Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 443

At The Atlantic: Dinosaurs might have had whole civilizations; how would you know?

Taking a break, do you recall that, according to a New York Times op-ed, Knowing the universe is a simulation will end it…? Here’s an even better one: Dinosaurs had an advanced civilization but then it just disappeared without a trace. So we found the fossilized poop but not the laptops and the androids?:

The idea, a thought experiment crafted by The Atlantic writer Peter Brannen, is meant to illustrate how all of the damage done to the world by humanity happened in the blink of an eye in terms of geological timescales — meaning that an archaeologist in the future might not even know that we were ever here.

Dan Robitzski, “The Atlantic: it’s possible dinosaurs had a whole civilization ” at Futurism

From that perspective:

If, in the final 7,000 years of their reign, dinosaurs became hyperintelligent, built a civilization, started asteroid mining, and did so for centuries before forgetting to carry the one on an orbital calculation, thereby sending that famous valedictory six-mile space rock hurtling senselessly toward the Earth themselves—it would be virtually impossible to tell. All we do know is that an asteroid did hit, and that the fossils in the millions of years afterward look very different than in the millions of years prior.

So that’s what 180 million years of complete dominance buys you in the fossil record. What, then, will a few decades of industrial civilization get us? This is the central question of the Anthropocene—an epoch that supposedly started, not tens of millions of years ago, but perhaps during the Truman administration. Will our influence on the rock record really be so profound to geologists 100 million years from now, whoever they are, that they would look back and be tempted to declare the past few decades or centuries a bona fide epoch of its own?

Peter Brannen, “The Anthropocene Is a Joke” at The Atlantic

Worse, all the great ideas the dinosaurs had were wiped out too, right, by that one miscalculation?

Actually, the Anthropocene is mainly a testament to the enormous power of immaterial ideas to shape things, for good or ill. It is the best argument against materialism and it is right under our noses.

In real life, the dinosaurs never had that.

See also: Knowing the universe is a simulation will end it…? Wow, magic. No, cosmology, according to the New York Times. At least the crackpot cosmologist is mostly scaring himself. The rest of us are wondering whether those water bears could survive on the moon. That’s all the “space aliens” we can be sure of.

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Science mag explains why we need “junk DNA”

We’ve all heard from the Darwinians about how 98% of our genome is junk:

Other research advances in the last decade also suggest “junk DNA” might just be misunderstood genetic material. Scientists have now linked various non-coding sequences to various biological processes and even human diseases. For instance, researchers believe these sequences are behind the development of the uterus and also of our opposable thumbs. A study published in Annals of Oncology last year showed that a non-coding DNA segment acts like a volume knob for gene expression, ultimately influencing the development of breast and prostate cancer. And a study in Nature Genetics this year found mutations outside of gene-coding regions can cause autism.

Exploring the role of non-coding sequences is now an area of intense research. Increasing evidence suggests these noncoding sequences might help cancer defeat treatment, and experts now see them as promising tools for cancer diagnosis.

Daniel Bastardo Blanco, “Our Cells Are Filled With ‘Junk DNA’ — Here’s Why We Need It” at Discover

Sure. Except for Darwinism, researchers would have tumbled to a lot of this stuff a long time ago.

See also: Humans may have only 19,000 coding genes

“Junk DNA” regulates regeneration of tissues and organs

Note: One junk DNA defender just isn’t doing politeness anymore. Hmmm. In a less Darwinian science workplace, that could become more a problem for him than for his colleagues.

Junk DNA can actually change genitalia. Junk DNA played the same role in defending Darwinian evolution as claims that Neanderthal man was a subhuman. did: The vast library of junk genes and the missing link made Darwin’s story understandable to the average person and the missing link even became part of popular culture. With Darwinism so entrenched, the fact that these beliefs are not based on fact will be difficult to root out of the culture. Darwin-only school systems are part of the problem.

Been a while since we’ve heard much about humans as the 98% or 99% chimpanzee. If the human genome is this fuzzy how would we know? And doubtless, things have gotten more complex.

At Quanta: Cells need almost all of their genes, even the “junk DNA”

“Junk” RNA helps regulate metabolism

Junk DNA defender just isn’t doing politeness any more.

Anyone remember ENCODE? Not much junk DNA? Still not much. (Paper is open access.)

Yes, Darwin’s followers did use junk DNA as an argument for their position.

Another response to Darwin’s followers’ attack on the “not-much-junk-DNA” ENCODE findings

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When the war on objectivity hits Big Tech

Daniel Olah, Unsplash

Whistleblower says Google called police to do a “wellness check” on him.

He can be seen doing a perp walk on the sidewalk in front of his house on the video; some portions transcribed here

Zachary Vorhies: And the reason why I printed these documents was because I saw something dark and nefarious going on with the company. I felt that our entire election system was going to be compromised forever by this company that told the American public that it was not going to do any evil and I saw that they were making really quick moves, not only in the documents but also in the internal speeches that the executives were giving to the company that they were intending to do that, that they were intending to scope the information landscape so that they could create their own version of what was objectively true. More.

Maybe Google hired crackpot cosmologists to do their theorizing.

Now that commercial enterprises are into this stuff, where will we turn for an attempt at objectivity?

Since we are here anyway: Is Google a cult? Or does it just act that way? Project Veritas announces that a new rebel Googler has sent nearly 1000 documents on algorithm bias to the DOJ

While we prepare a news story on Zach Vorhies’ revelations, it may be worth asking why one of the world’s largest companies has developed what appears to be the atmosphere of a political cult.

See also: See also: Google engineer reveals search engine bias. He found Google pretty neutral in 2014; the bias started with the US 2016 election (Gregory Coppola in July)

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Darwinists may be paying a price for pop science celebrity: Jeffrey Epstein

The late Jeffrey Epstein cultivated a lot of people, including Darwinists who were pop science faves:

On FEB 20, 2002 Epstein Flew from JFK to MRY (Monterey, CA) with the following people: (Many names misspelled and or omitted corrected and noted by italic emphasis) …

Daniel C. Dennett- Center for Cognitive Studies – Tufts University Richard Dawkins– Author ” The God Delusion” and Prof. Oxford University …

Vox Day, “Dawkins and Dennett connected to Epstein” at Vox Popoli

This item gives the sense of it:

It’s summer 2010, and Jeffrey Epstein has just returned to New York City after serving out an 18-month sentence in Palm Beach, Florida, including parole, for soliciting prostitution from a minor. He’s hosting dinner at his townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. To his left is John Brockman, the literary superagent who seems to represent every scientist who’s ever written a bestselling book (Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Daniel Kahneman, and so forth). Brockman has brought along a client—a young professor whose line of research interests Epstein. Across the table, and to Epstein’s right, is an aspiring fashion model and her companion.

There’s no cross-talk or conversation between these pairs of guests; it’s more like Epstein has convened two separate interactions for his private entertainment, and these just happen to be coinciding both in time and space. “He would alternate between us,” recalled the professor, who asked that his name not be included in this story.

Daniel Engber, “The “Girls” Were Always Around” at Slate

Over at Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne’s blog, Steven Pinker, also an Epstein guest at one time, talks about it: “I think the dislike was mutual—according to a friend, he ‘voted me off the island,’ presumably because he was sick of me trying to keep the conversation on track and correcting him when he shot off his mouth on topics he knew nothing about. But Epstein had insinuated himself with so many people I intersected with (Alan Dershowitz, Martin Nowak, John Brockman, Steve Kosslyn, Lawrence Krauss) and so many institutions he helped fund (Harvard’s Program in Evolutionary Dynamics, ASU’s Origins Project, even Harvard Hillel) that I often ended up at the same place with him. (Most of these gatherings were prior to the revelation of his sex crimes, such as the 2002 plane trip to TED with Dawkins, Dennett, the Brockmans, and others, but Krauss’s Origins Project Meeting came after he served his sentence.)”

Epstein seems to have gone out of his way to cultivate such people but in the place where he ended up their influence could not save him. They must be wishing now that they had never accepted his invitations to anything. Or never received any.

Hat tip: Ken Francis, co-author with Theodore Dalrymple of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd

See also: UD Newswatch: Epstein suicide

Now Steve Pinker Is Getting #MeToo’d, At Inside Higher Ed Over Jeffrey Epstein

Alleged Sex Trafficker Jeffrey Epstein Pledged $30 Million For Harvard Evolution Program

and

Jeff Epstein’s cultural dumpster fire spreads to ID vs. evo controversies. Just because people are in the news doesn’t mean they did anything. It rather shows how a bad actor can change the news picture.

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Believing elephants into personhood

Why do people who don’t believe elephants can fly believe that they can be made into “persons” by human effort?

For decades, researchers were transfixed with the idea of humanizing great apes by raising them among humans and teaching them language. Emerging from the ruins and recriminations of the collapse, philosophy prof Don Ross has a new idea: Let’s start with elephants instead…

The myth of the “talking animal,” far from receding into the ancient mists from which it sprung, never dies, as a recent essay at Aeon by a philosophy professor shows. The myth answers needs that cannot, perhaps, be realized in the real world but cannot die either:

“We know that elephants are more social – and far more intelligent – than cows. But the comparison goes far beyond the question of intelligence and alertness. I believe it’s possible that elephants have all the cognitive and emotional capacities it takes to be persons. I’m not claiming they belong to the species Homo sapiens, obviously: rather, I mean they might have the potential to deserve the label ‘person’ in recognition of their particular status or identity. Along with many philosophers, I think that being a person involves something different to being a living organism with human DNA.

“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that elephants currently express the full range of personal and creative capacities that humans do. But I suspect all that’s missing are certain informational and institutional structures, along with the motivations to innovate upon them. In humans, we know what those structures look like: they are the books, movies, museums and laws that manifest in the world what otherwise exists only in our heads. It might be that there’s a lot going on in the heads of elephants, but they just haven’t been moved to externalise and store it in the environment the way we have.” Don Ross, “The Elephant as a Person” at Aeon

But wait. Why haven’t elephants been so moved? This is like saying dogs don’t wear shoes on salty pavement because they haven’t been moved to make them. In short, it depends on a grammatical equivocation around the origin of the ideas themselves…

There is no evidence that a convergence between human and elephant intellect is happening elsewhere than in the vast, non-spatial, and minimally-chartable world of the human imagination.

Denyse O’Leary, “Elephants who fly—or become “persons”—are magic” at Mind Matters News

Amazing what people start to believe when they quit believing in conventional religions.

See also: Researchers: Apes are just like us. And we’re not doing the right things to make them start behaving that way… In 2011, we were told in Smithsonian Magazine, “‘Talking’ apes are not just the stuff of science fiction; scientists have taught many apes to use some semblance of language.” Have they? If so, why has it all subsided? What happened?

Does social ability distinguish human intelligence from that of apes? Not altogether, of course, but it plays a bigger role than we sometimes assume

Crows can be as smart as apes

Scientists clash over why octopuses are smart. New findings show, the brainy seafood breaks all the rules about why some life forms are smart. For many years, we’ve been trying to understand why the octopus is uniquely smart among cephalopods. Research answers some questions only to raise others, as a recent controversy shows.

Is the octopus a “second genesis of intelligence?” Can its strange powers provide insights for robotics or the human mind?

Yes, even lizards can be smart. If you catch them at the right time. But can we give machines what the lizard has by nature?

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Culturing a tentacled archean in a lab shows eukaryote-like genes from 2 billion years ago

The elusive Asgard archaea are now thought to provide information on how eukaryotes developed. Which is interesting because archaea are supposed to be the most primitive cells and eukaryote are the most complex, leading to multicellular life forms. (Bacteria are in the middle.)

An elusive marine microbe, once known only by its DNA, has finally been cultured in the lab and could grant hints as to how eukaryotic life originated, researchers reported August 8 in a preprint posted to bioRxiv. The single-cell organism grows branching appendages and contains eukaryote-like genes, though it belongs to the domain Archaea…

With the cultured microbe in hand, the researchers sequenced its full genome and confirmed the existence of eukaryote-like genes. They also observed that the microbe usually grows in tandem with a second, methane-producing archaeon, with whom it fosters a symbiotic relationship. Prometheoarchaeum breaks down amino acids and supplies its partner with energy in the form of hydrogen, which might otherwise impede the Asgard’s growth, according to Science.

Images captured with an electron microscope revealed that Prometheoarchaeum develops lengthy appendages with multiple branches, according to Nature. The authors suggest the microbe may have used the tentacles to grab hold of oxygen-producing organisms.
Nicoletta Lanese, “Elusive Asgard Archaea Finally Cultured in Lab” at The Scientist

Now, the Asgard archaea are thought to be 2 billion years old (The article in The Scientist says “2 million” as of this writing but that would seem to be a typo.)

Also, here’s a 2017 Abstract from Nature, noting that “Our results expand the known repertoire of ‘eukaryote-specific’ proteins in Archaea, indicating that the archaeal host cell already contained many key components that govern eukaryotic cellular complexity.” Thus they had that complexity back then. Not so good for Darwinism unless Darwinism is magic.

Abstract: The origin and cellular complexity of eukaryotes represent a major enigma in biology. Current data support scenarios in which an archaeal host cell and an alphaproteobacterial (mitochondrial) endosymbiont merged together, resulting in the first eukaryotic cell. The host cell is related to Lokiarchaeota, an archaeal phylum with many eukaryotic features. The emergence of the structural complexity that characterizes eukaryotic cells remains unclear. Here we describe the ‘Asgard’ superphylum, a group of uncultivated archaea that, as well as Lokiarchaeota, includes Thor-, Odin- and Heimdallarchaeota. Asgard archaea affiliate with eukaryotes in phylogenomic analyses, and their genomes are enriched for proteins formerly considered specific to eukaryotes. Notably, thorarchaeal genomes encode several homologues of eukaryotic membrane-trafficking machinery components, including Sec23/24 and TRAPP domains. Furthermore, we identify thorarchaeal proteins with similar features to eukaryotic coat proteins involved in vesicle biogenesis. Our results expand the known repertoire of ‘eukaryote-specific’ proteins in Archaea, indicating that the archaeal host cell already contained many key components that govern eukaryotic cellular complexity. – Asgard archaea illuminate the origin of eukaryotic cellular complexity Katarzyna Zaremba-Niedzwiedzka, Eva F. Caceres, Jimmy H. Saw, Disa Bäckström, Lina Juzokaite, Emmelien Vancaester, Kiley W. Seitz, Karthik Anantharaman, Piotr Starnawski, Kasper U. Kjeldsen, Matthew B. Stott, Takuro Nunoura, Jillian F. Banfield, Andreas Schramm, Brett J. Baker, Anja Spang & Thijs J. G. Ettema Nature volume 541, pages 353–358 (19 January 2017 More. (paywall)

See also: At Nature: Carl Woese’s Archaea Are “Shaking Up The Tree Of Life” The Archaea, a huge domain of life, were only identified in the 1970s, by Carl Woese., They, of course, were a problem for the Darwinian Tree of Life, which we were all taught in school as the Correct Understanding. And Woese wanted to overthrow Darwin. He might succeed posthumously.

and

Carl Woese on the “conceptual failings of the modern evolutionary synthesis”

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Will quantum biology help solve some of life’s greatest mysteries?

In the past, the idea that quantum effects would matter much in life forms was considered a “fringe idea” because the numbers would average out.

“The warmer the environment is, the more busy and noisy it is, the quicker these quantum effects disappear,” says University of Surrey theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili, who coauthored a 2014 book called Life on the Edge that brought so-called quantum biology to a lay audience. “So it’s almost ridiculous, counterintuitive, that they should persist inside cells. And yet, if they do—and there’s a lot of evidence suggesting that in certain phenomena they do—then life must be doing something special.”

Al-Khalili and Vedral are part of an expanding group of scientists now arguing that effects of the quantum world may be central to explaining some of biology’s greatest puzzles—from the efficiency of enzyme catalysis to avian navigation to human consciousness—and could even be subject to natural selection.

“The whole field is trying to prove a point,” says Chiara Marletto, a University of Oxford physicist who collaborated with Coles and Vedral on the bacteria-entanglement paper. “That is to say, not only does quantum theory apply to these [biological systems], but it’s possible to test whether these [systems] are harnessing quantum physics to perform their functions.”

… Most ideas in quantum biology are still driven more by theory than by experimental support, but a number of researchers are now trying to close the gap. t

Catherine Offord, “Quantum Biology May Help Solve Some of Life’s Greatest Mysteries” at The Scientist

Well, life is “doing something special” whether quantum mechanics drives much of biology or not.

Quantum mechanics can solve mysteries but only if they are mysteries of a certain sort. The temptation is to try to shoehorn a mystery – they mentioned human consciousness – into that mold in order that quantum theory might solve it. But we haven’t yet established the role of quantum processes in much more basic biology so they might want to wait on that fuzzier stuff.

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

See also: From Philip Cunningham: Darwinian Materialism Vs Quantum Biology: Part I

and

Philip Cunningham: Darwinian Materialism Vs. Quantum Biology: Part II

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Scientists: For the last time, plants are NOT conscious!!

Once again, attention focuses on plant scientists who find themselves fighting for sanity in a world where people confuse high levels of information transmission with conscious awareness:

Lincoln Taiz is peeved. Over the last decade or so, the retired plant biologist has watched the rise of the field of “plant neurobiology” with growing dismay.

That controversial field, which debuted in a 2006 article in Trends in Plant Science, is based on the idea that plants — which do not possess brains — nonetheless handle information in ways that resemble sophisticated animal nervous systems. This thinking implies that plants could feel happiness or sorrow or pain, make intentional decisions and even possess consciousness. But the chances of that are “effectively nil,” Taiz and colleagues write in an opinion piece in the Aug. 1 Trends in Plant Science.

“There’s nothing in the plant remotely comparable to the complexity of the animal brain,” says Taiz, of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “Nothing. And I’m a plant biologist. I love plants” — not because plants think like humans, he says, but for “how they live their plant lives.”

Laura Sanders, “Plants don’t have feelings and aren’t conscious, a biologist argues” at ScienceNews

We know something’s changed when scientists need to make these points. Maybe underestimating the significance of human intelligence plays a role. After all, if we are just clever apes, maybe lettuce is just-as-clever apes too. Maybe salad is murder…

Yes, plants have nervous systems that, like mammals, use glutamate to speed transmission and yes, plants be as “smart” as animals and communicate extensively, without a mind or a brain. But that is not the same thing as intelligent awareness. Even machines can do that.

See also: Scientists: Plants are not conscious!

and

Is salad murder? Some think so.

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Animal Kingdom, Nietzsche Comes to the Small Screen

[Spoilers below]

Animal Kingdom is a TNT television drama based on
a 2010 Australian movie of the same name. 
The series follows the Codys, an Oceanside, California crime family.  The Codys plan and execute their crimes with
meticulous attention to detail, and their crimes pay very well indeed.  The fruits of their criminal labors include
homes by the ocean, luxury cars, world travel, lavish parties, and unlimited
lines of cocaine.  The family consists of
matriarch Janine “Smurf” Cody, her sons Pope, Baz, Daren and Craig and her grandson
Josh.  The Codys are beautiful and (except
for Pope) charismatic, and the writers use these traits to beguile us into
cheering for them as they pull off their latest “Mission Impossible” criminal
escapade.

That said, Animal Kingdom is not just another action story playing on the “glamourous criminal” trope.  The writers draw back the curtain to reveal the dark current of evil that runs through the Codys’ lives, and remind us that “glamourous” is derived from a word that means “illusion.”  Like Breaking Bad, Animal Kingdom gazes into the abyss, and while Walter White was a Millean consequentialist, the Codys are disciples of Frederick Nietzsche. 

A lot of ink has been spilled about whether Nietzsche was
a nihilist.  The conventional wisdom is
that he was.  After all he spoke of the
meaninglessness of traditional morality and the death of God.  Others contend that the conventional wisdom
is based on a superficial reading.  Far
from embracing nihilism; Nietzsche feared and warned against it and conceived of
his work as a battle against the nihilism he believed was inherent in the Western
philosophical project.  He was not
amoral.  He was attempting to create a
new foundation for morality after the collapse of the Christian consensus based
on the a natural aristocracy in which the strongest man (the so-called übermensch)
would set his new standards and values of their own making.  In Beyond Good and Evil he wrote:

The noble type of man regards HIMSELF as a determiner of values; he does not require to be approved of; he passes the judgment:  “What is injurious to me is injurious in itself;” he knows that it is he himself only who confers honour on things; he is a CREATOR OF VALUES.  He honours whatever he recognizes in himself: such morality equals self-glorification. . . . one may act towards beings of a lower rank, towards all that is foreign, just as seems good to one, or “as the heart desires,” and in any case “beyond good and evil”

Nietzsche diagnosis of the main current of Western philosophy correct.  It was indeed bounding headlong down the road to nihilism, but his attempt to change course served only to accelerate the descent.  As David Bentley Hart explains, Heidegger understood this very well. 

For Heidegger, the last metaphysician was Nietzsche because in Nietzsche’s thought the will to power was elevated to a position of ultimate truth; it became the principle of principles.  In that moment, metaphysics became somehow perfectly self-aware.  It had discovered its deepest essence by having achieved its nihilistic destiny.

Nietzsche’s failure is not surprising.  The nihilist asserts that life has no objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.  Objective meaning, purpose, and intrinsic value exist if and only if God exists.  Thus, Nietzsche’s atheism doomed his project before it had begun, and Nietzsche’s elevation of the will to power as the ultimate good, far from checking the descent into nihilism, entrenched it more firmly than ever.

Which brings us back to Animal Kingdom.  The Codys never engage in philosophy-speak
and doubtless have never reflected on Nietzsche.  Nevertheless, they are the perfect embodiment
of his übermensch.  They recognize
no conceptual limits on their will to power. 
For them, neither right nor wrong exist. 
The only limit they recognize is a prudential one – i.e., what can they get
away with.  This is clear from the very first
episode of the series in which a heist goes wrong, and they inadvertently kill
a security guard when they run into him with their getaway car.  So they murdered a man.  Too bad for him.  They never shed a tear.  After all, the guard’s death is in the
natural order of things in their Nietzschean world where the strong make their
own rules and dominate the weak, and the weak get hurt (or die) if they resist.  As Nietzsche said, the strong “may act
towards beings of a lower rank just as seems good” to them.

Animal Kingdom explores what it is like to live in a milieu where all restraint has been cast off, and the metaphor of the show’s title illuminates the inevitable result of the Codys’ worldview.  The metaphor is only implicit in the series, but it was made explicit in the movie, in which there is a scene where a policeman attempts to convince Josh to accept his protection and give evidence against the family.  He tries to convince Josh that he is not safe, because he lives in a world that is “about super-efficient animals and hard thorny plants and everything knows it’s place in the scheme of things.  Everything sits in the order somewhere.  Things survive coz they’re strong . . .”  The dynamic described by the policeman in the movie plays out in the series.  Nietzsche’s premises lead to the jungle, a nihilistic bellum omnium contra omnes (“the war of all against all”), and not even familial bonds ensure loyalty or even survival. 

We see this war playing out as the series
progresses.  In season three a crescendo is
reached when Baz learns that Smurf has been skimming the proceeds of their
jobs.  In retaliation he tries to frame
her for murder, which in turn leads Smurf to hire a hitman (hitwoman actually)
to gun down her own son.  As Nietzsche
should have known, if life is not sacred for everyone, it is not sacred for
anyone. 

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Caution! Knowing the universe is a simulation will end it…? Wow, magic.

No, cosmology, according to the New York Times.

So, Sir Martin Rees, you be quiet for a bit. You might be right, of course, but please don’t frighten the Forces:

If we’re all living inside a complex computer simulation, we should probably accept our fate — lest our universe get unplugged.

At least, that’s according to Nanyang Technological University philosophy professor Preston Greene, who penned a New York Times op-ed arguing that we should stop looking for evidence of simulation theory — because proving the universe is simulated would probably render the simulation useless for whoever’s running it, meaning we could all get scrapped like a wayward family in “The Sims.”

Dan Robitzski, “Simulation Theory “May Cause the Annihilation of Our Universe.”” at Futurism

Here’s the op-ed:

As far as I am aware, no physicist proposing simulation experiments has considered the potential hazards of this work. This is surprising, not least because Professor Bostrom himself explicitly identified “simulation shutdown” as a possible cause of the extinction of all human life.

This area of academic research is rife with speculation and uncertainty, but one thing is for sure: If scientists do go ahead with these simulation experiments, the results will be either extremely uninteresting or spectacularly dangerous. Is it really worth the risk?

Preston Greene, “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Let’s Not Find Out” at New York Times

At least the crackpot cosmologist is mostly scaring himself. The rest of us are wondering whether water bears could survive on the moon. That’s all the “space aliens” we can be sure of.

See also: Rob Sheldon on the chances of the tardigrades (water bears) surviving the recent moon crash Sheldon: Well, I do think that dormant tardigrades, which could survive for hundreds if not thousands of years in a “freeze-dried” state, can be revived when placed in water. If the spacecraft, Beresheet, had crashed with dormant tardigrades, then most definitely they are scattered about the surface of the Moon, waiting for their resurrection day in water.

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