I am really getting tired of claims that say that scientists are finding signs of life on other planets. The Curiosity Rover on Mars is analyzing chemicals dug up at the Gale Crater site. They are looking for signs of life that possibly existed billions of years ago. What did they discover? 1. Long chain hydrocarbons (alkanes) a. Decane (10 carbon atoms) b. Undecane (11 carbon atoms) c. Dodecane (12 carbon atoms) 2. No evidence of amino acids 3. Methane 4. No guanine, cytosine, thymine, adenine. 5. Nitrogen heterocycle (unspecified) 6. Nitric oxide From Nature: "There is no evidence to suggest that the fixed nitrogen molecules found by the team were created by life. The surface of Mars is inhospitable for known forms of life. Instead, the team thinks the nitrates are ancient and likely came from non-biological processes like meteorite impacts and lightning in Mars’ distant past. Features resembling dry riverbeds and the discovery of minerals that only form in the presence of liquid water suggest that Mars was more hospitable in the remote past. The Curiosity team has found evidence that other ingredients needed for life, such as liquid water and organic matter, were present on Mars at the Curiosity site in Gale Crater billions of years ago." "Finding a biochemically accessible form of nitrogen is more support for the ancient Martian environment at Gale Crater being habitable" said Jennifer Stern of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Stern is lead author of a paper on this research published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science March 23. Given the list of chemical compounds found on Mars by the Curiosity rover, the claim that this suggests that life existed on Mars billions of years ago is a LIE. It is a deliberate deception. If Curiosity fails to find evidence for life, the mission would be considered an abysmal failure. Justification for funding of missions like this and other missions to extraterrestrial planets with similar purpose would be called into question. Here is an experiment that scientists should undertake to justify their claims. Take the chemicals they have found on Mars and since life is an on-off switch, combine them to form a living system such as a bacterium, worm, insect, and show that they could have arisen from such chemicals spontaneously. This doesn’t take millions or billions of years; you can’t hide behind that. We can give you purified amino acids and nucleotides already in the correct 3-dimensional enantiomer structure. Construct protein chains and DNA from your off-the-shelf chemicals and kick start a living cell. Chemistry doesn’t allow it, and you can’t do it.

Rich Geer presents his intriguing thoughs in archaeology and chronology. He used four references: Archaeology and the Bible by Tom Meyer, Unearthing the Bible by Titus Kennedy, Evidence for the Bible by Clive Anderson and Brian Edwards, and Excavating the Evidence for Jesus by Titus Kennedy. When he was at the University of Wyoming, Rich took a biblical archaelogy class and it was where he first heard that Biblical people and events could actually be verified. One example was the Sennacherib Prism that recounted events that confirmed the Biblical account. Also, Hezekiah's tunnel in Jerusalem is still there, and Rich explored it in 1974. Over 100 cases of Bullae or seals confirm the existence of persons recorded in scripture. The Ipuwer Papyrus confirms the 10 plagues of Egypt under Moses. The archaelogical site of Jericho confirms the account of the collapse of the wall. The House of David Stele confirms the existence of King David. The Mesha Stele mentions Omri, the father of Ahab. The Nabonidus chronicle and cylinder shows that Belshazzar was co-regent under Nabonidus and eliminates the reason for late dating Daniel. The Behistun Monument shows that Darius the Great recognized Cyrus's earlier decree, allowing the Jews to again rebuild the second temple. No archaelogical artifact has a date stamped on it. Lots of schemes has been proposed, but there is much contradictory information that is opposed to the clear Biblical record. Rich has studies the Old Testament chronology and is able to correct a number of assumptions based upon faulty archaelogical dates and come up with a timeline. Scripture is the oly reliable basis to establish a real timeline grounded in history.

Doug and Rich speculates on whether or not artificial intelligence is good or bad. The conversation began to explore the broader topic of AI's potential benefits and challenges. In a 1998 article by Daniel Graves about artificial intelligence and its implications on the RAE website, many of the benefits and problems are listed and still remain today. There is a fantasy about the triumph of reductionism: the doctrine that everything can ultimately be explained in terms of the lowest unit of nature: atoms and the forces of physics and chemistry. Computer genius Alan Turing proposed a test to see if a machine's intelligence rivaled a human. Bring in an astute observer and with a human and a robot typing on a keyboard, the observer asks questions and if he can't tell which answers are coming from a robot, the AI is shown to be as intelligent as a human. Doug shared his experience using Microsoft Word's co-pilot feature to add information to an article about the Michigan ghost town of Summitville, demonstrating how AI can pull from various sources to provide additional context and details. One result was finding the answer to an unsolved question about the death of a young man who wrote poetry and made wonderful drawings in the ledger. Other examples showed that the AI could not understand emotion, illogical arguments or distinguish casual banter from the main topic.

A curiosity I studied in my microbiology class many years ago, Mixotricha Paradoxa represents a case of a microorganism that is made up of a symbiosis of several unrelated types of bacteria. This organism lives in the gut of the Australian termite Mastotermes darwiniensis. This is a giant termite that is only found in northern Australia. According to the Wikipedia article, this is the most "primitive" extant termite species. ("Primitive" is only in the minds of evolutionists). This species does not form mounds but builds nests underground in a complex network of tunnels and galleries which they use to travel to new food sites. It is the only living member of its genus and family. Apparently, evolutionists find it difficult to classify, as they found similarities to cockroaches, with a similar abdomen. In Northern Australia, this organism is a major pest to the point where vegetable farming has been virtually abandoned wherever this termite is abundant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastotermes_darwiniensis Mixotricha Paradoxa lives in the gut of this pest, and for that reason it has been studied. The name was given by the Australian biologist J. L. Sutherland, who first described it in 1933. The name means "the paradoxical being with mixed up hairs". This large protist has both cilia and flagella, which before this discovery was not thought to be possible. It forms a mutualistic relationship with five different kinds of bacteria living inside the termite. There is a total of four bacterial symbiont species. Inside the cell, there is a spherical bacterium that has the same function as mitochondria, which Mixotricha lacks. The article claims that the Mixotricha mitochondria degenerated and lost the ability to produce energy aerobically. That begs the question, as we have no idea from what we find in the present what the evolutionary precursor might have looked like. The Mixotricha has four flagella at one end that serve as rudders, three pointing forward and one backwards. There are brackets that hold thousands of spirochetes that provide locomotion. Each bracket holds one spirochete and one bacillus. It is not definite, but it is believed that basal bodies could be making cellulases that digest wood. About 250,000 hairlike Treponema spirochaetes, a species of helical bacteria, are attached to the cell surface and provide the organism with cilia like movements. The flagella provide the steering. The motion of the spirochetes is in sync with each other, suggesting that they are somehow in touch with each other. Mixotricha have five genomes, as they form very close symbiotic relationships with four types of bacteria. The question is if these genomes evolved separately and came together. Evolutionists really are not looking for an explanation involving a master designer who coordinates symbiosis. They look for common features and misinterpret them as being from common descent. I recognized immediately the significance of the impossibility of five different synchronizing genomes to make up this organism when I took this microbiology class. It is obvious that this is a product of a Creator God who design these creatures to work in harmony. The question why this termite is a "pest" and why God would create this is not that weighty to answer. God designed certain creatures to be decomposers to consume dead plant life and turn it into soil. It is only a "pest" in terms of how man wants to cultivate agriculture, and if the environment is out of balance, one creature can be become destructive.