Laura Knight-Jadczyk, Barcelona Conference, October 15th 2011 - Part 1

How many people here have actually read our books and websites?
Iíd like to see hands.
Okay, hands down.
How many people have not?
Not too many.
Okay, so I feel like for those of you who havenít
I need to give a little background information
that probably everybody else will know,
but for the sake of those people who donít know,
I think you will forgive me for doing
a little bit of a recapitulation.
A lot of you,
who are familiar with our websites and our work,
know that we are living under
a little bit of pressure right now
because we have the French Police investigating us
for the accusation of being a cult.
I hope you all realize,
that the people who read our websites and read our books
are probably the last people
who would be considered cult followers,
because the main thing we encourage
is for people to think for themselves
and to investigate and of course the scientific method.
Iíve actually been accused
of using my powers of hypnosis
to mind control people.
Just warning you,
we have a Svengali here,
and you have to be really careful here
because Iím going to put you all in a trance (audience laughter).
Anyways, we made a trip up to Paris,
to engage an attorney last week,
and when we let him know what was going on
took all of our documents and so forth
you could tell from his expression
that he realized this was a serious concern.
He did tell us there was a possibility
that at any moment we could be raided
and they could confiscate all our computers,
equipment, records, and so on and so forth.
They've spent seven months already investigating us.
They've gone through all of our bank records,
they are tracking our cellphones,
probably reading our emails,
and, so far, they havenít found one single thing
that suggests we are a cult.
We live on a very limited budget.
We do exactly what we say we do on our websites.
Thereís no hidden agenda.
And even if the people in our group
who have been interrogated
say there is no hidden agenda,
they get told ìWell, you would say that,
because we know youíre hiding something!î
So how do you prove it negative?
At this point, we wake up early at home,
about 5:00am and lay there,
wait for the dogs to bark,
or hear the helicopters overhead or something.
And by the time 6:00am passes,
because the attorney said that usually
when they do these raids they start at 6:00am.
So when 6:00am passes and it gets on to 7:00am,
we figure we are safe for the day.
Four people have already been interrogated
and these interrogations have been really rough.
But what I want to tell you about,
is the reason for this,
is that there is an organization,
--several of them in fact--
the main one is called MIVILUDES.
And that stands for:
Mission Interministerielle de la Lutte Contre les DÈrives Sectaires.
Anyhow, thatís an acronym.
And for 30 or 40 years theyíve been active.
And what they are really all about
is what Ark would describe as a closed system.
There is some suggestion that
the Catholic Church is involved
but Iím not sure if thatís exact.
They have a 2010 report
where they have declared that such activities as
growing vegetables in your backyard without pesticides is a cultic activity,
using homeopathy is cultic, yoga, doing breathing exercises
such as the one we have created and promote are all cultic.
Being on any kind of special diet
other than what is promoted by the mainstream media,
which is big agricultural companies, pharmaceutical companies, etc.
Using any kind of medicine
which is other than what
the pharmaceutical companies promote is cultic.
Letís see, what else?
Buying gold! If you buy gold as an investment,
that means you are part of an end of the world cult.
And in fact, this came up in one of the interrogations.
If you go through my bank records,
you would realize that I bought gold.
And I buy gold in small amounts,
but I started buying gold back in 1998,
when I could get a one ounce gold coin for $79 dollars.
Itís now worth a lot more than that.
So I would say it was a damn good investment.
However, thatís end of the world, cult activity, an Apocalyptic Cult
Never mind that if the world is actually going to end,
according to an apocalyptic cult,
who the hell are you going to use the gold to buy anything from?
What good is it going to be?
Also, canning your own food, and storing food
is considered to be a cultic activity.
Thereís been one case where a child was dying of cancer,
the doctors told the parents that even with radiation and chemotherapy,
the child was going to die. There was no hope.
And they opted to forego the chemo and radiation,
so the child could at least die without being tortured
and the child was taken away from them
and they were designated a cult.
There was a doctor who developed an anti-cancer therapy,
and it wasnít necessarily like he was promoting it as a cure for cancer,
but it could have certainly prolonged peopleís lives
and could have been a cure but was never allowed to be tested that far.
The President of France, FranÁois Mitterrand,
was using this therapy,
and he had cancer and it prolonged his life
and enabled him to finish his presidency.
This doctor, 79 years old, was raided by 70 Gendarmes,
or SWAT team, or whatever they call them,
helicopters, dogs, the whole nine yards.
The old man, his wife and his secretary were in the house.
And when he went to the door to let them in
before they broke the door down,
they said ìSir, you are a cult!î
You are a cultÖ Anybody can be a cult.
So whatís behind this,
beside it being a closed system?
Well, itís really kind of hard to say.
What does seem to be apparent is that
this is something that is spreading throughout the EU.
This group, MIVILUDES, had been condemned by the European Court
on a number of occasions.
Their response to this condemnation was that the European Court
had been taken over by a cult.
(Audience laughter) I kid you not!
Anybody who doesnít believe the way they believe is a cult.
Thatís the first thing.
Second thing is, they have teams of instructors whose job is...
and also remember, they are funded by the State, by France.
They have teams of teachers who go to judges, lawyers,
Police Departments, Gendarmerie, the Military and so forth,
and they lecture them on how to tell
if somebody is a member of a cult.
Did you know that spending hours a day at your computer
is cultic behaviour?
You didnít know that?
How many of you spend more than 3-4 hours a day on your computer?
(Show of hands)
Oh! You guys are in deep trouble!
So those are some of the things that are happening there,
and they are spreading their influence throughout the European Union.
Itís very similar in a way to the Dominionist Movement
in the United States.
How many of you know what the Dominionist Movement is?
Itís like Sarah Palin and these Fundamentalist Christians.
People like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell... Those kinds of people.
So thatís whatís going on, on our planet.
Overall, it's an attempt to impose a closed system on humanity
and we have been targeted.
Now, the only reason I can think of why we,
particularly, have been targeted,
is because we go after our topic in a slightly different way.
How many UFO groups, or believers or channelers, whatever,
do you know of,
that have actually had their people interrogated or arrested,
been hauled in, been defamed in the way
I have been defamed for the past 10-15 years?
When you try to think of anyone who has endured
what we have had to endure to try
to bring together science and mysticism,
there just isnít anybody.
They're either totally scientific
and nobody listens to them,
or they're so wacko and out on a limb,
that their weird ravings and rantings about
the Space Brothers going to land
and take everybody up to Comet Hale-Bopp,
or whichever comet du jour,
so they don't get attacked.
And this goes back to something Jacques Vallee
wrote about in one of his books.
I think, "Messengers of Deception".
How many of you have read that book?
This is a really terrific book.
I would say anybody who was interested in the topic
should read "Messengers of Deception"
because the fact that there is more to this phenomenon
that meets the eye is evident,
and I think the people really ought to know what it is.
Well, anyhow, he gave a model for one of the ways
that this information works,
and one of those things is that if somebody starts to get close to the truth,
or if there is a topic that groups of people
are beginning to ask questions about,
they create so much noise, that they
--he described it as being a train that is the truth--
they keep loading on the fuel,
until the train goes faster and faster and faster,
until it ends off the track.
They give it so much speed, so much momentum,
so much noise,
so what to do with the fact that there's all kinds of unusual phenomena
in our skies and in our lives, except to create a lot of noise?
A scientist --I think he was a climate scientist--
James MacDonald,
the one that was driven crazy, well anyway,
he wrote a paper about it,
and he pointed out that the vast majority of what we call
--the New Age call it the Human Potential Movement--
is noise that was created by secret government operations
to distract people from the truth,
to create all kinds of theories and organizations,
and so forth, just to attract people.
At the same time, they had this wonderful device called HAARP,
and despite the fact that a lot of people think that HAARP is a weather-war thing,
I think that we can rely on the fact that
most of what's going on in the way of weather, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions,
is probably cyclical, planetary changes that have been long predicted,
long ago, and they have happened many times in the past.
For example, there's been a lot of talk recently about these strange sounds
that have been coming into the atmosphere in different places around the world.
From these humming, roaring, clanking, thumping, bumping,
really eerie noises, eerie sounds.
And these sounds have been recorded by people
hundreds and hundreds of years ago at varying times
of extreme planetary stress, climate stress,
when there were earthquakes, when there were floods,
when there were volcanic eruptions,
and when there were also a great many comets in the skies.
Of course, mainstream science doesn't deal with
the Electric Universe Theory
which is a lot more satisfactory and makes a lot more sense,
and explains a lot more phenomena than these standard theories
about how things relate to one another in the cosmos.
So they are basically unable to explain these kinds of things.
But back to HAARP.
HAARP is evidently,
I mean, I've watched these so-called HAARP metres
they publish on the internet,
and you'll notice whenever there's so-called activity,
if you start reading the news, start scanning the news,
I mean really scoping through what's really going on,
you find out there's an awful lot of unusual human behavior happening,
so you kind of have an idea that this thing
is designed or built to beam out thought-control signals.
There is some research that was being done back in the 70s,
where they were researching how to project thoughts or images
directly into peopleís minds
without any kind of implanted electrodes being there, available,
and theyíve actually succeeded in doing that.
They can put voices in your head, they can produce images,
they can control your emotions,
and I think that a lot of this is what is being done with HAARP.
And I think HAARP can be very specific.
I think it is set up so that you can target groups,
or individuals or an entire country.
It can blanket a country with waves
I think thatís what happened on 9/11.
I think that not only was there the activity,
where they were playing these tapes over and over again on television,
watching those airplanes crashing into these buildings,
and I think HAARP was being used to set people up
to program them into a certain belief system about who and what did 9/11.
Okay, so, that's a quick summary
Now, for people who donít know what the Cassiopaean experiment is,
it really is an experiment.
And the reason is that I spent many years reading a lot
and researching the paranormal.
It was a fascinating topic to me.
I spent 25 years doing hypnotherapy.
Sometimes I did it privately,
and sometimes I did it in conjunction
with (inaudible)
... having worked at Area 51,
out in the desert in the western United States,
where he says he saw alien craft, and
basically, was kind of exposing the whole top-secret alien ìallianceî.
That there was an alliance between the US government,
or the secret government and these aliens.
So we wanted to know about those things.
Weíd also watched one with this guy,
who talked about bases on Mars
and having traveled to Mars, and The Philadelphia Experiment.
What was the guyís name? Al Bielek.
I donít know if anyone has watched Bielekís interview on video.
That is the strangest thing Iíve ever seen.
He sits the whole time like this: [Laura looks down]
He never looks up, never moves his...
He's like a complete robot.
Anyway, he says interesting things.
So there had been Bielek, and there had been Lazar,
and I had been reading until my eyes were bleeding about this,
this kind of thing, bacause I thought, this is crazy.
I donít know whatís going on here.
And so these Cassiopaean figures come along,
and they say "Hi, weíre from Cassiopaea."
And I say, okay, well, whatís this deal about Bob Lazar?
He says aliens refer to human beings as ìcontainersî. What does that mean?
And the answer was, "Well, containers mean that all of humans are an experiment
and theyíre using body parts and stuff, and making experiments,
and they consume them, and theyíre trying to create a new race,"
and all this other weird stuff.
And I'm thinking to myself, Holy Jesus!
Who am I talking to?
Is the devil here? I mean, what would you think?
So then they talked about missing children,
and the fact that children were tasty morsels for certain alien races.
And I said, "My God! I donít want to hear that!"
Take my hands off that thing!
Ugh! God! And thatís what I did.
I mean, there were a couple of times when that kind of stuff came up, that I just turned...
I mean, what kind of channelled source tells you things like that?
And thatís what I was asking myself.
And because, if itís a channeled source,
all youíre supposed to hear is holy stuff, right?
I mean, itís supposed to sound good, and noble, and edifying,
and youíre supposed to hear angels in the background,
and harps playing and stuff.
And here theyíre talking about eating children and body parts? Gah!
So, I went away, and thought about it.
And I thought, what if itís true? What if itís true?
This is something maybe I should check.
So I started trying to find out the statistics for missing children.
And I found out there was no real way to get them.
I looked it up in the ñ what do you call it?
The World Almanac Book of Facts and I couldnít get anything there.
And so I said, okay, maybe what I can do, because I wanted to
know the difference between children that were missing
and then children that were later returned,
or children that were possibly taken by a parent in a divorce custody case,
and I wanted to eliminate them,
and I just wanted to stick to the ones that were never found.
Nobody, nothing ever turned up.
And I couldnít get a number on this.
Because, all you would get would be somebody saying
ìOh well, the majority of children that go missing,
it turns out that either the custodial parent
lost them because the other parent took them,
or they just took them for a day and them came backî.
And I thought, wait a minute, thatís not a satisfactory answer.
I want a number.
So I thought, well, I can call a police department in a large city
and I can see if I can get them to give me some actual numbers,
because obviously the police would know, right?
I mean theyíre the ones who file missing persons reports.
If the report is closed down because the child has been returned
then they have a number.
So, I had a lot of trouble getting anything from anybody
because they said "We donít really know,
we donít really have any answers"
and then finally a friend of mine got a figure for me
and so I extrapolated that figure out over the entire United States.
I mean by population, because it was a particular population density
and since I didnít plan on talking about this I donít have the number with me.
But it ended up being a figure so staggering
that the next question was: Where are the bodies?
I mean, if that many children go missing
the entire United States has got to be littered with bodies!
You wouldnít be able to go anywhere
without stumbling over a body!
Well, relatively speaking.
They could be dumping them in certain places, or whatever,
but eventually weíre talking about a staggering number of bodies!
Where are they?
And I couldnít get an answer to this.
So then I started thinking, ok,
maybe theyíre telling the truth.
And I had to really sit there and think about that for a while.
Do you really want to sit down at the board again and talk to some
entities or whatever they are
--because at that time I really didnít know anything--
that are telling you,
I mean, I asked the question but did I really want that answer?
Do I want to do this again?
Maybe I should be more careful about what I ask.
If you donít want to know the truth donít ask the question.
And I was going through all of this in my head
and I started thinking, well, all I really want is the truth
and if this is true, if this is true, weíre in deep doo-doo!
Weíve got a real serious problem. And what do we do about it?
Can anybody in here think
of what you could do about something like that,
if thatís true?
Well, of course, probably most of yaíll who have been following my work
know that itís not only true but itís actually worse than that.
And what weíve been doing basically is telling about it,
talking about it, writing about it,
and of course thatís why they want to arrest me.
They've got to shut me up somehow.
So thatís how the Cassiopaean Experiment kind of got started,
those are some of the highlights of the things that were going on.
All of this stuff is written about in pretty much exhaustive detail
and is published on the web and is also in "The Wave" books.
You know you can read the Wave on the web or you can buy the book.
My belief is that we do the research,
we put everything on the web for free because I know,
I well know, that sometimes the people who have the most questions
and sometimes the people with the best minds,
actually donít have a lot of money.
And probably because they do have the best minds
and they do have the best questions
is why the system beats them down
and makes sure that they donít have a lot of money
because if they had a lot of money
theyíd be one heck of a powerful source for change.
So everything is free on our website
but it supports us to continue doing everything we do
when you buy our books or make donations.
You donít have to be a member of the cult or anything,
you donít have to give me ten percent of your salary,
but if you buy a book every once in a while
or donate once in a while that helps.
So thatís basically what I wanted to say about the Cassiopaean Experiment
and youíve already heard what Ark had to say
about things weíve learned and things that heís figured out
since then and what they really meant by ìwe are you in the future.î
Itís looking more and more likely after, what?
itís 1994 to 2011, what's that? 15, 14 years...
17 years, Iíve been doing this.
Iíve kind of run out of questions.
Theyíre really looking...
Everything thatís happening in our world today
is stuff that they told us would happen.
They told us the entire planet would be taken over by a Nazi-like regime,
and that the Nazi experience in Germany was just a trial run to work out the bugs.
And of course, they talk about these things
from the point of view of "hyperdimensional realities,"
a hyperdimensional problem.
And as Ark said, when you have information and organization,
it isnít always good.
But then sometimes what may start out bad can turn into good,
because when bad things happen to good people
sometimes it changes them, transforms them,
makes them rise up to situations they wouldnít otherwise be able to deal with.
Itís like in the play Faust where Mephistopheles describes himself
as one who constantly intends evil but ends up doing good.
So what happens when something evil happens to you is a function of who you are inside.
So even if there is a movement for a global New World Order,
fascist takeover, total control of absolutely everything on the planet...
But one thing the Cs did say, in concert with this,
and we see that part of it happening,
but they said that this was happening because a big change was imminent.
Now this change can be consciousness, it can be a change to our reality.
It can involve Earth changes as part of the transition
but the hopeful thing about it is
that it is a precursor to basically a global kind of change,
but I think that we all have to become agents of change.
We can't just say
"Oh well, it's getting bad, because it's going to get better.
Let's just sit back.î
I don't think it's entirely that easy.
I think people have to at least work on themselves.
I don't know that it's necessary to go out there
and march on the streets or do anything like that.
I've never been an advocate of violence,
but I think if people work on themselves individually,
that somehow that spreads.
That changes the consciousness of the entire planet.
So that's the one thing we've noticed. The Cassiopaeans,
despite the fact that they've told us some pretty unpleasant things to have to hear,
and have driven us to research, research, research
and discover that what they've told us was true,
it just shows that they are actually way in the ballpark,
and we have a lot ahead of us, a lot on our plates.
So, I think we're going to take a break now,
if I can start off with my previously planned discussion.
So let's have a short break. Can we? [Yes. Applause.]
Here we go.
What I want to talk about is The Living System.
And the reason I'm calling it The Living System is very particular.
We are all cells in a much larger entity that lives on this planet.
And because we have consciousness and the ability to reflect on our consciousness,
--that is self-consciousness--
we tend to become pretty anthropocentric,
that is, we begin to think we're all the center of the Universe.
But we should never forget that we are part of a system
and that we individually, unless we choose otherwise
via freewill as Ark described, probably don't matter that much,
contrary to what a lot of religions and cults may tell you.
So, let me see if I can make this work.
There's this nice little book called
"The Living Stream: Evolution and Man", by Sir Alister Hardy.
Alister Hardy has another theory going, which is The Aquatic Ape.
His idea is that human beings, or early hominids
were diverted into a situation where they had to deal with a very aquatic environment
at some early point in their history,
like maybe millions of years ago
and that this was what caused us to have some particular characteristics
that are peculiar only to human beings of all the hominid type creatures
who exist on the planet.
So it is well worth reading for any of you who are interested in that sort of thing.
Now, life took hold on this planet between 3.4 to 3.8 billion years ago.
The life that existed then is not anything like what we would necessarily call life.
It was mostly something called cyanobacteria.
You could say that the entire planet was basically covered with a bacteria
that actually produced the oxygen atmosphere that we enjoy today.
Prior to that time there really wasnít oxygen in our atmosphere
and other types of life could not have existed.
Right here you have an Archean Stromatolite
which is very very old, and what youíre seeing in these bands
are levels of dead bacteria,
and this is like covering a very long period of time
with a bunch of these dead bacteria making these striations.
And this is another very ancient fossil of another creature
that finally developed and had a little hard shell cover.
The thing about fossils is that they really donít have much of a shelf life
and the best type of creature to produce a fossil
is something that has like an exoskeleton and hard body parts,
so thereís probably way more than what has ever been left
as fossils that actually existed because they donít survive well.
And this is a little shrimp-like creature from the Cretaceous period,
and this is a kind of a gastropod from the Pliocene.
You can see the side is one centimeter, so itís very small
and attached to it is a little worm. Isnít that cute?
Ok, this is the interesting thing that I want you to look at.
This chart shows you the main vertebrate groups
through the passage of time and you can see here,
this is four hundred million years,
and these are the different periods according to the way this guy named them.
And each one of these... it says, "The comparative abundance
of the different groups is roughly indicated by the thickness of the bands."
So this was a pretty big one and then right off from this came this group,
which got big and then got really small and then extincted.
This one extincted here.
This one formed that one, this one,
and then it got really big and then they had a little period
where they almost died off and then became enormous again,
and you see these kinds of things
for all of these different types of creatures,
and this is based on fossil studies.
So pay attention to how this is flowing. This is important.
Here we have bony fish.
And what you will notice here is the same thing.
They come into being as a species, proliferate,
and get very small and then become extinct,
and this happens over and over again.
Then you have a little line and this goes to the reptiles, right?
That way, we donít see reptiles here.
And here we have amphibians,
and as you can see there were quite a few amphibians
that came into being and then went away, became extinct.
This is the evolution of the main groups of the reptiles
and I want you to notice right here.
This is the group from which mammals also became. See? That goes to mammals.
But here you have, these are the dinosaurs, right?
And you can see how hugely they proliferated and then things happened and boom! Gone.
This is the history of the orders of the placental mammals.
Placental mammals are basically us.
Creatures that donít lay eggs any more.
They have a placenta and nurture their young and (inaudible)
It says the common name, the main representatives,
youíve got anteaters, sloths and armadillos, hares and rabbits, rats, mice
and other rodents, lemurs, monkeys, apes and man.
Number four would be monkeys, apes and man, these are the primates.
Sea cows, manatees, blah blah blah.
Now the evolution of the main families of just one of the orders of the placental mammals,
the carnivores, and that means youíve got seals,
sealions, raccoons, pandas, bears, dogs, weasels,
martens, otters, skunks, civets, hyenas and cats.
So you see that there are a bunch of them that are extinct here.
They didnít prove viable, and this group,
this one group went off here and from it were formed all these others.
And youíll notice that when they draw this diagram
they put these little offshoot lines as the approximate point on the species
where a new species speciated away from them.
So, now we have here the main group of the anthropoid branch
of the primates, and this is basically what we belong to.
And as you can see, there are a bunch of them that didnít go anywhere.
A lot of them.
And at the end of all this, look at this.
Hereís gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutangs, pretty much it, right?
This is a diagram that shows the typical evolution of several species
and you can see how often they end in extinction.
Anything that doesnít go extinct is kind of extraordinary.
And we notice that more lines end than continue
and when they do continue, they continue in greatly modified forms.
So thatís very important, greatly modified forms.
Now, the interesting thing about this is,
why weíre interested in this is because:
ìThe comparison between a physical river system flowing downhill
in space and the stream of lifeî.
The thing is that the stream of life flows in reverse. Ok?
If you had a typical river system
youíd have a stream and then another stream and then another stream
and they come together and another one and another one
and they all go to a single source and dump into the ocean.
But here supposedly we have, theoretically,
according to materialist science, we have that accidental organism
that sprang into being in the primordial soup
because some amino acids accidentally bumped together
and everything is supposed to come from that one creature.
Now this is a little bit from physicist...
was Shrˆdinger a mathematician too?
I know he was a physicist, I know that for sure.
Now I want you to notice what he said up there.
Let me try to catch up on my page here.
What we see is that life has been highly organized
and very busy for a very very long time on this planet.
Almost four billion years.
There is a definite sequence of fossils from some of the lowest phases upwards.
There are dating problems for a lot of reasons
not the least of which is cataclysmic activity which can reset the dating clocks.
In the charts we see the approximate points of origins of one group to another.
The reptiles from the amphibian, the amphibian from the bony fish and so on.
We clearly see the great outbursts of dinosaurs,
and that was the Mesozoic period.
All the archosaurian reptiles have been massed together for simplicity;
they are actually eight diverging lines.
Ok. Looking at the chart for hominids...
I want to go back and look at the chart of hominids.
Looking at the chart of hominids we see
that man is part of this evolutionary process.
When we look at the timescale
and see that man has been here less than one two thousandths
of the total time spread out in these charts,
and remember, these charts donít even go back
the entire four billion years, or 3.8.
This system has been continuing without pause
for at least three and a half billion years.
We are part of a vast chemical reaction taking place on the surface of this planet.
And this reaction has been modified
thousands or literally millions of times over that period.
And this is why Iím calling it a living stream
because it looks like this river system.
And the important thing about the river system is, of course,
that it is flowing in reverse
and it is essentially defying the second law of thermodynamics.
Does everybody know what the laws of thermodynamics are?
Anybody not know? Ok. Well, weíll get to it.
So looking at what Erwin Schrˆdinger said,
ìIt is by avoiding rapid decay into the inert state of 'equilibrium'
that an organism appears so enigmatic;
so much so, that from the earliest times of human thought
some special non-physical or supernatural force
was claimed to be operative in the organism,
and in some quarters is still claimed.
How does the living organism avoid decay?
The obvious answer is:
By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating nutrients.
The technical term is metabolism.
The Greek word means change or exchange. Exchange of what?
Originally the underlying idea is, no doubt, exchange of material.
That the exchange of material should be the essential thing is absurd.
Any atom of nitrogen, oxygen or sulphur is as good as any other of its kind;
what could be gained by exchanging them?î
Why canít we just get born, eat once, and be done with it?
What are we really getting from this act of metabolism?
What then is that precious something contained in our food
which keeps us from death?
That is easily answered.
Every process, event, happening ñ call it what you will;
in a word, everything that is going on in Nature
means an increase of the entropy
of the part of the world where it is going on.
Thus, a living organism continually increases its entropy
-- or, as you may say, produces positive entropy --
which is something very positive.
What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy,
or to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism
is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy
it cannot help producing while alive.
In short, life is something altogether different
from any other process we know of in the universe.
It does not obey the traditional accepted interpretation
of the second law of thermodynamics.
So, what is life?
1953, James Watson, Frances Crick.
They announce their discovery of the double helix architecture in the DNA molecule.
Okay, not only that, but that was the same year
that Stanley Miller and Harold Urey at the University of Chicago
simulated hypothetical conditions thought at the time,
(they were wrong by the way), to be present on the early Earth,
demonstrating that amino and nucleic acid, the essential molecules for life,
can be produced artificially from chemical reactions.
It has later been determined
that there were a whole host of flaws in their experiment,
not least of which was the discovery that the Earth's atmosphere
was actually quite different than they hypothesized.
That was over 60 years ago,
and there is still no proof of what is called spontaneous abiogenesis.
Spontaneous abiogenesis is, of course, the idea that
some primal atoms in a primal soup bumped into each other,
decided to like each other, shook hands, and "hit it off",
formed some amino acids.
The amino acids bumped into each other
and somehow they formed a primitive cell,
and they've gone into some real extraordinary mental gymnastics
to try to explain how you go from no life to life.
And the problem with this are the laws of thermodynamics.
But we'll get there.
Okay, let me get to the part where we have...
We have these options.
I'm talking here about... there's a book called "The 5th Option".
It's by a guy named Byrant M. Shiller
and he is writing about: "Did life arise from
a chance encounter in the chemical soup of the primordial sea
or was it deliberately designed?"
Now, this guy is an engineer and remember all we said,
what Ark said about engineers.
You see this is theorized,
engineers make a tweak and make it work.
So, I want to tell you a couple of little engineer jokes
just to help you understand the difference.
See, I was raised by an engineer, which is why I think the way I think.
So I really appreciate the point of view of this guy Shiller.
Engineers are by nature pragmatic problem solvers.
Engineers take abstract science produced by theoreticians
and try to see what really works in real life.
They are often called upon to combine esoteric findings
from a number of disciplines to find a practical application.
And here is where we find the jokes:
What is the difference between an engineer, a physicist and a mathematician?
An engineer believes the equations approximate the world.
A physicist believes the world approximates equations.
A mathematician sees no connection between the two. [Laughter]
A physicist and an engineer in a hot air balloon.
They've been drifting for hours, have no idea where they are.
They see another person drifting by in a balloon and call out to her,
ìHey, where are we?î
The person replies, "You're in a balloon!î and drifts away.
The engineer says to the physicist,
ìThat person was obviously a mathematician."
The physicist replies, ìHow do you know that?î
ìBecause what she said was completely true and totally useless.î [Laughter]
This is my favorite:
There was a mad scientist who kidnapped three colleagues;
an engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician,
and locked each one of them in separate cells
with plenty of canned food and water but no can opener.
Returning a month later, the mad scientist
(he was a social scientist, by the way)
went to the first cell where the physicist had been left.
The physicist had worked out the angle necessary to knock the lids off the tin cans
by throwing them against the wall.
He was eating well, developing a good pitching arm and a new quantum theory.
The mathematician had stacked the aluminum cans
into a surprising solution to the kissing problem.
His desiccated corpse was propped against the wall,
and this was inscribed on the floor in blood:
"Theorem: If I canít open these cans Iíll die.
Proof: Assume the opposite. [Laughter]
The engineerís cell, however, was empty.
The engineer had taken apart his bed,
made a crude can opener out of the parts,
then he had used the aluminum shavings from the can
and dried sugar from the beans to make explosives, and escaped. [Laughter]
So, letís look at the other options. The four other options.
The first option: Biblical creation.
You know, God created everything,
all the creatures were all created at once.
All the stuff that is evident in the fossil record
is just put there by the devil to lead you astray
and trick you into giving up your faith.
The second option, thatís spontaneous abiogenesis.
Thatís our primordial soup, everything coming together by accident.
And notice that theyíre really,
the closed system people are really stuck on this.
Theyíre stuck on this to the extent that
itís actually staggering when I read the kind of stuff that I read
when Iím going through this kind of research, to see how they must insist
that there is nothing outside of matter.
This is the whole point of it.
Itís a complete and utter denial of anything above and beyond physical matter.
Everything has to be accidental because if itís not accidental,
if you suggest that there is anything primary to, or prior to,
the eruption of physical matter in the universe
i.e. the Big Bang, then there is some possibility
that paranormal phenomena could be something other than physical,
and of course, the reason why they have completely dissed studying the paranormal
is because itís impossible! Mathematicians must be in charge.
Third option: panspermia.
This was come up with by, I can't remember, what was his name?
Rickwentz? I canít say his name.
And their idea was that... they did some calculations,
and Hoyle was an astronomer, and I think (inaudible) was a physicist.
And they did some calculations and they decided
it was just completely impossible considering
the odds against life just appearing,
out of magic or by accident or by bumping against each other,
and so it couldnít have happened
in the four billion years that our planet has existed.
It couldnít.
So their idea was that, ok, life was brought here,
seeded on this planet by comets or asteroids or whatever.
So, a comet comes along and has gazillions of...
microorganisms and then they already have,
theyíve already settled, they already have cellular machinery,
they already have DNA, all this kind of stuff,
so they just basically splatter all over the planet.
Thereís millions of them and they begin to create the evolution
that we see in the fossil record.
The problem is, if four billion years isnít enough time,
where did they come from?
Now supposedly the universe itself is like thirteen
to seventeen to twenty (depending on who you ask) billion years old.
So thereís still not enough time for life to have evolved
to the point where there would be cellular creatures
that could be brought down on a comet or an asteroid.
So they basically, they just put the problem off to somewhere else.
The fourth option: Directed Panspermia.
This isnít really that much better.
Because that is that somebody deliberately sent it here.
It didn't just accidentally happen from a comet hitting the Earth,
which is kind of an iffy proposition,
the right comet with the right microorganisms hitting the right planet,
that just pushes your probabilities way out there.
So the fourth option is directed panspermia, somebody sent it here.
Well we still have the same problems, so we canít deal with that.
Is that all there is?
Scientific creationism... Yeah, you notice Al Gore? We have fun.
The rational design hypothesis can be decoupled from religious dogma
and subjected to scientific inquiry,
and thatís what weíre going to talk about here.
Scientists have been pursuing the problem of the origin of life
from the materialist ìgot to be able to repeat experimentsî point of view
trying to create a semblance of biological life
from the basic elements of inanimate chemistry.
This approach is supposed to demonstrate that the initial organisms
that began life on Earth some 3.8 billion years ago
might have self generated under the then prevailing conditions,
but without the input of a molecular biologist in the laboratory
recreating those conditions
(running electricity through the test tube,
and then all of these things, right?)
Itís completely lost on them
that the only way they were able to make an amino acid
was because they artificially controlled everything about the experiment.
But not all scientists think this is how things happened.
Many believe that life was just too complicated to have appeared
as a result of a chance encounter
in the chemical soup of the primordial sea.
These scientists point out that even the simplest one celled organisms
are way too complicated.
Take the simplest bacterium, E coli.
It has ten thousand or so genes that represent a level of complexity
that so overshadows anything researchers can hope to reproduce in a test-tube
that the prospect of ever doing so is vanishingly remote, if not impossible.
A junk yard contains all the bits and pieces
of a Boeing 747 dismembered and in disarray.
A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard.
What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747,
ready to fly, will be found standing there?
That is what astronomer Fred Hoyle had to say about that.
Of course, this comment is attacked in numerous ways by materialist types
including Richard Dawkins who, by the way,
isn't even a scientist with qualifications to criticize Hoyle.
So weíve been through those four options.
After decades of intensive investigation,
the abiogenetic theories still have to yield a plausible, workable solution
to the origin of life problem.
Biblical creationism, of course, predates the scientific way of thinking
by thousands of years.
Before the advent of the scientific method,
unquestioned religious dogma dictated the answers
to nearly all important questions.
And theyíre really trying to get that back in place again, sorry.
Today religious dogma has been largely superseded by empirical science.
Science has been so preoccupied with co-opting the authority of the Church
that it tends to lump anything with the faintest odor of a "design hypothesis"
in with religious creationism.
There is certainly more to this than meets the eye,
and in fact the efforts to "materialize" all of science
is the most corrupting influence on our planet today,
initiated and propagated by pathological thinking.
The fact is, to date there has been no serious scientific inquiry
into the Rational Design Hypothesis.
But, as Shiller notes, design of systems
is not really in the purview of theoreticians
itís in the realm of engineering, because that is what engineers do.
So Shiller has undertaken a Systems Engineering approach to the study.
Systems Engineering concerns itself with:
Form: the structure, pattern organization or essential nature of anything;
the outward appearance of something that distinguishes it from the substance of which it is made.
So, as weíve already noticed this living system on our planet
basically has spread in the four billion years it has been here
to everything on the planet.
It could be described kind of like the mold on a cheese,
and it has taken many many forms
and basically found ways to survive literally anywhere.
From the arctic to the thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean
to the tops of mountains to the deserts,
anywhere you look you will find something that has evolved to live there.
Function: The acts or operations expected from a person or thing.
Boy, youíre not going to be happy with me when you hear that one.
Use: The act or practice of putting something into action or service.
Devise: A method devised for making or doing something or attaining an end.
Intent: What one proposes to accomplish or do.
Design intent: The set of goals intended to be achieved
by the designer as reflected within the design.
So itís obvious that the living system on our planet,
in my opinion, is designed.
The question is what is it designed for?
What are we really here for, what is really our purpose?
If you just look at the whole living system
and you just looked at all of those species
that came and went, and keep in mind that we could go too.
We are not the acme of biological evolution, clearly.
What is this system we call life?
What is its form and function?
What does the living system do, what is its generic purpose,
its specific use, that might reflect the Design Intent?
And finally what is the origin of the Living System phenomenon?
Take an internal combustion engine, for example.
You can study its various parts and components
and the way they are connected to determine its form.
You can see how the engine converts fuel to energy,
into rotational mechanical energy, that is its function.
You can examine its output; what the rotational energy is applied to,
and that will tell you its use.
The modifications to the basic design
will give insight into the Design Intent.
Was it designed originally to pump water
or is it an automobile engine that was modified to pump water?
Thus, a systems analysis will do the following:
Try to identify the overall Living Systemís objective
(distinguished from form and function).
Try to identify what generic use the Living System as a whole can possibly serve,
and try to determine what particular purpose
the Living System was designed to achieve as reflected in the Design Intent.
The answer is going to be...
I have to go through this stuff, itís really cool.
So hereís our question: What is the origin of the Living System?
Nowadays they have kind of an anthropocentric thing about your Gaia hypothesis.
The problem with the Gaia hypothesis is that
it assesses the relationship between the planetary biosphere
and the Living System from our contemporary anthropocentric point of view.
James Lovelock has devised autocatalytic models
involving non-equilibrium thermodynamics to justify
how life could get a jump started in defiance of the second law of thermodynamics.
In short, this is really just a variation of the Abiogenetic Origin of Life Theory
despite the fact that it has been roundly attacked
by arch-materialist Richard Dawkins for daring to suggest that life has a "purpose".
Ok, the Living System, the Earth is obviously the habitat,
and the Living System is the user-occupier.
Basically weíre renting the planet.
Just imagine an advertisement:
"Planet for rent. Itís in rough shape, doesnít have an oxygen atmosphere yet,
itís pretty volcanic right now, with boiling hot seas,
itís a real fixer-upper. Any takers out there?"
And the Living System says, ìWell, you knowî
and also, thereís a warning in there that,
conditions can change from moment to moment.
There are cataclysms can happen, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes.
This is really not a stable place.
And then youíve got a living system that comes along
and agrees to signs a contract to live there.
What is that living system going to have to do?
What is it going to have to be geared to do
in order to live in that place and survive?
What do living things do? At any given moment in time,
what is life activity if not the enduring challenge to stay alive,
to survive at all costs?
That is what every living thing strives for
and how virtually spends all of its time:
trying to stay out of the way of danger,
and acquire the resources it needs, such as food and water,
shelter, and iPhones, and that sort of thing.
Yet despite all such efforts,
it is brutally evident that no creature, large or small,
ultimately succeeds at it.
After a relatively short life span,
the only tangible evidence any organism leaves behind
is any offspring it may have produced during its brief allotted time
as a Living System participant.
After that, it seems that an organism, any organism,
has no further value to the system.
If it did, we would find evidence of perpetual organism life.
Thatís a cold hard fact.
Think about it. Can anybody disagree with that?
Thatís what we are. We have a short life.
We struggle to live that life.
Of course, the struggle is made that much harder
by the psychopaths in power on this planet,
but even without them, thatís what itís all about.
We have to have food, we have to have shelter.
If we have children, we have to feed our children.
We have to clothe our children.
Some of us want to have other things,
like I said, iPhones, TVs, cars..., you know,
thatís just particular to our civilization.
Weíre still dealing with the same struggle
that has always faced every member of the human species from time immemorial.
This description of the Living System has the advantage of being an obvious,
empirical, universal principle which operates system-wide throughout
thoughout the entire Living System
because thatís the same thing that applies to every creature,
dogs, cats, cows, horses, bears, wolves, foxes, rabbits, mice, you know.
Every creature.
Look at it!
I mean, if you were on a spaceship,
looking down on the Earth,
you would see that there are all these creatures
with different shapes and forms running around,
trying to get food, trying to metabolize something,
trying not to get killed or be eaten.
And in the case of human beings, since we have no natural predators,
we have a lot of intraspecies predators: psychopaths.
Machines have purposes, organisms have goals.
So what is the goal of the Living System?
Because, a machine obviously is made
by something with intelligence to do some work.
And an organism is something a little bit different.
Thatís why thereís a distinction between a goal and a purpose.
If organisms have goals, the results must be defined in terms of achievement.
The goals of safety and nourishment are ongoing short-term organism goals,
while the goal of reproduction is a longer-term goal.
In order to reproduce,
the organism must compete with others to stay alive by avoiding danger.
And this is where, it is theorized by some people in present times,
that Higher Consciousness, conscious awareness in human beings,
is something, itís like a feedback mechanism.
It was developed to make us better at achieving these goals of survival.
I mean, thatís all it really is for.
So, any kind of vaunted, elaborate ideas,
that our Higher Consciousness is somehow making us better or more holy
than any other creature on the planet,
may be going in the wrong direction,
but ñ I donít necessarily agree with that, but Iím just saying.
Strictly from an empirical point of view, it could seem,
and it could be said, and it could be said rationally,
that Consciousness is just something that developed to make us better
at achieving those goals which are to get food, to have shelter,
to reproduce and to be better at it. Think about it.
Okay, this is the biggie:
We have programed into us a survival instinct.
Nearly all creatures,
I would say all creatures in the Living System have survival instincts.
And yet, and yet! Everything dies.
Why in the name of anything rational,
would we be programmed with something that drives us to survive
when it is an absolute fact that weíre going to die?
Think about that.
Itís in this context that we can see that
the faculty of conscious awareness adds a whole new dimension.
What is learning, if not the filing in memory
for future use of successful tactics and strategies of the past
for helping an organism stay alive.
In humans, most humans that is,
learning amounts to retention in memory of concepts
that mirror reality.
The extent of learning success is measured by how little difference there is
between what is recalled from memory and what was placed in the memory.
Regarding the fact that weíre going to die,
surely the system could accommodate an immortal organism,
if that was considered desirable from the overall systemís point of view.
If immortality contributed to greater efficiency
in achieving the designed goals of the Living System,
surely we would be there, either by evolution or by design.
From a technological point of view there is nothing that stands in the way
of genetically programed immortality provision.
Technically, all that is required
is to expand the organism maintenance and repair subsystems.
Eliminating food-chain participation
and making the organism a photosythesizer.
So, Iím going to leave you with that thought,
because weíll take a break now, but the thing is:
Weíre all going to die, and yet weíre programed to do everything to not die.
And why canít, or why isnít or can we be immortal?
Because thatís where weíre going.
So, I think itís lunchtime, is that correct?
Somebody tell me what Iím supposed to do.