Origin-of-Life Researchers Pile Up Groundless Boasts

 For 70 years the mainstream science literature has presented enormously misleading coverage about origin-of-life research.  There has been a huge amount of bunk and baloney in the press coverage of origin-of-life research, and the statements made on this topic by scientists themselves have very often been wildly  inaccurate. Many examples of such misstatements can be found here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

Never has more boasting and hype been written when the results were so minimal and meager.  It is not merely that no experiments have ever produced life from non-life. The reality is that no experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have ever produced any of the main building components of single-celled life, and that no experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have ever produced any of the building components of the building components of single-celled life. 

The research output: "peanuts" (i.e. "chickenfeed") 

The main building components of one-celled life are functional protein molecules, which have never been produced in any experiment realistically simulating the early Earth. The building components of such building components are amino acids, which have never been produced in any experiment realistically simulating the early Earth.  The widely-discussed Miller-Urey experiment (which did produce some amino acids) was not anything like a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions, requiring a very specially constructed glass gizmo unlike anything that would have existed on the early Earth, and requiring a degree of electricity exposure unlike any part of the early Earth would have experienced. 

Let us look at a recent example of groundlessly boasting origin-of-life research. Some scientists created a very fancy chamber device which they claim simulates interstellar space. Inside the device they put some glycine, which is the simplest amino acid. They zapped the chamber with some energy that they claim was simulating cosmic rays, and got the most meager result: a mere peptide molecule. The peptide molecule they got was what you can get from combining two glycine molecules. The result was as simple as 1 +1 = 2 or "a + a = aa." 

The result is passed off as a simulation of what could happen in interstellar space. But is that claim accurate? No, it is not, because there is no robust evidence that glycine exists in interstellar space.  Recent claims to have found glycine after a soil sample retrieval from an asteroid in the solar system do not count as such robust evidence, both because such an asteroid is not in interstellar space, and because the amounts supposedly detected are so minute they can credibly be accounted for by assuming terrestrial contamination (as I discuss here). 

In the 2006 paper here we read about an apparent false alarm regarding the detection of the amino acid glycine in interstellar space:

"The early searches for glycine were all negative, but two years ago Kuan et al. (2003) reported detection of a number of glycine lines, some 27 in several astronomical sources. Unfortunately, this claim has not been confirmed. The amount of glycine claimed by Kuan et al. is in conflict with previously published upper limits (e.g. Combes et al. 1996; Ceccarelli et al. 2000), and glycine lines which should have appeared were not found. In a detailed analysis of the evidence, Snyder et al. (2005) recently concluded that few, if any, of the lines attributed by Kuan et al. to interstellar glycine were actually from that molecule. The spectroscopic data on which the claim of Kuan et al. was based have not been published or made available to other workers, and there is now a fairly wide consensus among radio astronomers and laboratory spectroscopists that glycine has not yet been found in space."

A more recent 2022 paper tells us this: "The simplest amino acid, glycine (NH2CH2COOH), has been searched for a long time in the interstellar medium, but all surveys of glycine have failed." 

So,  you are not realistically simulating interstellar space by putting glycine in a chamber and zapping it with energy.  The glycine-zapping experiment does nothing to make it seem more likely that extraterrestrial life exists, or that life could form naturally.  But our clickbait-loving "science news" press fell for the story "hook, line and sinker."

And so we have an article at the clickbait-heavy phys.org, an article with the extremely misleading headline shown below. At least the article has a visual which shows that all that is going on is "one plus one equals two" stuff. I added the bottom row as commentary to what is shown above. 

We have a quote from the main researcher, Sergio Ioppolo making this untrue claim: "We already know from earlier experiments that simple amino acids, like glycine, form in interstellar space." Experiments could never show that glycine forms in interstellar space. Only observations could show that, and no robust observations show that. 

Ioppolo makes this false claim: "But research like ours shows that many of the complex molecules necessary for life are created naturally in space." No, it does not show any such thing. All it shows is that when you stick in a chamber two simple glycine molecules and zap them with energy, you might get a molecule looking like two glycine molecules joined together, which is a result as unimpressive as the deduction that one plus one equals two. 

Physicists Try to "Big-Mystery-Glamorize" Their Pigeonhole Pet Projects

 Scientists believe that when two very high-energy photons collide, they produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and that when matter collides with antimatter, it is converted into high-energy photons. Such a belief is based on what scientists have observed in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider, where particles are accelerated to near the speed of light before they collide with each other. But such conclusions about matter, antimatter and photons lead to a great mystery as to why there is any matter at all in the universe.

Let us imagine the early minutes of the Big Bang about 13 billion years ago, when the density of the universe was incredibly great. At that time the universe should have consisted of energy, matter and antimatter. The energy should have been in the form of very high-energy photons that were frequently colliding with each other. All such collisions should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. For example, a collision of high energy particles with sufficient energy creates a matter proton and an antimatter particle called an antiproton. So the amount of antimatter shortly after the Big Bang should have been exactly the same as the amount of matter. As a CERN page on this topic says, "The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe." 

But whenever a matter particle touched an antimatter particle, both would have been converted into photons. The eventual result should have been a universe consisting either of nothing but photons, or some matter but an equal amount of antimatter. But only trace amounts of antimatter are observed in the universe. A universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter would have been uninhabitable, because of the vast amount of lethal energy released when even a tiny bit of matter comes in contact with a tiny bit of antimatter.

The mystery of why we live in a universe that is almost all matter (rather than antimatter) is called the baryon asymmetry problem or the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem.  There is not much of a prospect that this problem will be solved in our lifetimes.  It's like the problem of "why is there something rather than nothing?" That's not a problem we can expect to solve in our lifetimes. The infographic below explains this matter-antimatter asymmetry problem. 

But sometimes when scientists have embarked on a boondoggle costing billions, they may evoke the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem to try to sanctify their misguided schemes.  That is what is going on with various boondoggle projects researching neutrinos. They include these projects:

• An ongoing T2K experiment in Japan that beams neutrinos over a distance of 295 kilometers. 
• An ongoing 280-million-dollar NOVA experiment in the USA that beams neutrinos 804 kilometers (500 miles), from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois to a 14,000-ton detector in Ash River, Minnesota.
• An under-construction 3-billion-dollar DUNE experiment in the USA that will attempt to beam neutrinos 1300 kilometers (800 miles), from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois to a very-deep-underground facility in Lead, South Dakota. 

The first two experiments have been running for years, and there was recently released a paper announcing a kind of combined results from the projects. Nothing of any importance was found.  But you might think otherwise from some of the press coverage, some of which attempts to make this "found nothing" result sound like something worthwhile. 

Scientists were hoping to find evidence of something called "mass ordering" or something else called "inverted ordering," but the paper says, "The data show no strong preference for either mass ordering."  We read, "There is no statistically significant preference obtained for either of the mass orderings." We also read, "We do not see a significant preference at present for either mass ordering."  

The only thing the paper authors say on the question of the matter-antimatter asymmetry is, " It is unknown whether neutrinos—and thus leptons—violate charge-parity (CP) symmetry and thereby provide a source of matter–antimatter asymmetry in nature, which is of great interest given the connection between CP violation and the unexplained matter dominance in the Universe." Since the paper says nothing else on the topic of matter-antimatter asymmetry other than this "say nothing" sentence,  the results obtained utterly fail to shed any light on the mystery of matter–antimatter asymmetry, contrary to the sales pitches for these very expensive projects, which tried to suggest that they would give important insight on this topic. 

The Reuters article on this paper describes it without exaggeration, and does not claim that the work shed any light at all on the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem. We have a headline of only "Researchers in US and Japan offer insight into ghostly neutrinos."

A Caltech press release on the paper uses some scrambled reasoning to gin up some relevance to the results. It states this:

"The combined results of NOvA and T2K so far do not favor one mass ordering scenario over another. However, if future results show the neutrino mass ordering is inverted and not normal, NOvA's and T2K's results published today provide evidence that neutrinos do exhibit the suspected asymmetry, potentially explaining why the universe is dominated by matter instead of antimatter. "

This is  kind of like someone saying, "My photo published today of triangular marks in the mud provides no evidence of extraterrestrial creatures; however if it is proven in the future that there are extraterrestrial visitors with triangle-shaped feet, then my photo published today potentially provides evidence of such creatures." 

In the article here, a Professor Yu speaks in a bungling way. We read,  "Professor Yu said, 'Given these results, we expect that next-generation neutrino research facilities such as Japan’s Hyper-Kamiokande or America’s DUNE will discover matter–antimatter asymmetry,' adding, 'We anticipate being able to understand why matter exists in overwhelmingly greater amounts than antimatter in the universe.' ”  But we already know that matter-asymmetry exists, so it makes no sense for Yu to be claiming that it will be discovered by the still-under-construction DUNE project. That's as silly as saying that you anticipate that some new project will discover that the sun exists. There is no basis whatsoever for the described "anticipation." The new paper describes 14 years of expensive neutrino search that failed to shed any light on why "matter exists in overwhelmingly greater amounts than antimatter in the universe."

We can describe the neutrino study projects listed above as "pigeonhole pet projects." That's because they are investigations of some topic of no interest to the general public, and only of interest to a very small number of physicists, such as neutrino specialists. If you are a scientist trying to get funding for one of these pigeonhole pet projects that are of no interest to 99% of the public, what sales strategy can you take? One strategy: try to make your little pigeonhole pet project sound like it has some relevance to some grand mystery that people are interested in. 

More Who Seemed Trance-Transported to a Higher Realm

 In a previous post "Did Their Trances Give Them Trips to Heaven?" I gave newspaper accounts of people who reported something like trips to heaven after being in some kind of trance, often one produced by some kind of sickness. Let us look at some more cases of the this type. 

The January 27, 1900 newspaper account below (which you can read here) tells of a trance experience of Mrs. Mahlon Gause:

A similar account (involving the experience of Cora Matton) can be found in this 1891 account which can be read here.

In the newspaper account here, we have an account of a trance trip to heaven, one made by Luella Cameron:

In the newspaper account here, we have another account of a trance trip to heaven, one made by Eliza Wright:

In the newspaper account here, we have another account of a trance trip to heaven, one made by Ida Sharp:

We read here of a minister who went into a trance and claimed to have gone on a journey to heaven:

"After lying as in a trance on the pulpit platform from one o'clock to 5:40 o'clock in the afternoon, Pastor Brown emerged from his mysterious slumber, weakly crumpled into a seat, and later on when he had recovered his strength he related that he really had been to 

heaven, that he had met many former Wilmingtonians including Bishop Cook, the Rev. Dr. Skinner and others whom he mentioned by name. He told of some of the beauteous scenes there, and announced that he would return to the church next Sunday and tell in detail of his pilgrimage to the haven or rest, 'It would take me a year to tell all I saw, ' he declared." 

Below is an account of a woman near death (Mrs. Alexander Taylor) claiming to have visited heaven during a trance-like close encounter with death. You can read the account here. 

On the same page as the first account quoted above, we have this  remarkable account of telepathy between twins. 

NASA's Diminished Credibility on the Topic of Extraterrestrial Life

We hear these days quite a bit about "AI slop," error-containing output from AI programs. But it seems that an even worse problem is what we can call "science slop," and define as unbelievable news stories showing up on web sites or web pages claiming to give "science news." 

In September 2025 NASA made an utterly groundless boast of having discovered "potential biosignatures" on Mars. NASA had a press conference that received the most massive press coverage, even though it announced nothing new. All that was being discussed was the same utterly unimpressive find announced the previous year.  

The NASA press conference was devoted to trying to get people excited about the unimpressive-looking rock below, called the Cheyava Falls rock, which has no visual signs of life. The spot circled and called a "leopard spot" looks nothing like a leopard spot, and could have been formed by any of 1001 lifeless processes. 

Credit: NASA

The press conference was called to publicize a scientific paper about the Cheyava Falls rock and nearby rocks scanned in 2024. That paper has the dull title "Redox-driven mineral and organic associations in Jezero Crater, Mars." We hear no mention of any amino acids being found. Trying to boost excitement about something that is very probably no indication of life, the paper states, "In summary, our analysis leads us to conclude that the Bright Angel formation contains textures, chemical and mineral characteristics, and organic signatures that warrant consideration as ‘potential biosignatures’, that is, 'a feature that is consistent with biological processes and that, when encountered, challenges the researcher to attribute it either to inanimate or to biological processes, compelling them to gather more data before reaching a conclusion as to the presence or absence of life.' " 

The building components of one-celled life are many types of protein molecules, and the building components of protein molecules are twenty types of amino acids. Protein molecules used by living things are built from long sequences of twenty types of amino acids. Most types of protein molecules require a very special sequence of hundreds of amino acids. No amino acid used by life has ever been found on Mars.  It is therefore extremely misleading and arguably deceptive to be referring to something not looking like life found on a planet without any discovered amino acids, and to be calling such a thing a potential biosignature. 

I can give an analogy for how deceptive the use of such language is. Suppose you sent a spacecraft to orbit around some moon of a planet such as Jupiter and Saturn. Suppose you saw a little crater-like hole in the surface of the planet, something looking rather like this:

There would be three possibilities here:

(1) The feature might have been caused by some meteorite hitting the surface, the most common cause of craters. 

(2) The feature might be a sinkhole, caused by a sinking in of a little bit of the surface, as often is observed on our planet. 

(3) Or, maybe the feature was created by intelligent beings who were trying to start building a house, and were excavating as part of building the foundation of the house, and maybe the feature is a "potential signature" of purposeful engineering. 

In order to consider whether item (3) is a reasonable possibility, you would need to ask questions like this:

(1) Is this moon a place that can reasonably be postulated as a place where intelligent agents live, agents who might be starting to build a house for themselves?

(2) Are there any signs of building materials around or construction equipment around, things like shovels, bricks, pipes or boards?

If the answer to both of these questions is no, then there would be no reasonable chance that the observed feature is a potential signature of purposeful engineering. In that case anyone calling the feature a "potential signature of purposeful engineering" would be a deceiver, someone whose word should not be trusted. 

The situation I have described is analogous to what went on with the NASA press conference. Specifically:

(1) Just as the moon described in my analogy is a place profoundly hostile to life, Mars is a place profoundly hostile to life. 

(2) Just as the crater feature described in my analogy is at a place where there are no construction materials around lending credence to the possibility of a deliberate construction job, Mars is a place where no amino acids have ever been found, a place where none of the construction components for life have ever been found. 

The scientists and NASA personnel trying to persuade us that a "potential biosignature" had been found seemed as misleading as a scientist getting a photo of a mere crater, and describing it as potential signature of extraterrestrial intelligence. 

What has happened is predictable. The clickbait-hungry "science news" infosystem has followed their usual "give us an inch, and we'll take a mile" policy in its treatment of the NASA press conference. Now the Internet is filled with bogus stories groundlessly claiming or insinuating that life was discovered on Mars. 

Almost certainly NASA knew this would happen. The bogus stories are presumably exactly what it wanted, so that a Mars sample return mission would be funded. 

Without any warrant at all, NASA and some scientists have claimed "potential biosignatures," thereby misleading us very badly. If they had been honest they would have said something like this:

What we found could have been caused by life, but also could have been caused by lifeless geological processes. Given that we have searched hard for the lowest building components of life on Mars, and never found them, failing to ever find amino acids on Mars, we must reluctantly assume that almost certainly what we found is not any sign of life.

But they did not say that. Instead they used misleading language trying to cause people without any good warrant to believe or suspect that life had been found on Mars. This is not at all the first time this happened. NASA was involved in a similar affair of "crying wolf" during the 1990's, when it got the US President at that time (Bill Clinton) to do a press conference issuing a false claim that life had probably been found on Mars. 

So we should no longer regard NASA as an authority that has great credibility on the topic of extraterrestrial life. If the Mars sample return mission is funded, and NASA announces that the returned samples contain traces of life, we should be skeptical about what they tell us. We should instead suspect that anything found is the result of earthly contamination, or pareidolia by overeager NASA scientists. Ditto for NASA's missions to moons of Jupiter or Saturn. If NASA scientists ever announce they find life from any such missions, we should just roll our eyes, and say to ourselves, "On this topic you can't trust these guys as far as you can throw them." 

I now read that the Mars sample return mission has apparently lost its funding. NASA's attempt to whip up interest in the mission has failed to yield the desired funding. The failure to obtain the funding suggests that executive powers may have realized the "potential biosignatures" boast was unfounded.  Scientists have voiced relatively little protest about the cancellation. We can be rather sure that if scientists thought there was a good chance of detecting life by returning the Mars samples, that the scientific community would "scream bloody murder" about the cancellation. But the protest of the cancellation seems to have been faint, rather as if scientists realized the "potential biosignatures" boast was unfounded.  

Meanwhile, while an immoral and illegal war of aggression is raging in the Middle East courtesy of an unprovoked attack by the White House, NASA has a Big New Task it is eagerly working on: an Artemis II mission to have  astronauts go in orbit around the moon. This is something that was already accomplished quite a few times more than 50 years ago, when US astronauts not only orbited the moon, but walked on the moon, and drove around the moon in a little vehicle rather like a golf cart. The question we must ask about this  new Artemis II mission is the same question we must about the Iran war misadventure: why the hell are they doing that? 

In a 2022 post I pointed out that NASA's web page promoting the Artemis program miserably failed to articulate a convincing rationale for the program. But at least there was a page on the NASA site entitled "Why We Are Going to the Moon."  It was a fumbling, bungling attempt to explain a sound basis for the program -- but at least it was an attempt. Looking at the latest versions of the NASA pages promoting the Artemis program, I can't seem to find such a "Why We Are Going to the Moon" page. It seems that these days the guys in the Executive Branch of the US government are not very good at explaining reasons for their behavior.

Seeing that we cannot have much faith these days in the credibility of proclamations coming from the horribly-renamed US Department of War, should we have great faith in any proclamation of metaphysical significance coming from NASA? 

Postscript: Just after this post was published, I read a headline saying this:

"NASA to spend $20 billion to build a base on the moon

The agency is canceling plans to deploy a space station in lunar orbit and ​will instead use its components to construct the ‌base, NASA chief Jared Isaacman said."

We get rather an impression of minds that keep switching their plans. Replacing a space station orbiting the moon with a base on the surface of the moon is a case of replacing one boondoggle with another. I also read recently of a NASA plan to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to land unmanned helicopters on Mars, supposedly for the sake of scouting around for a good landing site for a manned mission. It's another plan that makes me ask: why the hell are they doing that? The surface of Mars has already been thoroughly mapped, and we already know of quite a few places that would make good landing sites for a manned mission.