Bioverse: What We Know about Cellular Intelligence and the Breakthroughs this Offers

Welcome to the Living to 100 Club Podcast. Here's our host, Dr. Joseph Casciani.

Good day to everyone. I'm Joe Casciani, your host for the Living to 100 Club Podcast. Our conversations are all about aging well, and doing what it takes mentally and physically to live longer and healthier. Our guests share insights and recommendations about successful aging, stories of perseverance, and inspiration about our future. Dr. Bill Miller is our guest on today's Living to 100 Club Podcast when we discuss cellular intelligence and how this can transform our lives. Dr. Miller is the author of the newly released Bio-Verse: The Secrets to Life's Biggest Questions. We explore the concept of cellular life and the tools that are now available to engineer or leverage this cellular life to improve health. Our guest explains how we can partner our personal cells, such as body tissue, with microbial cells to our advantage in ways that were not available in past decades. This is a conversation about scientific breakthroughs in the era of the cell. First, a little background. William B. Miller Jr., MD, is an internationally known evolutionary biologist, medical doctor, author of 7 acclaimed books and over 3 dozen peer-reviewed published articles. After a career practicing medicine, Dr. Miller has become a leading expert in the field of evolutionary biology as the developer of cognition-based evolution, publishing scores of peer-reviewed papers, hundreds of online articles and books, including the acclaimed The Microcosm Within. More recently, a docuseries based on his forthcoming popular science book for general readers, Bioverse, is in development. His latest book, as we mentioned, is Bioverse. How the Cellular World Contains the Secrets to Life's Biggest Questions. Dr. Miller, welcome to our program.

Thanks for having me on, Joe. I've been looking forward to this.

Great, you're most welcome. So I always like to open by asking our guests to tell us about the journey you've had, a good, rich, fulfilling journey, uh, to where you are today. But tell us about the, maybe the highlights that brought you to where you are today.

I started off as a practicing physician, loving the practice that I was in. And I practiced in a private practice in academic medicine for 35 years. And I was very contented in what I was doing. And the reason I'm going to go through this story is it's a very good illustration of how chance so strongly affects things and how opportunities can come to you at any age. So those people looking at me would realize that a dozen years ago or so, I was not a teenager. And so, I had gone on a medical meeting to Chicago in the specialty that I was in. And I can sit for just a few days. And after that, I really can't take it. So, I turned to a very bright partner of mine that came to this meeting with me. It was a blustery November day in Chicago. And I said, "You know, I just can't take it anymore. Let's play hooky late this afternoon." I said, let's go to one of the museums in wonderful Chicago. Pick the Art Museum, Field Museum, your choice. He goes, we'll go to the Field Museum. And I just want to preface this by saying, at this juncture, I had not given any real thought to evolution. I knew about it. I'd read about it. I was curious about it. I had a background in college about it, but I hadn't been reading about it and it wasn't a focus of interest of mine. So I don't know how many of those that are watching this video series may have been to the Field Museum, but those who are there will recall that there's this magnificent central rotunda. It's enormous. And in one part of it, dominant part of it, is what I like to call a Boy Named Sue, after the old Johnny Cash song. It was— it's a titanic Tyrannosaurus rex. It's the best in the world, and it is called Sue. And nobody really knows the sex of the beast, but it was the moniker Sue at the discovery site in Montana. And this was, I think, about 20 years ago. Anyway, it's the best in the world, and I am bowled over by it. I'm just standing in front of it, but I'm noticing something based on my medical career. Uh, much of what I did was based on anatomy, so I really do know my human anatomy. I know my bones, and I know where the muscles attached to the bones, and I'm looking at the skeleton. And to my amazement, of course, I never thought about before, there are very important relationships, anatomical relationships between the T-Rex and me. Of course, it's a huge difference in scale, Joe. But the point is that if you look at the specific anatomic features, so you take this upper arm bone, the humerus, and its juncture, at the top of the arm bone, and then the hip bone, and the hip socket, and pelvis, and the vertebrae, and the ribs. They're very much like human anatomy. They're not the same. It's rhyming rather than an identity.

Okay.

But I hadn't realized that that was the case, and I was amazed by it. And I just couldn't see the connection between random evolution, which is what I've been taught, random genetic errors over time shaped by natural selection created that beast and then me. And somehow I bear a familial resemblance to it. And this just couldn't compute. So I say that to my partner and he just looks at me with bemusement. Like, what are you talking about? It's just a matter of time. Don't even waste my time. And I cannot tell you now, Joe, why it was, but as if he threw a gauntlet down. He had no intention of doing it. Uh, he's a brilliant guy, he's smarter than I am maybe, but he didn't have a curiosity about it, and I did. And what's the wonderful moment, uh, thing about that moment? The web existed. It was pretty early compared to what we do now, but it was robust enough for me to, as, as someone without an academic credential, mm-hmm, and being an evolutionary biologist at that time, uh, research it extensively. I had also— and I'll be brief— I had also made many observations in the course of my practice that I've been thinking about in the subconscious. For example, I noticed in patterns of disease that it was our job to try to predict the specific organism that could be causing a serious infection. For example, in the brain, if you see a certain pattern on an MRI scan or a computed tomographic scan, you can pretty accurately predict it's going to be toxoplasmosis. Similarly, we all know that if you have a certain pattern of pneumonia, it's very likely bacterial. Can't always tell, but it is. And if it's bacterial, it's going to be Haemophilus influenzae. Why? Why is the— why are these patterns so predictable? And it occurred to me, and again, my partners could care less when I expressed it to them. I said, look, these microbes have preference. They're going there for a specific reason. Why? Nobody knew. I couldn't even find out that answer in the literature. There wasn't any literature on it. There was no— no one was thinking about the possibility that microbes are intelligent, that microbes had— and that they had inner lives, as it were. It just seemed actually heretical. Anyway, I got very fortunate. I met some terrific colleagues. They helped me, I helped them, and I've been able now to to put together the first complete reordering of evolutionary thought called cognition-based evolution. And there's going to be an academic book, the first textbook about this is— I'm reading the proofs right now for Taylor Francis CRC Press, a terrific academic publisher. So I'm very honored and lucky. And my job now is to communicate the things that I've been lucky enough to learn And I have an opportunity to teach some valuable things to other people about cells. And I know listeners are going to say, well, what do I care about cells? You know, I'm me, look, I'm not cells. That's what we're going to talk about. You are, you are, you're all cells.

So you've really immersed yourself in this cellular intelligence concept and its relationship to microbes. Now you've talked about the era of the cell. Let's start there. What does that mean and why is that important?

All right, I don't want to be digressive and cut me short if I'm gonna— if I get too detailed, but I'm gonna explicitly explain what the era of the cell is. To do that appropriately, I need to introduce two concepts briefly, and then we're gonna go immediately into the discussion of what The Era of the Cell means and what it will mean to each individual listener. First, there's a dramatic difference between evolution and biology in the 21st century than the 20th century. What is the central difference? Two things. The first is this concept that microbes are intelligent. Actually, all of our cells are intelligent. My liver cells are intelligent. My cells are a specific kind of cell. They are cells with a nucleus. Microbes don't have that. But nonetheless, all of them share one thing. They're— they all are intelligent, problem-solving, and communicative, and social. The other thing that we found out about ourselves, which completely contradicted what I was taught in medical school, is that far from being, uh, the kind of an organism that completely is protected against microbes. On the contrary, we're half microbial. We don't see it. We don't feel it. When I get up in the morning and I look in the mirror, and the first thing I say is, "Ah, Brad Pitt, eat your heart out." It's, "I'm a seamless being. I am one." That is a cellular illusion. I am tens of trillions of cells that are working together, collaborating together so exquisitely and intimately that I feel singular. And the fraction of those cells that are the me cells, the Bill Miller cells, the cells with the nucleus, my liver cells, my kidney cells, and so on, there's another half, and viruses too. We're talking about tens, perhaps as many as 100 trillion of these that are intimately part of me. They're in me, on me. They help govern my metabolism. And this is where we're going to get to the ear of the cell. Govern my metabolism, are important for my immune resilience. They influence my moods and my behaviors. That's— we are a combined organism. So what's the major difference? Smart cells versus what was thought before, which they were little automatic bots that just responded to stimuli without any problem-solving capability, any individual problem-solving capability, and what we are, which is called a superorganism. A combination of our own cells and our microbial cells. And that fraction, they work together to protect me. Those microbes can't live as they wish without me. I'm a habitat. I'm an ecology for them. And I can't do without them. If there was a means for them to be suddenly eradicated from me totally, I wouldn't be able to survive. Sure. That's how close this relationship is. So it used to be considered that a person like myself was a host, and the microbes that were in me and on me and around me, the few that were there, hardly counted. They were hangers-on. They didn't really matter one way or another. And mostly, I had to fear them. They were pathogens. Now we know an entirely different thing. We are a consensual we, a combined organism. We are combined because all of these cells are explicitly coming together because they want to, because they need to. And the number of pathogens that threaten us, like SARS-CoV-2, they're a distinct minority. So this leads to this concept of the ear of the cell. We have finally now in the 21st century, for the first time ever, discovered these things and can link them to a new set of tools that weren't available earlier than two decades ago. We're talking about metagenomic sequencing, the ability to run through large volumes of genetic data and so on, better microscopes, more flexible ways of looking at living rather than dead things under a microscope. You have to have that advance. It's very hard. Plus, we needed an awakening of a willingness of imagination. We had a failure— and Joe, I'm sure this is important in your work— the failure of imagination, the unwillingness to conceive that there's another way to look at it. Was impeding progress. Well, now all those things have come together, and we are at the beginning of enormous upward growth of knowledge about how these smart cells work— our own smart cells, our microbial smart cells. And the reason that we're entering the era of the cell, it's the era of truly understanding how to partner with them and leveraging them for our better health and longevity. So what will we gain from this? 2 things, longer lives and better lives. I was talking to my wife this morning at breakfast, and then I said, I'm looking forward to speaking with Joe. And what's the topic? I said, I'm living to 100. And she said, well, what are you going to say? And I said, just offhand, I said, well, you should be so lucky. But here's the difference, here the selling, you will live to 100, it'll become very, It'll become quite a routine thing beginning in the next few decades. It takes time for these things to roll out, but it will. But secondly, and this is just as important, you're going to live healthy. No era in human history had this gift on its horizon. And the reason for it, we didn't know these things. We didn't have the tools. There were always people that lived a long time. You know, Ben Franklin lived a long time in an era when most people were dead on the average by in the mid-30s. That's mostly because of childhood mortality, but it skews the figures. But very few people lived into their 60s and 70s as a percentage of the population. Almost none lived into 80s, and none of them were healthy if they did. What we will get in the opposite is everybody's going to get a better break. Because the possibility of, at birth, of living to 100 and living well into your 90s, deeply into your 90s, is going to be— it can happen. The only thing that can stop it is if we ruin it ourselves, you know, because of our human instincts are a little bit messed up. And we can talk about that and what our cells can teach us about how to be better humans. But that's the Year of the Cell. Genetic techniques, deep scientific understanding of all of the complicated inner workings of cells. I'm sure that no one's listening has ever learned about what are all of the structures inside of a cell. It's a dense, complicated, packed environment. And every part of it serves an integral purpose. As we dissect this out, what we will learn is how to engineer better things, for ourselves. Our cells engineer us. Our cells in their trillions link together to create us. We are going to learn how to use ourselves to regenerate organs, to conquer, uh, chronic diseases, chronic afflictions that we thought were inevitable products of aging, like arthritis, diabetes, hypertension. Uh, we will learn how to discipline obesity. We'll never conquer it completely, but we'll discipline it. We will gain new tools in suppressing appetite or increasing appetite when necessary. We'll learn how to protect people from infectious pathogens, like SARS-CoV-2. All of these things are realistically on the horizon. Nothing that I'm saying is conjectural, it might happen. It just will happen given time and some resources. And because there's money to be made, By all of these things, we will do it and our lives will be better for it.

It's going to happen. So what you're saying, Bill, is the, um, we've learned the intelligence of the cells and through these discoveries in the last few decades and how we can use this intelligence to our advantage rather than being just passive, um, kind of host to the cells in our bodies. Sure.

Sure. One other way that we'll do this and All of this stuff is all— all of this is already being done in the lab. It's just early. It's, it's, you know, primitive in comparison to what it'll be in 30 years, but we're going to create combined organisms. Some of this work could easily be done living, combining living organisms into new, not synthetic, they would be chimerical organisms, a mixture. And this has to be deeply thought about. And we don't have time to go through that today. But one of the other things that will be done and will be less controversial are synthetic organisms. So we read a lot about AI and how AI is going to take over our lives and AI is going to come alive. Well, it's not going to happen because to be alive means to be cognitive, to be conscious. And we have no idea how to create consciousness. What we know, what we have skill set in doing, is creating facsimiles of consciousness that are so seductive that unless we examine it very closely, we could believe that our counterpart is conscious. So many people may have heard of the Turing test. Alan Turing was a great scientist back in the '50s, '40s and '50s, critical in World War II. And he came up with a test of computer intelligence at that time. He said, if you could devise a little experiment, and you have a person on one side of the screen, and then on the opposite side, a computer, but the person doesn't know if it's a computer or a living person. And if the person can't tell the difference, then the computer has become intelligent. Well, the computer never becomes intelligent. The programming becomes so intelligent that it fools the objective observer into believing it's an intelligent counterpart. It's really not that hard anymore with what we know. We can already do it. It's sometimes uncanny. Even with CGI, we, we can create things that are remarkable facsimiles of reality that are not real, but that's not consciousness. However, when you combine conscious intelligent cells with artificial materials, many of which have yet to be developed, many of that will be developed in partnership with intelligent microbes and our intelligent cells. When those start to be combined, then we have a whole new set of products that are almost impossible to imagine. Plastics that will, that will be living materials and flexibly responding to the environment in ways that, candidly, none of us are prepared to predict because it's It's too wild. The other important thing are very intelligent biosensors. So if those people are motivated to read my book, I have a little section about a woman in her mid-70s going out on a date. And it— the reason that I bring it up is it offers an opportunity to talk about some of these new products that can be coming out. And the biosensors measure every day her health, and she's in terrific shape. And she doesn't even bother to think about that anymore because it's always been on. It's been part of her life for decades. And she's developed this confidence that the future is bright for herself, and it will be. So, none of this is Pollyanna stuff. This is where we'll go unless we muck it up ourselves.

So, as you talk about creating, are you talking about creating new organs, for example?

Oh, absolutely. In fact, talk about things that you can't imagine you would know. And this just came to my desk yesterday and I was actually startled by it. It turns out that the leprosy bacteria in mice causes liver regeneration. We don't know why, but it reprograms the cells of mice to produce new hepatocytes. These are the the liver cells. And so why is this important? Because this is an entirely new pathway of cellular regeneration that doesn't depend on the bioelectric fields that we thought were necessary to do that. We, we thought we had to know how to control the structural format, the, the template that would become the organ and control it by bioelectric fields. And That is one way to go about it. Now we know there's another pathway, an intracellular pathway that was unknown, or it could even be that these microbes are hijacking bioelectric fields. We have to experiment with it. But this is something entirely new. It's days old. And this is the kind of discovery that can lead to whole new organs through pathways that we never dreamt of 6 months ago. So we are on the threshold. The only key you can do is live long enough to enjoy it. That's our challenge, figure out the way to do that.

And get out of the way, get out of the way of our cells.

Yeah, you bet.

Because they're pretty smart. So is this the partnering between our host cells and the microbial cells? Is this what you're referring to?

Yeah, we are— one of the big things, one of the things that I emphasize is that our cells have a great deal to teach us. So they have a great deal to teach us about metabolic pathways. And immune systems, and we can tease that out. They have a great deal to teach us about how a successful organism like ourselves work. How is it conceivable that tens of trillions of cells of different species— now remember, all these microbes are not Bill Miller microbes, they're not me, they're different species, they're totally alien, as it were, organisms, and yet, somehow or other, our cells have learned the a magical thing in biology, that they will collaborate, cooperate, develop codependencies, and share resources in ways that you wouldn't have believed it's possible if you just thought Darwinian evolution was all that you could get. But the fundamental principle that gets you and me talking here is that we developed, beginning with cells a billion years ago, and then Homo sapiens a couple hundred thousand years ago, We have co-evolved and co-developed with microbes to develop these partnerships so that we can be the kind of collective seamless organism that allows us to enjoy this conversation today. And this is magical. And we are finally on the threshold of beginning to understand it.

Well, so, uh, regenerative medicine, Bill, is like the early stages of this movement that you're talking about, these discoveries. Developments. Yeah. Yeah.

And there's terrific research going on. There's a guy named— a brilliant professor at Tufts, Mike Levin, whom I'm in contact with, and we talk about these things. You know, it's very tantalizing. You just wish it could go faster and faster, but it's painstaking, and it has to go step by step. But it will happen. There isn't any question that we'll regenerate organs. Now, if you ask me, will we regenerate limbs? I don't know. Eventually, yes. We know that there are things like amphibians that can do that. If they can do it, we can find the way. Cells can do that. Now, we know that cells can do it. We just don't know how. We will do that. In my lifetime, no. We're not gonna regenerate limbs. But we will regenerate nerve. Pathways, we probably will solve the problem of the severed spinal cord and how to reconnect it satisfactorily. Won't be perfect, but it'll, it'll rhyme enough to deliver back a pretty good life, uh, you know, as far as mobility goes. Yeah, of course people still have good life after spinal trauma, uh, even terrible spinal trauma, but well, I'm talking about satisfactory.

Sure.

Yeah, reversal of some of the damage. Life for motility. These things are on the horizon, it will just take some time.

Well, let's talk about, uh, just for example, um, let's say we've got this case of inflammation and we're looking at what's going on in the microbiome and all of that, and where can we go with improving that, repairing that, that damage?

Well, you look at the interface, the most direct way to go about that would be look at the— let's say you have a spinal cord that had a small segment that has crushed in a car accident from a cervical fracture, for example, or a lumbar fracture, you'll look at the tissue damage on both sides. Basic cellular research that is being done now is beginning to understand these— the pathways of inflammation. They understand how certain inflammatory reactions will need to be blocked and others encouraged. And that balance will enable fibers to cross that wouldn't otherwise, that would be inhibited. That work is already ongoing in labs all around the world, and it's just a matter of unlocking the key. And as we keep at it long enough, and because we live in a wonderful era in communication amongst ourselves in science, that will happen. Someone was asking me the other day, well, the Year of the Cell, you say it's about these discoveries and so on, how rapidly science will increase. I'll tell you why it will increase so much more rapidly in the future than the past, because we have the internet that enabled my opportunities. The internet guarantees two kinds of things. It strongly enables the wisdom of crowds. It strongly enables the velocity of the circulation of the information that's available. That was not always so. When I first started in medicine and I wrote my first paper, which is about a bone abscess disease called Brodie abscess, all the work I did was in the library cross-referencing books. There was no such thing as an internet back then, in another century, actually, of course. Now, it's just anybody could do it, but it's— They pop up all over the place. Your problem is too much data. Now, you have to learn to become an effective management—

Sure.

—person in data. But in another year, there was too little data. So, you have that available, and you have the wisdom of crowds where we have an idea of how medicine progressed, of the brilliant man or woman. And there are many brilliant women. But, you know, we know about Pasteur, and we know that his dogged determination to prove germs really made a difference. We know that Lister figured out the possibility of keeping wounds clean, and disinfection, a new concept at this time. We know of these particular giants. But going forward, you're not going to have that very much. The possibility of the one individual coming up with it isn't going to happen because it's gotten too complicated and it's always a team effort. Sure. I mean, there are no papers of brilliant scientific breakthroughs that's a single person anymore that I know of. It's— they are— you can get theoretical things like the stuff I write. That's theory. That's not lab science. That's not bench science. Bench science is very hard. And that's a team effort. But the great news is teams can reach out across the globe in a way that was never possible, even in my field, which is both practical biology and theoretical evolutionary pathways. I have colleagues around the world. I'm very privileged that way. And I'm in communication with them every day via the internet to Germany and Canada and to Spain. How lucky I am. Friends in England, all of them are cross-fertilizing my ideas. I'm hopefully, I'm doing the same. We will have these new findings because we have new ways to communicate among ourselves. And our cells are actually offering us why this is important. This kind of cross-fertilization, this kind of cross-communication is the living principle. The sharing of information is why I am a collective. Cellular organization. So, you know, it's the proverbial wisdom of crowds. When people are on game shows and they don't know what to do, the data is confusing. All information, you know, almost all information you get in life is confusing. You make your best choice, but you very rarely know for certain what the very best thing to do is. Mostly, you muddle through. When you don't know, you ask somebody, "What do you think?" What does a person on a game show do? 3 doors in front of them, prizes behind one of them, which one should they take? They always ask the audience. They do because the wisdom of crowds, everybody knows that they're better off with collective judgment. I mean, there are exceptions, but I think everyone gets the point. This wisdom of crowds of the internet will make a huge difference in science. The other thing is that nothing needs to be forgotten anymore. So the first person to intuit, to actually do an experiment that uncovered the concept of genes was Gregor Mendel, an obscure monk operating in 100+ years, 150 years ago. In his garden. He did his work on pea pods. He uncovered many of the basic principles of segregation, of genetic segregation. And it was promptly forgotten and only to be rediscovered about 60, 70 years later by two biologist researchers and came across it almost strictly by accident. And they said, "Hey, this is a great idea." And so they had to repeat the experiments to validate it. But that's not going to happen in the future. All this information is permanently available. It's on the web. Yeah.

It's bubbling at the surface, isn't it? Yes.

And so, Joseph Casciani Everything, every good idea that ever existed will continue to exist. It won't, unless again, we destroy ourselves, it won't be eradicated. Sure. That doesn't mean that certain points of view, certain ideas won't go into, uh, be obscure, but they're readily discoverable. You don't have to go to some musty library and happen to come across it by chance.

You'll be able to do an advanced search and find it. Yeah, they're not going to be lost on the library shelves anymore.

That's very different, and we are very privileged to be at the very beginning of it.

Well, let me ask you, The Bioverse, um, that's the title of your book. How did you come to use that word? Made it—

I thought I'd made it up as an absolutely original thing. It just came to me. I'd been asked to write a— the script for a docuseries, and it needed a title. And it just, you know, I'm thinking universe and a universe of cells and microbial partnership. And none of those, none of that had any ring to it. So I did come up with Bio-Verse. I will admit that when I first thought of it, I thought this has got to be original. No one else is going to have thought of it. Found out this is true. There's a pool company, pool, pool maintenance company somewhere that has that name as an as a company. And so I couldn't even get the web domain because it was taken for that company. So my web domain is ourbioburst.com. You have to adapt. Wow, interesting. But it expresses the concept of the connections that exist between ourselves guarantee our planetary connections and even imply, very strongly imply, permanent cosmic connections. It's a very different way of looking how we impact both the local and perhaps the universal environment.

So it has this connotation of connecting all of us through our cells and cellular intelligence, that we're all part of this one entity, this one organization. Correct. Or organization. Yeah. So, and you say it's a It gives us a permanent connection to the cosmos.

How do you mean that? Yeah. The, um, our cells, every cell in our, all of our cells in our body, our body cells are talking to our body cells, but they're also chattering away to our microbes, our tens of trillions of microbial companions. The reason I emphasized intelligence when we first began is that one thing that we know today that we didn't know even a very short time ago is all that chatter is intelligent. That intelligence is not like my intelligence or your intelligence. There's not the same degree of— there's no expectation, there's abstraction. But it's problem-solving and it relates to behaviors. And those cells, those intelligent cells, those trillions of intelligent cells, they combine in ways that we don't yet understand to to create my seamless, human-type, unique intelligence. And it's— What is undeniable is that I am reciprocally imprinting my intelligence back on them. And thirdly, I'm leaving those cells everywhere I go. So you and I are sitting and looking at each other, and invisible to us is we are surrounded by what's called a microbial cloud. But in that microbial cloud are even our skin cells. And every, every movement you make, every bodily function you have leaves your cellular signature. Intelligent cells are being left everywhere you go. How do bloodhounds track humans? Because they're following the metabolic products of these cells. These cells stay alive for quite a while and they meld into the environment. Not all of them, some of them die off, but others are assimilating. Into the, into the ecologies that are around us everywhere we go our entire lives. And because these individual cells, when they aggregate together, help to form my moods and my behaviors and my metabolism and my immune system, reciprocally, I'm imparting some element of my total intelligence back on them. That's the way this system works. It's so much more complicated than we had imagined it. —there isn't any doubt about the total planetary connection of intelligence. That's absolutely undeniable. So why is there cosmic connection? Two reasons. One is research has shown that many of our senses require—and our cellular pathways—require quantum mechanisms. And quantum mechanisms are very complicated and very few people understand them, but they're there are certain basic concepts like entanglements and coherences, and these enable cells to communicate across space in ways that we still are learning. But that's how our senses work. I, I can detect a single photon with my vision through special quantum coherence. I can hear because of electron tunneling, a special kind of quantum mechanism. That allows me to hear. I can smell because of that same thing. There's a principle in quantum mechanics that if this action at a distance can happen locally, it can actually— it can happen far. If it happens in a single system, you can reasonably generalize it to all systems. Well, the implication of that is I'm quantum connected. Out there into cosmic. This is not spiritual mumbo jumbo. Yeah, this is just— this is the way the quantum realm works. I'm not saying that we understand it, and I don't want people to think that I'm talking about the kind of consciousness that, that our— whatever religious convictions we may have, let's say there are some that do— it doesn't match that. It's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that there is a kind of intelligent communication they're making out there in ways that we have yet to explore. It exists and it needs to be found. It is. I don't believe it's the pan-consciousness that, that certain scientists talk about. No. Okay. But there's justification to talk about it.

It pre— it pre-exists us and it continues after our body tissue dies. Absolutely.

Even, even after we're dead, you know, we've always thought that when you're dead, you're dead. Here today, here today, gone tomorrow. That's not true. First of all, you're living— you're leaving permanently assimilated trail of intelligence all your life. You've impacted these ecologies. Your intelligence has gone to your cells. Your cells are being assimilated into local ecologies. You may not care, you may not feel it's a large enough fraction that it matters to you, but it does matter. It absolutely matters to the fabric of life and the connections of this planet. That's a permanent type of meaning. It may not be what you yearn for, but it's real. And so we connect to the cosmos very likely along similar pathways, but these are quantum mechanical pathways. These are thermodynamic pathways. And then lastly, and this is quite concrete, and I— it's— we clever humans have determined to send spacecraft out off this planet. And what we've done carries enormous implications that we just simply won't talk about, uh, which mystifies me, but I think it's an embarrassment. So to credit NASA properly, back in the '70s when they were devising the first major type of, of vehicles to explore the solar system and beyond, uh, these are Voyager 1 and 2. These are spacecraft that were— that are are still in communication with us, been traveling since the '70s, and now they're extending beyond the heliosphere, which is the zone of the solar system in which the sun's influence is diminishing. So it's exiting the solar system, which takes a very long time, of course. You know, we're talking about huge, almost unfathomable distances. Anyway, when NASA began its work, they— and they went to the moon— they didn't want any microbes. They knew that would be bad. They thought it would be a very bad idea to send microbes off this planet. Uh, they're alien species. You just don't know what you're doing. And so you fight hard to do it. And they thought they did a terrific job. There was only one problem: the techniques that they had back then were completely flawed. They were not even identifying 1/10 of the total amount of microbial life and completely missing the hard-to-identify ones called extremophiles that can survive anything out there. Radiation that would kill you and me in seconds. Well, temperatures that would shrivel us in an instant. There are microbes that are so hardy that they can survive these very well. There's a tiny multi-celled organism, organism, only a couple of tens of thousands of cells, uh, called a tardigrade, 8-legged thing. It, it, it can survive anything. And we've sent these microbes off into space. And many of these microbes can go into spore, into dormancy, and last and regerminate after tens of thousands of years. Of course, there's even discussion that it could be millions of years. So we really don't know, but the certainty is we've done it. And whether or not this is a good idea, only time will tell. Yeah. There's no undoing that either. Yes. But, But Joe, the implication is, do you have cosmic connection? Yes. Every one of those cells that's out there came in contact with or is from an intelligent human engineer or an astronaut. And so when that intelligence is out there, it's in a micro— it's not the kind of intelligence of your conversation and mine, but don't underestimate how intelligent These are— the critical problem of intelligence is the capacity to adapt. Stephen Hawking said that intelligence is the ability to adapt to change, or at least he's reputed to have said. Whether he said it or not, it's an extremely true thing. Intelligence in the terms that matter to biologists is problem solving and communication. So if these intelligent cells get somewhere and it is the least bit hospitable, And by the way, hospitable to us is unbelievably different from hospitable to these extraterrestrials. Of course. Then their intelligence will be sufficient for them to affect those environments. And let me just say, if there is no other life out there, well then, then we've done a good thing. But if there is other life out there that could be valued, yeah, then we, then we've— and we're an invasive species.

Yeah, we may have compromised that intelligence.

We should at least discuss this. Yeah, I'm not saying we need to stop the space program, that's not my point. Yeah, and there's no way to clean these vehicles well enough for it not to happen. I just think we have to realize that it's going to happen. For example, when the— some, some of these space launches, they don't bother to care. The Tesla that went up there, remember that, that That ad, the Tesla, the red Tesla, uh, that circulated up, they were very big in the ads. It was brilliant advertising. They didn't really bother to clean that thing. They just didn't care.

I see we're running out of time here, Bill. This is such a fascinating, complex, complex, complicated subject. I excuse, um, myself for my voice. I've I've lost my voice, but final question, what would you like our listeners to take away? We touched on some very, uh, heady subjects. So what would you like our listeners to take away from today?

I believe that our cells do have something extremely valuable to teach us. They do have specific living parameters, collaboration, cooperation, codependence, communication. But if there's one overarching thing that cells do. They've learned the art of something that humans find very challenging. They've learned, and this is not a theoretical aspect of cells, this is exactly how they live because they freely trade resources except for cancer, which is why it is destructive. Cells have learned that you serve yourself best by serving others. That is the secret sauce that makes me able to talk to you. My cells, of all of the behavioral traits that they exhibit, the intelligent things that they're doing. They respect the integrity of each other absolutely through the principle of they serve themselves best by serving others. And that's why cancer's terrible, because it's a rogue state and it triggers that it doesn't play according to the rules of agreement.

Yeah. They're serving their own selves for themselves. Yeah.

It's very selfish pattern. So that's the living principle.

That's a good one. That's a good one. Thank you for that. Bill, it looks like we're out of time. I just want to say before we wrap up, I want to remind my listeners to visit my website, livingto100.club, sign up for my email list and download a free copy of my 9 Tips to Make Living Longer Enjoyable. Bill, thanks so much. If people would like to contact you, how can they do that?

They can go to my website, ourbioverse.com. They could buy my book, Bioverse, which is on Amazon, Barnes Noble, all the general commercial outlets. And I do have a very nice science feed. It's pure science. It's no politics, no religion, no nothing. Sure. Nice science feed at Bill @billmillermd. Yep, latest stuff coming across the wires.

Okay, well, thanks again, and thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. Hope to see you next time.

Thank you. Hi everyone, this is Meredith from the Senior Fitness with Meredith podcast where I discuss all things for seniors, from fitness, your health and wellness journeys, how to be all over strong and beyond. I also have my mini podcast called Motivation with Meredith. It's a great quick motivational pick-me-up for your days. Join me, listen now, search for Senior Fitness with Meredith on your favorite podcast platform.