the neurons appear to be what computer program designers call ‘compilers:’ they take several inputs from several sources and put them together into a coding sequence that will then process other information. They appear to be computer programs that basically write new computer programs. Other neurons work in ways that no existing silicon-based computer is able to work: they build new pathways, allowing us to process new information in unique new ways and to revise the way we think about things.

This makes a lot of sense: our minds are learning new things. They wouldn’t be able to process the incredible amounts of information they process if they didn’t grow and adapt over time. Your little baby mind, for example, wouldn’t be able to process information about cooking food, cleaning windows, riding a bike, for example. It needs to be able to create subroutines that can be compiled into larger programs.

Crick did a great deal of research into the physical structures of the brain in an attempt to figure out what the thing we call ‘consciousness’ was, how it worked, and if it had a location, where it was located. He found that the brain is an incredibly complex mechanism. You might understand this if you understand the basics of modern computers.

Each computer does its work in a device called a ‘processor.’ You can find the processor on an older computer (when they were separate parts) by opening the case and looking for a square about an inch by an inch with an immense spider web of wires leading to and away from it. I am writing this in 2018 and, at this time, people are expanding computer capabilities by building computers with multiple processors. The first processor splits the task into smaller tasks. It then passes each task to another processor or another part of that particular processor for processing. At the end, the processed information is put back together again and used to control the letters on the screen, the sounds you hear, the pictures you see, the settings on the control of a self-driving car, or whatever the computer was designed to do. So far, the processors are laid out on a linear fashion, which you may think of as two dimensional (2d) processing. Having a series of processors make computers far more capable. But they don’t have anything close to the processing power of the brain of even the simplest animal (like a fly), because the animals brain has processors stacked together in a three dimensional pattern.

Crick explains the way this work in his book ‘Live Itself.’ Each ‘fold’ of the brain is essentially a 2D network of processors. They communicate with each other through multiple neural pathways, just as a computer with multiple processors will communicate through multiple 2D networks of processors. But there are certain things the fly’s mind can do that the network of processors in the computer can’t do. The fly’s brain can fold over the processor network into three or more folds. It can then make connections to the folds above and below. It can even skip over a fold and make connections to processors that are two folds up or down. This leads to true 3D processing. The differences in computational capabilities between 2D and 3D processing are vast. The fly can do incredible things that no computer could come close to doing. The fly, for example, can recognize its mates; it can recognize food, it can lay eggs, and, of course, it can fly. The 3D neural network is far more capable than the 2d model.

Artificial Intelligence Or Real Intelligence?

In 1936, the mathematician Alan Turing published a paper called ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.’ This paper had an appendix that was not published until after Turing’s death, titled ‘Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory.’

Turing had believed that the appendix was too controversial to be included with the original paper.

He had had ideas that got him into a lot of trouble his entire life; he thought that his ideas about intelligent machinery would give his critics too much ammunition and he never published this appendix at all; it was not published until 1996, 42 years after his death and 60 years after he wrote it. In this essay, Turing claims that it would be possible to construct a machine that could be taught, could solve problems that were unsolvable by algorithms, and could learn and become more complex over time, eventually becoming so intelligent that it wouldn’t be possible for a human interacting with it remotely to tell that it was a machine, not a real human being. This is a heretical idea because, like many other scientific explanations for the things we see around us, it implies that the religious explanations for reality are incorrect. If it would be possible to make a machine that could think as humans think, how can we tell for sure that the others we are interacting with are really humans, with God-given souls? How can we even be sure that we, ourselves, have God-given souls that are subject to damnation or salvation by the proper thoughts? His collogues attacked him for even thinking such things.

Here are some excerpts from the essay:

'You cannot make a machine to for you.'

This is a commonplace that is usually accepted without question. It will be the purpose of this paper to question it.

Most machinery developed for commercial purposes is intended to carry out some very specific job, and to carry it out with certainty and considerable speed. Very often it does the same series of operations over and over again without any variety. This fact about the actual machinery available is a powerful argument to many in favour of the slogan quoted above. To a mathematical logician this argument is not available, for it has been shown that there are machines theoretically possible which will do something very close to thinking. They will, for instance, test the validity of a formal proof in the system of Principia Mathematica, or even tell of a formula of that system whether it is provable or disprovable. By Godel's famous theorem, or some similar argument, one can show that however the machine is constructed there are bound to be cases where the machine fails to give an answer, but a mathematician would be able to. I believe that this danger of the mathematician making mistakes is an unavoidable corollary of his power of sometimes hitting upon an entirely new method. This seems to be confirmed by the well known fact that the most reliable people will not usually hit upon really new methods.

My contention is that machines can be constructed which will simulate the behaviour of the human mind very closely. They will make mistakes at times, and at times they may make new and very interesting statements, and on the whole the output of them will be worth attention to the same sort of extent as the output of a human mind.

It is clearly possible to produce a machine which would give a very good account of itself for any range of tests, if the machine were made sufficiently elaborate. Such a machine would give itself away by making the same sort of mistake over and over again, and being quite unable to correct itself, or to be corrected by argument from outside. If the machine were able in some way to 'learn by experience' it would be much more impressive. If this were the case there seems to be no real reason why one should not start from a comparatively simple machine, and, by subjecting it to a suitable range of 'experience' transform it into one which was much more elaborate, and was able to deal with a far greater range of contingencies.

I may now give some indication of the way in which such a machine might be expected to function. The machine would incorporate a memory.

This does not need very much explanation. It would simply be a list of all the statements that had been made to it or by it, and all the moves it had made and the cards it had played in its games. These would be listed in chronological order. Besides this straightforward memory there would be a number of 'indexes of experiences'. To explain this idea I will suggest the form which one such index might possibly take. It might be an alphabetical index of the words that had been used giving the 'times' at which they had been used, so that they could be looked up in the memory. Another such index might contain patterns of men or parts of a GO board that had occurred. At comparatively late stages of education the memory might be extended to include important parts of the configuration of the machine at each moment, or in other words it would begin to remember what its thoughts had been. This would give rise to fruitful new forms of indexing.

Let us now assume, for the sake of argument, that these machines are a genuine possibility, and look at the consequences of constructing them. To do so would of course meet with great opposition, unless we have advanced greatly in religious toleration from the days of Galileo. There would be great opposition from the intellectuals who were afraid of being put out of a job. It is probable though that the intellectuals would be mistaken about this. There would be plenty to do in trying, say, to keep one's intelligence up to the standard set by the machines, for it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits.

Turing expected that a machine that could mimic human thought would never be built because of religious opposition. Believers had great influence in the governments of the world. They would fight against any attempt to build this machine and prevent it from becoming reality.

But he doesn’t seem to have considered an important reality of societies that divide the world into ‘nations' and accept that nations can have and own everything they can take by force. These systems have military needs that go above all other needs. If people have to disregard religion to build better tools of war, they will do so.

Turning thought that the research needed for this kind of machine would never be undertaken, but he was wrong. Even the example he uses in this essay, of Galileo, shows exactly why they were wrong. It is true that Galileo was arrested and jailed for life for his analysis in ‘Two New Sciences,’ and that this text was banned in its home country, with all copies collected and burned. But Galileo’s ideas had an important military application: The banned book contained formulas that could be used to predict the exact place a cannonball would land if launched at a given angle. Without this formula, bombardment would never be effective because experience alone won’t account for many variables. (For example, if you are used to using a totally level range for tests, your understanding will be very far off if the target is even a few feet below or above the cannon; if you are used to a particular slope, a different slope will throw you off; there are just too many variables to find where the cannonball will end up by random chance. Galileo’s calculations could tell where they would end up, exactly.) Military planners began to realize that Galileo’s work could help them do their jobs and began to request more research be done in the field. Researchers were not just allowed to advance Galileo’s work; they were paid to do it. The more work they did, the better results they got, and the field advanced into a very complex science, the field that we now call ‘rocket science.’

We live in societies with incredibly powerful forces pushing toward war. The forces are so strong that religion gets pushed aside or ignored if ‘heretical’ research has the potential to help the military. This has happened in the field of computers and, as a result, we have started down the path that can lead to the kinds of machines that Turing claimed could exist in this essay. It may help to understand these machines if you understand how these machines came to exist, what they do, and how they work. We will see that these machines actually use processes that are very similar to the process that Crick and other researchers have worked out to represent the operation of the human brain.

History of Smart Machines

If we use the term ‘computer' loosely enough, computers have been around for a long time. The abacus is a simple kind of computer, adding numbers up in rows. The abacus has been around many thousands of years. People have used variations of what we now call the ‘slide rule’ for centuries. These basically have two sets of numbers in different scales on the rulers; line them up properly and you can do simple calculations like multiplying, taking powers and roots, calculating logarithms, and doing calculations with sines, cosines, and tangents. These were computers but they were really ‘dumb’ computers. They couldn’t learn anything. They could only be operated by hand. Each device only performed the functions it had been built to perform. Nothing could be ‘programmed’ into them.

Alan Turing built the world’s first programmable computer for military purposes. In September of 1938, he was hired by GC&CS, the British code breaking organization. While there, he built the machine he called the ‘A machine,’ later renamed ‘The Turing machine.’ This machine was built for a very specific purpose: It was designed to determine the settings on the enigma machine, a coding machine used by the Nazi military. The machine he built to work out these settings was the world’s first electronic computer. To do its job, the machine would have to process a set of information, change its settings to new settings depending on the results of the first test, process again, and constantly revise its internal settings, making additional calculations based on these new settings. It had to be able to change its programming.

The enigma coding device the German military used had a set of rotors that changed letters to other letters; the first rotor might change a Z, for example, to a G; this ‘G’ would be sent to another rotor that might change it to a Y, and then to one after another of the rotors that ultimately led to a final output. The rotors were not fixed, but would adjust. They didn’t just adjust at the end of the day or end of a message, but could be set to adjust after each letter typed. A rotor might move 2 settings, or 6 settings, or not move at all, with each press of the key. The code operators would be told the settings that would tell the machine how many keystrokes between steps or steps per keystroke each rotor would move. They would adjust the machines settings to match that day’s settings and type in the message.

At the destination, the message would be typed into another machine that was set the reverse way. The second machine would change the coded message back into a readable message.

The hardware of the machines was not secret: These machines had been created for commercial use before the war and many were available to buy from commercial equipment dealers and even junk shops around the world. It was easy to get the hardware. The problem was in the software: there were a very large number of possible settings. If you didn’t know the settings, you couldn’t decode the message. The standard commercial machine had a total of 6 settings that could be adjusted a total of 150,738,274,937,250 different ways. A Polish code breaking team had invented a computing machine called the ‘Bomba’ which could test the settings one at a time. It could go through one set of settings, decode the message and display it. Humans could then see if it made sense. If it didn’t, they would push a button and it would go on to the next combination and try it. The enigma machine had so many possible settings that, even if a giant network of bomba machines and army of workers were on the job, they couldn’t test more than a tiny percentage of them in a day. Since the settings were changed each day, they had no chance of testing the settings one at a time.

Turing's first programmable computer was designed to learn. It would figure out certain combinations that were highly  unlikely and find some that were more likely. It would then ‘concentrate’ on the more likely combinations to find the sets that were the most likely. It would then narrow down these combinations by doing this over and over, until it had a manageable number (say a few thousand) likely combinations to test. These could then be fed into the bomba machine to test them one at a time. This system worked. Turing had built a machine that could often give the settings of the day within a few hours. The British could then decode all messages sent with that day’s settings and work out all secret plans. Many authors have claimed that this information turned the tide of the war. Before the British had the machine, its side was losing. After, the British side quickly gained the upper hand. Military planners can do a much better job if they know where the enemy is going to attack and where it is going to leave itself vulnerable.

After the war, Turning wanted to continue his work and see if he could make a computer with non-military applications. But he had signed an agreement not to discuss anything about his work and the British government held him to this agreement. He couldn’t work publicly with others in the field. But he did talk and write letters and some of the information was helpful, particularly to his American counterpart, Johnny Von Newmann.

Von Newmann

On 18 March, 1939, Nature magazine published an article by the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner called ‘Products of the Fission of the Uranium Nucleus.’ Dr. Meitner suggested that atomic nuclei may be split ‘like a droplet of water,’ releasing truly staggering amounts of energy. No one in the United States except the recent immigrant Albert Einstein seemed to realize the significance of this article. In August of 1939, Einstein wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt, the President of the United States. Here is the critical part of the letter:

In the course of the last four months it has been made probable that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.

This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.

Roosevelt set up the United States nuclear program the same day he got this letter.

Meitner had explained that a nuclear self-supporting fusion reaction was possible and this reaction could release immense amounts of energy. The problem was that such a reaction would require a special kind of uranium, an isotope called ‘U₂₃₅,’ which is very rare in nature and extremely difficult to refine and remove from other uranium. The only ways of refining this uranium involved the use of immense amounts of electricity to make even a tiny bit of the U₂₃₅. To be self supporting, the uranium atoms would have to be more than a ‘critical mass.’ (See sidebar for more information.)

The difficulty involves calculating something called the ‘critical mass’ of uranium. Neutrons are going into and flowing out of uranium all the time. The larger the mass, the more of these neutrons stay in the uranium and hit other uranium atoms, leading to a chain reaction. How many atoms do you need to get a chain reaction that is self-sustaining? Once you know this, you can design a bomb; without this information, you have nowhere to start. The result has to be calculated. It turns out the number is 5x10²⁴ atoms of U₂₃₅. Both the team in the United States and the team in Germany were competing to get this number. If the German team had gotten this number first, Germany would have had the bomb first.

No one knew how much U235 would be needed to make a critical mass. To figure this out, you need to do some incredibly complex mathematics. As of the beginning of 1940, the mathematical tools needed to solve this problem simply didn’t exist.

Both the Germans and the Americans realized the importance of getting the answer. If they found, as they eventually did, that the ‘critical mass’ is only a few pounds of U₂₃₅, they could justify diverting enormous amounts of electricity from existing factories and building large numbers of new power plants to generate the electricity to make it, so they could build some of these bombs. If it took a few tons per bomb, or even a few hundred pounds, they wouldn’t be able to make enough U₂₃₅ to make these weapons and it would not make sense to divert resources to the nuclear bombs. Both the Germans and Americans started a frantic program to solve this mathematical problem.

The famed mathematician and physicist ‘Werner Heisenberg’ headed the German team up. The United States didn’t have any researchers with the expertise to solve this problem. Roosevelt discovered that the leaders in this field lived in Hungry and hired the very best Hungarian physicists and mathematician’s money could buy for the American team. The team leader was the Hungarian, Johnny Von Newmann.

The two men took entirely different approaches to solving the problem.

Heisenberg created a brand new branch of mathematics, called ‘matrix algebra,’ for to work out the answer. Matrix algebra basically allows large numbers of complex interconnected interactions to be solved simultaneously. It is a systematic approach that would definitely give the right answer, if all of the rules of matrix algebra were followed precisely and every single calculation was done correctly. It takes what starts out as many different problems and puts them together into one truly giant problem. Solve it by adding, multiplying, dividing, and performing other calculations on large ‘matrices’ of numbers. When you finish, you end up with something called a ‘determinant’ of the matrix, which is a simple number. This number is the answer to the puzzle.

The problem with this approach is that there are millions of different calculations that have to be made to get this one number. Make a single mistake in any one of these calculations, and the number you get is wrong. Heisenberg had large teams of accountants going over the calculations, checking each other’s work, and trying to find the answer. Unfortunately, there are certain common mistakes in arithmetic that are very common. The first person who does the calculation can get this wrong answer; the one who checks this work can then get the exact same wrong answer, and this can happen over and over again. In the end, Heisenberg came up with the wrong answer. He told the military that the critical mass was more than a ton of U₂₃₅, far too much to make. Germany decided not to pursue the bomb.

Von Newman took a different approach. He realized that no amount of checking and cross checking of the calculations could prevent errors. People make mistakes with numbers. Since there is no way to tell exactly where the error was, it would not be possible to tell if the answer given was correct. Von Newmann felt that only machines could solve this problem. He built a computer that worked on principles that were very similar to the principles of Turing’s machine. His machine was essentially self programmable: it would solve one part of the problem, then reprogram itself given the solution to that part of the problem, and solve the next part of the problem, going on until it had the final answer. Von Newman was right: He got the right answer and the United States quickly realized it could win the war, and have an advantage in all future wars, if it devoted whatever resources were necessary to the bomb. On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was exploded in the test facility near the Los Alamos research facility. Less than a month later, the Japanese emperor surrendered, granting the United States total victory and the right to do anything it wanted with anything Japan had formerly owned.

The H Bomb

After the war, Von Newmann had turned his attention to an even harder problem:

It would be possible to use a standard nuclear explosion to trigger a fusion reaction, the same reaction that is used to turn hydrogen into helium into the sun. This reaction has far greater potential than the nuclear devices he had built out of uranium. The simple uranium bomb, also called an ‘A-bomb,’ could only destroy the hub of a city, an area of a few square miles. A fusion bomb, called an ‘H-bomb,’ could potentially be any size desired, even large enough to destroy the planet. The calculations needed for the H-bomb were far more complex than those needed for the A-bomb. Turning had explained the basic operating principles of a programmable computer to Von-Newmann.

Von Newmann had never had any budget constraints: the United States government had devoted nearly half of the total GDP of the entire United States (half of all wealth produced) to the bomb for several years. Von Newmann was their wonder boy: if he wanted money for a computer, he got it.

He immediately began work on a far more advanced computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (or ENIC), which became operational on February 15, 1946. It was located at the Army Ballistics Research Laboratory (now called the ‘US Army Research Laboratory). It was designed, built, and programmed to make the calculations needed for the hydrogen bomb.

All electronic computers built before 1955 used vacuum tubes for calculations. The tubes used enormous amounts of energy (the UNIVAC, the first commercial unit, had 5,200 vacuum tubes and consumed 125KW of energy, about the amount of energy needed to power a city block at the time). These computers were, obviously, very expensive. Because the tubes were fragile, got very hot, and burnt out often, these computers were also incredibly unreliable.

The first transistors were built in 1948 at the Bell Telephone laboratory. High quality transistors could perform the same functions as the vacuum tubes in a tiny fraction of the space with a tiny fraction of the energy. But early transistors were not of a high enough quality to replace vacuum tubes until 1954. In January of that year, Gordon Teal, working at Texas Instruments, developed a transistor that could be made through a relatively simple process, could be mass produced, and would perform the same functions as vacuum tubes. The first transistorized computer was the he Harwell CADET of 1955, built by the electronics division of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. Although transistor based computers were far cheaper and more reliable than vacuum tube computers, they were still not reliable enough to use for much of anything other than developing weapons and other military applications. The CADET was far more reliable than any vacuum tube computer, but its average working time between breakdowns was still only 80 minutes. This was time to do a lot of calculations.

One worker at Texas Instruments, Jack Kilby, realized that he could basically make a silicon-based transistor and basically etch a line that would cut it in half, creating two transistors. The two transistors could then be cut by another line to create four, eight, or more transistors. The transistors could then be connected together with wires that could be soldered onto the transistors or, later, printed with electricity conducting ink. He had created a new type of device, called an ‘integrated circuit.’ The first integrated circuit was ready for testing on 12 September 1958. In his patent application of 6 February 1959, Kilby described his new device as "a body of semiconductor material … wherein all the components of the electronic circuit are completely integrated." Texas instruments began making the integrated circuits for the United States military. For the next few years, virtually all integrated circuits produced were purchased by the United States military, with the largest use being for guidance systems for the missiles that carried nuclear bombs.

In 1964, Frank Wanlass demonstrated a chip he designed containing a then-incredible 120 transistors.

The military had a lot of uses for chips and ordered a lot of them. Many companies opened factories to build them. With (very expensive) precision machines, producers could cut finer and finer lines into and print more elaborate networks of wires onto the chips, creating chips with more and more transistors.

In April of 1974, the Intel corporation introduced the 8080 chip. This chip had 4,500 transistors on a single chip that was 6mm by 6 mm (about ¼ inch by ¼ inch). The etched lines that separated the transistors were a mere 3 microns thick. To put this into perspective, an atom of hydrogen is about 1 angstrom across. There are 10,000 angstroms in a micron so the line etched to separate the transistors in the chip was only 30,000 atoms across.

This was an incredible device. For once, the military was not first on board. The first 8080 computers were made by hobbyists as kits. In 1976, Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the first fully assembled computer available to purchase in heir garage in Sunnyvale Ca. This was the Apple 1.

Chips have gotten faster and more capable each year since they were first created. A computer ‘chip’ is basically a tiny piece of silicon that has been etched to turn it into an electrical circuit. The etching marks create individual transistors that are as small as the etchings can make them. Each transistor can do the same work as one of the vacuum tubes in the original UNIVAC. But modern chips now have transistors so tiny that a single chip can have billions of them. The largest as of 2018 is the Graphcore GC2 IPU with 23.6 billion transistors. The etched lines that separate the transistors are only 160 angstroms (the equivalent of 160 hydrogen atoms) across.

The ‘clock speed’ of a chip is the number of calculations it can make (the number of times it can totally reset any number of its transistors) per second. Most computer chips now have clock speeds of more than 2 GHZ, meaning more than 2 billion calculations per second. Multiply this by the billions of letters and numbers that can be processed in each calculation set, and you get chips that have truly incredible capabilities. You don’t have to guess about the capabilities of these devices. Get a smart phone. Many today can produce video at speeds of more than 240 frames per second with each frame having more than 8 million pixels, each of which may be any of more than 2 million different colors and shades. You can record this and play it back on a machine small enough to put into your pocket. You can then use the computer in the phone to edit it, add titles, change the language, change the colors, and send it anywhere in the world you want in a matter of seconds.

Machines Made By Machines

These chips are now designed and built almost entirely by machines. The pathways are too complex for the human mind to comprehend. The etchings are far too tiny for humans to hope to even see, with even the best microscopes. (A wavelength of light is 5,000 angstroms; it is not possible to see anything smaller than a wavelength of light, even with the best microscopes.)

Computer programs, the instruction sets that run computers are also built by machines. Programmers used languages which include instruction sets that themselves are made of complex instruction sets, each of which instructs transistors to hold a certain state of charge for a certain length of time, to allow a pathway to open or to close an open pathway.

As of 2018, computers with the basic capabilities that Turning surmised in his ‘heretical’ paper of 1936 are pretty close to reality. I get fooled sometimes. (I hate it when the phone rings and I have a conversation with what I think is a very concerned person and ultimately find out that it is just a computer that is programmed to respond to the things I say.) Machines will clearly be able to mimic all of these things closely enough that most people won’t be able to tell the difference between a human and a machine in remote exchanges.

The Stream of Activity in a Computer

The basic idea of a computer with what we now call 'artificial intelligence' goes back to Alan Turing’s 1936 paper. It involves a “stream’ activity. In his paper, the activity started with a type of symbols that loaded the initial operating system onto the computer. The computer would be ready to receive instructions. The tape would pass a read head that would read it. The reader would send the symbols to the processor that would decide what to do with them.

Sometimes, the symbols on the tape would tell the processor to read something from a different tape, a tape of what we may call ‘memory.’ There may be several different memories, including short-term memories and long-term memories. The processor will have the address of the tape it needs; it will tell the tape device to advance to the appropriate space and read what it is supposed to read.

Sometimes, the processor would want to remember something for the short run. For example, it may be doing a complex calculation and need some numbers for an intermediate step of the calculation. It will advance to a blank place on the tape and write the data, placing the address of the data on another part of the tape where it stores addresses. By writing, reading, calculating, rewriting, rereading, the computer can do extremely complex calculations.

On the first computers, the term ‘tape’ was literally tape. A long tape would be strung between two reels. The reels would spin to get to the right location. The head would read the information then spin the tape. It would write and spin, read and spin, write and spin, over and over. Because the tape was mechanical, it took a very long time to do complex calculations with these machines. Each time, the tape had to find the right spot for the read head.

Starting with the Apple II computer in 1979, the tape was replaced by something called a ‘floppy disk.’ This disk was basically a tape that was laid out in a spiral. The first floppy disks were 8 inches in diameter. The floppy disk system was much faster than the old tape systems because the tape didn’t have to advance back and forth over long distances anymore. The head could simply move in or out on the spiral. In time, people found out how to make the lines on the spiral smaller, allowing more data to be on a disk. But even the best floppy disks had very limited abilities to store data. The first floppy disks stored only 360 KB of data. Each KB was 1,000 ‘bytes,’ each of which was 8 ‘bits’ in size, so it essentially stored 2.8 million individual ‘bits’ of information, each of which was either a 1 or a 0. (It either was a ‘marked’ space or an ‘empty’ space.’) The best floppy disks increased this storage ability by a factor of 10.

The first ‘hard drives’ were basically sets of stacked floppy disks. These were placed inside a housing and permanently sealed to create a vacuum. Without any air resistance, the disks could spin extremely rapidly, allowing the data to be printed and read very quickly. These types of disks are now able to store more than 1 gigabyte, more than a billion times more data than the first floppy disks. As I write this, scientists are developing memory chips that can sore far more information in a smaller area.

The processor is a large network of transistors. Transistors are switches that can be left on or turned off and will hold this on or off position until signaled to change. This network may have millions or even billions of transistors on it. Each transistor network is broken down into sets of 8 transistors. (Note: this is for ‘8 bit computers.’ The first Apple and IBM computers were 8 bit computers. More recent computers have computers in sets of 16, 32, or even 64 computers, allowing far more complex calculations.) Each set of 8 transistors works together to render a letter or symbol. Each letter or symbol is represented by a certain setting of these 8 computers. For example, if you want the computer to remember the letter ‘a’ for example, one of the particular sets of transistors will be set to off-on-off-off-off-off-off-on. In computer language, ‘off’ is represented by the number ‘0’ and ‘on’ by the number ‘1.’ The setting for the letter ‘a’ then becomes 01000001, where ‘0’ represents a transistor that is set to ‘off’ and ‘1’ representing a transistor set to ‘on.’ If the 8 wire circuit is set to off, on, off, off, off, off, off, on, that circuit is set to hold the letter ‘a.’ If you start with a chip that has no electricity put on to it, and energize it properly, it will set the transistors to make the letter a.

If you want a letter ‘b' you would set the transistors to 01000010. Each letter has a different setting.

You may hook up a keyboard to the processor. You can press the letter ‘a’ and the keyboard will send signals that turn on the transistors in the right order to make the letter ‘a.’ Now, the processor is remembering something. As long as the electricity is on, the transistors will hold their ‘states.’ These transistors may then be wired to another set of transistors that are hooked up to an output device, like a computer screen. If you have them talk to each other, when you press the ‘a’ on the keyboard, the transistors will go into the state of ‘a’ and stay there. They will then ‘tell’ the transistors connected to the screen to illuminate the letter ‘a’ on the screen.

In early computers, most of the transistors were wired in a way that allows them to communicate with the ‘tape’ (the memory system). The tape tells them when to turn on and when to turn off. They can write to the tape. If they need something stored on the tape for a short time, they can put it into short-term memory; if they need it stored over the long run, they can put it into long-term memory. As computer chips got more and more transistors, short-term memory could go directly to networks of transistors that would store them there. This got rid of the need for mechanical devices to read and write, making the computer much, much faster.

The signals come at a fixed rate. This rate is called the ‘cock rate.’ A set of signals will go through the wires and then there will be a pause when the signals will ‘settle into’ their desired state. This basically means that the transistors that are supposed to be on will get to an ‘on’ state while the transistors that are off go into an ‘off’ state.

While the pause is happening, the electricity continues to flow through the machine. It is used to ‘hold’ the transistors in their intended state. If the electricity should ever go off, the transistor states will return to their preset unpowered state (some are set to be off without power, some on; those are the only two states possible).

Then another pulse goes through the computer resetting the transistors, millions of them at a time, in accordance with its programming. With billions of calculations being made each second, written to short term memory, read from short-term memory, modern computers can do a great many things very rapidly. When Turing wrote about a machine with artificial intelligence, he talked about an extreme idea: he claimed there would come a time when the machine would be able to provide feedback so ‘human like’ that humans interacting remotely would not be able to tell that they were interacting with a machine or a real human. Machines get more and more capable as complexity of the chips (basically, this means the number of transistors) increases, clock speeds increase, the amount of memory that the computers can access at random (called ‘random access memory’ or ‘RAM’) increases, and the complexity of the programs—the instruction sets—increase over time.

Today, you can push a button on your phone and ask the phone a question. The computer will be able to analyze the tones, pitch, inflection, and volume to determine what you said. It will then use a complex program to determine what sort of information would help you get what you want. It will then look for this information, searching enormous databases that may be on computer servers on the other side of the planet. It will find the best answer and present it, both in written text and by voice.

If you like the way the computer answered your question, you can press a button that basically tells the computer it did a good job; if not, you can press another button that says you didn’t like the answer. The computer goes over the differences in the algorithms that gave acceptable answers and those that gave bad answers. It then adjusts the algorithms to try to make answers better.

These computers are modern versions of Turing’s ‘learning machines.’ They learn how to provide better answers to questions.

If you interact with these computers regularly, you will get used to their ‘personalities.’ You will learn the way they answer questions and figure out ways to phrase your questions that will make them more likely to give you the answers that provide the help you wan. You will be making the same kinds of adjustments that you make when you are dealing with people from other cultures or something different about their way of life.

The computers that provide these answers have multiple redundant systems in place to prevent them from ever losing their electricity. If they do lose their electricity, even for a microsecond, they will lose their ability to do anything. They will become nothing but chips of silicon (dirt). They will have to be reprogrammed with an operating system before they can work again. To prevent this, redundant power systems provide back up power if the main power system goes out. If the backup goes out, another backup kicks in. The power never goes out.

If a processor starts to act up, a computer will catch the error and switch the operations to another processor without any interruption. The memories are backed up many different places. If a memory bank should fail, another has the same information and can take over. If you wake up in the middle of the night and want to know the time, you can ask your computer for the time. It will tell you. You can ask about the weather, the name of the president of France, the name of his wife and all his girlfriends. You can get pictures of his girlfriends and compare them. You can play chess or poker with your computer, you can have it stream a video for you, you can ask it to monitor your heart rate and vital signs and pick a song that is appropriate to these things.

What happens if the power goes out?

If this happens, all of the computer chips become nothing but pieces of rock again. They aren’t capable of doing anything.

They are the machine equivalent of ‘dead.’

The Stream of Consciousness/Activity in a Living Thing

Your brain and nervous system run on electricity. If you go to the doctor with certain ailments, you will be hooked up to machines that read the electrical impulses to determine if there might be some problems in the switches or circuits that send the signals to our muscles, organs, or parts of your brain. If doctors find that these circuits are functioning normally and sending the right signals, but some muscle, organ, or brain component is not functioning correctly, the doctors know that the problem is in the component itself. If the signals are bad, the doctors might try to repair the part of the nervous system or brain that sends the signals; if this is impossible, they may implant a device to send the correct signals to the affected organ. For a simple example, sometimes the signals that go to the heart don’t work right and the heart beats too fast or too slow. Doctors can fix this by implanting a pacemaker.

The electricity is on from the moment of your conception. Throughout the life of all living things, electricity will be produced by adenosine triphosphate (ATP). ATP breaks down into ADP (adenosine diphosphate, with one phosphate group broken off) producing roughly 10 watt hours of electricity per pound of ATP reduced. Each cell contains mitochondria; these are the factories that make ATP. They use glucose, water, and oxygen to provide the energy that reattaches the phosphate group to the adenosine base. Some cells don’t do a lot of work or don’t live very long, so they don’t need a lot of mitochondria. Sperm are in this category; they have only about 50 to 100 mitochondria per cell. The egg will need a LOT of energy to grow into a person, so it will have a great deal more mitochondria, normally between 100,000 and 250,000 per egg. The ATP produces its energy in pulses, just like the computer. Each pulse of electricity goes into a neuron. The neuron is a kind of processor, like the processor of a computer. You wouldn’t be able to compare a neuron to a transistor because a transistor only has three connections. A typical neuron has about 100,000 connections to other cells. Most of these connections go to other neurons. Some go to ‘input devices’ like the optic nerve, the nerves that we use to understand touch, sound, or our other senses. Some go to ‘output devices,’ including muscles, telling these devices what to do.

By contrast, the most complex computer processors as of this writing (2018) have only about 2,000 connections. In machines with multiple processors, most of these connections go to other processors; the rest go either to input or output devices. So far, the largest multiple processor machines have 18 processors connected. The human nervous system has about 100 billion neurons.

The two types of devices share a very important characteristic: they need electricity to run. If the electricity shuts off, even for a second, both devices lose their memory settings and become nothing but a piece of non-living matter.

Just as computer designers have placed a great emphasis on making sure the computers won’t lose their electricity, whoever or whatever designed living things on Earth went to elaborate lengths to make sure the electricity would never stop.

As noted above, the electricity comes from the breakdown of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. ATP is a ‘spine’ of adenine, hooked up to three phosphate groups in a molecule that looks like the capital letter ‘E.’ You could think of this E as having each of its three arms spring loaded: pull off the arm, and the spring does work. In this case, you could think of the spring having a magnet on it and running the magnet through a coil of wire, to generate a spark. The spark is a ‘pulse’ of the nerve cell, one unit of calculation. The body goes to elaborate lengths to make sure that there is always a lot of ATP, by making it constantly. But what if there isn’t enough at a given time? The body absolutely has to have electricity so it has an emergency way to get more: it can break off another of the phosphate groups, to get the same amount of electricity it got breaking off the first group. It is very, very, very rare that this happens, but if necessary, it can happen and your body can get electricity.

What if there is an incredible need for electricity, one so vast that the body even runs out of ADP? If this happens, you are in a dire situation, perhaps fighting a wild animal that will kill you if you lose, perhaps running for your life, or perhaps having a heart attack. Your body needs more electricity than it can get from the existing ATP or ADP. In an absolute emergency it can break off the third arm and get more electricity. This is so rare that it will never happen to most of us. The reason is that the body is making more ATP all the time. Most ATP is made by mitochondria within the cell. The cell starts with glucose (pushed in from the bloodstream after you have eaten), oxygen (from hemoglobin brought in by the blood) and water (which you drink and get from your food and is 55% of your blood). Mitochondria use a super-efficient mechanism called the ‘Krebs cycle’ to convert glucose, water, and oxygen into pure energy; they use this energy to ‘reload’ the phosphate groups back onto the adenosine backbone.

What if there isn’t enough glucose?

This can happen at certain times. Your body always has a ‘blood glucose level.’ (Talk to your doctor to find out yours; it is measured every time you have a physical or any other blood work.) If it falls too low, your body will react very quickly. First, it will send signals to you that will tell you that you are hungry. You will want to eat. If your blood sugar is just a little low, you will just be a little hungry. You may only be interested in eating if you can get specific foods, like a hamburger or ice cream. If the sugar level keeps getting lower, you won’t be as picky. You will be able to willing to eat pretty much anything you recognize as food. If you don’t eat for many days, you will start to wonder if your body can metabolize things you don’t normally eat, like insect eggs, sour fruit, or rats. In addition to sending signals to you to eat, it will start to conserve energy. It will make you feel very, very tired. Every step you take will cause your muscles to ache and require immense effort. You won’t want to move.

If your body tells you to eat but you don’t, your body will start to eat itself. It will start to break down the easy-to-metabolize fats in the liver and inside the muscles. If you have plenty of stored fat, your body can last many days eating these reserves. But eventually you will run out. When you run out of the easy-to-metabolize fats, it will start to work on the proteins of the muscles themselves. The proteins can be converted directly into ATP. The process is highly inefficient and you don’t get nearly as much ATP from a pound of muscle tissue you lose than you would get from a pound of glucose. But your body is desperate. It needs electricity and it makes its electricity from the sugars, proteins, and fats that you eat or that are stored in your body. In many situations, people can live for more than a month with no significant intake of food. But there will come a time when your body has nothing left to eat except vital organs. If it can only get electricity to run the brain by metabolizing these essentials, it will start to turn them into ATP so the electrical processes will not shut down. By the time you get to this stage, your body will be so weak and tired it will only allow you to stay awake for short periods of time; your body allows you this in the hope that, during one of these times, you will find food. But if you don’t find food, there will come a time when you go to sleep and your body doesn’t have enough ATP to power the parts of your brain responsible for consciousness. You will never wake up. A few hours to a few days of this and a key part of your body, the heart perhaps, the lungs, or the spinal cord signals that run the heart or lungs, will stop functioning. The mitochondria will try to the very last to make ATP. But there will be no food for energy. The final molecules of ATP will become ADP and then AMP. Then the electricity will shut down.

When the electricity shuts down in your nervous system, you will no longer be a living thing. You will be mostly calcium (bones) and water, with a few proteins and fats that no longer function to do anything at all. Your body will be just as lifeless as the chunk of rock (silicon) in a computer chip, when its electricity signals stop. When the constant electricity that had been holding the neurons in their desired states ends, your brain will go from ‘living’ to ‘dead.’

The Stream Of Consciousness

If you wanted to make a machine that was as close as possible to a human, so close it would be able to fool most humans into thinking it was a human, what would you have to provide that 21^st century computers lack?

Human minds have something that has been called various names from a ‘homunculus’ (the ‘little man in your head,’) to ‘consciousness’ to a ‘soul.’ In a practical sense, this is like a thread that may be thought of as a main thread in a story. Many signals come into this thread: you see things, you hear them, you feel them, and you otherwise interact with them through a network of senses that all appear to be in perfect synchrony. There is something outside of you that you may call ‘reality’ that generates the sights, sounds, smells, and other feelings. There are sensory input devices that determine ‘what is happening’ in reality and transmit these signals to a part of your mind that puts them together to create a picture of reality.

Picturing, hearing, and otherwise sensing reality is an important part of what it means to be human, but it is not the critical thing. Other animals seem to have the same or, in some cases, even better abilities to sense and interpret reality. (Dogs have much better senses of smell than humans; eagles have sharper vision, dolphins and bats have much better hearing, for a few examples.) Machines can shoot constant video, determine what is in their field of view, and identify specific individuals by their appearance, sound, or other stimuli. This ability is, by itself, not enough to convince a person that another being or machine might possibly be a human.

For a moment, let’s leave the issue of what a machine might be able to do aside, and consider what would be needed for a person to believe another living thing was a human. Clearly, the ability to speak would be a big help. If the other being could speak in a way that indicated she was able to understand abstract concepts, to visualize things that only existed conceptually, and to engage in complex abstract reasoning, you would probably be strongly inclined to think the being was a human. But the ability to speak in a certain language wouldn’t be necessary. A great many people who don’t speak the same language as you are real people and could easily convince you they are human, without any need to first learn to speak and understand enough of your language to communicate abstract concepts.

Say that you are kidnapped and drugged; while you are unconscious, you are moved to a part of the planet thousands of miles from your home, where no one speaks any language you understand. When you wake, you will easily be able to tell which of the beings around you are human, without having to understand the meaning of the words they say. If you escape, you may look for people who are not likely to be sympathetic to the kidnappers for assistance. If you find people not aligned with the kidnappers and who appear to be empathetic to the plight of another human in need, you will be able to make yourself understood pretty quickly. You can find ways to use signs to indicate that you are hungry, you are thirsty, you are sleepy, or you need to hygiene facilities. You will probably not have to try to figure out how to tell them that you are from a place far away—they will probably be able to tell this by the way you look and act—but you can find ways to let them know that you need help and show them how they might be able to help you. You will be able to tell, without any common language, that they are human and they will be able to tell that you are human.

If you are of the proper age and disposition for mating, you may be attracted to someone of the opposite sex and, given time and the right circumstances, even have a loving relationship. You may not be able to describe in scientific terms what it is about the other beings that convince you they are humans, but you will be able to know the difference.

One of the key features you might look for would besomething you might call a ‘stream of consciousness.’ Non-human animals would probably only focus on you for a brief time, perhaps to determine if you might be a predator and they should run, or that you might be food and they should consider attacking, or to determine that you are of no interest to them and they can ignore you. Once their attention was fixed either on running away, attacking, or ignoring you, you would not expect any kind of reason or entreaties to treat you differently. A human, however, would do something you might call ‘trying to figure you out.’ She might look at you and then go back to her peers, and chatter something to them. Then come back and look at you in more detail, perhaps trying to touch you or get you to understand some verbal signals. Then she might to back to her peers and verbalize something with them again, then come back to you, and do this over and over. You may find that certain gestures you make lead to reactions you interpret as fear or anger. You can go to great lengths to avoid these gestures. You may find certain gestures seem to invite her to continue her investigation and perhaps even make her smile. You can pattern your behavior to her reactions.

You will see that she is doing the same thing.

You are reacting, she is reacting.

You will be able to determine by her actions that she has a memory.

When she is trying to figure you out, she may repeat the same test a few times until she is satisfied she knows the answer, but she won’t keep trying the same thing over and over expecting you to react differently. Once she knows how you act in one situation, she will expand her tests to get more information about you. You will not only be able to tell that she has a memory, you will be able to tell that she can process this memory over time. If you listen to her vocalizations long enough, you will be able to tell certain patterns. You may hear her peers refer to her with a certain vocalization and you may see her react whenever this specific sound is uttered. You may think that this might be her name and you may try to mimic it, to let her know that you understand the concept of a ‘name.’ If she reacts in a way that indicates that she understands you are trying to call her by name, you may then try to teach her your name.

You will recognize that she is a human-like being, not a sub-human animal, by recognizing a kind of thread of behavior, thought, speech, and communication that conforms to a ‘human like’ pattern. If you watch her long enough, you will soon start to see expressions or patterns of movement that indicate what we humans call ‘emotions.’ You can tell how she is feeling. You will be able to tell that certain things you do make her act in ways that indicate she is feeling something different. You will see that there is some kind of logical connection between the things that are going on around her and her behavior, as an indication of her feelings. You will realize that imagines of reality are going into her, through her senses; she then processes them in a logical way, almost as if you, an image in her sensory range, is a kind of movie to her, that the movie of ‘you’ is interacting with the movie of ‘her and her peers’ and ‘the environment around her.’ You will recognize this particular way of interacting with reality, as if it is a movie, from your own experience. You will think that a being that interacts with reality the same general way that you do might be the same sort of being as you are.

You may find certain things she does strange, as they aren’t the things you are used to seeing other people do. For example, when Columbus landed on the Caribbean island of Haiti in November of 1493, he clearly recognized the inhabitants of Haiti as people and they clearly recognized the Spaniards as people. They both had complex languages; both understood sign language enough to trade, both felt sexual attraction between the opposite sex (for heterosexuals) and attractive people of the same sex (for homosexuals). But the natives of Haiti had certain features that Columbus felt were extremely strange.

For example, they generally went around naked and had no shame for their bodies. Almost certainly, the natives thought it was extremely strange that the newcomers felt they had to hide their bodies under many layers, even though they were clearly uncomfortable in the stifling tropical heat. The natives had certain social features that were extremely strange to the newcomers. For example, Columbus was surprised by the lack of property, the lack of ownership, and the general idea of sharing and equality among the natives; the natives were shocked that the majority of the Spaniards were subservient and basically acted as if they were slaves to a tiny minority that were their masters; the majority (which could have easily overwhelmed the minority that controlled them and done as they pleased with them) accepted certain people as their masters, did whatever they were told, and cowered in fear at the slightest hint of disapproval by their masters and rulers.

The two groups had different customs and social behaviors. But neither group appears to have had any doubt that the members of the other group were true human beings.

They could tell.

What if you had way to make machines that looked like living beings and you wanted to make them so realistic they could fool a group of people into believing they were true human-like beings. In other words, what if you wanted the people to think of the machines the same way that Columbus thought of the natives of America and the same way they thought of Columbus and his men: they had different cultures but they were convinced the others were true humans? What kind of characteristics would you give these machines? Assume, for this analysis, that you have all processing abilities of the leaders of the servers of Apple computer, Google, Facebook, and all artificial intelligence (AI) software that has been created so far in the past. You are trying to find the key features of speech, behavior, and reactions that will cause the observers to conclude that the human appearing machines they are interacting with really are humans. Where would you focus your attention?

It seems pretty clear to me that they would need to have something that was or at least appeared to be a stream of consciousness. They act in ways that make them appear that they have the ‘movie of existence’ playing in their minds. Observers would see that these AI machines ‘had lives’ before the came into contact with the observers. The AI machines would have some sort of social structure that would be logical and make sense. They would act in such a way that the observers would accept that they had been interacting with each other for a very long time, found behavior patterns that helped both the individuals and groups meet their needs, and practiced these behaviors.

This, by itself, wouldn’t be enough: groups of dogs clearly have social hierarchies and behave consistently with learning, but they are not humans. You would need more. You would need to get the observers to believe that the AI machines were in control of their own thoughts. Other, non-human, animals may well have something that we would think of as a ‘stream of consciousness.’ Many animals certainly appear to be thinking about things and exhibit behavior that indicates that they are thinking about certain things. (You can tell if a dog is thinking about biting you by her behavior. Many people have found out the hard way that this is, indeed, what the dog was thinking about, when they get bitten.) But we will be able to tell by the behavior that the other animals have an extremely limited behavioral repertoire. They are clearly not in conscious control of the way they will be acting over time, able to manipulate their behavior to cause the ‘movie’ of their existence play out in a way that benefits them.

This is what you will need. If you can generate this kind of behavior, you will have made an artificial intelligence machine that could fool people into thinking it is a true human.

Are We Androids?

What if we did send a package to another world?

It might contain DNA that was modified so that it would eventually give the atmosphere of the destination planet enough oxygen to support the extremely efficient Krebs cycle, as happened with cyanobacteria here on Earth. This first ‘terraforming’ being would be able to use the light of the planet’s sun to do this work, just as the cyanobacteria use the sun’s energy to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and replace it with oxygen. It might contain DNA for several different complex life forms that would take advantage of the oxygen. We almost certainly couldn’t and wouldn’t even want to send fully formed humans to the other world. Even with a bootstrap that would allow activation and birth at a certain point, they almost certainly wouldn’t make it. We would want to send far simpler life forms to the other world and then evolution select the best ones for survival. Evolution would make sure that the beings were perfectly adapted to the realities of life on their world: those that were not well adapted would be selected for extinction while those that were would be selected for survival.

We could send an operating system that would be able to accommodate both the primitive starting beings and the more complex ones to follow. The beings would develop physical tools like eyes, ears, and other sensory organs. The operating system would accommodate them, allowing them to use these ‘peripheral devices’ as they were developed. Eventually, one of the species of beings would develop some processing center in their brains that would allow them to direct their thoughts. The members of this species would become self aware. They would gain the same basic abilities as humans have here on Earth. The operating system would be designed to accommodate this advance. Beings with this ability could use it to help them survive, while lesser beings and those without this ability would not be able to compete and perish.

The operating system would be designed to accommodate these thought processes. We, here on Earth, would have either put this operating system together from scratch or adapted it from the operating system that works for us. The beings would have their own will and their own ability to direct their thoughts, but this will and this ability would have been designed and worked out by engineers here on Earth.

What kinds of beings would these be? Would they be ‘androids' or would they be 'life?’

I don’t have any idea how to tell. If you have a test that would answer this definitively, let me know.

And what of us?

What if the operating system for simple multi-cellular sexually reproducing beings was sent here to this world, on a craft from another world, some 3.58 billion years ago? These beings take advantage of oxygen for their life processes and could not survive until oxygen levels got up to their current 21% about 541 million years ago. (The pre-industrial oxygen level was about 2%. It is declining as we burn carbon fuels and the oxygen gets incorporated with carbon to form carbon dioxide; this carbon dioxide replaces the existing oxygen. You can find charts showing the oxygen’s very clear decline on the Scripps Oxygen study at http://scrippso2.ucsd.edu/). When the oxygen levels got high enough, some sort of mechanism was triggered to apply the bootstrap to these primitive sexually reproducing multi-cellular beings. The beings gained capabilities. Their operating system was able to accommodate their greater capabilities. About 69 million years ago, the evolved into the family that we call ‘primates,’ the family that includes humans. About 3.4 million years ago, they evolved a primitive frontal cortex and the operating system connected it to the rest of their brains. They could think on a conscious level. They could make complex tools. They could communicate in unique ways, with vocalizations that were themselves tools; each utterance meant something and worked as part of a complex message that could communicate complex ideas. They gained the ability to speak, to think, to talk about abstract issues like the meaning of life.

What if the ones who put this entire thing together had a purpose for us? What if they highlighted the genetic instructions that we would need to modify the DNA—the CRISPR sequence—so that, if we wanted, we could do the same thing they had done, and send life even further into the universe than they sent it? What if they realized that by the time we gained the ability to understand the message in the DNA, we would also already have or be close to developing the ability to send packages to other worlds ourselves?

If these things happened, what would this tell us about the reason we are here?

Interstellar space is vast. Science fiction books and other entertainments gloss over the distance by a simple literary device: They make things up. They say that, somehow, the ‘light barrier’ has been broken and we can travel faster than light. But Einstein’s formulas show us that it even if we could apply all of the energy in the universe to try to accelerate even the tiniest object (say an electron) to the speed of light, we would not succeed.

In fact, other limits would kick in long before a craft got close to the speed of light. The problem involves collisions. At speeds more than just a small fraction of the speed of light; the collisions will have incredible power. For example, if an object is traveling at 75% the speed of light and it hits another object that is 0.001 KG (1/1,000^th of a KG, or 1 grams), the collision will generate a force of 758 TJ (terrajoules) of energy. For comparison, the Hiroshima bomb generated energy of about 67 TJ. This means that at this speed, the collision would generate 11 times more energy than the bomb. To survive, the vessel would have to be built to be capable of surviving this collision.

If the vessel is moving more slowly, the collision wouldn't be as dangerous, but it would still be more than most materials could withstand. At a speed of 20% of the speed of light, the same collision would generate about 36 TJ of energy, about 1/20^th as much as the bomb. This is still a lot of energy.

To translate it into something that has energy levels that are easier to imagine and compare, let’s deal with energy in terms of 1 KG TNT equivalent. 4,184 KJ (kilojoules of energy). If the craft hit a 1 gram object at 20% of the speed of light, the collision would have a force equal to about 430 kg of TNT. We can calculate the amount of energy for a collision with a smaller object by dividing the weight. For example, if the craft hit an object with a mass of 1 mg (1/1000 of a gram), the collision would have a force of 430 grams of TNT, or roughly 1 pound of TNT. If the craft hit an a speck of dust that weighed 1 mg, it would have the impact force as a pound of TNT.

How fast could a group of intelligent beings reasonably send an object from one star system to another? If we accept that the laws of physics are as currently accepted, they wouldn’t be able to send it a significant percentage of the speed of light. It would have to be much slower. For reference, fastest speed so far of a human built craft is 17 KM per second; Voyager 1 is reaching this speed as it heads out of the solar system into space. This works out to 0.0057% (57/1000ths of 1%). We might expect that the speed of the craft would have to be somewhere between these two speeds.

How long would it take?

There are 512 star systems within 100 light years of the solar system and roughly 1.73 million star systems within 500 light years. For the sake of example, let’s say that the star system sending life is 500 light years away. At the faster speed, 1/5^th of the speed of light, it would take 2,500 years to get from the other star system to the solar system where we live. At the slower speed—a speed we know we could manage, because we have sent craft traveling at that speed—it would take 8.8 million years.

Is this a lot?

It depends on your perspective.

Bear in mind that it took more than 3 billion years for the cyanobacteria to produce the atmosphere the Earth now has, and make it able to support advanced life. In terms of ‘the length of time of an average science fiction movie,’ or even ‘the length of a human lifetime, 8.8 million years is a very long time. Even 2,500 years is a long time. But if we compare it to the 3 billion years it would take to terraform the Earth, even the long figure is not very long. It seems logical that if a group of beings with intelligence wanted to send life to other worlds, and had accepted a time frame of 3 billion + years for the generation of the oxygen atmosphere, a few more million years wouldn’t make much difference.

We KNOW that the speeds of 17 km per second are achievable because we have sent craft traveling at this speed. Almost certainly, much higher speeds are achievable. As long as we are patient, or the beings sending the craft are patient, they would do it.

Could We Do It?

Humans don’t yet have the technology to manufacture DNA from nothing.

We can make DNA, however: CRISPR is a tool that whoever or whatever beings or processes created DNA included with the package. It allows us to alter DNA. Although the CRISPR gene sequence was only discovered very recently, and scientists haven’t yet worked out the tools to use this edit genes to exact specifications, scientists have done enough tests to confirm that it has the capability to and will eventually allow us to create genetic material that matches whatever specifications we work out.

We can make DNA.

If we wanted to send the raw materials needed for life to another world, we would be able to do so.

The Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched September 5, 1977. It weighs 825 KG (1,820 pounds).

It is currently traveling through interstellar space at a speed of 17 km/second. It will keep going through interstellar space at this speed until its speed is altered by the effects of gravity or some other force. If its speed is not altered, it will travel 500 light years in 8.8 million years.

We know it is possible to send a craft that weighs 825 KG to one of the 1.73 million star systems that is within 500 light years of Earth; with the technology we have available now. In fact, we could do this with the technology that we had in 1977 (actually earlier; the craft was built before 1977).

If we were sending genetic material to a planet that we know will have a carbon dioxide atmosphere that can be turned into an oxygen atmosphere, we wouldn’t even have to change anything in the DNA that exists on this world. We could send some cyanobacteria. We could send single-celled beings that reproduce asexually. We could send the raw materials for beings that reproduce sexually.

If we wanted to send genetic material to a world circling another world, we could do this.

The Bootstrap Problem

We could send genetic material to another world in another star system. We would not be able to send it in a living state.

Merely ‘being alive’ requires energy.

All living things on Earth require electricity to be provided to them continuously maintain life. If the electricity ever shuts off, even for a microsecond, the beings are no longer living beings. They are debris. All Earth life forms get their electricity from the same source: the breakdown of ATP into ADP. If the 'hardware’ (the living things) that is sent to Earth has been rendered into a ‘living' condition, and put on the craft for transport, it will require constant energy to keep it ‘alive’ until it gets to its destination. Shut down the energy, and the life ends and the operating system is lost. It is no longer life, it is just a bunch of space junk.

Some DNA-based life forms use very little energy. But they all require some. Some can go years without eating. They have mechanisms that allow them to break down food they have eaten in the past and turn it into glucose. This glucose then goes through the Krebs cycle (for aerobic life forms) or the far less efficient anaerobic process to create ATP. Most organisms are able to store enough ATP to allow them to continue to function for some time, even if they have no new ATP being manufactured. But even at the lowest practical power consumption levels—a state of deep hibernation—these beings will require many pounds of glucose or ATP per year to survive. A voyage of millions of years, or even thousands of years, with a living being would not be possible with DNA-based life forms as we see them on Earth. They could not be shipped in a living state.

Using the CRISPR and other tools, we may be able to modify genes into an embryonic state, what we may call 'life ready' genetic material, ready to load the operating system (essentially insert the spark of life) into the material and turn it into living material. You may consider a ‘life ready’ genetic material to be similar to an ‘operating system ready’ computer. The hardware is all there, assembled, and configured. The power system is either integrated into the machine or attached and ready. There is a ‘bootstrap’ that has changed the power state of the computer chips to make the transistors ready to receive their first instructions from the operating system. The operating system is in place and ready to load.

We don’t really know much about how the ‘operating system’ for living things gets into them.

Before conception, the human egg is just genetic material. It has the potential to turn into a living being, able to breathe and reproduce, but it is not a living being by itself. If it is not fertilized, the body gets rid of it; it is considered trash and removed.

Conception doesn’t really provide everything the person will need: a fertilized egg is still unable to survive on its own or do anything without help from the mother’s body. We can easily fertilize eggs outside of the body. But then they have to be put back into the mother’s body for the next nine months. Merely giving them nourishment isn’t enough. The mother provides a great many things for the growing living thing, turning it first into a zygote, then into an embryo, then into a baby. At some point during the later part of this nine-month period, the operating system somehow gets loaded into the growing mass of genetic material.

By the time if birth, the instruction set is in place. The baby can leave its mother and can survive (with care of course) without any physical connection to its mother.

The ‘bootstrap’ is the something that somehow causes the set of operating instructions to be loaded onto the genetic material, turning it into something that performs the complex functions of DNA-based life.

A bootstrap would be needed to send life to another world because of the vast distances. If the craft containing the life was sent from one of the more than 1.25 million star systems within 500 light years, it might take thousands or even millions of years to get there. If it had to come from farther away, it may have been in transit for more than a billion years before it arrived. Clearly, it could not be shipped alive. It would require a bootstrap.

What might this bootstrap look like?

As we learn more about DNA, we can start to see that a great deal of engineering went into this molecule and the life based on it. We humans are still very early in our understanding of DNA. We will probably not be able to understand even the basics for a long time. But if we understand what is needed to send life to another world, we will know what to look for. Then, when we see something that looks like what we are looking for, we will recognize it.

What if you found a strand of DNA that was surrounded by a lighted marquee, flashing with signs that say ‘look at me!!, look at me!!’ What would you think of this? In the late 1990s, several researchers working independently found some DNA sequences that seemed to them almost as if they were intentionally highlighted. These sequences were highly unusual.

They had a long sequence of the standard letters of DNA but these letters were interspaced. In other words, they had a blank space between each of the letters. The great majority of DNA has letter after letter, with only an occasional space between the letters. These unusual sequences had spaces between each letter. This set these sequences apart.

It would be as if I put a hyphen between every letter in a sequence of words of the book. For example, if I spelled out the title of this book as t-h-e-m-e-a-n-i-n-g-o-f-l-i-f-e. This stands out. This ‘interspaced’ mechanism made researchers look at certain sequences of DNA. When they looked closely, they found something even more strange. These sequences were ‘repeated palindromes.’ A ‘repeated palindrome’ is a set of letters that goes foreword and then repeats; only going backward. Here is what one would look like, using the title of this book as a sample: The palindrome for themeaningoflife is efilfognineameht (the same letters, backward). The interspaced palindromic repeat would be themeaningoflifeefilfognineameht. Adding the spacing you get t-h-e-m-e-a-n-i-n-g-o-f-l-i-f-e-e-f-i-l-f-o-g-n-i-n-e-a-m-e-h-t.

If you step back from the page and look at the text from a distance, as would researchers looking at the letters in a DNA sequence, you would see how this catches the eye. You would even be more likely to notice it if you had looked at millions of pages that had only rare spaces and these at irregular intervals, with no palindromes, and suddenly saw several full pages with nothing but clusters of interspaced letters. Then, if you look at them closely enough to see that they were clusters of interspaced repeated palindromes (something you would never expect to see occur by chance, even once, let alone repeated over and over) you would realize there is something special about these sections of DNA. They aren’t random. There is some reason behind them.

Gene Editing

In 2000 a team at the University of Alicante in Spain led by Francisco Mojica named these DNA sections ‘Clustered Regularly Interspaced Palindromic Repeats or CRISPR. Researchers had good reason to look closely at the CRISPR sections. They stood out. When they first saw these things, they wondered if they meant something. It was worth a look.

They eventually found that the repeated palindromes were not random letters. They were each codes for certain sections of DNA in microbes that have the potential to harm DNA. Each palindrome was the name of an enemy of DNA. They found that if they put the CRISPR DNA in with its enemy, the CRISPR would go to the section of the DNA indicated by the palindrome, cut out the section represented by the palindrome. It would then replace that section of removed DNA with the codes for another section in a different palindrome. Normally, this would kill the enemy microbe; it couldn’t continue to survive without the section of DNA that had been removed and replaced. The enemy died. The CRISPR was an attack molecule. But it wasn’t just any attack molecule. It was adaptive.

This meant that if the DNA found a new enemy, it could edit the sequence in the palindromic repeats to match the name of this new enemy. It could also adapt the replacement DNA. This means it could do more than just attack the DNA of an enemy. It could be used to repair DNA. It could also be used to modify DNA. This ‘CRISPR’ was an amazing discovery. Scientists quickly discovered that they could easily and quickly modify the palindromic sequences themselves. This meant that they could alter DNA.

The best analogy people have been able to come up with for the function of the CRISPR is the ‘cut and replace’ function in a word processor. Say you write a long text and you put in a phrase several times that you later find you don’t like. You want to replace it with a different phrase. You can go to the ‘cut and replace’ function in the word processor, type in the phrase you want removed, type in the new phrase you want, and press enter. The computer will find every instance of that phrase in the text and replace it with the desired phrase. This is what CRISPR does. It cuts out a gene sequence that is undesired and replaces it with something that is desired.

What Does It Matter?

Imagine you are on a world with highly advanced sciences. Your people are going to send ‘life’ to other worlds. Your people haven’t found a way to overcome the limits of the speed of light and the laws of inertia: you can’t send anything faster than the speed of light and will require immense amounts of energy to send anything at even very high speeds.

The less matter you need to send, the less energy you need to get it heading to the other world. Since the distances between stars are vast, and you will want to send life to many different star systems, you will want a ‘life package’ that is small and light as possible.

You have put together a little package. It contains DNA for the simplest life form, the prokaryote that will be needed to generate the oxygen for the more complex life forms. It contains the DNA for the more complex life forms, the life form the eukaryote. It contains the ‘operating system’—the ‘software’—that will turn both of these DNA molecules into living things, tell them how to get energy and tell them how to reproduce.

The cyanobacteria will reproduce asexually. Each parent will basically split into two new organisms that are identical to the original. They will not evolve because they will all be the same. The cyanobacteria’s main function will be to create the conditions needed for the complex life forms to exist. These complex life forms need atmospheric oxygen to metabolize sugar (turn it into the ATP that will produce the electricity needed to operate the life forms). Oxygen is highly reactive and bonds with almost anything. If there is silicon on the planet where you are sending the life, or iron, or aluminum, you will not find any free oxygen: it will be bound with the silicon, iron, or aluminum.

However, if the atmosphere of the planet has carbon dioxide—which is an extremely stable molecule and doesn’t really bond with anything—you can get all of the oxygen you need from the carbon dioxide. The prokaryotes will use photosynthesis to split the carbon from the oxygen. The carbon will become the skeleton of the sugars, proteins, and fats of their body; it will be an integral part of the prokaryotes. When they die, their carbon-filled bodies will sink to the bottom of any bodies of water where they live and get covered by silt. Over the course of time, the bodies of the prokaryotes will fossilize and become coal, oil, or natural gas, depending on the conditions where they end up. The oxygen that was once a part of the carbon dioxide will go into the atmosphere and build up there.

After enough time, the atmosphere will have enough oxygen to support the more complex life forms. Some kind of trigger will take them out of hibernation, and they will begin to reproduce. The more complex organisms, called ‘eukaryotes,’ will reproduce sexually.

This will lead to huge variations in the genetic codes of the offspring. The offspring that have variations that give them advantages will have greater abilities to get food and live long enough to have offspring of their own. Their DNA lines will continue while the DNA lines of less capable offspring will die out. As time passes, the branches of the tree of life will split, with the intermediate sections disappearing to lead to more and more species, each of which has a different set of advantages and needs. Throughout all of this, the capabilities of the most capable beings will increase.

Why CRISPR?

As you design this DNA, you think that, one day, beings with the ability to think on a conscious level will evolve on the worlds you are seeding. These beings will eventually gain the ability to read the letters in the DNA. DNA overlays three codes, one on top of the other. I have gone over the codes in other parts of this book, but I want to repeat the discussions here for a kind of refresher:

The First Code

The first code is the reproduction code. There are four letters in the reproduction code: ATGC. The letters ATGC stand for four amino acids, adenine (A), thiamine (T) guanine (G), and cytosine (C). Each link of the DNA—meaning from each ‘spine’ to the middle of the ‘rung’ of the ladder’—is one of these four letters. The letters form into ‘base pairs’ with one of the letters (say ‘A’) being on the one of the spines of the double helix and the other (say ‘T’) being on the opposite spine. Each base pair makes up one of the ‘rungs’ of the ‘ladder.’ The letters don’t bond in a random way; they can only bond with their ‘compliment.’ A and T are compliments and G and C are compliments.

A always bonds with T.

T always bonds with A

G always bonds with C

C always bonds with G.

If you get the sequence: ATGC on one spine, you will have the sequence TACG on the other spine. There is one and only one match for each of the four letters. This system allows the DNA to make perfect copies of itself. Here is how this works:

It splits down the middle. This leaves two half ladders with sequences of letters. A special and very complex protein called a ‘ribosome’ acts like a worker. It goes down the letters of one spine, one at a time, and matches each letter with its compliment. After this is done, the ‘rungs’ on the ladder are back as they were in the original molecule. Other proteins rebuild the spine to create a new DNA molecule that is identical to the original. Other ribosomes and proteins do these same things to the other ‘half ladder,’ creating a second copy that is also identical to the original.

The total length of the DNA in humans is about 3 billion links. The ribosomes work very fast; they match 2.5 million letters per second, rebuilding 2.5 million ‘rungs’ of the ladder, allowing them to complete the rebuilding of the entire 3 billion link chain—meaning to reproduce DNA, starting with one molecule and ending with 2 molecules—in about 20 minutes.

Since the ribosomes are working at this fantastic speed, they sometimes make mistakes. These mistakes are exceedingly rare, but they do happen. After the ribosomes are through, other protein ‘workers’ come along that we may think of as ‘building inspectors.’ This inspectors look for mistakes in matching the letters. If they find mistakes, they bring in other worker proteins to cut out the wrong letter and replace it with the correct letter. After this process is finished, the reproduction is perfect, with every letter in the exact right place. The two new DNA molecules are both exactly the same as the original molecule, with every single one of the 3 billion letters in the exact same place. In fact, the copy is so perfect that every one of the atoms in the copy DNA are in the exact same position in relation to all of the other atoms as the original. The copy mechanism is amazingly precise. The first code in DNA is what makes this precise copy process work.

The Second Code

Each 3 letters forms a ‘codon’ or ‘triplet.’ There are 64 possible triplets. You could think of these triplets as letters in an alphabet. If you read down from the top of the DNA, the first triplet is the first letter. If you go down to the next triplet, you get the second letter of the coded message. You can go down through all the triplets, one at a time, and get letter after letter. There are a total of one billion triplets, meaning there are 1 billion letters in this second coded message.

There are 64 triplets possible, meaning there are 64 ‘characters’ in the alphabet of this second code. But only 21 of these letters are in actual use. In 1954, the discoverers of the first code (Watkins, Wilkins, and Crick) found that the second code matches each of the triplets to one of exactly 20 amino acids OR will be a character that they call an ‘end of chain’ character, that tells the ribosomes that use the code to make proteins that the protein chain for that particular protein is finished. This means that the second code only contains 21 characters, not the full 64 that are available for use. Because there 64 ways to make up 21 characters, each of the characters can be made by more than one triplet. You can find the combinations listed in the chart below.

Qqq genetic code chart.

You could think of this second coded message as a kind of ‘materials list’ for making all of the things that DNA makes.

The third code

Scientists figured out the 20-digit code in 1954, the same year they figured out the 4-digit code. Since each of the 20 digits in the larger code, called ‘the genetic code,’ can be made more than one way, a third message can be overlaid over the first two. Since this third code has far more letters in it, it can contain far more information than either of the first two codes. Each extra digit that you add to the alphabet increases the information carrying capacity by one ‘order of magnitude.’ This means that if you can carry X amount information with a 20 digit alphabet, you can carry X² (X squared) times that amount of information in a 21 digit alphabet. You can carry X³ (X cubed) amount of information in a 22-digit alphabet, and so on. You can therefore carry X⁴⁴ (X to the 44^th power) times more information in a 1 billion character message written in a 64 character alphabet than you can carry in the same length message in a 20 character alphabet. You could easily encode all the information in the largest paper-printed encyclopedia in a 1 billion-character message (the length of the message in human DNA) so you could carry 1 billion to the 44^th power information if you were using a 64-character alphabet. This number (10³⁹⁶ possible pieces of information) is immense, far to great of a number for the human mind to comprehend. (By comparison, there are estimated to be between 10⁷⁸ to 10⁸² atoms in the universe.) If the DNA was created by intelligent beings, and they have encoded a message in DNA, this message may possibly be very long and complex. It may contain more information than all of the books, letters, emails, tweets, blogs, and spoken words ever uttered or printed by humans.

What if you were putting together this package and you wanted the beings that would ultimately evolve to notice something about the DNA and give them a starting place to look for the message. You may highlight certain sequences in some way. The CRISPR sequences stand out so strongly that people saw them at a very early stage in our understanding of DNA technology. The first human genome was not sequenced until 2003. In 1983, we only had the most primitive sequencing equipment, but the CRISPR stood out so much that, even with primitive equipment, it was obvious. Why CRISPR? Of all of the DNA sequences that could be highlighted, why choose this one? For that, we have to go on to the next chapter.

When I first read Darwin’s book, 'The Origin of Species,’ I was amazed that anyone could possibly dispute its findings. Everything in it seems ironclad, with arguments totally locked up and all possible counterarguments showed to be invalid. Darwin starts by presenting some extremely convincing arguments to support his theory that species evolved from other, less capable species, through the process of natural selection. Then, after he presents these arguments, he approaches the issue from an entirely different perspective. He then shows that this brings up an entirely different body of evidence and this evidence also points to the same conclusion. Then, he ends that chapter and opens a new chapter, looking it from a third point of view. He keeps adding proof after proof, one on top of the other, to create an ironclad argument. No matter how you look at the issue, all signs point the same way.

When Darwin published his book, he was highly criticized. In fact, he was attacked with such ferocity that he actually wrote that he wished he had never started the project. You might be able to understand why he attacks came: He was basically presenting evidence to show that the foundational premises that supported all studies in the field of biology were wrong. Large numbers of people made their living through their claims to understand this field. Darwin was basically taking away the foundation of their field. Once the foundation was gone, everything that foundation supported collapsed.

If Darwin was right, the many people who claimed to understand biology did not have even the most basic understanding of the things that have to be understood to really know what they were doing. The people in this category included a lot of professional who need respect to do their work. Many of the people who attacked Darwin were medical doctors. They had gotten a lot of money from a lot of people for procedures based on nonsense ideas. Darwin’s scientific approach basically revealed them to be charlatans.

Standard medical practice:

If life has a divine origin, diseases are caused by interference of evil entities. The evil entities were messy and were thought to be attracted to messy things like the blood. A standard treatment was to remove these evil entities by attaching leaches or cutting open the veins to remove the blood. Of course, most of the people treated this way did not survive: they were already sick; removing their blood only made them weaker and less able to fight the disease. Many millions of people died totally unnecessarily by this treatment (George Washington was one of them).

Of course, they didn’t want the information Darwin presented to be known. In many countries, Darwin’s book was banned. Some countries passed laws that made it a crime to even let vulnerable people know that the book existed at all. Darwin had anticipated this reaction. People don’t like to have the foundation for their understanding of key aspects of existence pulled away from them. They want to keep believing the things that people before they had believed. Darwin was trying to redo the way people look at the world.

I think this is the reason for the approach in his book. He starts with one ironclad argument that seems to totally prove his point. It is proven. Normally, a scientist would prove a point, consider it proven, and go on. But Darwin doesn’t do this. He then proves it again, by another perspective. He then provides more proof, all of which seems so convincing that most people would think he is being ridiculous: he has already proven it three ways. Even the most resistant skeptics would have to accept, if they were willing to accept the evidence of their own eyes. But this isn’t enough. He goes on and on, with each argument adding to the one before it.

I don’t think that Darwin’s arguments really convinced most of the people the people who had been raised and educated with the former beliefs. They only felt hatred and saw Darwin as an enemy. He was taking money out of their pockets and turning their customers against time. These critics didn’t stop resisting because they were convinced, but because they died. Younger people saw the different approaches that could be taken to solving problems. Darwin’s approaches led to understanding. The standard approach wasn’t helpful to solve problems. Just as people didn’t start accepting the ideas of Galileo until long after he was dead, people don’t seem to have started accepting Darwin’s ideas until after he was dead.

When I went to school, in the 1960s, the laws that allowed teachers to be arrested for teaching Darwin had been repealed. But the mindset hadn’t really changed. A lot of teachers seemed to want to explain this new approach. But the school boards would have to change their policies for this to happen. Although teachers couldn’t be arrested for teaching Darwin in class, they could still be fired. I did not learn about Darwin in class. I learned about his ideas by outside reading. I remember that I had to sneak the book out of a section of the library that was restricted, with no children allowed.

Times have changed. Now, teachers openly teach Darwin’s ideas in school. Nearly all students, at least in developed countries, consider Darwin’s premise to be the foundation of our understanding. I have to wonder if his ideas would have become accepted so fast if he hadn’t been so fastidious in his proof. (It only took about 150 years.)

Why This Matters

I believe that a lot of the problems of the world exist because of the way we look at certain key aspects of our existence. We accept the idea of dividing the world into the strange entities called ‘nations’ for some reason, even though we know that wars between nations can destroy the world at any time and will destroy the world if the nations continue to make the claims they make long enough. Why? Part of the reason appears to be our beliefs about the way life came to exist. Religious texts claim that we were created by a deity that ordered us to treat the world a certain way: we were to ‘subdue the land and hold dominion over it and everything that moveth upon it.’ (These words are from God’s first speech to the newly created humans in Genesis.)

The same deity that created us then created Nations.

They exist because they are supposed to exist.

The creator sanctions wars. They couldn’t exist if the creator didn’t want them to exist. We aren’t even supposed to question them. To do so questions the will of the creator.

We are threatened with extinction because people are not willing to ask certain questions. We accept war because we accept the foundation for understanding ‘why we are here’ that people have accepted for thousands of years. The idea of nations, wars, destruction, inhumanity to man by man, and endless misery for large percentages of the population; we accept these things because we were raised to believe that everything works as it does because that is the way things are supposed to work. We are not supposed to question all come from this foundational understanding. If you listen to the officials of the governments of nations, you will realize they accept that things work as they are supposed to work. Nations are supposed to have sovereignty (absolute rights) over a certain part of the world. They are not supposed to allow any interference in this. If others try to interfere, they are supposed to use weapons or whatever is necessary to prevent the interference. The politicians were elected on the promise that they would do the things they are supposed to be doing. They are totally vested in the existing system, in the same way that the doctors of the eighteenth century were vested in blood letting, exorcism, and cutting of limbs after the slightest injury. They have reputations that are based on their claims of expertise. They want people to accept and believe that they know what they are doing.

The system they are operating is based on the premise that we are here to serve the needs of a system that is supposed to work as it does.

What if we find this is not true?

What if we find that there is no mandate from higher powers that dictates that we divide the world into nations with imaginary lines and fight each other over the locations of these lines? What if this was just a bunch of foolishness that, once it becomes a part of history, people will look back at and laugh, in the same way the now laugh at the idea of people who claimed to be doctors attaching leaches to people to cure everything from tuberculosis to back pain?

The idea that everything works as it does because it is supposed to work that way, and we aren't supposed to change it, is based on guesses about the origins of the human race, the origins of the world, the origins of life, and the implications that come from these guesses. If we find evidence that they are wrong, we will be basically forced to step back and build a new foundation for understanding the basic realities of existence. In this book, I am trying to present evidence to show you that the standard accepted ideas that form the very foundation of our organized way of living needs to be reexamined.

I propose that it is possible that DNA-based life originated somewhere other than Earth and was sent here intentionally.

So far, we have seen that two of the four things that are necessary for life to survive on this world after having been sent from another world are here and are in a form that is consistent with this premise. The hardware—the DNA, the ribosomes, and the more than 100,000 specialized proteins needed for life exist. We know that the genetic code is the same today as it was for the life forms who lived on Earth while the planet was so hot that most of its crust was still molten lava. The proteins existed, the DNA existed, and the ribosomes existed. All the hardware needed was there when the first known life forms were on this world.

The power system was there. It is an incredible power system; it is the same system that runs our bodies.

Two more things would be needed: The operating system and the bootstrap.

The Operating System

If you wanted to send life to another world, sending some the hardware discussed above to that world wouldn’t do any good if there was no way for this hardware to reproduce and do the other things needed for them to be ‘alive.’ Ribosomes are amazing proteins with incredible capabilities. They do things that include rebuilding the DNA ladders to reading the codons (the triplets of DNA rungs) of the messenger RNA to determine which amino acid they represent, finding that amino acid, attaching it to a chain of acids in a particular way, ‘walking’ down three rungs of the RNA ladder to the next codon, and doing the same thing again. They use electricity to do these things. Cut off the electricity that holds their instruction set for even a microsecond, and they become nothing but a mass of goo, unable to do anything. (Cyanide interferes in the Krebs cycle, preventing ATP replication. As a result, cyanide causes virtually instant death of any cells exposed. Once any stored ATP is used up, the power is turned off as if turning off a switch.)

There is clearly an instruction set.

How Do Operating Systems Work

Before the computer age, not many people would have understood exactly what is needed to make non-living things (like the silicon that is in rocks) actually do things in an organized way.

Now that we have computers, and a large percentage of the world’s people have been raised with them and learned to use them, a great many people understand the concept of ‘hardware’ and ‘software.’

The hardware is the physical computer itself. The main working parts of the computer are made of silicon, which is the same thing sand and rocks are made of. (About 87% of the part of the world we know about is silicon dioxide; this is the main component of sand and rocks.) In other words, the working parts of the machine (the silicon ‘chips’) are basically ordinary earth; if you if you break them with hammers, you will end up with sand, the same thing they are made of. Before being processed, powered, and organized with the operating system, sand is incapable of doing any of the things that computers do. In fact, even after sand has been processed into a fully assembled computer and the power is hooked up, the computer won’t do anything at all unless you get the instruction set called the ‘operating system’ into the computer, in the proper way.

I find an interesting example of the things that no one seemed to understand only a short time ago that nearly everyone seems to know now in Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001, A Space Odyssey. In that movie, a tiny defect in the operating instructions on the computer on board the space craft (called the HAL 9000) caused ever-increasing difficulty with the computer. Eventually, the computer couldn’t resolve the problems with its operating system and went crazy. Now, nearly everyone knows what to do if your computer starts to go crazy: at the first sign of problems, you turn it off. Then you turn it back on and it reloads the entire operating system again. It becomes a brand new computer. It still has all of its ‘memory banks’ intact: all the information on the hard drive and cloud is still there. But the defect in the operating program of the computer has no chance to grow because it has been installed fresh. Kubrick clearly did a lot of research for his movie and it is a brilliant movie. But he clearly didn’t understand the fundamental difference between the hardware and the software. He thought that a defect in the software could grow and there wouldn’t be any way to fix it without erasing everything in the memory and starting fresh. We all have electronics that get glitches. We turn them off and they become nothing but a bunch of silicon. Then, reload the operating system, and they start to work again. (In severe cases, there are problems with the operating system instructions themselves. In these cases, the solution is the same, except that a new copy of the operating system has to be reloaded on the computer and then installed.)

The same is true for the hardware of life, including the DNA, ribosomes, ATP, glucose, proteins, and other parts. If you have a bucket of mixed coal (carbon) water (hydrogen and oxygen), and rocks that contain iron, phosphorous, nitrogen, and a few other trace elements that are needed for life, you can strip some wires from a cord and put them into the bucket, then plug it in to provide electricity, and it won’t somehow come to life and start reproducing. It needs to know what to do.

What is an Operating System?

If you buy your computing devices with pre-installed operating systems, you probably don’t have any real idea exactly what the operating system is or how it differs from the computer itself. If you have ever bought a computer without an OS, and put it on the computer, you will know that the OS normally comes on some sort of media (a CD, DVD, flash drive, hard drive, or ‘floppies’) but the actual physical item with the operating system on it is NOT the operating system. The OS is nothing physical, it is a set of instructions that tell the transistors (switches) on the computer chip when to open and close, allowing electricity to pass through the switches or stopping the electricity.

The OS is information.

Computer operating systems started out very small. The first operating system in use for microchip-based computers (personal computers) was CP/M, created to allow the Intel 8080 chip to process basic information. The entire instruction set for this operating system consisted of 27,880 ‘bits’ of information, where each ‘bit’ was a character of either 1 or 0. (The ‘bits’ were arranged in sets of 8 which were processed together as something called a ‘byte,’ each of which could be thought of as a ‘word.’ The entire operating system was in 3,584 ‘bytes’ or ‘words.’ This works out to about 7 pages of typed words.) These ‘words’ basically tell the microprocessor how to set its switches (each ‘transistor’ in the circuit is one switch that allows information to either pass or not pass) so it can process information.

As time passed, people built larger and larger instruction sets for operating systems, and compiled them into larger and larger operating systems. The operating system most commonly installed on most new personal computers as I write this is Windows 10, with an instruction set that includes 36,960,000,000 (36.9 billion) bits of information, or 1,289,062,500 times more information than was in the instruction set installed on the first microchip-based computers.

How Many Operating Systems Were Needed?

If the DNA were sent intentionally to Earth, the people who sent it would have had to include at least three separate operating systems.

Lets look at them one at a time:

The first operating system would run the cyanobacteria that would reduce the carbon dioxide levels of the atmosphere to make the planet habitable. The cyanobacteria’s main function would be to produce the oxygen that would be needed for the more advanced life. Although the operational details of cyanobacteria are simple compared to those of other life forms on Earth (humans, for example), they are incredibly complex relative to the operating systems of microchip-based computers.

Cyanobacteria have to be able to operate their own life functions. They have to be able to manufacture all of the parts their bodies need to operate. This includes all 20 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Other animals, including humans, don’t need to be able to make all 20 of them; they can get some from their food. But there is nothing else for cyanobacteria to eat. They have to make all of these amino acids themselves. After they make the amino acids, they need to make many thousands of proteins out of these raw materials. This requires ribosomes (the ‘worker’ proteins that manufacture other proteins). They also have to be able to extract carbon dioxide from the air, dismantle the molecules into carbon and oxygen (this requires energy, which comes from the sun but must be directed in some way to the process), take water from the environment around them, dismantle the molecules to get the hydrogen and oxygen atoms, reassemble the carbon and hydrogen into carbohydrates, and release the oxygen into the air. They must be able to make ATP to run the electrical processes of the cell, which include the electrolysis of both carbon dioxide and water, amino acid. manufacture, and protein synthesis. Not even the most capable computer on Earth today can come close to doing anything like this.

The operating system for this simple life form is incredibly complex.

If the people on the other world who were sending life to Earth only wanted ‘some kind of life’ they would only have to send down the hardware and software for cyanobacteria. Cyanobacteria reproduce asexually. This means that every ‘offspring’ cell is identical to its ‘parent’ cell. Such a system is not going to produce mutations. If they wanted life that would eventually evolve, they would have to send down at least two more pieces of hardware together with the operating systems to make them work.

The Mitochondrial Operating System

As we have seen, mitochondria are living things with their own DNA. Your own body has many trillions of these living things. They are never really ‘born’ as you and I were born; they are the byproducts of mitosis, the splitting of one living cell into two living cells. The mitochondria in your body were alive long before you were alive. It was a live long before the first human lived, long before the first animal lived, long before the first plant lived.

Mitochondria absolutely need ‘free’ oxygen in order to sustain their own life processes (produce the ATP they need to operate) and to produce the ATP needed to support YOUR life processes. Before about 541 million years ago, oxygen levels were very low and we have no evidence of aerobic (mitochondria based) life forms existing on Earth. At a certain point, oxygen levels were high enough to support these living things and, somehow, they simply appeared. Almost certainly, they were here all along. Almost certainly, they had arrived some 3 billion years earlier, in the same craft that held the cyanobacteria and other essentials for life. They were just turned off. Most likely, some sort of bootstrap system was set to monitor the oxygen levels of the planet. When oxygen levels got high enough, the mitochondria got ‘turned on.’ The spark of life was somehow infused into them and they began to grow, operate their life processes, and reproduce.

Remember that even the anaerobic life forms, like cyanobacteria, use ATP for electricity. They couldn’t sustain very vigorous or complex life processes because their bodies simply couldn’t make enough ATP to provide the amount of electricity that vigorous or complex living things would need. Once the mitochondria existed, however, ATP was suddenly very plentiful. Mitochondria can produce far, far, more ATP than they need. Remember, ATP is essentially electricity in a liquid form. Living things suddenly have all of the electricity they need.

Sex

The third operating system operate the far more vigorous and complex advanced life forms that would be able to exist once the atmosphere had sufficient oxygen and the power systems: mitochondria. These advanced life forms would be entirely different in character than the cyanobacteria that terraformed the Earth, so they would require their own operating system. They would have ‘cells’ with many different internal structures; all of these structures would have to work together, sustain each other, and operating in sync with each other, for the cells to remain alive and reproduce. Clearly, the operating system for these advanced living things would have to be far larger and more complex than the operating systems for the cyanobacteria and mitochondria.

Since the advanced life forms would reproduce in a way that led to genetic diversity, they would ‘evolve’ over time.

The diversity would create some organisms that were better suited to survival than others; these ‘better suited’ organisms would survive to sexual maturity and reproduce, while less suited organisms would perish before they reproduced. The organisms would change. As the cells (and eventually multi-cellular organisms) developed new structures, the operating system would have to be able to deal with them without crashing. This means it would have to be ready for structures that did not yet exist. (Modern operating systems are built to be ready for physical components of computers that don’t yet exist: they have interfaces (USB ports, for example) that can be ‘configured’ with ‘drivers’ to interact with memory chips, video chips, sound chips, peripherals (printers, for example, cameras, and scanners) that have not yet been invented. When they are invented, the operating system is already able to deal with them, through instruction sets that are built in to the operating system.

The operating system that ran the first advanced life on Earth would have had to have had the same capabilities, or it would not have been able to accommodate evolution. Since we know evolution took place, we can infer that the operating system has been able to adapt as necessary to power the life forms.

This is unlikely to have happened by pure chance. If the operating system were preinstalled, it would have to have the ability to adapt to change, while not changing its basic instruction set (necessary for DNA to use the power of ATP to manufacture amino acids and proteins, and reassemble them into new beings, under the rules of sexual reproduction). Once more, the basic realities of existence give us evidence to support the premise of intelligent design.

Advanced life on Earth requires three separate operating systems that operate independently of each other. One operating system operates the cyanobacteria that made and keeps the planet habitable by advanced life. One operating system runs the mitochondria that create the ATP that powers all life on Earth and must be produced in enormous quantities for advanced life to function, and the third operating system powers the advanced life.

The two more advanced operating systems could not have evolved from the simpler one, for a very simple reason: the oxygen needed for these operating systems to function did not exist until the first operating system created it. Although there are synergies between the two beings that are needed for advanced life (mitochondria and cellular life), the operating systems work entirely independent of each other. In fact, this is a general characteristic of all advanced Earth life (everything other than cyanobacteria): it has many structures that work independently of each other to allow complex life forms to exist and reproduce. This feature of Earth life can’t be explained by evolution through random processes: for this to have happened, evolution had to have been planned, at least to some extent, with an operating system designed to create certain structures (when cellular processes were advanced enough to accommodate them) and put them into use. Then, eventually, the system would have to start producing specialized ‘cells’ to do separate things that would work together (in the same basic way that internal cellular structures work together to keep cells alive), to create a ‘body’ of a being that was far more advanced than any single-celled being cold be.

For DNA to appear at all on this world by random chance—with the entire correct configuration of hundreds of billions of atoms—seems to stretch the limits of probability. How can a random chance event arrange anything with such incredible precision? For the DNA to begin ‘operating’ at all, and doing anything whatever, stretches out probability much farther. For it to ‘operate’ as it does operate, creating all of the essential molecules needed to reproduce itself, and then assembling these molecules into copies of itself, all through random chance, is hard to imagine ever happening even once in all of time in any place at all. For it to then operate in a way that positively reeks of intent, with the new DNA-based life rearranging the environment, changing the atmosphere, altering the climate, all of which led to a world where liquid water was common and the oxygen needed for complex life existed—and then accept that this all happened by chance—would require that we throw the laws of probability out the window and disregard it all.

Then, once this happened, for an entirely new form of life to come to exist, one that somehow sensed that oxygen was now available and took advantage of that oxygen, by random chance? No sane person would speculate on something so remote. Then, for the new living things to be organized in ways that utilize the energy with so close to the maximum efficiency that, for all intents and purposes, it is perfectly efficient? (The ATP/Krebs cycle is 98% efficient; perfect efficiency is 100%.) Finally, for the new living things to start reproducing in ways that appear to be designed to lead to evolution, all by random chance? It makes more sense to simply fall back on the primitive modes of thought that have been dominant for millions of years in human communities, and call it all magic.

If we are to be true scientists, we must discard these two possibilities for the origin of life on Earth, and the origin of humans:

1. It is magic.

2. It random chance.

We need to discard the first option because it is not scientific to claim something you don’t understand happened by magic. Saying it is ‘magic’ is essentially the same as saying ‘it happened in ways that aren’t subject to analysis by science and explanation by scientific laws.’ It is unscientific to skip over the hard parts of our scientific analysis, or skip over things that are inconsistent with the simple scientific laws now in place (‘simple’ in a relative sense; they are simple relative to the scientific laws we will understand in the future) by saying ‘and then something magic happened and now we can get back to our science.’ To be scientific, we can say ‘at this point something happened that we don’t yet understand’ but not ‘at this point, something magic happened.’

What about random chance?

We can calculate the probabilities of random things happening. We can then compare the probabilities generated by analysis of truly random variables with the things we observe. If we could show that one out of every hundred universes would generate the kind of life we see on Earth one time through random processes in the first sixteen billion years of its existence (the time since the big bang), we would say the odds against random chance being responsible were 1:100. If the odds were in this range, we might say that it is reasonable to accept random chance as a possible explanation for what we see. But the odds against even the simplest life form on Earth—cyanobacteria—coming to exist by random chance are so high that we wouldn’t have numbers enough to write them out. Not only would this ‘hardware’ have to materialize, it would require its operating system to be there and ready to be loaded. It would have to somehow have a force that would load the operating system into the hardware. Although this ‘loading mechanism’ wouldn’t necessarily have to be complex, it would have to work perfectly to get the operating system into the hardware. The odds of all even the bare essentials needed for cyanobacteria materializing and coming together at the same time, and then turning into a living thing, are so remote it is impossible for the human mind to imagine them. Even if this did happen, it wouldn’t explain us. It wouldn’t explain the far more complex beings we call ‘plants.’ It wouldn’t explain animals. And it wouldn’t explain humans.

At least three operating systems would be needed to explain what we see around us on Earth. The incredible diversity of life on Earth tells us there are likely to have been many more operating systems.

For example, chloroplasts also have their own DNA and reproduce themselves. The chloroplasts are a lot like cyanobacteria mitochondria in that they convert carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbohydrates. But they are far more vigorous than cyanobacteria and produce oxygen at a much faster rate. How is this possible? They work in concert with mitochondria and can therefore use the far more efficient electricity production method that became possible once the oxygen levels on Earth got high enough. It would seem logical for a group of intelligent beings on another world sending life to seed a planet to send both: the cyanobacteria would work to create the oxygen needed for mitochondria to produce the ATP; once the ATP existed, the plant-based life forms (those using chloroplasts) would take over oxygen production, leaving cyanobacteria to a subsidiary role.

It would also make sense to send two kinds of ‘cells.’ One kind of ‘cell’ would have no nucleus and the other would have a nucleus. Biologists have a very hard time explaining how cells with nuclei could suddenly materialize at the beginning of the Cambrian era, when no such cells had ever existed before. The common explanation is that a cell without a nucleus somehow swallowed another cell and this ‘swallowed cell’ became an essential part of the life forces of its swallowed. This really is a pretty silly explanation; it only tells us how genetic material got inside of another cell and says nothing about how the two components began to operate together. It would be like speculating that a whale could swallow a human and the human would then somehow prosper inside of the whale, reproduce there, and become symbiotic to the whale, all by some sort of random process. It is much more likely that cells with nuclei and cells without were sent together, each with their own operating system.

Another difficulty that people who propose the random chance theory of existence have involves explaining the idea of multi-cellular beings somehow evolving out of single-celled beings. The operating systems of multi-cellular systems seem able to manufacture many different components, all of which work together to make a complex being. How could this have happened? There are many theories, most of which don’t really make any scientific sense. Yet, multi-cellular beings clearly exist. They got here somehow. How? It would be hard to explain if we were trying to put together some sort of theory that they came to exist as a result of random chance. But it would be easy to explain if they were sent together and had their own operating system.

One final problem with the random chance theory of existence involves sex. How did two sexes come to exist? How is it that two beings that operate in different ways come together to mix their genetic material? This seems critical to evolution. It seems that if we ever wanted to seed life onto other worlds, and had a limited payload so we couldn’t send a fully functioning and living ecosystems, we would have to make sure that, at some point, two sexes existed, operating much as the two sexes on Earth operate. If a group of intelligent beings wanted life to exist on other worlds, and they wanted this life to evolve to eventually gain the abilities that humans now have, it makes sense for them to send down the operating instructions for many different stages of beings. Obviously, if you want to have the greatest chance of ending up with intelligent beings with the same capabilities of current humans, you would want to send as many operating systems as possible to the other world. But of course, it is very hard to send a great deal of material through the remoteness of space to another world. The more material you send, the harder it would be. You may want to send more, but you would have to send at least three:

1. The operating system for cyanobacteria

2. The operating system for mitochondria

3. The operating system for aerobic (vigorous and complex) life.

If you had a very good design team, they may be able to make the third operating system dynamic to adapt to the capabilities of the evolving living things, making use of new hardware as the processes of evolution created it.

In 1961, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for the work that led to the discovery of the genetic code. The prize included a large amount of money. The three people went their separate ways. Crick had come to some conclusions that made him very interested in questions related to the genetic code that no one seemed willing to pay him to answer. Some of the things he considered went against the grain of conventional thinking. When he discussed these things, his colleagues not only didn’t seem interested in helping him, they acted as if Crick was doing something that was somehow immoral, wrong, or even crazy.

He had money. He didn’t have to do what other people told him to do. He decided to do the work that interested him.

One of the things he had discovered led him to believe that the accepted theories for the way life came to exist on Earth had to be wrong. This discovery involved the genetic code. The code relates each triplet of DNA to one of 20 amino acids. The code is ‘interpreted’ by the ribosome, an incredibly complex protein. The DNA makes the ribosome and it is an enormous molecule. It is so large, that a full 6% of the code of the DNA is used to create this one molecule.

Crick had found that the genetic code is the same for all beings on Earth, from the simplest algae to humans. The ribosome is just as complex and has the same sequences in all living things. The method that the ribosome uses to make proteins is identical in all living things. Crick proposed that this was a powerful argument against the idea of evolution having created the ribosome and the genetic code.

If evolution had caused these things to exist, we would expect them to have started out in a simpler form and then gotten more complex, eventually reaching the level of complexity we observe in modern living things. If this had happened, we would find remnants of the earlier code somewhere. We would expect some very simple living things to still carry the simpler forms of ribosomes and the genetic code. We don’t find any evidence of a simpler form of ribosomes or any variation whatever in the genetic code. It is identical for all living things. This leads to the conclusion that the ribosome and genetic code did not start with a simpler form. The very first living things that existed on Earth operated the exact same way as living things now.

How do we explain this?

Life Itself

First, there is something we can rule out: The ribosome and genetic code could not have come to spontaneously exist by chance. The reason for this is its complexity and synergy. Inside of your DNA is a code which tells the body exactly how to make each of the several millions proteins your body needs to operate. These proteins include the ribosome itself and thousands of other proteins that help the ribosome do its job. Some of these proteins contain billions of atoms. Each individual atom has to be in the exact right place for the protein to do its job. A process that starts with the simplest elements there are, including hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, somehow creates machines (mechanical molecules; all of the proteins act by doing something that physically alters other molecules) that rearrange all of these atoms. For this to happen, each of billions upon billions of atoms has to be aligned in one specific way.

This alignment could have possibly happened by chance.  But the odds against it happening are so high that, in a practical situation, they wouldn’t happen even if we could try aligning atoms at random over and over again, making more attempts than there are atoms on the universe.

To see why this is unlikely to have simply materialized, imagine the complexity of a living human baby. We know that the baby is made up of molecules; molecules are made of elements (mostly hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, with small amounts of other elements.) Imagine that there is a pond made of water (hydrogen and oxygen) with some oil floating on it (oil has lots of carbon) and all of the other elements needed to make the baby. Say that a nuclear bomb was to go off in that pond and send the elements into the stratosphere. Most of the molecules would be destroyed and the elements would recombine in various ways.

It is possible that, if dropped enough nuclear bombs on enough ponds, the elements would recombine to the exact configuration of the human baby, and somehow whatever spark that makes a baby ‘alive’ would come out of the explosion, causing a living human baby to be the result of this process.

But it isn’t likely. The baby is simply too complex. The odds against this happening are so high that if you started dropping nuclear bombs now, and dropped billions of bombs per second each second, you wouldn’t end up with living baby in any time frame that would make sense to the human brain.

This is the basic problem with accepting that the first DNA-based life coming to exist as a result of some spontaneous event: the processes that take place in DNA-based life are simply too complex. I will go over a few of these processes below; it is easy to see, when you understand how they work, that they couldn’t have simply started doing these things as a result of random events.

If they couldn’t have evolved on Earth, and couldn’t have come to exist as a result of random events, how did they come to exist on this planet? Francis Crick concluded there was only one option left: They came from some other world.

Design or Chance?

If DNA came from some other word, there are two possibilities:

1. It was sent here intentionally.

2. It came as a result of an unintentional event.

It is fairly easy to rule out the second option. Let’s consider why it is impossible. There are several reasons that it couldn’t have happened unintentionally:

The first involves the idea of life. Sending DNA, by itself, would not lead to DNA-based life. The reason is that DNA, by itself, is not alive. You can take DNA out of cells. If it doesn’t have the millions of proteins needed for reproduction, all acting in concert (as described below), it is nothing but a glob of acidic organic residue. It is not ‘alive.’

For it to be ‘alive,’ it must have more than just the DNA. It must also have all of the proteins needed for the DNA to operate. It must also have a power source, or something that will give it the energy it needs for the proteins to do the things they have to do. It must also have an ‘operating system.’ The operating system is the set of rules that the DNA ‘understands’ that tell it how to operate.

The easiest way to understand the need for an operating system is by analogy to a personal computer. The raw materials for personal computers are built of silicon. The silicon is basically sand. If you were to crush a computer chip (silicon chip) with a hammer, it would turn back into sand. A pile of sand obviously can’t do the things a personal computer can do.

In order to make them do the things a computer does, you have to do several things.

First, you have to properly process the sand into the correct silicon mixture, and turn it into a ‘wafer.’ Then you have to ‘etch’ the wafer, or divide it into all of the different transistors that process information. Once you have done this, you still don’t have a computer: You need to install an operating system that tells it what to do. This operating system is not a real physical thing; it is information. (This information is held on a physical thing, but the information itself is not physical.) In order to get the chip to take the information, you have to plug it in to a power source and turn it on. Then, the information will set the transistors to the state they have to be in to do what they do. Only after you have done all of these things will you have a computer that actually does the things computers do.

The same is basically true for DNA. If you send a dead animal into space, and part of it’s DNA falls to Earth (without burning up in the atmosphere), this DNA will not come back to life. If DNA came to Earth from another world, then came to life, it would have had to have come to the world with at least two things: a power source and an operating system. Then, once it was here, it had to have something computer programmers call a ‘bootstrap,’ which is set of instructions that tell the computer to load the operating system. This bootstrap has to be self-contained and have its own power source, because without being ‘booted,’ the computer itself doesn’t even know how to use the energy that comes from your wall outlet.

If DNA arrived, it would have to have all four elements, at a minimum. It would need to be intact DNA; it would need the operating system, the energy source, and the bootstrap.

The odds of all of these things being in the same place and having arrived from another solar system by random chance are immensely high. Even if they were in the same place, the odds against them surviving the fall through the Earth’s atmosphere, even once, are astronomical. In order for DNA to arrive on Earth by accident and then come to life by accident, a great many things must happen, all together. The odds of such things happening together by accident even in perfect conditions too high for the human mind to comprehend. The conditions on Earth when the first life was on this world were far from perfect. The majority of the surface of the planet was still molten lava, with rocks floating like icebergs in it. The clouds were almost certainly as thick as the clouds of Venus, so thick that only tiny amounts of sunlight made it to the surface to provide the power needed for photosynthesis and to operate the life processes of the early living things.

We can’t say that it is impossible for this to have happened, but we can say that is so improbable that we can rule it out as a practical explanation for the way life came to Earth.

The Power Source

Crick proposed that one alternative to ‘it happening by chance’ was ‘it happening by design.’ He proposed a theory called ‘Panspermia,’ which speculated that it is possible that, slightly more than 3.58 billion years ago—when the Earth was still a new planet and a very inhospitable place—a tiny package arrived here. This package contained the DNA, the operating system, the power source, and the bootstrap. It made the DNA ‘alive.’ Crick believed that a package could have been sent here. It could have been intended to live. It could have been intended to make the changes needed to make the Earth capable of supporting life that operated in ways that generated immense variety, lead to very rapid evolution. Sexual reproduction provides this advantage. It could have been intended to create us.

Crick proposed a theory called ‘Panspermia Theory.' This theory holds that it is possible for intelligent life forms on other worlds to create the essentials needed for DNA to be sent to Earth and, once the DNA arrived, bring it to ‘life.’ The theory of Panspermia holds that the UCA (the ancestor of all life on Earth) arrived this way, came to life, and then began to reproduce. At some point, certain pre-set thresholds were set for this being to start acting differently and it began to reproduce in ways that led to great diversity. Evolution began to take place. After some 518 million years of evolution (3 million years ago), the first humans evolved. Over the last 3 million years ago the capabilities of humans have increased, as a result of evolution. And here we are.

Crick proposes that the Panspermia theory is the only scientific theory that can explain the realities of the fantastic process we call ‘life’ on Earth. All other theories either start with unscientific premises (for example, that a super-human being called ‘God’ said an incantation and, due to his powers, it appeared) or are in capable of explaining certain realities of the process called ‘life’ that science has discovered or categorized. If we want to analyze the factors that led to life existing on Earth logically and scientifically, we would start by laying out a list of scientific theories that were consistent with the things we observe. Crick proposed that the first theory we would have to put on the list is the theory of Panspermia. Perhaps, at some time in the future, others will come up with other theories. But so far, this is the only theory on the list.

Why This Matters

The Panspermia theory was so outlandish and contrary to accepted ideas about the origin of life on Earth that it turned Crick into a laughingstock for many years. People wouldn’t take him seriously as long as he remained willing to consider this theory as a real possibility. He eventually turned to other matters, those that weren’t so contrary to standard accepted beliefs. Eventually people seemed to forget and it was as if the theory had never been proposed.

I am bringing the ‘Panspermia’ theory up for an important reason:

Without passing judgment on whether or not this theory is correct, we have to accept this: this theory is the result of a mode of organizing thoughts that is highly desirable, if the human race is to overcome the obstacles we now face and prevent our extinction. The mode of thought that is willing to consider such theories puts logic and reason above beliefs, feelings, and traditional ideas that ascribe anything we don’t understand to magical and miraculous forces. This mode of thought shows a lack of fear for things that humans appear to be afraid to think about. By merely proposing that people consider this theory, Crick is showing confidence in the human race, accepting that the human race is at or at least on the verge of having the ability to put primitivism in the past, and use force of will to prevent the beliefs of past generations from coloring analysis of objective reality.

New Information about Panspermia

Crick abandoned his work on the Panspermia theory in the mid 1980s. Since then, we have discovered a great deal of additional information about the nature of DNA and the processes of life.

A great deal of this new information leads to ideas that support the idea of Panspermia. The first automated DNA sequencers didn’t come into use until after Crick’s death in 2004. As you are reading this, all around the world are using these sequencers to unravel one of the messages that Crick and his colleagues found written in the DNA in 1954. They are finding wonderful things. Many of these things don’t make any sense if we think of DNA as having come to exist through some random processes, but make total sense if we accept the Panspermia theory.

In this book, I want to go over some of this new information, along with the information that Crick provided in the 1980s.

I am NOT doing this because I have come to accept Panspermia as a kind of religious belief and want to ‘convert’ you to this ‘religion.’

I am doing it for an entirely different reason:

Whether or not this theory is correct, its acceptance as a possibility indicates the acceptance of a mode of thinking that can help us get out of our current problems and prevent our destruction. If you take this theory seriously, you will consider the evidence that supports it objectively. If you do this, you will find a way to look at human existence and the realities we see around us that will allow you to see existence in a new light.

You will see that it is highly likely that the human race exists for a very definite reason. This reason may not be totally clear or readable to us now, but if this theory is correct it definitely exists. We are here for a reason, and this reason is not to find new and better nuclear bombs so we can destroy ourselves fighting each other over the locations of imaginary lines. Our destiny, whatever it is, lies in the distant future, when we know more and have greater intellectual capabilities.

We will only reach it if we can overcome our primitiveness and look at existence objectively.

We clearly have incredible intellectual skills and talents. As a witness to this, consider that we can now split atoms (something far too small for us to even see) to make nuclear bombs, and send these bombs into outer space on missiles which will then split into multiple warheads and are capable of destroying more in a single microsecond than the entire human race created for the first 3 million years of its existence. This feat would never have been accomplished if we didn’t have incredible intellectual skills.

The problem is that we are afraid to use them in certain areas. The next discussions will be a kind of test. If you can take them seriously, you will have provided proof that it is possible for at least one human mind to think in the ways necessary to prevent our extinction.

What percentages of the people of the world are capable of this? That is the question…

When Charles Darwin was born, people had taught and accepted for centuries that a creator created all plants and animals as separate entities. For many centuries, the religious views had been required, with an aggressive inquisition hunting down people who were thought to be non-believers, with those who were convicted often executed. By the mid 1800s, the religious repression was being relaxed, somewhat, and people who had other views were not being hunted down and punished. But most people in Europe still accepted the basic premise behind the religious teachings. They believed that all of the plants and animals on Earth had been created pretty much as they were at the time. There had been no change.

In 1859, Charles Darwin published ‘Origin of Species,’ a book that challenged this premise. Darwin proposed that it is possible that all life on Earth had a common primordial origin. The change happened over a very long period of time; through a process he called ‘natural selection.’ Here, he explains the idea that got him into a great deal of trouble with the people who accepted the standard view:

On the principle of natural selection with divergence of character, it does not seem incredible that, from some such low and intermediate form, both animals and plants may have been developed; and, if we admit this, we must likewise admit that all the organic beings that have ever lived on this earth may be descended from some one primordial form. (Link to source, Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.)

In popular parlance, this is called the ‘theory of evolution.’ Scientists call it the ‘universal common ancestry’ theory, or ‘UCA.’

In the early 2000s, the invention of mechanical gene-sequencers allowed scientists to test Darwin’s theory. All life on Earth is based on a molecule called ‘deoxyribonucleic acid’ or ‘DNA.’ The DNA has sequences of ‘codons’ that contain the codes that DNA uses to build the proteins and other complex molecules needed for life.

Qqqq DNA sequencing image

If different organisms had different origins (in other words, if they weren’t all descended from some one primordial form), these complex molecules would have been determined by various different DNA codes in different organisms. In other words, the code that related the sequences of atoms that go together to make the proteins to the ‘steps’ on the DNA would be different. Scientists can sequence genes from widely divergent organisms, say the Treponema pallidum bacteria that causes syphilis, on the one hand, and chimpanzees on the other. They can then compare the sequences. If the different organisms had different origins, we would not expect the codes to be the same. We would expect different codes to be used to create the same atomic structures in the different organisms.

This is a testable theory. In the early 2000s, Douglas Theobald and a team of researchers at the University of Colorado obtained funding to use advanced gene sequencing techniques and statistical analysis to test the UCA theory: They published their findings in 2010. They found that the coding mechanisms used for the various proteins in the different life forms were not just similar; they were identical in all living things they tested. They used standard tests to determine how likely this is to be a coincidence. Here are their findings, from their paper:

UCA is at least 10^2,860 times more probable than the closest competing hypothesis. Notably, UCA is the most accurate and the most parsimonious hypothesis. Compared to the multiple-ancestry hypotheses, UCA provides a much better fit to the data (as seen from its higher likelihood), and it is also the least complex (as judged by the number of parameters). (Link to source.)

What does this mean?

The sequences were identical. This might be a coincidence, or it might indicate a relationship existed between the different beings. They could use standard statistical tools to determine how likely the observed results were to be a coincidence. In this case, they found that the odds against a coincidence were 10^2,860 were to one against. In other words, if you were in a position to create DNA based life in separate events, and put together the DNA of different organisms in separate acts, without any attempt to make the different DNA based beings match each other, you would have to do this 10^2,860 times before you would wind up with one set of beings that has the observed similarities as a result of random chance.

To put this into perspective, scientists have determined that there are about 10⁸² atoms in the entire universe (Link to source.) There have been about than 10¹⁷ seconds since the big bang. If life could come to exist by random processes as many times as there are atoms on the universe, and this happened anew once each second for all of the time that has passed since the big bang, life would have come to exist a total of 10⁹⁹ times. If you had 10^2,760 identical universes, each of which is the same size as our universe, and conducted this test that many times, only once in all of these times (only on one atom in one second in one universe) would random chance cause the genes to align as we observe.

This basically means that the mathematical probability that Darwin's theory (the universal common ancestry theory) is wrong is zero, or a number so close to zero that there is no difference in practice from zero. All beings on Earth share a common ancestor.

Where Life Came From: ALL Possibilities

We don’t know exactly when this common ancestor lived but we do know it must have lived here more than 3.58 billion years ago, because we have evidence of some life—clearly descended life existing as of that date.

There are only four possible ways that the universal common ancestor could have come to be on Earth when it arrived:

1. It could have evolved from some non-living thing here on earth.

2. It could have been intentionally created here on Earth.

3. It could have evolved or come to exist spontaneously somewhere other than earth and found its way to Earth, with no intention being involved.

4. It could have been created intentionally somewhere other than Earth and then sent here.

In order to understand exactly why the first four options are not possible, we need to understand a little bit about the way the process we call ‘life’ works, from a mechanical perspective, in all things that are ‘alive’ here on Earth.

I want to warn you in advance that the information that follows is intellectually challenging. I have spent a great deal of time learning it, many years in fact, both in university classes and through independent study in very difficult and challenging fields. I will condense this information a great deal and simplify it as much as I can, so you can see the general ideas needed to understand the essential points of this chapter. If you find this kind of analysis interesting (and I hope that you do; there is a great deal more work that could be done in all of the fields discussed below), the internet provides a treasure trove of information and virtually any university in the world will have classes in the key fields from which this information is drawn. I have tried to make the discussions as simple as possible, given the topic, and expect that most people should be able to get it if they are willing to go through it slowly.

Molecules

First a little physics:

Before 1905, scientists only had theories to tell them that the things called ‘molecules’ exist. There was no proof. Scientists had never seen molecules, or done any experiments that allowed them to tell if molecules really existed.

In 1905, Albert Einstein got a paper published called ‘Investigations on the theory of Brownian movement.’ In this paper, Einstein presented mathematical evidence that the movement of pollen grains that were suspended in water, called ‘Brownian motion,’ could be explained by collision with tiny ‘particles’ of water. The math showed that, if water formed itself into ‘particles’ with one atom of oxygen and two of hydrogen, the weight of these ‘particles’ colliding with pollen grains would be exactly enough to account for the observed motion of the pollen grains.

This was seen as proof that molecules existed and were real things.

Over the next few decades, analysis of molecules advanced a great deal. The next great milestone came in 1939, when Linus Pauling published the book ‘The Nature of the Chemical Bond and the Structure of Molecules and Crystals: An Introduction to Modern Structural Chemistry.’ This book used various different tools to show how nature puts atoms together to form molecules. Pauling’s book explained how to determine the exact distance that the atoms were from each other, and the angles that separated them. It explained how to calculate the bond ‘strength,’ or the amount of force holding the atoms together and the amount of energy needed to separate them.

This passage is from the jacket material for this book:

For the first time, the science of chemistry is presented as the natural result of quantum mechanics operating at the level of the chemical bond. Observable chemical properties such as melting point, boiling point and bond strength resulted from molecular structure; molecular structure resulted from the bonds that held the atoms in position; and the bonds resulted from the quantum nature of the atom.

With this information, researchers could begin to make scale models of molecules for the first time. They could and did get tiny balls made of some porous material (Styrofoam) and sticks, and physically put them together. Pauling’s book explained how far apart the atoms must be, and the exact angles of the bonds. Scientists could put together even very complex molecules as if assembling a puzzle.

Prior to the 1953, the term ‘deoxyribonucleic acid’ or DNA simply referred to an acidic substance of the nuclei of cells. By the 1950s, researchers were starting to realize that DNA was no ordinary substance. DNA formed itself into shapes that could be seen under microscopes as very complex. It reproduced itself to make exact copies of these shapes in incredible numbers. There are more than 5 trillion cells in your body; each of them has an exact copy of the DNA that is your genetic code.

DNA appeared to be a truly enormous molecule, one that clumped together into collections of atoms so large that they can be seen with microscopes (we can see ‘chromosomes’). DNA appears to have special properties that no other molecule had. Researchers began to try to figure out how DNA could do the seemingly impossible things it did.

In 1953, three researchers at the University of Cambridge in England, Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins, used calculations in Linus Pauling’s book to make physical models of the components of DNA. These components are called ‘amino acid bases:’ they include adenine (abbreviated A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and uracil (U). After they had models of the bases, they worked out ways to fit them together to see if they could make a model of this complex molecule.

They found that they only fit together in a very specific way only, a way that explained the special properties of this molecule.

A could only bond with U and U could only bond with A. G could only bond with C and C could only bond with G. These bondings created something called ‘base pairs.’ The ‘base pairs’ then became something that looks like the rungs of a ladder that takes the shape of a double helix.

Qqqq dna model left.

The chemical bonds holding the base pairs together in the middle are very weak. (Technically called ‘hydrogen bonds,’ they are a kind of ‘semi bond,’ which is not nearly as strong as true chemical bonds.) The bonds that hold the atoms that make up the side rails of the DNA ladder are very strong and the bonds that hold half of the rung of the amino acids to the side rails are very strong, but the bonds the center of the rungs of the ladder together are very weak. This allows the ‘ladder’ to split in the middle; under the right circumstances, it will ‘unzip’ almost like a zipper, turning the molecule into two ‘half ladders.’

Note about Thiamine and Uracil:

These are basically two names for the same amino acid. You will find some texts use Thiamine (T) and some use Uracil (U) for this acid, leading to some confusion. Most commonly, when talking about DNA texts call it ‘Thiamine’ and when talking about RNA (the ‘half ladder’) they call it Uracil. There are tiny quantum mechanical differences in these molecules, which is the reason they have different names, but these differences don’t affect anything that would have any impact but the most ardent quantum mechanical researchers. (I think that many scientists like such complexities, as it makes their field seem far more complex than it really is, allowing them to impress people more easily.)

Each rung of the ‘half ladders’ can only bond with the appropriate other ‘base amino acid,’ as described below. A can only bond with U, U can only bond with A, and so forth. Once a DNA molecule has split into two ‘half ladders,’ molecules found in the nuclei of cells can then ‘rebuild’ the two half ladders into two brand new ladders.

Human DNA has about 3 billion ‘rungs’ in its ladder. In the new ladders, the rungs are identical to those in the old ladders, with each of the 3 billion ‘base pairs in the exact same sequence in the new ladders as in the original one.

The new molecules (‘ladders’) are exact clones of the original.

You could think of the information in the DNA as like a coded message. If you start with a ‘half ladder,’ each ‘half rung’ will be one of the four ‘amino acid bases,’ either A, C, G, or U. There will be 3 billion ‘half rungs.’ The sequence of the ‘letters’ in the genetic code is used (as we will see shortly) to create the physical molecules needed for the processes we call ‘life’ to take place.

This coded message can make exact copies of itself. Under the right circumstances, each of the coded messages can turn into a new independent living thing.

Crick, Watson, and Wilkins discovered these things in the spring of 1953.

This was an amazing discovery.

But even more amazing discoveries were to come.

The Second Coded Message In DNA

There is also a second, far more complex code within DNA.

This code is responsible for producing the ‘worker molecules’ in living things, called ‘proteins.’ Proteins are very complex molecules that do things in life.

Hemoglobin is one example of a protein. The hemoglobin molecule is red in color; this is what gives blood its distinctive color. Hemoglobin is a complex molecule that has the ability to ‘soak up’ oxygen when it passes through the lungs. The hemoglobin then carries that oxygen to the cells of the body, which all need oxygen for their life functions. When a red blood cell containing oxygen-saturated hemoglobin gets to cells that need oxygen, it releases the oxygen and sends it through the cell wall. The cell then sends carbon dioxide (a waste product of metabolism) back through the wall. The hemoglobin inside the red blood cells then ‘soaks up’ the carbon dioxide. The red blood cells then travel back to the lungs where the hemoglobin releases the carbon dioxide as air (which you will then exhale). The entire process then begins again.

Hemoglobin is one of more than 2 million different known proteins in the human body.

All of them have to be manufactured by the body; none of them can come from food:

The reason for this is that all proteins are far larger than the openings in intestinal walls and can’t get through from food to the bloodstream. It is true that you can eat proteins. But these proteins can’t go directly from your food into your cells. In your intestines, bacteria break down the proteins into amino acids (which all proteins are made of). The amino acids are small enough to get through the intestinal wall. Once they are there in the bloodstream, your body sends them to cellular factories that ‘reassemble’ them, through the process described below, to make the exact mix of new proteins that your body needs.

These new proteins do the ‘work’ needed to keep your life functions going.

The second code in DNA is the code the body uses to reassemble the amino acids as needed into new proteins.

Researchers have found that there are exactly 20 amino acids in all living things on Earth. (You will find them all listed in the table below, marked ‘the genetic code.’) No living thing has more or less than this. The DNA ‘codes’ for these 20 amino acids in a very specific way that Crick, Watkins, and Wilkins discovered and catalogued in the fall of 1953.

Here is the short version of how this process works (you can find as detailed of explanations as you want on the internet):

If your body needs a protein, certain worker molecules (proteins) go to the DNA molecule and split the ‘ladder’ into two ‘half ladders.’ One of these half ladders then ‘grabs’ the amino acids needed to reproduce itself and turn it back into a full ladder. That replaces the original molecule. If it is needed again, it is there to be used again.

Now you have a full DNA molecule (the replacement) and a ‘half ladder.’

The ‘half ladder’ is called ‘messenger RNA.’ It holds the ‘messages’ needed to make the proteins. Each set of 3 rungs on the messenger RNA is called a ‘triplet’. For example, if there are three ‘rungs’ that are each made of Uracil, the triplet is UUU. There are 64 possible triplets. (In other words, 64 possible three letter combinations, where each of the letters may be one of four amino acids.)

The chart to the right shows all of the possible combinations. Each three-letter combination corresponds to one block in the chart, and each block contains the name of 1 of the 20 amino acids. (Note that there are 64 possible combinations but only 20 amino acids, so each amino acid is coded by more than one triplet; in some cases there are 2 and in some cases 3.)

This relationship, between the ‘triplets’ of letters and 20 amino acids, is called ‘the genetic code.’

Qqqq genetic code here.

Crick, Watson, and Wilkins discovered the mechanism living things use to manufacture the worker molecules needed for life processes to take place. Here is how it works:

A specialized protein called a ‘ribosome’ ‘grabs’ onto three of the ‘rungs’ of this half ladder. The ribosome then ‘reads’ that triplet and ‘decodes it,’ figuring out which of the 20 amino acids it represents. For example, if it ‘sees’ UUU, it knows that the required amino acid is Phenylalanine; if it ‘sees’ UUA it knows it needs Leucine. (You may want to refer to the chart to the right to see that these are the corresponding molecules.) Once the ribosome ‘knows’ which amino acid is required, it ‘grabs’ that particular amino acid from its surroundings, where all of the 20 amino acids are available. It ‘attaches’ the required amino acid to the three ‘rungs’ it is ‘holding.’ It then ‘walks’ down another three ‘rungs.’ It ‘reads’ the code to see which amino acid is called for; it ‘grabs’ that amino acid, and it ‘attaches’ it to the three ‘rungs’ it is ‘holding.’ It then walks down the ‘ladder’ again to get to the next three ‘rungs’ and does the same thing.

At a certain point, it will come to a code that tells it that the protein is finished. At this point, the ribosome will work with several other proteins to ‘cut’ the long chain of amino acids loose from the ‘half ladder’ of messenger RNA. After the new protein has been removed, the messenger RNA (the ‘half ladder’ that we started with) is available to make another protein, if another is needed.

This leaves a long chain of amino acids in the right sequence that is floating in the cell. This is not a finished protein yet, because all proteins are 3-dimensional molecules and this is just a long chain. The protein is a worker; it can’t do its job unless it has been ‘folded’ into the proper shape by other worker proteins. Every atom has to be in the exact right position for the molecule to do its job.

Specialized proteins come in to ‘fold’ the chain into the required shape. Now the protein is finished and can be sent out to do whatever job it was designed to do.

Here is an example so you can see how this works: Hemoglobin is a protein. It has exactly 137 amino acids. These amino acids are coded in 438 of the 3 billion ‘rungs’ in your DNA. Each 3 ‘rung’ combination (triplet) represents 1 of these 137 amino acids. If your body needs hemoglobin, it signals to the cells to make some. Proteins divide a DNA molecule into two ‘half ladders’ (if there is none already divided) and ribosomes begin making the 137-link chain. Once the chain is complete, other proteins cut this chain loose from the half ladder (allowing the half-ladder to make another hemoglobin molecule, if necessary).

The hemoglobin molecule is not finished yet. It is a 3 dimensional molecule and can’t work as a chain. Other proteins then ‘fold’ this hemoglobin into the required shape.

Now the hemoglobin molecule is finished. Your body needed the hemoglobin to make red blood cells, the only cells in the body that use hemoglobin. Bone marrow is the only place in your body that makes red blood cells, so the hemoglobin and all of the other proteins needed to make red blood cells must be transported to the bone marrow. Once all of the parts needed to make red blood cells are available, the marrow makes them. It then sends the blood cells out into the blood stream to start their working life.

Your body replaces all of its red blood cells every 90 days, so the old cells are constantly being removed from the body and replacement blood cells are being made. To supply the needed hemoglobin, your body makes millions of molecules of hemoglobin (by the above process) every minute of every day you are alive.

Hemoglobin is one of roughly 2 million different proteins that your body needs to operate. They are all made the same way. A single strand of DNA contains all the information needed to make every one of these proteins.

This is not a theory.

A theory is a guess about how something might work by people who don’t fully understand the exact mechanism. People make such guesses and then test them. Once they have tested the theories and confirmed them, the information is called a ‘fact’ not a ‘theory.’ The mechanism discussed above has been thoroughly studied. It happens this way.

This is the way life works.