“The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.” — Ray Bradbury.

Not that long ago, Scientists at UCSD discovered that bacteria talk with each other using similar electrical signals as neurons in the human brain. This should be a line from a science fiction novel, but it is not…

Would it be such a big leap from this discovery to learn that bacterial colonies collectively function at a higher level of awareness than a simple single-cell organism? Perhaps the bacteria in our gut really are a second brain, as some doctors have theorized. Bacteria were very likely the first life form on Earth billions of years ago. Some scientists, including a Nobel Laureate or two, speculate that Earth was seeded with bacteria from space.

In my bestselling novels Immortality (pub 2007) and its sequel Ghost of the Gods (pub 2014), the Colorado River and other great rivers are drying up, forests and farms are dying, massive super-wildfires are burning out of control, and mass animal extinction events are occurring. These environmental problems trigger a pandemic caused by my imaginary COBIC-3.7 bacteria.

The first draft of Immortality was completed in 1998 with a different title, God’s Clay. Twenty years after that first draft, in the real world, the Colorado River and the Mississippi River were drying up, forests and farms were dying, super-wildfires were burning out of control, mass animal extinction events were occurring, and a pandemic called COVID-19 was about to sweep the land, partially as a result of climate change forcing wild animals into closer proximity with people.

Immortality and Ghost of the Gods proved to be prescient in many large and small details, including small things such as calling the pandemic causing bacteria COBIC-3.7, which is eerily similar in spelling to COVID-19. Isn’t it odd how life sometimes imitates fiction?

In the story, COBIC-3.7 bacteria communicate electrically and are collectively very intelligent. There were many events and discoveries that I wrote about in Immortality and Ghost of the Gods that were science fiction when I created those books and are now science fact. Maybe we can now add one more item to that list: smart bacteria?

I wonder if that second bacterial brain in our gut senses the damage we’re doing to the Earth, and is begging us to stop before we make our only home unlivable. That would be one hell of a stomachache.

We, in our advanced society, take comfort in thinking that we’re on track to discover all there is to know and that science is zeroing in on more explanations every day, but the truth is, we know so very little. The history of science is one of brilliant theories proven wrong and replaced by newer, brilliant theories, only to have those newer theories also replaced. It’s the great eternal cycle of science, which quite often has nothing to do with the refinement of theories and everything to do with chaotic revolution.

By 2015, scientists had “proven” that quantum entanglement was a real reproducible experimental fact. Arguably the greatest physicist in the history of the world, Einstein thought quantum entanglement was ridiculous and called it “Spooky action at a distance.”

What’s next now that quantum entanglement is real? In a few years, another quantum mechanic’s theory will be experimentally proven. The headline will be that reality only exists in our minds because matter does not take its “final form” until consciousness is focused upon it. Another way of looking at this is that reality is a kind of conscious dream, and its mental malleability is the explanation for spooky action at a distance.

Powerful experimental evidence that quantum entanglement was real was earth-shattering for science. It broke a core principle of the study of physics called locality, which states that an object is directly influenced only by its immediate surroundings.

So spooky action at a distance is real. Instantaneous communication across the universe is real. In the infinite past or big bang (take your pick), every possible piece of matter has interacted with every other piece of matter. So everything at some point was entangled.

The loss of entanglement, decoherence, is real, but that does not mean entanglement is binary. Entanglement is analog and can slowly or rapidly lose coherence in an analogous manner to the way electromagnetic waves are diminished over time.

This means that an entanglement, like an electromagnetic (EM) wave, potentially lasts forever. It never fully winks out, just forever dims, decoheres, below the ability of our scientific instruments to detect. For EM waves, this diminishment is largely not the result of entropy. For entanglement, entropy does not play a role at all.

Unlike in the case of EM waves or entropy, an entanglement that is disorganizing can be reenergized or even reestablished with active management. If our brains work utilizing quantum mechanics, as many believe, then entanglement makes our brains transceivers of data beyond our five senses. This means our brains may not even be the ultimate repository of all “our” data. What that wild idea leads to is wonderfully delicious heresy and a possible explanation for the existence of a disincarnate awareness, a soul, as well as reincarnation.

All these ideas are explored in my books.

Related info:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151021135616.htm

Originally published on: Oct 28, 2015
Updated on: May 12, 2026