Tantalizing clues in asteroid Bennu samples could reveal particular molecular formations that some scientists say support the workings of consciousness.
Every six years, an asteroid by the name of Bennu passes by Earth. Bennu is a small, loosely compacted ball of black rocks that formed nearly 4.6 billion years ago. Recently, scientists accomplished an unprecedented feat, sending a spacecraft billions of miles to the asteroid and back to collect 121.6 grams of material from Bennu for study at an Arizona State University lab. NASA tasked the OSIRIS-REx team that retrieved material from Bennu to examine it for clues to the nature and origins of life. Tantalizing evidence in the Bennu sample suggests that the asteroid contains constituents of the "primordial soup" that scientists believe likely led to life emerging on Earth. But that's not all. It could also contain particular molecules that could have formed crystalline formations that some scientists believe are key to consciousness. These formations may have been present among organic molecules for a hundred million years before genes existed, enabling the earliest forms of decision-making and self-organization into life. According to Dr. Stuart Hameroff, a former anesthesiologist and one of the world's leading experts on consciousness, the director of the Bennu team, Dante Lauretta, reached out to him before they had received the samples. Both are at Arizona State University. Lauretta was wondering how one might find signs of life in the material they were about to receive and found an intriguing paper by Dr. Hameroff on the nature of consciousness and carbon molecules. The prevailing theory of consciousness is that humans manufacture it inside the brain—that it boils down to a computation. Yet, Dr. Hameroff and his collaborator, Nobel Laureate and physicist Roger Penrose, have argued for decades that consciousness made the world and not the other way around. They believe that it is not manufactured in the brain but only processed there, via an external quantum wave function sweeping through the universe that interacts with tiny protein tubes. These…