When I do search for the definition of the term "exobiology," I get this definition: "the branch of science that deals with the possibility and likely nature of life on other planets or in space." The definition does not really make sense. Science is the study of nature as we observe it, not "dealing with possibilities," in the sense of undiscovered phenomena, which is the realm of mathematics and philosophy. And since any kind of natural origin of life on other planets would face the steepest odds everywhere, and would have almost infinite possible forms, it does not seem to make much sense to talk about "the likely nature of life on other planets."
Last summer I did a post on a press release NASA issued trying to whip up exobiology enthusiasm about some rock found on Mars by one of its robotic rovers. There was no logical basis for suggesting that the rock had any biological relevance. Analysis of the rock had not discovered any evidence of any of the building components of one-celled life in such a rock, because no evidence of any proteins had been found. Analysis of the rock had not discovered any evidence of any of the building components of the building components of one-celled life in such a rock, because no evidence of any amino acids had been found. What kind of tricks did NASA use to try to whip up some exobiology enthusiasm about the rock? For one, they published a photo in which tiny little feature on the spot was circled after the photo was taken, and the spot was called a "leopard spot." Talk about your strained efforts to make a dead thing sound a little biological.
Since last summer, NASA has kept running its robotic rovers named Curiosity and Perseverance, looking for amino acids, the building components of the building components of one-celled life. NASA has failed to find any trace of any such things on Mars. So what do you do when don't have anything worthy of a boast? Maybe you brag about things that are not worthy of a boast. Recently we had NASA making grand boasts about finding some biologically irrelevant molecules that were hardly worthy of a boast. It was like some young male suitor who did not have any car or house or apartment he could boast of owning, who tries boasting to his blind date that he has a nice TV set or video game device.
NASA's unwarranted boasts on this topic have inspired a USA Today news story with the bogus baloney BS headline "Mars rovers make separate finds pointing to past life: What Perseverance, Curiosity found." In the headline the word "separate" is misspelled. Neither of the items referred to "point to past life."
The article has a modus operandi we see abundantly these days in science news articles: an untrue clickbait headline followed by a "letdown" that kind of says, "Not really." I identified this pattern in a visual I made a long time ago:
First we get a description of a Perseverance rover find that is a big nothing from an exobiology standpoint: just a rock with lots of bubble-like spheres, which might have produced by any number of geological processes (such as bubbling hot molten rock) having nothing to do with life. Contrary to the story's claim, this does nothing at all to indicate that "ancient life may have once existed on the Red Planet."
The second item mentioned by the USA story is the discovery of the molecules decane, undecane and dodecane. The writer of the USA story has got the wrong idea from this quote from this recent NASA press release:
"Scientists probed an existing rock sample inside Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) mini-lab and found the molecules decane, undecane, and dodecane. These compounds, which are made up of 10, 11, and 12 carbons, respectively, are thought to be the fragments of fatty acids that were preserved in the sample. Fatty acids are among the organic molecules that on Earth are chemical building blocks of life."
Here we have some misleading sleight-of-hand designed to make us think that something biologically relevant was found. But no such thing occurred. Specifically:
- Decane is not in any sense a building block of life. The wikipedia.org article on decane says, "Although it is a component of fuels, it is of little importance as a chemical feedstock, unlike a handful of other alkanes."
- Undecane is not in any sense a building block of life.
- Dodecane is not in any sense a building block of life.
The building components of one-celled life are proteins and DNA and its genes. The building components of such building components of one-celled life are: (1) the twenty types of amino acids that are the building components of proteins; (2) the four types of nucleobases (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine) and the deoxyribose that are the building components of DNA and its genes. No protein or DNA or genes have been found on Mars, and none of these amino acids or nucleobases have been found on Mars.
The statement quoted above from the NASA press release was not strictly speaking untrue, but just something that might give you the wrong idea. But the next part of the NASA press release ends up with a statement that is dead wrong. We read the following:
"Living things produce fatty acids to help form cell membranes and perform various other functions. But fatty acids also can be made without life, through chemical reactions triggered by various geological processes, including the interaction of water with minerals in hydrothermal vents.
While there’s no way to confirm the source of the molecules identified, finding them at all is exciting for Curiosity’s science team for a couple of reasons.
Curiosity scientists had previously discovered small, simple organic molecules on Mars, but finding these larger compounds provides the first evidence that organic chemistry advanced toward the kind of complexity required for an origin of life on Mars."
The last sentence is the most egregious error. It is gigantically untrue to claim that the simple chemicals of decane, dodecane and undecane are "the kind of complexity required for an origin of life on Mars." To get something like the origin of life you need something more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times harder-to-achieve: the creation of hundreds of types of functional protein molecules, most of which require hundreds of specially arranged amino acids.
The image of the NASA press release shows how trivial from an information standpoint are the three molecules discovered:
There is nothing hard-to-achieve about such molecules. They are mainly just the same little section consisting of three or four atoms, repeated in a chain. From an information standpoint, this is as easy-to-get as this sequence of letters:
HHCCHHCCHHCCHHCCHHCCHHCC
What is required to produce a living cell is an amount of well-arranged functional information that is exponentially more improbable than getting so trivial a result as the simple chemicals of decane, dodecane and undecane. The mathematical improbability of getting that result is discussed in my post "Why Accidents Cannot Produce Very Complex and Useful Instruction Information," which you can read here.
Here's how someone could roughly go about calculating the likelihood of getting the type of organization and complexity needed for the simplest living cell:
(1) First, he would study the likelihood of a random set of amino acids resulting in a functional protein, keeping in mind that proteins are very sensitive to small changes, and that the average protein requires hundreds of specially arranged amino acids. A key part of the calculation is that there are twenty possible amino acids used by living things.
(2) Under a reasonable assumption that at least half of a functional protein's amino acid sequence is necessary for it to have any function, he would make a rough calculation that the probability of getting a functional protein by chance combinations of amino acids is roughly 1 in 10 to the hundredth power.
(3) He would consider the minimum number of functional proteins in a self-reproducing cell, which is at least 100.
(4) Using the rule that you get the probability of independent events all occurring by multiplying their individual probabilities, he would calculate that the chance of amino acids accidentally forming into a collection of all the proteins needed for a self-reproducing cell is roughly 1 in 10 to the ten-thousandth power, or roughly 1 in 1010000.
How hard is it to get such a result? Almost infinitely harder than to get the easy-to-get result of decane, dodecane and undecane. NASA's recent statement that finding "finding these larger compounds provides the first evidence that organic chemistry advanced toward the kind of complexity required for an origin of life on Mars" is therefore the most complexity-clueless misstatement. It's kind of like saying that your dog fetched a stick, and the stick makes the letter "I," so that shows your dog can produce the kind of complexity needed to write novels or textbooks.