Quest with Kirk Durston

Kirk and Sheldon discuss the building blocks of life and what space rocks may explain.

https://apple.news/AIsEeLZs9Q_m7pRKiKrElfA

Creators and Guests

Host

Kirk Durston

Scientist, philosopher, clergyman, outdoorsman, husband to the Queen of Hearts and father to six young adults.

Host

Sheldon Kotyk 🇨🇦

Father and Husband. “Fantastic and terrible in equal measure.” Probably not being serious.

What is Quest with Kirk Durston?

Kirk is a philosopher, scientist, husband, and a legit Christian. His podcast is mostly about exploring assumptions and questions pertaining to God, philosophy, science and life that he ponders about, hence the name Quest with Kirk Durston.

Kirk wants you to join him on that Quest or perhaps you're on your own quest about such matters and you can explore together.

Good afternoon Kirk, how are you doing?

I think I'm doing reasonably well.

Getting all geared up to

cook my world famous

spaghetti sauce tonight for supper.

Although probably only less

than half a dozen people know about it.

Well,

now I really have to make a trip out

to Ontario.

Yeah, it'll be unforgettable.

Since it's world famous,

at least it should be seven.

I say world famous because

that's what it should be.

It is so good.

Everybody who has it just raves.

It's like a whole different

universe of spaghetti sauce

compared to what we're normally used to.

Okay, so what's the trick?

It's tough to say.

There's a number of good ingredients,

but I think one of the big

attractions is that I melt about, I'd say,

at least a quarter pound of

mozzarella cheese into the sauce.

Into the sauce.

Nice.

Yeah.

And I tang it up a little bit, just enough,

you know,

with some Tabasco sauce or

crushed habanero peppers or whatever,

just enough not to make it uncomfortable.

I knew the peppers would be a part of it.

Yeah, yeah, they gotta be.

Nothing like blows off the

top of the stove or anything.

Yeah, no.

Oh, yes.

Thanks for doing this a

little bit later to speak

in our chapel today.

Yeah, no worries.

Right after normally we do our thing,

and I had to do some stuff before.

Yeah.

So thank you all for joining us.

So, Kirk.

How are you doing?

What's going on in your life these days?

Well,

I've been doing an awful lot of snow

shoveling the last week or two.

It's just unbelievable.

Do you have a blower?

I do.

I do a blower.

A big one,

like a forty-two-incher on the

front of my lawn tractor.

But even then, a couple days ago,

it was almost two hours of blowing.

This morning, it was maybe about an hour,

solid.

And a lot of that was spent

up near the road.

My driveway is about a

hundred and forty meters long.

But the snowplow... That's

like six thousand feet.

Yeah, well, no, not six thousand.

It's more than a football field.

I bet you it felt like six

thousand feet when you were

in that for an hour and a half.

The biggest problem is the

snowplow leaving a gigantic

wall of snow that's high,

and because he's going so fast,

it's extended down my driveway.

So that took... So do they

follow it up with a

front-end loader or anything like that?

No.

When they do our roads,

they'll follow it with a

front-end loader and do it

in the driveway.

Now, I love it.

But they also dump it onto our lawn,

which would be okay if it

wasn't for the ice and the gravel.

That's true because having had four boys,

a gigantic pile of snow on

the front lawn would be

almost heaven as far as

digging tunnels and everything goes.

But this is hard stuff.

This is chunks of ice and

rock and stuff and salt.

Not so good.

uh yeah so is is the snow

still coming or is it gonna

today is nice uh sun's

actually shining today

there's no wind uh

yesterday it was about

gusting to about fifty

miles an hour or eighty

kilometers per hour um so

the drifts were huge it was

ridiculous but today I'm

feeling pretty good good

good good well um

So when we were figuring out

what to talk about today, you said, Hey,

there's this article.

So you sent me this and, uh,

I didn't skim through it.

Uh, like I said,

it was a little bit swamped this morning,

but interesting.

So, uh,

we've got these rock rockets flying

around up there with, uh,

the key building blocks of life.

Hmm.

Yeah,

there's... They're saying it's

probably widespread.

Mm-hmm.

Now,

what was it about this that got you

excited?

Because I've always assumed

that they've always said this,

haven't they?

They have always said this, same old,

same old,

but this is maybe just a little more...

What generally they might be

more excited about is that

they were able to actually

go to the asteroid and not

just wander around on

fallen ones here on Earth

that have gone through a

lot of burning through the

atmosphere and stuff.

So they were actually able

to go to one out there and

bring back a sample so it

wasn't damaged or altered

by the atmospheric entry

and the heat generated there.

And what they found is a lot

of amino acids,

fourteen out of the twenty

common ones used for life,

fourteen of them,

as well as some of the

bases that are needed for

building DNA and RNA.

And so part of the problem is how,

like one of the things

science has occupied itself

with is how do we get life

emerging all by itself without any help,

Oh, hold it.

What's this?

Oh,

my music application just started to

fire up accidentally.

I must have hit something

and it was playing music.

I can hear it.

Oh, that's good.

It was drowning out

everything in my earphones.

So, yeah, so there's this... Basically,

at one point in time,

for much of our human history,

we kind of attributed...

And different cultures would

have different ways of looking at it,

but there was a creator.

There was some sort of a god out there,

depending on what culture

you're looking at,

who was ultimately

responsible for creating

life and the world and everything else.

Now,

that would vary wildly depending on

what culture and when in

history and so forth.

Now, science came along,

and at first it was mostly...

Christians or not just

Christians but let's say

theists who are advancing

science because one of the

things we've known since

the oldest book in the Bible,

the book of Job,

talks about the laws of

nature that govern the cosmos.

So that provided a basis for science,

for repeatability and what

are these laws and how do

they work in this world.

But more recently,

with the rise of a new philosophy, well,

it's not a new philosophy,

atheism has been around since, well,

who knows when,

but it was very important

to be able to explain

things without having to

acknowledge the existence of a creator,

of God.

So,

we're looking for a natural way life

could have arisen.

and uh that's a massive

problem we have been

working on it for over a

century and maybe really

seriously for maybe maybe

like seventy five eighty

years um the stanley miller

experiment back in I think

it was around nineteen

fifty four or fifty three

somewhere in there try to

find a way to naturally

produce amino acids no

You might be wondering what

are amino acids?

But we'll put that on hold

for a second just to

summarize what I've said thus far.

So basically science has

sort of assumed its own kind of religion.

It's called scientism.

Not all of science,

but scientism is kind of

like atheism dressed up in a lab coat.

So everything under

scientism must be explained

just through the laws of

nature and the initial

conditions of the universe.

so is that is it like a

synonym to naturalist or is

there uh am I thinking of

something else uh

naturalism yeah materialism

all very closely related

materialism is more like

nothing exists except the

material stuff in the

universe here space time

matter and energy that sort

of thing that's materialism

and naturalism would be

very closely related that

is everything must have a

natural explanation

the laws of physics,

the initial conditions of the universe.

And scientism really kind of

almost deifies science.

In other words, science is our tool.

In fact, it's not just a tool.

It's now regarded as the

ultimate bastion of truth.

because it is so objective

and so methodical now the

reality is is that science

has been badly corrupted by

what the science journal

nature describes as

perverse incentives

competition for funding and

so forth but I'd say it's

also been corrupted by this

allegiance to atheism

In other words,

you can have a perfectly...

With advances of science now,

it's looking increasingly likely.

In other words,

the fingerprints of an

intelligence behind life

and behind the universe are

becoming more and more

obvious all the time.

So we have this huge answer sitting there,

and there's just a state of denial,

just denying that

intelligence was involved.

Rather,

we're trying to come up with a way

to see how life would arise by itself.

And so this asteroid,

actually what they found

was what they call some of

the basic building blocks of life.

In other words,

the basic components for DNA.

And I'll clarify what I'm

talking about here in a

minute when I say DNA and proteins.

But the basic components of DNA,

RNA and proteins.

they found these basic

building blocks and you

might think wow we found

the basic building blocks

of life we're well on our

way now to explaining how

life arose naturally if you

think that you would be uh

massively mistaken and I'll

explain that in a minute or

so too so how does that

sound uh sheldon as far as

kind of like a background

Yeah, and as I'm reading here, I'm like,

okay, similar stuff,

including amino acids,

have been detected in meteorites before.

but they're after they come in to earth.

So they're not perfect where this one,

because they're getting it

from the original, original area,

it makes, it makes it a much more, um,

pure sample, I guess you can, it's less,

less likely to get the

earth's life blocks all over.

Um,

So, yeah, so let's dig into this.

Amino acids,

they're saying they got

fourteen of the twenty that

life on Earth uses to form proteins.

Now,

you have a little bit of background in

this.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention that.

I did a PhD in biophysics at

the University of Guelph

and have since published a

few papers in this area in

science journals.

But I focused on how do you

identify or detect

functional information

encoded in things like DNA and proteins?

And secondly, how do you quantify it?

How do you measure it?

So you've got to identify it,

then you have to measure it,

how much is there?

And then third,

which was the most

complicated and biggest

part of my PhD project was,

what does this information

do in terms of making a

protein useful for biological life?

I'm trying to stay to

layman's terms as much as possible.

Well,

because there's no point in talking

about stuff if nobody

understands what you're saying.

Let's just talk about it this way.

That you have,

let's say there's twenty

different colors and sizes

of Lego you need.

That's right.

To create the house.

Yeah.

They found fourteen of these.

Yeah, fourteen Lego pieces.

Let's put it that way.

Okay.

Now, are those other six important?

It turns out that they all are.

They're all important.

But they're hoping that they will find,

like some scientists have said, oh,

we could have maybe a sort

of a rudimentary type of

life with maybe fewer amino

acids and then later on.

Because the amino acids themselves,

these Lego pieces,

you can sort them out into

different categories.

And so there are some of the

scientists say, well,

we only maybe need one from

each category and then we'd be on a roll.

Well, the reality is,

and my own research showed that no,

that's not going to work.

At some point,

you're going to need each of

the twenty on different proteins.

You're going to need each one of those.

Now,

so let's go back to the Lego block

analogy.

So just imagine that you got

a package in the mail and it was a tube.

And in that tube were a

bunch of Lego pieces all

attached together in a long chain.

And as you pulled those Lego pieces out,

and remember we're talking

about twenty different kinds of pieces,

so you could use the same

kind multiple times in the chain,

but you got this chain

that's roughly three

hundred Lego pieces long.

That's the average length of a protein.

so the lego pieces represent

the amino acids and the

chain represents a protein

which is just a chain of

amino acids in this case a

chain of lego pieces so as

you pull this chain out

what you notice is that it

collapses into a stable

three-dimensional structure

Well, that would be pretty impressive.

But it collapses into a

stable three-dimensional structure,

and that structure,

it'll do that same

structure every time you

pull it out of the tube.

In other words,

in biological... In the tube, they're all,

like, separated.

But... Well, no,

let's assume they're all

attached in one long chain

inside the tube.

Okay, so...

and you just pull them out

of the tube like this.

And it doesn't stay in a long chain,

it just sort of all

collapses in on itself and

you get this three-dimensional structure.

Okay, so a house gets created.

Well, that would be a bit too far.

Let's say an amazing,

let's say you take those

Lego pieces and you build a

much larger component.

Let's say a Lego motor for

an airplane that you want to build.

So that one protein won't

build the house or that one

structure won't build it.

But it is an important part.

Or if you're thinking about cars,

it all collapses into, let's say,

let's say a bolt or a nut or

a particular piece and if

you get a bunch of them you

can make a wiring harness

but we're getting too

complicated here let's just

keep it simple now here's

the thing the shape of that

three-dimensional structure

will depend on the sequence

of the Lego pieces inside the tube

In the same way,

the shape of the

three-dimensional structure

that a protein will

typically take depends on

the sequence of the amino acids.

And they're all in a chain.

They're put together.

Now,

all the amino acids are assembled into

a long chain,

but the chain collapses into

this three-dimensional structure.

And so we're talking about

Lego pieces here.

The Lego pieces are in a chain.

There's three hundred of them.

Three hundred total pieces

but for each link in that

chain you've only got

twenty choices because

there's only twenty

different kinds of Lego pieces.

So you pull it out and you

get this nice

three-dimensional structure.

You have another tube comes

in the mail with a

different sequence of the

same Lego pieces.

The same Lego pieces, all twenty of them,

but they're sequenced differently.

You pull that out of the

tube and it collapses to a

different three-dimensional structure.

Now what you'll find is that

it's not just one

particular sequence that'll

collapse to that structure.

There could be a lot of

different sequences that'll

still collapse to the same

structure and you would

call that subset of sequences,

you'd call that a family,

a family of Lego piece

sequences that collapse to the same,

let's say Lego motor or

Lego bolt or whatever it is

you'd need to build that

larger thing which

The larger thing in biology would be,

let's talk about humans, with humans.

So humans,

we have roughly twenty thousand proteins.

Twenty thousand.

And these proteins,

about roughly seventy percent,

maybe seventy-five percent,

they have stable

three-dimensional

structures once they're formed,

once a chain forms.

Like pulling that string of

Lego pieces out of the tube

and it collapses into this

nice structure.

So that's why they're important for life,

because you are built.

Let's say if I was looking

at a Lego Sheldon here, Sheldon,

you'd be built out of

twenty different Lego pieces,

all amazingly sequenced

together such that they

formed larger sections like

the retina on your eyeball or, you know,

whatever.

And then those would be assembled,

those larger pieces

assembled to basically

build a Lego Sheldon.

But you've got to start with

the Lego pieces.

And so this discovery that

they made on this asteroid called Bennu,

what they're discovering

here is that fourteen of

those Lego pieces were

found on this asteroid.

They only need six others,

but the assumption is that

you would find them somewhere else.

So it talks about like

thousands of organic

compounds and fourteen of

the twenty amino acids.

So what are these organic

compounds that we're talking about?

Is that different types of dust?

No,

it would be different kinds of

molecules that usually have

carbon in them.

And so carbon will bond with

other things and produce

amino acids and other

so-called organic compounds.

Organic doesn't necessarily

mean it came from life.

The picture of this asteroid,

I'm not seeing a lot of

trees or anything.

No.

And just quite like,

when I think of organic,

I think of really overpriced bananas.

Yeah.

But in this case,

is this anything that might have types of,

well,

is the asteroid all made of organic?

No.

Stuff?

No, and they were pretty clear.

There's some stuff in here that was...

They got a bucket of dust off the asteroid,

and within this bucket of

dust they found thousands

of organic compounds.

Yeah, different molecules that involve,

carbon is a big one,

but the ones we're really

interested in would be the

amino acids and the

nucleobases to make DNA and RNA.

Now,

the perception that the reader gets

when they read the article

is that, oh,

science has made another

significant advance in how

life might have risen naturally.

But I want to explain that it is... No,

no.

It's kind of like you found

this old abandoned house,

and you found this amazing

book of just...

a written set of

instructions on how to

build a supersonic jet.

And it was all using

alphabet characters to

write those instructions.

And you might say, well,

how did we get this set of

amazing instructions on how

to build a supersonic jet?

And then you happen to

notice in one of the rooms

that there was some children's alphabet,

plastic alphabet characters

laying on the floor.

Now we have twenty six

characters and let's say we

found about like eighteen of them.

found eighteen alphabet

characters laying on the floor.

So you notice that, wow,

we got eighteen out of the

twenty-six alphabet

characters used in this

book that tells you how to build

Well, let's go big here.

Let's go large.

An interstellar spaceship, okay?

So you got eighteen of the

twenty-six of the

characters that are used in that book.

Now,

how close are you now to being able to

explain how an interstellar

spaceship could arise

naturally because you found

eighteen alphabet

characters on the floor?

Well, let's say you found all twenty-six.

The fact that you have all

found twenty-six alphabet

characters is of no help at all.

virtually no help at all in

writing a book that

explains how to build an

interstellar spacecraft.

So you've got an unlimited

supply of Scrabble sets.

And all you need to do is

shake it enough that it

creates the dictionary.

Yeah, you could shake it, whatever,

just throw it around,

let the wind blow it and stuff.

Now, let me get back to this problem here,

and using that kind of an analogy.

So, any sequence of amino acid,

let's say you're at twenty Lego pieces,

any sequence at all will

give you a chain.

And we can call these chains proteins.

But,

almost none of them will

collapse into a stable

three-dimensional structure.

That's the problem.

So what you have to find are

just those sequences that

if you put the Lego blocks

together in that sequence,

it'll collapse into a

stable three-dimensional

structure that you can then

in turn use to mate with

other structures to build, let's say,

a frog or a human or something.

So you might ask, well,

how common are these

sequences that give you

that stable three-dimensional structure?

And that's part of what I

was able to do in my PhD program,

was write some software

that would look at massive

databases of protein families.

So when you think about a protein,

I said we got about twenty

thousand of them in the human body,

When you think about that, these proteins,

as I mentioned earlier,

the sequence of those amino

acids or the sequence of

the Lego blocks forming that chain,

Very important.

That gives you the structure.

But there's a lot of slop involved,

or allowed,

so that you don't have to have

the sequence exact.

It turns out there's a lot

of different sequences,

provided some general

overall patterns are obeyed,

that will give you the same

three-dimensional structure,

and you could call that set

of sequences a protein family.

Consisting of all the

different sequences that

will give you that same

three-dimensional structure

But as I said There are

most of the proteins most

of the sequences will not

give you a stable

three-dimensional structure

They'll just collapse to

some random shape a blob We

call them amyloids because

they will stick to other

collapse proteins and

whatever so here's the question

If you wanted to search,

if you had evolution

searching for the right sequences,

how big would this search have to be?

So imagine space has these

bubbles floating around in it,

and each bubble is roughly

one meter in radius,

or two meters in diameter,

or let's use yards and

meters are pretty close,

two yards in diameter.

a bubble in space.

And you have to accidentally

find... So anything in that

bubble will collapse to a

nice three-dimensional

structure you're going to need.

But you're going to need lots of them.

You're going to need about

twenty thousand of them to build a human.

So how far away would the

next bubble be in space?

Because you're going to have

to do a random walk between

the bubbles to find these other bubbles.

Turns out

I got some numbers here.

Where'd my numbers go?

Did I write these numbers down?

No,

they're still sitting on the calculator

here.

Yes, okay.

So it turns out

that these islands,

so let's fill the universe with proteins,

okay, with amino acid sequences.

We'll fill the entire

universe with protein sequences,

amino acid sequences,

so we got a universe of proteins now,

all just randomly generated,

but all the ones that fold

to this nice particular

fold that mark one protein

family is a little bubble

in the whole universe

That's roughly two yards or

two meters in diameter.

So the question is,

how far would you have to

search to find the next bubble?

Because all these other ones

are useless to biological life.

They just collapse to random

shapes and you can't build

anything with them.

They're like Lego blocks.

They're melting and so they

take a different shape all the time.

Never repeatable.

You can't do anything with them.

Turns out you won't find another bubble

bubble in the entire

universe that's how rare

these things are you will

not find another bubble in

this entire universe in

fact you would need I did

how many universes would

you need to sort through

before you found another

bubble on average on

average you would have to

sort through ten

With thirty-four zeros after it,

that's how many universes

you'd have to sort through

before you found, on average,

another bubble.

So, you're talking the odds, right?

The odds of finding another

bubble are like...

Well,

you can either put it in terms of odds,

but I find that people who

have embraced the

philosophy or the religion of scientism,

they get angry when you talk.

Literally, some lose it.

They literally lose the

composure when you start

talking about odds here.

So I kind of stay away from odds.

What I want to talk about is target size.

Now, target size, odds, same thing,

really.

How small is this target

versus where we're aiming?

how accurate do we have to

be to hit the target,

which is find a sequence

that gives you a stable

three-dimensional fold.

On average,

you're going to have to sort

through one with

thirty-five zeros after it.

That's how many universes

the same size as ours that

you're going to have to

search through before you find even one

one sequence that codes for

a stable three-dimensional protein.

Now, I didn't make that number up.

I didn't pull it out of my back pocket.

That arises out of hard data.

So you can actually look at,

for many protein families,

twenty thousand different

sequences that will code

for that same protein structure.

Twenty thousand.

And then from that, the software will look,

what is the pattern?

that we observe in this

massive array of sequences

like what's the probability

of this amino acid working

here and what about that

one that one works too okay

add that and so it does all of that work

which you'd never be able to

do in a human's lifetime if

you didn't have a computer.

But you do all of that work from real data,

and it tells you just what

your target size is.

It tells you how rare these

stable proteins are.

Okay, so let me repeat this back,

and I know I'm going to

mess up here because I went

through school,

and that's all my teachers told me.

So we have...

There are about twenty

thousand of these proteins in our body.

Yes.

Made up of amino acids and

the amino acids have how

many amino acids?

Twenty?

There's twenty that are

commonly found for

biological life and they

found fourteen on the asteroid.

Okay,

and then each protein is made up of

three hundred amino acids.

On average.

You'll find really short ones.

You'll find much longer ones.

But the average is three

hundred amino acids, more or less.

And the chances of one of

these proteins occurring in

the exact same way around

the universe is really, really small.

Well, it's worse than that, Sheldon.

It's the chance of finding any,

any biological protein or

the sequence for that.

And we started, remember,

we started with filling the

universe with amino, not amino acids,

but proteins.

On this asteroid,

they just found amino acids.

You've got to chain those

together to form a protein.

And then you can't just

throw them around on the

surface of an asteroid.

You've got to pack the

entire universe full of them.

It's full of proteins, and if you did that,

you would have virtually no

chance at all of producing

one that will collapse into

a stable three-dimensional fold,

given the real data.

So to actually get it to happen once,

to get it to happen once naturally,

you would need trillions

and trillions and trillions of universes.

Yeah,

you'd need roughly ten to the

thirty-fifth power of universes,

and each universe is not just has,

you know,

asteroids with amino acids on them.

No,

each universe is packed full of proteins,

biological and otherwise.

Okay, and then, like,

we've lost the whole lot, so that's okay,

but I want to figure this out.

So...

How long, like, let's say these,

let's say instead of fourteen,

they found twenty.

Yeah.

Actually,

let's say instead of fourteen of

the twenty,

they found twenty and they had

three hundred of them all together.

That's one protein, right?

Yeah.

Oh, that would make the big time news.

Big time.

Okay.

So what does that protein do by itself?

Well, it'll do one of two things.

It'll just collapse into, well,

they'll all collapse, probably.

So you need more than one at

a time to actually be useful.

Well, in the right environment,

all chains of amino acids

are likely to collapse,

mostly into some random

shape that is not repeatable.

It'll be different every time.

or a biological protein will

collapse into a stable

three-dimensional structure,

at least about seventy,

seventy-five percent of them will.

The others are called,

they basically don't have a

three-dimensional structure,

they're intrinsically unstructured,

but usually when they bind to something,

then they assume a structure.

So, but how long do these things, like,

because these are the

building blocks of life.

The amino acids, yeah.

How many of them

to get the most primitive life.

I remember in science class

talking about that

one-celled organism that

was like the start of life.

You're at the swampy area

and it's the perfect thing

for life to happen.

So you need all of this to

make that one cell happen, right?

uh... you would need another

number that uh... there's a

lot of different papers

that speculate as to what's

the minimum number of

protein coding genes we

would need for the simplest

life form and a lot of

those experiments in the

past at least started with

the simplest life form we

could think of which was m

genitalium uh... but a lot

of work has been done since

then so let me just ask

Chad GPT here how many proteins

are required for minimal life form.

So,

it's gonna give me a nice simple answer.

Yeah, M. genitalium has about, um,

three hundred and fifty to

four hundred proteins.

But they have experimented how small,

just how many could we take away.

Yeah.

Okay.

So that's,

I was going to say about two

hundred and eighty five

different proteins for the simplest,

absolute simplest life form.

Chat GPT gives me a bigger range here.

Two hundred and fifty to three hundred.

But I'm right in there.

I'm right in that range.

Okay.

So I interrupt you here.

I mean, let's, let's do,

let's do two hundred.

Let's not, not three hundred,

but we're two eighty five.

Let's make it simple.

Let's just make it simple.

Round number two hundred.

That's for one cell approximately, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

That would be for the

absolute simplest life form.

And I'm not sure it could

survive without getting it.

My next question,

like not only does it need to survive,

it needs to split into two, correct?

Because there's nothing to make.

Well, yeah,

it's going to have to replicate.

Yeah, it's going to have to replicate.

How long does it have in the

perfect situation before

that one cell dies because

there's nothing to eat?

Oh, yeah, I mean,

you're hitting the nail on the head here,

Sheldon.

There are a host of problems

in the origin of life.

In fact,

here's a choice quote I took from

this article.

It says this,

more research is needed to

understand what precisely

causes life to emerge.

Now,

that is probably one of the largest

understatements in human

history right there.

I think that's towards the

end of the article here

more research I just about

fell off my chair laughing

when I read that more

research more research um

yeah okay uh good luck with

that because what the

science is saying and this

is the problem is that what

the science and the data is telling us

is that life is not going to

happen in this universe.

In fact,

you don't have to just listen to me.

Eugene Koonin is an

internationally

distinguished evolutionary biologist,

and he's talking about what

are the chances of getting

not the simplest life form,

but just RNA replication,

which is even simpler still.

What are the chances that, in his paper,

it's not going to occur

anywhere in the universe,

in the history of the universe?

It's not going to happen.

His solution is to invoke an

infinite number of universes.

Right.

Which is what you're going to need.

Well, there's another way.

But again,

let's say you have found that

second protein.

Yeah.

They have to be close enough together.

They have to be close enough

together to actually be together.

Yeah.

And you need two hundred and

eighty five of them for the

simplest life form.

That we know.

Yeah.

So not only do you have that,

like you scale this sucker

out and there's just nothing,

like you have more in the little,

what's the, not subscript,

but what's the top number

there with the zeros?

Oh, the superscript.

Like you'd run out of the zeros.

Oh, yeah.

What you have to start doing

is you have to put

superscripts on the superscripts.

Okay.

Like ten to the ten to the

one hundred and twenty-seventh power,

that kind of stuff.

So this is to get

potentially the simplest block of life.

Then you need,

what did Bennu not have that

Earth did have?

Well, I mean,

it's a pretty hostile

environment on the surface

of an asteroid.

Absolute perfect situation

for that one cell to live

long enough to figure out how to...

replicated itself before it

died because once it died,

you need to start over.

Absolutely.

I mean, you've just, you know,

you got so close.

You almost, you had a life form here.

But,

and let's go with one cell where they

can simply split in half.

But you need to reproduce

the DNA in that organism so

that when you split in half,

both of them have the

instructions on how to keep

doing what they're doing.

Plus, they need some sort of nutrients.

Now, you could, you know,

you can have bacteria that will feed off

stuff that, um, let's say, um, crude oil,

for example.

Okay.

Like where'd that come from?

Well, yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's a problem too.

We haven't actually figured

out how we got so much

crude oil on this planet.

It's a big, it's a big mystery.

And I read a lot of

different speculations on that,

but that organism would

have to be attached to the crude oil.

I would have to be able to survive.

Sheldon,

you're talking about winning a

massively improbable

lottery just to get one

stable three-dimensional protein,

but then to have another

one occur somewhere in the universe,

And not just somewhere in the universe,

it has to be like right

beside it in order so it

can assemble and to build

something bigger with it.

Like these Lego chains, the Lego pieces,

build the Lego chains,

the Lego chains collapse

into a stable

three-dimensional thing and

now you've got to

build the rest of the

whatever it is you're

building and so it all has

to happen at the same time

in the history of the

universe on the same planet

and the same spot in the

planet and there happens

there has to be all this

fortuitous stuff going on

when you actually dive into

it it becomes so mind die

and it cannot die it has to

survive in any of the

things that are replicating

because you need to have

enough of those replicating

to actually produce

anything beyond that simple organism.

Yeah,

it has to build its own amino acids

so that it can build its own proteins.

Like once it's up and running,

you're going to have to get

more amino acids to build

more of these proteins so

you can split in two and

continue on replicating like that.

Sheldon,

I will have to say that the theory

if you want to grace it with

the title of theory,

the theory that life arose

naturally is by far the wildest,

wildest idea, wildest theory

fantastic idea humanity has

ever come up with fairies

would be much more easier

to genetically engineer a

piece of cake in comparison

to the origin of life say

fairies that fly around or

unicorns dragons I mean I

imagine with genetic engineering and

We could build something like a dragon,

maybe, you know,

take the genetics of the

Bombardier beetle that

fires two chemicals on its

backside day and night and

make a little explosion.

We could actually

genetically engineer a

dragon with enough work and funds.

So we can build all these fairytale stuff,

but how to build the first life form?

We've had thousands of

scientists working on this

for over a hundred years.

And we are, and in fact, in one sense,

this article shows the

pathetic state that science

is at when it comes to

coming up with a natural

explanation for the origin of life.

We're still stuck with how

do we get the initial building blocks?

Forget about proteins and

RNA and how we're gonna

have that all happen in the same place.

We just want to get the building blocks.

It's like,

You find this magnificent

book of instruction on how

to build an interstellar spacecraft,

but you're at the stage

where you're still looking

to figure out how the alphabet's made.

How do you get these

alphabet characters so that

book can be written?

I found this interesting

because they sort of moved

the needle here.

They found sodium carbonate

compounds referred to as soda ash.

So maybe that's because of

all the people doing those

Mentos in a Coke bottle experiments.

experiments blowing those up into space.

I don't know where that's coming from.

So, okay,

this might exist on Saturn's moon

and a dwarf planet.

They said here, where did I see it?

While the samples from Bennu

have already yielded intriguing results,

more researchers need to

understand what precisely

causes life to emerge on

one planet or moon and others.

What did Bennu not have that

Earth did have?

Well, one,

they didn't have the other six

amino acids.

It had all the stuff but didn't make life.

Well, not all the stuff.

It didn't have all the stuff,

but that's what I'm saying.

But if it did,

it still would be no closer.

Yeah.

It would still be no closer

to making life.

Okay, and they didn't say, like, is this,

so it's showing sodium carbonate.

So are these, like,

are we talking these are the amino acids,

are there amino acids in this?

Is that what they're saying?

No.

Well,

I don't know the chemical structure

of sodium carbonate,

but I think it's just a

standard molecular compound

of sodium and carbon.

I don't know what that is here.

What is the chemical?

let me see here we're gonna

yeah sodium carbon and

oxygen okay so it's called

soda ash you know in

everyday language or

washing soda use it for

washing water softening yeah but

But this is really, let's say,

forget about the book

telling you how to build an

interstellar spacecraft.

Let's say you wanted to

build one and you knew that

you're going to need some titanium,

you're going to need some

silicon dioxide.

And you look around and you

see sand on the beach and say, oh,

there's some silicon dioxide.

You start mining and digging

around the dirt, there's some titanium.

We have found the building

blocks of interstellar spacecraft.

That's pretty much where we are at here.

Pretty much where we are at.

There's a missing ingredient here.

So remember that I told you

that the chance of...

The chance of finding any

combination of amino acids

useful for biological life

is so small you'd have to

sort your way through

thirty-five universes full

of proteins to find one

that would actually give

you a stable three-dimensional structure.

Well,

what do you do when you have a

serious problem like that?

Well,

you do the same thing when you want to,

let's say, open the vault at the bank.

You don't go in the bank,

let's say you're a new employee.

You don't go just to the vault,

boss says open the vault,

so you just don't go in

there and start randomly trying numbers.

You're gonna be there,

that's gonna be your career.

Instead,

what you're gonna look at is at the boss,

and you're gonna say, well,

I need some information.

What is the proper combination?

In other words, when we see effects,

and they could be anything in this world,

you see a car, plane, laptop, computer,

these are all examples of

intelligent design.

And last week we punched in the question,

is a laptop computer an

example of intelligent design?

And ChatDBT says yes, of course.

And here's,

so when you ask what are the

characteristics, well,

there's four things, but you see

What the problem is for

information is that

information actually

reduces the uncertainty.

And we've already seen the

uncertainty of finding one

of these proteins useful

for biological life.

It's huge.

So if you want to reduce that,

you're going to need information,

and information actually

reduces the uncertainty

down to essentially zero,

if you're lucky.

and that comes from to

produce massive quantities

of information there is

only one thing that science

has discovered that will

produce significant

quantities of useful

information just one it's

the only thing that's

repeatable verifiable

observable and that's

intelligence that's it you

can accidentally produce

very low levels of

information like a

two-letter word

accidentally dumping some

stuff on the floor

But there is a threshold.

You've got to start looking

at what is the target size,

what's the probability of getting that,

and you see,

or how uncertain am I if I

generate a sequence of Lego

characters that it's going

to collapse into a stable,

useful three-dimensional structure?

How uncertain am I?

If you have no information at all,

you're going to be very uncertain.

For proteins,

you're going to have to sort

through randomly

thirty-five universe-fulls of proteins.

But if you have information,

if you actually understand

how the structure is

determined by the sequence,

then you don't have to

start doing the search anymore.

Intelligence can actually

build artificial proteins,

and we've already started to do that.

Human intelligence.

Now, granted, we have plagiarized a bit.

We've basically reversed

engineering proteins to see

how they fold.

But we're able to take that

information and build a new protein,

a novel, very simple protein.

But what's critical there is

you have to have a mind.

You have to have an intelligence.

Instead of randomly sorting

through thirty-five universes,

uh so this this asteroid

does absolutely I mean it's

it's almost it's almost

discouraging to say after a

century we're still

searching for how can we

get the basic building

blocks of life I'm prepared

to grant you all the basic

building blocks of life

let's just grant that let's

just give it as a gift

That would be the easy problem,

and they've been working

since the Stanley Miller experiment,

in the year of fifty-three or fifty-four,

just to find out how do we

get these amino acids,

and so we have all the different things.

Now there's a problem here,

when you get amino acids, biological life,

you see these amino acids

tend to have a mirror image

of themselves.

And it's only one type of

mirror image works for biological life.

Let's call it the left-hand image, okay?

And what they found on this

asteroid is you got both.

So actually, that's a serious problem.

You cannot symbol just a

mixture of both left- and

right-handed amino acids

that hope to get any

protein that's useful for life.

So that's actually what they found there,

and they mentioned that.

The Chirility.

Oh, no, I looked at the actual paper.

That's where it was telling me about that.

They forgot to mention that

in the article.

Yeah, the Chirility.

Okay, so now I have another quote.

Let's say there's intelligence.

The universe has intelligence.

We'll say the universe has intelligence.

doesn't it also need a reason?

Well, that's a very good,

very good question.

Like,

you don't just... Because you can be

the smartest person in the world,

but if you have no

motivation... No reason...

no motivation, no reason, no goal.

What's the point?

That's actually very interesting, Sheldon,

because what they have

discovered as well is that

the universe appears to be

incredibly fine-tuned,

such that it is able to support life.

So there does seem to be, first of all,

something behind the scenes

Let's say cooking the books, so to speak,

massaging the numbers,

so that we do get a habitable universe.

But that in turn points that

there is a reason for the

existence of the universe.

It's to support life.

So there is a reason there,

but a reason requires a mind, again,

so you can't just

intelligently produce a

universe capable of supporting life.

It's not just that.

It also has a reason for doing such.

And once you see that the

universe appears to be

designed for the purpose,

underscore the word purpose,

of supporting life,

then it should not be

surprising if that same

intelligence has been

involved in the universe to

properly sequence and code

these basic building blocks

to support life in the same

way that when you read a book

There has been an

intelligent mind behind

their property sequencing

the alphabet characters for

whatever purpose the writer

of the book has in mind,

whether it's poetry, fiction, information,

whatever.

And then it needs capability.

The capability to pull it off, yeah.

So it could be intelligent,

but it would also need to

have the amount of power to

create something out of nothing.

Yep.

In fact,

logic says it had to have that ability.

Whatever it was that produced space, time,

matter,

and energy cannot itself be

composed of those things or

dependent upon those things.

So it has to be non-physical.

It has to be what we might

call nothing as far as no matter,

no space, no time, no energy.

It just thinks this into existence.

So...

What is now needed for

science to be able to prove

that life could have been

created on some other planet?

Like,

life had to exist some... Because all

they're saying is it could

have happened somewhere else first,

right?

Yeah, in fact,

that's where they... Even if it's like,

okay, yeah, it happened on Earth.

All those building blocks

had to come from somewhere else.

Yeah.

In the perfect situation to

have it happen because it,

it had assumed the big bang,

either everything has these

building blocks in it or

earth is special.

Because they didn't find any on the moon,

did they?

I'm assuming they looked.

Yeah,

I think we would have heard about it

if they found amino acids on the moon.

And that's pretty close to Earth.

You would expect some sort

of pollution wafting in the solar wind.

I'm just trying to figure out,

at what point do we say, you know what,

I don't think we're going to find it.

Well, you see,

it's not what we don't know now,

it's what we do know about

how rare these stable

three-dimensional sequences are.

It's what we do know that

tells us there's not a

chance we will find life

anywhere in the universe

unless there is a mind behind this.

And if there's a mind behind it,

then we could easily find

life all over this universe.

So one of the points that I

like to make is that if we

discovered alien life somewhere else,

that would virtually

guarantee that that would,

It would make it, not prove,

but it would be very close to it,

that there is a mind behind the universe.

Because you don't,

let's say you start winning

the lottery once,

and then you win it the next week.

The Lottery's Commission

would start maybe

investigating you if they

started finding you

frequently winning the lottery.

way too frequently,

exactly the same thing here.

You start finding life on

other planets when you know

the science says that these

are so rare they will never

occur in the entire universe,

a stable three-dimensional

folding protein.

But does science actually admit that?

Well, science is a... Okay,

when they use science says

this... I'm just thinking

the people that are looking for this...

Do they realize like, are they in denial?

Are we wrong?

Like is Kirk potentially wrong in your,

in your work?

It's not me.

I mean, it's the data that's saying this.

But some scientists are aware,

like Eugene Koonin,

he's aware that the

probability that this could

all cobble together by

itself is so vanishingly small,

you're going to need an

infinite number of universes.

But he interprets that as, therefore,

there are an infinite

number of universes.

Not just possible, there is.

There has to be.

yeah and so let's say

otherwise it would never

happen and the other person

says well wait a sec we

don't need an infinite

number of unseen entities

here to explain life all we

need is a super

intelligence that already

understands how these bonds

occur and how the how the

sequence will affect the

structure and with that in mind codes

the proteins,

various biological proteins

into the DNA of whatever

organism it's designing.

That's the way we do it in

the lab when we're fooling

around with genetic

engineering or when we're

trying to build an

artificial simple protein.

So it's pretty much

impossible for it to have

happened naturally.

Um, let, let's give them the point, blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah, percent chance.

Well,

it reaches a point where that you

have to say it's not possible in science.

Let's say tend to the minus

fiftieth power.

Well, you get to little numbers like that.

No, it's not going to happen.

Okay.

But let's just grant that

there is this remote

possibility because of all

these users universes.

Um, what created those?

Oh, well, that's another problem.

Exactly.

Because those, that multiverse,

so to speak, has to have a beginning.

And it's not just because I said so.

It's because of the nature

of a countable infinite set

of universes that are all

spawning each other.

You work backwards in time.

You cannot,

the nature of a countable infinite,

a countable infinity is

that you cannot make any

progress towards whatever

universe we're in now.

There's always an infinite

number that still has to

take place before you get

to this one here.

We're here.

Therefore,

we know that even if you did

have a multiverse out there somewhere,

that this chain of

universes that produce more

chains of universes does

converge to an initial

mother of all universes.

Now, Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist,

says, yeah, we have to admit that,

but it pushes these so far

back we don't have to worry

about it anymore.

But as a philosopher, I'm saying,

wait a sec,

we do have to worry about it

because you've not answered

anything here.

You've just pushed the problem back,

let's say, five trillion universes.

You've just pushed the problem back.

What does create nature in the beginning?

And nature, in this case,

would be the entire multiverse.

So you have all this energy,

and we looked at what

amount of energy would have

needed to be at the start

of the Big Bang.

So all of that needs to all

happen perfectly.

And they say the universe is

how many billion years old?

Uh, it just changed from time to time.

Let's say twelve and a half billion,

thirteen billion.

Okay, so we're not even in trillions here.

No, no, no, no.

Twelve and a half billion.

Because they know it as a beginning.

Yeah, we do know that.

They admit it as a beginning.

Um, yeah.

Okay,

so how much money has the world spent

trying to prove a negative?

Well, you know,

personally on one side of me,

I say if you can find... I

think it is a good thing to

see if there's a natural explanation.

But there reaches a point in

your research that you

begin to find out enough to see that...

as any forensic

investigation will tell you,

that this was not just, let's say,

death by natural means.

Let's say we're talking

forensic science here.

There was a human agent

involved or an intelligent

agent in the case of life

in the universe.

It reaches that point.

We have long past that point.

And when science continues

to beat its head against the wall,

when all the data and the

fingerprints of an

intelligent mind are all

over the genomes of life in terms of

digital information encoding

all these protein coding genes

there reaches a point where

it's just complete denial.

It's just, you know,

like the emperor has no clothes,

but the emperor still

insists he's wearing something.

One more thing I wanted to

note here in this article,

this is something to note

in all these articles,

is the use of lack of data words.

This is when,

these are words my supervisor,

my PhD supervisor,

wouldn't let me use in any

paper I submitted to a journal.

The first one was suggests.

I used that once in my first paper.

He said, suggests.

What do you mean suggest?

Do you have the data to support that?

I said no, but I mean it does suggest,

you know, this and that.

He says take that out.

This is science we work with.

If you don't have the data to back that up,

then you have to not use

the word suggest.

But they use the word suggest twice.

There's another phrase, may have.

This is in the article.

Yeah, these aren't from the article.

Is this in the paper as well,

or is this just... No, no,

I haven't read the... I've

just read the abstract from

the paper at this point,

but the word suggest occurs twice.

May have occurs four times.

Here's another one.

Is thought to have.

That occurs once.

Bolster the theory.

Now that's an interesting term, bolster.

Likely is a lack of data word.

So these are words that you

use in science when you

don't have the data to

support what you're saying.

So you say, well, it's likely this,

or it might have been that.

I mean, yeah, that's nice.

You might use that in

forensic science when

you're... But you've got to

have a test to somehow...

It's got to be verifiable or falsifiable.

And in every way we test this,

it continues to falsify the

idea that you can get from

these amino acids on this

asteroid or even trillions

of asteroids crashing into the Earth...

pounding the Earth full of

amino acids and nucleobases,

that you will ever get

anything that's useful for life.

Say,

any kind of stable three-dimensional

protein out of stringing

these random amino acids together.

And a massive problem,

which most people wouldn't notice,

is that these were racemic.

That is,

you had both left and right-hand

versions in roughly equal

quantities on this asteroid.

Okay, so I'll...

Time to shut her down here,

but I have one more question.

So, and I know that...

It wasn't really scientists

that wrote this article.

This is NBC News.

There was a reporter that

might have interviewed them,

but the researchers did not

find evidence of life itself.

Rather,

their results bolster the theory

that asteroids that crash

into Earth when it was

young may have delivered

the necessary ingredients

for life to take hold.

Findings could also mean

that the life force on

other planets and moons

could be higher than

scientists previously thought.

The mission is already

rewriting the textbook on

what we understand about

the ingredients thought to

be necessary for the

emergence of life in our solar system.

I don't understand how they

can say that when we already know,

or are they just saying

what we understand about

how the ingredients got here?

Is that what they're saying

it's rewriting?

I think what they're saying

is that the idea that the

building blocks of life

came from space rather than

were constructed on Earth,

we have more reason now.

So when our theories,

when we're writing

textbooks on how life might

have accidentally come here, our theories,

we're going to put more weight on it,

came from space.

But I don't understand how

this actually helps that, because at...

Like, give the Big Bang Theory, let's just,

okay, let's say that's how it happened.

Why didn't Earth already

have those building blocks?

And then wind blew them

together or something like that.

Like,

why does it have to come from

external places to hit that

perfect swamp?

It goes to how do we get the

elements like iron and

hydrogen and all these

elements to begin with.

And then, first of all, in a big bang,

you've got a lot of heat,

you've got a period of inflation,

and then slowly,

but you've got some simple,

you've got electrons and

stuff being produced,

and then maybe some simple molecules,

or simple elements like hydrogen,

for example.

Hydrogen is the simplest one.

And then you've got star formation,

and these stars, as they burn out,

as they burn,

they can produce heavier elements,

according to theory.

and then they explode

supernova you blow

themselves all over the

universe all these heavier

elements and then they

gradually re-accrete onto

other stars and planets and

so forth and it's a

narrative it's a story okay

it's like a science fiction

but but then you got out of

all of that you you you

have other planets forming

you you have other you have

asteroids that

that are supposedly pulling the, like,

how these amino acids get on the asteroid,

right?

Yeah, well,

they're thinking there was

another world or another

planet or somewhere, and it got, yeah,

it got nailed.

But how did it get it?

How did it get there?

Oh, yeah.

Well, it just goes on, Sheldon.

When you start,

the more you learn about

proteins and protein structure,

they're more wildly implausible.

And I'm being generous here

when I say I'm wildly implausible.

The more absurd it becomes to think.

You can get the, you know,

stable three-dimensional

proteins through any kind

of an unguided natural process.

It is so...

beyond plausible.

We have crossed the line

probably ten years ago

where it becomes painfully

obvious that the

fingerprints of a mind are

all over the genome's life

in the form of information

digitally encoded into DNA.

And DNA is digitally because

there's only four

nucleotides in DNA,

so you've got to arrange

these into groups of three called codons,

and then for these groups of three,

you can arrange them in the

right sequence that will

eventually code for a

protein that will actually

fold into a three-dimensional structure,

repeatedly.

So, the information,

when you get above a

certain threshold of

information and any effect,

you know there's a mind behind it.

and the science is repeatedly,

systematically,

inexorably having this

forced into its face,

but many people who are

totally committed to scientism

have crossed the point of credibility now.

I'd say Eugene Koonin is ahead of the game,

at least acknowledging it's

not going to occur in the universe,

therefore we need an

infinite number of them.

But even then it becomes

absurd to postulate an

infinite number of unforeseen,

unseen entities in order to avoid,

don't want to look over there,

avoid the idea of a mind

creating information,

which encodes all this into the DNA.

That is so patently obvious now,

that you have to know that

this isn't a matter of science anymore.

It is a matter of what

people want to believe.

It also gets into ammonia.

Now, interestingly,

in my understanding of ammonia,

having a dog, doesn't ammonia kill stuff?

Well, it's got,

it's got components that

are useful for biological

life and biological life produces ammonia,

but yeah, it's,

it's too much of that in your toast.

So,

so like a hundred times more than the

natural levels of ammonia

that you find in soils on earth,

would that be enough to kill proteins?

Basically what you're seeing

in this article is what am

I called clutching at straws?

A person has just fallen out

of an airplane at

thirty-five thousand feet,

along with a bunch of luggage and stuff,

and you're frantically

trying to grab stuff to

build yourself an airplane

or a parachute before you hit the ground.

That's the kind of clutching

and straws that's going on here.

There's nothing wrong with

the kind of research that says,

can we see this kind of

stuff occur naturally?

That I endorse.

It's a part of our curiosity.

But the problem is that life

requires information

encoded into the DNA.

That's the problem.

So these steps here we're

seeing on this asteroid, that's fine.

There's nothing wrong with that.

I endorse it.

I support that.

Looking for the components,

the building blocks of life.

It's part of our curiosity and search.

But where we hit the wall is

explaining the information

encoded in the genomes of life.

Life does require

information in order to

know what sequences of

those legal blocks or what

sequences of amino acids

will give us stable

three-dimensional

structures in globular proteins.

We need to know that in

order to build a body,

build a human or a frog or

a fish or whatever, even build a virus.

Yeah, okay.

So, but we now know,

and I'll close with this,

we now know from Bennu that

the raw ingredients of life

were combining in really

interesting and complex

ways on Bennu's parent body.

We have discovered that next

step on a pathway to life.

I would say, okay,

blow the whistle at that last sentence.

We have discovered that.

I might blow the whistle

halfway through that sentence,

the next step on the pathway to life.

No.

Until they figure out how

you can get huge quantities

of functional information

encoded digitally into DNA,

you haven't even started.

You're still looking at

titanium and iron and

silicon dioxide in your

quest to build an

interstellar spacecraft.

Yes,

natural ingredients are here to build

interstellar spacecraft, maybe,

if such a thing is possible, physically.

but uh don't tell me uh

don't get me excited by

saying we found a titanium

deposit here on earth's

therefore we have

discovered that next step

on a pathway to

interstellar spacecraft

spacecraft it's about as

it's about as impressive or

not impressive okay well

now that uh you've picked

this article apart and uh

dash the hopes of many many people um

We have these conversations

because we believe in an

intelligent designer who

actually had a purpose for

creating this universe.

And the big difference is

you just have to believe

that there is something

beyond the natural.

Because if you believe

there's something beyond

the natural that created nature,

It makes sense.

Yeah.

Logically, you have to concede.

Logic dictates there is

something not natural or

supernatural or beyond the

natural in order to be able

to bring nature into existence.

It has to be independent of

the natural world,

and we know nature had a beginning.

So both from science and

mathematics to the nature

of countable infinite sets

and what it takes to get

through them one at a time.

The hard part, though, is if you believe,

if you're willing to grant

there's a supernatural being,

it opens a lot of questions.

Oh, huge.

But it's a major step forward.

It's a major step forward.

But the reason people don't

want to believe it is

because it's not a science

question at that point.

That's right.

It's a spiritual question at that point.

Yeah.

Very good point.

Absolutely.

There is a psychological

reason or a spiritual

reason why people are killing themselves,

figuratively speaking,

like just trying to find

some natural explanation

for nature and for life.

And I think you've nailed it, Sheldon.

So those of you who are watching,

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